Wow. CNN is reporting that Trent Lott just said that the Washington Post leak was probably perpetrated by a Republican Senator! Apparently, the gulag was discussed at the Republican-Senator-only meeting last week in which Cheney begged them to back-off the anti-torture policy.
Lott said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Man a majority leader scorned is fearsome creature, ain’t he?
I do find it fascinating that Cheney was discussing this Gulag opernly in front of the GOP caucus after they had just recently voted 90-0 for the anti-torture amendment. Seems old Dick is a little slow on the uptake. He didn’t learn a thing from his earlier leaking campaign, did he?
As Dear Leader would say, I think it’s a “faahbulous” idea to hold hearings into how the Washington Post found out that we have established an illegal gulag (yes, a gulag) in countries around the world where we are holding and torturing prisoners indefinitely and with impugnity. I hope it creates headlines every single day for months as we explore this issue of how reporters found out that we are behaving in an illegal and immoral fashion along the lines of the Soviet Union. We need to get to the bottom of how such a thing happened and if it requires days and weeks of media coverage discussing how we torture and imprison people in foreign countries, so be it.
This Republican implosion is really becoming interesting to watch. These people lose their wits when they are forced to play defense. They think they are being clever and “turning the tables” on the Democrats by holding hearings into a leak but they apparently don’t understand that they are playing right into the Democratic narrative about Republican secrecy, lies and incompetence.
If Republicans think this is a good idea for the political health of their party, they’re stupider than I’ve ever thought they were. First, they’re all but admitting to the world that we do have such sites, especially when someone on the Hill tells Drudge the leak “damaged national security.”
More importantly, we’re finally going to get to talk about issues that we should have been talking about all along. The Geneva Convention debate will be renewed. Dick Cheney’s walk on the “dark side” will show. Eventually, leaders in countries that haven’t avoided the International Criminal Court will go on trial and save their own asses by ratting out the Bushies.
We’ll probably also get to see a real First Amendment debate, which will demonstrate just how ridiculous Judith Miller’s claims of higher moral purpose were. The honesty of journalism “shield law” advocates like Sen. Dick Lugar and Rep. Mike Pence will likewise be tested.
This could be an all-out, to-the-mattresses fight over the values that we Americans truly hold dear and, in the process, we might even save our country’s soul.
Via Americablog: I see that the GOP attack machine is swift-boating Joe Wilson, saying that he casually spilled his wife’s CIA status in the FOX greenroom back in 2002. I kid you not. They got two wingnut ex-generals to say that Wilson told them about his wife before they were about to go on television.
I suspect they might get a visit from the FBI about this because the last I heard, there was still an ongoing investigation into the matter of how reporters found out about Plame’s employment. Patrick Fitzgerald might just be interested to know why these fellows haven’t come forward before. After all, the story sounds a little bit wierd considering the fact that Joe never let it slip to his own friends and neighbors that Valerie was CIA, yet he supposedly blabbed to a couple of total strangers in the greenroom of a news network.
See, Fitz will wonder if after they heard this juicy little nugget about about a CIA spy married to an ex-Ambassador that they, in turn, told a FOX news reporter who might have then slipped it to Karl or Scooter sometime later. After all, both of those guys have very faulty memories and have said that they don’t remember exactly where they heard about Plame.
I think somebody needs to get on the horn and let Pat Fitzgerald know that there are a couple of witnesses going around on right wing talk radio who could blow his case wide open. He needs to get the FBI out to talk to them right away.
Just in case anyone is wondering about these two guys’ political orientation, here’s an excerpt of the Publisher’s Weekly review of these two patriots’ Regnery book called “Endgame: The Blueprint For Victory in The War On Terror”
As the authors would have it, North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program or face U.S. invasion. Syria, unless it stops supporting terrorism and coughs up the Iraqi WMDs the authors say it’s hiding, should also be invaded. Saudi Arabia should be nudged toward a diversified economy and political reform, but if Islamic radicals take over, it too must be invaded. Iran, too big to invade, should be slapped with an embargo and naval blockade,[that view is no longer operative. Iran should now be tactically nuked — ed] while Pakistan should be enticed with aid packages into curbing its nuclear proliferation and cracking down on the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The authors’ ambitious schedule of ultimatums and conquests leads them to focus almost exclusively on the U.S. military, for which they recommend the Rumsfeld doctrine of light, mobile forces, supplemented by additional weapons spending.
.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Considering what we know about Dick Cheney, it is not surprising that these two fellows would come to his defense. Let’s consider General Paul Vallely, Fox news analyst and certified Strangelovian freakshow. From Newshounds November 2004:
Colmes questioned the wisdom of a Judeo/Christian holy war against Muslims. “That’s what’s going on,” Vallely said. “If you don’t understand that, then you don’t get it.”
But that’s not General Vallely’s claim to fame. He is known for a paper he wrote with a military intelligence officer named Michael Aquino in the late 1980’s called From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory. Aquino is also the founder of a Satanic cult called “The Temple of Set” which has had many run-ins with the law regarding satanic pedophile rings on military bases. I still kid you not. You can find a copy of this paper on the Temple web-site. He founded the cult in the mid-1970’s more than a decade before he wrote this paper with our friend Vallely. I’m not big on guilt by association — but really.
Vallely and Aquino’s views are a bit eccentric, to say the least:
In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe – neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics – but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts made possible a penetration of the minds of the worlds such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.
[…]
Unlike PSYOP, MindWar has nothing to do with deception or even with “selected” – and therefore misleading – truth. Rather it states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States. The examples of Kennedy’s ultimatum to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Hitler’s stance at Munich might be cited. A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP there; its source makes it credible.
[…]
“MindWar must target all participants to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people, and by explaining and emphasizing to our people the rationale for our national interest in a specific war.”
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
This “Mindwar” paper evidently made the rounds in the military when it was published and informed a lot of wingnut thinking. What are the odds that Sec Def Cheney wasn’t impressed? He’s the guy who wanted to use tactical nukes use during Gulf War One, after all.
Mcinerney is only slightly less kooky than Vallely. He is heavily involved in neocon circles, particularly the Iran Policy Group with more famous notables like Gaffney, Ledeen and Pipes. He is also an influential board member of NetStar, a very interesting global communications company. Jim Stanton at the Agonist reported:
At the Intelcon blast held this past February, McInerney chaired a panel on Securing Intelligence Networks. As a director of NetStar Systems, that subject matter is an important part of his job. According to NetStar’s website, it is “a fast-growing Virginia corporation with headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. It was founded in 1998 and most of our employees are cleared at the Top Secret or higher levels. NetStar is growing rapidly in the Intel and DOD sectors and has provided numerous solutions and staff to many of the Intelligence agencies in the DC metro area.” Clients include the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS and the Office of Naval Intelligence. NetStar is a member of the National Military Intelligence Association (NMIA). Most of NetStar’s clients were at Intelcon 2005 including General Jim Williams, USA (Ret.), former director of DIA, and NMIA’s current director.
[…]
“He [Bush] doesn’t have any choice [but to attack Iran because] he understands [the Iranians] are the king of terror right now. They are striving for nuclear weapons that can get into the hands of terrorists and then it’s too late. B-2 stealth bombers, armed with the huge penetrating bombs commonly called bunker busters, would be able to pierce Iran’s aging air defenses and hit 20 or more sites. They have not updated that very, very old air defense system. McInerney said that as a colonel in 1977 he went to Iran and conducted a war exercise against various Iranian targets during the rule of the United States’ ally, the Shah of Iran. They were not very good then, and they have clearly just gotten worse…I can tell you from my personal experience we would have no problem there.”
Vallely is also a major neocon player. He was quoted back in February saying:
“Negotiations will not work,” said Maj. Gen. (ret.) Paul Vallely, chairman of the military committee of the neoconservative Center for Security Policy, who described the Iranian regime as a “house of cards.”
… the voices in favor of an “engagement” policy are being drowned out by crescendo of calls to adopt “regime change” as U.S. policy.
The latest such urging was released here Thursday by the Iran Policy Committee (IPC), a group headed by a former National Security Council staffer Ray Tanter, several retired senior military officers, and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
The 30-page document, “U.S. Policy Options for Iran” by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Clare Lopez, appears to reflect the views of the administration’s most radical hawks among the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
It was Cheney who launched the latest bout of saber-rattling when he told a radio interviewer last month that Tehran was “right at the top of the list” of the world’s trouble spots and that Israel may strike at suspected Iranian nuclear sites even before the U.S.
These are all extremely creepy people involved in all kinds of neocon cloak and dagger fantasies. Just like Dick Cheney, whose idea of military leadership was gleaned from watching movies and TV series. They are part of the crackpot Cheney cabal.
These two men specifically are Jack D. Ripper and Buck Turgidson come to life. I think Pat Fitzgerald needs to talk to them. Immediately.
U.S. forces in Iraq have used incendiary white phosphorus against civilians and a firebomb similar to napalm against military targets, Italian state-run broadcaster RAI reported on Tuesday.
A RAI documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the town of Falluja, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against men, women and children who were burned to the bone.
“I do know that white phosphorus was used,” said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.
The U.S. military says white phosphorus is a conventional weapon and says it does not use any chemical arms.
“Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women,” said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. “White phosphorus kills indiscriminately.”
A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said he did not recall white phosphorus being used in Falluja. “I do not recall the use of white phosphorus during the offensive operations in Falluja in the fall of 2004,” Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan said.
An incendiary device, white phosphorus is used by the military to conceal troop movements with smoke, mark targets or light up combat areas. The use of incendiary weapons against civilians has been banned by the Geneva Convention since 1980.
The United States did not sign the relevant protocol to the convention, a U.N. official in New York said.
This report may be wrong, or a malicious attempt to make the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld military look truly monstrous.* But given everything else that we know about – Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the black sites, the murders and “renditions” and refusal to abide by any law other than the president’s will – I can only assume this is probably true. And note: white phosphorous, an incendiary, is classified as a conventional, ie non-chemical, weapon. Well, since ketchup’s been a vegetable since the Reagan administration, I suppose napalm-like substances can be classified as little worse than rubber darts.
What will it take to stop these horrors? When will this country demand, with one voice, that torture and atrocities committed by the US stop, and stop, now, today?
*For the benefit of the rightwingers amongst us, who assume that those of us opposed to Bush/Iraq hate the military and think all soldiers are sadistic beasts, I don’t believe the majority of American soldiers behave like the Abu Ghraib torturers. Obviosuly.
But I do believe that soldiers must follow orders from their higher ups and are often in no position to question what may be morally questionable orders. The sadistic beasts are the ones who condoned and ordered atrocities, not the soldiers who have been placed in an untenable position and cannot refuse without risking court martial or perhaps even summary execution.
Jamadi’s bruises, [a forensic pathologist who examined the case records] said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way [with his hands tied behind him in a painful position known as a “Palestinian Hanging”] and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.”
As in a crucifixion. At the hands of Americans. And it may not be against the law anymore:
The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist.
So, is the “right to crucify” behind the objections of the Bush administration to McCain’s bill banning torture overseas? Someone should ask Scott McClellan. Today.
As a wise man said back in January 2003 regarding Cheney and his curiously enduring reputation for competence even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, “his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.” Looking back, perhaps historians will say that November 2005 was when they finally saw it.
I agree. It’s finally coming into focus that every single one of this administration’s so-called grown-ups are idiots. There were people who knew that the avuncular Dick Cheney was something of a nut, but nobody believed them. He just seemed so darned competent compared to the callow Junior, there was no need to look any further.
Frances Fitzgerald pointed out back in 2002 that Cheney was a bit of freak, in her fascinating article in the New York review of Books called “Bush and the World:”
In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
The man is clearly a fool and always has been. Larry Johnson wrote about Cheney and torture today over on TPM cafe and mentions that the real CIA guys aren’t all that into torture because it doesn’t work. He suggests that Cheney and his minions got their ideas about all this from the movies.
That certainly does ring true to me. Here’s an old favorite, that’s amazingly illustrative of the incredible shallowness of Big Time, the man who was supposed to help little Junior get over his lack of foreign policy sophistication:
Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”
And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”
But that wasn’t the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being “as bad as it could possibly be… But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn’t die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney’s staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.” (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he’d already known Cheney as “one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.
Remember the adoring crowds and nearly hysterical screaming for this kook during last years election? What in gawd’s name were those people drinking?
It is a wierd goddam day when Elliott “El Mozote” Abrams turns out to be the dove in the administration. (Check out Elliott’s link there if you aren’t familiar with his litany of crimes.) In fact, I can hardly believe it. It’s either a testimony to how radical Bush and Cheney really are or how mellow and peaceful Abrams has become. I’m pretty confident it’s the former.
I remember how dumb and scary I thought Reagan was. Compared to Junior, he was Einstein. What will they shove at us next?
What “compassionate conservative” are they going to foist on this country to take it even further to the right than we can imagine today? I’m thinking it has to be a Dobson or a Robertson Armageddonist. There’s nowhere else to go.
Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his vote against the ban doesn’t mean he favors torture. He rejected Durbin’s comments as ”not really relevant to what we are trying to do to detain and interrogate the worst of the worst so that we can save American lives.”
Roberts said that success with detention and interrogation depends on the detainee’s fear of the unknown. He suggested that passing a law and putting U.S. policies into a manual would tell detainees too much about what to expect.
”As long as you’re following the Constitution and there’s no torture and no inhumane treatment, I see nothing wrong with saying here is the worst of the worst. We know they have specific information to save American lives in terrorist attacks around the world. That’s what we’re talking about,” Roberts said.
People like Pat Roberts make that fatuous argument all the time. They always say we only capture the “worst of the worst” whom soldiers and CIA agents KNOW beforehand have information that they stubbornly refuse to share (unless we make him sit on an exhaust pipe causing softball size blisters on their backside.) We don’t need to apply any rules or laws because they deserve whatever they get. Of course, we don’t torture and wouldn’t dream of it and we always follow the constitution. But when we do it’s only because they are the worst of the worst.
Once again I’m drawn to ponder why we have all this pesky due process here at home if it is possible to know before hand that someone is undoubtedly guilty so whatever punishment they are premptively given is only what they deserve. In the US, we have cops and prosecutors who investigate in scrupulous detail before somebody is tried. We go through a whole lot of gyrations weighing the evidence and making arguments according to laws that have been made to ensure we come as close an approximation of the truth as we can find. We do this because it turns out that sometimes all those cops and prosecutors make mistakes or are corrupt or are anxious to catch a fearsome killer so they get the wrong man.
It’s quite cumbersome, but civilization determined some time ago that not only are torture and cruel and unusual punishment wrong — and it has been millenia since anyone has argued that condoning the torture, punishment or imprisonment of an innocent man is anything but immoral. Yet, that is essentially what this argument does. It must condone the imprisonment and torture of innocent people. It is impossible that we are always capturing only the worst of the worst. In fact, we know that we aren’t. Unless Senator Roberts is even dumber than he sounds, he has decided that torturing the occasional innocent person is just collateral damage.
The military code of justice, the Geneva conventions and the army code of conduct have all been designed to keep some sort of due process alive even in wartime so that we don’t descend into depravity and chaos. They are designed to keep us moored to the idea of justice and morality in the midst of violence. It makes it possible for us to explain what we are doing — to ourselves and others.
I recall during the great Clinton panty raid, the constant refrain about “what will we tell the children?” Everyone was concerned about the moral health of the next generation. How in the hell are people explaining to their children why we need a system of justice when we don’t need it to figure out who is “the worst of the worst.” How do you explain that torture is wrong except when it isn’t?
Still, I think it’s important to remember that we are pursuing phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation for purely political purposes. We will get nothing substantive out of it as long as Senator Pat Roberts is the Chairman.
In Phase I you can see that whoever actually wrote the thing for the Republicans is quite skilled with language (perhaps they hired the romance novelist who penned the Starr report). In this case, it wasn’t bodice ripping sexual adventure, it was a masterful work of subliminal innuendo. The Democrats were either too lazy or too weak to fight this word for the word they way they should have done. Without the underlying information on which the conclusions were based, there is no way to understand what the hell really went on.
This is from the main body of the report, not the separate Hatch, Bond, Roberts addendum hatchet job:
( )Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife “offered up his name” and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” This was just one day before CPD sent a cable DELETED requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him “there’s this crazy report” on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.
This sounds innocuous. However, when you read the report carefully you realize the only time that any person is directly quoted it’s done to create a certain impression. In that paragraph we see that Wilson “offered up” her husband to investigate a “crazy report.” This shows that she has an agenda. Here’s another example:
An INR analyst’s notes indicate that the meeting was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.” The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.
Notice they don’t quote Valerie Wilson there, only the INR analyst. They do not reveal what she said about the “idea to dispatch him” in this passage, but leave it hanging there, unrefuted. There is plenty of information in the report itself and elsewhere from which to support a different view of events, but the report is subtly slanted throughout to give the impression that Plame sent her husband to Niger to knock down a claim that didn’t fit with her pre-conceived beliefs. (Of course, even if that were true, she would have been right. The Iraq Survey Group report put that one to bed.)
It happens throughout the otherwise rather dry, difficult report. By using selective quotes to promote a certain point of view while dissents are buried in expository language, they cleverly give weight to their conclusions while pretending to be even-handed. We can expect more of this for Phase II. (I have little faith that Jay Rockefeller can deal with this any more effectively now than he did before.)
Pat Roberts is the worst possible choice to be the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is a partisan first and last. His predecessor, Richard Shelby of Alabama was no moderate (and he has his own problems with disseminating classified information) but he operated independently of the White House and took his job seriously. In combination with Bob Graham on the Democratic side, they were able to maintain at least some bi-partisan integrity. There is no integrity on the Republican side of the Intelligence Committee at present.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t press for the second phase of the investigation and more. We are about to go into an election year in which it may be possible to take control of the congress if we play our cards right. A huge part of that is laying this cover-up at the feet of these congressional enablers as much as the White House. They have been covering for the Dick Cheney show for years now and it’s time for the public to hold them responsible.
Here’s an early example of Roberts doing a bang up job of congressional oversight, from March of 2003:
Sarah Ross, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, said the committee will look into the forgery, but Roberts believes it is inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.
The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger’s largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.
A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear who first created the documents. The official said American suspicions remain about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection because of other, still-credible evidence that the official refused to specify.
In December, the State Department used the information to support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. But on March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries.
Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but “there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”
Then in November of 2003, look how they handled reports that the Democrats wanted to investigate how the White House used the intelligence. Frist had one of his patented hissy fits:
Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo — which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch — to “identify himself or herself . . . disavow this partisan attack in its entirety” and deliver “a personal apology” to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
Only if those steps are taken, Frist said, “will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner — a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the executive branch.”
Roberts followed Frist on the floor and said that unless the Democratic members “properly” address the issue, “I am afraid that it will be impossible to return to ‘business as usual’ in the committee.”
A committee meeting scheduled for yesterday was canceled, and none has been scheduled for next week, according to a senior committee staff member.
I would suggest that we use their own language against them instead of against ourselves, for once. Who are the real spineless politicians in Washington, after all? Is it the opposition Democrats who flailed unsuccessfully at a president who says that he’d prefer to be a dictator? Or are the GOP Senators and Congressmen who have spent the last five years as servile yes men and women to every single insane thing the president asked of them the real wimps in all this?
They have covered and excused and enabled and supported President Bush and Vice President Cheney no matter what cockamamie acheme they came up with at the expense of their duty as an equal branch of government. What kind of mealy-mouthed little bed-wetters are these Republicans who stood by while this president took this country down the path to perdition.
George W. Bush would be nothing today if it weren’t for the unified unquestioning support of the GOP congress of the United States. We need to make sure that he’s hung like a dead soaring eagle around the necks of every single Republican running for office next year. It isn’t just Codpiece and his mad dog Cheney. It’s the legislative branch who checked their consciences and their responsibilities at the doors to become brown-nosing sycophants for the most incompetent, radical, corrupt administration in history. It’s their Party and they can cry if they want to —- but it won’t do any good.
Are there any Republican political types who aren’t crooks? Any? I think that may be there are one or two, there have to be, but I honestly can’t think of any.
It turns out that Kenneth Tomlinson, the ousted head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is being investigated for “misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees.”
People involved in the inquiry said that investigators had already interviewed a significant number of officials at the agency and that, if the accusations were substantiated, they could involve criminal violations.
Last July, the inspector general at the State Department opened an inquiry into Mr. Tomlinson’s work at the board of governors after Representative Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, forwarded accusations of misuse of money.
The lawmakers requested the inquiry after Mr. Berman received complaints about Mr. Tomlinson from at least one employee at the board, officials said. People involved in the inquiry said it involved accusations that Mr. Tomlinson was spending federal money for personal purposes, using board money for corporation activities, using board employees to do corporation work and hiring ghost employees or improperly qualified employees.
Through an aide at the broadcasting board, Mr. Tomlinson declined to comment Friday about the State Department inquiry.
And guess who’s one of Ken’s good friends?
In recent weeks, State Department investigators have seized records and e-mail from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, officials said. They have shared some material with the inspector general at the corporation, including e-mail traffic between Mr. Tomlinson and White House officials including Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President Bush and a close friend of Mr. Tomlinson.
Mr. Rove and Mr. Tomlinson became friends in the 1990’s when they served on the Board for International Broadcasting, the predecessor agency to the board of governors. Mr. Rove played an important role in Mr. Tomlinson’s appointment as chairman of the broadcasting board.
The content of the e-mail between the two officials has not been made public but could become available when the corporation’s inspector general sends his report to members of Congress this month.
The turning of public broadcasting into a cog in the GOP noise machine was undoubtedly part of Rove’s master plan. One of the beautiful things about controlling the government was the availability of taxpayer money to pay for partisan propaganda. Why bleed your friends when you can bleed the saps who are paying the bills? I’m sure Rupert Murdoch and Dick Scaife would be very grateful if they didn’t have to underwrite the entire thing. Why, if they played thier cards right, in a decade or two, the private sector could be completely out of the propaganda business.
Update: Never Mind. Bush has solved the problem. He’s a leader cuz he knows how ta lead. Back to codpiece worship for everyone:
President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.
The mandatory ethics primer is the first step Bush plans to take in coming weeks in response to the CIA leak probe that led to the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, and which still threatens Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff.
[…]
A senior aide said Bush decided to mandate the ethics course during private meetings last weekend with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and counsel Harriet Miers. Miers’s office will conduct the ethics briefings.
Is it mandatory for Rove and Cheney, do you suppose? It seems kind of pointless otherwise.