I Can’t Wait
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Lou-seurs
Democrats lose even when they win, apparently. Here’s the headline on the NY Times article about Herseth’s win:
Could Herseth’s Victory in South Dakota Hurt Daschle?
Yeah. It was a huge mistake winning that seat. Silly Democrats.
The Abu Ghraib Scandal Cover-Up?:
Strong Leadership
…the White House seems to be constructing a legal moat around the president. Its argument is that Bush’s orders were simply disobeyed. Rice told the human-rights lawyers last week that the president’s clear directives on observing the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture laws were not followed
Ministry Of Fear
Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, who is in charge of setting policy on prisoners and detainees in occupied Iraq, has banned any discussion of the still-classified report on Abu Ghraib written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, which has circulated around the world. Shortly after the Taguba report leaked in early May, Feith subordinates sent an “urgent” e-mail around the Pentagon warning officials not to read the report, even though it was on Fox News. In the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, officials in Feith’s office warn that the leak is being investigated for “criminal prosecution” and that no one should mention the Taguba report to anybody, even to family members. Feith has turned his office into a “ministry of fear,” says one military lawyer. A spokesman for Feith, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, says the e-mail warning was intended to prevent employees from downloading a classified report onto unclassified computers.
Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you no man ask for
Under pressure
That burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets
That’s o-kay!
It’s the terror of knowing
What this world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming let me out!
Pray tomorrow takes me higher
Pressure on people
People on streets
The Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi — formerly a key ally of the Bush administration — is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, government sources told NEWSWEEK
Somebody’s got a problem.
The article doesn’t go into any further detail on that, but it does feature a bunch of neocons (called here “political activists” which cracks me up) in high dudgeon screaming about “witch hunts.”
People might be able to chalk up all this espionage, treason type talk as partisanship or business as usual in the nation’s capital, except it’s got nothing to do with the Democrats!! This is a Republican show all the way and all we have to do is bring the popcorn.
Oh, and by the way:
President Bush also distanced himself from Chalabi, saying he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times.
Who is this Chalabi you speak of?
If that’s on camera, it would make a nice video companion to his notorious “I believe I met Mr Lay when he was working for my opponent.”
And I think the more pertinent question is how many times did President Cheney meet with Mr Chalabi, anyway.
Josh Marshall points out the ultimate paragraph of this piece which is a real killer:
One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.
I’m having milk duds too. This is going to be good.
Update:
Via Atrios, the actual Bush comments from yesterday:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that’s fallen out of favor within your administration. I’m wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly —
THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi?
Q Yes, with Chalabi.
THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven’t had any extensive conversations with him.
…Q I guess I’m asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it’s going to be in Iraq.
If you haven’t already seen it, go read the patented Eschaton takedown of this obvious lie.
Woolcott on Bush’s Women
Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott gives the women closest to President Bush a very rough going-over in the latest issue – portraying mom Barbara Bush as a nasty piece of work, wife Laura as timid and ineffectual, former Bush aide Karen Hughes as a wacko and a liar and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as a weirdly worshipful “professional wife.” But, surprisingly, Wolcott concludes with a backhanded compliment for daughters Jenna and Barbara: “I’ve come to have a grudging regard for the Bush twins. Jenna and Barbara may be spoiled brats – tarty party girls – but at least they’re not perpetuating false pretenses, being used as attractive props and tweeting noises they don’t believe.”
I agree with this, actually. Those two girls may be spoiled little Paris Hilton wannabes but you have to give them credit for not buying into the phony sanctimony of their religious-right pander patsy of a father. They told him to go to hell. I’m not sure they’re Republicans.
Via the great Catch.com
Chalabi, he pointedly noted, wasn’t the only Iraqi exile with White House connections. He added that the administration has “had relations with a number of groups previously that were intent on seeing Saddam Hussein’s regime removed from power.”
And he never asked anyone to lie. Not one time.
Just In Case
Bush Consults Lawyer in CIA Leak Case
President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.
There was no indication that Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney’s advice, “he would retain him,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.
The lawyer is Jim Sharp, Buchan said, confirming a report by CBS News.
“The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself,” the spokeswoman said.
She deflected questions about whether Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case.
If he’s called before the grand jury can he take Cheney with him?
Little Mikey on the big raid:
The early-morning raid on the home and office of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad sends “the wrong message” to America’s would-be allies in the Arab world, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin tells Insight.
“This is a huge blow to America’s prestige,” he said. “The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”
Rubin, who served as an aide to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, spoke with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid Thursday.
“Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he says. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Deeply involved in planning for the Iraq war, Rubin tells Insight that he left the government in April out of a sense of frustration.
“This administration has been taking so many hits, many of them based on outright fabrications or on information from ‘anonymous intelligence sources,’ that I felt I could be more effective on the outside,” he says.
Rubin now is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
[…]
American news reports yesterday gave several variants of the alleged charges against the Chalabi aides, ranging from corruption, fraud and vehicle theft to intimidation and blackmail. But INC sources and Rubin believe there is no doubt that U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer ordered the raid.
“The decision to “cut Chalabi down to size” was taken in Washington,” Rubin said, “but the operation against Chalabi originated in Baghdad. There is no doubt that Bremer signed off on this. Basically, Bremer has gone mad. This raid shows the U.S. has not learned the lessons of Abu Ghraib, and is still trying to “humiliate” perceived opponents.
Attempts by Insight to reach Bremer for comment were unsuccessful.
At a press conference in Baghdad after the raids, Chalabi identified one of the individuals allegedly being sought as Aras Habib, his longtime security and intelligence chief. Before the U.S.-led invasion, Habib ran the INC’s network of informants within Saddam’s regime and identified defectors the INC ultimately helped to escape Iraq.
Chalabi’s detractors claim the intelligence provided by those defectors relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs was false or fabricated. But in fact, says Rubin, the INC provided intelligence and human sources at a time when the CIA has no assets inside Iraq at all.
“The CIA hates Chalabi because he comes out with information they do not have and that later gets confirmed,” Rubin says.
[…]
“The most virulent hatred of Chalabi comes from those who have never met him,” he [Rubin] says. “Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] and U.S. military commanders in Iraq who have worked with the INC have given them stellar reviews. They have used INC intelligence to stop operations by insurgents that were targeting Americans. They have caught insurgents red-handed because of information provided by Chalabi. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage appear to place greater value on winning bureaucratic battles in Washington than in saving American lives in Iraq.”
[…]
In citing [ormer DIA analyst Pat] Lang as an expert on Iraq, neither CBS nor the Washington Post ever has mentioned that Lang has registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for an Arab government.
“How can somebody working for an Arab government parade about as a neutral analyst?” asks Rubin.
What a good question.
Now, I ask you, does Rubin sound here like he might be a tippler? Or is just wired out of his mind on venti-quad-no-foam-lattes?
This article was written the day after the raid. Perhaps what seeps through here isn’t booze or caffeine. It sounds more like panic.
Intriguing as her personal history may be, however, Ms. Miller’s troubles didn’t arise from mere ambition or poor manners. Instead, they reflected the reluctance of her editors to recognize that she was motivated by an ideology shared with her sources. Such ‘passions’ are far more common among mainstream journalists than they like to admit; indeed, strong beliefs are characteristic of many of the nation’s best journalists.
But by failing to exercise adequate control over Ms. Miller’s urge to propagandize, those editors allowed The Times to become an instrument for her neoconservative patrons in and out of government, and for their agenda of ‘regime change’ in Iraq and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East.
Miller is one of the rare reporters whose ideology was evident to practically everyone, which is why her “errors” have been attacked so relentlessly. You didn’t have to be a gernius to realize that this woman was pushing an agenda because she really didn’t make any effort to hide it.
But the fact is that even without a full-on GOP operative working as a reporter, The Times long ago became a willing tool of the right wing when the story was juicy enough. I don’t say that because I believe the editors sincerely want to promote right wing views. Some undoubtedly do, but most of these people are big city cosmopolitan types who probably hold fairly liberal beliefs in most areas. I think there is a much subtler and more sophisticated phenomenon at work.
We know about the “working the refs” angle. They have been affected subconsiously by the decades-long “liberal media” attack on their integrity and so they lend more and more credibility to right wing sources to achieve “balance.”
But, more than that, they have become dependent on the easy, stimulating, tittilating tabloid inspired “scoops” that the right wing propaganda shops learned they liked. The breathless, uncritical style of reporting that Miller personified, and the screaming headlines that accompanied her stories, were very similar in tone to the Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee series’. These were BIG stories about southern gothic corruption, lethal Chinese espionage and “smoking guns as mushroom clouds.” They were sensational. They had pulitzer written all over them if they panned out. But, they didn’t. They were false trails, propaganda and manipulation by people with a political agenda.
The paper has yet to grapple with the fact that they were used by political players. This means that they will remain subject to the same inducements. And they are not alone. Look at a respected TV journalist like Tim Russert. He can be indicted on exactly the same charges as the Times’ editors. He has accepted far too much information from right wing political operatives that turned out to be wrong to justify his continuing to use them. Yet, he obviously does and mostly uncritically. He uses their lies to confront the political opposition and force them to deny them without ever evidencing any qualms that he might be helping to spread falsehoods and wrong impressions by doing so.
The most important thing is for Democrats, particularly in Washington, to absorb the fact that they cannot count on these institutions to be objective. They must not give credence to stories just because they appear in The New York Times and they must not adhere to the “conventional wisdom” that often follows from those reports. As long as these bastions of “liberal media” are subject to right wing manipulation, belief in their credibility by Democrats perpetuates the Republicans’ brilliant use of subliminal anti-liberal cant to demoralize and disillusion us.
It’s a flavorless kind of kool-aid and we don’t even know we’re drinking it.
