Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“Iraq For Sale”

by tristero

I saw a preview of the new Robert Greeenwald film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers last night and it’s very good. It’s directed at any and all Americans who “support the troops,” especially those who support the war and assume that the Bush administration is doing everything possible to prevent the troops from suffering unnecessary harm.

And if you support the troops, for any reason, you should be furious at the incredible extent of the greed, corruption, and incompetence of the companies the Bush administration is contracting with over in Iraq. We’re talking KBR/Halliburton, CACI, Titan, and of course, Blackwater, all of which have placed their CEOs’ obscene compensation above the safety of American soldiers, of innocent Iraqi civilians, and even of their own employees.

How obscene, exactly, is the compensation of these CEOs? We’re talking around $40 million each for the most part. Paid for with your tax dollars, of course. And what do the troops get? They get lousy food and stand in line for hours for the privilege. They get an incompetent laundry service that charges you and me a C note per each soldier’s wash. They get translators that barely speak the languages or understand how to translate. They get torturers and psychopaths – drooling sadists accountable to no one who have been doing their level best to destroy any small vestiges of goodwill towards the US and its soldiers that might still exist beyond our borders. And the troops get rubbed in the face every day with the simple fact that they’ve been played for real suckers. That’s because the “private contractors” – the euphemism of choice for mercernaries these days – make about 6 times what the average soldier makes, often for doing the same job.

None of this is news to many of us, of course. But it may very well be news for lots of Americans, if this film gets seen by the kinds of people who are interviewed in it: middle-class men and women who were bamboozled by the Bush administration into a war whose only point appears to be the further enrichment of the already rich over the bodies of dead American patriots and dead Iraqis. Some liberals might object that the film finesses the larger point, that none of these Americans should be over there in the first place. In fact, it simply makes that point in language that Americans to the right of Colin Powell can understand. And it pulls no punches.

Several times people in the film bluntly accuse the men running KBR, Blackwater, et al of deliberately endangering the lives of soldiers and their own employees in pursuit of profit. The term “cold-blooded murderers” is too kind a word to describe these men. The same goes for high-placed officials in this, the worst of all American presidencies, who have blocked investigations into the war profiteers and in fact rehired them, not only for Iraq but also to slurp up funds for the cleanup after Katrina.

Even for those of us who already know all this, the film dramatizes the sheer extent of it in such a way as to make it infuriating all over again. A must see.

[UPDATE] I Arianna says that “Iraq For Sale” will make a good tool for Democrats in Red States as it paints Republicans as corrupt, cynical, and even murderous in their pursuit of profit. True enough, and that’s probably what Dems should do, but I wouldn’t quite put it that way. The film is less about Republicans and Republicanism per se as it is about the betrayal of American soldiers and American interests overseas by very specific companies and very specific politicians (all of whom are, well, Republican). Its specificity is what gives it its power; it’s not a rant against Republicanism except by implication, and so it comes across as being bipartisan.

Even more to the point, the film doesn’t give any indication that Democrats care deeply about this issue. Few major Democrats in the legislature appear willing to oppose the profiteers with the intensity it will take to bring them to justice (and many surely have committed serious crimes against Iraqis, American civilians, and American soldiers). Where’s Hillary, where’s Schumer, where’s Reid, where’s Pelosi? My recollection is that the most prominent Dems in the film are Dodd and Waxman, no slouches, but where are the so-called top leaders? I don’t remember any of them appearing (and please let me know if I’m wrong, that many of the majors are, in fact, been on top of this issue in a deeply serious way).

All Americans – even Republicans – should be appalled by the disgraceful behavior of the war profiteers. It’s simply a film anyone who supports the troops should see.

The American Scene

by digby

Atrios suggested earlier today that it might be time to start talking about the Mouse’s rather “ugly” past and I agree. Whenever they wingnuts go on about “liberal” Hollywood, I always have to laugh. It’s the oldest story in the book.

Here’s one of my favorites. Good old Uncle Walt testifying before the HUAC:

SMITH: What is your opinion of Mr. Pomerance and Mr. Howard as to whether or not they are or are not communists?

DISNEY: In my opinion they are communists. No one has any way of proving those things.

SMITH: Were you able to produce during the strike?

DISNEY: Yes, I did, because there was a very few, very small majority that was on the outside, and all the other unions ignored all the lines because of the setup of the thing.

SMITH: What is your personal opinion of the Communist Party, Mr. Disney, as to whether or not it is a political party?

DISNEY: Well, I don’t believe it is a political party. I believe it is an un-American thing. The thing that I resent the most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over, and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good, 100 percent Americans, are trapped by this group, and they are represented to the world as supporting all of those ideologies, and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all of the good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism. That is my sincere feeling on it.

SMITH: Do you feel that there is a threat of communism in the motion-picture industry?

DISNEY: Yes, there is, and there are many reasons why they would like to take it over or get in and control it, or disrupt it, but I don’t think they have gotten very far, and I think the industry is made up of good Americans, just like in my plant, good, solid Americans. My boys have been fighting it longer than I have. They are trying to get out from under it and they will in time if we can just show them up.

SMITH: There are presently pending before this committee two bills relative to outlawing the Communist Party. What thoughts have you as to whether or not those bills should be passed?

DISNEY: Well, I don’t know as I qualify to speak on that. I feel if the thing can be proven un-American that it ought to be outlawed. I think in some way it should be done without interfering with the rights of the people. I think that will be done. I have that faith. Without interfering, I mean, with the good, American rights that we all have now, and we want to preserve.

SMITH: Have you any suggestions to offer as to how the industry can be helped in fighting this menace?

DISNEY: Well, I think there is a good start toward it. I know that I have been handicapped out there in fighting it, because they have been hiding behind this labor setup, they get themselves closely tied up in the labor thing, so that if you try to get rid of them they make a labor case out of it. We must keep the American labor unions clean. We have got to fight for them.

SMITH: That is all of the questions I have, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Vail.

VAIL: No questions.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. McDowell.

MCDOWELL: No questions.

DISNEY: Sir?

MCDOWELL: I have no questions. You have been a good witness.

DISNEY: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Disney, you are the fourth producer we have had as a witness, and each one of those four producers said, generally speaking, the same thing, and that is that the communists have made inroads, have attempted inroads. I just want to point that out because there seems to be a very strong unanimity among the producers that have testified before us. In addition to producers, we have had actors and writers testify to the same. There is no doubt but what the movies are probably the greatest medium for entertainment in the United States and in the world. I think you, as a creator of entertainment, probably are one of the greatest examples in the profession. I want to congratulate you on the form of entertainment which you have given the American people and given the world and congratulate you for taking time out to come here and testify before this committee. He has been very helpful.

But that doesn’t really give the full flavor of old Walt’s contribution to the Hollywood witchhunt. He was a prime mover behind it:

The Motion Picture Alliance was formed in the early 1940s by some of Hollywood’s high-profile conservatives including director Sam Wood, Walt Disney, and Leo McCarey. When the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated the motion picture industry, the “friendly witnesses” came largely from the Alliance.

Here is their “statement of principles:”

We believe in, and like, the American way of life: the liberty and freedom which generations before us have fought to create and preserve; the freedom to speak, to think, to live, to worship, to work, and to govern ourselves as individuals, as free men; the right to succeed or fail as free men, according to the measure of our ability and our strength.

Believing in these things, we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of communism, fascism, and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life; groups that have forfeited their right to exist in this country of ours, because they seek to achieve their change by means other than the vested procedure of the ballot and to deny the right of the majority opinion of the people to rule.

In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots. We believe that we represent the vast majority of the people who serve this great medium of expression. But unfortunately it has been an unorganized majority. This has been almost inevitable. The very love of freedom, of the rights of the individual, make this great majority reluctant to organize. But now we must, or we shall meanly lose “the last, best hope on earth.”

As Americans, we have no new plan to offer. We want no new plan, we want only to defend against its enemies that which is our priceless heritage; that freedom which has given man, in this country, the fullest life and the richest expression the world has ever known; that system which, in the present emergency, has fathered an effort that, more than any other single factor, will make possible the winning of this war.

As members of the motion-picture industry, we must face and accept an especial responsibility. Motion pictures are inescapably one of the world’s greatest forces for influencing public thought and opinion, both at home and abroad. In this fact lies solemn obligation. We refuse to permit the effort of Communist, Fascist, and other totalitarian-minded groups to pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs. We pledge ourselves to fight, with every means at our organized command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that give it birth. And to dedicate our work, in the fullest possible measure, to the presentation of the American scene, its standards and its freedoms, its beliefs and its ideals, as we know them and believe in them.

Yes, they were just as thick and incoherent then as they are now.

But old Walt got his way, at least for a while. They succeeded in ruining a lot of people’s lives for the crime of being accused of having once been associated, however peripherally, with the communist party — and, not incidentally, having the temerity to organize unions in Hollywood.

Apparently, Walt Disney’s creepy rightwing spirit remains at the heart of the Disney empire as even today they go out of their way to cater to the religious right, help Republicans win elections and airbrush reality. Where once they tainted liberals as being communist sympathisers, they now blame them for 9/11.

The more things change…

Here’s a link to the story of that strike that old Walt was so exercized about. It’s interesting reading.

Update:

h/t to commenter The Obvious Guy

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They Care

by digby

There is much discussion today about the result of a medical study that shows 70% of people who worked in the WTC center rubble have lung problems. I’m not surprised. I recall writing a post about this back in 2003, when it was first revealed that the administration “edited” the EPA’s health recommendations:

There are so many political and policy atrocities associated with the modern GOP and this administration that it becomes hard to feel anything more than a sort of resigned acceptance and hope that the historians will place them in their proper place in history beside other failed radical experiments.

But, every once in a while something comes to light that begets an emotional charge of such white hot anger and outrage that I find I’m shocked and awed once again at the sheer lack of decency and any claim to honor these people have, particularly after having to listen to their phony pretensions of patriotism and virtue.

Two such cases came up just recently and I wondered once again how low they can possibly go. Pretty low, apparently.

First, I simply cannot wrap my arms around the fact that the White House “sexed down” the EPA assessment of the air quality around ground zero. That they would knowingly place the people involved in the rescue and clean-up operation in long term health danger is simply so disgusting that I find it hard to imagine that any public safety worker in this country could ever vote for the Republicans again.

Remember, the people most likely to be affected by the bad air quality around the WTC after the attacks were cops, firefighters, municipal workers, rescue units and military personnel. The heroes of 9/11, the ones Bush so shamelessly exploited day after day after day — the ones that Peggy Noonan and K-Lo and Coulter got all misty and moist over.

Thanks guys. And by the way, Fuck You.

Would it have been too much trouble for the party of personal responsibility to give unspun information to citizens of the site of the most deadly terrorist attack in the nation’s history so they could decide for themselves how to mitigate the risk of serious long term consequences? The workers would have gone to work anyway, guaranteed, but they might have used more sophisticated equipment and might have discouraged people with respiratory problems from going into the area until it was completely cleared. Gosh, maybe they would have had themselves medically monitored more closely. That would have been terrible.

The only people who likely would have held back are those who work in the Stock Exchange, and there we find the real reason for the lie. Because a bunch of rich traders might have stayed home rather than expose themselves to long term lung damage, Bush and his cronies decided to throw them to the wolves, too.

Good thing you got those tax cuts boys. You’re going to need them to pay for your health costs.

Vote Republican. They care.

They sure do:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg cast doubt on the study’s claims, saying, “I don’t believe that you can say specifically a particular problem came from this particular event.”

Smoking doesn’t cause cancer and evolution and global warming are hoaxes, too, right Mike?

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Who Lost Osama?

by digby

As the right tries to spin 9/11 as being the fault of the Democrats, I can’t help but wonder how they can do it when something like this is right out there for everyone to see:

Let’s hear no more about who caused 9/11. Even after 9/11, George W. Bush said right on television that he didn’t worry about bin Laden.

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Why It Matters

by digby

Dean Barnett, of Hugh Hewitt’s blog, is having some second thoughts about “The Path to 9/11:”

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT “The Path to 9/11” centers on one scene where CIA operatives and Northern Alliance irregulars under the leadership of the awe-inspiring Ahmed Shah Massoud have the opportunity to kill bin Laden. They phone NSA chief Sandy Berger for authorization to make the hit. Berger refuses to make the decision and in the scene actually hangs up on the operatives.

I’ve done a lot of reading and research regarding 9/11, and I have to admit that this story is new to me. The closest parallel I can think of is Tenet’s, Berger’s and Clinton’s irresolute follow-through on the Predator program which had the very real likelihood of knocking off bin Laden assuming the administration was willing to risk the death of innocents. Given the fact that Clinton was willing to take such a risk when the Lewinsky scandal reached its most fevered pitch, the fact that he wasn’t as bold without the looming specter of political calamity is damning. What’s more, the Clinton administration’s lethargic and chronically dilatory efforts to deal with bin Laden are an irrefutable part of the historical record.

The preceding leaves us with two possible explanations regarding the controversial scene. One is that the filmmakers have unearthed a previously unknown jewel that they can fully document; that Berger really did slam down the phone on a field agent looking for guidance. If that’s the case, then this entire conversation is irrelevant and you should cease reading this essay.

The other explanation is that, being a docudrama, the filmmakers included a fabricated scene (which was a composite of many real factors) to dramatize the ineptitude and fecklessness that so characterized the Clinton administration. One can (if one so chooses) give the filmmakers artistic license to do such a thing. But if that is what they have done, conservative analysts who back this movie as a historical document will mortgage their credibility doing so.

The second explanation is the correct one, as Thomas Kean admitted yesterday. And the problem goes much deeper than the credibility of conservative analysts. ABC is sending this thing out to 100,000 educators for free as a history lesson.

The “Student Resource Sheet” omits any mention of two crucial facts: We now know Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and there is a voluminous and growing body of evidence that indicates that the Bush administration knew its claims about weapons of mass destruction were unsupported…

The “Student Resource Sheet” also seems to link the war in Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, the United States began a global “War on Terror” to stop terrorist groups and state-sponsored terrorism. President Bush has led the United States into Afghanistan and Iraq and reorganized the national government in an attempt to combat terrorist activity.”

The reason this matters so much, and why Democrats are so apoplectic at the way ABC has handled this material, is that popular culture has a way of inculcating certain concepts into people’s minds, especially young minds, far more effectively than talking head programs or earnest debates among political bloggers and columnists. This is the kind of thing that could taint the debate for generations if it takes hold.

The right howled mercilessly at Oliver Stone’s depictions of JFK and Nixon, claiming that he was rewriting history. He was, and he used very clever techniques to do it — particularly the odd, dreamlike optical montages that feel like memories. But the key is that these films were about events that happened long in the past — they were re-writing history, not writing the first draft while the immediate events were still being debated. Certainly, nobody sent out high school study guides saying they were based on fact or claimed they were based on The Warren Commission Report or Nixon’s memoirs. Stone never claimed that he was depicting a factual account but rather always said that he was providing an “alternate history.”

“Path to 9/11” is using the sophisticated techniques (if not the talent) of Stone’s “alternate history” style to create an alternate reality in real time. The purpose of this can best be compared to the “who lost China” and “sell-out at Yalta” campaigns of the late 40’s. The right made political hay for decades out of those — blaming the Democrats for being soft on communism. These set the stage for the next 50 years of full throated accusations of traitorous cowardice and we are dealing with the residual results of that cynical political calculation even today. (After all, the Republicans of the day were the reluctant warriors in WWII. They desperately needed to erase that image just as they desperately need to erase the image of the Bush administration’s failures on 9/11 and Iraq.)

If this nonsense is allowed to stick, we will be battling these inaccurate demagogic, phantoms for another 50 years — and I don’t think the country will survive it. These new rightwingers make the red-baiters of the 50’s look like Gandhi. In order for the Republicans to maintain power as often and as much as possible, they must find a way to blame the Democrats for terrorism and ensure that neither party can ever stray from the most hard line they can possibly maintain. It’s the same formula that killed over 50,000 Americans in Vietnam and it’s going to do far worse this time out if we let it happen again.

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Disney Throws Away Millions For Republican Causes

by digby

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution notices a strange contradiction:

So…”The Path to 9/11″ cost $30 million and was written and directed by conservative ideologues. Factually speaking, it’s predictably craptastic. And yet Disney is glad to lose at least $30 million on it.

By contrast, this was Disney’s treatment of another political movie—one that eventually grossed over $200 million:

The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday…

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

”It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.

read on…

You would think they would at least be somewhat uncomfortable about screening this rightwing mini-series only for conservatives. According to this alleged email to Hugh Hewitt, 900 screening copies were mailed out. Sadly, it appears that there were none available for members of the Clinton administration or anyone from the left.

This correspondent told Hewitt that the Disney execs were all atwitter over the week-end:

The story here is the backlash that the Disney/ABC execs experienced was completely unexpected and is what caused them to question themselves and make these changes at all. Had this been the Bush Admin pressuring, they wouldn’t have even taken the call. The execs and studio bosses are dyed in the wool liberals and huge supporters of Clinton and the Democratic Party in general. They had no idea any of this could happen. As I understand this, the lawyers and production team spent literally months corroborating every story point down to the sentence. The fact that they were the attacked and vilified by their “own team” took them completely by surprise; this is the first time they’ve been labeled right-wing, conservative conspiracists.

The scramble caused by this backlash was so all consuming that the execs spent their holiday weekend behind closed door meetings and revamped their ad campaign. But at the end of their mad scramble, they found only a handful of changes they could make and still be true to the events. The changes are done only to appease the Clinton team – to be able to say they made changes. But the blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project and could not be eradicated without pulling the entire show. A $40 million investment on the part of ABC is enough to stem even Bill Clinton’s influence.

We are, apparently, supposed to assume that the communist corporate officers of Disney/ABC (many of whom inexplicably contributed to the Bush campaign) knew that the “blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project” and yet they never expected this fictionalized account of the Clinton administration causing 9/11 would make any waves among their comrades. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

It’s evident that Disney/ABC Entertainment is anything but a bunch of lefties. If they were they would have been thrilled to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” instead of avoiding it like the plague. And they most certainly wouldn’t have signed off on crazy anti-semite Mel Gibson’s Holocaust project, for God’s sake:

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6, 2005 – Mel Gibson, whose “The Passion of the Christ” was assailed by critics as an anti-Semitic passion play – and whose father has been on record as a Holocaust denier – has a new project under way: a nonfiction miniseries about the Holocaust.

[…]

It is not expected that Mr. Gibson will act in the miniseries, nor is it certain yet that his name, rather than his company’s, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to several people involved in developing it. Nor is it guaranteed yet that the project will be completed and broadcast.

But Quinn Taylor, ABC’s senior vice president in charge of movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.

“Controversy’s publicity, and vice versa,” Mr. Taylor said.

Right. Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is an awesome way to get publicity. But distributing a documentary about the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11 was too hot to handle. And they had no idea that a mini-series claiming that the Clinton administration was responsible for the attacks would be controversial at all.

Here’s the record:

Disney/ABC cancelled the reality show featuring a gay couple, “Welcome To The Neighborhood,” ten days before it was to air when James Dobson and the religious right threatened to withdraw their support for the conservative classic “Narnia.”

Disney refused to allow its subsidiary Miramax, which specialized in controversial fare, to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” allegedly because they felt it was too political.

They made a deal with Mel Gibson, beloved on the religious right for his film “The Passion,” to produce a film about the Holocaust even though they knew at the time he held extremely controversial views about the Holocaust and Judaism. They only cancelled the project when he was caught by the police drunkenly saying “all the wars in the world are caused by the Jews.”

Now they have produced a blatantly rightwing work of fiction which they are saying is based on the official 9/11 Commission report and they are giving it away without any advertising. They sent out hundreds of screening copies but failed to send any to the Clinton administration officials who are trashed in the film or to liberal columnists and bloggers.

There’s a pattern here folks and it isn’t a pattern that shows ABC knuckling under to liberals. There is a huge amount of money at stake in all these decisions, but for some reason Disney seems to be more than willing to throw it away when it benefits the right wing: already produced films and TV shows are either cancelled or allowed to be distributed by others, while hugely expensive, controversial rightwing mini-series’ are broadcast with no advertising and allowed to be downloaded for free by I-tunes.

Isn’t that something that Disney shareholders should be just a little bit concerned about? If ABC is protecting its “Narnia” franchise, at some point you have to look at whether the price they are paying is too high. If they have thrown this kind of money away to appease the GOP for business reasons then their shareholders have just been taken to the cleaners. The old K Street project is dead and when Democrats take congress this fall they aren’t going to be happy. They are on to it.

If Disney/ABC is giving away free air time for conservative projects and denying distribution to programs that don’t favor the Republican Party, then perhaps somebody needs to look at whether this stuff is legal. There are laws regulating corporate giving to campaigns. By not showing advertising it seems to me that it’s not impossible to make a case that this latest is a free gift to the Republican party just weeks before an important election.

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ABC Has No Class

by tristero

To provide a slimeball like Limbaugh an advance copy of their miniseries but refuse to send one to Clinton? Not to mention Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger? Who the fuck do they think they are? From Albright’s letter:

While I have requested a copy of the broadcast, I have yet to receive one. I have been informed by some who had been given the right to view the broadcast that the drama depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred; it asserts as fact things that are not fact.

For example, one scene apparently portrays me as refusing to support a missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistanis; it further asserts that I notified the Pakistanis of the strike over the objections of our military. Neither of these assertions is true.

You can write ABC here.

Trials and Tribulations

by digby

According to Pete Williams on MSNBC, Bush’s announcement that they are moving the 14 terrorists we’ve had holed up in secret prisons to Guantanamo is a political ploy to force Democrats to have to give “rights” to Khalid Sheik Mohammed if they want to challenge his Guantanamo policies. It’s quite clever.

Might I suggest that since they’ve just spent the last week shrieking about fascists and Nazi’s and comparing the GWOT to WWII, that Democrats simply remind them that the gold standard for trials of fascists is the Nuremberg trials? Perhaps we could settle this whole thing by simply saying that Nuremberg should serve as the basis for these new “Islamo-fascist” trials and put an end to the controversy.

Of course, that means the trials would have to be public.

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The Littlest Hero: One Year Ago Today

by digby

One year ago today I was as depressed as I’d ever been after watching a week’s worth of Katrina aftermath horrors. And then I saw this story on Talk Left:

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

…Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building. The children were clean and healthy ? downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that “time had been taken with those kids.” The baby was “fat and happy.”

Later, more details emerged:

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he’d take care of his little brother.

[…]

Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte’s mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children’s pictures on a website set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.

Here’s the kid last February, doing well in the first grade in San Antonio.

February 2006
Alan Rochkus, principal of Harmony Hills Elementary School, watches Demonte Love, first-grader, complete a math puzzle while a KSAT-12 photojournalist films him. Love rescued six children, ranging in age from 5 months to three years, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, La. He received a Trumpet Award for his heroism.

It does your heart good, doesn’t it?

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Take Another Look Kewl Kids

by digby

Since the press has turned into lobotomy patients with memory deficit disorder on the Plame case, I don’t suppose it’s even worthwhile to point out that the Armitage revelations of the past week or so in Isikoff and Corn’s new book aren’t really all that earth shattering compared with this week’s bombshell:

A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was “an analyst, not in covert operations.” White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”

Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President’s case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.

[…]

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

“We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.” Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)

The JTFI found nothing.

Now I realize that it would be imprudent of me to suggest that her group’s failure to adequately provide the vice president with the information he needed might have prompted him to tell his henchman Libby to burn her, but, you know I’m like that.

Armitage may have just been a gossipy little busybody from way back, but that doesn’t explain LIbby and Judy and Rove and Cooper or the “two senior administration officials” who tried to get the Washington Post to print that Wilson’s CIA “wife” had sent Wilson on a “boondoggle.” Rove said she was “fair game.” You simply cannot persuade me that every last person involved in this did not know that the head of the Joint Task Force on Iraq’s WMD at the CIA in 2003 was the person they were busy making sure was publicly outed.

Wilson scared the hell out of them because they knew who his wife was and knew what she knew. This is about Cheney and the CIA, whom he and all the neocons have thought were a bunch of liberal appeasers for decades because they have so often failed to back up the wingnuts’ most fanciful, paranoid wet dreams about the boogeyman of the day — wet dreams, by the way, which were always, everytime, proven false in the end.

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