Month: May 2004

Who Fed The Boys?

If anybody wants to catch up the very latest in Chalabi intrigue, Laura Rozen at War and Piece has got it goin’ on as usual.

It’s creeping closer and closer to the inner circle. According to a UPI report Rozen cites from Tuesday, the FBI is looking at two former CPA officials who are now back in the states — one still working for the pentagon and one snuggled safely in the arms of AEI.

Rozen says the two are reported to be Michael Rubin and Harold Rhode (although they have denied it.)

Just for kicks, here’s what Right Web watch says about Rubin:

Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. A Yale graduate whose dissertation focused on modern Iran, Rubin has traveled extensively in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.

Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP).

Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.

In a National Review article, Rubin discusses sentiments expressed whenever Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Envoy Anthony Zinni would visit Israel.

“While working at Hebrew University this past year, I took the bus to campus each day. Whenever U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell or Special Envoy Anthony Zinni was dispatched to Israel, colleagues would urge me to stay home until after the suicide bombing. Middle Easterners understand the lesson those in the U.S. and Europe are still learning: When governments engage dictators, civilians suffer.” [Yeah. Europe doesn’t know anything about that…ed.]

I hadn’t heard of Harold Rhode, but waddaya know. It turns out that he is one of Michael Ledeen’s intellectual houseboys. And he was involved in that bizarre little bit of deja vu-vu last summer when Ledeen tried to “open up the lines of communication with Iran” by getting in touch with our old friend Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian con artist who arranged the arms for hostages deal for Ollie and the boys.

Pentagon hard-liners pressing for change of government in Iran have held secret, unauthorised meetings in Paris with an arms dealer who was a main figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held “several” meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The officials who disclosed the secret meetings said the talks with Mr Ghorbanifar were not authorised by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting sensitive negotiations with Iran’s Government.

A senior Administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorised talks by accident.

The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.

The immediate objective appeared to be to “antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them”.

The official confirmed that the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, complained directly to the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, several days ago about Mr Feith conducting missions that went against US policy.

A spokesman for Mr Feith’s Near East, South Asia and Special Plans office, which sources said played a key role in contacts with Mr Ghorbanifar contacts, ignored an emailed inquiry about the talks.

The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith’s top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary’s office.

Mr Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Mr Feith’s office, which drafted much of the Administration’s post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exilegroomed for leadership by the Pentagon.

Mr Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair.

Rozen says that many of her colleagues have expressed skepticism because these guys couldn’t have had access to the kind of sensitive information that’s being discussed.

That may be true, but it sure looks like they have easy access to those who do. Particularly Douglas Feith, who is clearly up to his neck in this thing. Ledeen probably is too. He’s been playing the Iran angle for years.

Who duped who and how is still up for grabs, but it sure looks like Junior and the Retreads got taken to the cleaners. What a surprise. Them being grown-ups and all.

Update:

Thanks to commenter Vin Carreo, I was reminded of this article by josh Marshall from 2002 in which he dissected the entire “second tier” pentagon neocon crew, (which includes an amazing anecdote about Rhode) describing them as even more nutty than the first tier of Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest:

In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East — Turkey, Iraq and Iran — democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn’t be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They’d be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.

As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon — indeed most establishment foreign policy experts — see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush’s hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn’t Baghdad, it’s Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Consider The Source

Eric Boehlert has an interesting post up in Salon’s War Room ’04. Discussing the NY Times sorta culpa, he notes the similarities between the paper’s Wen Ho Lee apology and the Judy Miller debacle and then asks when it will have to answer for its even more egregious Whitewater coverage. (Never, is my guess.)

But, he says something in passing that is very important:

Of course the most troubling similarity is that in both cases Republican informants, operating with a clear political agenda, took the paper-of-record for a joy ride as they tried first to tar President Clinton with a China spy scandal in the late ’90s and then set out to launch an unprecedented U.S. preemptive U.S. war against Iraq.

I would say this is troubling indeed. I have had a number of altercations with journalists over my characterization of them being spoonfed by Republican liars but it is a fact. It has been going on for a long time now and it is unlikely to stop.

Alterman, Conason, Brock and others have written about the SCLM and the echo chamber effect and the Mighty Wurlitzer. The information is out there and available. But, I’m not sure what it’s going to take to convince the press that when a GOP operative is offering you a juicy story that is just too good to be true that it probably is.

The list of wrong stories, innuendos, misdirection, disinformation and outright lies that have been printed and broadcast on behalf of the Republican party in the mainstream press is staggering. It runs from bullshit about haircuts to rape accusations to trashing the White House to Bank Fraud to Chinese espionage to phony assertions about nuclear bombs and pending terrorist attacks. It goes on and on and on, escalating exponentially, and yet the media keeps writing up these falsehoods as if these people haven’t been proven to be liars time and time again.

Judith Miller is only the most obvious culprit because her false stories have been so blatently exposed. But, it happens every day in the major papers and networks. These journalists have cultivated “sources” who are giving them misinformation. They continue to rely on these “sources” even though they have led them astray time and time again. That these sources are also Republican operatives or GOP power players with an agenda doesn’t seem to engender much skepticism, I believe, because these sources always have such an entertaining and interesting “story” to tell.

But, why should an journalist worry much about such things? Getting stories wrong time after time after time doesn’t seem to have any impact on your career. Unless you are caught red handed plagiarizing or simply making things up out of whole cloth, if you’ve got the inside Washiington track you won’t be fired no matter how badly you get things wrong. As Judy says:

I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate,” Miller told me. “I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn’t believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, ‘What do you know at the time you are writing it?’ We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully.”

That seems to be good enough for the New York Times which is why they are constantly being played for stooges by the Republican party. And it’s a good part of the reason why our politics are so fucked up.

In any normal organization Judith Miller would be gone. She committed journalistic malpractice of such a magnitude that people have died partially as a result of what she did. But instead, they are protecting her. After all, if she goes she’ll take all of those “great sources” with her.

Sending A Message

I thought it would be nice to hear what our troops are listening to today as they toil in dangerous places, particularly the middle east. This is what they’re hearing from home:

Algore, this whole speech, he went nuts. He’s flailing around wildly there. Not just me, he’s attacking everybody who has led the nation through 9/11, the war on terrorism, and he’s making statements that are flat out lies in this speech. For example, the Geneva Conventions. I don’t know how many of you know this, the Geneva Conventions do not protect terrorists. They protect soldiers who serve under a nation who wear uniforms who carry their weapons openly, and with the kind of threat that we’re facing today with terrorist cells in the U.S. plotting an even bigger attack than 9/11. I mean, it says a lot about Gore. It says he’s perverse, that he would be argue to go confer greater rights on those who seek to murder millions of Americans and calling for even tougher actions to seek them out and destroy them before they destroy us, and this is what is truly puzzling to me about the left, and this is what’s disarming about these prison photos.

What really troubles me about these photos, above and beyond what’s in them, is how they’re being used to undermine our war effort. Now we have the former vice president, a man who was thisclose to becoming president of the United States, speak out in this speech. We haven’t played you the bites, but he was flailing around on the Geneva Convention. He starts talking about conferring more rights on the kind of people who want to murder tens of thousands more Americans than he does seem interested in dealing with the people who want to commit those murders. He has succeeded in giving our adversaries in Europe and our enemies in the caves of Afghanistan and the allies of Iraq a message that they’ll take to heart, and that is that we are not a united nation, that we do not have the will to win this war, and that we are weak and indecisive. That’s the message that Gore sends today, and it’s the wrong message, because it’s a lie, and beyond that it is an outrage.

I don’t think anything of this kind has ever been done by a former vice president during a war, but our adversaries and our enemies would be badly mistaken if they actually believe that Gore speaks for this nation, because he doesn’t. I speak for more of this nation than Algore does, and I will say it on this program. Otherwise, why is he bothering to mention my name? He speaks for the radical fringe in his party who have become more and more the mainstream of his party. They are the Hate-America First radical left, and I hope the American people get to hear all of this speech. I hope it’s played over and over again, for this is how low Gore and his crowd are willing to go to undermine the war effort and our troops and this president to promote themselves and their own agenda and get themselves back into power. Lest we forget, Algore and his boss, Bill Clinton, stood by while the enemy was plotting and planning to murder thousands of Americans.

They did nothing serious to stop bin Laden. They did nothing serious to fight terrorism. They degraded or military. They slashed our troop levels, undermined our intelligence services. Today calls for civil rights for terrorists in his speech while opposing the Patriot Act which helps us find and stop terrorist cells right here in our country, and Gore has said nothing about how he would fight this evil because he’s obsessed with hatred not for the enemy but for George W. Bush — and that’s what identifies MoveOn.org. That’s what identifies most of the fringe, radical left in this country. They actually think Bush is a greater threat to the people of this world and this country than any thug dictator, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong ll, anybody. They think Bush poses a greater threat, and as misguided as that is, this is what animates them. It is what motivates them and inspires them.

I’m sure glad the boys and girls in uniform are kept up to date on current affairs, aren’t you? And I’m sure they heard Gore’s entire speech so they could judge for themselves if what Rush says is true. Certainly on All Things Considered or Marketplace they’ll be addressing the question of whether the Democrats caused 9/11 and support terrorism. It wouldn’t be fair and balanced otherwise.

Rush might be causing just the teeniest, tiniest bit of confusion, though, when the troops in Iraq hear that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to people who aren’t in uniform. But, hey , I’m sure Goober and Gomer know that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I can’t imagine that hearing stuff like this would make some pissed off national guardsman think that his countrymen support his treating Iraqi people like animals.

Thanks to Seeing the Forest for the heads up. Read Dave’s entire piece. It’s great.

Each In His Own Way

Sometimes I wonder how a Democrat can ever win an election in this country because he’s being pulled so hard from all directions that he’s likely to go crazy from the pain.

Al Gore gave a great speech today. The wing nuts are all over it, of course. But, it’s also an occasion for our side to criticize John Kerry for not giving the same speech. Sigh.

As I said in my earlier post, I think that Al Gore holds a unique position in American politics. He is the man who was elected president who was not allowed to take the office. It’s a position that allows him to speak in ways that others, who are within the political system, cannot. It’s not because they are cowardly but because they have to actually govern and our system requires that presidential candidates especially, have to run to represent all the people, not just our side.

Al Gore can speak effectively yet with no holds barred because he holds the moral authority of the presidency without actually having to govern. It gives power to his words, particularly abroad. But, it is because of his unique situation that people listen to what he says. Kerry, on the other hand, is trying to get getting elected in what is currently a close election and that takes some — dare I say it — nuance.

Firebreathing is a powerful thing. But, it is not in and of itself a good thing. We have to use our hearts and our heads and manange this election intelligently.

For what it’s worth, Kerry is on the same page this week as Gore. I don’t think this is an accident:

At the same moment Attorney General John Ashcroft was telling reporters in Washington that al-Qaida may be planning an attack on the United States, Sen. John Kerry was in Seattle, arguing that Ashcroft and his Bush administration colleagues have failed to do enough to prepare for such an attack.

Noting that Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that a terrorist attack in the United States is a question of “when, not if,” Kerry asked why the administration hasn’t moved more decisively to increase the number of cops on the street, to require inspections of cargo container ships, to increase security on trains and to protect nuclear power plants and other potentially vulnerable targets.

“I’m not going to stand in front of you as a potential president and say to you that you can protect every single place and harden every single target in the country — all Americans know that,” Kerry told a few thousand supporters who braved Seattle’s drizzle to see the candidate speak on a public pier. “But what we can do is protect against catastrophe. What we can do is protect those places that are most logical places for the largest potential damage or danger. And that is the responsibility of a president.”

While Kerry didn’t specifically say — as some of his supporters have — that Ashcroft’s warnings could be a politically motivated ploy to shore up Bush’s free-falling approval ratings, he came awfully close to doing so. “We deserve a president of the United States who doesn’t make homeland security a photo opportunity and the rhetoric of a campaign,” Kerry said. “We deserve a president who makes America safer.”

Kerry begins an 11-day “focus” on national security and foreign policy in Seattle Thursday with what aides are billing as a major speech on terrorism and the war on Iraq. Wednesday’s speech — in which Kerry said that Bush had repeatedly misled the country about Iraq — may have been a preview of things to come.

Invoking his own experience in Vietnam, Kerry said that the ultimate test of a commander-in-chief in wartime comes when he must look the parents of a fallen soldier in the eye. At that moment, Kerry said the president must be able to say of any war: “I tried to do everything in my power to avoid it, but the threat was such that we had no choice.” Bush, Kerry said, “failed — and fails — that test in Iraq.”

Nothing We Do Can Ever Be Bad

Via Media Matters I read this from Ben Stein:

Media, Congress, get it straight: The U.S. is the main repository of decency on this Earth. The al-Qaida can never defeat us if we are united. But we can defeat ourselves if we begin to think we are the enemy and lose our confidence in our cause. There is no moral equivalency between us and the terrorists. We’re the good guys, and if we lose because we didn’t play hard enough, it’s the end of everything good in our world.

Then, I believe, his head turned five revolutions on top of his shoulders and he projectile vomited several gallons of matzo ball soup.

Update: Mary Matalin was on Rush Limbaugh and said:

[Y]ou inspired me this morning. There’s no reason that I have to do that. I’m — and at least I think I do, but when I listen to you, I get all the information I need, and I — and I — it is — I have a confidence in the President, in the policies, in the goals. I have — I know his conviction. I know he’s right and I know he has the leadership to do it. What I don’t have, and what I can only get from you, is the cheerfulness of your confidence —

It’s amazing how a fistfull of little blue babies can lift your spirits, Mary. But, I think you know that.

The question I will always have for James Carville is … how can anything be good enough to make up for all the rest?

Support The Troops

Salon.com is offering free subscriptions to active duty personnel. Tell your friends and relatives in the service. (It has some good sexy stuff, too, if that’s what it takes to get them interested. And I mean normal sexy stuff, not the freak show stuff that Limbaugh quite obviously spends way too much time perusing.)

And, there’s a petition circulating to get Limbaugh off of American Forces radio. Personally, I’d rather see them challenged to give Howard Stern the follow-up slot since he’s explicitly anti-Bush these days, but this is good, too.

Turning down the volume of the Mighty Wurlitzer is key to ending the reign of the Gingrichian Republicans. If there’s one thing we can do on the internet its show what glass jaws these right wing tough guy pundits really have.

Layers Of Lies On Lies

Bush administration has used 27 rationales for war in Iraq, study says

Only 27?

If it seems that there have been quite a few rationales for going to war in Iraq, that’s because there have been quite a few – 27, in fact, all floated between Sept. 12, 2001, and Oct. 11, 2002, according to a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All but four of the rationales originated with the administration of President George W. Bush.

The study also finds that the Bush administration switched its focus from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein early on – only five months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

[…]

Largio mapped the road to war over three phases: Sept. 12, 2001, to December 2001; January 2002, from Bush’s State of the Union address, to April 2002; and Sept. 12, 2002, to Oct. 11, 2002, the period from Bush’s address to the United Nations to Congress’s approval of the resolution to use force in Iraq.

She drew from statements by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Policy Board member and long-time adviser Richard Perle; by U.S. senators Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, Trent Lott and John McCain; and from stories in the Congressional Record, the New York Times and The Associated Press. She logged 1,500 statements and stories.

The rationales Largio identified include everything from the five front-runners – war on terror, prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, lack of weapons inspections, removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Saddam Hussein is evil, to the also-rans – Sen. Joe Lieberman’s “because Saddam Hussein hates us,” Colin Powell’s “because it’s a violation of international law,” and Richard Perle’s “because we can make Iraq an example and gain favor within the Middle East.”

We knew this because unnamed Bush administration officials said in the fall of 2002 that they were throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. And, of course, there was the infamous George W. Corleone statement, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” Still it is very interesting to see all the various excuses and rationales in one place.

But, here’s the interesting part:

Largio also discovered that it was the media that initiated discussions about Iraq, introducing ideas before the administration and congressional leaders did about the intentions of that country and its leader. The media also “brought the idea that Iraq may be connected to the 9-11 incident to the forefront, asking questions of the officials on the topic and printing articles about the possibility.”

The media “seemed to offer a lot of opinion and speculation, as there had been no formal indication that Iraq would be a target in the war on terror,” Largio wrote. Oddly, though, the media didn’t switch its focus to Iraq and Saddam until July of 2002.

Yet, “Overall, the media was in tune with the major arguments of the administration and Congress, but not with every detail that emerged from the official sources.”

So much has happened so quickly that we lose sight of what total war whores the media were in the lead up and initial execution of the invasion. The reason the media “initiated discussions” about Iraq was quite obviously because they were being spoonfed by the administration. And, as they admitted again just today, even SCLM outlets like the NY Times just can ‘t shake the habit of running like a herd of buffallo over the cliff whenever the Republicans let out a war whoop.

Here’s the report’s web site.

The Best Speech Of His Presidency

I urge all of you to read President Gore’s speech if you didn’t get to see him give it.

Al Gore has a unique position in the eyes of the world, especially in places where Machiavellian vote counting schemes are the norm rather than the exception. He is the shadow president, the man who should be at the helm instead of the man whom they have almost universally come to despise.

His words have particular meaning because they express to many the beliefs of the majority of Americans. He alone has the authority to speak for all of us who were cheated and have been forced to sit by as this usurper, through incompetence, misplaced machismo and — most of all — unbelievable hubris, has managed to destroy more than half a century’s worth of international goodwill and over two centuries hard won belief by the American people in the rule of law.

The world is watching to see what we do in November. They are counting on us to save this country and them. Al Gore is the single best person to reassure the world that we are serious, we understand the problem and we are going to deal with it.

A few excerpts follow, but I urge you, again, to read the whole speech:

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by “a few bad apples,” it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America’s checks and balances.

The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration’s march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th.

There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation — because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him.

[…]

President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is “the central front in the war on terror.” It’s not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. [Dick Cheney said, “This war may last the rest of our lives.] The unpleasant truth is that President Bush’s utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict ” has arguable focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition.” The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks.

[…]

Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America’s reputation and America’s strategic interests, but also to America’s spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize – and to recognize quickly – that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush’s belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, “a few bad apples.”

But as today’s shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today’s New York Times reports that an Army survey of prisoner deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanisatan “show a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.’

Nor did these abuses spring from a few twisted minds at the lowest ranks of our military enlisted personnel. No, it came from twisted values and atrocious policies at the highest levels of our government. This was done in our name, by our leaders.

These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration’s contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America – it is also an illusory goal in its own right.

[…]

A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for Al Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans.

Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to “bring it on.”

[…]

They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics. It is that viciousness that led them to attack as unpatriotic, Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat during the Vietnam War.

The president episodically poses as a healer and “uniter”. If he president really has any desire to play that role, then I call upon him to condemn Rush Limbaugh – perhaps his strongest political supporter – who said that the torture in Abu Ghraib was a “brilliant maneuver” and that the photos were “good old American pornography,” and that the actions portrayed were simply those of “people having a good time and needing to blow off steam.”

[…]

But what we do now, in reaction to Abu Ghraib will determine a great deal about who we are at the beginning of the 21st century. It is important to note that just as the abuses of the prisoners flowed directly from the policies of the Bush White House, those policies flowed not only from the instincts of the president and his advisors, but found support in shifting attitudes on the part of some in our country in response to the outrage and fear generated by the attack of September 11th.

The president exploited and fanned those fears, but some otherwise sensible and levelheaded Americans fed them as well. I remember reading genteel-sounding essays asking publicly whether or not the prohibitions against torture were any longer relevant or desirable. The same grotesque misunderstanding of what is really involved was responsible for the tone in the memo from the president’s legal advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote on January 25, 2002, that 9/11 “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

[…]

The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration.

[…]

President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world – but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm’s way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

[…]

In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president.

I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability…

So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation’s trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands.

I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable – and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, “We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility.”

I hope that this speech is covered heavily in the rest of the world. The situation is so dire that it is important that people realize that the duly elected president of the United States stands in stark contrast to the usurper who sits in the White House. These words could go a long way to calm some of the anger overseas by clearly and distinctly separating the hated president from the American people.

What A Novel Idea

The Bush administration is actually going to work with other nations to solve the global challenge of how to keep nuclear material away from terrorists and dictators. I know it’s not quite as efficacious as breast beating about good ‘n evul and invading foreign countries to show off our big swinging military prowess, but in a sane world it is the kind of thing one would have expected us to do immediately after 9/11 to great fanfare.

However, as it is a break from the preferred Republican methods of intimidation and “message sending,” I’m sure it will be repudiated by Monsieur Delay and Senator Lott as a feminized, sissy-boy program.

The United States, Russia and the U.N. are working to round up nuclear material across the globe to keep it out of the hands of rogue states and militants trying to acquire anything from crude ‘dirty bombs’ to atomic weapons.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave details of the initiative in a speech on Wednesday to members of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Washington has earmarked more than $450 million for the plan, he said.

Abraham said the initiative addressed ‘the threat posed by the entire spectrum of nuclear materials (and) reflects the realities of the 21st century that were so startlingly made clear on a September morning three years ago’.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said the plan was a crucial step in reducing the nuclear threat in light of the recent discovery of a global black market that supplied sensitive atomic technology to countries like Libya, North Korea and Iran.

‘We live in an increasingly polarised world,’ ElBaradei told reporters. ‘If you put these…things together — a polarised world, the proliferation of (nuclear) technology, the proliferation of terrorism — you know we will need to adjust, augment, strengthen our defence.’

The initiative includes a plan to repatriate all unused Russian-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel by the end of next year and all spent nuclear fuel by 2010.

It really is a bold move on Bush’s part because this kind of thing could actually, you know, solve a probem. And solving problems is not something the Bush administration lowers itself to do. Following their Leader’s example, the GOP believes that solutions are for the cleaning crew (the Democrats) to handle after Republicans have worn themselves out raping and pillaging the treasury and the military to such an extent that the American people have to throw them out of office — after which they will devote their rich, fat lives to criticizing the sexual mores of the dog loving feminazis and counting their ill gotten gains.

This is obviously yet another testament to how much the administration is in disarray. This kind of thing would never have happened if Preznit Cheney wasn’t distracted by all the torture, error, lying and mismanagement folderol.

Close Your Deaf Ear

Via The Poorman, I’m glad to find that not all Republicans are simpleminded fools like their president. Here’s one who’s talking some sense for a change:

When people are running for cover to avoid contact with powerful, deadly chemicals, there will be little time to say “I told you so” because once a person is exposed to Sarin gas and other deadly gasses, death is imminent and fast. Maybe then, when it is too late, they will wish they had closed a deaf ear to political rhetoric, and united with the ones who really had their best interest uppermost in their minds.. . all along.

There is no way to satisfy liberals. President Bush was unfairly criticized for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks (he knew nothing about), and yet he is criticized for trying to ward off another devastating attack. What do these people want? It’s obvious, the White House, the Senate and the House. Never mind the safety of the citizens. I would love to be a fly on the wall, at some of the private meetings of the Democrats. Boy, talk about an ear full!

No one paid attention to “Chicken Little” running around like a chicken with his head cut off, warning the sky was falling, either. Most people want to live in their own little world, and the world be void of problems. Since the threat of terrorist attacks are real, it’s time to get out of the mode of fairytales and enter the real world.

The real world hates America, and we were hated long before President Bush came into office. And we’ll be hated long after he leaves office. It does not matter to terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who is president in America. The destruction of America has been many years in the making and now it’s coming to pass, unless the plan is foiled by logical minds. Senator John Kerry cannot stop terrorists who are determined to destroy America, whether he is president or not.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is why the administration didn’t send this person to Iraq to run its ministry of science and hang out with Sophie Ledeen and her Neocon Party Posse. She seems to have the required qualifications.

(BTW: Did Chicken Little really run around like a chicken with his head cut off? That seems so wrong.)

For an in-depth analysis, read all about it at The Poor Man.