Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Bush: "an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public"
"'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,' which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.
On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Mr. Bush's vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi forces well enough to free American forces for more of the bloody and ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that accomplish little beyond alienating the populace. "
Bush’s Bloody Strategy for Victory
"Bush plans on replacing a reliance on U.S. troops with a reliance on U.S. bombers.
“Departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower,” Hersh writes. “Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units.”
Already, “the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Hersh reports. And he cites a Pentagon press release that notes that one Marine aircraft unit alone has “dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance.”"
Cheney 'May Be Guilty of War Crime'
"two justice department memos listing permissible interrogation methods have been kept secret by the White House, even from the Senate intelligence committee. The New Yorker recently quoted a source who had seen a memo as calling it 'breathtaking'.
'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,' the magazine reported.
One technique allegedly used by the CIA in questioning suspects is 'waterboarding' (strapping a detainee to a board and submerging it until the prisoner believes he or she is drowning). The White House is accused of defining 'torture' so narrowly as to exclude such methods. But James Ross, a legal expert at Human Rights Watch said such a narrow definition was at odds with international norms.
'Waterboarding is clearly a form of torture. It has been used since the Inquisition. It was a well-known torture technique in Latin America,' Mr Ross said...
The US is a signatory to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture, which bans inflicting "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental". Such practices are also a crime under US federal law."
U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press - Los Angeles Times
"The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.
The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.
It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled 'The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.' Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations.
Underscoring the importance U.S. officials place on development of a Western-style media, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the country's great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein. The hundreds of newspapers, television stations and other 'free media' offer a 'relief valve' for the Iraqi public to debate the issues of their burgeoning democracy, Rumsfeld said."
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Bush: Early Iraq Exit Would Be a Mistake - Yahoo! News
"'I want to defeat the terrorists. And I want our troops to come home,' the president said. 'But I don't want them to come home without having achieved victory.'"
So it's all about Bush. That's the mission. We have to stay in Iraq until he's satisfied. It wasn't about WMD. It wasn't about democracy. It wasn't about regime change. It was about Mr. Bush's satisfaction. Well at least that's clear.
Transcript of Wilkerson interview
"I look at the relationship between Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld as being one that produced these two failures in particular and I see that the president is not holding either of them accountable, or at least up to this point he is not, and so I have to lay some blame at his feet too."
Cheney accused on prisoner abuse--BBC NEWS
"A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell has launched a stinging attack on US Vice-President Dick Cheney over abuse of prisoners by US troops.
Col Lawrence Wilkerson accused Mr Cheney of ignoring a decision by President Bush on the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror.
Asked by the BBC's Today if Mr Cheney could be accused of war crimes, he said: 'It's an interesting question.'
'Certainly it is a domestic crime to advocate terror,' he added.
'And I would suspect, for whatever it's worth, it's an international crime as well.'
This is an extraordinary attack by a man who until earlier in the year was Mr Cheney's colleague in the senior reaches of the Bush team, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says.
Col Wilkerson has in the past accused the vice-president of responsibility for the conditions which led to the abuse of prisoners.
But this time he has gone much further, appearing to suggest Mr Cheney should face war crimes charges... "
"Bush deserves to be impeached": Military Author
"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.
Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, is author of 'Transformation of War' (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers."
Nowhere to run
" ... In his eagerness for regime change in Iraq, Mr Bush blundered into a trap from which in the short term there is no way out: the Americans will be damned if they stay and damned if they leave."
Shake and Bake - New York Times
"Let us pause and count the ways the conduct of the war in Iraq has damaged America's image and needlessly endangered the lives of those in the military. First, multilateralism was tossed aside. Then the post-invasion fiasco muddied the reputation of military planners and caused unnecessary casualties. The W.M.D. myth undermined the credibility of United States intelligence and President Bush himself, and the abuse of prisoners stole America's moral high ground.
Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America's credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.
White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy's positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.
... all of us, including Americans, are safer in a world in which certain forms of conduct are regarded as too inhumane even for war. That is why torture should be banned in American prisons. And it is why the United States should stop using white phosphorus."
Abuse of Prisoners in Iraq Widespread, Officials Say
"Iraqi authorities have been torturing and abusing prisoners in jails across the country, current and former Iraqi officials charged.
Deputy Human Rights Minister Aida Ussayran and Gen. Muntadhar Muhi al-Samaraee, a former head of special forces at the Ministry of the Interior, made the allegations two weeks after 169 men who apparently had been tortured were discovered in a south-central Baghdad building run by the Interior Ministry. The men reportedly had been beaten with leather belts and steel rods, crammed into tiny rooms with tens of others and forced to sit in their own excrement.
A senior American military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said he suspected that the abuse wasn't isolated to the jail the U.S. military discovered.
Ussayran said abuse was taking place across the country.
In five visits to a women's prison in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district over more than three months, the Human Rights Ministry found that women were being raped by male guards, Ussayran said. That problem continues."
Monday, November 28, 2005
Bush's Can't-Lose Reversal - Wednesday's speech will set the agenda for withdrawal from Iraq. By Fred Kaplan
"Brace yourself for a mind-bog of sheer cynicism. The discombobulation begins Wednesday, when President George W. Bush is expected to proclaim, in a major speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, that the Iraqi security forces—which only a few months ago were said to have just one battalion capable of fighting on its own—have suddenly made uncanny progress in combat readiness. Expect soon after (if not during the speech itself) the thing that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have, just this month, denounced as near-treason—a timetable for withdrawal of American troops."
The Formerly Great Writ - Goodbye, habeas corpus. Hello, executive detention. By Emily Bazelon
"Tucked into the renewal of the Patriot Act, which Congress will reconsider in December, is an unrelated provision that would make it harder for American prisoners to challenge their convictions in federal court. Congress may also soon vote to limit the rights of foreign detainees in Guantanamo Bay to apply to federal court."
GOP Rep. Cunningham Enters Guilty Plea, Resigns
"Cunningham admitted 'he took $2.4 million in bribes to steer defense contracts to conspirators.' The defense contracting firm at the center of the scandal is MZM Inc., which is run by Mitchell Wade"
Truth, lies, and intelligence - The Boston Globe
"To date, some of the best work on the use of prewar intelligence has been done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank. Its painstaking study, from January 2004, compared what the various intelligence agencies were estimating about Iraq in the runup to the war to what administration officials were saying.
The authors arrived at this conclusion: ''Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon programs and ballistic missile programs.'
... ''We don't use the word 'lie' because it is hard to prove intent or the knowledge of the individual at the time, but it is clear that senior administration officials systematically misled the Congress and the American public about the nature and the immediacy of the threat,"
Bush "doesn’t feel any pain," as number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year
"Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.
One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”
Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said.
... “The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”"
Timing Entwined War Vote, Election: "the vote paving the way for the second war with Iraq came in mid-October of 2002 — at the height of an election campaign in which Republicans were systematically portraying Democrats as weak on national security.
... Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said recently that a delay might have prompted more Democrats to vote no by increasing the time available to study the evidence for war and by dissipating the political pressures surrounding the decision.
"There was a stampede to vote on this," Kennedy said. "A lot of our people got caught up in it.""
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Bush's "Compassion": Favoring Corporations Over People:
"According to the New York Times, the U.S. Navy has asked FEMA to give it $2 billion to restore Northrop's Gulfport facilities to their pre- Katrina 'capacity and profit opportunities.' According to the Times that would 'shift the full burden of hurricane-related cost overruns and ship-building delays from Northrop to the government.' That amount is in addition to the $500 million Northrop has already gotten from its insurers and the additional $500 million it believes its insurers owe it. According to one watchdog group, the $2 billion is almost as much as the government plans to spend on repairing housing. The reason those funds are available for FEMA to give to Northrop instead of to non-corporate victims of Katrina goes back to October 28.
On that date Mr. Bush asked that $17.1 billion of FEMA funds be reallocated. He said he wanted the pentagon to get $6.6 billion (a sum that includes the Northrop money). The rest is to go to the National Guard reservists and repairs to military installations damaged by Katrina. He didn't leave out the human victims. He said $2.2 billion should be used for housing recovery."
Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity: "The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.
The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
... Among the steps already taken by the Pentagon that enhanced its domestic capabilities was the establishment after 9/11 of Northern Command, or Northcom, in Colorado Springs, to provide military forces to help in reacting to terrorist threats in the continental United States. Today, Northcom's intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas fuse reports from CIFA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, and are staffed by 290 intelligence analysts. That is more than the roughly 200 analysts working for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and far more than those at the Department of Homeland Security."
Abuse worse than under Saddam, says Iraqi leader
"Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country's first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam's regime.
'People are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse,' Ayad Allawi told The Observer. 'It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.'
In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.
Allawi, who was a strong ally of the US-led coalition forces and was prime minister until this April
... "We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'"
Friday, November 25, 2005
Secret British document accuses Israel
"Ariel Sharon's government is jeopardising the prospect of a peace agreement by trying to put the future of Arab East Jerusalem beyond negotiation and risks driving Palestinians living in the city into radical groups. The document, obtained by the Guardian, was presented to an EU council of ministers meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on Monday with recommendations to counter the Israeli policy, including recognition of Palestinian political activities in East Jerusalem."
Torture claims 'forced US to cut terror charges'
"Yesterday's New York Times, quoting unnamed current and former government officials, said the main evidence of Mr Padilla's involvement in the plots against US cities had come from two captured al-Qaida leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a leading al-Qaida recruiter. But the officials told the newspaper Mr Padilla could not be charged with the bomb plots because neither of the al-Qaida leaders could be used as witnesses as they had been subjected to harsh questioning and could open up charges from defence lawyers that their earlier statements resulted from torture. Officials also feared that their testimony could expose classified information about the CIA prison system in which the men were thought to be held.
The CIA has never publicly acknowledged it is detaining Mr Mohammed and Mr Zubaydah. It is not known where they are being held. But it was reported last month the CIA was using secret detention centres in eastern Europe, possibly in Poland and Romania, for interrogations, thus beyond the reach of US law.
Internal reviews by the CIA have raised questions about the treatment and credibility of the two men."
In the End, Torture Hurts Us
"When U.S. officials decided to allow the torture of Libi, they made a pact with the devil. And by my reckoning, that pact has not only cost us our national soul, but has contributed, indirectly but surely, to the loss of more than 2,100 American soldiers in Iraq."
Bloomberg.com: Top Worldwide
"A Council of Europe investigator said he has found evidence of ``suspicious movements'' of 31 aircraft he said are believed to have been used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to transport suspected terrorists.
The Council of Europe, which represents 46 countries, said on Nov. 23 that it was opening a formal inquiry into reports the U.S. secretly detained terrorist suspects in Europe and used European countries as transit points for the detainees."
Beyond That Memo: Bush Wanted al Jazeera Gone
"If true, Bush's threat is a bold confirmation of what many journalists already believe: that the Bush Administration views us all as enemy combatants."
Sometimes, a Tax Cut for the Wealthy Can Hurt the Wealthy - New York Times
"At the president's behest, Congress has already enacted tax cuts that will result in some $2 trillion in revenue losses by 2010. According to one recent estimate, 52.5 percent of these cuts will have gone to the top 5 percent of earners by the time the enabling legislation is fully phased in. Republicans in Congress are now calling for an additional $69 billion in tax cuts aimed largely at high-income families.
With the economy already at full employment, no one pretends these cuts are needed to stimulate spending. Nor is there any evidence that further cuts would summon outpourings of additional effort and risk taking. Nor, finally, does anyone deny that further cuts would increase the already high costs associated with larger federal budget deficits.
... WHEN market forces cause income inequality to grow, public policy in most countries tends to push in the opposite direction. In the United States, however, we enact tax cuts for the wealthy and cut public services for the needy.
... On the benefit side, tax cuts have led the wealthy to buy larger houses, in the seemingly plausible expectation that doing so would make them happier. As economists increasingly recognize, however, well-being depends less on how much people consume in absolute terms than on the social context in which consumption occurs. Compelling evidence suggests that for the wealthy in particular, when everyone's house grows larger, the primary effect is merely to redefine what qualifies as an acceptable dwelling.
On the cost side of the ledger, the federal budget deficits created by the recent tax cuts have had serious consequences, even for the wealthy. These deficits will exceed $300 billion for each of the next six years, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The most widely reported consequences of the deficits have been cuts in government programs that serve the nation's poorest families. And since the wealthy are well represented in our political system, their favored programs may seem safe from the budget ax. Wealthy families have further insulated themselves by living in gated communities and sending their children to private schools. Yet such steps go only so far.
For example, deficits have led to cuts in federal financing for basic scientific research, even as the United States' share of global patents granted continues to decline. Such cuts threaten the very basis of our long-term economic prosperity. As Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, said: 'We thought we'd keep the high-end jobs, and others would take the low-end jobs. We're now on track to a second-rate economy and a second-rate country.'
"
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Padilla Case Shows Abuse Of Power | November 22, 2005 19:30:04
"Under deadline pressure from the United States Supreme Court, the Bush Administration Tuesday finally decided to allow a judge and jury to determine the fate of Jose Padilla, the young man to whom we were introduced three years ago by a former U.S. Attorney General as a 'dirty bomber.'
Only the government did not in the end charge Padilla with plotting to explode a radiological device in an urban core, as John Ashcroft once suggested in a dramatic news conference fed to stunned viewers via satellite from Russia. The feds did not allege that the young street punk was on his way to back to America — he was arrested at O’Hare airport in Chicago — to kill civilians here.
Instead, prosecutors bootstrapped charges against Padilla to an already-existing criminal case in Miami involving what one could reasonably call 'run-of-the-mill' terror suspects.
The disconnect between what the government initially said about Padilla, and what it now believes it can prove against him, is so startling that it ought to provide a jump-off point for the aggressive defense Padilla is now likely to receive in federal court. "
Director for Torture
"the Bush administration has so loosened and degraded the torture standard, the abuse of detainees will become far harder to prevent -- not only in the CIA's clandestine cells but around the world."
Director for Torture
"CIA DIRECTOR Porter J. Goss insists that his agency is innocent of torturing the prisoners it is holding in secret detention centers around the world. 'This agency does not torture,' he said in an interview this week with USA Today. 'We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture.' Mr. Goss didn't describe any of those 'innovative' interrogation techniques, nor has his agency allowed its secret prisons to be visited by the International Red Cross or any other monitor. But some of the people who work for him provided a description of six 'enhanced interrogation techniques' to ABC News, because they believe 'the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen,' the network reported. Thanks to that disclosure, it's possible to compare Mr. Goss's words with reality.
The first three techniques reported by ABC involve shaking or striking detainees in an effort to cause pain and fear. The fourth consists of forcing a prisoner to stand, handcuffed and with shackled feet, for up to 40 hours. Then comes the "cold cell": Detainees are held naked in a cell cooled to 50 degrees, and periodically doused with cold water. Last is "waterboarding," a technique that's already been widely reported. According to the information supplied to ABC: "The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt." ABC quoted its sources as saying that CIA officers who subjected themselves to waterboarding "lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in."
Are these techniques "not torture," as Mr. Goss claims? In fact, several of them have been practiced by repressive regimes around the world, and they once were routinely condemned by the State Department in its annual human rights reports. By insisting that they are not torture, Mr. Goss sets a new standard -- both for the treatment of detainees by other governments and for the handling of captive Americans. If an American pilot is captured in the Middle East, then beaten, held naked in a cold cell and subjected to simulated drowning, will Mr. Goss say that he has not been tortured?"
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Middle America asks: 'Did we give up our young so cheaply?'
"The American public has been told that about 16,000 troops have been wounded in Iraq, but if the Pentagon counted everyone flown out for medical treatment - which is how the British Ministry of Defence calculates figures - then the number of American injured would double to more than 30,000."
Frontline police of new Iraq are waging secret war of vengeance
"According to human rights organisations in Baghdad, 'disappearances' - for long a feature of Iraq's dirty war - have reached epidemic proportions in recent months. Human rights workers, international and local, who asked not to be identified in order to protect their researchers in the city and their organisations' access to senior government officials, told The Observer last week that they have hundreds of cases on their books. They described the disappearances as the most pressing human rights issue in a country that is in the midst of a human rights disaster.
The crisis was underlined by last week's uncovering of the secret Ministry of the Interior detention facility in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Jadriya.
It led the US embassy in Baghdad to forcefully condemn the new Iraq's culture of torture and killing - a statement that many believe has been too long in coming.
The emergence of a culture of pernicious violence at Iraq's interior ministry blossomed in the face of repeated warnings to US and UK officials over the past year and a half, under an apparently deliberate policy by London and Washington to avoid public criticism of the country's new institutions."
'Dirty Bomb' Suspect Jose Padilla Indicted: "Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held by the Bush administration for three years without charges as an enemy combatant plotting a 'dirty bomb' attack in the United States, has been indicted on charges unrelated to any potential terrorist attack in this country.
Padilla, 35, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam, was indicted by a Miami federal grand jury Thursday on charges he and four others were part of a U.S.-based terrorism conspiracy to 'murder, maim, and kidnap' people overseas, Justice Department officials announced at a press conference in Washington today.
"The indictment alleges that Padilla traveled overseas to train as a terrorist with the intention of fighting a violent jihad," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said.
The charges did not include the government's earlier allegations, however, that Padilla was planning to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. When asked about those allegations, for which Padilla was held, Gonzales said he could comment only on the present indictments."
Woodward's Weakness
"the Post’s own ombudsman referred to Woodward as “a relentlessly aggressive reporter and a rock-solid member of the Washington Establishment”—a characterization that gives a whole new meaning to the term oxymoron. Woodward’s knack for making nice with the people he should, by definition, be at odds with, is evidence anew that journalism must be reformed, rather dramatically, if it is to survive."
Cheney distorts and misleads yet again as he accuses others of 'revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety'
"Cheney yesterday took point in the massive PR blitz aimed at salvaging the administration's reputation. He lashed out at the suggestion that 'brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood,' calling it 'revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety' and saying that 'it has no place anywhere in American politics.'
But he was a bit late: Opinion polls show that fully 55 to 57 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration was intentionally misleading in the run up to war. That kind of mistrust is why the question of the administration's integrity has become absolutely central to modern American politics.
Rather than substantively address any of the allegations against the administration, however, Cheney used a handful of straw-man arguments and dubious assertions to make his point. And he took no questions.
... William Douglas of Knight Ridder Newspapers today maintains his bureau's tradition of consistently pushing back on mischaracterizations in White House speeches, rather than just repeating them.
He quotes Cheney:
"(T)hey attacked us on 9/11 here in the homeland, killing 3,000 people. Now they are making a stand in Iraq. . . . '
"Would the United States . . . be better off, or worse off, with Zarqawi, bin Laden and Zawahiri in control of Iraq?'
" . . . A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists."
Then Douglas writes: "But the war in Iraq isn't primarily with terrorists. Cheney didn't note that Iraq's insurgency rises primarily from ethnic and sectarian tensions among Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds, rejection of U.S.-led occupation forces, and loyalists to Saddam and his once-dominant Baath Party."
Fletcher and VandeHei also note at the end of their article: "Some observers called into question Cheney's repeated description of the enemy in Iraq as 'terrorists' who are seeking to control that country to establish a base from which they can 'launch attacks and to wage war against governments that do not meet their demands.'
"U.S. intelligence agencies say foreign terrorists represent a minority of the insurgent forces; the vast majority are Iraqis."
Was US Press in "Coma" During Drive to Ear with Iraq? : New Book Asks
"'With few exceptions, both print and television provided very poor coverage,' said independent intelligence expert and reporter James Bamford, in the book, exempting the Washington Post's Pincus and the Knight Ridder operation which feeds regional US papers.
'The problem was, these people were fighting an entrenched mind-set that was accepting the Bush administration's rationales for going to war, when they should have been doubting.'
Helen Thomas, grande dame of the White House press corps, argues in the book the media was cowed by the fallout from the September 11 strikes in 2001.
'From 9/11, the American press suddenly had to be the superpatriots,' she said. 'The press went into a coma.'
As the administration began to argue for war with Iraq, the country was still wallowing in wounded patriotism.
But that was no excuse for journalists not to ask awkward questions about the expansion of the 'war on terror' to Iraq, said John MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper's Magazine.
'It was just pathetic, it was the worst it's been since before Vietnam,' Borjesson quotes him as saying."
Bush Plot to Bomb his Arab Ally
"President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a 'Top Secret' No 10 memo reveals.
But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.
A source said: 'There's no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it.' Al-Jazeera is accused by the US of fuelling the Iraqi insurgency.
The attack would have led to a massacre of innocents on the territory of a key ally, enraged the Middle East and almost certainly have sparked bloody retaliation.
A source said last night: 'The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush.
'He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere. Blair replied that would cause a big problem.
'There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it.'
A Government official suggested that the Bush threat had been 'humorous, not serious'.
But another source declared: 'Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language"
Former DeLay Aide Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy
"Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, pleaded guilty Monday to conspiring to bribe public officials and agreed to cooperate in a widening criminal investigation of members of Congress.
... Scanlon entered the plea before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle and was ordered to pay restitution totaling more than $19 million to Indian tribes that he admitted had been defrauded.
In an eight-page statement of facts, he agreed that he and an unidentified person referred to as Lobbyist A 'provided a stream of things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts.'
The items to one unidentified congressman or his staff included all-expense-paid trips to the Northern Marianas Islands in 2000, a trip to the Super Bowl in Tampa., Fla., in 2001, and a golf trip to Scotland in 2002.
Based on information already placed on the public record by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Lobbyist A is Jack Abramoff and the congressman is Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio."
Monday, November 21, 2005
White House Used 'Gossip' to Build Case for War
"President Bush referred to Curveball's tale in his January 2003 State of the Union address, and the alleged mobile labs were a central claim in the now notorious presentation to the United Nations by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, in February 2003, making the case for war.
The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Mr Powell overstate Curveball's case. 'We were shocked,' he said. 'We had always told them it was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence.'
The Iraqi, it now is clear, told his story to bolster his quest for a German residence visa. According to BND officials, he was psychologically unstable.
The debacle became complete when American investigators, sent after the invasion to find evidence of the WMDs, instead discovered Curveball's personnel file in Baghdad. It showed he had been a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Moreover he had been dismissed in 1995 - just when he claimed to have begun work on bio-warfare trucks.
Curveball was also apparently jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi."
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Did They Lie?: the Debate over Iraq War Intelligence - Yahoo! News
"looking back at what was known about the administration's main justifications for invading Iraq, terror and weapons experts say that a clear pattern emerges of evidence being ignored."
Widespread Violence Kills Dozens Across Iraq - New York Times
"The deaths capped one of the deadliest three-day periods since the American invasion. In all, at least 155 Iraqis and 7 foreign soldiers have been killed in a spate of bombings and assaults that began Friday morning, when jihadists tried using two trucks packed with explosives to demolish a Baghdad hotel full of Western journalists.
That attack was followed by a pair of suicide bombings in two mosques in the northern Kurdish town of Khanaqin that left at least 80 dead and more than 100 wounded.
It is unclear what exactly provoked this series of attacks, but several factors could be stirring the anger of the Sunni-led insurgency. Last week, the American military announced that soldiers had discovered 169 malnourished, mostly Sunni Arab detainees in a secret police prison in Baghdad run by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry. The interior minister, Bayan Jabr, tried to play down the discovery, but admitted that seven of the detainees had been tortured."
U.S. Unprepared for Super-Flu Pandemic - Yahoo! News
"The U.S. is unprepared for the next flu pandemic, lacking the manufacturing capacity to provide 300 million doses of a vaccine for three to five more years, Health and Human Services Secretary
Mike Leavitt said Sunday."
Liberal Media: "sailing in Bush’s press armada"
"While conservatives will still complain about the “liberal media,” it’s now clear that the supposed flagships of that “liberal media” – the Washington Post and the New York Times – mostly were sailing in Bush’s press armada. That alignment made sense because the most effective way to protect one’s career was to keep out of the Right’s line of fire.
However, in the wake of the news media’s humiliation over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, some outlets have begun to chart more independent courses. Millions of Americans also are furious that the press did so little to prevent the nation from being misled into a disastrous war in Iraq that has killed more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers."
CNN.com - Washington Post rebukes Bob Woodward - Nov 20, 2005: "The Washington Post's ombudsman rebuked journalist Bob Woodward on Sunday for withholding what he knew about the CIA leak probe from his editor and for making public statements that were dismissive of the investigation without disclosing his own involvement.
... In a column highly critical of Woodward's conduct, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said the newspaper took a "hit to its credibility" and called for more oversight of Woodward's work.
"He has to operate under the rules that govern the rest of the staff -- even if he's rich and famous," Howell wrote of Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters famed for coverage of the 1970s Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.
Howell said Woodward committed a "deeply serious sin" by keeping Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie in the dark about his source for more than two years.
"He also committed another journalistic sin -- commenting on National Public Radio and (CNN's) "Larry King Live" about the Plame investigation without disclosing his early knowledge of Plame's identity," Howell wrote.
In a series of television and radio interviews before publicly disclosing his involvement in the leak case, Woodward described the leak case as laughable and Fitzgerald's behavior as "disgraceful."
One day before Fitzgerald brought charges against Vice President Dick Cheney's long-time chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Woodward said he saw no evidence of criminal intent.
Woodward has apologized to Downie, who said "Bob made a mistake" by not informing him sooner of his source on Plame.
"He made a mistake going on television, giving his opinions about the investigation. ... He shouldn't have been expressing those opinions," Downie added on CNN's "Reliable Sources.""
Telling The Truth about Bush
"Bush was nurtured by the peculiar Texas blend of piety and privilege that mocks those values. With the election of 2000, he and his cohorts arrived in Washington like atheists taking over the Vatican; they had come to run a government they don’t believe in.
The results have been disastrous: reckless tax cuts, a relentless assault on social services, monumental debt, pre-emptive war, an exhausted military, booming corporate welfare and corruption so deep and pervasive it has touched every facet of American government.
Much has been made of the president’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina. His early response was to joke the fun he had as a frat boy in now-grieving New Orleans. When a reporter pressed him on what had gone wrong after the hurricane struck, he sarcastically asked: “Who says something went wrong?” His attitude would surprise no one who read the 1999 profile of Bush by a conservative journalist who reported how the then-governor had made fun of Karla Fay Tucker’s appeals to be spared the death penalty. The journalist—a conservative, remember —wrote that Bush mocked and dismissed the woman, like him a born-again Christian, as he depicted her begging him, “Please don’t kill me!” But this is not what she had said. Bush made it up.
Such contempt for other people’s reality is embedded in a philosophy hostile to government except as an instrument of privilege and patronage. This is the crowd, remember, that was asleep at the switch in the months leading up to 9/11 when the intelligence traffic crackled with warnings about terrorist attacks (look it up in the official commission report). It’s the same crowd that made a mess of the occupation of Iraq—and then awarded themselves Medals of Freedom for the wreckage they had created. Their mentality was well summed up by Donald Rumsfeld, who, after Baghdad’s libraries and museums were sacked, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Stuff happens.’
Hurricane Katrina uncovered what the progressive advocate Robert Borosage calls the “catastrophic conservatism” of the long right-wing crusade to denigrate government, ‘starve the beast,’ scorn its purposes and malign its officials. We are seeing the results of an economic policy focused on top-end tax cuts and deregulations to reward private investors, as opposed to public investments in the country’s vital infrastructure. On the day that Katrina struck the coast, the census bureau reported that last year, one million people had been added to the 36 million Americans living in poverty. A few weeks earlier, the Labor Department had reported that while incomes had grown impressively last year, the gains had gone mostly to the top—the people with stocks and bonds and income other than wages. But the 80 million people who live paycheck to paycheck barely stayed even. It took a natural disaster to expose the stunning inequality and poverty produced when people are written off and shoved to the margins. And to remind us, as Borosage writes, of the dearth of basic investment in the boring but essential public works vital to civilization—schools, public transport, water systems, public health, and yes, wetlands and trees.
... the core of the radical right’s atheist-in-the-Vatican philosophy: Denounce the government you now run, defang its powers and dilute its responsibilities, and direct the spoils of victory to your cronies in the private sector.
This predatory convergence of corporate, political and religious power has taken the notion of our commonwealth —the ‘We the People’ in that magnificent preamble to the Constitution—and soaked it in the sanctimony of homegrown Ayatollahs, squeezed it through a rigged market, and then auctioned it to the highest bidder for private advantage, at the expense of working people, their families and their communities. "
Setting The Record Straight
"Telling the whole truth is not an exercise to be limited to children before they reach the age of reason. It is the indispensable requirement for an effective democracy. If the press and the politicians lie to the people, or hide those parts of the truth which trouble the conscience or offend a friend, how can the people’s falsely-based decisions be trusted?
... what matters in journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to the truth."
Thank you Bill Moyers for your wonderful contributions to journalism and for telling the truth. I love these additional wonderful quotes from your article:
"No matter the players, one-party government is a conspiracy in disguise."
"their loathing of other people is the kindling of evil.""
Air Force Gen.: no evidence that Syria is involved in the infiltration of insurgents in Iraq.
"Buchanan said the United States had no evidence that Syria was involved in the infiltration of insurgents in Iraq.
'Our only concern with Syria is the number of terrorists infiltrating through porous borders with Iraq,' he said."
Bush Lowers Temperature of Iraq War Debate:
"After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy.
'People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq,' Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President
Dick Cheney that the critics were 'reprehensible.'
The president also praised Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., as 'a fine man' and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible.
Bush brought up the growing Iraq debate when he met reporters after inconclusive talks with President Hu Jintao about friction in U.S.-China relations. Bush ran into stiff resistance from the Chinese to his call for expanding religious freedom and human rights.
He also reported no breakthroughs toward reducing China's massive trade surplus, overhauling its currency system or protecting intellectual property rights."
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Bush's War on the Press:
"this White House is doing battle with the journalistic underpinnings of democracy."
Friday, November 18, 2005
Four former Guantánamo detainees talk about their experiences
This weekend Amnesty International is holding a conference in London which brings together the biggest gathering of former "war on terror" detainees.
Around 25 former inmates at Guantánamo Bay are attending and speakers will include former detainees from the UK, Russia and Afghanistan.
Ahead of the three-day conference, Amnesty conducted interviews with four former Guantánamo detainees and transcripts of these are below. You can also listen to audio files of the first and second interviews.
... "This detainee had apparently been able to push the barbed wire through and crawl out and run out - completely confused as to whether he's going left or right or where he was going to go in his orange suit. So the guards caught him and they beat him literally to death."
House Approves Spending Reductions
"The House narrowly approved a broad five-year budget plan early this morning that squeezes programs for the poor, for college students and for farmers, handing Republican leaders a hard-fought victory after weeks of resistance in GOP ranks.
... The House measure would cut about 220,000 people off food stamps, allow states to impose new costs on Medicaid beneficiaries, squeeze student lenders, cut aid to state child-support enforcement programs and trim farm supports."
The Media Monster That's Eating the Dems
"CNN President Jonathan Klein explained that Democrats have a hard time getting booked because they don't get 'angry' enough to excite the viewers. He told Charlie Rose, '[Liberals] don't get too worked up about anything. And they're pretty morally relativistic. And so, you know, they allow for a lot of that stuff.'"
The Man Who Sold the War
"One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.
For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.
"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies."
Ludendorff, Not Lincoln: Bush's White House is Dismissive of History, Yet Increasingly Desperate to Rewrite It: "
Bush's presidency is an effort to defy history, not only in America, writing on the world as a blank slate. Now he wants to erase memory of his actual record, substituting a counterfactual history. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Lincoln. Never mind.
... 'We are at war,' insisted Gingrich. 'With whom?' he was asked. 'The Democrats,' he apparently replied without hesitation."
'Cheney is Vice President for Torture'
"The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney 'a vice president for torture'.
He said: 'We have crossed the line into dangerous territory'.
The American Senate says torture should be banned - whatever the justification. But President Bush has threatened to veto their ruling.
The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US."
Research Dispels Bush Claims That Tax Cuts Create Jobs - Yahoo! News
"In June 2003, the Bush administration had claimed that the president's tax cut policy would create more than five million jobs by the end of 2004, but the study shows that only 2.6 million jobs were created--1.6 million less than what would have been expected without any special economic stimulus.
... Based on statistical analysis of changes in tax polices and rates of job growth in the past 60 years, the report points out that tax reduction does, however, disproportionately lead to economic disparity between the rich and poor.
"No workers have really benefited from President Bush's tax policy," says Gloribell Mota, a bilingual education specialist at UFE. "But Blacks and Latinos have suffered disproportionately."
The study shows that African American unemployment remains about twice as high as that of White workers. Moreover, it indicates no sign of growth in quality jobs (defined as paying at least 16 dollars per hour and including health benefits and a pension plan) for workers from any racial background, including Whites.
Last year, one million people fell below the poverty line, a disproportionate number of them children, while the number of billionaires rose to 374, the study says, adding that the number of people living in poverty rose from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.7 percent in 2004."
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Woodward Bombshell
"By becoming a partisan in the context of the leak case without revealing that he was at the center of it, really a party to it, he wasn't being honest with his audience. I don't see much way around that.
Now, his antipathy toward the investigation seems much easier to understand.'"
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Another Duel In Credibility Gulch: "the president mischaracterizes the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Yes, the report did state that it 'did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.'
But the committee specifically - and controversially - put off until after the 2004 elections a 'Phase II' report tasked with assessing the public and policy uses of intelligence about Iraq by the administration. The first report simply did not clear the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence and misleading the American people. Period. ('Phase Two' has been delayed and delayed; that's what the ruckus was about when the Senate went into secret session a few weeks ago.)
Third, the Democrats are attempting a creepy 'rewrite' of history that would absolve them of responsibility for their votes for the war and their passivity in checking and balancing the administration. But it absolutely does not follow that the administration leveled with Congress or the public, played straight with the intelligence or that investigations are not still needed.
When The Washington Post ran a piece on the president’s skewed uses of the Senate report, the White House issued a pugnacious response that had the audacity to reach for support from the Robb-Silberman report on pre-war intelligence - a report that began with these damning words:
"On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over."
So to rebut claims that its case for war was both wrong and politicized, the administration cites a report concluding that the work of the American spy service before the war flat out failed. Okay. The report also states clearly in the introduction that it was "not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." That's the million dollar question - not whether Scooter and Cheney strong-armed the spymasters.
The Robb-Silberman Commission did find, as the White House rightly asserts, that "analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
But here's the next sentence: "That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom." "
U.S. Has Detained 83, 000 in War on Terror - New York Times: "The United States has detained more than 83,000 foreigners in the four years of the war on terror, enough to nearly fill the NFL's largest stadium. ...
Roughly 14,500 detainees remain in U.S. custody, primarily in Iraq.
The number has steadily grown since the first CIA paramilitary officers touched down in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, setting up more than 20 facilities including the ''Salt Pit,'' an abandoned factory outside Kabul used for CIA detention and interrogation.
In Iraq, the number in military custody hit a peak on Nov. 1, according to military figures. Nearly 13,900 suspects were in U.S. custody there that day -- partly because U.S. offensives in western Iraq put pressure on insurgents before the October constitutional referendum and December parliamentary elections.
... In Iraq, the Defense Department says 5,569 detainees have been held for more than six months, and 3,801 have been held more than a year. Some 229 have been locked up for more than two years.
About 100 to 150 people are believed to have been grabbed by CIA officers and sent to their home countries or to other nations where they were wanted for prosecution, a procedure called ''rendition.'' Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are known to cooperate.
... former CIA Director George Tenet said the agency and FBI had ''rendered 70 terrorists to justice.''"
And how many have been prosecuted / given a trial / found guilty? In other words, what has been gained from these extraordinary and appalling detention policies?
Bill Clinton Calls Iraq 'Big Mistake'
"Clinton told Arab students Wednesday the United States made a 'big mistake' when it invaded Iraq, stoking the partisan debate back home over the war.
Clinton cited the lack of planning for what would happen after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
'Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done,' Clinton told students at a forum at the American University of Dubai.
'It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors ... one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country.'
Clinton said the United States had done some good things in Iraq: the removal of Saddam, the ratification of a new constitution and the holding of parliamentary elections.
'The mistake that they made is that when they kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure of Iraq. ... We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders,' Clinton said.
As the borders were unsealed, 'the terrorists came in,' he said.
Clinton said it would have been better if the United States had left Iraq's "fundamental military and social and police structure intact.""
Ignore the Man Behind That Memo
"When Judge Alito applied for a job with the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, he submitted a Personal Qualifications Statement that outlined his approach to the law. That statement raises three major concerns:
First, he has extreme views on the law. Judge Alito said he was particularly proud of his work on cases that tried to establish that 'the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.' He did not merely oppose Roe v. Wade in the abstract - he worked to reverse it. He also noted his 'disagreement with Warren Court decisions' in many important areas, including reapportionment. The reapportionment cases established the one-person-one-vote doctrine, which requires that Congressional and legislative districts include roughly equal numbers of people. They played a key role in making American democracy truly representative, and are almost uniformly respected by lawyers and scholars.
Second, Judge Alito does not respect precedent. Judicial nominees who appear extreme often claim that because they respect precedent, they will vote to reaffirm decisions they disagree with. When Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court, he told the Senate about his deep respect for precedent - and then immediately began voting to overturn important precedents when he joined the court. The Senate has specific reason to be skeptical about Judge Alito. Not only did he work to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he also said he had been inspired to go to law school by his opposition to Warren Court precedents - presumably by a desire to see them overturned.
Third, he is an ideologue. The White House has tried to present Judge Alito as an impartial judge without strong political views. But he said just the opposite in the 1985 statement. "I am and always have been a conservative," he wrote. He called himself a "life-long registered Republican" who contributed to "Republican candidates and conservative causes" including the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the super-PAC of the Reagan era. He strongly suggested that he would have been active in Republican politics if the law had not prohibited him, as a federal employee, from doing that.
Judge Alito is already trying to distance himself from the memo. He cannot say it was merely a lawyer's representation of an employer's views because it was undeniably a statement of his personal beliefs. He cannot call it an excess of youth because he was 35 when he wrote it. According to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, Judge Alito told her yesterday that when he had written it he had merely been "an advocate seeking a job."
This is not very credible because the statement is entirely consistent with his full career. On the bench, Judge Alito has voted to uphold extreme limits on abortion and on other important rights, like freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Equally alarming is the notion that he fudged the truth to tell a potential employer what it wanted to hear. "
US Forces Used 'Chemical Weapon' in Iraq
"'White phosphorus is a conventional munition. It is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal,' [Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable] said on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme.
'We use them primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases. However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants.'
Asked directly if it was used as an offensive weapon during the siege of Fallujah, he replied: 'Yes, it was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants'."
Monday, November 14, 2005
A Reminder of How Debate Over Prewar Intelligence Continues to Shadow Bush - New York Times
"To date, the two major official inquiries - by the Senate Intelligence Committee, in 2004, and the Robb-Silberman commission, in March 2005 - have addressed only the prewar intelligence itself. Neither found evidence that any political pressure by the Bush administration had contributed to the failures by the Central Intelligence Agency and others in assessing the threat posed by Iraq.
On the question of whether there were close, collaborative ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the reviews found that Mr. Cheney and others had encouraged analysts to rethink their skepticism, but they found no evidence that the repeated questioning from the administration had altered the conclusions reached by the agencies.
But neither panel compared public statements by Mr. Bush and his aides with the intelligence available at the time, or reviewed internal White House documents, including a draft of a speech to the United Nations Security Council later delivered by Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, for further evidence of how intelligence had been used.
The Robb-Silberman commission was established by the White House, not Congress, and in releasing its report last March, Judge Laurence Silberman, one of the two co-chairmen, said, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
The scope of the initial Congressional review, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, was limited in March 2004, under an agreement between Republicans and Democrats, after Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to address issues involving the administration's use of intelligence.
Republicans regarded that issue as too sensitive for a presidential-election year, but their stance prompted sharp protests from Democrats, including Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the panel. This month, Democrats closed the Senate for two hours and threatened to shut it down if Republicans did not agree to move ahead with that part of the inquiry. "
Bush "personally involved in fighting" McCain's attempts to ban torture
"Bush has gotten personally involved in fighting Senator John McCain's attempts to ban torture entirely.
'A White House official who did not wish to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter claims that Bush has personally reached out to McCain to seek a compromise. McCain told Newsweek that he had briefly spoken with the president by phone.'"
Pentagon embraced Red Army Torture Methods After 9/11
"A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.
M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins."
Bush Rewrites History To Criticize His Anti-war Critics
"57 percent of the respondents now believe that Bush 'deliberately misled' the nation into war."
Sunday, November 13, 2005
White House declines to totally rule out torture - Yahoo! News
"a top White House official refused to unequivocally rule out the use of torture, arguing the US administration was duty-bound to protect Americans from terrorist attack.
The comment, by US national security adviser Stephen Hadley, came amid heated national debate about whether the CIA and other US intelligence agencies should be authorized to use what is being referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" to extract from terror suspects information that may help prevent future assaults.
... McCain, who appeared on CBS's "Face the Nation" program, said White House negotiators led by Vice President Richard Cheney were pushing to safeguard the option of using the enhanced interrogation techniques in order to get information from detainees in extraordinary circumstances.
The senator said he disagreed with that approach because he was worried about the damage to the image of the United States.
"I hold no brief for the terrorists," he said. "But it's not about them. It's about us. This battle we're in is about the things we stand for and believe in and practice. And that is an observance of human rights, no matter how terrible our adversaries may be.""
U.N. Food Expert Condemns U.S. Tactics in Iraq
"Jean Ziegler, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, made waves last month when he accused U.S. and British forces of using food and water as weapons of war in besieged cities in Iraq...
Jean Ziegler called theUS and British withholding of food and water in Iraq 'a clear violation of international law'.
... He said that the U.S.-led Coalition forces and the Iraqi Army use the military strategy of cutting off food and water supplies to cities under attack by insurgents, which frequently use the civilian population as human shields. The objective is to encourage civilians to flee before the attack."
Vice President Cheney Should Resign
"How can it be that the person who is only a heartbeat away from the Presidency actually advocates the use of torture? Cheney reportedly would authorize any level of mistreatment “short of organ failure.” Under that definition, not even rape would be excluded.
The Abu Ghraib photographs of the mistreatment (read torture) of our prisoners served as recruiting posters for would be terrorists around the world. The Vice President has now made himself a poster child for torture. Cheney is making it clear that the United States has no compunctions about mistreating its detainees, the vast majority of whom are of the Islamic faith. The Vice President is thereby facilitating the Arab street’s believe that the United States is truly at war with Islam.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney could care less. They both believe that those who oppose the plan to exempt the CIA from strictures against torture are “aiding and abetting” the enemy. In effect, American citizens with a moral conscience are deemed to be traitors."
US President's Latest Scandals of Leaks and Torture are Turning him into a Modern McCarthy
"Bush and Cheney now face a Republican and Pentagon revolt over their disgraceful defence of torture.
'We do not torture,' Bush insisted from Panama,. Of course not, Mr. President. You call it 'forceful interrogation.' Meaning: Being kidnapped, drugged, stripped, thrown into a refrigerated, lightless underground cell, starved, deprived of sleep and sensory contact, covered with urine and excrement, severely beaten, anally raped, subjected to mock executions, given hideously painful electrical shocks, and strapped onto a special board and immersed in water until confessing or drowning.
This is what suspects have reportedly endured in America's secret, outsourced prisons around the world.
... Bush is actually threatening to veto McCain's bill. Cheney keeps defending torture. Americans will one day look back on this period with the same revulsion and shame as they do on Joe McCarthy's era."
Many already do!
Bush Didn't Mislead on War, Adviser Says - Yahoo! News
"Dean said, how the administration handled the intelligence it received has yet to be determined by a Senate committee.
Contending that the president has not been honest about the size of the deficit as well as the war, Dean said, 'This is an administration that has a fundamental problem telling the truth.'"
The Worst Speech of Bush's Presidency
"Bush... sounded like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson during the worst days of the Vietnam War, although neither is remembered for flubbing a speech on a national holiday. It's as if Bush was reading from a cue-card that proclaimed, 'Message: I'm embattled and embittered.'
... It's hard for a president to sound unpresidential on a patriotic holiday, but Bush achieved that dubious distinction today."
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
"President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.
Neither assertion is wholly accurate...
Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials... were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions."
In addition, Cheney also advised Libby on a media strategy to counter Plame's husband, former ambassador Wilson, according to a person familiar with the case.
'This story doesn't end with Scooter Libby's indictment,' said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), giving voice to widespread Democratic hopes about the outcome of Fitzgerald's case. 'A lot more questions need to be answered by the White House about the actions of [Cheney] and his staff.'"
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Friday, November 11, 2005
Bush Aide Fires Back at Critics On Justification for War in Iraq: "For the Bush team, the Iraq war has evolved into the most damaging political liability at a time of multiple setbacks, and the president's advisers do not want Democrats writing the history of how the war began. The White House decided to respond aggressively in hopes of convincing the American people that Bush relied in good faith on intelligence that proved wrong in an effort to protect them -- rather than skewing the data to rationalize a war he was already determined to wage, as many Democrats contend.
Successive investigations have documented the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to correctly judge Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs before the war, including a commission appointed by Bush that concluded that the intelligence was 'dead wrong.' The government relied on lying sources, fragmentary information and unwarranted analysis, the commission found, resulting in one of the 'most damaging intelligence failures in American history.'
... In a separate statement earlier in the day, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) recounted the various urgent warnings about supposed Iraqi weapons delivered by Bush and his advisers in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion -- warnings that all proved overstated if not flatly wrong.
"In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people," Kennedy said. "It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war.""
Rove Addresses Federalist Society
"Noting that the Senate has confirmed about 200 of Bush's judicial nominees, Rove said that among the president's greatest contributions 'are the changes he's brought about in our courts and our legal culture' and added that 'those changes would not have been possible were it not for the Federalist Society.' The group has so 'thoroughly infiltrated the White House,' he joked, that Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had asked him to announce a staff meeting after dinner.
Turning serious, Rove condemned a series of judicial decisions, including a Massachusetts court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. 'We will see one of two things come to pass,' he said. 'The courts will on their own reform themselves and return to their proper role in American public life, or we will see more public support for constitutional amendments and legislation to rein them in.'"
Record U.S. trade deficit
"The U.S. trade deficit swelled to a record $66.1 billion in September after Hurricane Katrina pushed oil prices to record highs and exports fell, causing the largest monthly increase in the deficit in over a year."
Falluja: "a symbol of unconscionable brutality"
"One year ago this week, US-led occupying forces launched a devastating assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja. The mood was set by Lt Col Gary Brandl: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."
The assault was preceded by eight weeks of aerial bombardment. US troops cut off the city's water, power and food supplies, condemned as a violation of the Geneva convention by a UN special rapporteur, who accused occupying forces of "using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population". Two-thirds of the city's 300,000 residents fled, many to squatters' camps without basic facilities.
As the siege tightened, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the media were kept out, while males between the ages of 15 and 55 were kept in. US sources claimed between 600 and 6,000 insurgents were holed up inside the city - which means that the vast majority of the remaining inhabitants were non-combatants.
On November 8, 10,000 US troops, supported by 2,000 Iraqi recruits, equipped with artillery and tanks, supported from the air by bombers and helicopter gunships, blasted their way into a city the size of Leicester. It took a week to establish control of the main roads; another two before victory was claimed.
The city's main hospital was selected as the first target, the New York Times reported, "because the US military believed it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties". An AP photographer described US helicopters killing a family of five trying to ford a river to safety. "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."
The US also deployed incendiary weapons, including white phosphorous. "Usually we keep the gloves on," Captain Erik Krivda said, but "for this operation, we took the gloves off". By the end of operations, the city lay in ruins. Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines.
The US claims that 2,000 died, most of them fighters. Other sources disagree. When medical teams arrived in January they collected more than 700 bodies in only one third of the city. Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimate between 4,000 and 6,000 dead, mostly civilians - a proportionately higher death rate than in Coventry and London during the blitz.
The collective punishment inflicted on Falluja - with logistical and political support from Britain - was largely masked by the US and British media, which relied on reporters embedded with US troops. The BBC, in particular, offered a sanitised version of the assault: civilian suffering was minimised and the ethics and strategic logic of the attack largely unscrutinised.
Falluja proved to be yet another of the war's phantom turning points. Violent resistance spread to other cities. In the last two months, Tal-Afar, Haditha, Husaybah - all alleged terrorist havens heavily populated by civilians - have come under the hammer. Falluja is still so heavily patrolled that visitors have described it as "a giant prison". Only a fraction of the promised reconstruction and compensation has materialised."
Poll: Most Americans Say Bush Not Honest - Yahoo! News
"Almost six in 10 now say Bush is not honest, and a similar number say his administration does not have high ethical standards.
During his re-election bid in 2004, Bush skillfully wove the public's trust of him and faith in his handling of the terror threat into a winning campaign over Democrat John Kerry.
Now, 56 percent disapprove of the way Bush is handling foreign policy and the war on terrorism, the poll found. Overall, 37 percent approve of the job Bush is doing as president.
An AP-Ipsos poll last week asked people to state in their own words why they approve or disapprove of the way Bush was doing his job. Almost six in 10 disapproved, and they most frequently mentioned the war in Iraq — far ahead of the second issue, the economy.
'To use an unfortunate metaphor, Iraq is a roadside bomb in American politics,' said Rich Bond, a former national Republican chairman."
Bush Forcefully Attacks Iraq Critics - Yahoo! News:
"Accusing his critics of making false charges, Bush said: "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will.
... In a speech in Philadelphia, Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., criticized how the war has been presented to Americans — both by the media and the White House. Afterward, Santorum said the war has been "less than optimal" and "maybe some blame could be laid" at the White House. "Certainly, mistakes were made," Santorum said.
... 'It's a dangerous day for our national security when an administration's word is no good,' Kerry said.
Bush chose to go on the road this Veterans Day to make his forceful defense of the war, leaving Cheney in Washington to attend traditional wreath-laying ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., accused Bush of using Veterans Day as 'a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.'
Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, who is still under the cloud of the CIA leak investigation, hopped Air Force One to attend the speech, an indication that it was a political event.
Bush shared the stage with a tan Army depot vehicle, and banners behind him read 'Strategy for Victory.' 'Hail to the Chief,' which is rarely played to mark Bush's arrival, blared from speakers in the warehouse."
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Should Bush Fire Rove? - William Kristol
"Rove has become a political albatross for the Bush administration.
But would firing Rove help Bush? No. It would reflect an attempt by Bush to find favor among 'good government' moderates and allegedly reasonable critics. It would signal a repudiation of the dominant political strategy of Bush's first term. And it would most likely prove a disaster."
OK. Let Bush resign then and just let's have Rove take his job. That would restore honesty to the White House. Since it's apparent that Bush really can't do his job without Rove, according to insider Kristol, it follows that Rove is effectively President. It would be a refreshing dose of reality-based reality for all of us if they acknowledged that.
Report Warned C.I.A. on Tactics In Interrogation - New York Times: "A classified report issued last year by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general warned that interrogation procedures approved by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks might violate some provisions of the international Convention Against Torture, current and former intelligence officials say.
The previously undisclosed findings from the report, which was completed in the spring of 2004, reflected deep unease within the C.I.A. about the interrogation procedures, the officials said. A list of 10 techniques authorized early in 2002 for use against terror suspects included one known as waterboarding, and went well beyond those authorized by the military for use on prisoners of war."
Cruel Distortion: 'We Do Not Torture'? Is the President Serious?: "At times President Bush inspires a kind of awe. It is a rare individual who can repeat obvious falsehoods with so much tenacity and conviction that millions of listeners eventually mistake them for the truth.
... This administration has condoned and sometimes encouraged the cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees. A president who excuses this policy, denies it or conceals it from public view is assaulting this country's basic values in the name of preserving them."
Democrat wins signal trouble for Bush - Yahoo! News
"Democrats retained governor's offices in conservative Virginia and Democratic-leaning New Jersey on Tuesday after sometimes nasty campaigns. They also dealt California's Republican Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger an across-the-board defeat on four ballot initiatives he had championed.
The loss in Virginia was a personal setback for Bush, who put his declining political capital on the line with an election-eve visit on behalf of Republican former attorney general Jerry Kilgore -- only to see him soundly defeated by Democratic Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine."
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Bush's Tortured Logic
"The president's only defense against being a liar is that he is defining 'torture' in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush's own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree...
Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is 'torture'? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? .... What is his definition of torture?""
