Cheney's new security adviser linked to bogus information on Iraq
"Vice President Dick Cheney replaced I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby as his national security adviser on Monday with an aide identified by a former Iraqi exile group as the White House official to whom it fed information on Iraq that turned out to be erroneous.
... The White House announced on Monday the elevation of John Hannah to replace Libby as Cheney's national security adviser. Earlier in the day it announced that Libby would be arraigned Thursday in federal court on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. "
Cheney's not changing course, is he? I guess they are going to just keep going, until they hit a brick wall.
- posted by geoff @ #

 
The Real Rosa Parks
"Parks’s journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart--as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history."
- posted by geoff @ #

 

U.S. Inquiry Cites Missteps in Iraqi Reconstruction
"As the money runs out on the $30 billion American-financed reconstruction of Iraq, the officials in charge cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no clear source for hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to operate the projects that have been finished, according to a report to Congress made public today.
The report, by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, describes some progress but also an array of projects that have gone awry, sometimes astonishingly, like electrical substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the country's electrical grid."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Bush calls Iran and Syria 'outlaw regimes'
"President George W. Bush on Friday called Iran and Syria 'outlaw regimes' and said countries that support terrorism are just as guilty of murder as those who commit the violence."
May might more accurately say that the indictment of Libby today shows that the Bush Administration is an "outlaw regime". Bush's war mongering is dangerous.
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Rove unmasked - Los Angeles Times: "After Bush won reelection, he granted Rove all-encompassing power over his domestic agenda. Rove is now overseeing the White House Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, National Security Council and Homeland Security Council. This was simply a formal recognition of the de facto power that Rove had wielded all along."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Cheney Adviser Resigns After Indictment - Yahoo! News
"Libby submitted his resignation to White House chief of staff Andy Card. It was accepted and Libby left the White House. Card notified Bush.
The indictment alleges that Libby began digging for details about Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband and an Iraq war critic, well before the former ambassador went public July 6, 2003, in a newspaper opinion piece with his criticism of the Bush administration's use of faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear ambitions.
Libby made his first inquiries about Wilson's travel to Niger in late May 2003 — a trip the government sent him on in early 2002 to check on reports that Saddam was trying to buy uranium — and by June 11 Libby was informed by a CIA official that Wilson's wife worked for the agency and might have sent Wilson on the trip.
On June 12, 2003, the indictment alleges, Libby heard directly from Cheney that Plame worked for the spy agency.
'Libby was advised by the vice president of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the CIA,' Fitzgerald said in a news release.
A short time later, Libby began reaching out to reporters, starting with The New York Times' Judith Miller on June 23."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Miers Withdraws as Nominee Amid Conservative Revolt
"the nomination ``smacked of cronyism and raised the question whether she' was named to the court as a rubber stamp,'' Pilon said. ``With so many highly qualified people, that he chose this woman suggests a tin ear of monumental proportions.''"
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Military Has Lost 2,000 In Iraq: "The number of U.S. troops who have died in the Iraq war hit 2,000 yesterday, a toll felt deeply at big military bases across America that active-duty soldiers and families call home, as well as in hundreds of communities where the National Guard and reservists work, live and train.
The threshold was crossed with the Pentagon's announcement that Staff Sgt. George Alexander Jr., 34, of Killeen, Tex., had died at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas on Saturday of injuries suffered in Iraq earlier this month, when a bomb planted by insurgents exploded near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Since the March 2003 invasion and quick march to take Baghdad, U.S. troops have been dying at about 800 a year, with most killed in action by crude but powerful roadside bombs and in firefights against an unrelenting insurgency. More than 90 percent of the deaths have come after President Bush declared an end to "major combat operations" on May 1, 2003."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Vice President for Torture
"VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.
It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel."
- posted by geoff @ #

 

Focus of Prosecutor in CIA Leak Inquiry Appears to Shift to Rove - Yahoo! News
"Italian parliamentary officials announced that the head of Italy's military secret service, the SISMI intelligence agency, would be questioned next month about allegations that his agency gave the disputed documents to the United States and Britain, an Associated Press report said. A spokeswoman said Nicolo Pollari, the agency's director, asked to be questioned after reports this week in Italy's La Repubblica newspaper claiming that SISMI sent the CIA and U.S. and British officials information that it knew was forged.
The newspaper reported that Pollari met at the White House on Sept. 9, 2002, with then-deputy national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley. The Niger claims surfaced shortly thereafter. A spokesman for Hadley, now the national security advisor, confirmed that the meeting took place but declined to say what was discussed.
Hadley played a prominent role in the controversy over Bush's claims in his State of the Union address. He took responsibility for inserting into the speech the famous 16 words that laid out the allegations."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Frustrated Scowcroft Assails Neo-Cons, Cheney
"Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under Bush's father, assailed neo-conservatives who persuaded the president to go to war in Iraq.
In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Scowcroft, whose relations with the Bush administration have been badly strained since he publicly warned against invading Iraq seven months before U.S. troops crossed over from Kuwait, argued that the invasion was counter-productive.
'This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism,' Scowcroft told the magazine...
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's top aide for some 16 years... accused Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of leading a "cabal" that circumvented the formal policy-making and intelligence processes in order to take the country to war in Iraq."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Cheney Plan Exempts CIA From Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees
"The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in U.S. custody.
The proposal, which two sources said Vice President Cheney handed last Thursday to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the company of CIA Director Porter J. Goss, states that the measure barring inhumane treatment shall not apply to counterterrorism operations conducted abroad or to operations conducted by 'an element of the United States government' other than the Defense Department."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations
"The FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight, according to previously classified documents to be released today.
Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view.
In one case, FBI agents kept an unidentified target under surveillance for at least five years -- including more than 15 months without notifying Justice Department lawyers after the subject had moved from New York to Detroit. An FBI investigation concluded that the delay was a violation of Justice guidelines and prevented the department "from exercising its responsibility for oversight and approval of an ongoing foreign counterintelligence investigation of a U.S. person."
In other cases, agents obtained e-mails after a warrant expired, seized bank records without proper authority and conducted an improper "unconsented physical search," according to the documents."
- posted by geoff @ #

 

Bushies Feeling the Boss' Wrath
"Bush, who has a long history of keeping staffers in their place, has lashed out at aides as his political woes have mounted.
'The President is just unhappy in general and casting blame all about,' said one Bush insider. 'Andy [Card, the chief of staff] gets his share. Karl gets his share. Even Cheney gets his share. And the press gets a big share.'
The vice president remains Bush's most trusted political confidant. Even so, the Daily News has learned Bush has told associates Cheney was overly involved in intelligence issues in the runup to the Iraq war that have been seized on by Bush critics.
Bush is so dismayed that 'the only person escaping blame is the President himself,' said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration 'illogical.'
A second senior Bush loyalist disagreed, saying Bush knows 'some of these things are self-inflicted,' like the Miers nomination, where Bush jettisoned contrary advice from his advisers and appointed his longtime personal lawyer.
'He must know that the way he did that, relying on his own judgment and instinct, was not good,' another key adviser said."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State: "It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: 'During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.' And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, 'I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.'
Let's replay that one again in slow motion.
Judith Miller is a reporter for the New York Times. After the invasion, on assignment to cover a U.S. military unit as it searches for WMDs in Iraq, she's given 'clearance' by the Pentagon 'to see secret information' -- which she 'was not permitted to discuss' with Times editors.
There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation"
- posted by geoff @ #

 
List of Foiled Plots Puzzling to Some: "A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.
Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or 'elevated' risk of attack, to orange, or 'high' risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.
The president made it "sound like well-hatched plans," said a former CIA official involved in counterterrorism during that period. "I don't think they fall into that category.""
- posted by geoff @ #

 

The Tarnish of Torture
The McCain amendment requires a tough uniform standard for the interrogation of detainees and will prohibit "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of individuals in "the custody or under the physical control of the United States government." It essentially restates what is already in U.S. law and our legal and moral commitments to international conventions on human rights. Almost 30 retired military commanders supported McCain's amendment.
Astonishingly, the White House has threatened a veto, claiming that the anti-torture provision would unduly "tie the hands" of the president in fighting the war on terrorism. Tie his hands? Isn't that what the rule of law is supposed to do? Is the administration actually suggesting it should be exempt from law? Perhaps. This is the same administration that launched an illegal war in Iraq and lied about why it was necessary.

- posted by geoff @ #

 
Bush Is in No Hurry on Katrina Recovery - Los Angeles Times: "Despite mounting evidence that Washington is having trouble putting to use most of the $62 billion in emergency funds approved by Congress so far, the president has resisted appointing a recovery coordinator or further detailing his vision of how to tackle rebuilding. In interviews last week, he explained that he wanted state and local officials to act first.

'I recognize there's an attitude in Washington that says, 'We know better than the local people.' That's just not the attitude I have,' Bush told NBC's 'Today' show.

Bush's cautiousness appears to be partly a response to some conservatives' clamor for federal budget cuts to offset aid to the Gulf Coast.

In addition, the scale and complexity of reconstruction pose special challenges for an administration that firmly favors market mechanisms over government action, at least domestically.

With the immediate crisis past, administration officials may be hoping that state and local efforts — and the free market — will relieve them of the thorniest decisions, as well as a substantial chunk of the estimated $200-billion price tag for the region's revival.

However, a variety of prominent Republicans warn that the president's approach is a recipe for trouble."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Presidential Chat: Staging Democracy: "
With the inadvertent release of a dress rehearsal for troops before their talk Thursday with President Bush, the White House showed its true self. This is an administration that cares less about the truth than controlling the public's perceptions.
It was bad business as usual when the administration carefully staged, rehearsed and even gave breathing instructions for what was supposedly 'just a conversation' between President Bush and troops in a live video conference. The White House and the Pentagon tried to spin the staging as normal preparation. But, as Fox News reported, even some senior Pentagon officials were privately angry."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
UN Official: US Troops 'Starving' Iraqi Civilians: "Jean Ziegler, a former Swiss sociology professor who is U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said the Geneva Conventions banned military forces from using 'starvation of civilians as a method of warfare'.
But he said that in Falluja, Tal Afar and Samarra, Iraqi and U.S.-led forces had cut off or restricted food and water to encourage residents to flee before assaults on entrenched Sunni insurgents over the past year.
'A drama is taking place in total silence in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces are using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population,' Ziegler told a news briefing.
Two 1977 protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which lay down rules of conduct in armed conflicts, ban using deprivation of food or water as a weapon of war. They also prohibit destruction of food stocks or interruption of food supply lines.
Ziegler said he understood the military rationale of the coalition forces who were 'facing such a horrible enemy -- these insurgents who do not respect any law of war and who use the civilian population of cities like Falluja or Tal Afar as human shields, who keep them as hostages'.
But he said their actions were nevertheless a 'flagrant violation of international humanitarian law'."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
The Art of Caring for Souls: "Response to hurricane Katrina is not proof of government’s failure; it is proof of George W. Bush’s failure to govern effectively."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom: "what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: 'We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation'. I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria."
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Making it easier for the president to declare martial law
Bush says he's considering deploying the military to enforce rapid command and control measures. Given the churn of the world's population, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of people flying into and out of this country every day, it's doubtful that any post-outbreak military action short of a total national quarantine would be at all effective. And that would mean a national lockdown that some ranking military officers are loath to contemplate, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"We're trying to put some plans in place," Bush told reporters. Those plans would be better directed at resuscitating a moribund domestic vaccine industry, proven so wanting when supplies ran out last year.
The primary role of the military is to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," not to supplant civil authority.
What Bush is thinking about could change for much the worse a relationship between a free people and their sworn protectors more than 200 years in the making. He'd better think again.
- posted by geoff @ #

 

Bush Presidency Judged Unsuccessful

- posted by geoff @ #

 
Bush Coming to a Boil
... close inspection of Bush's body language in the video of the interview exposed any number of signs of strain -- including blinking and twitching.
"Only the president's closest friends and family know (if anybody does) what he's really thinking these days, during Katrina woes, Iraq violence, conservative anger over Harriet Miers, and legal trouble for Bush's top political aide and two congressional GOP leaders. Bush has not been viewed up close; as he took his eighth post-Katrina trip to the Gulf Coast yesterday, the press corps has accompanied him only once, because the White House says logistics won't permit it. Even the interview on the 'Today' show was labeled 'closed press.'
"But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC's broadcast during Bush's 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.
"The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was 'trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,' Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.
"When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling."
Milbank also touches on Bush's habit of making inappropriate facial expressions. At one point, he writes, Bush "seemed to lose control of the timing. He smiled after observing that Iraqis are 'paying a serious price' because of terrorism."
And Milbank doesn't even mention the tic that has been the subject of intense speculation in the blogosphere for several months: Bush's bizarre, shifting lower jaw movement that increasingly punctuates the ends of his sentences.
- posted by geoff @ #

 

White House Ignored C.I.A. on Iraq Chaos

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

The unclassified report was completed in July 2004. It appeared publicly for the first time this week in Studies in Intelligence, a quarterly journal, and was first reported Wednesday in USA Today. The journal is published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is part of the C.I.A. but operates independently.
The review was conducted by a team led by Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, working under contract for the C.I.A. It acknowledged the deep failures in the agency's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs but said "the analysis was right" on cultural and political issues related to postwar Iraq.
Mr. Kerr's review did not describe those findings in detail. But The New York Times first reported last year that two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 had predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.
Those reports were by the National Intelligence Council, the highlevel group responsible for producing the government's most authoritative intelligence assessments.
Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies have been notably more gloomy than the White House and the Pentagon about prospects for stability in Iraq. In the summer of 2004, newspaper articles about those reports so angered some Republicans that they accused the agency of trying to undermine President Bush.
- posted by geoff @ #

 
Bush Sets Foxes to Guard Chicken Coops (ie. US Govt. Agencies) Industry and Media Paricipate in Coverup
President Bush has turned the agencies charged with environmental protection over to people who don't believe in it. To run the Interior Department he chose a long-time defender of polluters who has opposed laws to safeguard wildlife, habitat, and public lands. To run the Forest Service he chose a timber industry lobbyist. To oversee our public lands he named a mining industry lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional. To run the Superfund he chose a woman who made a living advising corporate polluters how to evade the Superfund. And in the White House office of environmental policy the President placed a lobbyist from the American Petroleum Institute whose mission was to make sure the government's scientific reports on global warming didn't contradict the party line and the interest of oil companies. Everywhere you look, the foxes own the chicken coop.
My colleagues and I reported these stories again and again on my weekly PBS series, to the consternation of the President's minions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB Chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, turned the administration's discomfort at embarrassing disclosures into a crusade to discredit our journalism. Tomlinson left the chairmanship this week but the Rightwing coup at public broadcasting is complete. He remains on the board under a new chair who is a former real estate director and Republican fund raiser. She recently told a Senate hearing that the CPB should have the authority to penalize public broadcasting journalists if they step out of line. Sitting beside her and Tomlinson on the board is another Bush appointee - also a partisan Republican activist - who was a charter member and chair of Newt Gingrich's notorious political action committee, GOPAC. Reporting to them is the White House's handpicked candidate to be President and chief executive officer of the CPB - a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee whose husband became PR director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had helped the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the environment, Silent Spring. Mark my words: if this gang has anything to say about it, there will be no challenging journalism to come from public television while they are around; no investigative reporting on the environment; no reporting at all on conflicts of interest between government and big business; no naming of names.
- posted by geoff @ #