The Bush/Cheney attack on Iran would have stopped the current Iranian revolution

Do you realize where the young people in Iran would have been today if we or the Israelis had attacked Iran? Iran would have been on a war footing, just as America was after December 7, 1941 and Ahmahdinejad would have been reelected with no questions asked.Those same young people who are today demonstrating in the streets would instead be volunteering to attack the enemies who attacked Iran.

Think not? Bernard Avishai provides the in-depth analysis.

Think war brings peace? Ask the Palestinians in Gaza. The Israelis did not secure peace, or secure their borders, or secure the the long term existence of Israel by attacking Gaza. Nor did the Gazans obtain peace and stability by shooting rockets into Israel. Nor did the Iranian hardliners secure Iran by shipping rockets and weapons to the Palestinians. All the hardliners of all the nations have to offer is a perpetual cycle of more war and killing and starvation for their people.

War does not bring peace and social stability. War begats more war.

Peace and stability require a political solution - along with careful and appropriate policing to deal with individual crazies and bandits.

Wilkerson shoots down Cheney's lies

Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson was listening as Dick Cheney shot off his mouth lying about how successful the Cheney-Bush administration was in protecting American lives during seven-and-on-half years after they stupidly allowed the 9-11 terrorists to kill over 3000 Americans. So Col. Wilkerson has written his response. Here it is, along with a short video of Cheney's on-TV statement which prompted it.

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Addendum 5/15/2009 8:48pm
Joe Conason writes about how torture was used to justify the war in Iraq. It was not used to warn of upcoming terrorist activities. I was used to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

Obama is right to be reluctant to investigate Bush admin officials and the torture issue

I am a strong proponent of the Rule of Law as a basic element of the American nation, since without the Rule of Law the Constitution itself, the basis of all American law, is nothing by a fanciful piece of fiction. So I strongly support investigation of the high government officials and prosecution when necessary. No one is above the law. Ever. That is an absolute necessity in America if America is to continue to exist as a democratic form of nation.

That said, Harry Truman considered the need for national health care to be critical back in 1948. It was seriously discussed when Social Security was passed in the 30's. It's been two generations now, and the need has only gotten much worse in the intervening years of conservative obstruction and delay. I also see what appears to me to be a concerted effort by Obama and his administration to clear the decks of anything and everything that would interfere with passing universal national health care in some form this year.

Obama is gathering allies and neutralizing opponents at every step of his administration, and I'd guess that even includes the sacrifice of some things he otherwise considers very, very important. To me that appears a likely explanation for many of the decisions, actions and statements that Obama has been making which have infuriated Progressives. One of those items is, I think, Obama's reluctance to be seen supporting investigation and the potential prosecution of Bush/Cheney officials for their crimes in office. I think that every action, decision and statement out of the Obama administration has to be considered in the light of the question of how it will effect Obama's effort to pass universal health care by October of this year.

My guess is that the Obama effort to avoid a divisive battle over investigating and possible prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration officials is one of the otherwise extremely important things that is being sacrificed to get the health care bill passed. Any such prosecutions will unavoidably be highly divisive and will completely consume the media, sucking wind out of the health care issue. Prosecutions of ex-government officials is "sexy" and easy reporting to the media, just as dead blond girls or the J.R. murder trial are. Health care legislation is not similarly easy to cover. Obama has a unique opportunity to pass health care at long last, and the investigation/prosecution issue threatens that greatly.

That's the kind of balancing act that Presidents must perform. There are two absolutely critical issues that have to be dealt with, and to deal with either means sacrificing the other. If I'm right, then Obama's choice of putting all his effort into the health care fight is, I'd say, the correct decision. Not one I like and not a pretty choice, but certainly the one that I think needs to be made for the long term good of America.

It's time to proscute the war criminals who approved and conducted torture.

Glenn Greenwald has been through the torture memos which were released yesterday as a result of a freedom of information lawsuit in which the government lost. Glenn displays some of the most egregious parts of the memos, then states:

Needless to say, I vehemently disagree with anyone -- including Obama -- who believes that prosecutions are unwarranted. These memos describe grotesque war crimes -- legalized by classic banality-of-evil criminals and ordered by pure criminals -- that must be prosecuted if the rule of law is to have any meaning. But the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama's to make; ultimately, it is Holder's and/or a Special Prosecutor's.

I agree. For the Rule of Law in a Constitutional America to be continued, the Americans who authorized and conducted these war crimes must be prosecuted for their crimes. Otherwise, the American Republic given to us by the Founding Fathers (who wrote the Constitution to be the basis of law by which is would be governed, depending on the courts to guarantee the enforcement of the law and the Constitution) is gone.

Bush didn't know what he was doing, but he turned the government over to Dick Cheney who does not want the America the founding Fathers gave us. Cheney directed that the torture be carried out. Bush also appointed his old family attorney, Albert Gonzales, as Attorney General to enforce the law. Three of the memos were written in the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel under Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. The fourth was written in 2002 in the Office of Legal Counsel in the CIA under CIA Director George Tenet. The actual memos are posted on the ACLU site:

• 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
• A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
• A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.
• A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

The names I have highlighted above are criminals. They should be prosecuted.

By not prosecuting the attorneys who justified the clear War Crimes and not prosecuting the individuals who carried out the crimes justified by John Yoo and his fellow lawyers, the Bush administration will have destroyed the Constitutional Republic of America given to us and fought for by Veterans through two centuries. We have to act to save our national legacy.

The first step is to appoint the public prosecutor. The time for that step is now!

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The ACLU has posted the torture memos on their website.

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Adendum: April 16, 2009 11:15 PM Digby has a blog post on Hullabaloo That provides a great deal more information on the Bush Administration torture program. Among other things, it reminded me that the John Yoo authored and Jay Bybee signed the 2002 memo that unleashed the CIA torture program. She also goes into its use on Zubaydah as well as how effective it was.

Fewer than 24 real Intelligence assets at Guantanamo? Wilkerson says so.

Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army Colonel, Vietnam veteran and Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has written a powerful article pointing to aspects of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that have not been discussed in the media.

First was the utter failure of the segregation in Afghanistan of high value prisoners from accidental detainees. He attributes that largely to mismanagement by then-secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. second was the failure of Guantanamo and military managers to act when they realized that a very large number of relatively innocent and mostly useless detainees were being housed at Guantanamo. Wilkerson's third issue is to explain how extremely hard both Colin Powell and Richard Armitage worked to correct the problems created by the first two failures of Bush administration and military management.

Wilkerson's fourth issue is to point to the truly bizarre ad hoc "Intelligence-gathering doctrine dreamed up to conceal the extreme degree to which Guantanamo and its detainees were being mismanaged. The purpose of the new doctrine was to permit the managers to ignore the fact that almost all of the detainees in Guantanamo were both innocent of any real crime and were in fact of no real value as intelligence assets.

There were no more than at most two dozen real leaders with any Intelligence information at all located at Guantanamo. The rest of the detainees were individuals swept up on the battlefield and (properly) handed off by the combat troops to the people who should have been evaluating them and segregating the potential high-value Intelligence assets for Interrogation. The support individuals were not trained to do this and were also under great pressure by the Bush administration civilian leadership to get as many possible people sent back to Interrogation as possible. The result was the beginnings of the disastrous mismanagement of detainees.

In my opinion Wilkerson addresses only a few aspects of the way in which the support of the combat troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan was totally mismanaged by the incompetent Bush administration. Wilkerson is, in my opinion, way too kind to how badly the Bush administration handled the entire set of middle eastern issues. The Bush people had already failed in so many things they had tried that the very threat of exposing one more drove them to commit utter absurdities just to avoid press coverage of another major set of failures.

Because of the continued highly defensive posture taken by ex-Vice-President Dick Cheney and so many other ex-officials of the Bush administration these issues are still being highly covered up. That's the basis for Cheney's attack on Obama the other day, for example. The cover up is not least perpetuated by the Washington political media which seems to have a vested interest is supporting the Bush administration and tearing down the Obama administration. Oddly enough, the Bush administration's attitude towards the massive economic downturn afflicting our economy was "I'll fix itself. We'd just screw it up if we tried to fix anything." So they took a very Hoover-like approach to the economy.

That may have been an accurate assessment of the competence of the conservative Republicans then in power. In fact, most of the current downturn can be tracked back directly to economic policies the conservatives have put into place in the last 30 years.

Obama obviously thinks otherwise and so do most sentient Americans. So he is trying to fix the economy as much as possible as his first priority. But for some reason, the media is still hung up on defending the Bush administration, so they are participating in the conservative cover up. Only the alternate media, such as Steve Clemon's blog where this current article by Wilkerson was published provide the real truth about the degree of sickening mismanagement and incompetence that was the hallmark of the most recent eight years of government.

It is this kind of media defensiveness that has Jon Stewart on the warpath against MSNBC. But as Wilkerson documents in his excellent article, the whole set of problems goes back to the gross mismanagement that has characterized literally every action of the Bush administration, followed by a continued cover up of most of the worst of the Bush administration's failures to govern with even a modicum of competence. The Bush administration was wall-to-wall "Michael Brown at FEMA" from 2001 right through 2009. Guantanamo was only a small part of the overall picture.

Go read Wilkerson's excellent article. This summary can't do it justice.

Lame duck Bush fiddles as American economy burns

Krugman today describes the disaster that is the Bush administration on the way out.

Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence.

Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.

There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now.

How much can go wrong in the two months before Mr. Obama takes the oath of office? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot. Consider how much darker the economic picture has grown since the failure of Lehman Brothers, which took place just over two months ago. And the pace of deterioration seems to be accelerating.

Most obviously, we’re in the midst of the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression: the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has now fallen more than 50 percent from its peak. Other indicators are arguably even more disturbing: unemployment claims are surging, manufacturing production is plunging, interest rates on corporate bonds — which reflect investor fears of default — are soaring, which will almost surely lead to a sharp fall in business spending. The prospects for the economy look much grimmer now than they did as little as a week or two ago.

Yet economic policy, rather than responding to the threat, seems to have gone on vacation. In particular, panic has returned to the credit markets, yet no new rescue plan is in sight. On the contrary, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, has announced that he won’t even go back to Congress for the second half of the $700 billion already approved for financial bailouts. And financial aid for the beleaguered auto industry is being stalled by a political standoff. [Snip]

I’m concerned, in particular, about the two D’s: deflation and Detroit.

About deflation: Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s taught economists that it’s very hard to get the economy moving once expectations of inflation get too low (it doesn’t matter whether people literally expect prices to fall). Yet there’s clear deflationary pressure on the U.S. economy right now, and every month that passes without signs of recovery increases the odds that we’ll find ourselves stuck in a Japan-type trap for years.

About Detroit: There’s now a real risk that, in the absence of quick federal aid, the Big Three automakers and their network of suppliers will be forced into liquidation — that is, forced to shut down, lay off all their workers and sell off their assets. And if that happens, it will be very hard to bring them back.

Now, maybe letting the auto companies die is the right decision, even though an auto industry collapse would be a huge blow to an already slumping economy. But it’s a decision that should be taken carefully, with full consideration of the costs and benefits — not a decision taken by default, because of a political standoff between Democrats who want Mr. Paulson to use some of that $700 billion and a lame-duck administration that’s trying to force Congress to divert funds from a fuel-efficiency program instead.

You can hear the Washington-based fiddle music all over America now. That's the conservatism of the Reagan Revolution "at work" (if you can call sitting on their hands being "at work"), with the same level of successful programs as were offered by the Hoover administration in the early 1930's.

Do the Republicans particularly care about the problems of deflation and Detroit? I doubt it. They care about figuring out how to get back into power as soon as possible, and they see obstructing all efforts to improve the economy as their route to the return to power. As you can see the Administration is doing nothing, and as John Kyl has demonstrated they are already warning they will obstruct every effort by Congress to do anything at all. Seventy-six years after 1932 they Republican Party is still pursuing the same strategies which made them famous in the last great economic failure.

How passionately should people object to our elite opinion-forming classes when they support and encourage this?

Here is Glenn Greenwald's description of what the Bush administration done to America.

As the Bush administration comes to a close, one overarching question is this: how were the transgressions and abuses of the last eight years allowed to be unleashed with so little backlash and resistance? Just consider -- with no hyperbole -- what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons -- "black site" gulags -- beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they'd be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of "war crimes".

Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward -- something that was never supposed to happen -- spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that's to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense. And on and on and on.

Prime responsibility for those actions may lie with the administration which implemented them and with the Congress that thereafter acquiesced to and even endorsed much of it, but it also lies with much of our opinion-making elite and expert class. Even when they politely disagreed, they treated most of this -- and still do -- as though it were reasonable and customary, eschewing strong language and emphatic condemnation and moral outrage, while perversely and self-servingly construing their constraint as some sort of a virtue -- a hallmark of dignified Seriousness. That created the impression that these were just garden-variety political conflicts to be batted about in pretty conference rooms by mutually regarding elites on both sides of these "debates." Meanwhile, those who objected too strongly and in disrespectful tones, who described the extremism and lawlessness taking place, were dismissed by these same elites as overheated, fringe hysterics.

Can the supporters of these Bush administration actions rationally argue that those who learn about what was done should not respond to such non-American aberrations from the Constitution in a passionate manner?

Frankly I think anyone aware of these Bush administration actions who is aware of them and does not passionately oppose them is simply unAmerican.

How Dick Cheney created the key policies of the eight-year Bush administration

Dick Cheney is known to be far and away the most powerful Vice President America has ever had. There is not even any debate on this subject. The obvious question is “How did he become so powerful?” It's not a new question.

This question is generally answered briefly, and pretty much everyone who knows about the issue answers it much the same way. The first response is to point to his experience in government. They will always point to Cheney’s experience in the White House as Ford’s chief of staff, his time in Congress during which he was Republican Whip, then his time as Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush. The second thing normally mentioned is George W. Bush’s dislike of the mechanics of governance, usually associated with a brief statement that as the first MBA President, “W” delegates his work to his subordinates. Both facts are true, but “W” has brought a lot of experienced people into government and delegated work to them. No one else has ever placed their own agenda into action in the way that defines the Bush Presidency. What has made Dick Cheney such a unique individual in “W’s” White House?

At last Barton Gellman explains how Cheney accomplished his task of setting so very much of the White House agenda in his excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. There is a lot in the book, but what has not been clear until now has been what tools Cheney has used to manipulate government and set it to the tasks that forwarded his agenda. His agenda included the economic issues, the security issues and the energy issues.

Cheney was brought in as a defense – foreign policy expert to educate then Governor George W. Bush as he prepared to run for election as President. His broad experience in the federal government and his wide network of personal contacts made him a logical person to task with finding a Vice Presidential candidate to join with Bush. Cheney’s control of that process provided him with the background on potential candidates and at the same time to frame what characteristics the Vice President should have. Cheney defined the requirements such that he himself was the best candidate, convinced Bush that he met the requirements for Vice President, and with his knowledge of the other candidates’ deepest secrets he was able to present them to W in such a way that they were not selected. In the end, candidate George W. Bush was presented with a single clear candidate who met the requirements Cheney had established – Cheney himself.

Cheney was not selected the assist in electing Bush. He was selected in part because he would not run for President himself, so he would not become an opponent within the White House fighting Bush’s policies. So Cheney was chosen to assist Bush govern when he was elected without becoming a threat to Bush.

Cheney started organizing the executive office even as the battle for the Florida votes was being fought by Jim Baker. At that point Cheney took over the staffing of the federal government for the incoming administration. He asked Bush for the role and Bush gave it to him. He knew what positions needed to be filled, what individuals in those positions could do for him or to him, and he had his wide network of contacts and friends available to fill those jobs. He also had a Republican Senate to work with, so that his appointees could be quickly confirmed.

The network that Cheney set up is quit interesting. First he brought “Scooter” Libby and David Addington into his own office. These were people he had long worked with. He then arranged for everything in the White House to run through his office. In addition, he had Libby assigned as Assistant to the President, the highest rank in the White House so that he outranked almost everyone in Bush’s office. Several other members of Cheney’s staff also held the same rank as individuals doing the same job for the President. Mary Matalin, Cheney’s Counselor, shared rank and office space with Karen Hughes who was Counselor for Bush. In previous White Houses the members of the Vice Presidents’ office held rank one level below that of the equivalent person on the President’s staff.

Then Cheney chose individuals for the policy positions. Cheney placed Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor (she had previously worked for him) and backed her up with Steven J. Hadley who had also worked for Cheney at the Department of Defense. Then he placed Colin Powell, who he had previously promoted to Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of Defense, at Secretary of State . Donald Rumsfeld, who went to Secretary of Defense, had been Cheney’s mentor and closest friend since they worked together under Nixon. Paul O’Neil, who went to Secretary of Treasury, had worked closely with Cheney when Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. Cheney chose John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Ashcroft had embarrassingly just lost a Senate race to a man who had died three weeks before the election, and was grateful to Cheney for the position.

Cheney was not working just to get control of the top of the major departments. He also knew that a lot of issues that came to the top for decisions had been selected and framed by individuals at levels below Department Secretary, so he suggested that trusted acolytes be appointed positions at lower levels in the bureaucracy. One example is John Bolton who went to the State Department to keep Colin Powell from going off Cheney’s defined reservation. These appointments gave Cheney control or awareness of new issues as they moved up the bureaucracy and gave him a major advantage over other players of bureaucratic politics since he was generally prepared for new issues before they were.

The foreign policy team consists of The Attorney General, The central intelligence director and the secretaries of state, defense and treasury. When the Foreign policy team meets, it is called the Principals Committee, except when the President is attending. Then it is called the National Security Council. The normal job of the National Security Adviser is to chair meetings of the Principals Committee. Chairing the committee means to set the agenda and to coordinate activities the committee directs. Cheney chose to join the committee, making him the highest ranking member when the President was absent. Richard Haas, director of policy planning in the State Department, later described Cheney’s role as getting “Three bites at the apple,” on every decision. Cheney got his information from the deputies, then from the Principal’s committee, and then had his influence on Bush when the two of them were alone.

This wasn’t all that Cheney was involved in. As Vice President he had an office with the Senate. He also had regular meetings with Senator Arlen Specter and a few other senior Republican Senators. He also went to his old friend Bill Thomas, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and asked for an office in the House. He got one right off the floor. This was important because all tax bills originate in the House.

With this structure in the executive branch and congress as well as his web of contacts throughout the government Cheney was in position to be aware of and able to influence major issues from their inception to the point at which George W. Bush finally decided what to do with them. This was possible because Bush himself was disinterested in most of what Cheney was doing .

It appears to me that the hard right-wing turn of the Bush administration in Bush’s first term was largely dictated by Cheney’s agenda. It was permitted by Bush because he trusted Cheney. Cheney immediately followed any direction given by Bush and so kept that trust, but in many cases Bush simply did not make a decision, letting issues grow and fester in the bureaucracy. In those cases Cheney felt free to use his own power to implement the elements of his own agenda.

Barton Gellman describes this process in much greater depth and carries it on well past its initiation. The book is worth buying and reading.

Dick Cheney - The most dangerous man in America

Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman has published his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describing Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President America has ever suffered. Much of what Gellman has written is new information for the public.

The story that becomes clear is that Dick Cheney arranged to have himself chosen Vice President by George W. Bush, and from that position has spent the last seven-and-a-half years working to create a Monarchical role of"Commander in Chief" for the American President in which the President is the supreme decision-maker with almost no limitations by any other institution including Congress and the Courts. Except for earlier reports by Gellman this story has also completely escaped the notice of the American media.

The following is an except from the review of "Angler" by Steve Clemons.

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics—one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the White House and turned himself into the nation’s most consequential political force. Whether George W. Bush approved or not, his VP animated most of the controversial policies that will define for decades the Bush II presidency. [Snip]

Cheney was put in charge of finding Bush’s VP, and he positioned himself for selection. He uncovered, through an exhaustive questionnaire process, the most private and intimate details of the lives of the other candidates. No one vetted Cheney, though, so nobody had anything on him. He had the goods on everyone else, and he got the nod from Bush.

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush’s ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney’s adventures as Bush’s “No. 2.” Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney’s power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America’s citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America’s mystique as a benign and respected nation—how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power. [Snip]

Gellman ... records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney’s take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation’s policy course—all about principle. Cheney['s]... heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most—terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.[Snip]

Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the “unitary executive.” In Gellman’s framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchical presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq—or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force—and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn’t have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end—a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts—a move that made even Bush uncomfortable—and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality. [Snip]

Cheney’s maneuvers, his angling inside the wide berth that Bush gave him, eventually created so much blowback from colleagues inside the administration and Congress that his office began to slide off its rails. Gellman relates a telling incident involving this reviewer and the vice president on the subject of North Korea, when it appeared that Cheney was unaware of President Bush’s intention to ask Congress to remove North Korea from the terrorist watch list. (I was not the source of this information: the New York Times reported the encounter between Cheney and me on its front page.) At an off-the-record forum, I asked Cheney about the possible change toward North Korea. The question was simple, but Cheney froze, staring at me for an awkwardly long time. He refused to answer, then left the stage. Gellman suggests that Cheney, who for years had been wired into every key national-security decision and able to paralyze nearly all policies with which he disagreed, had been left out—“not read in,” according to the lingo—of the policy-making process, the very tactic his team had so often used against their rivals.

Cheney was also frustrated on the Iran front, increasingly convinced that his team was losing in the interagency process to State Department officials R. Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates. He felt his hawkish, more militarily focused strategy was being undermined by advocates of diplomacy. In a Salon article on Sept. 19, 2007, “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran,” I disclosed that a senior member of Cheney’s team had said that the vice president was considering ways to “tie the president’s hands” and outflank those delaying a confrontation with Tehran—a policy that Cheney felt amounted to appeasement. Clearly, the Angler’s influence was declining. Some sources suggest that Cheney still wields great power and has of late been winning his battles again against Rice, Bellinger, Gates, and others. But he is certainly a long way from his halcyon first years in office, when he had virtually nothing stopping him.

[highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

This looks like a book that explains a great deal of the inner workings - especially the series of blunders - of the Bush White House since January 2001.

Here's a question this review triggers. A great many people have anticipated that Bush will create some form of "October Surprise" between now and the Presidential election in order to get McCain elected President. But if Cheney has been the primary motivator of so many of the White House activities, is Cheney either interested or in a position to cause some kind of international incident in the next two weeks? What is the relationship between McCain and Cheney?

I have written a great deal about the Reagan Revolution, its underlying conservative ideology, and the manner in which the Reagan Revolution has led directly to the present credit crisis and Recession. Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, suggests that behind the scenes of - and perhaps even mostly unrelated to - the current economic crises there has been a very different mechanism for many of the disasters that have been created by the Bush administration. I suspect that this book will be the basis for a lot of the defenses created by conservatives to avoid blame for the disastrous state that America has been brought down to. It won't wash. Dick Cheney and his acolytes have been a key element of Republican dominance for the last three decades and especially so since 2001. The Conservatives who will be wanting to distance themselves from him are the same ones who linked arms and supported his actions in lockstep, just as the social conservatives have. Conservatives are driven as much be social cronyism as they are by their myth of ideology. They just don't like to look at that aspect of being a conservative.

A Review of a book is supposed to sell people on the idea of buying and reading it. Steve Clemon's review has succeeded.

Biden is Obam's choice for Veep. Well-played in the media games.

We know now that Obama announced Sen. Joe Biden as his choice for the Democratic nomination for Vice President. Joe's not perfect, but he is clearly a good match for Obama and will be a real asset to the Democratic ticket.

What I find most fascinating is how the Obama people have used the Veep announcement to play the media like it was a musical instrument at Julliard. The Veepstakes has had the reporters sitting at Obama's feet panting with their tongues hanging out like dogs waiting for a treat. Even better, the pundits/TV personalities have been going wild with both anticipation and frustration as they can't get any news on the choice.

Beyond the suspense, the release of Biden's name by email drives everyone to the media that Obama dominates - the Internet. The reporters, pundits and TV personalities have nothing they can do to add value to the Obama announcement.

Another point - the timing of the Veepstakes announcement gives the Sunday morning TV talking heads time to discuss it as a lead-in to discussing the Democratic Convention. As I say, Obama has played the Veep announcement very well.

Then McCain's "House-count gaffe" adds even more to the same media frenzy. Obama has hit back hard, and his attack the big advantage of being true. That contrasts it sharply to the media fiction based on Brittany and Paris Hilton that has been coming out of the McCain camp. Add to this, this week's announced Bush - al Maliki agreement on a timetable to get American troops out of Iraq has cut the legs out from under McCain's recent VFW statement that "We both agree we will bring the troops home, but I will win first" line of attack.

With all this happening, who is going to be the first talking head on Sunday who asks about McCain's age and apparent confusion?

Looking forward to nest week, all this media frenzy provides a really fine base on which to run the Democratic convention. If it's as well coordinated as this weeks Obama PR stuff, next week is also going to be a very interesting - and for Democrats, pleasing - Fall leading into the election.

The dark spot that concerns me is that it is clear that the Bush administration set Georgian President Saakishvili up to attack into South Ossetia knowing that the Russian military was waiting for him.

The Russian troops had to have been sitting in place waiting for the command to attack to the south. They reacted too rapidly for it to be otherwise. US technical Intelligence had to have satellites pictures of their armor and troops in the jump-off locations. With all the warning and tension there, not to have had satellite coverage of the Caucasus Mountains would be pure incompetence on the part of US Intelligence. Had the Americans who claim they were warning Saakishvili not to attack South Ossetia shown those pictures to the Georgian high command, the Georgians would not have walked into the trap as they did.

The Bush administration was adding to the anti-Russian rhetoric and encouraging Saakishvili in his hothead rhetoric with promises of "support", so at best they might have been providing mixed messages. Had they actually shown pictures of the Russian troops in position waiting to snap the trap on the Georgian military, it is very unlikely the Georgians would have attacked South Ossetia. The US either suffered a massive Intelligence and diplomatic failure or they directly encouraged Saakishvili to attack South Ossetia. Two separate sources have informed me that the US encouraged the Georgian attack.

One very strong implication is that the Bush administration is playing the "fear of Russians" game to try to spread fear of a new Cold War in the American electorate, since fear of Iranians and fear of al Qaeda is not having the effect on the American electorate the Republicans hoped for. As far as I can tell, the threat of a new Cold War is McCain's best chance of winning in November. This makes the Cold War with Russia the Republican Presidential-Monarchist's in control of the Presidency.

Will it work to elect McCain and allow the Republican NeoCons to keep control of the Presidency - which they are pressing hard to turn into a monarchy based on the theory of the Unitary Presidency?

Any patriotic American will hope it doesn't work. For right now, Obama appears to be playing the media game beautifully. This builds on his ground game and the declining Republican economy that should determine the Presidential election. But the Bush Administration still has slightly over 10 weeks to set up a new Cold War with the Russians and get McCain elected to keep the Cheneyites and NeoConss in control of the Presidency. As the election gets closer and everything else fails for the Republicans they are likely to get desperate and attempt anything to defeat Obama.

Veteran's Administration refuses to allow veterans to vote

Why won't the Secretary of the Veteran's Administration allow veteran's in his care to register to vote? From the New York Times

On May 5, the department led by James B. Peake issued a directive that bans nonpartisan voter registration drives at federally financed nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and shelters for homeless veterans. As a result, too many of our most patriotic American citizens — our injured and ill military veterans — may not be able to vote this November.

These are the guys who fought for our right to vote, and now the VA won't allow them to register to vote unless they are physically capable of escaping control of the Veteran's Administration.

This is more Republican voter suppression, but I thought that veterans were a Republican-oriented voter block? What are Karl Rove's disciples afraid of? Poor veterans?

Suskind releases transcripts of interview to support his allegations in The Way of the World

Reporter Ron Suskind recently released his book The Way of the World which includes the inflammatory indictment that the White House had the CIA forge a letter ("The Habash Letter") and feed it to reporters in Iraq to justify their wild allegations that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda and that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium yellow cake in Africa. The purpose of the letter was to confirm earlier allegations the White House had already made publicly to justify invading Iraq. The original allegations had already met a lot of push-back question the Truth of the White House's allegations including Ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson's OpEd published in the New York Times. Wilson's OpEd led the White House to illegally publicize the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an active serving CIA officer, a political retribution that ended her CIA career, exposed the CIA cover organization she worked for, and ultimately led to the conviction of "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former Chief of Staff, being convicted on March 6, 2007 on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying during the leak investigation.

As anticipated, the White House has strongly denied what Suskind wrote. So have then CIA Director George Tenant and Rob Richer. Richer was extensively interviews by Suskind for the story. Suskind has stated on NPR that the denials by Tenant and Richer are a result of pressure fropm the White House, something that the Plame Affair shows it normal operating procedure for the Bush/Cheney White House. Here is Suskind's transcript along with his explanation for releasing it.

A note to readers

I've decided to post a partial transcript of one of a number of taped conversations in which Rob Richer and I discussed, on the record, the Habbush letter. We discussed it many times through the spring of 2008.

Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:

"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbash as outlined in Mr Suskind's book."

The conversation below took place in June 2008. As in all of our conversations, it shows Rob pressing to get at truth and embrace probity.

This posting is contrary to my practice across 25 years as a journalist. But the issues, in this matter, are simply too important to stand as discredited in any way.

--Ron Suskind


Interview Transcript

. . . Ron Suskind: I know we've talked through these things eight ways to Sunday, and hour after hour, but here's what I want you to ask yourself. Prior to me jogging your memory, okay--forget Habbush part one, okay.

Rob Richer: Okay.

Ron: You know, the prewar stuff, cause there's zillions of people in on that part. And there's people in on the second part, too. But here's my question to you: before I, as I said, before I jog your memory on this stuff, what do you--and I think I have a good idea, cause I've asked you this seven different ways, but I just want to make absolutely sure--what do you remember? If I just grabbed you on the street and said what do you remember of the second part, okay--with the letter and all the rest--what would be the high marks in terms of what you--memory's the best editor I think's a line from Tennyson--

Rob: Exactly.

Ron: What were the parts that you remember most vividly?

Rob: You're talking about Habbush himself, correct?

Ron: No, I'm talking about the second part, with the letter being passed from--through George [Tenet] and down the ranks. Cause at one point--and I know we have recollections at the top and that's fine--you have recollections, not from me but from your own memory on that--

Rob: Let me tell you what I know, just so before you color any of it. Is that when you first asked me about it I remember just really telling you that it was a non-event, and if you were to ask me today I would tell you it was a non-event. It came down from the seventh floor. It was part of--as I remember it, it wasn't so much to influence America--that's illegal--but it was kinda like a covert, a way to influence Iraqis.

. . .

Rob: To characterize it right, I would say, right: it came to us, George had a raised eyebrow, and basically we passed it on--it was to--and passed this on into the organization. You know, it was: 'Okay, we gotta do this, but make it go away.' To be honest with you, I don't want to make it sound--I for sure don't want to portray this as George jumping: 'Okay, this has gotta happen.' As I remember it--and, again, it's still vague, so I'll be very straight with you on this--is it wasn't that important. It was: 'This is unbelievable. This is just like all the other garbage we get about . . . I mean Mohammad Atta and links to al Qaeda. 'Rob,' you know, 'do something with this.' I think it was more like that than: 'Get this done.'

Ron: Do something with this, right. Get this, this is like--

Rob: It died a natural death as you know.

Ron: 'This thing stinks, take it.'

Rob: Yeah, kinda like that, yeah. But, you know, we got so much garbage that first couple—that year.

Ron: Were there other things like this where we were creating product?

Rob: You know, I don't remember that.

. . .

Ron: The intent--the basic raison d'etre of this product is to get, is to create, here's a letter with what's in it. Okay, here's what we want on the letter, we want it to be released as essentially a representation of something Habbush says. That's all it says, that's the one paragraph. And then you pass it to whomever to do it. To get it done.

Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how--you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was--

Ron: Right. You saw the original with the White House stationery, but you didn't--down the ranks, then it creates other paper.

Rob: Yeah, no, exactly. But I couldn't tell you--again: I remember it happening, I remember a terrible brief kinda joking dialogue about it, but that was it.

. . .

Ron: Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?

Rob: No, no, no. What I remember is George saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'

Ron: Which is the White House?

Rob: Yes. But he did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president.

Ron: Yeah, right.

Rob: But he didn't say that specifically. I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.

Ron: Right, I'm with you, I'm with you. But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president.

Rob: Nope.

Ron: It just had the White House stationery.

Rob: Exactly right.

Ron: That's fine, White House stationery's fine. Everything's from there. You know, that's the center point. But not OVP's Office. It's just the White House. It comes from the White House. That's plain and simple.

Rob: And you know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP. I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you. . . .

I am posting Suskind's entire post from his own web site based on the "Fair Use Doctrine." This information is critical to the discussion of the issue of whether George Bush and/or Dick Cheney committed war crimes or impeachable offenses.

White House ordered CIA to forge letter to justify the Iraq invasion

Ron Suskind has a new book out in which according to Mike Allen at Politico he states

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush [Saddam's Intelligence Chief] to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [Snip]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Another thing that Suskind reports refers to whether the Bush White House knew there were WMD's in Iraq.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

“They secretly resettled him in Jordan, paid him $5 million – which one could argue was hush money – and then used his captive status to help deceive the world about one of the era’s most crushing truths: that America had gone to war under false pretenses,” the book says.

Allen also reports other revelations reported by Suskind in the new book.

Among the 415-page book’s other highlights:

--John Maguire, one of two men who oversaw the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, was frustrated by what Suskind describes as the “tendency of the White House to ignore advice it didn’t want to hear – advice that contradicted its willed certainty, political judgments, or rigid message strategies.”

And Suskind writes that the administration “did not want to hear the word insurgency.” [Snip]

--Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

--Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

Suskind's book looks like it is well worth reading.

The final year of Bush's rogue Presidency

The Bush administration has surpassed itself, both in ridiculousness and in flat being scary and out of control. Everything they have attempted outside of getting poison legislation passed has failed. Will they attempt one last Hurrah on the way out and try to take all of America and the Middle East down to failure with them? That is a realistic expectation for a group of administrators who are living in a bunker mentality inside what Scott McClellan described as the White House bubble.

How total is the administration's failure so far? Just look at this (very incomplete) list:

• Let's start with Iraq. First look at the lies told to take us to war. Then look at the real reasons as indicated by the recent actions of the Bush administration and its puppet Maliki government.
  • There is no longer any doubt that the Bush White House essentially lied to the U.S. and Congress to authorize the unnecessary invasion of Iraq. (MSNBC's analysis of the report here and from the Financial Times here) The statements the administration presented to the public (repeatedly) were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting provided to the Committee."
  • One real reason for invading Iraq has been denied all along by the Bush administration: Permanent military bases in Iraq. Here is what the Iraqis say is being demanded in the new Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration is hurriedly trying to negotiate before leaving office.
  • The other reason, which again the Bush administration has denied for six years, is bringing the American oil companies back to Iraq. That's another thing that the administration and the puppet Maliki government are now doing.
• But that's just the why for invading and occupying Iraq. Look at the utter incompetence with which they have handled it.
  • First was Rumsfeld's effort to conduct the invasion with too few troops and no effective plan to control the country, as demonstrated by the looting that occurred immediately.
  • The abrupt change of plans that removed Jay Garner and replaced him with Jerry Bremer showed they were operating with no plan.
  • When Bremer took over, he immediately disbanded the Iraqi army although there were clearly not enough American troops to control the country, and absent a draft, never could be. The resulting utter anarchy permitted, even encouraged the rise of an insurgency. It's almost as though the Bush administration actually WANTED continued combat in Iraq.
  • Bremer's well-known effort to use a "Kiddy Corps" of young conservative ideologues vetted by the American Enterprise Institute to turn the Iraqi economy into a libertarian free market "paradise" clearly failed completely.
  • One of the efforts to bring Iraq under control has been to create a $500 million Arabic language television and radio station to pump out American propaganda, to counter the reporting by al Jazeera. This has been an utter failure. Not only is the al-Hurra network completely unable to operate effectively in the highly competitive Arabic Language TV industry, it has actually been producing and airing anti-American broadcasting.
• None of this incompetence would have been possible had the Bush administration not made its decisions in total secrecy, avoiding all Constitutional oversight. The lies an and misrepresentations have been matched by an almost total refusal to answer questions. Consider the efforts they have gone to to avoid testifying before Henry Waxman's Congressional committee.
  • Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten refuse to answer questions about the politically motivated firing of US Attorneys who refused to use their office to attack effective Democratic politicians.
  • State Department officials refuse to testify about corruption in contracts in Iraq.
  • The head of the EPA refuses to answer questions asked by Congress.
  • The Department of Justice will not act to enforce Waxman's subpoenas.
• This is just a small sample of the refusal to the Bush administration to respond to Constitutional oversight.

I've previously discussed elsewhere why the really severe economic crisis that America is currently enduring is primarily a result of the implementation of the small government free market refusal to plan or regulate the economy and the banks properly. The conservative movement and the Reagan Revolution have come home to roost. The conservative fantasy they represent has failed America terribly. That ideology simply cannot deal with reality.

The clear pattern is that the Bush administration is able to politically control the federal government, but fails completely when faced with reality. They appear to treat reality as just another political situation that can be lied away in the press. The result is an administration which has been a total and complete failure.

So what does a completely failed administration do as the end of its term approaches? Well, all they can do successfully is pass legislation. Reality escapes them. So, as M.J. Rosenberg reports, the administration that treats reality as though it were political legislation is very close to Declaring War On Iran!

Both the House and Senate are considering legislation that would put us in a state of war with Iran. Right now.

H. Con. Res 362 and S.Res.580 are identical bills (designed for expeditious passage) which have as their goal "preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is vital to the national security interests of the United States and must be dealt with urgently...." The bills introduction coincided with the AIPAC conference.

The bill's "action clause" would put us at war with Iran by immediately imposing a blockade.

The resolution cleverly states that "nothing in this resolution shall be construed as an authorization of the use of force against Iran" assuming, apparently correctly, that potential co-sponsors won't know that a blockade is an act of war.

169 Congress persons is 39% of the House of Representatives.

The Bush administration plans to pass legislation to declare a blockade of Iraq (that is, declare war while jacking world oil prices into the stratosphere) as their last action on the way out of office and leave it to the next administration to deal with the reality of the crap they are unleashing. Besides the legislation itself, there are also the right-wing pronouncements such as this one by substitute but never confirmed ex- U.N. Ambassador John Bolten talking up an attack on Iran, and Bill Krystol's encouragement for an attack on Iran. This certainly has the looks of a drumbeat for war.

Hitler would have been proud. He, too, living his last days in the Bunker in Berlin knew that he had failed, so he decided to take Germany down with him. This is no different.

Five top administration Lawyers wrote the Bush/Cheney rules on torture

Alberto Gonzales - former White House Council.
David Addington - legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney.
William J. Haynes II - former Pentagon general counsel.
John Yoo - former Justice Department Lawyer.
Timothy E. Flanigan - former deputy to Alberto Gonzales.

What do these men have in common? From the McClatchy news article:

WASHINGTON — The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. [Snip]

The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council," drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military's code of justice, the federal court system and America's international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

These five men, following orders and guidance from George Bush and Dick Cheney, allowed and encouraged individuals from being held accountable for what otherwise would be considered war crimes. It seems only right and fair that they, themselves, should be held directly and criminally accountable for those crimes.

Why do Republicans claim government cannot help? Because, under Republicans, it refuses to help.

This is an example of Conservative Republican Chutzpa. From CNN:

(CNN) -- Louisiana officials are demanding that hurricane supplies the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave away be returned to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Their request comes after a CNN story Wednesday revealed that FEMA had given away $85 million in supplies that lingered on storage shelves while hurricane victims suffered without the items they needed.

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Sen. Mary Landrieu demanded answers from FEMA.

"While I understand the stated need to save taxpayer money being spent storing these materials, I am concerned that there are still ongoing needs for these type of goods in my state," Landrieu wrote Chertoff, whose department includes FEMA.

She asked for Chertoff's assistance "in reviewing this situation and redistributing these goods."

The Louisiana Recovery Authority announced that it was asking the federal government to return goods "that were intended to help disaster victims in Louisiana but were marked as surplus and remain unused." iReport.com: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast

"Many of these items are believed to be household goods that could help residents moving out of FEMA trailers re-establish their homes," the agency said.

But government under the Republicans only refuses to help the average Americans like residents of New Orleans after Katrina or like homeowners facing foreclosure because the lenders sold them bad loans. They hop to it to shovel money to the wealthy in tax cuts and bail outs to failed big businesses like Bear Stearns.

For the Republicans, only the very wealthy need government support. The rest of us are just out here for the very wealthy to exploit so that they can get more wealthy.

The Italian trial of Americans for kidnapping and "rendering" Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr

Twenty-six Americans (CIA) and Italian intelligence officers (Italian SISMI military intelligence)are currently on trial in Italy in the kidnapping and rendition of an Egyptian cleric as part of the CIA's extraordinary renditions program. The CIA officers are being tried in absentia, and the U.S. government has said that if the Italian government asks that they be sent to Italy, the U.S. will refuse.

The current report in USA Today focuses on the Italian trial of the Intelligence officers, both U.S. and Italian, who conducted the clearly illegal kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. This report focuses on the kidnapping in Italy and Europe and his rendition to Egypt.

Earlier (March 13, 2005) the Washington Post reported on the investigation that led to the current trial. The same reporter, Craig Whitlock, reported Dec 13, 2005 on a ruse by the CIA to misdirect the investigation.

Italian judicial authorities publicly disclosed the CIA operation in the spring. But a review of recently filed court documents and interviews in Milan offer fresh details about how the CIA allegedly spread disinformation to cover its tracks and how its actions in Milan disrupted and damaged a major Italian investigation.

The European edition of the Stars and Stripes reported Dec 10, 2006 on an attempt to get Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, the former commander of the 31st Security Forces Squadron at Aviano Air Force Base in Northeastern Italy, to comment on the Italian investigation of the kidnapping. Col. Romano declined to comment.

Then the BBC reported Feb 12, 2007 that the Egyptians had released Abu Omar.

Prosecutors have said the cleric was snatched on a Milan street and flown, via Germany, to his native Egypt where he was interrogated.

The cleric has accused Egyptian agents of using electric shocks, beatings and rape threats against him.

He had been initially charged with membership of an illegal organization [allegedly al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya] but the charges were later dropped. Mr Nasr was briefly released in 2004 but was later detained without charge under the north African country's emergency laws.

This is the surface story, the part that can be told in public. Much of the details are covered by secrecy, both American and Italian. The Chicago Tribune addressed why Abu Omar was kidnapped in their story published July 3, 2005.

Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA's most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?

Neither the Bush administration nor the CIA has acknowledged any role in the operation. But U.S. government officials privately paint Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, as a dangerous terrorist who once plotted to kill the Egyptian foreign minister and was worthy of an audacious daylight abduction involving more than 20 operatives, weeks of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

One senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition that she not be identified, asserted: "The world's a better place with this guy off the streets."

But evidence gathered by prosecutors here, who have charged 13 CIA operatives with Abu Omar's kidnapping, indicates that the abduction was a bold attempt to turn him back into the informer he once was. [Snip]

Milanese prosecutors and police, who had been closely monitoring Abu Omar and knew nothing about his planned abduction, are furious.

"Instead of having an investigation against terrorists, we are investigating this CIA kidnapping," a senior prosecution official fumed last week.

According to the prosecutor's application for the 13 warrants, when Abu Omar reached Cairo on a CIA-chartered aircraft, he was taken straight to the Egyptian interior minister.

If he agreed to inform for the Egyptian intelligence service, Abu Omar "would have been set free and accompanied back to Italy," the document said.

Alternatively, the senior official said, the Americans may have hoped the Egyptians could learn something by interrogating Abu Omar about planned resistance to the impending war on Iraq.

Abu Omar refused to inform, according to the document, and spent the next 14 months in an Egyptian prison facing "terrible tortures." After a brief release in April 2004, he was imprisoned again.

The source of the prosecution's information is Mohammed Reda, another Egyptian imam living in Milan and one of the first people Abu Omar called during his brief release.

Asked to assess Reda's credibility, the prosecution official asserted that "in this case, he had no reason to lie. And when he made his first statements, he was unaware he was being intercepted" by a police wiretap on his cell phone.

If this was all about an effort by the CIA to coerce Abu Omar into becoming an informer again, it certainly got out of hand and screwed up badly.

There will be more about this story as the Italian trial continues.

Did Iranian Intelligence dupe Cheney and company into the Iraq invasion?

Journalists are frantically wading through the long delayed (four years?) but finally issued Phase II of the Senate investigation into the US Government's use of Intelligence before invading Iraq. Trust McClatchy News to come up with a really big issue. Did Iranian Intelligence use a small cabal of American government officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney's office to feed fake Intelligence to the government and cause the American invasion of Iran's worst enemy, Iraq?

By John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that a small group of Pentagon officials who'd collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service . . . to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the group's activities after only a month, and Pentagon officials never followed up on investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. [Snip]

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar [1}, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen [2], a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar."

The counterintelligence unit said, however, that Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know."

Stephen Cambone [4], then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.

Among other things, the Iranians told the Americans about:

_ Iranian "hit teams" they said were targeting U.S. personnel and facilities in Afghanistan.

_ What they claimed was Shiite Muslim Iran's longstanding relationship with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

_ "Tunnel complexes in Iran for weapons storage or exfiltration of regime leaders," and about the alleged growth of anti-regime sentiment in Iran.

Franklin [1], who, in an unrelated matter, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 2006 for providing classified information on Iran policy to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, passed the information about the alleged Iranian hit squads to a U.S. Special Forces commander in Afghanistan. Although a DIA analyst told the Senate committee that he couldn't speculate on whether the information had been "truly useful," Ledeen and Pentagon officials claimed it saved American lives, the committee said.

During the Rome meetings, Ghorbanifar also laid out a scheme to overthrow the Iranian regime on a napkin during a late night meeting in a bar. "The plan," said the Senate committee, "involved the simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran that would create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures" in a capital city famous for its traffic congestion.

Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money, Franklin told the committee, and indicated that if the traffic jam plan succeeded, he'd need additional money.

"The proposed funding for, and foreign involvement in, Mr. Ghorbanifar's plan for regime change were never fully understood," the Senate committee said.

Nevertheless, Ghorbanifar's proposals grew more ambitious — and expensive. A February 2002 memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman referred to an unnamed foreign government's support for a Ghorbanifar plan that would cost millions of dollars. A later summary referred to contracts "that would assure oil and gas sales in the event of regime change". The U.S. ambassador to Italy said that DOD officials "were talking about 25 million for some kind of Iran program."

After Franklin and Rhode returned from the Rome meetings, the Senate report said, two series of events began to unfold in Washington that were typical of the gamesmanship that plagued the Bush administration's national security team.

"First," the report said, "State Department and CIA officials attempted to determine what Mr. Ledeen and the DOD representatives had done in Rome, and second, DOD officials debated the next course of action."

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.

He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.

[1] Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar was suspected by the CIA of passing forged documents to the U.S. during the Iran-Contra situation, and had been completely abandoned by the CIA as totally unreliable. He had been a close associate to LtC. Oliver North.

[2} American civilian, Michael Ledeen was another individual who used Ghorbanafar as a source, and was upset with the CIA when the issued a "burn Notice" (meaning do not use this individual or information he provides - he is a known liar.) Ledeen had vouched for Ghorbanafur to National Security Adviser Robert McFarland who then used his data in the Iran-Contra situation. Ledeen was also tightly linked to the Yellow Cake Forgeries which led George Bush to include the statement "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." in his 2003 State of the Union speech. The book The Italian Letter describes how a forged letter became a key element in the invasion of Iraq. Michael Ledeen is a key player in the book, in large part because of his connections with Italian Military Intelligence. The NeoCon Michale Ledeen still supports the invasion of Iraq and pushes actively for air strikes on Iran.

[3] Larry Franklin worked in Douglass Feith's Office of Special Plans, an organization set up to use Intelligence reports rejected by the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence community. The so-called Intelligence reports from OSP were then stove-piped directly into Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Cheney was known to dislike and distrust the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community because he felt they ignored, downplayed, or rejected significant Intelligence reports.

[4] Stephen Cambone was the much disliked Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld who shut down the investigation after only a month. He was known as Rumsfeld's chief henchman, and the orders to Intelligence personnel and contractors to "soften up" prisoners came from his office. He resigned shortly after Donald Rumsfeld left the job of Secretary of Defense. It seems probable to me that he and Douglas Feith worked closely together stovepiping Intelligence information to the office of the Vice President.

Consider also the Iraqi National Congress which was set up under the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi after the Persian Gulf War to coordinate the activities of the various anti-Saddam groups attempting to overthrow Saddam's government. Chalabi has a record of illegal dealings and is known to have numerous Iranian contacts. Since he is a Shiite, this is not surprising but it leads to speculation that he has long been an agent for Iran. Yet since he was close to the American NeoCons and considered one of them, the Pentagon had initially planned to install him as the new leader of Iraq after America removed Saddam. His inability to obtain on the ground support from Iraqis ended that effort shortly after the Pentagon delivered him to Baghdad in 2003. Suspicion that he is and has been an agent for Iranian Intelligence persist. Using the INC to confirm false intelligence sent thorugh other sources to the American NeoCons and the Pentagon and Office of the Vice President is exacly the kind of activity a foreign Intelligence agency bent on sending bad Intelligence to the top American Officials would conduct.

There is also the fact that America has used Iraq as a counter to Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and in fact covertly supported Iraq when Saddam attacked Iran in the early 80's. If Iranian Intelligence could get Americans to removed Saddam from power that action would make Iran much safer. It has to be assumed that the Iranian Intelligence Services has been working hard to distract America from Iran and to get Saddam removed. That certainly has been the effect of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Have we been witnessing the very successful efforts of Iranian Intelligence to remove Saddam, Iraq and weaken America in the Middle East?

There's no smoking gun yet, but it certainly fits the publicly known motivations of the various players in the last two decades. Then there is the fact that Stephen Cambone shut down the internal investigation of those Pentagon - Office of the Vice President players after only one month with no results reported. That's so suspicious that it is close to an admission of guilt. Any report of an investigation that resulted in such a report would be politically disastrous to the Bush administration, and they have been very good at shutting down such investigations.

Maybe it's time to reopen that investigation. Hey! It might exonerate all the various Bush administration players from suspicion. But it might also show them as stupid rubes played for suckers by Iranian Intelligence, too.

I know which alternative that I consider more likely.

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If you are curious and have some time on your hands, here are the (large!) PDF files that contain the Phase II report:

• "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information"


• "Report on Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans Within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy"

Talking Points Memo has bloggers reviewing those files and reporting what they find

• here.

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Addendum 6/6/08 3:40 PM
The New York Times has now published its reflections on the Senate report on Intelligence. It's not kind to the Bush administration. Instead it's a compendium of example of how it is possible to lie by misdirection and technically accurate yet highly misleading statements.

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

The New York Times Editors also make it quite clear that this report was available nearly five years ago, but was buried by the Republican Senators on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

The lies told by the Bush administration are not the work of just a few individuals. The entire Republican leadership in Congress and in the White House all got behind those lies.

And why?

To misdirect the American public into a war against Iraq which was no threat to anyone other than their own people, and to direct Americans away from the real threats of terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely funded by Saudi Arabian money.

It sounds insane, unless the only purpose was to gain power in the American government for a permanent minority party by faking an external threat that did not exist. Still, why did they ignore the threat that did exist?

It still sounds insane. But that's the Party of Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatives. Threats and fear where none really exists while ignore real threats right in front of their eyes because to recognize the real threats would jeopardize their power in government, which allows them to corruptly steal taxpayer money left and right.

McClellan: Started writing as a Bush defender; upon investigation agreed with Bush's detractors

Ryan Grim of Politico reviewed a copy of the book proposal that Scott McClellan used to sell his memoir and reports that it started out to be a defense of George Bush, blaming the failures of his administration primarily on overly powerful Neo-Conservatives and Social Conservatives in the administration. He also intended to defend Bush from liberal caricatures.

After researching, thinking about and writing the book he reached very different conclusions.

Rather than take on President Bush, McClellan suggests in the proposal — which was circulating in New York publishing circles in January of last year — that social conservatives and neo-conservatives were responsible for much that went wrong during Bush’s tenure. In his book, the finger instead pointed squarely at the president.

He also offers in his proposal to counter the liberal caricatures of Bush. But as has been widely reported, he wound up only buttressing such portraits.

Sherer also finds that comparison of McClellan's book with the proposal showed that the book took a very different view of the failures of the media than were suggested in the proposal.

instead of whacking the press for not digging deep enough into the Bush administration's rationale for war, as he does in his memoir, the proposal dings the press for a left-wing bias. "Fairness is defined by the establishment media within the left-of-center boundaries they set," he offers. "They defend their reporting as fair because both sides are covered. But, how fair can it be when it is within the context of the liberal slant of the reporting? And, while the reporting of the establishment media may be based on true statements and facts, is it an accurate picture of what is really happening?"

Logically there are two possible rationales for the change in tone the book took from that of the proposal. Either Scotty decided to spice up the book to increase sales while settling scores with some of the White House insiders he felt had misused him, or he found that after research and reflection his earlier opinions of what had happened was overly influenced by his closeness to and liking for George Bush.

Working in the White House at Scotty's level gives very little time for investigation and reflection. I can envision that originally Scotty wrote the proposal based largely on the "common wisdom" that floated around inside the bubble of the White House, and then, while writing, began to become aware that that "common wisdom" is simply wrong. Since he doesn't suggest that Bush was one of those who misused him, but was himself misused by powerful White House insiders, I am inclined to think the second choice is the more significant reason for the way his book turned out.

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Scott McClellans book proposal is available here

"A man with a conscience" - words Bush and Cheney hate to hear

Scott McClellan appears to be a Republican with a conscience - the kind of person that I am sure Rove had hoped he, Cheney, and the Republican Congressional leadership (including Gingrich) had driven out of the Republican Party.



Not, mind you, that I don't think the money he will make from his book is negligible to Scotty. It better not be. He has burned his bridges to the conservatives. He'll never get wing-nut welfare like I. "Scooter" Libby has done since he fell on his sword and was convicted to protect Dick Cheney.

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Addendum 3:51 PM CDT
The New York Times has a good article on the reaction to Scotty McClellan's revelations. In particular, Karl Rove,political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary, and Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to the president, are all using similar terms to describe McClellan as a disaffected former employee of the White House who appears to have been influenced by publishers to pump up sales of his book by making outrageous, untrue accusations.

The terminology they are all using - in concert - appears to have been crafted by White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino. It's a highly organized White House push-back against McClellan, something that he clearly knew to expect.

I'll bet those people, Bush, Cheney and Rice are all looking around them wondering who the next "person of conscience" will be. "Conscience" is clearly a word they don't recognize fondly.

Also interesting. Over at Huffington Post Arianna entitles her post "Scotty Come Lately" and asks "What took you so long" about McClellan's revelations. More interesting than McClellan's revelations, which anyone who reads the blogs knew about long ago, is the way the Inside the Beltway based media has come to attention and saluted the story which they have previously ignored.

This action on the part of the inside the beltway media seems to be a reaction to (1) hearing the story publicly from one of the premier inside the beltway individuals (Scotty) and at the same time, (2) represents a reaction to his highly credible accusations that the media didn't do its job in the run-up to the war.

The media still won't listen to anything from outside Washington, but they are clearly going to be a lot more aggressive about the administration from now on - now that it's a Democratic administration, just as they always have been.

So for the political media, this reaction is just more of their continued incompetence and general irrelevance. They are just taking advantage of Bush's long lame duckness to start early.