More support for Ron Suskind's accusations that the CIA planted the Habash Letter at the direction of the White House

Joe Conason has stepped into the issue of whether the Bush administration (Cheney) directed the CIA to create and plant the forged Habash Letter to justify the invasion of Iraq just as the administration's earlier lies were falling apart. Joe points to the evidence that supports Ron Suskind's story.

The letter itself was handed by Ayad Allawi to the Sunday Telegraph's foreign editor and Chief MidEast reporter, Con Coughlin. Allawi is well known to be a paid operator who worked for years for the CIA, while Coughlin is known to be a source of a lot of NeoCon claptrap that has appeared in print over the years.

Specifically, Allawi was a longtime asset of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had funded his struggle against Saddam for years prior to the invasion. His CIA sponsorship is noted in nearly every news article about Allawi, usually contrasted with the Pentagon sponsorship of his political rival, Ahmed Chalabi, the infamous fabricator of WMD intelligence (and suspected double agent for Iran).

And where was Allawi right before Coughlin broke the story of the Habash Letter?

On Dec. 11, 2003 -- three days before the Telegraph launched its "exclusive" on the Habbush memo -- the Washington Post published an article by Dana Priest and Robin Wright headlined "Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks." Buried inside on Page A41, their story outlined the CIA's efforts to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency:

"The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.

"Badran and Ayad Allawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein." (The Web link to the full story is broken but it can be found on Nexis.) [Snip]

That picture becomes sharper in the months that followed Allawi's release of the Habbush forgery, when he suddenly returned to favor in Baghdad and eclipsed Chalabi, at least for a while. Five months later, in May 2004, the Iraqi Governing Council elected Allawi as his country's interim prime minister, reportedly under pressure from the American authorities. Combining subservience to the occupiers with iron-fisted tactics, he quickly squandered any popularity he might have enjoyed, and his INA party placed a humiliating third in the 2005 national elections.

So RonSuskind has extensive tapes with sources in the CIA who were aware of the instructions from the White House to forge and plant the Habash Letter. (See the partial transcript Suskind has posted with Rob Richer.)Then we have a well-known CIA asset, Allawi, who the reporter Coughlin reports gave him the letter who oddly enough was in the U.S. working with the CIA (as was independently reported by Dana Priest and and Robin Wright of the Washington Post) immediately prior to the date the Telegram printed the letter.

Shortly after the letter was printed, the U.S. government pressured the Iraqis to appoint Allawi as interim Prime Minister. A payoff?

This is a story that supports Suskind's book. The Bush administration will clearly push back as hard as it can. This story, published by Ron Suskind, may well determine the legacy of George Bush and his administration. It comes down to a question of the relative reliability of the known liars in the Bush/Cheney administration against the reputation of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Ron Suskind. The weight so far is heavily on Suskind's side. Any allegation that Suskind is wrong will be seen as coming from known liars and will very likely have been planted - much as was the Habash letter itself.

We will hear more about the Habash Letter. A lot more.

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.

The idea of a long term global recession has gone mainstream

For a year now we have been getting repeated news of new economic problems, followed by quick responses from financial leaders that the problem is near its low and that early recovery is expected. After each "happy news" response we have gotten a new announcement that there is a new problem -- immediately followed by new happy talk announcements the the economy is strong and flexible, the problem has gotten as bad as it can, and recovery can be expected "soon." For most of this year the "soon" has been either by the end of the year or as the year has worn on, early in 2009.

Since the current recession is caused by a combination of the garbage mortgage loans bankers have been selling at exorbitant prices to investors for years and the fact that the American consumer has run out of both disposable income and savings to spend in consumption and the government is not going to do anything beyond playing with interest rates and the money supply (both financial economy measures to deal with what is now a real economy problem of lack of consumption), there has been no obvious source of recovery any time soon.

Lack of demand means lack of investment and declining sales. The absence of increased consumer income together with the inability of banks to lend even at previous levels shuts off any likelihood of an economic recovery anytime soon. The negative feedback loop here is that the declining economy is leading to increased unemployment and even less money for consumers to spend.

Financial fixes that the Federal Reserve can conduct involve either lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Increasing the money supply directly creates inflation. The bond market will react to anticipated increased inflation by increasing interest rates - anticipation of inflation is the reason why long-term mortgages have not dropped in price, for example. In the meantime, the fed lowering short term interest rates (the only rates the fed has much control of are short term) will continue to cause a drop in the price of the dollar and thus increase inflation.

This view has gone mainstream. Read Jon Markham at MSN Money. He reports on the highly respected money manager Mohamed El-Erian's recent report that we face "...a painfully stretched-out global recession over the next couple of years."

El-Erian believes that the solvency issues now challenging big U.S. banks are destined to spread out into a full-blown economic dislocation that engulfs and endangers innocent bystanders the world over.

In an interview this week, he insisted that regional banks and local governments can no longer stomp their feet and claim they are immune from danger because they did not speculate on high-risk real-estate loans or structured finance: Collateral effects are going to crash into every institution that has ever lent a dime as excessive levels of debt are violently wrung out of the global financial system.

"I live in a world where crisis management is the norm, not the exception, and you learn a few things" El-Erian said. "You learn never to underestimate the destructive power of negative feedback loops."

Here is El-Erian's view of how the recession is spreading. Bullet points are added.

The insidious loop now has spun its way from Wall Street to the everyday lives of Americans as a financial crisis has become an economic crisis.

• Damaged money-center banks are lending less, leading to lower levels of production and curtailed expansion at companies.
• That has led to job cuts,
• which in turn have led to cutbacks in consumer cash flow and spending,
• which are feeding back into creating problems for credit card, auto and home loans made by smaller banks.
• Those troubles will in turn lead back to a diminished appetite to lend locally for projects with the slightest whiff of risk.

What makes El-Erian stand out among so many skeptics today is his view of the length of time these loops will need to play out. He argues that current stock and bond valuations are still so lofty, even after recent declines, that they suggest most investors believe solutions will come quickly -- creating a V-shaped recovery.

So according to El-Erian, there is still a stock and bond bubble, with both still greatly overprices. Working those prices out will involve a set of negative feedback loops that are all operating to deepen and extend the recession now. There are no free market possibilities which can stop those feedback loops or even shorten the time they go on.

Clearly the only hope that the recession can be shortened lies in government actions. Here's El-Erian's view of that.

El-Erian thinks U.S. government action has been so slow and timid that the recovery will instead drag out into the shape of an L and that it will curve upward into a U only when regulators and lawmakers worldwide are bludgeoned by losses to coordinate their approach despite dramatic regional differences in growth and indebtedness.

"Policy change in Washington, D.C., has been too little, too late," he said. "In a crisis like this, leaders have to be much bolder." [Snip]

A big part of the problem, he says, is that U.S. financial leaders have failed to communicate the extent of the problem, insisting that everything is fine and thereby creating false expectations. He also believes that the Federal Reserve has erred badly both by taking on too many responsibilities and by not prioritizing them effectively. The Fed, he says, started with this mandate: to guide short-term interest rates in a way that supports U.S. economic growth without causing inflation. In March, it appeared to add another mandate: to promote financial stability by mediating deals to keep faltering broker-dealers from collapsing, as it did by assisting the takeover of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan (JPM, news, msgs). And the Fed then appeared to add one more mandate when Bernanke began to talk up the value of the dollar, which is something no predecessor had done.

These mandates conflict with each other, particularly in an economy in need of radical deleveraging, or the shedding of debt. Unless Bernanke can pare back his obligations and clearly articulate that he will help promote growth as a top priority, it will be difficult to assure investors that the central bank is being guided by policy focused on restoring profitability to banks and companies.

A lot of this, El-Erian believes, is because the western bankers and financial experts do not realize that the world economy is very suddenly shifting.

...the United States and Europe have lost their role at the center of the investment universe. He observes that we are currently at a unique moment in world history when the richest countries on Earth are borrowing heavily from the poorest countries... [Snip]

El-Erian says, the world is "upside down" when you consider the strange turn of events that have led irresponsible New York banks to go hat in hand to Abu Dhabi, Singapore and China's sovereign wealth managers in search of new capital. "Poor countries are recapitalizing the rich countries. It's a complete change," he said.

As a result of this transformation in world finance, emerging economies are buying developed countries' assets on the cheap and thus will be first to benefit when global deleveraging is complete. And even at present, while heavily indebted consumers in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia are cutting back on their purchases, dampening their countries' economic growth, consumers in Eastern Europe, China and India who have never had credit cards or subprime mortgages are actually accelerating their purchasing, helping their local economies power ahead.

Going forward, El-Erian believes we should anticipate a widespread realignment of the U.S. banking system, with dozens of medium-sized and large banks disappearing and a few supersized entities, such as, potentially, JP Morgan, emerging.

So if El-Erian is correct, the global financial world is rapidly shifting away from the current wealthiest countries and towards the less-developed world.

The current economic problems, then, reflect major changes in global finance and economics and massive shifts in control of the world's assets. This rather sounds like the abrupt shift that occurred in global finance as a result of WW I, in which Great Britain, France and Germany entered the war effectively owning or controlling over half the world, and four years later came out of the war as essentially destroyed debtor nations with the U.S. owning most of the debt.

But the global shifts are less clear than the fact that the current recession is gong to get deeper rather they recovering by early 2009. That is no longer insider-information known only by the big money banks and traders. MSN Money has reported it, which means that it is already old news that has gone mainstream.

---

Discussing the political problems of the Whigs as the severe recession of 1837 to 1846 ran on, Historian Daniel Feller stated "It was one thing to invite people to thrive on their own, another to tell them to suffer on their own." [From p. 505, "What Hath God Wrought[*]" by Daniel Walker Howe.] It has surprised me to find that American political rhetoric from the period of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson seems to be recycled by modern politicians.

Today's Republicans have a strong interest is denying that the economic conditions are bad and getting worse with little likelihood of recovery soon, particularly since they base a lot of their appeal to voters keeping government intervention out of both the real and the financial economy. Ex-Senator Phil Gramm's recent statement that the American public is a bunch of whiners is exactly that. He is expressing the conservative view that Americans need to suffer alone.

If El-Erian and I are correct about the depth and length of the current economic problems, the conservative economic message and the Reagan Revolution are dead in the water and will be for a long time.

---

[*] Addendum 8/11/2008 11:52 pm CDT Misspelling of "wrought" corrected. I blame my fingers liberated by touch-typing for that error. My typing fingers are convinced I meant "wrote."

Which, if you think about it, is a very interesting piece of psychology. How much conscious control do we really retain over those functions we have learned sufficiently well to relegate to unconscious processes - like driving a car or shifting a manual gearshift, for instance.

Think of a soldier trained to fire at any possible threat before thinking about it. It's the same psychological process.

TPM interview Dahlia Lithwick about accountability for the Bush admin crimes next year

Dahlia Lithwick is the legal affairs writer for Slate, and she was on a panel at the Netroots Nation in Austin a couple of weeks ago. While there, David Kurz of TPM interviewed Dahlia and asked some interesting questions, to include how the new Congress in 2009 should deal with the increasing evidence of criminality that has characterized the Bush administration and the Department of Justice.

It's a very interesting discussion. She also makes the case very clearly that the Bush administration has been packing the Supreme Court and the judiciary with extremist Federalist members more to create a monarchical Presidency then to change Row vs. Wade -- and it has almost completely worked.



An irrelevant comment - I've read a lot of Dahlia's work over the years, but I had no idea that she "spoke with her hands" as extensively and as fluently as she does in this interview.

Hardball pundits excuse McCain as too "out of it" to know what his campaign is doing in his name

The McCain campaign is getting so slimy and incoherent that his media supporters simply can't credit that the "honorable straight-shooting maverick" could possibly be aware of what is happening in his name. Here's his media supporters on MSNBC expressing their dismay at his campaign and trying to rationalize the obvious horror of it with their firmly held image of the most honorable St. John McCain.



This should be entitled "When pundits face cognitive dissonance." They just can't accept that the man they know by his media persona actually realizes how rotten his campaign for President is.

OK. So that leaves us with a choice. We have to decide whether McCain is too out of it to know what is going on in the Presidential campaign he is in charge of, or whether he is a lying opportunist who will say anything, do anything his immediate audience wants to hear while pretending to be whoever they want him to be just as long as they will vote him into the office of President.

Of course, nothing stops McCain from being both at once. But I'm not part of his media base of support, either. I can abandon the media narrative and feel no cognitive dissonance at all.

Neither choice presents a candidate that America wants to follow the incompetent George Bush.

[H/T to TPM.]

Cheney's plausible deniability explains Bush's incompetence as President

In the excerpts of Ron Suskind’s new book Mike Allen at Politico quotes a very interesting observation by Suskind, one that explains much of the incoherence and poor management that has characterized the Bush White House since day one. Allen quotes Suskind as saying about Dick Cheney:

“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.”

Bush has frequently seemed lost and out of touch with reality. An excellent example was his videotaped reaction on 9/11 as he was notified that the second hijacked aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

Anyone who has watched that video of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to school children when he was notified is aware the Bush lost his nerve. It was all over his face. He was also very confused. He didn’t know which way to turn.

Upon leaving the school Bush retreated to his plane to fly to some safe location. According to an essay posted on History Commons:

"A journalist who said Bush was “flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare” and another who said Bush “skedaddled” were fired. [Washington Post, 9/29/01 (B)]"

The almost random flight out of Florida headed anywhere besides Washington, D.C. confirms those characterizations. They were threatening to the White House exactly because they were such accurate characterizations of Bush's indecisive behavior.

Bush left Sarasota, FL and headed first for Louisiana, then Nebraska as they tried to find the safest place for him to hide out. He had not only lost his nerve, he couldn't make a coherent decision regarding where to go or what to do. That indecisiveness is not surprising for a Chief Executive who is being protected from accountability by being kept in ignorance.

If Cheney was making the decisions and protecting Bush to give him "plausible deniability" it would mean that Bush wouldn’t dare to make a decision because the process of plausible deniability would mean Cheney was holding holding back critical relevant information from Bush. Bush would never know enough to make decisions! If Bush were to make an independent decision on his own, he could never be sure he wasn’t screwing up plans Cheney hadn’t told him about. The result is that only Dick Cheney could make decisions for Bush and for the nation.

So plausible deniability would protect Bush from accountability for the actions of his administration, but it would also mean that Bush himself would never have enough information about what was being done in his name to create a coherent administration policy.

Each of Bush’s subordinates would be left to operate on their own without the guidance and coordination that an overall strategy conducted by a knowledgeable and accountable strategic manager should have provided. Instead of focusing on their assigned jobs, each subordinate finds it necessary to build his own base of power and protect it from those around him. Only after establishing his individual base of power will Bush’s subordinates be in a position to try to accomplish his task.

While the idea of plausible deniability to protect the chief executive from being held accountable for the criminal actions of his subordinates sounds neat to someone with a Machiavellian attitude (like Cheney or Rumsfeld), withholding critical information from the chief executive means the CEO is not competent to perform his job. Instead of managing, Bush merely presides over a fiefdom of independent Barons in which each has his own base of power and has to fight with the others to protect or extend his personal power.

Another severe weakness of giving the Chief Executive plausible deniability is that it guts the separation of powers in the Constitution and shreds the Rule of Law.

This is not something that was done to Bush. It is something he has approved of. Bush clearly wants to imagine that by holding the office of President he is automatically a leader and can conduct his leadership by delegating the work to subordinates, it means he cannot hold subordinates responsible for what they each individually decide to do. Bush has never liked the hard work of administration and has no interest in it. So Cheney's plan to protect him through plausible deniability met a willing figurehead leader who was happy to cooperate.

Suskind's description of Cheney's decision to protect Bush from impeachment by "plausible deniability" really explains one major mechanism that has created the utterly incompetent Bush administration. It has happened because a lazy President chose a paranoid Machiavellian Vice President to guide him and to direct the functioning of the Federal Government while protecting Bush from accountability.

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.

Novak retires because of poor prognosis of his brain cancer.

Not good news for Bob Novak. The Washington Post just announced his retirement.

He's a public figure so his private personal battles tend to become public events, but it looks like his political reporting days are over and he is now entering a very private period. I'd pray for an improved prognosis, or failing that, a good death. But that's presumptuous of me. He's now, at the end of a long life, entering the period we all face sooner or later, the end of his life. It's a period most Americans avoid thinking about. Perhaps we should all just pray for him.

I will.

Ivins painted as Anthrax terrorist - but we can't trust the FBI or Justice Department who are doing the accusing

The news is full of multiple stories about how very unstable Bruce Ivins was and how he may have been a "revenge motivated sociopath." Cased closed. After almost seven years of failure and having to pay off an earlier "Prime Suspect" "Person of Interest" for leaking his name to the press, the FBI claims they have their man.

Oh, and this time they arranged it better lucked out. He's dead, so he can't defend himself and shred their case.

Only as Glenn Greenwald now points out, all of the reports of Ivin's mental instability come from a single Social Worker (not a psychiatrist or psychologist) who is only one year out of school herself. The "social worker", Jean Carol Duley, has herself had mental health problems. From Glenn:

She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. [Snip]

Just three months ago, Duley pled guilty and was sentenced to probation (and fined $1,000), as a result of having been stopped in December, while driving at 1:35 a.m., and charged with driving under the influence: [Snip]

On April 21, 2006, Duley was also charged with "driving a vehicle while impaired by alcohol," driving "while impaired by drugs or alcohol," and reckless driving, and on October 13, 2006, she pled guilty to the charge of reckless driving and was fined $580. Back in 1992, Duley was criminally charged with battery against what appeared to be her now-ex-husband (and she filed a complaint against him as well). Later that same year, she was criminally charged with possession of drug paraphenalia with intent to use, charges which appear to have been ultimately dismissed.

Glenn has screen shots of the charging documents for the two DUI's.

This is not to say that Bruce Ivins was not the Anthrax killer. All it says is that none of the news media reports are worth the pixels and ink they are presented on until the FBI releases the real evidence - and it is carefully evaluated, something a jury might have done had Ivin's not conveniently "committed suicide" and the Department of Justice had permitted the case to go to trial.

At the moment, the only sources of information are highly biased and completely unreliable (Duley and the FBI.) While we don't know What Duley's motive for framing Ivins might be, the FBI has taken seven years for the investigation, severely screwed up the case against Steven Hatfill, and shown no effective results. The new FBI management has had no better success than the previous management, and the FBI in general has, shall we say, NOT been seen to cover itself in glory at any time since it was found they screwed up following the 9/11 attackers in 2001.

The FBI is part of the Justice Department, which has an even worse reputation for both effectiveness and honesty this decade. Add to that, they are all part of the Bush/Cheney/Rove administration known for never telling the Truth when a lie was possible. The Anthrax investigation is unfinished business that needs to be closed before the end of the Bush administration or someone new will come in and see how badly it was screwed up. The FBI and their bossed have strong motivation to find a culprit and convict him - in the Media at least.

There is clearly a heavy propaganda effort to paint Bruce Ivins as the guilty culprit, and it will be made easier because of his very timely death. But so far it is all based on smoke and mirrors.

Let's wait for someone to remove the curtain so we can see what's behind it before we decide the FBI has this story right.

---

Addendum 1:12 pm CDT
Language cleared up to make the argument more clear, and my erroneous references to "Irwin" have been replace with the proper "Ivins."

Hey, I DO react to comments. So feel free to comment. I write this stuff to clarify my own thoughts, and comments and criticism are greatly appreciated because they make me reevaluate both my thoughts and presentation. Rationality is a prime goal here.

The Republican template for attack ads against Black candidates

It is interesting how the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton ad attacking Obama resembles the attack ad Republicans ran against Harold ford when he was running for Senator from Tennessee.

Digby shows the similarity of the ads. They come from the same template, and no doubt focus-group much the same way.

McCain is running a campaign in which the economy is against him, the Republicans are on the wrong side of almost every important policy issue, and both the Republican brand and current Republican President are in the pits in terms of public approval. On top of that, McCain's not the most charismatic candidate, either.

McCain clearly has no choice except to run an extensive nasty attack campaign during this period before the conventions.

If McCain can get people to look at Obama with suspicion now, before most voters are familiar with him, then maybe he can get them to "vote their gut" rather than their needs. [translation - vote their fears instead of their rational needs.] If, by doing this, McCain can get enough votes to bring the vote close, then the Republican efforts at Voter suppression and vote theft might shift the election in his favor.

To accomplish that, McCain has had to abandon all pretense of running an "Honorable" campaign. So much for the "straight shooter."

---

Addendum 12:25 pm CDT

Here is the TPM Veracifier from UTube that presents yesterday's Sunday political show discussion of the Hilton/Spears ad and how the McCain camp is using it.



It's a very sophisticated ad. The people who are afraid of an "uppity" Black running for President know exactly what is being said, while the McCain people and Lieberman can stand there and say with a straight face "What? McCain doesn't have a racist bone in his body!"

Which is perfectly reasonable to say. McCain doesn't have to be racist to speak to racist voters and say - in effect - "Vote for me and you won't get that scary Black Man as President." McCain may not be racist himself, but he for damned sure is courting racist voters.

So much for McCain's reputation as a Straight shooter and a maverick Republican. He's just like the rest of them. He'll do or say anything to get power.

How old did you say McCain is now?

Here is a McCain video that a lot of people are watching.



Sharp as a tack, isn't he? Wonder if he got his nap.

---

Addendum 11:33 am CDT
Josh Marshall asks how much longer the Washington Press corps will continue to grade McCain on the curve. Will they continue to ignore his two major reversals of general policy positions in the last six years and his apparent mental slippage on the campaign trail much longer?

Let's be frank. On the campaign trail this cycle, McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries' names wrong, forgets things he's said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused. Any single example is inevitable for someone talking so constantly day in and day out. But the profusion of examples shows a pattern. Some of this is probably a matter of general unseriousness or lack of interest in policy areas like the economy that he doesn't care much about. But for any other politician who didn't have the benefit of years of friendship or acquaintance with many of the reporters covering him, this would be a major topic of debate in the campaign. It's whispered about among reporters. And it's evidenced in his campaign's increasing effort to keep him away from the freewheeling conversations with reporters that defined his 2000 candidacy. But it's verboten as a topic of public discussion.

The other point that again goes almost totally undiscussed is McCain's two reinventions of himself over the last decade. From a mainline conservative Republican to progressive reform candidate to Bush Republican. The reporters who have been covering him for the last decade know that there is virtually no public policy issue of note which McCain hasn't made a 180 degree change of position on in the last half dozen years. An ideological shift of that magnitude is far from unprecedented. And such turnabouts or transformations can be a product of searching insights into the changing terrain of American governance. But two such shifts in the course of a decade strongly suggest either instability or opportunism.

Frankly it looks like McCain is currently functioning at about the same level as Reagan in the later part of his second term and declining.

It's not just a question for the Washington Press Corps. The larger question is whether the Republican convention will actually nominate an individual who is mentally declining so rapidly. But if they don't, how will they pull off a switch and who WILL they nominate?

The value of American troops in Afghanistan

Kevin Drum refers to two excellent discussions (How to Save Afghanistan by Rory Stewart and Behind the Indian Embassy Bombing by Robert Kaplan.) on how to deal with the problems in Afghanistan. The two discussions reach the same conclusion, which Kevin summarizes as

Afghanistan is not primarily a military problem. We can't and shouldn't abandon Afghanistan as we did in the early 90s, but our presence should be targeted, tightly constrained, and mostly economic and diplomatic. There's a place for counterinsurgency there, but not for tens of thousands more troops trying vainly to control hundreds of thousands of square miles of unfriendly territory.

Afghanistan is one location causing problem in a Middle East that is roiled with the problems of the continued conflict between (the nuclear armed) Pakistan and India, compounded by the aggressiveness of Iran, all of with has been made worse by the misguided American invasion and the subsequent collapse of the state of Iraq. It doesn't help that Pakistan itself is close to being a failed state with large areas inside its borders where the government does not control what happens.

The ISI of Pakistan - in many ways an uncontrolled state-within-the-state of Pakistan - is fixated on its war with India and sees Afghanistan as a theater of that war. So they are actively encouraging the Taliban (again) to hide out in the Pakistani borderlands and attack both Karsai government and the NATO troops in Afghanistan. None of this has been helped by the efforts of the Karsai government to develop closer relations with the government and military of India, but with the ISI of Pakistan actively trying to remove the karsai government, that is one of Karsai's best options. In the absence of a strong central government of Pakistan that could reign in the ISI and the fact that the U.S. has no remaining troops to send and no capability to conduct effective diplomatic assistance, Karsai has little alternative. (It would be interesting to know if funds from Islamic extremists in Saudi Arabia were funding the ISI in its efforts to support the Taliban push to reconquer Afghanistan as they were two decades ago.)

The discussion above should not be construed to say that the ISI is the source of all the problems in Afghanistan. A brief timeline of ISI operations connected to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, the Soviet Union and others clearly shows that Pakistan faces numerous threats to its existence. That list shows an indication of just how unstable the entire Middle East - South Asia area is and has been since at least WW II. (By the way, a major reason given for the American invasion of Iraq was to create a free market democracy that would be a model for the rest of the region to try to calm the turmoil. Such an ignorant, naive and simplistic effort never had a chance, of course. It merely added to the problems by removing the relatively stable government of Iraq and giving the Shiite portions of Iraq over to Iran.)

So what are more American troops to do in Afghanistan? Without putting American troops along the Afghanistan border almost shoulder to shoulder and more troops on every crossroads and intersection within Afghanistan, there really is very little that conventional troops can do in Afghanistan.

All of which is completely irrelevant to American policy in a Presidential election year when American voters are afraid and are looking for a Presidential strong-man who will protect America from the radical terrorists being created by all that Islamic/Hindu conflict. Especially since the conflict is more about population pressures, modernization and the western exploitation of oil producing nations for their oil wealth, combined with the absence of strong nation states in the region. Religion is more of a reaction to the other problems than it is the cause of them.

Even if more troops were the solution, the U.S. is totally tied down now in Iraq. There is only one place to get more American troops, so Obama is promising to break loose three brigades and send them to Afghanistan. McCain is making similar tough-man noises. What those troops would do once they reached the superb guerrilla territory of Afghanistan is not mentioned from either camp. Exactly like the occupation of the conquered Iraq has been since weeks after the initial invasion, Afghanistan is becoming a theater of shadow puppets designed to distract the American voters and make the Presidential candidates each look tougher. What is happening in Afghanistan is unimportant except for how it causes American voters to vote to choose the next President. The result is that the media presents nothing but shadows and uninformed images manipulated by American political actors and designed to influence votes instead of policies.

Want to look tough on terrorism? Promise to send more troops to Afghanistan. Until recently it was a cheap promise, although the apparent shifting of Islamic fighters from Iraq appears to have caused an increase in America casualties in Afghanistan as experience guerrillas have redeployed their experience with IEDs from Iraq to Afghanistan.

How much better argument against a country-by-country strategy of deploying military do you want? It's whack-a-mole, and the military by itself is a poor mole-whacking hammer as the Soviets proved on the same battle ground in the 80's. And they had a lot more troops to send than we do.

We can't just leave Afghanistan as Bush 41 did two decades ago, but the problems there will not be solved by sending more troops and blowing more stuff up; And it damned sure won't be solved by frightened voters casting a vote for the presidential candidate who talks toughest. Kaplan makes a very important point when he says "we are in danger of conceiving of war in narrow military terms alone, and thus getting the politics wrong." Kevin is right. "...our presence should be targeted, tightly constrained, and mostly economic and diplomatic."

Kevin's approach has the advantage of being something that might work, unlike sending more (but never enough) troops. It also has a second major advantage - it's an approach America might be able to afford considering the hollowed out under-trained and poorly equipped Army and Marine Corps Bush and Cheney have left for us to use.

None of this matters until after November 4th, unless Cheney is allowed to do something utterly stupid between now and January 20th. American policy toward Afghanistan and the Middle East in general is not going to move forward while Bush remains President, and we aren't even going to hear much that makes sense during the Presidential campaigns. That doesn't mean things aren't going to get worse in the Middle East or that the U.S. government won't do something utterly stupid (again.) It just means that there is no room for even discussion of a rational policy until January 20th - and not afterwards if McCain steals wins Bush's third term.

Anarcho-Libertarianism - the core idea of the Reagan Coalition and of movement conservatism

First, I consider Anarcho-Libertarianism to be a philosophy that combines the Anarchistic concept that rule by hierarchy is inherently illegitimate with the similar Libertarian concept that no hierarchy is legitimate unless it is established by a formal contract between the leader and his followers. Libertarians generally reject the theory that government is based on an implied contract between the people and government since that means accepting a decision made by others. Implied in Libertarianism is also the Free Market idea that government regulation of private enterprise is inherently illegitimate and inefficient. Both ideas reject compulsory obedience to authority and the right of government to enforce such authority though for slightly different reasons. They agree that government is inherently authoritarian and illegitimate.

This is not a nuanced description of Anarcho-Libertarianism. It extracts core principles, but the result is one that many Anarchists and Libertarians will take issue with. Still, the ideas are at the base of most conservative government and political policies. Those ideas are behind much of the set of philosophies that express movement conservatism, Goldwater conservatism, and the Reagan Revolution. The Bush administration has seen the most consistent application of the ideas that represent movement conservatism and the Reagan Revolution to modern American government. After eight years of this, the Bush administration has also been the most spectacularly failed Presidency in American history, and it is primarily through the effort to apply these ideas and force reality to bend to the ideology.

As the failed Bush administration ends, we can see where teh practitioners of these ideas are going next. Digby describes how the conservative oppositional Republican Party is preparing the political ground for the total Republican obstructionism and ongoing character assassination they will practice against President Obama beginning 12:01 pm January 20, 2009. It’s clear that the conservatives/Republicans cannot govern. But they are brilliantly organized and led to obstruct government. They don’t solve problems, they stop government efforts to identify and solve them. It’s what they do and they do it superbly. These are the ideas that have held the Reagan Coalition together for the last three decades.

The conservatives have built an institution of obstructionism. It is frequently called the right-wing noise machine, or sometimes “the right wing Wurlitzer.” The current project is to create the image of Obama as “a phony, messianic, presumptuous, vapid, anorexic starlet who ruthlessly plays the race card.”

These themes all work together to delegitimize their target, Democratic leader. The process works against the presumed legitimization that winning an election supposed to give to the winner.

The power of democracy is the legitimization that elections give to government by the winner and which allows the winner the presumption that their efforts to identify and solve large social problems. This is the great strength of a democracy. Government leaders who are legitimized by elections are in direct contrast to the older process of government leaders legitimized because of the presumed superiority of their social class.

But it seems unlikely that the practitioners of the politics of delegitimization want to substitute democratic government by a presumed legitimate social class for government by leaders legitimated by popular vote. More likely the Anarcho-Libertarianism of movement conservatives is an expression of the absolute rejection of government and hierarchy that is characteristic of both Anarchism and Libertarianism. It is this world view that motivates the efforts to totally obstruct government functions while making effective use of government almost a total impossibility when they get into control of it.

The philosophy of Anarcho-Libertarianism would explain conservative corruption in government. Since the conservative movement Anarcho-Libertarians do not consider government a legitimate function in the first place (except for the military, and for limited police functions to protect Natural Law Property Rights from burglary and such low-level theft) they consider that each individual has the Natural Right to possess any property they can get control of from any source whatsoever. They see nothing illegitimate or immoral about considering the (illegitimate) government to be nothing more than a giant ATM which their personal success at gaining access (getting government office) allows them to plunder at will.

The shared acceptance of an Anarcho-Libertarian world view would also provide a unifying theme between the major branches of the Reagan coalition. Big business and big banks reject as illegitimate any government regulation in their property-gathering activities, as do Libertarians of all stripes. The social conservatives agree with the free marketers and Libertarian efforts to delegitimize government, but they don’t accept the part that considers hierarchical government itself inherently illegitimate. They want secular government delegitimized because they to replace it with a government legitimized to enforce laws established by God.

This unifying theme of Anarcho-Libertarianism would explain one puzzling apparent inconsistency in conservatism. Why do members of the conservative movement reject government control by government hierarchy yet proudly support the identical authoritarian hierarchy operated within business organizations?

I think the difference is that conservatives consider the authoritarianism in business to be an expression of property rights which are (supposedly) based on individual negotiation as opposed to the kind of authoritarian hierarchy based on the legitimate functions of government. Both free marketers and Libertarians consider property rights to be at the level of an individual Natural Right and transfer of property rights to naturally occur in markets through negotiation.

Another element of movement conservative control of government that is clear in the Bush administration is their ability to ignore the Rule of Law. If movement conservatives consider government and its hierarchy illegitimate, then they also consider the government’s hierarchical function of enforcing laws illegitimate. That's why we see them simply ignoring the Rule of Law. Laws themselves are OK, but an illegitimate government has no Right to enforce them. Enforcement of laws should be conducted only on the basis of formal contracts between individuals. Social conservatives disagree here. Social conservatives simply reject laws based on democracy and popular sovereignty. They are happy to delegitimize secular government. But they want to replace it with a government that enforces laws which are based on the Word of God. [This may be a characteristic of all kinds of religious fundamentalists, regardless of religion.]

If these are the ideas at the core of the Reagan coalition, then why did the Reagan coalition fall apart in the effort to nominate a Presidential candidate in 2008?

It wasn't from lack of agreement on the illegitimacy of most government. It was based on the clear failure of all the candidates to express a theme that could lead to winning the Presidency in 2008 in the face of an economy that is going bad, a current President with unprecedented low approval ratings and the continuing failure to win the highly unpopular war in Iraq. The coalition failed to coalesce around a single Presidential candidate because none of the groups thought the candidates from the others were offering to apply the shared conservative principles in ways they could all agree with.

That collapse in the Republican Presidential Primary is summed up in the often heard claim "Conservatism hasn't failed. There is simply no candidate who is sufficiently conservative to make it work." The old policies of "No new Taxes. Small government. Strong military. Anti-Abortion. Anti government regulation." have each been shown to have failed according to a majority of the voters, and conservative politicians have not been able to field test new policies with similar power to attract voters.

The result is the McCain campaign for President. He goes around expressing all the old conservative polices in a disjointed and highly inconsistent way. The inconsistent presentation is not important to conservatives. Unfortunately McCain cannot find new and powerful messages he can use to rebuild the Reagan coalition. But the Republican Party is still trying to win the Presidency because without it they will suffer a severe setback in organizing when they lose the patronage powers of the White House. Much of the strength of the Bush administration has been based on those patronage power combined with strong enforcement of the conservative ideology.

So we are seeing the first post-Reagan Coalition Republican Presidential candidate, McCain, who has no effective strategy for winning other than painting Obama as "an illegitimate leader, unworthy of the presidency, a fluke, a phony (and a fascist."

So the Republicans expect to lose the Presidency in November. But they have a fall-back position, one that Digby points to. It is the strategy they used effectively against the Democrats beginning January 20, 1993. They are going to mau-mau Obama from day one as an illegitimate President who stole the election.

Who cares if the conservatives cannot organize and operate an effective government. They don't want one anyway, except as a source of political patronage and as a magical ATM machine that takes tax money from average Americans and hands it off to the most wealthy Americans. The conservatives will, once removed from the White House, revert to what they do best - they will obstruct every effort of Democrats to solve national problems and they will do their best to delegitimize Obama as President.

Why not? It worked against Clinton in the 1990's.

Here's what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls 'unemployment."

What the media reports as "the" unemployment rate is not the only measured unemployment rate. It is U-3, the rate of unemployment that, as it drops, leads to inflation. That's the rate the bond market considers important, since if it drops too much they have to raise interest rates to anticipate inflation. It is relatively unimportant to individuals looking for a job. So here is how The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment.

This is just the definitions. Go look at the BLS article for the numbers. I'm not willing to spend six hours creating a table to present them neatly in blogger.

• U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force


• U-2 Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force


• U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)


• U-4 Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers.


• U-5 Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other marginally attached workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers


• U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

NOTE:

• Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.


• Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job.


• Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

For more information, see "BLS introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures," in the October 1995 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.

U-3 is subject to a lot of manipulations at BLS. For better statistics, U-6 should be reviewed and observed for changes over time.

How deeply in the tank can the media get?

This is what the media has reported recently about McCain's lies, distortions and smears (from Media Matters):

FactCheck.org, for example, has called one McCain attack ad "false," said another contains a "false" insinuation, described another as misleading, called another "ridiculous" and added, "That's absurd, and McCain knows it." FactCheck said the attacks in yet another McCain ad are "oversimplified to the point of being seriously misleading," noting that by the standards of evidence the McCain campaign used in the ad, the Arizona senator himself could be criticized precisely the same way. FactCheck called criticisms McCain has leveled against Obama's tax plans "bunk," adding, "He's wrong," and stating that McCain is using a "false and preposterously inflated figure" to attack Obama. They called another McCain attack "simply wrong" and "not true." They said yet another McCain ad "gets nearly all its facts wrong. ... [E]very number in the ad is wrong, except one. ... And even that number is rounded upward so generously as to flunk third-grade arithmetic." And FactCheck called yet another McCain attack "trickery" based on an "inflated and misleading" number that was the result of "Double, Triple and Quadruple Counting."

Sounds like the media is on top of this election and doing a good job of reporting, right?

Well, no.

also from Media Matters:

All week, McCain's attacks have been driving news coverage. Those same news organizations that have declared McCain's charges false have given them an extraordinary amount of attention, repeating them over and over. They have adopted the premises of the McCain attacks even as they acknowledge the attacks are based on false claims. The media narrative of the week has not been, as you might expect, that John McCain's apparent dishonesty may hurt him with voters. Instead, the media's basic approach has been to debunk McCain's attacks once, then run a dozen stories about how the attacks are sticking, how the "emerging narrative" will hurt Obama.

But attacks don't just stick and narratives don't just emerge. The only reason that the topic of the week was whether Obama is presumptuous instead of whether McCain is a liar who will do anything to get elected is that the news media decided to make Obama's purported flaws the topic of the week -- even after debunking the charges upon which the characterization is based. It's as though the news media -- so concerned about lies (that weren't really lies) in 2000 -- have suddenly decided that it doesn't matter that the McCain campaign is launching false attack after false attack. That it's the kind of thing you note once, then adopt the premise of the attack.

What the media is doing is covering its ass. When accused of being in the tank for McCain, they are going to point to the debunking of his lies they have performed, but they will never admit to or address the way they have been giving his lies free exposure repeatedly.

Why? Because their bosses in the media are bought and paid for by the Republican Party and the underlings are doing what they have to do to keep their jobs and try to reach to heights achieved by Chris Matthews, Brian Williams and Katie Couric. That's why.

If you don't like the results of globalization then the higher oil prices are a good thing

Low oil prices have meant that globalization allowed high paying jobs in industrialized nations to be replaced with low paying jobs half way around the world. Guess what happens when the price of oil quadruples and transportation costs increase by 100% to 150%? The New York Times presents an example.

When Tesla Motors, a pioneer in electric-powered cars, set out to make a luxury roadster for the American market, it had the global supply chain in mind. Tesla planned to manufacture 1,000-pound battery packs in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, then bring the mostly assembled cars back to the United States.
Skip to next paragraph

But when it began production this spring, the company decided to make the batteries and assemble the cars near its home base in California, cutting more than 5,000 miles from the shipping bill for each vehicle.

“It was kind of a no-brain decision for us,” said Darryl Siry, the company’s senior vice president of global sales, marketing and service. “A major reason was to avoid the transportation costs, which are terrible.”

But it is more than just the higher price of oil. Emissions intensive business models are also impacted.

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.” [Snip]

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

The spike in shipping costs comes at a moment when concern about the environmental impact of globalization is also growing. Many companies have in recent years shifted production from countries with greater energy efficiency and more rigorous standards on carbon emissions, especially in Europe, to those that are more lax, like China and India.

While this is clearly going to change globalization, it does not mean the end of globalization.

As economists and business executives well know, shipping costs are only one factor in determining the flow of international trade. When companies decide where to invest in a new factory or from whom to buy a product, they also take into account exchange rates, consumer confidence, labor costs, government regulations and the availability of skilled managers. [Snip]

The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected. [Snip]

Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities.

The results of this trend is going to be less globalization and more regionalization.

In addition, the sharp increase in transportation costs has implications for the “just-in-time” system pioneered in Japan and later adopted the world over. It is a highly profitable business strategy aimed at reducing warehousing and inventory costs by arranging for raw materials and other supplies to arrive only when needed, and not before.

Jeffrey E. Garten, the author of “World View: Global Strategies for the New Economy” and a former dean of the Yale School of Management, said that companies “cannot take a risk that the just-in-time system won’t function, because the whole global trading system is based on that notion.” As a result, he said, “they are going to have to have redundancies in the supply chain, like more warehousing and multiple sources of supply and even production.”

One likely outcome if transportation rates stay high, economists said, would be a strengthening of the neighborhood effect. Instead of seeking supplies wherever they can be bought most cheaply, regardless of location, and outsourcing the assembly of products all over the world, manufacturers would instead concentrate on performing those activities as close to home as possible.

Will this be beneficial for America? That's debatable.

But a trend toward regionalization would not necessarily benefit the United States, economists caution. Not only has it lost some of its manufacturing base and skills over the past quarter-century, and experienced a decline in consumer confidence as part of the current slowdown, but it is also far from the economies that have become the most dynamic in the world, those of Asia.

“Despite everything, the American economy is still the biggest Rottweiler on the block,” said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, the author of “In Defense of Globalization” and a professor of economics at Columbia. “But if it’s expensive to get products from there to here, it’s also expensive to get them from here to there.”

This last view seems to look at America is primarily an exporter in the global economy. If that is all that matters, it is correct. But since America HAS lost much of its manufacturing base and skills,and become financialized, this trend will reverse that problem. America's banks and financial institutions will be hurt, but there is a residual belief in America that we are engineers and can build anything.

We probably will prove - again - that this is true. There is no other population in the world sitting on so much high-resource geography with such an excellent internal transportation network with such excellent resources. We also have the necessary infrastructure for an economy mostly measured by markets instead monopolies or the administrative decisions of large businesses or government. Anyone with a good idea can organize a group and create a new business. All we need is an educated workforce and a reversal of the idiotic idea that managers are a special privileged class who create products and so should be treated as a higher social class.

The sharp increase in transportation costs is not going to disappear. It is going to cause a lot of trouble economically, especially in the U.S. which has become addicted to cheap oil and low transportation costs. But after the problems pass, the regionalization will begin to appear to be a blessing.

All we have to do is get through the current tough times, adapt, and then enjoy the blessings of the new situation. The immediate result is going to be a lot of painful belt-tightening, though. The near future is not going to be a good time to be in debt for consumer goods.

What is the articulated 'desired end-point' in Afghanistan?

Senator Jim Webb, reported in the Financial times (free registration required) asks the key question about what America is going to do in Afghanistan.

He said that the US could be about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq. "You have to have an articulable end-point," he said. "We've got to clearly understand what it is that the US wants to do in Afghanistan and understand what we can do." [Snip]

The US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan, according to Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia.

Fresh from ruling himself out as a possible running mate for Barack Obama, Mr Webb's comments come as an implied criticism of the Democratic party's orthodoxy on Iraq and Afghanistan - including Mr Obama's own stance.

Following his recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr Obama welcomed growing support for his plan to set a timeline for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq and said the US "should seize the moment" to build up its presence in Afghanistan.

"The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan," he said.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Webb politely disagreed, without mentioning Mr Obama or other Democratic colleagues by name. "We should be very careful from making it sound like we are withdrawing from Iraq because we have to build up in Afghanistan," he said. "You're starting to see people say this when they weren't saying it before.

"We tend to be country-specific when we talk about how to defeat international terrorism rather than looking at the whole dynamic. The dynamic is that terrorism works the seams of international law. We can't create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can't be our objective."

Senator Webb is exactly right. Without a clearly articulated end goal, there is no coherent strategy and if anything has become clear in the twentieth century, and organization with no strategy will usually lose to an organization with a clearly articulated and consistently implemented strategy.

Both Vietnam and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have suffered from the absence of a clearly articulated and implemented end goal. Afghanistan is shaping up to be another example of this poor management.

Another thing that needs to be applied in Afghanistan is the application of a broad set of methods of achieving the strategy. Sen. Webb does not mention this in the Financial Times article, but the military is a poor tool for defeating a guerrilla or terrorist movement. Terrorism will be defeated through well-coordinated actions that include Intelligence operations, police operations, NGOs that rebuild Afghanistan and wean that nation from the opium crop, together with long term efforts to train and educate a new generation of Afghani's to lead their nation and close coordination and advice to the government of Afghanistan in how to extend the effective reach of that government to those areas not currently under government control. The State Department and America's allies are going to be more important to Afghanistan in the long run than our military forces.

Without a clearly articulated end goal carefully communicated to all subordinate players, all those resources cannot be effectively coordinated to achieve anything strategically useful.

Experience shows that the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge this. Cheney and Rove do appear to have had clear strategy that they have tried to implement, but it basically has been to convert the dominant political ideology to the mishmash of confused ideas that have dominated the Republican Party for the last three decades and to institutionalize conservative Republican control of the American government by any means possible. Iraq appears to have been one element in that overall strategy, so it was not considered worthy of strategic action itself. This accounts for the extreme secrecy that characterizes the Bush administration. If the public knew what they were seriously trying to do, most of America would rise up to stop them.

McCain has not articulated any central strategy at all. His goal is clearly just more of the same. The disorganization that characterizes his campaign for the Presidency appears to stem for exactly this same kind of lack of a clearly articulated strategic vision.

Obama? I suspect, from the tightly coordinated and effective nature of the campaign he ran for the Democratic nomination, does understand this. The formulation of that end-goal will have to wait until after Obama is elected President and will require close coordination between at a minimum the Pentagon, the State Department and the Intelligence Community. This is going to be the National Security Diretor's primary purpose for quite a while. In the meantime, the nature of sound byte politics does not allow any articulation of a concept this complex. Don't expect Obama to articulate a clear end goal for Afghanistan until after the election. The Republicans would use it to attack him while avoiding any responsibility for the foreign policy and military disasters their party have conducted in the last eight years.

So I am glad to hear Senator Webb state that we need a clearly articulated end goal for Afghanistan. He is completely correct. Unfortunately, the Presidential campaign will not be about that kind of discussion. Instead it is going to be about how scary the Black Man, Obama, is and why the Republicans don't want him elected.

That probably doesn't matter much, though. Presidential elections are won by the party out of power for three reasons. First, when the economy is in the tank during election year, second when the previous President has very low approval ratings and the third factor is an unpopular war. The first two reasons are going to dominate this year. Iraq will be somewhat significant but McCain's history of getting shot down over Hanoi and tortured as a POW somewhat insulates him from that losing the Presidency because of the unpopularity of Iraq. Clearly that experience did not teach him strategic management, however.

Oh, and I have no idea what the appropriate "articulated end-point for Afghanistan" is. Nor have I yet heard one for Iraq. I just know that America will not win in either place without such a clear statement of purpose.

This is going to remain an interesting year right up to January 20, 2009.

Another failed bank taken over on Friday.

This list of failed banks maintained by the FDIC will keep you up on the latest bank failures. Expect it to grow in the next months.

Today's failed bank is First Priority Bank, Bradenton, FL.

Here, from Herald Tribune, is a brief explanation for the failure:

First Priority is the eighth U.S. bank to fail this year in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, and the first Florida bank failure since March 2004. Andrew Gray, spokesman for the FDIC, said the bank had "significant loan losses" in the Florida commercial real estate market that eroded its capital.

And if you are curious why banks seem to all fail on Friday, the Herald Tribune also explains that. The exact date the failure is announced is chosen by the FDIC.

Announcements of bank failures tend to be made after the close of business on a Friday, so the banks can reopen under new ownership the following Monday morning.

First Priority appears to be another casualty from the collapse of the Housing Bubble combined with the banker's poor underwriting procedures as they worked to make every possible loan, sell it to investors and collect the commissions. Banker's bubble mentality, in other words.

The next time someone tells you that professional investors and bankers are so experienced and smart that they don't need regulation, just laugh at them.

---

Addendum 11:09 am CDT
This from the Friday Financial Times (Free registration required):

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation revealed on Friday that it had issued warnings to four small US banks that lacked sufficient reserves to cover potential loan losses.

The cease-and-desist orders issued in June said the four banks needed to raise more capital, expand their loss allowances and better oversee and diversify their loan portfolios. A fifth bank was cited for violating consumer protection laws. [Snip]

The banks receiving cease-and-desist orders in June were MetroPacific Bank in Irvine, California; Bank Haven in Haven, Kansas; Clarkston State Bank in Clarkston, Michigan; and Hastings State Bank in Hastings, Nebraska. [Snip]

The fifth bank – Columbus Bank and Trust in Columbus, Georgia – received a cease-and-desist order because its credit card program violated consumer protection laws.

No telling how many more there are. It's interesting that the FDIC has publicized and named these banks. Isn't that kind of publicity supposed to be likely to cause runs on the named banks?

One more element in the Republican plot to invade Iraq

So a top Army researcher into Anthrax has conveniently committed suicide, and only after his suicide is a story released that he was considered by the FBI to be the latest prime suspect in the Anthrax attacks which occurred right after 9/11. Ivin's "suicide" will certainly make it easier for the FBI to pin the attack on him, since unlike their last effort to blame Steven Hatfill, Ivins will not be alive to defend his reputation.

Who knows, maybe Ivins even did it? Of course, now that he is conveniently dead, we will never know why or who else might have been involved.

Why did the U.S. invade Iraq again? We know now, clearly, that the WMD excuse was a sham, a piece of pure propaganda created to frighten Americans into supporting an invasion of Iraq. We know that George Bush used the bogus Italian Letter that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain Yellow cake Uranium, a precursor which could, with great effort, possibly be refined to use in an atomic bomb to justify the invasion. We know that the White House Iraq Group was set up specifically to coordinate all the lies and propaganda in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.

We know from Paul O'Neill that the invasion of Iraq was a key element of discussion in the White House Security meetings beginning days after the Bush administration was inaugurated in January 2001.

We know that 9/11 was planned and conducted by al Qaeda out of his hideout in Afghanistan, and that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had no tactical connection with Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Yet we also know that the Bush administration's first reaction after 9/11 was to use the attack to justify an invasion of Iraq. After 9/11 the Bush White House used every possible method to derail any effective investigation into what events led to the 9/11 attacks, including placing a high-ranking Republican White House staffer, Philip Zelikow, into the job of Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission where he could control what information was released.

What we forget is that after 9/11 the thing that really solidified the fear the American public had was the Anthrax attacks on American officials only a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. What caused those anthrax attacks? Look at this point Glenn Greenwald made yesterday:

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.There is a clear pattern of the Bush administration using every possible element of the U.S. government to bring about their long desired invasion of Iraq.
[Highlighting mine]

I find it highly suspicious that at first the FBI was releasing very inflammatory statements about Steven Hatfill as a "person of interest" only to have to withdraw them, apologize and pay him $5.8 million because he clearly was not the culprit. Then when the frame didn't work and a new FBI management took over the case, they focused in on Bruce E. Ivins, who very conveniently "committed suicide" before every being able to defend himself against the charges that he committed the crime.

Is Bruce Ivin's death and the public charges made - only after his death - to blame him for the Anthrax Attacks another part of the great Bush administration "shredding party" that is currently taking place to eliminate as much evidence of the criminal misdeeds conducted by Cheney and his group of thugs in Bush's name?

If so, expect to find some of the individuals who took the action covered by strange, mostly unexplained Presidential Pardons issued in Bush's last few days in office. There will be so many other similar pardons that isolating these will be difficult if not impossible.

I rarely indulge in conspiracy theories, but it has been obvious that the Bush administration, driven by Cheney, the Neocons, and others, wanted the Iraq invasion in the worst way from day one. The evidence that they did everything possible to push American into the invasion of Iraq is clear, and each day grows stronger. Since the initial invasion and its incompetent occupation the last six years have consisted primarily of secrecy and efforts to cover up and obfuscate the evidence of their culpability in propaganda, lies and misdirection the Bush Mayberry Machiavellis used to get their way.

In this environment, there seems to be nothing the Cheney thugs would not do first to get their way and after its failure, to stay out of prison and keep their wealth.

---

Go read all of Glenn Greenwald's article for a less speculative view of what has happened.

---

Addendum 10:24 AM CDT

OK. This morning there has been a lot of talk about how Ivins has been mentally unstable since College. Consider the source of all this talk - it's the FBI or other elements of the Bush government. The breathless news reporters write those "reports" down and report them as true.

But if an Intelligence Analyst were to evaluate the history of reliability of the Bush administration, then they would immediately recognize that the Bush administration cannot be trusted to honestly present the time of day or the nature of the weather we can see both see right outside the window. Their history of preventing NASA scientists from reporting their findings on Global Warming provides only one example of reasons to distrust anything they say.

As for the FBI itself, it screwed up badly with Steven Hatfill as the $5.8 million settlement (our tax money, by the way) they gave him demonstrates. They are desperate to be able to show they have "solved" the Anthrax attacks. If they are discernibly more honest than George Bush, Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez it would be hard to say why one should believe that.

The only counter argument the reporters have reported is that Ivin's lawyer claims he was completely innocent. The fact that this supposedly "mentally unstable individual" had a top security clearance for the last 18 years makes the stories of his mental instable highly questionable.

Right now the most reliable data we have is that Dr. Ivins is dead, that he was a coworker of the previously wrongly indicated possible suspect, Steven Hatfill, at Fort Detrick working on Anthrax, and that there is a big propaganda effort currently going on to try to blame him for the Anthrax attack and get the FBI and the Bush administration off the hook for not getting results in the last seven years. We can't trust the sources for anything else at this time.

Oh, and we do know that the Bush administration admits that the U.S. Army itself was the source of the anthrax that killed or injured several people right after 9/11. Since this is not favorable information for the Bush administration to offer, the poor reliability record of the Bush administration is less of a reason to believe them. Glenn Greenwald has gone into this.

---

Addendum II 11:30 am CDT
Laura Rozen at War and Piece offers links to several stories on Bruce Ivins.