Is There Really A War?

The one thing that strikes you when reading this is that there is no war, really. There is mass folly encountered, deadly chaos engaged and a kind of medieval criminality suffered, but no actual war, to which President Obama just committed thousands more troops and trainers -- a human admixture of warriors and therapists, if you will, to battle ghosts and advise an amorphous foreign temperament.

The NY Times piece, the "this" -- "Corruption Undercuts Hopes for Afghan Police," by Richard Oppel Jr. -- is a terrifying 1,500-word descent into another world and another time, which Western modernism has no more hope of organically changing than its subject could change the West.

It's a portrayal, variously and by aggregating bits and pieces, of "extortion by police officers," of "fraud and swindling up the chain of command," of kidnappings and smuggling and protection rackets, of "high-ranking officials [with] immunity from the law," of "provincial officials [likened] to a criminal mafia," and, as if this needed to be added, an utter "lack of competent civilian authority."

You won't read of enemy troops amassed or bases of operations supplied or communications lines established or military tactics determined because, as mentioned, this really isn't a war. What it is -- with advance apologies to my postmodernist friends -- is a cultural cesspool.

Yet we send troops and military advisers to better train and equip the guardians of perpetual chaos.

Tactics? There can be no effective tactics, it seems to me, since effective tactics stem from a comprehensible strategy and a higher, achievable objective -- two little items we don't exactly lack in our own minds, it's just that they're at war with each other. We shall rid Afghanistan of Qaeda elements and the unpacifiable Taliban, we declare, while simultaneously declaring we shall not engage in nation building, which, while admittedly impossible, is absolutely essential.

To be tactically effective we must be engaged in that which we can't. Here, for instance, from the NY Times piece, is just one small example of effectiveness denied: "Referring to one corrupt and high-ranking government official he sees routinely, Maj. Randy Schmeling, a 43-year-old Army National Guardsman who commands the American police mentoring teams in Ghazni [province], said, 'I’d like to break down his door, stomp on his chest, point my 9-millimeter at his head and say, Stop what you are doing!' " -- that being extortion, fraud, smuggling, etc.

Yes, well, that's one way of doing it; next time followed by an unholstered crack splintering the air. The problem, of course, is that the day after that the corrupt official's nephew or brother-in-law would return the dispensation, since human corruption is the one thing Afghanistan possesses an inexhaustible supply of. Hence even effective tactics would be, alas, momentary at best, not to mention ineffective.

As is customarily true in modern war, or police actions, or non-nation-building efforts of curious nation-building personalities, the embattled occupiers on the ground are closest to the reality and see best its immense contradictions. As does First Sgt. John Strain, a philosophical observer involved in training the Afghan police, who told the Times: "The corruption here is a bigger threat to a stable government than the Taliban. If we stay here another year, or another 50 years, I think it’ll probably only take two to three years after we are gone until it reverts to the way it was right before we got here....

"[I]t really breaks your heart, to think that what you are doing is probably not going to turn out to be a hill of beans."

In early December of last year, as President-elect Obama was assembling his domestic and foreign policy teams, the Times' Frank Rich dolorously pondered the "sardonic" term, "the best and the brightest." "The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco," he wrote -- referencing McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Robert McNamara -- "had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees.... The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson."

But, continued Rich, "that’s not what gives me pause.... No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past": Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner.

Rich was right to worry, as much as anyone is about any presidential appointments that harbor checkered pasts of questionable judgments. But on balance, I was convinced then, as I remain convinced now, that those with the much greater and predictable potential to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama are those advising his Afghanistan policy.

For that policy is, in previously stated words, one of immense contradictions mired in assured futility.

The one upside? I also believe Barack Obama himself is among the more authentic best and brightest. And from his reading of history, much like the exceedingly wary Jack Kennedy's, he'll someday declare victory in Afghanistan as a fulfillment of his campaign promise, and then promptly skedaddle -- leaving that cesspool to diplomats and drones.

 

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him atfifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

McClellan May Shed Light On Niger Forgeries

Monday, 16 June 2008, 9:45 pm
Column: Jason Leopold

McClellan Testimony May She Light on Niger Forgeries

By Jason Leopold, The Public Record

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s testimony later this week before the House Judiciary Committee promises to reignite the debate over the “16 words” in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address that claimed Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger, and how the White House’s aggressive effort to defend the bogus intelligence lead to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Aides to several senior Democrats on the committee are poring over former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside The Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, as well as news reports and documents released publicly by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel appointed to investigate the leak of Plame’s identity.

Right-wing columnist Robert Novak blew Plame’s cover on July 14, 2003, in an article suggesting that Plame had helped arrange her husband’s trip to Africa as some kind of junket.

The aides, who requested anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss details of next week’s hearing, have been drafting detailed questions for McClellan about the behind-the-scenes conversations that took place between Vice President Dick Cheney, former White House political adviser Karl Rove, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and President Bush, surrounding accusations raised in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath that the administration knew the Niger intelligence was false.

The committee wants McClellan, who was deputy press secretary at the time the administration was forced in July 2003 to admit the uranium allegations should not have been included in President Bush’s State of the Union address, to elaborate on Bush, Cheney, Hadley and Rice’s role in the campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who had served in Iraq and Africa, was selected by the CIA’s non-proliferation office, where Plame worked, to travel to Niger in early 2002 to examine the Iraq-yellowcake allegations. Wilson returned to the United States and reported to CIA officials that the claims appeared to have no merit, a finding that matched with inquiries from other U.S. officials.

Two weeks ago, Congressman Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey a letter that indicated Vice President Dick Cheney may have authorized his former deputy to leak Plame’s identity.

"In his interview with the FBI, Mr. Libby stated that it was ‘possible’ that Vice President Cheney instructed him to disseminate information about Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson's wife to the press. This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter. It cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the Vice President's FBI interview," Waxman wrote.

Waxman's office would not release copies of the Libby-Rove transcripts or describe the contents in any detail. Fitzgerald's investigative interviews with Bush and Cheney -- asking how much knowledge the President and Vice President had about the Plame leak -- have not been disclosed.

But the committee wants to know if McClellan can offer insight into the vice president’s role as well as answers about why the administration continued to peddle the Niger story after the documents the intelligence was based upon were exposed as forgeries,

Democratic lawmakers have been trying to determine if Bush administration officials knew the Niger intelligence was bogus and if they allowed President Bush to cite it in his State of the Union address despite warnings of its veracity.

Last year, issued a subpoena for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice demanding that she explain her role in the matter and whether she had prior knowledge that Niger intelligence was fabricated. Rice has said that she could not recall receiving any oral or written warnings from the CIA about Iraq's interest in uranium from Niger as being unreliable. Rice penned an op-ed January 23, 2003, claiming Iraq was actively trying "to get uranium from abroad."

Rice ignored Waxman’s subpoena and the congressman had decided not to litigate the issue.

Now, by securing McClellan’s testimony, assuming the White House does not assert a last minute claim of executive privilege, some Democratic lawmakers are hoping they will be able to fill in some holes in the narrative related to the Niger story and determine what the administration knew and when they knew it.

The “16 words,” "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," was cited by President Bush on Jan. 28, 2003 and has widely been viewed as convincing the public and Congress to support a preemptive strike against Iraq.

The White House has never provided a full accounting of how the intelligence, despite warnings from several government agencies that it was unreliable, made its way from Italy to Washington and into President’s Bush’s State of the Union address.

State Department Memo

Sixteen days before Bush’s State of the Union, the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a declassified State Department memo.

The memo says: "On January 12, 2003," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) "expressed concerns to the CIA that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries."

Moreover, the memo says that the State Department's doubts about the veracity of the uranium claims may have been expressed to the intelligence community even earlier.

Those concerns, according to the memo, are the reason that former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to cite the uranium claims when he appeared before the United Nations in February 5, 2003 - one week after Bush's State of the Union address - to try to win support for a possible strike against Iraq.

"After considerable back and forth between the CIA, the (State) Department, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and the British, Secretary Powell's briefing to the U.N. Security Council did not mention attempted Iraqi procurement of uranium due to CIA concerns raised during the coordination regarding the veracity of the information on the alleged Iraq-Niger agreement," the memo further states.

During a closed before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence back in July 2003, Alan Foley, the former director of the CIA's nonproliferation, intelligence and arms control center, said he had spoken to Robert Joseph, the former director of nonproliferation at the National Security Council and former undersecretary of state for arms control, a day or two before President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address and told Joseph that detailed references to Iraq and Niger should be excluded from the final draft. Foley told committee members that Joseph had agreed to water down the language and would instead, he told Foley, attribute the intelligence to the British.

At this time, the international community, the media, and the IAEA called into question the veracity of the Niger documents. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Wilson Speaks Out

Wilson began to question the Niger intelligence a day after Bush's speech. He said he reminded a friend at the State Department that he had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to investigate whether Iraq attempted to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Wilson said his friend at the State Department replied that "perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case."

Wilson said he had attempted to contact the White House through various channels after the State of the Union address to get the administration to correct the public record.

"I had direct discussions with the State Department [and] Senate committees," Wilson told me in April 2006 following a speech to college students and faculty at California State University Northridge. "I had numerous conversations to change what they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."

Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and that he received word, through then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, that he could state his case in writing in a public forum.

In March 2003, Wilson began to publicly question the administration's use of the Niger claims without disclosing his role in traveling to Niger in February 2002 to investigate it. Wilson's criticism of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence caught the attention of Cheney, Libby and Hadley.

In an interview that took place two and a half weeks before the start of the Iraq War, Wilson said the administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called terrorist threat.

“The underlying objective, as I see it - the more I look at this - is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

“So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson added.

A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. "Well, this particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by the US - the US government - is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early 1960s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq."

Wilson's comments enraged Cheney because it was seen as a personal attack against the vice president, who was instrumental in getting his underlings to cite the Niger claims in government reports to build a case for war against Iraq.

Wilson's critique during his appearances on CNN, in addition to ElBaradei's UN report, were seen
as a threat to the administration's planned attack against Iraq, which took place eleven days later.

Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press" on March 16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were forgeries.

“I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

The former ambassador's stinging rebuke also caught the attention of Hadley, who had played an even bigger role in the Niger controversy by failing to heed written warnings by the CIA to remove the reference from President Bush’s State of the Union.

Hadley responded to Wilson's comments by writing an editorial about the threat Iraq posed to the U.S., in an attempt to discredit Wilson's comments on CNN.

A column written by Hadley that was published in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

(More projection from the "projection administration." More often than not, when the Bush administration starts telling scary stories about another head of state or "turrist, evil-doer, whatever they attribute to the evil-doer, applies to them as well or completely to them (Bushites). Who was really in denial and trying to deceive?

Second State Department Memo

Wilson spoke to at least two journalists in May 2003 about the bogus Niger intelligence. A phone call to the White House by one of the reporters, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, seeking comment about Wilson’s accusations prompted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff to inquire about Wilson’s trip to Niger. Libby contacted the State Department. A memo, dated June 10, 2003, drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was issued and sent to Libby. It said Wilson undertook the mission to Niger to investigate the Niger intelligence.

The White House has long maintained that they were never briefed about the State Department's or the CIA's concerns related to the Niger uranium claims..

But in a previous interview with me, the memo's author, Carl Ford, said he has no doubt the State Department's reservations about the Niger intelligence made their way to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“This was the very first time there was written evidence - not notes, but a request for a report - from the State Department that documented why the Niger intel was bullshit," Ford told me. "It was the only thing in writing, and it had a certain value because it didn't come from the IAEA. It came from State. It scared the heck out of a lot of people because it proved that this guy Wilson's story was credible. I don't think anybody wanted the media to know that the State Department disagreed with the intelligence used by the White House."

The Intel. used by the White House was stove-piped through the Pentagon Intel. Squad, (Rummy's own little CIA at the DoD)., which was filled to the rim with Neocons of the PNAC variety; huge fans of Ahmed Chalabi and a drunk-guy named "curve ball.") Geebus, someone ought to make a movie about all this. The problem is, no one would believe it. It's all just too insane and no one wants to believe that the guys who are running things are this idiotic or, worse, criminals who have sucker punched them where it hurts, everywhere it hurts, several times.

Well, believe it, my fellow Americans. You have all been suckered and conned by some of the most sociopathic con-men in the world, who are now making big bucks off your blood and treasure; we are talking about being "given," for the most part, gazillions of bucks, hand over fist, as a result of this criminal war and Bush administration energy policies.

I'm not sure that they have a real energy policy, as such. Their "energy policy" was written by oil men and other energy company corporate officers who support the GOP to the largest extent, which is to say that they do hedge their bets, with contributions to the Democrats as well. (Do they ever support a third party candidate?

I would guess that they don't, unless said candidate will help beat the Democrats in a single, minor election, like known Goopers helped Lieberman get elected as an independent, instead of backing the Republican senate candidate in Conn. The Goopers knew that Lieberman would lose if they did not help support him, over Lamont. Putting their money and power behind the GOP candidate would be pointless, because in Conn, being a Democrat of some hue or the other, would be necessary, and Lieberman could be counted on to lose all his senses and powers of mind when it came to Neoconservative philosophy vs. stated Democratic philosophy, and go out of his way to support the Republican (Neocons') agenda, because the Neocons agenda is supposedly good for Israel. Can anyone be sure of that anymore? The Neocons may well be responsible for the death of Israel as well as the huge collapse in our nation, both economically and socially.

As it turns out the Neocons were just highly educated idiots with theories. THEORIES!

As my grandpa used to say, "theories are very pretty, much like the tail feathers of a Peacock, but they are completely useless in a head wind. Right you were, Pop, and, unfortunately, we have had to, and will continue to, pay an extremely high price for accepting goofy theories untested in the real world, simply because our own government set about scaring the wits out of the "brave and the free."

How much it will actually cost us, all total, cannot not be realized at all, at this moment in history, because what we have seen so far, while scaring the crap out of many middle/lower working class people, and young people who have their whole lives ahead of them (or did), is only the tip of the iceberg; the iceberg which will do to the U.S. Ship of State, that which was done to the Titanic.

What happened to the Titanic was foolish, stupid human error. What is happening in Iraq is not human error; at least not all together. Bush said it himself, when talking to the man who was supposed to be his official biographer for the book that came out before the 2000 (s)election. Bush said that he had learned from his father's presidency, that presidents who were war presidents usually are assured second terms. That biographer was fired and another book came out in place of the one written by the "official author," after the manuscript was perused by Bush's communications people, like Karen Hughes.

That is the problem with Junior. If left to his own devices, he will tell the truth, every once in a while, when one least expects it.

Many of us knew that the goals of this crowd, known in the Reagan/Bush administration as "fucking crazies," as clearly stated in the PNAC document, were not possible, for many reasons, but number one was that Arabs/Muslims would never allow a U.S. occupying force in the Middle east, or any where in "Muslim land," in general and a Bush occupying force was absolutely out of the question, especially if it came in the form of "Shock and Awe."

I mean, has anyone asked themselves the simple question, why in hell would you start the liberation of a people with "shock and awe" in their capitol city, killing thousands of people in the first few days of the war; Iraqis whose only "crimes" were being born in Iraq (in other words, born atop OUR oil) and living in Baghdad or in other cities that were being hit and hit hard?

Seems like a pretty dumb thing to do to a nation's people when you say you want them liberated and to be so happy about it that they would greet us with chocolate and flowers , be our friends forever, allow us to create 40 some-odd permanent military bases, plus the most humongous American Embassy the world has ever seen, on their land, be friendly with Israel and sign contracts with certain oil companies; mostly those who have been upset since the 70s that Iraq's oil industry had been taken over by the government and Saddam would not re-privatize it. I can mention just as few: BP, Dutch Shell, Exxon-Mobile and Chevron (the oil company whose logo is a chevron, ferchrisszke, like those which are worn on the sleeves of military uniforms and indicate rate or rank of the person wearing the uniform. A true oddity, eh? ).

Trying to bring to the Iraqis, or anyone else, democracy at the point of a gun or with hundreds of thousands of pounds of bombs in a matter of days and then more later, when those ungrateful teeth in Iraq made it clear that they liked the fact that Saddam, America's nut-job puppet for many years, and his psychotic sons, were gone, but they wanted Bush gone as well. They did not trust him, because he was his father's son. GHWB is seen as having betrayed Saddam with regard to the Gulf war. Saddam was being given mixed signals regarding what would happen if he invaded Kuwait to reclaim land Saddam believed belonged to Iraq. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't, I don't know for sure. Nevertheless it does sound like something of which GHWB was entirely capable, whether he meant to do it or not. GHWB has never been the most decisive person on earth, so he might have been giving mixed signals because that is simply how he is, or that he sent mixed signals on purpose, so that Saddam would give him a reason to bomb Iraq to the stone age, making Saddam less powerful and war-like toward Iran. GHWB wanted a little balance there, between tyrannies.

We did know, after a time, that we, Americans, were being told false-hoods in the lead up to that war, as we were already deploying to the area with our U.N. partners and with full participation of Saudi Arabia. One of the whoppers that was told, was that Saddam's soldiers were throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and onto the floor of hospitals in Kuwait. Turns out, that wasn't true at all, but it rightly horrified Americans, which is exactly what is was meant to do.

Ford added that when the request came from Cheney's office for a report on Wilson's Niger trip it was an opportunity to put in writing a document that would remind the White House that it had been warned about the Niger claims early on.

Tenet Warned Hadley

In his book, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA Director George Tenet wrote that he personally asked Hadley to remove the 16 words from President Bush’s speech just three months earlier.

“Steve, take it out," Tenet wrote about a conversation he had with Hadley on October 5, 2002. As deputy national security adviser, Hadley was also in charge of the clearance process for speeches given by White House officials. "The facts, I told him, were too much in doubt."

Following his conversation with Hadley, one of Tenet's aides sent a follow-up letter to then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Hadley, and Bush's speechwriter Mike Gerson highlighting additional reasons the language about Iraq's purported attempts to obtain uranium from the African country of Niger should not be used to try to convince Congress and the public that Iraq was an imminent threat, Tenet wrote in the book.

"More on why we recommend removing the sentence about [Saddam's] procuring uranium oxide from Africa," Tenet wrote in the book, apparently quoting from a memo sent to the White House. "Three points: (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of French authorities; (2) the procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions; and (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them the Africa story is overblown and telling them this was one of two issues where we differed with the British."

Tenet, however, says he was "in bed, asleep" when Bush delivered the State of the Union.

"You won't find many Washington officials who will admit to not watching the most important political speech of the year, but I was exhausted from fifteen months of nonstop work and worry since the tragedy of 9/11," Tenet writes in the chapter "16 words." "We had warned the White House against using the Niger uranium reports previously but had not done so with the State of the Union," Tenet wrote.

Tenet wrote that he believes the administration was excited about the prospect of removing Saddam Hussein from power and ignored his previous warnings about the bogus intelligence in order to win support for the war.

"The vision of a despot like Saddam getting his hands on nuclear weapons was galvanizing" and "provided an irresistible image for speechwriters, spokesmen, and politicians to seize on," Tenet wrote.

What it was, was fear of karma, Mr Tenet. Sad thing is, we don't learn much from fear. "Fear chemicals" make us, for the most part, incapable of learning a damn thing or, even, paying any attention to much we have learned in the past. Adrenalin really is stupid juice. The Iraq war Selling Group knows that just as we all do.

Still, Tenet says when the furor surrounding the 16 words reached a boiling point in July 2003 he "decided to stand up and take the hit."

"Obviously, the process for vetting the speech at the Agency had broken down," Tenet wrote. "We had warned the White House about the lack of reliability of the assertion when we had gotten them to remove similar language from the president's October [2002] Cincinnati speech and we should have gotten that language out of the [State of the Union address] as well."

Tenet added that the White House officials had told the media that the language pertaining to Niger omitted from the Cincinnati speech was dramatically different from the Niger claims that ended up in the State of the Union address.

"That simply wasn't so," Tenet wrote. "It was clear that the entire briefing was intended to convince the press corps that the White House staff was an innocent victim of bad work by the intelligence community."

“On July 18, Condi Rice requested formal declassification of part of the October NIE, including the "key judgments" section and the paragraphs relating to Iraqi attempts to secure uranium in Africa. This was done through the normal CIA channels the same day, and Tenet personally spoke with Cheney and Rumsfeld that day to let them know it had happened,” McClellan wrote in his book.

The NIE was formally declassified on July 18, 2003 and a background briefing with a "senior administration official" was arranged for reporters to respond to questions about Wilson and how White House officials failed to vet the State of the Union.

Tenet wrote that the intent of the White House's background briefing on July 18 "was obvious.”

“They wanted to demonstrate that the intelligence community had given the administration and Congress every reason to believe that Saddam had a robust WMD program that was growing in seriousness every day. The briefers were questioned about press accounts saying that the White House had taken references to Niger out of the Cincinnati speech at the CIA's request. Why then did they insert them again in the State of the Union address?" Tenet wrote in his book.

The NIE Leak and the Attack on Wilson

McClellan wrote in his book that the campaign to discredit Wilson heated up at the White House in June 2003 when Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus contacted the Office of the Vice President.

“In early June, while making inquiries about what [New York Times columnist Nicholas] Kristof wrote, Pincus had contacted Cathie Martin, who oversaw the vice president's communications office. Martin went to Scooter Libby to discuss what Pincus was sniffing around about,” McClellan wrote. “The vice president and Libby were quietly stepping up their efforts to counter the allegations of the anonymous envoy to Niger, and Pincus's story was one opportunity for them to do just that.”

Kristof accused Cheney of allowing the truth about the Niger documents the administration used to build a case for war to go "missing in action." The columnist obtained his information from Wilson in May 2003 at a political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

In mid-June 2003, Libby chose New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as recipients of the still classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The Pulitzer Prize winning journalists were urged by Libby to report that that Iraq had in fact attempted to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, directly contradicting Wilson's claims.

A week before he met with Libby, around June 16, 2003, Woodward met with two other government officials, one of whom was later revealed to be Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Woodward says Armitage, referring to him as an unnamed official, told him in a "casual" and off-handed manner that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Woodward said the meeting with Libby and the other government officials had been set up simply as "confidential background interviews for my 2004 book "Plan of Attack" about the lead-up to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for the Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be published in 2006."

Woodward wrote a first person account in the Washington Post about his involvement in the Plame leak a couple of weeks after Libby was indicted. The Watergate-era journalist wrote that when he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, "Libby discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, mentioned "yellowcake" and said there was an effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02. This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger."

Neither Miller nor Woodward wrote stories for their newspapers about the intelligence report Libby leaked to them.

Libby also met with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, another Pulitzer Prize winner, and leaked the same portions of the NIE when Miller raised questions about Wilson's claims about the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for in 2006 for refusing to reveal the identity Libby as her source who disclosed to Plame’s identity to her.

And things just get more and more absurd from there..............

Libby and Cheney continued to peddle the Niger intelligence as solid even though there was agreement among Bush’s senior officials that the White House would issue a mea culpa. Indeed, on July 14, 2003, just three days after senior officials met to discuss the White House response, Libby contacted then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and asked him to contact the editorial department at the Wall Street Journal and leaked the NIE to the paper as a way of undermining Wilson. Cheney approved leaking the NIE to the Journal.

"After July 14, in that week, the Vice President thought we should still try and get the [NIE] out. And so he asked me to talk to the Wall Street Journal. I don't have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did, and so we talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across [to the Journal], and he undertook to do so," Libby testified.

Wolfowitz faxed the Wall Street Journal a set of "talking points" about the former ambassador that the paper's editors could use to discredit him in print, according to Libby's grand jury testimony, and then leaked to the paper a portion of the then-still-classified NIE that claimed Iraq did in fact attempt to acquire uranium from Niger. The Journal printed, verbatim, Wolfowitz's talking points in an editorial in its July 17, 2003, edition and then misled its readers about the source of the information.

According to the editorial, "Yellowcake Remix," the Journal said the data the newspaper received about Iraq's interest in uranium "does not come from the White House," despite the fact that Libby testified that he personally lobbied Wolfowitz to leak the NIE to the Journal, and that arguably Wolfowitz's position as Undersecretary of Defense made him a senior member of the Bush administration.

Here's the thing: The W.H. has the biggest podium in the world. Everything the White House needs to say should be said from there, not leaked to friendly press. How much common sense does it take to realize that? Nothing leaked by the White House should be reported at all. We can all assume that it is tainted, if it is leaked. Come on, People, how hard can this be?

Bush’s Role

For an administration that despises leaks, the decision by Cheney to declassify highly sensitive portions of the NIE and have his most trusted aide leak it to reporters in order to attack Wilson’s credibility showed that Bush and Cheney and other senior administration officials took the ambassador’s criticism personally.

Hell, yes it was personal. They knew what Wilson was, in fact, accusing them of was the mother of all war crimes, lying the nation into a war of aggression, because they knew damned well that the Niger documents were fakes. A nine year old with access to Google could have known it within minutes. The forgeries were so obviously bullshit, crude forgeries.

Those forgeries were terribly important to Cheney and the Neocons, as one of the paint brushes with which to paint pictures/visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities ("we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," George W Bush), was a must, if they wanted to get support for the Iraq invasion because the administration knew what kind of effect it would have on the American public, no matter how unlikely the scenario was. Americans, as a whole, don't deal too well with visions of Mushroom clouds dancing in their heads. Rationality and reason go out the window, as with any phobia. Cheney and company have been messing with the heads of Americans, on and off, for close to 4 decades. They know perfectly well what will work and what won't.

In his book, McClellan said in early 2006 a reporter questioned him aboard Air Force One about rumors that Bush authorized Libby to leak the NIE to the media. McClellan wrote that he asked the president the question directly and was stunned by his response.

A reporter “asserted you authorized the leak of part of the NIE,” McClellan wrote about a conversation he had with Bush.

“Yeah, I did,” is what Bush’s response was, McClellan wrote. “The look on his face said he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further. Nor did I expect him to, since he had already been advised by his personal attorney Jim Sharp not to discuss any details related to the Libby trial. I was shocked to hear the President casually acknowledging its accuracy, as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score or the latest tidbit of inside-the-Beltway gossip.”

Well, Scott, why should that surprise you? Bush had no doubt that he was God's chosen president by that time. Thanks to the Theocons, others of the religiously insane and corporate whores, both within and without the government.

“No one else was told about the secret declassification — not Chief of Staff Andy Card, not National Security Advisor Condi Rice. When Rice was publicly rejecting the notion of selective declassification on July 11, 2003, Scooter Libby had already leaked it to Judith Miller on July 8 — at the vice president’s direction with authority from the president.”

In early fall 2003, President Bush then announced that he was determined to get to the bottom of the Plame leak.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the scheme to discredit Wilson got started – since he was involved in starting it – the President uttered misleading public statements that obscured the White House role.

Also, since the leakers knew that Bush already was in the know, they might well have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. In early October, McClellan said he could report that political adviser Rove and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams were not involved in the Plame leak.

I am not for capital punishment, but if there was ever a reason, it would be for heads-of-state who terrorize their own and other nation's citizens, so they can gain support for a crime.

That comment riled Libby, who feared that he was being hung out to dry. Libby went to his boss, Vice President Cheney, complaining that “they want me to be the sacrificial lamb,” Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells said later.

Cheney scribbled down his feelings in a note to press secretary McClellan: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others.”

In the note, Cheney initially ascribed Libby’s role in going after Joe Wilson to Bush’s orders, but the Vice President apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in a passive tense.

Cheney has never explained the meaning of his note, but it suggests that it was Bush who sent Libby out on the get-Wilson mission to limit damage from Wilson’s criticism of Bush’s false Niger-yellowcake claim.

Did Bush Authorize Plame Leak?

During Libby’s criminal trial last year, David Addington, Cheney’s attorney in the Office of the Vice President, had testified that, during a conversation with Libby about the president's authority to declassify documents, Libby also questioned him specifically about whether "if somebody worked out at the CIA and the CIA sent the person's spouse on a trip to do something for the CIA, would there be a record out at the CIA of that," states a copy of the trial transccript.

(Addington is a Nazi in the first degree!)

Addington said he told Libby "it depended ... the kind of paperwork would depend on whether you were on the operational side of the CIA, the folks who run spies overseas, if you will, or on the analytical side, the folks at CIA who write reports for policymakers and so forth about what is going on in the world."

In late June or early July 2003, "a question was asked of me ... by Scooter Libby: Does the president have authority to declassify information?" Addington testified. "And the answer I gave was, 'Of course, yes. It's clear the president has the authority to determine what constitutes a national security secret and who can have access to it.'"

In an interview with Fox News in 2006, Cheney said he had the legal authority to declassify intelligence as he saw fit. There is still strong debate about the interpretation of the executive order Cheney referred to that provided him with such power. Cheney's comments came on the heels of a disclosure Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald made in a letter to defense attorneys representing Libby in the leak case.

President Bush signed an executive order in 2003 authorizing Cheney to declassify certain intelligence documents. The order was signed on March 23, four days after the start of the Iraq War and two weeks after Wilson first appeared on the administration's radar.

McClellan wrote that he wondered whether allowing the NIE to be leaked to the media had somehow caused the same officials to disseminate Plame’s CIA status.

Well, duh.....

“Questions were also raised about whether the president's action had set in motion the unauthorized disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity,” McClellan wrote in his book.

*************

Jason Leopold launched a new online investigative news magazine, The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Froomkin Rips Bush, Cheney and the Neocons' Prewar Propaganda

I wonder where that old bull whip of mine is. I haven't seen it in 30 years, but surely it could be found around here somewhere. I can think of some damn good ways of using it, right about now.


The Propaganda Campaign Dissected

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, June 6, 2008; 1:22 PM

Yesterday's long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report further solidifies the argument that the Bush administration's most blatant appeals to fear in its campaign to sell the Iraq war were flatly unsupported.

Some of what President Bush and others said about Iraq was corroborated by what later turned out to be inaccurate intelligence. But their most compelling and gut-wrenching allegations -- for instance, that Saddam Hussein was ready to supply his friends in al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons -- were simply made up.

In an accident of timing, the report also validates former press secretary Scott McClellan's conclusion in his new book that the White House pursued a "political propaganda campaign" to market the war.

The White House response? That officials in Congress and elsewhere were saying the same things about Iraq. Or in other words, that other people bought the administration line. It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you've engaged in a propaganda campaign by noting that it worked.

About the Report

Here's a statement from Democratic Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller: "Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.

"It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa'ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa'ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.

"There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

Here's the dissenting view from Kit Bond, the ranking minority member of the committee. Bond calls the report an act of political theater. And, like the White House, he points to "a public record . . . replete with examples of statements by Democrat Senators making the same characterizations regarding Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to terrorism."

Senator Russ Feingold's "additional views" make for much more dramatic reading than the main report, though they make similar points.

Writes Feingold: "Even the deeply flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) did not support the claims made by the President and the Vice President regarding an Iraqi nuclear program. That NIE assessed that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one, and that without sufficient fissile material acquired from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until 2007 or 2009. Yet the President made the following statements: '[Saddam] possesses the world's most dangerous weapons' ( March 22, 2002); '[w]e don't know whether or not [Saddam] has a nuclear weapon' ( December 31, 2002); and, of course, '[f]acing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud' ( October 7, 2002). Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney insisted that assessments related to Iraq's nuclear program that were disputed within the Intelligence Community were known 'with absolute certainty' ( September 8, 2002) and through 'irrefutable evidence' (September 20, 2002). And, on the eve of war, after the IAEA had reported that its inspectors had found 'no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq,' the Vice President asserted, '[w]e believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons' ( March 16, 2003).

"Administration officials' claims of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda were even more outlandish. Before the war, the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that 'Saddam has viewed Islamic extremists operating inside Iraq as a threat,' that 'Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden are far from being natural partners,' and that assessments about Iraqi links to al Qaeda rested on 'a body of fragmented, conflicting reporting from sources of varying reliability.' Moreover, the Intelligence Community consistently assessed that Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States rested on his being 'sufficiently desperate' in the face of a U. S. attack and his possible desire for a 'last chance at vengeance.' Yet the President not only repeatedly suggested an operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, but asserted that Saddam would provide weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda for an unprovoked attack against the United States: 'you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror' ( September 25, 2002); '[e]ach passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX - nerve gas - or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally' ( September 26, 2002); '[Saddam] is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army' ( October 14, 2002); '[Saddam] is a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda. . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint' ( November 7, 2002); and '[t]he danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other' ( March 17, 2003)."

At yesterday's press briefing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino was on the defensive: "The administration's statements on Iraq were based on the very same intelligence that was given to the Congress, and they came to the same conclusions, as did other countries around the world. The issue about Iraq's WMD ultimately turned out to be false, and we have fully admitted that. We regret it. And we have also taken steps to make sure that we can correct it for -- in the future. . . .

Q. "But you understand the differences they're making, that they think that the claims -- understanding that the intelligence was wrong -- but that the claims went far beyond what the intelligence community was giving the White House, and that it ignored significant dissent within the intelligence community -- the White House."

Perino: "That dissent, amongst experts within the intelligence community at some levels, did not reach the President. The process that I just talked about, in terms of how we've improved the process, would hopefully make sure that now that we have this different levels of confidence, so that the President now knows if there is dissent amongst them. And that is all now coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence -- Mike McConnell in this case.

"So we've fixed the problems, in terms of the intelligence, but no one lied. And I think that's sort of the point of all this."

The committee's main but not exclusive focus was on five major policy speeches: Vice President Cheney's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention on Aug. 26, 2002; Bush's address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002; Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002 (which, ironically, appears on the White House Web site under a banner proclaiming "denial and deception"); Bush's State of the Union message on Jan. 28, 2003; and former secretary of state Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

The Coverage

Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times: "A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq's weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda. . . .

"That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

"The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska."

Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus write in The Washington Post: "President Bush and top administration officials repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about Iraq's weapons and its ties to terrorist groups as the White House pressed its case for war against Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee said yesterday in a long-awaited report."

Jonathan S. Landay writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "The committee found that the administration's warnings that former dictator Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden, a highly inflammatory assertion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaida attacks, weren't substantiated by U.S. intelligence reports. In fact, it said, U.S. intelligence agencies were telling the White House that while there'd been sporadic contacts over a decade, there was no operational cooperation between Iraq and al Qaida, the report said. . . .

"Cheney's assertions that Mohammad Atta, the chief Sept. 11 hijacker, had met months before the attack with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital, Prague, were also unsubstantiated, the inquiry found.

"The committee said that Bush and Cheney 'failed to reflect concerns and uncertainties' expressed in intelligence analyses that questioned administration assertions that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops as liberators and warned that American forces could face violent resistance."

Greg Miller writes for the Los Angeles Times: "The report on the Bush administration's case for war, 170 pages long, reads like a catalog of erroneous claims. The document represents the most detailed assessment to date of whether those assertions were backed by classified intelligence reports available to senior officials at the time."

Randall Mikkelsen writes for Reuters: "Bush's and Cheney's assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence.

"Such assertions had a strong resonance with a U.S. public, still reeling after al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Polls showed that many Americans believed Iraq played a role in the attacks, even long after Bush acknowledged in September 2003 that there was no evidence Saddam was involved."

Opinion Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes: "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. . . .

"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. . . .

"We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public -- or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true -- to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough."

The USA Today editorial board writes: "For this and future administrations, the lesson is that White House officials need to weigh and study all available intelligence, not seize on only what supports their preconceived notions. They mustn't present ambiguity as certainty. They mustn't launch pre-emptive attacks without bulletproof evidence. And never again should they treat war as a marketing campaign, like selling a new brand of toothpaste."

Here's MSNBC'S Keith Olbermann talking to former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke last night:

Olbermann: "I use the word lie. The report does not use the word lie. Are there lies?"

Clarke: "There certainly are and this is a big report. What it says is statements by the president were not substantiated by intelligence. And then it stays statements by the president were contradicted by available intelligence. In other words, they made things up. And they made them up and gave them to Colin Powell and others who believed them."

The Second Report

John Walcott writes for McClatchy Newspapers about a second report issued by the Intelligence Committee yesterday: "Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials 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 Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the 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.

"Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces."

Meanwhile, in Iraq

David Stout writes in the New York Times: "The United States ambassador to Iraq dismissed any suggestion on Thursday that the Bush administration was maneuvering to set up permanent military bases in Iraq.

"'I'm very comfortable saying to you, to the Iraqis, to anyone who asks, that, no indeed, we are not seeking permanent bases, either explicitly or implicitly,' the ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, said at a State Department news briefing.

"Mr. Crocker commented at length, and sometimes disdainfully, on a report in The Independent of London of 'a secret plan' involving 50 permanent American military bases in Iraq, American control of Iraqi airspace and continuing legal immunity for American soldiers and contractors."

It doesn't mean much anymore when Bush administration officials deny that they intend to establish permanent military bases in Iraq. Permanent bases are already becoming a reality there. And, as this exchange between Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) and Defense Department officials makes clear, the official administration position is that there is no such thing as a permanent military base.

For more on that Independent news article, see yesterday's column. Today, Patrick Cockburn had a followup: "The US is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent. . . .

"The threat by the American side underlines the personal commitment of President George Bush to pushing the new pact through by 31 July. Although it is in reality a treaty between Iraq and the US, Mr Bush is describing it as an alliance so he does not have to submit it for approval to the US Senate.

"Iraqi critics of the agreement say that it means Iraq will be a client state in which the US will keep more than 50 military bases. American forces will be able to carry out arrests of Iraqi citizens and conduct military campaigns without consultation with the Iraqi government. American soldiers and contractors will enjoy legal immunity.

"The US had previously denied it wanted permanent bases in Iraq, but American negotiators argue that so long as there is an Iraqi perimeter fence, even if it is manned by only one Iraqi soldier, around a US installation, then Iraq and not the US is in charge."

Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: "The Iraqi government may request an extension of the United Nations security mandate authorizing a U.S. military presence, due to expire in December, amid growing domestic criticism of new bilateral arrangements now being negotiated with the Bush administration, according to senior Iraqi officials.

"Iraqis across the political spectrum have objected to Bush administration proposals for unilateral authority over U.S. military operations in Iraq and the detention of Iraqi citizens, immunity for civilian security contractors, and continuing control over Iraqi borders and airspace.

"Failure to reach an agreement on the arrangements, which must be approved by the Iraqi parliament, would leave the negotiations over a future U.S.-Iraqi relationship and the role of U.S. forces in the country to the next American president. . . .

"The Iraqi government, still struggling toward political reconciliation, can ill-afford to sign an agreement that leading political actors have branded a violation of sovereignty. After a meeting Wednesday of the Council of Ministers -- made up of Maliki, the Iraqi president and the two vice presidents -- government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told the London-based newspaper Asharq Alawsat that 'the Iraqi government's vision differs from that of the Americans, who think . . . [the agreements] will give them almost totally a free hand in Iraq and that, as a military force, they
must have absolute powers.'"

Remember Peace?

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush, whose administration has been dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global battle against terrorism, helped break ground yesterday on a $185 million facility for the U.S. Institute of Peace -- a government-funded think tank with the mission of preventing conflict and helping promote postwar stability operations."

Abramowitz writes that some of Bush's fellow speakers, while "outwardly polite. . . hinted at the deep disagreements over Bush's use of preventive war to head off what his administration considered a threat from Iraq.

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pointedly quoted from President John F. Kennedy's 1963 commencement address at American University to say that he would 'look kindly' on the work of the institute.

"'The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,' Kennedy told the crowd, as Pelosi recounted. 'We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.'"

How We Became Torturers

From a Fox News report last night by Jim Angle: "The nation was stunned by the attacks on 9/11, and in the fearful days that followed, the intelligence community was consumed with finding out if another attack was on the way. In an interview, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Fox the fear of an imminent attack led to what are now known as enhanced interrogation techniques."

Hayden: "And keep in mind, this is a time when we didn't know nearly as much about al-Qaeda as we know today, and you have the nation suffering, reeling from a recent attack in which 3,000 citizens had been killed, until it was the collective judgment of the American government that these techniques would be appropriate and lawful in these circumstances."

Angle: "Hayden was at the National Security Agency in those days, but now has been at the CIA for two years. He acknowledges that three high-value detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, were waterboarded. . . . [U]sually the subject is tilted on a board with a cloth covering his mouth and nose, then water is poured over it, creating a sense of drowning. Hayden says that technique generated key intelligence that allowed the U.S. to disrupt attack plots that were already in motion."

Hayden: "That two of the people against waterboarding was used created a significant fraction of our reporting in al-Qaeda over a period of several years.

Angle: "Really?"

Hayden: "Yes. But there's a question of lawfulness. Now, if you ask me was it lawful, the answer is absolutely.

Angle: "Though he says the legal landscape has changed as a result of court cases and legislation, back then, the U.S. government as a whole gave the green light. Key members of Congress from both parties were briefed and none raised objections, in part, perhaps, because the U.S. had long experience with waterboarding, a matter raised with Hayden."

Angle (to Hayden): "We waterboard our pilots as a way of training them against something that might happen to them. Has anyone at the agency who's involved in interrogations subjected themselves to waterboarding?

Hayden: "Yes."

Angle: "They have."

Hayden: "Yes."

Angle: "As a result, Hayden argues, interrogators had a detailed knowledge of waterboarding's effects from their own experiences and those of many others."

Hayden: "Could it be that waterboarding was selected as the high-end interrogation technique against a very small population because of our experience with the technique on literally thousands of Americans that gave us a body of knowledge as to what the transient and permanent effects of the technique would be?"

Here's how Angle finished up the report: "Whether the effects are transient or permanent has legal significance, because the law defines torture as mental harm that is either prolong or permanent, and some say waterboarding is neither. Controversial yes, but inappropriate for terrorists who know of ongoing plots to kill innocent civilians? After 9/11, the government's answer to that was no."

A little context: Waterboarding is one of the most iconic and notorious forms of torture, dating back to the Spanish inquisition. It is flatly a violation of international law, and administration officials have never made a compelling case as to how it could be legal under American law.

Furthermore, as I've repeatedly pointed out, none of the administration assertions that torture provided valuable intelligence have been substantiated -- and in fact they are highly suspect.

Meanwhile, Desmond Butler writes for the Associated Press: "A leading Homeland Security Department investigator said Thursday his office is re-examining the conclusions of a probe that exonerated the government in the case of a Canadian engineer who was seized by U.S. officials, sent to Syria and allegedly tortured."

Karl Rove Watch

In an excerpt from his new book 'Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove' published by Salon, Paul Alexander writes about how Karl Rove played politics while New Orleans drowned.

"Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. . . .

"Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame [Louisiana governor Kathleen] Blanco, the Democrat. . . .

"Rove sold the story, as he had in the past, through the media. On Wednesday, while Blanco was trying to get help from the White House, her staff began receiving calls from reporters questioning her handling of the disaster, almost all of them citing as their sources unnamed senior White House officials."

Not an American Idol

Elizabeth Snead blogs for the Los Angeles Times: "'American Idol' creator Nigel Lythgoe didn't want President Bush to appear on the 'Idol Gives Back' show.

"Lythgoe has told OK! magazine that during the planning for the second annual 'Idol Gives Back' fundraising special, which aired in April, America's biggest TV show had a serious spat with the White House.

"He said that the show's producers were so disappointed with Bush's efforts to combat the poverty that the show was trying to relieve that they were simply embarrassed to have him on their show.

"But Nigel says they relented under pressure from the Prez's peeps, and allowed him to speak during the star-studded broadcast."

Cartoon Watch

Rex Babin on Bush's new sales job; Ed Hall on the McAlbatross; Mike Keefe and Matt Wuerker on the new G.I. Bill.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Inside The Data Mine

These bastards ought to be sued 'til hell won't have it.

If Bush is successful at making it off limits to sue them, leaving Americans have no legal recourse, it might be worse for the CEOs and other corporate officers of the spying corporations than a law suit.

by Onnesha Roychoudhuri

On April 20, 2007, former Qwest telecommunications CEO Joseph Nacchio was found guilty on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading. “For anyone who has ever made a call in Qwest territory, the term ‘convicted felon Joe Nacchio’ has a nice ring to it,” U.S. prosecutor Troy Eid told the press. The mood was fairly universal. One securities lawyer pitched in: “The government has another notch in their belt. They’ve had a tremendous winning streak in these corporate crime cases.”

But it would have been more accurate to qualify the statement by saying that the government has had a tremendous winning streak in the corporate crime cases it chooses to pursue. We now know that the Securities and Exchange Commission has chosen not to pursue charges of insider trading in the case of a Wall Street executive named John J. Mack because of his “political clout.” And while former U.S. Attorney William Leone led the case against Qwest, he was one of the unfortunate attorneys on the Department of Justice’s “purge list,” replaced by none other than Bush-nominated Troy Eid, a former co-worker of Jack Abramoff at the firm Greenberg Traurig.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, Nacchio’s verdict could be seen as the continuing triumph of an efficient and unbiased judicial system—one working to protect the people’s interests against unbridled business tycoons. But the insidious environment of purges and selective prosecution based on cronyism necessitates a more critical view. To celebrate Nacchio’s verdict in such a simplistic light would miss a far more interesting story about what telecommunications success and failure signify in a post-September 11th world.

Delving into Joseph Nacchio and Qwest’s story reveals a company with close ties to the White House—ties that appear to have been temporarily severed when, according to Nacchio and his legal team at Qwest, the company refused to participate in the government’s data-mining program—making it the only big telecommunications company that didn’t take part. Nacchio claims that secret government contracts he was expecting were never delivered after his refusal to participate in the National Security Agency program, resulting in skewed profit claims.

While currently under new leadership, wooing back government contracts, and finally turning a profit, Qwest will have to struggle to maintain a competitive edge in an industry of telecommunications giants. These giants have received favorable treatment from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. Parallel to this success have come news reports that these ever-merging entities—notably AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon—are participating in domestic data-mining programs.

In an amoebic dance, SBC, AT&T, Bell South, Cingular, MCI and Verizon have all coupled and re-coupled, forming a terrain redolent of the days of Ma Bell. Comedian Stephen Colbert, with deadpan delivery, traced the acrobatics in his January 2007 TV primer explaining why Cingular changed its name to AT&T:

As you no doubt remember, Cingular was co-owned by BellSouth and SBC, which had been Southwestern Bell and Ameritech, which before that had been Illinois Bell, Wisconsin Bell, Michigan Bell, Ohio Bell, and Indiana Bell. ... A couple of years ago Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and renamed it Cingular, but then SBC bought AT&T and changed its own name to AT&T. Then that new AT&T bought BellSouth, changing its name to AT&T, making it only logical to change Cingular into AT&T.

These mergers are even more conspicuous due to the number that have been approved in just the past three years. 2005 alone saw enough mergers to leave Americans with only two major telecommunications companies: Verizon and AT&T. Colbert cites the most recent and highly contested AT&T/BellSouth merger that combined the country’s two largest telecommunications companies. Despite the massive scope of the merger, when the Department of Justice conducted its regulatory analysis it concluded that there were no major antitrust issues.

In contrast to companies such as AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, Qwest has encountered significant roadblocks in its expansion efforts, causing telecommunications experts to ask pointed questions about differing treatment from the Department of Justice, the FCC and the SEC. Specifically: Is there government retribution? The question gains clout in light of the recent U.S. attorney scandal and the selective prosecution that the Bush administration has been practicing.

The ties between the telecommunications industry and the White House have grown even deeper since the Sept. 11 attacks, making it impossible to understand data mining or the telecommunications industry without exploring this relationship.

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