Wednesday, September 26, 2007

What has Bush Done To Government?

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 24, 2007; 1:30 PM

The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word "incompetent."

What makes that particularly fascinating is that it's a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.

The Public doesn't matter. Just ask Bush, or our own Congress Critters for that matter. We the people, have been less and less relevant for the last couple of decades. When we allowed unelected people to occupy the White House, we made ourselves completely irrelevant, almost overnight. 9/11 was the nail in our coffin, so to speak. BuchCo would not have accomplished very little of their agenda, spoken and unspoken, without 9/11.

While there's certainly been spirited debate and extensive news coverage about the ideological merit (or lack thereof) of Bush's policies pretty much across the board, there's also a critical underlying issue: Whether those policies are being competently carried out by the people Bush has put in charge of the agencies, departments and branches of the armed forces responsible for their execution.

It's certainly hard to find anyone, even among Bush's most ardent supporters, who would argue that the war in Iraq has been carried out intelligently. As one example, there is ample evidence that many warnings from career bureaucrats about post-war challenges were blithely ignored by their political bosses.

Just this past week, stories about the unregulated conduct by employees of private security firms, a massive corruption investigation involving the Pentagon's war-zone procurement system, and yet another sudden ballooning of war costs make it clear that the competence issue in Iraq is anything but ancient history.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's tragically botched response to the catastrophe in New Orleans in 2005 briefly turned director Michael " heck of a job, Brownie" Brown into a poster-boy for incompetence, but didn't lead to any sort of rigorous administration-wide assessment.

The admission by top officials at the Department of Justice that they engaged in a systemic pattern of putting political hacks not just in the traditional appointed slots, but in senior career-level positions as well -- i.e., the places where the hard work of government traditionally gets done -- has apparently been written off as an isolated incident.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the president's public acts and statements get the most attention from the media. But it's well past time to ask ourselves: What has Bush done to our government?

Bush's two top advisers -- Vice President Cheney and just-departed political guru Karl Rove -- made little secret of their desire to have the wider federal bureaucracy serve their purposes. But just how much has the exertion of absolute White House political control, through a network of loyalists put in key positions, damaged government agencies' ability to accomplish the tasks the American people expect of them?

How many long-time senior career employees have been marginalized, micromanaged or driven out of government? How low have the standards dropped for senior-level appointments amid the need to find people who would be sufficiently loyal?

David E. Lewis is a political scientist at Princeton University and author of an upcoming book, The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Over on NiemanWatchdog.org, where I am deputy editor, Lewis today raises some important questions the press should be asking about the federal government under Bush. Among them:

"Have Bush political appointees taken away hiring authority from senior-level career employees elsewhere besides the Department of Justice? Is there any evidence that those career hires have been made on a partisan basis? . . .

"Are presidential loyalists being placed in jobs with direct influence over grants, contracts, the granting of licenses, etc? If so, was there a centrally directed effort to use these powers for the benefit of Bush's reelection or the Republican Party?"

Lewis also asks: "[I]s there a competence gap developing? Have this administration's actions to politicize the bureaucracy in order to get control of the bureaucracy and satisfy patronage demands done serious damage to government competence? My research shows that politicization hurts performance. Apart from the competence gap between new hires and those departing, politicization of the bureaucracy creates systematic management problems that hurt the agencies more generally. It makes it difficult for agencies to recruit and retain high-quality civil servants; it reduces incentives for careerists to develop expertise; and it leads to increased management turnover -- three factors that can hurt performance even under the best of conditions."

I intend to keep an eye on this issue, both here and at Nieman Watchdog, with the hope that we'll see more coverage in the future. As you run across stories about federal government competence -- or if you feel like sharing your own observations -- e-mail me at froomkin@washingtonpost.com. And keep an eye on my new "Federal Government Competence Watch" feature as well.

Federal Government Competence Watch

For my inaugural entry, Ellen Nakashima and Brian Krebs write in The Washington Post: "The FBI is investigating a major information technology firm with a $1.7 billion Department of Homeland Security contract after it allegedly failed to detect cyber break-ins traced to a Chinese-language Web site and then tried to cover up its deficiencies, according to congressional investigators."

Who was supposed to be minding that particular store?

Iran Watch

Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball write in Newsweek that "though the United States is now emphasizing sanctions and diplomacy as the means of compelling Tehran to stop enriching uranium, an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities could end up dragging Washington into a war."

I wrote about the ambiguous White House role in Israel's recent bombing raid on suspected nuclear facilities in Syria in Friday's column.

Ephron and Hosenball write: "While the Bush administration appears to have given tacit support to the Syria raid, Israel and the United States are not in lockstep on Iran. For Israel, the next three months may be decisive: either Tehran succumbs to sanctions and stops enriching uranium or it must be dealt with militarily. . . .

"In Washington, on the other hand, the consensus against a strike is firmer than most people realize. The Pentagon worries that another war will break America's already overstretched military, while the intelligence community believes Iran is not yet on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough."

That said, as Ephron and Hosenball note: "There are still voices pushing for firmer action against Tehran, most notably within Vice President Dick Cheney's office. But the steady departure of administration neocons over the past two years has also helped tilt the balance away from war. One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney's Middle East adviser. A spokeswoman at Cheney's office confirmed to Newsweek that Wurmser left his position last month to 'spend more time with his family.' A few months before he quit, according to two knowledgeable sources, Wurmser told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz--and perhaps other sites--in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. The Iranian reaction would then give Washington a pretext to launch strikes against military and nuclear targets in Iran."

That's a shocking and important story and it's getting quite a bit of media pickup today. But it's also old news.

Newsweek gives credit for the original reporting about Wurmser to Washington foreign-policy blogger Steven Clemons-- but suggests that Clemons first wrote about it only last week.

In fact, as I wrote in my June 4 column, Clemons first described Cheney's position in late May, and in early June, Helene Cooper of the New York Times followed up with confirmation, specifically naming Wurmser.

And back in late July, I noted that investigative reporter and blogger Robert Dreyfuss had broken the news of Wurmser's departure.

Attacking Iran -- to Vindicate Iraq?

Via Andrew Sullivan, I find Dan Friedman writing for the American Thinker: "All the damaging consequences of all the blunders the President has committed to date in Iraq are reversible in 48- to 72-hours - the time it will take to destroy Iran's fragile nuclear supply chain from the air. And since the job gets done using mostly stand-off weapons and stealth bombers, not one American soldier, sailor or airman need suffer as much as a bruised foot."

But wouldn't that backfire at least as badly as Iraq? Wouldn't the Iranians strike back?

Not at all, Friedman insists: "They would stand before mankind with their pants around their ankles, dazed, bleeding, crying, reduced to bloviating from mosques in Teheran and pounding their fists on desks at the UN. . . .

"Miracles would be seen here at home. Democratic politicians are dumbstruck, silent for a week. With one swing of his mighty bat, the President has hit a dramatic walk-off homerun. He goes from goat to national hero overnight. The elections in November are a formality. Republicans keep the White House and recapture both houses of Congress."

Yeah, and we will be greeted as liberators

Reality Bases Prophecy: Our solders in Iraq are sitting ducks for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Oil goes for $500/barrel, a nuclear standoff with China and possibly Russia that would make the Cuban Missile crisis look like child's play would ensue and it is anyones guess how long the new cold war would remain cold; another 50 years or 50 minutes.

In Iraq, Has It Come to This?

Josh White and Joshua Partlow write in The Washington Post: "A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of 'bait,' such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents."

In case the horror of this escapes you: "Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined 'quite meticulously' because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

"'In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,' Fidell said."

Not So Fast?

In the Washington Post, Walter Pincus calls attention to several indicators of wiggle room in Army Gen. David H. Petraeus's stated goal of bringing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq back down to 130,000 by July.

Much More Money

Julian E. Barnes writes in Saturday's Los Angeles Times: "After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure -- totaling nearly $200 billion -- to fund the war through next year, Pentagon officials said.

"If Bush's spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war. . . .

"The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $147.5 billion for 2008, but Pentagon officials now say that and $47 billion more will be required. . . .

"When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses are added, the war in Iraq currently costs taxpayers about $12 billion a month, said Winslow T. Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

"'Everybody predicts declines, but they haven't occurred, and 2008 will be higher than 2007,' Wheeler said. 'It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive. Everyone says we are going to turn the corner here, but the corner has not been turned.'"

The Oilman

Richard Wolffe and Gretel C. Kovach write in Newsweek about Jay Hunt's ambiguous role in Iraq. The longtime Bush friend and benefactor's oil company "announced this month that, after secret negotiations, it had struck a deal with leaders in the country's Kurdish-controlled north to explore for oil in the Dahuk region near the Turkish border." The move threatens "to disrupt already fragile talks over a critical benchmark for peace: an agreement among the Sunni, Shiites and Kurds to share profits from the country's bountiful oil supply. . . .

"White House officials may not have helped Hunt put together the deal, but that doesn't mean they're not doing their best to portray Hunt's project as a sign of progress. 'It's positive that a firm would choose to invest in Iraq--whether an American firm or not,' says spokesman Tony Fratto."

But consider this: "At least one top White House official was willing to express some skepticism. Asked by Newsweek about the controversy at last Thursday's news conference, President Bush said, 'I knew nothing about the deal. I need to know exactly how it happened. To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue-sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it, I'm concerned.'"

Mukasey Watch

Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek about some of the conservatives who were summoned to the White House to be won over by Michael Mukasey before Bush announced his nomination as attorney general. Among them: Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo and former A.G. Edwin Meese.

Writes Isikoff: "According to three sources, who asked not to be named discussing the private meetings, Mukasey said that he saw 'significant problems' with shutting down Guant¿namo Bay and that he understood the need for the CIA to use some 'enhanced' interrogation techniques against Qaeda suspects. Mukasey also signaled reluctance with naming a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-administration misconduct, according to one participant. 'Gosh, I'm a little worried that the Democrats might have problems with him,' said one well-connected conservative after being briefed on Mukasey's responses."

Philip Shenon in the New York Times describes Mukasey's cavalier attitude toward the indefinite detention of Arab men after 9/11 -- including one college student who complained of being beaten in the federal detention center in Manhattan.

"As far as the claim that he was beaten, I will tell you that he looks fine to me," Mukasey said of the man whose prison jumpsuit covered the bruises he had across his body.

Writes Shenon: "Although Mr. Mukasey is otherwise widely admired by prosecutors and defense lawyers alike in New York, his handling of the cases of Mr. Awadallah and other material witnesses taken into custody in terrorism investigations after Sept. 11 produced some rare, sharp criticism of his performance on the bench and raised concern among civil liberties groups. Senate Democrats have suggested they will focus on the issue when Mr. Mukasey is questioned at his confirmation hearings."

Richard B. Schmitt and Richard A. Serrano write in the Los Angeles Times that "if confirmed as attorney general, his independent streak could pose problems for President Bush.

"With his reputation already well-established and a gig at the Justice Department expected to last no more than a year or so, Mukasey, at 66, has little to lose. As a result, observers think he'll view his role much differently than did his predecessor as attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, who developed a reputation as a loyal advocate for administration legal positions and policies."

The Los Angeles Times editorial board warns, however, that "the Senate should carefully question even as impressive a candidate as Mukasey about his plans and his philosophy, particularly regarding the legal basis for the war on terror. If that requires postponing a vote until after the recess, so be it."

Budget Watch

Robert Pear writes in the New York Times: "With the new fiscal year just a week away, President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress are far from agreement on the proper level of spending for myriad federal programs, and the two sides have not even begun negotiations to resolve their differences. . . .

"Mr. Bush's public comments suggest he is determined to veto one or more appropriations bills, to highlight what he describes as excessive spending. But neither side has a post-veto strategy.

"Democratic leaders in Congress say they have yet to resolve the most basic strategic question: Should they negotiate with the president or just send him bills reflecting their priorities and wait to see what happens? . . .

"Representative David R. Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee . . . said the differences with Mr. Bush could be easily resolved if the United States were not in the middle of 'that stupid war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the Republic.'

"'The White House is looking for a fight,' Mr. Obey said. 'The president is in trouble across the board, and he's looking for some way to shore up his political base. I think he is trying to reclaim the mantle of fiscal responsibility on the cheap.'"

Here are Bush's brief remarks today about the budget -- and Congress: "If they think that by waiting until just before they leave for the year to send me a bill that is way over budget and thicker than a phone book, if they think that's going to force me to sign it, it's not."

Key Players

William Douglas writes for McClatchy Newspapers that even some of the administration's harshest critics have some nice things to say about White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.

"Since he replaced Andrew Card as chief of staff in March 2006, Bolten, 53, has methodically gone about trying to change how the White House operates and shift its reputation to a place where pragmatism and dissent aren't viewed as disloyalty.

"Even while praising Bolten, critics say he still has a ways to go.

"'I think that the test of a good chief of staff is if the White House is getting its act together and producing policy and getting done what the president wants to do,' said Leon Panetta, who whipped President Bill Clinton's undisciplined first-term administration into shape as his second chief of staff.

"'If you look at that, the results are mixed.'"

Dave Montgomery writes for McClatchy Newspapers about Clay Johnson III, "one of the few remaining members of a Texas cadre that followed Bush from the statehouse in Austin to the White House in Washington.

"As deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Johnson is hardly a staple on the Sunday talk shows. He's always been far less visible than now-departed members of Bush's Texas entourage, such as political guru Karl Rove and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

"But the Fort Worth native's unglamorous title and self-imposed low profile mask what Bush insiders describe as Johnson's influential relationship with the president, built largely on the friendship that started in 1961 at one of the country's most prestigious boarding schools."

Book Watch

Roger Lowenstein writes in the New York Times Book Review: "Five years into the Iraq war, it is hard to remember that George W. Bush once was controversial for something that had nothing to do with terrorism or the Middle East. But in 'The Big Con,' Jonathan Chait reminds us that Bush will also leave an economic legacy, and it is as radical and, he argues, as wrongheaded as anything his administration has managed overseas.

"Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic who writes the magazine's TRB column, argues that a band of ideological zealots succeeded in capturing first the Republican Party and then, by poisoning the political process, Washington itself. Though their true agenda, tax cuts for the rich, was both economically unsound and politically unpopular, Chait writes, Bush and his conservative foot soldiers deceived the public and the press before pushing their policy -- four huge tax cuts in six years, in case you lost count -- on an enfeebled and corrupted Congress. . . .

"Since tax cuts tilted toward the rich were unpopular, George W. Bush and his supporters had to argue that the rich were not in fact the main beneficiaries. Thus, under Bush, dishonesty became 'integral to the Republican economic agenda.' As Chait baldly puts it, 'Lying has become a systematic necessity.' . . .

"Chait is particularly good in describing how the press, wary of seeming partisan, simply reported the claims on each side rather than analyzing them. The problem with this approach, he argues, is that the relationship of the two political parties is no longer symmetric. Democrats do not patrol their ranks for heretics or force them to sign no-tax pledges; liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution are not devoted to a single view of taxes, as is the conservative Heritage Foundation; and liberal newspapers are far more balanced than, say, Fox News. . . .

"[Splitting the difference] is the approach, he ruefully observes, of most of the Washington press corps, and it is one of the secrets of the Republicans' success. Reporters mechanically grope for the 'middle,' but when one party is veering rightward, the middle is, too."

Here is Chait's first chapter.

Bush's Political Prognostication

Peter Baker blogged for washingtonpost.com on Friday that Bush isn't betting against Hillary Clinton: "At an off-the-record lunch a week ago, Bush expressed admiration for her tenacity in the campaign. And he left some in the room with the impression that he thinks she will win the election and has been thinking about how to turn over the country to her.

"The topic came up when Bush invited a group of morning and evening news anchors and Sunday show hosts to join him in the executive mansion's family dining room a few hours before he delivered his nationally televised address on Iraq last week. Bush made no explicit election predictions, according to some in the room, but clearly thought Clinton would win the Democratic nomination and talked in a way that seemed to suggest he expects her to succeed him - and will continue his Iraq policy if she does. . . .

"For a guy who says he doesn't want to dissect the campaign, Bush sounded a little like he was auditioning for a pundit job after his term ends."

The audition continues today. Bill Sammon writes in the Washington Examiner: "President Bush, for the first time, is predicting that Hillary Rodham Clinton will defeat Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries. 'She's got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary,' Bush said in an interview for the new book, The Evangelical President. 'And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated.'"

Bush told Sammon: "I will work to see to it that a Republican wins and therefore don't accept the premise that a Democrat will win. I truly think the Republicans will hold the White House."

And here, from Sammon, is pundit Cheney's view: "The election 'could go either way,' Vice President Dick Cheney told The Examiner in his West Wing office. 'Right now, we're sort of in the area where we're pretty evenly balanced on both sides.'"

Bush's National Guard Service

Eugene Robinson writes in his Washington Post opinion column about Dan Rather's lawsuit against his former bosses at CBS: "Rather's lawsuit gives his account of how he came to report on the since-discontinued '60 Minutes II' that a young George W. Bush not only relied on political connections to get into the Texas Air National Guard -- which allowed him to avoid serving in Vietnam -- but also got special treatment while he served. Bush escaped punishment for infractions and indiscipline that could have landed a less well-connected guardsman in the brig, the story said.

"The story was based in part on a batch of Nixon-era documents. When Internet bloggers noticed that the documents didn't look as if they had been produced by Nixon-era technology -- that in fact they looked as if they might have been written using Microsoft Word software -- the story, and Rather's career, started to fall apart. . . .

"The lawsuit says that Rather still believes the documents are probably genuine. I'm not sure about that -- come on, Dan, they're 'shakier than cafeteria jello' -- but I do think he makes a valid argument about the larger issue: The point of the story, that Bush got kid-gloves treatment while he was avoiding Vietnam in the Air National Guard, didn't rest entirely on the disputed documents. But CBS never tried to defend the story's central thrust. The network backed off, ordered Rather to apologize on the air, eventually fired him as anchor of the 'CBS Evening News,' restricted his airtime on '60 Minutes' and finally let his contract expire."

By contrast, Washington Post editorial-page staffer Charles Lane writes on the very same page that "no one in his right mind would keep insisting that those phony documents are real and that the Bush National Guard story is true."

Movie Night

Ken Herman of Cox News Service, who attended a White House screening of "The Kite Runner" on Sept. 16, resolves the conundrum of whether the event was on or off the record by imagining what such a night might be like:

"The evening might begin with hallway chit-chat that would include extended banter with a former Austinite now living in his dad's former place on Pennsylvania Avenue. A little baseball, a little current events and a lot of artful dancing about whether the next morning would bring an announcement about the selection of a new attorney general. . . .

"[T]hrough luck of the draw, perhaps former presidential aide Karl Rove would be seated directly behind you. And maybe Rove would introduce you to the man seated next to you as 'the most cynical' reporter in the White House press corps. . . .

"And then maybe Rove would evidence his 'inexhaustible good cheer' by kicking the back of your chair throughout the opening credits. . . .

"At one point, there might be the unmistakable sound of the president's trademark chuckle during a part of the movie that did not seem intended to produce chuckles. Might have been a front-row, highly classified inside joke. . . .

"Thanks, you might say to the president, joking that you are looking forward to coming back again next Sunday.

"And maybe he would respond by joking that next week's movie is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"

Freepers at the White House

What does the White House consider a "military support organization"?

Via Americablog, I see that members of the D.C. chapter of Free Republic, a notoriously vitriolic right-wing Web site, were invited to the White House last week for an event where Bush thanked the attendees for their "steadfast resolve," and their "support of those brave souls who have volunteered in the face of the danger."

Cartoon Watch

Signe Wilkinson on Bush's longtime companion.

(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.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Hired Guns, Loose Canons

Coming to a neighborhood near you.

Published on Sunday, September 23, 2007 by The Toronto Sun

by Eric Margolis

Munich - Private armies have a very sinister reputation in Europe.Memories still linger of Germany’s post First World War army veterans, the Stahlhelm, and Nazi Brownshirts, who battled Communist street toughs in Munich and Berlin.

Europeans remember Italy’s fascist Blackshirts and, most recently, Serb neo-fascist gangs like Arkan’s Tigers and the White Eagles who committed some of the worst atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Germany also remains haunted by folk memory of the hordes of blood-crazed mercenaries who turned much of this nation into a wasteland during the savage 30 Years War. The name of the great mercenary captain, Wallenstein, still resounds, and of those most feared mercenaries of all, the ferocious Swiss, who once terrorized Europe.

Wrote Machiavelli: “where there is gold and blood, there are the Swiss.” The Vatican’s Swiss Guard is a faint reminder of the “furia Helvetica.”

Small numbers of mercenaries have been used in many modern wars, from Vietnam to Central America. The most famed modern mercenary force is France’s tough Foreign Legion.

The rise of powerful mercenary armies within the United States, and their use in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an entirely new, deeply disturbing development.

Last weekend, mercenaries from the U.S. firm Blackwater gunned down 11 Iraqi civilians during an attack on a convoy they were guarding. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, ordered Blackwater’s thousands of swaggering mercenaries expelled from Iraq. But his order was quickly countermanded by U.S. occupation authorities.

There are 180,000 to 200,000 U.S.-paid mercenaries in Iraq — or “private contractors” as Washington and the U.S. media delicately call them. They actually outnumber the 169,000 U.S. troops there. Britain pays for another 20,000. At least half are armed fighters, the rest support personnel and technicians. Without them, the U.S. and Britain could not maintain their occupation of Iraq.

These private enterprise fighters, like the Renaissance’s Italian condotierri, German landsknecht, and Swiss pikemen, are lawless, answering to no authority but their employers. Democrats in the U.S. Congress are rightly demanding these trigger-happy Rambos to be at least brought under American military law.

Blackwater

The U.S. State Department now has its own little army in Iraq and Afghanistan of about 3,000 Blackwater gunmen who protect American officials and their local collaborators. Some reports say the State Department has spent $678 million alone with Blackwater since 2003.

Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, is surrounded at all times by 200 American bodyguards, his own people not being trusted to protect their president. Iraq’s U.S.-installed leaders are similarly guarded by U.S. mercenaries.

Nearly all Washington’s contracts for mercenaries are awarded without competitive bidding to firms close to the Republican Party. Blackwater’s owners are major contributors. Their 7,000-acre base in the southern U. S. is likely the world’s largest non-government military operation and a menacing creation straight out of the famous film, Seven Days in May.

This unprecedented use of mercenaries has masked the depths of U.S. involvement in Iraq and clearly shows how little the occupying forces can rely on the locals, whom they supposedly “liberated.” It has also allowed the U.S. to sustain an imperial war that could never have been waged with conscripted American soldiers, as Vietnam showed.

Unleashed

Vice-President Dick Cheney took Vietnam’s lesson to heart by championing use of mercenaries for nasty foreign wars. But democracies should have no business unleashing armies of hired gunmen on the world.

Worse, these private armies hardwired to the Republican Party’s far right are a grave and intolerable danger to the American republic. Congress should outlaw them absolutely. The great Roman Republic held that mandatory military service by all citizens was the basis of democracy, while professional armies were a grave menace.

How ironic that colonial America, which rose up in arms in response to the British crown’s use of brutal German mercenaries, is resorting to the same tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Europe wants no more of private armies. Americans have yet to learn this painful lesson.

Eric Margolis is columnist for the Toronto Sun.

Independent Voters Tilt Democrat

Can't say we didn't tell you so.

So why didn't the GOP know this was happening? Could it be because Karl Rove convinced them that Bush actually won the 2004 election because of a last minute out-pouring of "values-voters?" Patently ridiculous on it's face, this argument doesn't hold water for a number of reasons.

So-called Values Voters did not come out in any last minute surge. Voting to them is a religious duty and the nightmarish corruption among the GOP had not hit the news in the Fall of 2004.

The only party that is really gaining adherents is the (i)ndependent (un)party. The latest generation to gain voting rights are registering independent in huge numbers and the vast majority of them are anti-establishment to varying degrees. They see both major political parties as establishment parties.

Neither major party can count on their loyalty. They are thinking people, anti-ideology and -dogma.

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer

Sun Sep 23, 4:59 AM ET

Michael Brooks is exactly the kind of voter the Republican Party can ill afford to lose. But in a foreboding omen for 2008, it may have already done just that.

The auto parts store worker from St. Charles, Mo., says he used to be a Republican but felt abandoned and is now an independent.

"For some reason or other, they didn't seem to be for the masses anymore," said Brooks, 59, citing a lack of help for middle-income earners. He said he voted for George W. Bush in 2000, thinking the Republican was "more middle of the road, for the people. Obviously I was incorrect."

Brooks is not alone. From coast to coast, independent voters tilt tellingly toward Democrats in their opposition to the Iraq war, their displeasure with Bush and their feeling that the country is moving in the wrong direction, according to data from recent Associated Press-Ipsos polls.

That could be decisive in next year's contests for the White House and Congress, starting with the crucial early presidential primaries in New Hampshire.

The portion of that state's registered voters not enrolled in a political party has grown to 44 percent. While people can vote in either major party's primary, more are expected to choose the Democratic contest. That potentially would boost antiestablishment candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., while leaving the GOP race more in the hands of the party's traditional conservative voters.

National exit polls show that after leaning toward Republicans by 48 percent to 45 percent as recently as the 2002 elections, independents began shifting toward Democrats.

"This is a serious problem" for Republicans, says GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. "We didn't get where we are among independents overnight. The data does suggest that it's going to take us some time to earn those votes back."

Cheney Mulled Conspiring With Israel To Launch Strikes Against Iran

We reported this several months back. It was also reported in the Washington Post and at Antiwar.com. We wondered, at the time, if this Cheney/Israel conspiracy was with or without Junior's knowledge.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney had at one point considered asking Israel to launch limited missile strikes at an Iranian nuclear site to provoke a retaliation, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday.

The news comes amid reports that Israel launched an air strike against Syria this month over a suspected nuclear site.

Citing two unidentified sources, Newsweek said former Cheney Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group several months ago that Cheney was considering asking Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

A military response by Iran could give Washington an excuse to then launch airstrikes of its own, Newsweek said.

Wurmser's wife, Meyrav Wurmser of the neoconservative Hudson Institute think tank, told Newsweek the claims were untrue.

Wurmser left Cheney's office last month, the magazine reported. The steady departure of neoconservative hawks from the administration has also helped tilt the balance against war, it said.

Washington has been pursuing diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear program. It has refused to take military options off the table, even U.S. resources are taxed by having 169,000 troops in Iraq.

Although some intelligence sources say Iran is years away from nuclear capability, Israel believes that military action may be necessary as early as 2008, Newsweek said.

Israel has declined to comment on the reported air strike, while Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear aid and said it could retaliate for the September 6 violation of its territory.

Reuters

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

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Students and Faculty Protest At Stanford

Seems to me the solution is rather simple. If the faculty and students of Stanford don't want Rumsfeld's name associated with their University, Stanford should disassociate itself from the Hoover Institute and ask them to leave the campus. I realize that sounds a bit harsh, until one realizes that Rumsfeld is a known war criminal.

More than 2,600 faculty and students at Stanford University have signed an online petition to protest the appointment of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a distinguished fellow to the university's Hoover Institution, the latest in a string of campus controversies that involve high-profile names and questions about ethics, free speech and political partisanship.

This week alone, there were three such incidents. Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University who was criticized for questioning whether women have the same innate abilities as men in science and math, was replaced as a speaker at a UC Board of Regents dinner after 300 people from the university system signed a petition.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a prominent liberal commentator and expert on constitutional law, saw his job offer revoked after he wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times questioning the death penalty.

And pundits debated whether it is appropriate for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address American college students at Columbia University during his visit to New York.

The Rumsfeld appointment is being protested by Stanford faculty, staff, students and alumni who do not want the university's name associated with an architect of the Iraq war.

"We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested enquiry, respect for national and international laws and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed," the petition reads.

"This is an appointment that trades on the prestige of the name of Stanford University," said Pamela Lee, an art history professor who created the petition two weeks ago. "The petition is meant as a signal to the rest of the world that Donald Rumsfeld and Hoover do not represent the overall Stanford community."

The think tank, which is dedicated to research in domestic policy and international affairs, has a history of appointing outgoing members of Republican administrations, such as George Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. The institution has its own endowment and operates free from university oversight, a fact that rankles Lee and other faculty.

"If this were a transparent process that involved all of us, the whole university," Lee said, "then we could have an open dialogue about it. As it is, they do what they want, and get the name 'Stanford.' "

Fellows and administrators from the Hoover Institution did not return phone calls on Friday, but John Raisian, the institution's director, told the New York Times he had appointed Rumsfeld, "...because he has three decades of experience, of incredible public service, especially in recent years as it relates to this question of ideology and terror."

Rumsfeld will join a task force on ideology and terrorism that includes Shultz; he will visit the campus three to five times to advise the panel.

Tom Wasow, who signed the petition and is chairman of the linguistics department, said he is happy to invite people he disagrees with to campus for debates. Yet the former secretary of defense won't be engaging with faculty or students through lectures or public conversations, he said.

"They are bestowing honor on a person many of us think brought a great deal of dishonor to this country," Wasow said.

The Rumsfeld protest is similar to recent academic debates making headlines, said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, in that it reflects a shifting tone on campus "from tolerance to intolerance.""There's an idea on college campuses now that wasn't there in the '70s, that if you don't clamp down on speech that's not agreed upon, then the university isn't doing enough to protect you," he said. "And somehow, the university is part of the problem."

Roger Kimball, author of "Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education," said the Rumsfeld controversy is an example of the way liberals have overtaken college faculties since the '60s.

"What's happened on college campuses is that the faculty likes to proclaim 'diversity,' which really means strict intellectual conformity on any contentious social or moral issue," Kimball said.

Kimball said the Hoover Institution's full title - the Hoover Institution, War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University - is the ideal place for the former secretary of defense.

"Here's a man who obviously has insight into what the institution is dedicated to," Kimball said. "What better person to appoint than a Donald Rumsfeld?"

Lee said the Rumsfeld appointment crystallized an issue for faculty members: distinguishing the goals and hiring methods of the university and those of Hoover.

"We need to determine what the relationship is between the university and institution," Lee said. "Either we need to integrate the institution into the university, or it needs to become more independent."

E-mail Justin Berton at jberton@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The Fall of The Godmongers

I remember the old adage, one of my grandfather's favorites; give a fool enough rope and he will surely hang himself.

That is precisely what has happened with the crusading-crackpots of the christian-right. Nevertheless, I can't find it in me to rejoice just yet. They have done so much damage in the last 20 some-odd years, it will take several generations to clean up the mess

Their religiously insane preznit still has his finger on the button. Therefore, though they will surely go down in flames in America, we may all go with them, worldwide if the idiot emperor does what he has said he must, nuke Iran.

We are far from out of the woods yet.

The end of evangelical rule in America, praise Jesus

By Mark Morford

Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.

Because indeed, you've got your wonderful and ever-accelerating green movement, your lovely mixed-blessing organic food movement and your rejuvenated attention to solar power and sustainable buildings and organic cotton and fair-trade coffee and clean energy and CFLs and urban recycling and sleek gorgeous modern vibrator design to make hip women of the world swoon.

We've got urban smoking bans and Smart cars and women finally rising to the most powerful positions in the land. We've even got an increasing awareness (BushCo, the Middle East, and China gruesomely excepted) of industrial pollution and global warming, all maybe indicating a subtle but still profound shift away from traditional modes of waste and war and our everlasting thirst for death and all possibly pointing to a happy delicious karmic sea change toward light and health and love for all beings everywhere for all time, as the butterflies and bunnies and birds all hum and smile and sing. Mmm, utopian.

But wait, why stop there? While we're wearing these swell rose-colored glasses of momentary progressive bliss, let us go one big step further.

Because right now, there is perhaps no greater item we as a struggling human ant farm can be grateful for, no single social emetic we can look to for inspiration or hope or a happy tingly sensation in our collective groinal region indicating a possible move away from our long-standing Dick-Cheney-in-hell attitude of shrill bleakness, alarmism and religious righteousness than the simply wonderful implosion of the evangelical Christian right that's happening right now in America.

Do you know this clenched and panicky group? Of course you do. They're the throngs of megachurch lemmings Karl Rove masterfully manipulated and rallied and whored to Bush's very narrow advantage in two elections.

They're the ones who've made all the headlines and influenced all sorts of laws and national policy changes lo, this past half-decade concerning everything from stem cell research to gay marriage to evolution, sanitized school textbooks to failed abstinence programs to RU-486 restrictions to silly anti-science rhetoric, the ones who gasped in horror at a woman's bare nipple and made a disgusting mockery of Terri Schiavo and actually applauded when John Ashcroft spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to throw some heavy drapery over the shamefully exposed breasts of the bronze (female) Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice. And so on.

They are, in short, responsible for a great many of the most notable social and intellectual embarrassments in America since the new millennium took hold, and rest assured, we and the rest of the civilized world shall recall their bleak accomplishments for much of our natural born lives, and shudder.

Now then, your evidence of a new hope? Your reason for rejoicing? Right here: It seems the remaining core of politicized evangelicals, far from realizing its diminished influence and far from realizing the GOP has largely imploded and far from sensing, therefore, that it might perhaps be time to dial down some of its more unpopular, virulent agenda items, this group is actually aiming to step up its dogmatic demands from various GOP candidates this next election.

That's right. They want more. Or rather, less.

Apparently, Bush's GOP has let them down. They have not been content with BushCo's anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-sex, pro-abstinence, anti-women, anti-science, pro-war, God-hates-Islam stance, nor have they been content with having their trembling hands around the throat of the preceding Republican Congress for half a decade and clearly they have been insufficiently humiliated by the happy slew of right-wing preachers and politicians who've been revealed as meth-loving, restroom-lurking, boy-fetishizing gay hypocrites.

According to the new plan, any current GOP candidate who now wants the valuable evangelical vote will have to prove himself not merely guided by conformist religious zealotry in all things (Hi, Mitt!), but will have to prove his unflappable support for the GOP stance in key issues across the evangelical board, primarily regarding the Big Duo: abortion rights and gay rights. Or, more specifically, the total annihilation of both.

Do you see? This is exactly why we can now rejoice. Because this is the delightful thing about the fundamentalist worldview (and, for that matter just about any strict religious worldview you can name), the thing that absolutely and forever guarantees its frequent and eventual downfall: It can never be sated.

It's true. No matter how clamped down we as a culture become, no matter how much misinterpreted Biblical dogma we're forced to swallow, no matter how many insidious laws are passed limiting behaviors and restricting independent thought and repressing sexuality and banning dildos in Texas, it will never be enough.

And why? Because the fundamentalist mind-set is not so much a firm and rational set of beliefs based on thoughtful interpretation of strict Biblical screed as it is, well, a paranoid wallowing in fear. Fear of the Other, fear of change, of progress, of the new and different and young and the sexual and the truly spiritual. And as we all know from almost seven years of Bush, fear knows no reason. It knows no stability. Fear is simply insatiable, voracious, and about as un-Godlike as Jesus with a machine gun.

But let's not get carried away. Make no mistake, tremendous damage has indeed been done. After all, this last batch of hotly politicized evangelicals that just passed through our nation like a giant kidney stone enjoyed one hell of a run, and much of what they accomplished will be felt for years and decades to come. The Supreme Court, by way of just one example, has now been so front-loaded with righteous misogynists, we've already lost great hunks of women's rights, environmental protections and many of the cornerstones of America's moral foundation.

Truly, the evangelical movement is still a significant enough threat, at least regionally, in areas where its megachurches still wield tremendous power and where cultural conservatism has held sway for decades and where the laws are already so misogynistic and homophobic and backwards we might as well lump them all into one giant state and call it Alabama.

But then again, the cheerful upside is tough to resist. Jerry Falwell is dead. Pat Robertson is so politically dead he's become nothing more than a sad punch line, a guy who makes the devil himself smile every time he opens his "gays-caused-9/11" mouth. Then there's the truly spectacular list of scandals and meltdowns and moral collapses that have befallen the "family values" party. Indeed, while cultural conservatives have certainly won a few nasty battles (and they'll doubtlessly win a few more), they're very much losing the war.

But when you come right down to it, the Great Truism has been validated once again: Righteous fundamentalism, be it Christian, Islamic, or otherwise, has the seeds of its own destruction built right into its very framework, a priori and de facto and by default. Powered by the deeply joyless engines of fear and shame, it can never quench its own impotent desires.

And for that, we can all praise Jesus indeed.

Mercinaries Putting Troops At Risk. Where Is Congress?

Where the hell is Congress while these sociopaths are running loose in Iraq and god only knows where all else?

Want to stop the war? Stop funding these idiots!

Published on Saturday, September 22, 2007 by The Nation

Blackwater: Hired Guns, Above the Law

by Jeremy Scahill

This is an edited transcript of the prepared testimony of Jeremy Scahill before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, September 21, 2007.

My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine and the author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I have spent the better part of the past several years researching the phenomenon of privatized warfare and the increasing involvement of the private sector in the support and waging of US wars. During the course of my investigations, I have interviewed scores of sources, filed many Freedom of Information Act requests, obtained government contracts and private company documents of firms operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. When asked, I have attempted to share the results of my investigations, including documents obtained through FOIA and other processes, with members of Congress and other journalists.

I would like to thank this committee for the opportunity to be here today and for taking on this very serious issue. Over the past six days, we have all been following very closely the developments out of Baghdad in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of as many as 20 Iraqis by operatives working for the private military company Blackwater USA. The Iraqi government is alleging that among the dead are a small child and her parents and the prime minister has labeled Blackwater’s conduct as “criminal” and spoke of “the killing of our citizens in cold blood.” While details remain murky and subject to conflicting versions of what exactly happened, this situation cuts much deeper than this horrifying incident. The stakes are very high for the Bush administration because the company involved, Blackwater USA, is not just any company. It is the premiere firm protecting senior State Department officials in Iraq, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This company has been active in Iraq since the early days of the occupation when it was awarded an initial $27 million no-bid contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer. During its time in Iraq, Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights and other deadly incidents. About 30 of its operatives have been killed in Iraq and these deaths are not included in the official American death toll.

While the company’s operatives are indeed soldiers of fortune, their salaries are paid through hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxpayer funds allocated to Blackwater. What they do in Iraq is done in the name of the American people and yet there has been no effective oversight of Blackwater’s activities and actions. And there has been absolutely no prosecution of its forces for any crimes committed against Iraqis. If indeed Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater USA last Sunday, as appears to be the case, culpability for these actions does not only lie with the individuals who committed the killings or with Blackwater as a company, but also with the entity that hired them and allowed them to operate heavily-armed inside Iraq–in this case, the US State Department.

While the headlines of the past week have been focused on the fatal shootings last Sunday, this was by no means an isolated incident. Nor is this is simply about a rogue company or rogue operators. This is about a system of unaccountable and out of control private forces that have turned Iraq into a wild west from the very beginning of the occupation, often with the stamp of legitimacy of the US government.

What happened Sunday is part of a deadly pattern, not just of Blackwater USA’s conduct, but of the army of mercenaries that have descended on Iraq over the past four years. They have acted like cowboys, running Iraqis off the road, firing indiscriminately at vehicles and, in some cases, private forces have appeared on tape seemingly using Iraqis for target practice. They have shown little regard for Iraqi lives and have fueled the violence in that country, not just against the people of Iraq but also against the official soldiers of the United States military in the form of blowback and revenge attacks stemming from contractor misconduct. These private forces have operated in a climate where impunity and immunity have gone hand in hand.

Active duty soldiers who commit crimes or acts of misconduct are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court martial system. There have been scores of prosecutions of soldiers– some 64 courts martial on murder-related charges in Iraq alone. That has not been the case with these private forces. Despite many reports–some from US military commanders–of private contractors firing indiscriminately at Iraqis and vehicles and killing civilians, not a single armed contractor has been charged with any crime. They have not been prosecuted under US civilian law; US military law and the Bush administration banned the Iraqi government from prosecuting them in Iraqi courts beginning with the passage of Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17 in 2004. The message this sends to the Iraqi people is that these hired guns are above any law.

US contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” That should be chilling to everyone who believes in transparency and accountability of US operations and taxpayer funded activities– not to mention the human rights of the Iraqis who have fallen victim to these incidents and have been robbed of any semblance of justice.

The Iraqi government says it has evidence of seven deadly incidents involving Blackwater. It is essential that the Congress request information on these incidents from the Iraqi authorities. What we do know is that in just the past nine months, Blackwater forces have been involved with several fatal actions. Last Christmas Eve, as Katy mentioned, an off-duty Blackwater contractor allegedly killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi Vice President. Blackwater whisked that individual out of the country. Iraqi officials labeled the killing a “murder” and have questioned privately as to why there has apparently been no consequences for that individual. Blackwater says it fired the individual and is cooperating with the US Justice Department. To my knowledge no charges have yet been brought in that case.

This past May, Blackwater operatives engaged in a gun battle in Baghdad, lasting an hour, that drew in both US military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. The very next day in almost the same neighborhood, the company’s operatives reportedly shot and killed an Iraqi driver near the Interior Ministry. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater guards reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between American and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles.

The actions of this one company, perhaps more than any other private actor in the occupation, have consistently resulted in escalated tension and more death and destruction in Iraq–from the siege of Fallujah, sparked by the ambush of its men there in March of 2004, to Blackwater forces shooting at Iraqis in Najaf with one Blackwater operative filmed on tape saying it was like a “turkey shoot” to the deadly events of the past week.

Colonel Thomas Hammes, the US military official once overseeing the creation of a new Iraqi military, has described driving around Iraq with Iraqis and encountering Blackwater operatives. “[They] were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated,” Hammes said. But, he added, “they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.” Hammes concluded the contractors were ” hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”

Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division said of private security contractors, “These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force…. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place.” Horst tracked contractor conduct for a two month period in Baghdad and documented at least a dozen shootings of Iraqi civilians by contractors, resulting in six Iraqi deaths and the wounding of three others. That is just one General in one area of Iraq in just 60 days.

The conduct of these private forces sends a clear message to the Iraqi people: American lives are worth infinitely more than theirs, even if their only crime is driving their vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time. One could say that Blackwater has been very successful at fulfilling its mission–to keep alive senior US officials. But at what price?

It is long past due for the actions of Blackwater USA and the other private military firms operating in Iraq–actions carried out in the names of the American people and with US tax dollars–to be carefully and thoroughly investigated by the US Congress. For the Iraqi people, this is a matter of life, and far too often, death. In the bigger picture, this body should seriously question whether the linking of corporate profits to war making is in the best interests of this nation and the world. I would humbly submit that the chairs of relevant committees in both the House and Senate use their power of subpoena to compel the heads of the major war contracting companies operating on the US payroll in Iraq to appear publicly before the American people and answer for the actions of their forces. I am prepared to answer any questions.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

American Mercinaries and Massa's Oil Plantation

Published on Saturday, September 22, 2007 by The Nation

Blackwater, Oil and the Colonial Enterprise

by John Nichols

Blackwater USA’s mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this week, and rightly so. The private military contractor’s war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a big “perhaps,” Blackwater’s “troops” could come home before the U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense of these international rent-a-cops.

But it is not the specific story of Blackwater that matters so much as the broader story of imperial excess that it illustrates.

If Blackwater, with an assist from the U.S. government, beats back the attempt by the Iraqis to regulate the firm’s activities — as now appears likely, considering Friday’s reports that the firm has resumed guarding U.S. State Department convoys in Baghdad — we will have all the confirmation that is needed of the great truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: This is a colonial endeavor no different than that of the British Empire against America’s founding generation revolted.

But even if Blackwater loses its fight to stay, even if the corporation is forced to shut down its multi-billion dollar, U.S. Treasury-funded operation in Iraq, the brief “accountability moment” may not be sufficient to open up the necessary debate about Iraq’s colonial status. The danger, for Iraq and the United States, that honest assessment of the crisis will lose out to face-saving gestures designed to foster the fantasy of Iraqi independence.

It is not enough that Blackwater is shamed and perhaps sanctioned. A Blackwater exit from Iraq will mean little if its mercenary contracts are merely taken over by one or more of the 140 other U.S.-sanctioned private security firms operating in that country — such as Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

Whatever the precise play out of this Blackwater moment may be, the likelihood is that the colonial enterprise will continue. That’s because, in the absence of intense pressure from grassroots activists and the media, Congress is unlikely to go beyond a scratch at the surface of what is actually going on in Iraq.

The deeper discussion requires that a discussion about the substance that no less a figure than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan describes as the reason for the invasion and occupation of this particular Middle Eastern land: oil

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed that “colonialism was made for domination and for exploitation,” and there is no substance that the Bush-Cheney administration is more interested in dominating and exploiting than oil.

Thus, while it is right to pay close attention to the emerging discussion about Blackwater’s wicked work in Iraq, Americans would do well to pay an equal measure of attention to the still largely submerged discussion about an Iraqi oil deal that will pay huge benefits to the Hunt Oil Company, a Texas firm closely linked to the administration. How closely? When he was running Halliburton, Cheney invited Hunt Oil Company CEO Ray Hunt to serve on the firm’s board of directors. Hunt, a “Bush Pioneer” fund raiser donated the tidy sum of $35 million to the Bush presidential library building fund.

The new “production sharing agreement” between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government puts one of the administration’s favorite firms in a position to reap immeasurable profits while undermining essential efforts to assure that Iraq’s oil revenues will be shared by all Iraqis. Hunt’s deal upsets hopes that Iraq’s mineral wealth might ultimately be a source of stability, replacing the promise of economic equity with the prospect of a black-gold rush that will only widen inequalities and heighten ethnic and regional resentments.

The Hunt deal is so sleazy — and so at odds with the stated goals of the Iraqi government and the U.S. regarding the sharing of oil revenues — that even Bush has acknowledged that U.S. embassy officials in Baghdad are deeply concerned about it. What Bush and Cheney have been slow to mention is the fact that Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, says the deal is illegal.

As with the Blackwater imbroglio, however, there is no assurance that the stance of the Iraqi government is definitional with regard to what happens in Iraq.

That is why it is disturbing that, for the most part, members of Congress — even members who say they do not want the United States to have a long-term presence in Iraq — have been slow to start talking about Hunt’s oil rigging.

One House member who has raised the alarm is Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who in his capacity as a key member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked the committee’s chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to launch an investigation into the Hunt Oil deal.

“As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,” Kucinich, who is mounting an anti-war bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared on the floor of the House this week. “The Bush Administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up control of their oil. We have no right to set preconditions to Iraq which lead Iraq to giving up control of their oil. The Constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property for all Iraqi people.”

With that in mind, Kucinich explains, “I am calling for a Congressional investigation to determine the role the Administration may have played in the Hunt-Kurdistan deal, the effect the deal will have on the oil revenue sharing plan and the attempt by the Administration to privatize Iraqi oil.”

Waxman has been ahead of the curve on Blackwater, seeking testimony from the firm’s chairman at hearings scheduled for early October.

But Waxman needs to expand his focus, and the way to do that is by heeding Kucinich’s call for an investigation into the Hunt deal.

That inquiry should begin with two fundamental questions:

Who runs Iraq — the Iraqis or their colonial overlords in Washington?

And, if the claim is that the Iraqis are in charge, then why is Ray Hunt about to start steering revenues from that country’s immense oil wealth into the same Texas bank accounts that have so generously funded the campaigns of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Bush's Final Solution

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Bush's "Final Solution" or Why Bush Will Nuke Iran

Bush's plan for a "Final Solution" were revealed by Bush himself in off the cuff remarks that he made to former French President Jacques Chirac. Bush's speeches have always been "apocalyptic". It's not surprising that Bush would find in biblical "prophecy" a role that in his delusional state, he sees himself playing out. Unlike Hitler's Final Solution, the Bush version is lifted right out of the Old and the New Testaments. It's an apocalyptic vision of a final battle, a "final solution" in the Middle East.

Of course it's all psychotic but tell that to Bush and his religious minions who accept it as "the" Gospel. Don't forget --Bush has threatened the hard rain of nukes to trigger it all.

Added: Sept. 19th, 2007 6:30 AM

In 2003, University of Lausanne theology professor Thomas Römer received a telephone call from the Elysée. Jacques Chirac's advisers wanted to know more about Gog and Magog ... two mysterious names pronounced by George W. Bush while he was attempting to convince France to enter the war in Iraq at his side. In its September edition, the University of Lausanne's review, Allez savoir, reveals this story that could seem fantastic did it not, as Allez savoir's Editor-in-Chief Jocelyn Rochat emphasizes, reveal the religious underpinnings of Bush's policy.

Apocalyptic prophecy: Bush would have declared to Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and that the Biblical prophecies were in the process of being fulfilled. That was several weeks before the intervention in Iraq. The French president, to whom the names of Gog and Magog meant nothing, was stupefied.

In Allez savoir, Thomas Römer details: Gog and Magog are two creatures who appear in Genesis, and especially in the most arcane chapters of the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. An apocalyptic prophecy of a global army giving final battle in Israel.

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins," continues Thomas Römer.

According to him, George W. Bush is not the first to look for an incarnation of Gog and Magog on earth. Ronald Reagan had deemed that the cold war and the atomic bomb's existence made Ezekiel's prophecy realizable....

If today the University of Lausanne reveals these explanations Thomas Römer supplied to Jacques Chirac, it's because the latter has left the Elysée. For Jocelyn Rochat, this little international policy professional secret raises a vast question: our lack of religious education, our ignorance of Scriptures at a time when religious foundations are far more crucial than we'd like to believe in political and military decisions. Religion is not confined to the private sphere, Jocelyn Rochat concludes. A parameter to take into account "at the risk of no longer understanding the way the world works today."
A Little Scoop on Bush, Chirac, Gog, Magog, and the End of the World
--A Little Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog, Jacques Sterchi, Rue89 in partnership with La Liberté, Fribourg

What does all this mean? Bush either fancies himself the Messiah or, possibly, Satan Incarnate whose mission is to deceive all the nations of the world to begin the last war --Armageddon, a Final Solution.

It is not unusual for those suffering profound psychosis to cast themselves in "biblical" roles. Bush will play out a script in which he uses the peoples of the world as pawns. Based upon his remarks to Chirac, we may reasonably conclude that his script is found in Revelation 20:1-10

And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time. I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection.

Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth--Gog and Magog--to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God's people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.

And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

--Revelation 20:1-10

Bush has said that he will not be "cowed" by international pressures and opinions denouncing his plans to wage pre-emptive, nuclear war on Iran. Certainly Bush has made the bald faced lie his modus operandi. Nevertheless, when Bush often tells the truth inadvertently, it always lays bare a murderous cretin, contemptuous of intelligence, desirous of absolute power for the ego strokes it gets him. Such moments include the ridicule he heaped upon Karla Faye Tucker, awaiting death by injection in a cell on death row deep inside the gulag state of Texas. Such moments include his revelatory quip: "I just won the trifecta!" Equally repugnant his "plans" for America: "This would be a whole lot easier if this was a dictatorship...jest as long as I'm the dictator!"

I am quite certain that what is denied in public is discussed in private. What is obvious to anyone certainly cannot be a mystery to the elites. Now we might imagine it's Nero all over again, at least the Nero of popular myth who "fiddled while Rome burned". But these grey-faced, grey-suited, somber, soured souls are not hedonists nor are they acting like Hitler's cronies in the Berlin bunker. They aren't looking to solutions and they aren't going out with one last party. To my mind that leaves only one possible scenario.

They know what's coming and they don't care because they don't intend for most of us to survive. Reduce the population by 90-95% and none of this makes any difference. There's plenty of oil, plenty of places on the planet to move to, even if the coastlines of the continents are under water. Things start to look much different if you imagine a world of at most a few hundred million. Quite honestly, as far as I can see, that's the only future in which what's going down right now can end well for anyone.

In that context the aggregation of wealth and power become paramount. It's like the back end of a poker tournament. Wars become very useful in a variety of ways. They help the population reduction. They distract the masses. They provide tangible "enemies" while masking the common enemy. They inure people to all sorts of cruelty and inhumanity. And they garner chips so that the winners have more clout in the competition between elites after the die-off begins.

If I were a member of the elites, and possessed that sense of innate superiority and lack of compassion and morality that mark those who are visible members, it's what I'd do. It just makes sense. And it's already begun in Africa and elsewhere.

Of course, it's totally unnecessary, but the alternatives are as unthinkable to the elites as this idea is to most of us. There is a path to a sustainable economy but it involves massive decentralization and localization. It collapses the corporations, destroys the elites, and creates a world in which there are neither rich nor poor. It's what some of us call the better world, Possible. But it's anathema to fat cats and the power brokers. ...
--Len Harrison

It's easy enough to believe its true. It's in Bush's make up. Bush does tell the truth inadvertently and when he does so, it reveals hideous truths about the dark soul he sold long, long ago. About, Iran, we may believe the indications that have now put the leaders of Europe on quiet alert. Bush plans a nuclear strike on Iran.

Everything in its place. Bush, upon his whim and order, may simply drop the nukes on Iran. We may awaken one day to the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. We might brace ourselves for yet another holocaust as a result.

Bush may seem incomprehensible to sane people but that's because Bush is insane. If you suspend normal modes of thought and, for a moment, indulge the psychotic fantasies that obviously rule Bush's life, his modus operandi all begins to make sense.

Existentialist Cowboy

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