Goopers are busy selling myths, again.

Seems the media is willing to go along, again.

Suggested Action: E-bomb Blitzer at CNN for allowing Romney to get by with the Big Lie.

By Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and radio personality Jay Diamond are right to wonder why Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney got away with rewriting a key chapter of the Iraq War history without political reporters raising a peep.

At the June 5 Republican debate, co-sponsored by CNN, Romney defended George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons inspectors in to search for WMD.

If Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” the war might have been averted, the former Massachusetts governor said.

But the reality is that Hussein did open up his country through the fall and winter of 2002-03, giving Hans Blix and his U.N. inspection team free rein to check out suspected WMD sites. It was President Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors out in March 2003 so his invasion could proceed.

The answer to the media question of why the U.S. press corps didn’t object to Romney’s bogus account is that Washington journalists have accepted this revisionist history since Bush began lying about the facts in July 2003.

On July 14, 2003, as the U.S.-led WMD search was coming up empty and only four months after Bush pushed the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq, he began asserting that Hussein had never let the inspectors in.

Bush told reporters:

“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”
Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie in varied forms over the next four years as part of his public litany for defending the invasion.
On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”


Color of Truth

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the color of truth.

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

Only two weeks ago, at a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledges the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing. [For more on Bush's Iraq War deceptions, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Killer Talking Points.”]

Prominent Washington journalists have even repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But he did so in the real history, not in the faux reality that now governs Washington.


‘Big Lie’

This strategy of repeating a “big lie” often enough to make it sound true was famously described in the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels during World War II. However, given the relatively free U.S. press, many Americans felt they were protected from “big lie” techniques, counting on journalists to call lying politicians to account.

But that clearly is no longer the case – and hasn’t been for some time. Facing career pressure from well-organized right-wing attack groups, American journalists act more like triangulating politicians, fearful of accusations of “liberal bias” or unpatriotic behavior or softness on terrorism.

To have challenged George W. Bush in July 2003 – when he was near the height of his popularity and to do so in a way that might be interpreted as defending Saddam Hussein – would have looked like career suicide to many American reporters.

So, discretion – or in this case the acceptance of a lie as truth – was the better part of valor. And once the lie was repeated enough, it would have sounded odd to suddenly start challenging what had become the official version of reality. It was the smarter choice to stay silent and avoid certain punishment from Bush’s defenders.

Clever journalists know that it’s much safer to bash someone like, say, Al Gore. There’s virtually no career downside to do that. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The New Assault on Al Gore.”]

Now, the bogus history of Saddam Hussein barring the U.N. inspectors has been passed down to a new political generation and surely is believed by millions of Americans who will be called on to evaluate this latest cast of aspiring presidential hopefuls.

To state the obvious, this is not the way a healthy democracy should work.


Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.


(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.

Time of showdown hangs over us....

.....Like the sword of Damacles.

Courage.


WHAT IS "THE PROGRAM"? Those of you who have followed some of the convoluted tale of what we know about the NSA eavesdropping and datamining "Program," know that nothing could be more important beginning to get at the truth of what it is and isn't than issuing subpoenas.

There's no other way, the administration has made entirely clear. That's why this is really good news:

Senior House Democrats threatened Thursday to issue subpoenas to obtain secret legal opinions and other documents from the Justice Department related to the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program.

If the Democrats take that step, it would mark the most aggressive action yet by Congress in its oversight of the wiretapping program and could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers. Absolutely right.

The subpoena threat came after a senior Justice Department official told a House judiciary subcommittee on Thursday that the department would not turn over the documents because of their confidential nature. But the official, Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, did not assert executive privilege during the hearing.

Why is this so crucial?

[...] At the same time, the Bush administration is seeking new legislation to expand its wiretapping powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have argued that they do not want to vote on the issue without first seeing the administration’s legal opinions on the wiretapping program.“How can we begin to consider FISA legislation when we don’t know what they are doing?” asked Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, who heads the subcommittee. That's why.

No, the public doesn't need to know every technical detail of what the NSA has been doing, to rebut the inevitable claim: but our legislators need to be able to clearly understand what the program entails, and to help determine what information can be made publically available that will allow the public the best information necessary to determine if it's an appropriate program, while not giving away an inappropriate technical details. And to do that, our legislators have to be able to, as Jerrold Nadler says, know what they [the NSA and the administration] are doing; that's Congress' role.

You can't oversight what you can't sight. So what's going to happen? Some opinions:

[...] On May 17, after Mr. Comey’s testimony, Mr. Nadler and Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, who is the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales requesting copies of Justice Department legal opinions used to support the N.S.A. wiretapping program, as well as later documents written by top Justice Department officials that raised questions about the program’s legality in 2004. The letter also asked Mr. Gonzales to provide his own description of the 2004 confrontation.

Mr. Conyers said he had not received a response from the Justice Department. “We’re going to give him two more weeks, and then, as somebody said, it’s about time process kicks in somewhere around here,” Mr. Conyers said.

In an interview after the subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Mr. Bradbury said his refusal to provide the documents was not the final word from the Justice Department on the matter.

But Mr. Nadler made it clear that he did not expect the administration to comply and said he thought he would soon have to push for subpoenas. Bush supporters will predictably object, because it will help Teh Terrorists, infringe on the Leader's power, etc. This will be another political fight: keep an eye out. Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5.ADDENDUM, 5/8/07, 12:19 a.m.:

I should note that the news on habeas corpus is even more cheering:

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an important bill to restore habeas corpus, the sacrosanct Constitutional right to challenge government detention in court, by a vote of eleven to eight.Habeas corpus was revoked by last year's Military Commissions Act, which has been assailed as unconstitutional and un-American by leaders across the political spectrum. Today's habeas bill was backed by the Judiciary Committee's Democratic Chairman, Patrick Leahy, and its Republican Ranking Member, Arlen Specter.

"The drive to restore this fundamental right has come from both sides of the aisle," said Sharon Bradford, an attorney at the bipartisan Constitution Project, in response to today's vote.

"Restoring America's commitment to the rule of law is not a partisan cause; it is a patriotic one," she added.

Just so. Who would have thought we'd have to argue to get back to the basic principles of Magna Carta?

Now to get it the rest of the way through Congress.

(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.

Middle East Meltdown - U.S. Middle-class- meltdown

Not a good strategy for attracting loyalty, within the vast electorate of this country, let alone any other.

Are the Bushites just ignorant and incompetent, greedy corporatist Americans or traitors?

by Justin Raimondo

As the situation on the ground in Iraq veers out of control, the rest of the Middle East is coming undone – a state of affairs directly attributable to our policy of "regime change" throughout the region.


On the western front, Lebanon is teetering on the brink of (yet another) civil war, with the very forces we have been backing covertly – al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni radicals – in a stand-off with the (U.S.-allied) government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. With the Americans, the French, and assorted Euro-types standing behind them, the busybodies over at the UN – supposedly the world's major force for "peace" – have engineered a scenario whereby the Syrians and their Lebanese allies are being blamed for an assassination so mired in murk and mystery that it would take Sherlock Holmes on steroids to unravel it – and certainly the UN "investigation" has done nothing to solve this whodunit. The outcome is likely to be a UN-sponsored intervention that will be little more than a fig-leaf for American (and Israeli) meddling in the internal affairs of a supposedly sovereign nation – and, perhaps, a confrontation with Iran, which supports the nationalist-Shi'ite Hezbollah.

Also on the western front: the Turks have launched what is to all intents and purposes an invasion of Kurdistan, sending thousands of troops into a region effectively controlled by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a terrorist group that has wreaked death and destruction on thousands of Turkish civilians and foreign nationals over the years. The Turks legitimize this open violation of Iraqi sovereignty in the name of "hot pursuit," but of course they could pursue the terrorists all the way to Sulaimaniya, the regional capital, if they wanted to get at the true source of the PKK's support. They mounted this incursion in spite of strenuous warnings by the Americans that the consequences of such an act could be disastrous for US-Turkish relations – an indication of just how volatile this long-simmering issue has become.


To the east, Pakistan's crisis looms as potentially the biggest disaster of them all, one that would give a rather sinister meaning to the prospect of a Middle East meltdown – because Pakistan, after all, possesses nukes, the only Muslim nation so endowed. The result could well be a nuclear meltdown, with horrific consequences for the region and beyond. General Pervez Musharraf's grip on power – never all that firm to begin with – is increasingly shaky, with the nation's Muslims in open rebellion, the National Assembly in an uproar over newly-imposed restrictions on the media, and much of the countryside slipping outside the General's control. If Muslim extremists succeed in toppling the Musharraf regime, the West could find itself confronted with a nuclearized ally of al-Qaeda ensconced in Islamabad.

Superimposed on the twin crises currently unfolding in Iraq and Iran – the former deteriorating into chaos and the latter just as rapidly rising to challenge American hegemony – these new threats to regional stability threaten to ignite a conflagration on a par with both world wars.

To begin with, the economic blowback from the outbreak of World War IV in the Middle East would strike a stunning blow to the American middle class – and, perhaps, drag us and much of the rest of the world into a downward spiral that would make the formerly "Great" [.pdf] Depression seem like a minor blip on the screen.

The economic costs of empire were calculated half a century ago by the Old Right seer Garet Garrett, who said part of the problem was that "everything goes out and nothing comes in." The American Imperium, Garrett averred, was an "empire of the Bottomless Purse" – and yet perhaps we will soon scrape bottom, having mortgaged our children, and their children, and exchanged our republic for what will surely go down in history as one of the biggest, and shortest-lived, empires of all time. An empire built on debt, an exercise in vanity and a monument to the hubris, affecting of our rulers: like the pyramids of Egypt, its relics will be the object of study and much wonder at how so great an effort could have been wasted on behalf of such a towering narcissism.


We have the mightiest military machine in human history, yet what do we have to show for it? In Iraq, we have an insurgency mounted by a rag-tag army of Ba'athist "dead-enders" and makeshift local militias that have fought us to a standstill. In the meantime, we have no effective defense against the day the Chinese and Japanese dump their dollars and stop subsidizing American militarism. No purse is bottomless: our empire of debt puts us at the mercy of our creditors.

America's imperial aspirations are also cause to fear a threat on yet another front: as 9/11 proved, "blowback" is likely to hit us on our own soil. It behooves us to remember that, for all the diversions away from our real enemies, al-Qaeda and its satellites around the globe, we do indeed face the very real threat of a 9/11-like attack in the continental US. This, after all, has always been the linchpin of Osama bin Laden's strategic line: that, rather than conducting guerrilla operations around the edges of the empire – say, against Israel, or the local U.S.-supported tyrants, such as Hosni Mubarak and the House of Saud – it is necessary to hit the Americans where they live.

Seismic tremors – rippling outward from the center of the earthquake set off by the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq – are shaking the entire region, and the shockwaves are sure to hit Washington, London, Paris, and Tokyo with gale force. Whether our fragile freedoms and the bubble of inflated prosperity will survive the storm is an open question, but of one thing we can be sure: we're about to be tested as never before.

Given the sorry record of the past five years or so, I'm not at all confident that we'll muddle through, this time, without losing a lot of what America – and the developed world, often known as "the West" – used to be about. It's at times like these that I wish I was religious, in the true sense of the word, and could put my faith in Providence as the ultimate guarantor of American liberty and our republican traditions, but, unfortunately, I find that impossible. Although I am not evangelical in my atheistic fervor, and give moral credence to religiously-motivated resistance to militarism and authoritarianism, the only sort of faith I can claim is full confidence in the power of ideas. Specifically the power of the libertarian and anti-imperialist ideas that generated the American Revolution – and hold out the promise of sparking yet another.

My great fear, however, is that it is too late for that. We are hurtling toward catastrophe in the Middle East at such speeds that it seems almost impossible to slow down, let alone reverse, the momentum for war. With lemming-like determination, our rulers seem intent on leaping over the Middle East precipice and into an abyss. Who will stand in the path of the War Party as it force-marches a reluctant nation into battle, this time against the entire Muslim world?


Like that lone Chinese dissident who stood in the pathway of a Red Army tank during the
Tiananmen Square protests, such a leader would have to possess the kind of courage that surpasses all reason – and where are such people to be found? Surely not on the stage of either party's presidential debates, unless we're talking about Ron Paul or the Democrats' Cassandra, Mike Gravel.

Gravel is not a real factor, except as a provocateur to show up the cowardice and opportunism of the "majors." However, Ron Paul is a different matter: his candidacy could easily set off the sort of ideological avalanche that paleoconservatives and many libertarians have long awaited, one that could eventually sweep away the neoconservative hegemony over the GOP and help return the Republicans to their anti-interventionist, pro-individual rights roots. This, however, is a long-term project, one that cannot be achieved in the course of a single election season, and that's the problem: we don't have a lot of time.

The spark was struck when we invaded and occupied Iraq, and the fuse is now burned nearly to the end. If our republic survives the inevitable explosion, it will be in some permanently disfigured form – an America rendered unrecognizable not only to the shades of the Founders, but to ourselves.

http://www.antiwar.com/


(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.

GOP Candidates: America Unhinged

by hilzoy

(1): The Republican candidates for President seem to be engaged in some sort of arms race to see who can say the toughest-sounding things on foreign policy. Since very few of them seem to be constrained by any sort of realism (among the leading candidates, only McCain seems to retain some tenuous connection to the real world), this leads them to say things that are basically insane.

Fareed Zakaria, in an article that's worth reading in its entirety:
"More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him.

"They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. In the last five and a half years, with bipartisan support, Washington has invaded two countries and sent troops around the world from Somalia to the Philippines to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain.

It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. It has set up secret prisons in Europe and a legal black hole in Guantánamo, to hold, interrogate and—by some definitions—torture prisoners. How would Giuliani really go on the offensive? Invade a couple of more countries? (...)

The competition to be the tough guy is producing new policy ideas, all right—ones that range from bad to insane.

Romney, who bills himself as the smart, worldly manager, recently explained that while "some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo, my view is we ought to double [the size of] Guantánamo." In fact, Romney should recognize that Guantánamo does not face space constraints. The reason that President Bush wants to close it down—and it is he who has expressed that desire—is that it is an unworkable legal mess with enormous strategic, political and moral costs. In a real war you hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities. When does that happen in the war on terror? Does Romney propose that the United States keep an ever-growing population of suspects in jail indefinitely without trials as part of a new American system of justice?

In 2005 Romney said, "How about people who are in settings—mosques, for instance—that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror? Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?" This proposal is mild compared with what Rep. Tom Tancredo suggested the same year. When asked about a possible nuclear strike by Islamic radicals on the United States, he suggested that the U.S. military threaten to "take out" Mecca."

"Take out Mecca." That's the ticket. I wonder who will be the first to suggest preemptively turning the entire Middle East -- or, better yet, the entire rest of the world -- into radioactive glass on the grounds that we can't wait for Muslims to become terrorists; we have to nip them (all of them) in the bud? Surely that's the logical endpoint of this little bidding war.

(2) They say things that are flat-out wrong, and very few people call them on it. Atrios notes one example:

"MITT ROMNEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that -- or a null set -- that is that if you're saying let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in.

But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in."

Um: no. No, no, no. (Good for Paul Begala for bringing this up on CNN: "You can't get something like that wrong. I mean, that's like -- that's like saying the Mexicans bombed Pearl Harbor."

Scorn and contempt for Mike Murphy, "Republican strategist" (according to Anderson Cooper), who tries to say that Romney was actually right.)
Matt Yglesias spots another:

"It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States."

Do I even have to bother refuting this one? For all its awfulness, Iraq was not harboring terrorists before we invaded. (Preemptive note: Ansar al-Islam was in a part of Iraq that Saddam did not control.) It was not going to harbor terrorists. Saddam's involvement with terrorists was minimal: he sheltered some aging ex-terrorists, and paid some suicide bombers' families. Now, it's a recruiting tool and training ground for terrorists, and the likelihood that it will become a base for al Qaeda is much, much greater than it ever was before.

And that was just the first five minutes.

These are serious issues. It matters to have a President who understands the most basic facts about them. And yet two of the three leading Republican candidates make huge mistakes in the first five minutes of the debate, and most of the press doesn't seem to notice.

(3) Some rather significant members of the press choose to spend their time talking about the virility and vigor of the Republican candidates instead. Politico's Roger Simon on Mitt Romney:

"FIRST PLACE: Mitt Romney
Analysis: Strong, clear, gives good soundbite and has shoulders you could land a 737 on. Not only knows how to answer a question, but how to duck one. Asked why he was so late in deciding to oppose abortion, Romney smoothly replied: “I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I became pro-life.”

His strongest line came about his being a Mormon: “I also believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping that I’ll distance myself from my church so that that’ll help me politically. And that's not going to happen.”

Romney does well in these debates but he is still languishing in the national polls. In the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted May 29-June 1, Romney was still in single digits, tied for fourth place with Newt Gingrich, who may not even run. Romney can’t debate his way to the White House. He needs something more and he better find it before Fred Thompson gets in the race for real and starts using up all the oxygen.

Score: 82.346 (out of 100.)"

Nothing, zero, nada, on whether he would in any way make a good President. Nothing on any position he took, or any proposal he made. Politico might as well be commenting on a fashion show.

Of course, no one can top Chris Matthews in the bizarro comments about candidates' toughness and virility sweepstakes. Here's one of my recent favorites:

"MATTHEWS: Who would win a street fight? Rudy Giuliani -- just think of a street fight now over in Queens somewhere. It's a dark night, it's about 2 in the morning. Two guys are out behind the building, right? On a vacant lot. Rudy Giuliani or President Ahmadinejad, who would win that fight?"

And, via Digby, this, about Giuliani:

"FINEMAN: He doesn‘t—he looks like a guy who, if he had had the opportunity to grow up as a hunter, would have been a great one.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

FINEMAN: He just gives off the aura of a guy who wouldn‘t be afraid to use a gun, you know? That‘s just—and that‘s the record that he had in New York."

If Giuliani had grown up as a hunter, he would have been a great one. If I had wheels, I would be a trolleycar. A trolleycar who could beat Ahmedinejad in a street fight!

Honestly: sometimes I just despair.

Digby and Atrios are puzzled by this. I share Digby's utter bafflement on one point:
"When they start going on and on about the babe magnet Fred Thompson or the hunky Giuliani I have to shake my head in wonder."

Me too. And I do think that Chris Matthews has some sort of bizarre fascination with the sex appeal of various candidates. But there's one part of this that I think is fairly straightforward, namely: contempt for their audience. I think they really believe that one of the things their audience is most interested in is who comes off as tough and masculine, where 'tough and masculine' doesn't mean anything genuinely interesting, like the toughness McCain would have had to have to stick out torture, but some degenerate version, the sort that means nothing more than: who seems like he would have been a good hunter, if only he had ever learned to hunt, or who would win a brawl with Ahmadinejad, in the imaginary world in which Giuliani isn't thirteen years older than Ahmadinejad.

Rich Lowry thinks they're right. In one of his most disturbing Corner posts ever, he wrote:
"Have been talking to some smart people today about Giuliani. Two of them said independently that the appeal of Giuliani is he'd be “a tough SOB—for you,” and that he'd be “a d—head—for you.”

Another said (and he hadn't seen Kate's e-mail post yesterday) that a Giuliani supporter he knows considers the nasty divorce a kind of asset because it speaks to his toughness."

If we have reached the point at which it's an electoral asset that a candidate chose to tell his wife of sixteen years that he was divorcing her in a press conference -- if more voters approve than disapprove of gratuitous cruelty to a person one once loved who is the mother of one's children -- then I really will -- well, OK, I won't actually despair, but I'll be pretty seriously troubled, and I'll admit that Simon, Matthews, et al are right to hold their audiences in contempt. In the meantime, I just wish they'd try to care a little about who would actually make a decent President.


(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.

NYT To Leahy: It's Time To Put Up Or Shut Up

I'm not quite sure what remedy the NYT editor thinks that Leahy and the Judiciary Committee have, after the subpoenas are issued and ignored, but if there is one, we agree and add our voice to that of the Times.

June 8, 2007
Editorial

It’s Subpoena Time

For months, senators have listened to a parade of well-coached Justice Department witnesses claiming to know nothing about how nine prosecutors were chosen for firing. This week, it was the turn of Bradley Schlozman, a former federal attorney in Missouri, to be uninformative and not credible. It is time for Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to deliver subpoenas that have been approved for Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and their top aides, and to make them testify in public and under oath.

Mr. Schlozman was appointed United States attorney in Missouri while the state was in the midst of a hard-fought Senate race. In his brief stint, he pushed a lawsuit, which was thrown out by a federal judge, that could have led to thousands of Democratic-leaning voters being wrongly purged from the rolls. Just days before the election, he indicted voter registration workers from the liberal group Acorn on fraud charges. Republicans quickly made the indictments an issue in the Senate race.

Mr. Schlozman said it did not occur to him that the indictments could affect the campaign. That is hard to believe since the Justice Department’s guidelines tell prosecutors not to bring vote fraud investigations right before an election, so as not to affect the outcome. He also claimed, laughably, that he did not know that Acorn was a liberal-leaning group.

Mr. Schlozman fits neatly into the larger picture. Prosecutors who refused to use their offices to help Republicans win elections, like John McKay in Washington State, and David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired. Prosecutors who used their offices to help Republicans did well.

Congress has now heard from everyone in the Justice Department who appears to have played a significant role in the firings of the prosecutors. They have all insisted that the actual decisions about whom to fire came from somewhere else. It is increasingly clear that the somewhere else was the White House. If Congress is going to get to the bottom of the scandal, it has to get the testimony of Mr. Rove, his aides Scott Jennings and Sara Taylor, Ms. Miers and her deputy, William Kelley.

The White House has offered to make them available only if they do not take an oath and there is no transcript. Those conditions are a formula for condoning perjury, and they are unacceptable. As for documents, the White House has released piles of useless e-mail messages. But it has reported that key e-mails to and from Mr. Rove were inexplicably destroyed. At the same time, it has argued that e-mails of Mr. Rove’s that were kept on a Republican Party computer system, which may contain critical information, should not be released.

This noncooperation has gone on long enough. Mr. Leahy should deliver the subpoenas for the five White House officials and make clear that if the administration resists, Congress will use all available means to get the information it needs.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


(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.

Reporter Arrested on Orders of Giuliani Press Secretary

A peak at Rudy G's fascist America

Reporter Arrested on Orders of Giuliani Press Secretary:

Charged with Criminal Trespass Despite Protest of CNN Staff and Official Event Press Credentials at GOP Debate in New Hampshire"

Goopers Have Snakes In Their Heads

...and Rudy G. is leading the damnable pack of them.

Obsidian Wings: General Expression Of Bewilderment:

'More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him. 'They hate you!' says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fear-monger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there.

'They don't want you to be in this college!' he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. 'Or you, or you, or you,' he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students.

In the first Republican debate he warned, 'We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us.'

On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. 'This is reality, ma'am,' he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. 'You've got to clear your head.' (We strongly suspect that you have snakes in yours,.)

Goodling In Private Email: ‘Send Directly Up To Me, Outside The System’

Gonzales and every attorney he has hired should be sent to Siberia.

Calling President Putin! Got some tundra we could borrow?

Those methane bogs will do nicely.

Think Progress » Goodling In Private Email: ‘Send Directly Up To Me, Outside The System’:

New Justice Department communications released tonight include an email from Monica Goodling, former counsel to Alberto Gonzales, directing another official to draw up a directive giving her unprecedented authority to hire and fire political staffers. Goodling tells the official, assistant attorney general Paul Corts, to “send [it] directly up to me, outside the system.'

Senate Begins Real Push on Habeas Corpus

Thanks Be!

The Bill of Rights is just a piece of paper without the Great Writ

Senate Begins Real Push on Habeas Corpus:

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an important bill to restore habeas corpus, the sacrosanct Constitutional right to challenge government detention in court, by a vote of eleven to eight.

Habeas corpus was revoked by last year's Military Commissions Act, which has been assailed as unconstitutional and un-American by leaders across the political spectrum. Today's habeas bill was backed by the Judiciary Committee's Democratic Chairman, Patrick Leahy, and its Republican Ranking Member, Arlen Specter. 'The drive to restore this fundamental right has come from both sides of the aisle,' said Sharon Bradford, an attorney at the bipartisan Constitution Project, in response to today's vote. 'Restoring America's commitment to the rule of law is not a partisan cause; it is a patriotic one,' she added.

Look Out Democrats!

Disapproval of Bush’s performance in office remains high, but the poll highlighted growing disapproval of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Just 39 percent said they approve of the job Congress is doing, down from 44 percent in April, when the new Congress was about 100 days into its term. More significant, approval of congressional Democrats dropped 10 percentage points over that same period, from 54 percent to 44 percent.

The Religious Left: The Birth of A Movement?

Possibly.

Such a movement will only be effective if it remains independent of political parties and other corrupting influences. It should be as leaderless as possible.


By Linda Feldmann,
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Wed Jun 6, 4:00 AM ET


Washington - John Edwards spoke about how prayer helped him get through the death of his son and his wife's cancer diagnoses.

Barack Obama repeatedly invoked the biblical phrase "I am my brother's keeper" as he spoke about poverty and injustice.

Hillary Rodham Clinton credited her faith with getting her through her husband's infidelities.


This was no garden-variety political presentation by the top three Democratic presidential candidates Monday night on the campus of George Washington University, in the shadow of the White House. The forum, sponsored by the progressive Christian group Sojourners, represented the boldest indication yet that the "religious left" is building as a political force, no longer willing to cede "values voters" to the religious conservative movement that has long formed the activist base of the Republican Party.

The candidates' easy willingness to appear at the forum also represents a watershed for the modern Democratic Party: Intimate discussion of faith, and how it informs policy views and personal behavior, is no longer an arms-length proposition at the party's highest levels.

"It's an important strategic move for all these people – not to say their faith isn't genuine," says Jim Guth, an expert on religion and politics at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. "But I think they recognize that in a very closely divided electorate, any ability they have to peel off moderate religious conservatives or centrists, by making it clear they're comfortable with the language of faith – that's a political advantage and wise strategy and maybe good policy and good politics."

In an ironic twist – following a 2004 election in which white Evangelicals went 80 percent for the Republican, President Bush – today's top Democratic contenders may be more comfortable fielding questions on religion than today's top Republicans.

On the GOP side, Rudolph Giuliani is a Roman Catholic who is on his third marriage and who takes liberal positions on social issues; John McCain is an Episcopalian, but, like Mr. Giuliani, rarely mentions his faith. Mitt Romney describes his Mormonism as central to his life, but it's a religion that leaves many voters uncomfortable – and could make him an awkward fit for conservative Evangelical voters. The three top Republicans have been invited by Sojourners to appear at a forum in September.

Still, experts on religion and politics agree that the religious left has a way to go to catch up to the religious right in organizational strength and that there are structural barriers that could prevent it from happening.

"When you look at religious progressives, generally, they come in many different varieties," says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Some are theological liberals who happen to be politically liberal, some are theological conservatives who happen to be politically liberal, and some are a bit of both, Mr. Green says.

And they come from different backgrounds – evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant. So while religious conservatives can easily organize within their congregations, for the religious left it is more complicated. Also, adds Green, "people on the liberal side of these debates tend toward ecumenism and interfaith. A lot of Reform Jews might be considered part of this. Certainly, black Protestants would be part of this."

A look at the numbers also shows a religious left that is still on the beginning end of a trajectory movement leaders hope will make it a major force in shaping political and policy debate. At this week's four-day Pentecost conference sponsored by Sojourners, there are 600 people in its attendance. At its height in the mid-1990s, the Christian Coalition could summon 4,000 people to Washington for its annual convention. And while that organization has faded, the religious right's top mass gathering – now sponsored by the Family Research Council and allied groups – was able to draw 1,700 attendees to a Values Voter Summit in 2006, with another scheduled for this fall, according to Joe Conn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Each side emphasizes different issues, and so the rise of one is not necessarily dependent on the decline of another. For the right, abortion and gay rights have long been the driving issues, while on the left, poverty is the top issue – and was the focus of Monday's presidential forum. The
Iraq war, climate change, energy, and the environment have also grown in importance among religious liberals, and the rise of those issues in public consciousness in the past couple of years has also given religious progressives more to rally around.

On the left, many political religious activists disagree over abortion and gay rights, and so those issues are not central to the movement. The founder and organizer of Sojourners, the Rev. Jim Wallis, is an Evangelical Christian who calls himself pro-life, but it is the issues of poverty and social justice that animate him in the political sphere.

Religious conservative leaders say they welcome the rise of a religious left and see it as a validation of their own entry into politics in the 1970s, after a long period when the blending of religion and politics on the right was seen as anathema.

"I think it points to the success that Christians have had," says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "It means we're no longer on the outside looking in. Faith has very much permeated the political process in this country."

But to some activists, especially those who are fighting to maintain strict separation between church and state, the growth of a religious left raises the risk that the public loses sight of the proper place of religion and faith in government.

"My concern is that merely mentioning religious matters or using religious language is not a way to run a political campaign," says the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "The bad news is that the religious left could begin to use religion in the same way that the religious right does…. We already have too much religious rhetoric in what should be a secular-oriented campaign."

But, he adds, it's "possible for right and left to talk about values and explain the source of their beliefs, and that's an important part of the public dialogue."

(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.

Purely Political Pardons Will Be Punsihed

It's time for the American people to make a few things clear to their politicians (elected or wannabes).

We can start with this:
A purely political pardon is any pardon given without a guilty plea and full cooperation from the defendant or a guilty verdict and complete appeals process. Any pardon not meeting these criteria will be considered by the people to be obstruction of justice and a conspiracy to willfully withold information from the American electorate.

Any pardon given by a president to a member of his/her administration shall be suspect.

Any president giving such pardons can expect that his party will be punished to the 7th election cycle, at least.


Libby supporters press for presidential pardon

Bush gives no hint of his intentions
By Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press June 7, 2007


WASHINGTON -- Allies of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby urged President Bush yesterday to pardon the former White House aide, but Bush rebuffed questions about whether he would intervene to prevent Libby's incarceration .

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was sentenced Tuesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation.


He became the highest-ranking White House official sentenced to prison since the Iran-Contra affair.

A Republican stalwart, Libby drew more than 150 letters of support from military commanders and diplomats who praised his government service from the Cold War through the early days of the Iraq war.


"The White House is well aware of what a lot of supporters of Scooter have to say about this," said Mel Sembler, who served as Bush's ambassador to Italy and now leads Libby's defense fund. "There really is only one answer. This man has to step up and pardon him."

Bush, traveling in Europe, gave no hint about his plans.


"Yesterday was a very sad day for Scooter and his family," Bush told reporters. "But there's an ongoing process and it wouldn't be appropriate for me to discuss it while the process is going forward."

"My heart goes out to his family," the president added.


Libby's lawyers are rushing to try to forestall the prison sentence. They planned to file papers today arguing that Libby should remain free while his appeals play out.

But that appears to be an uphill battle. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald intends to oppose the motion and US District Judge Reggie B. Walton said he sees no reason to grant a delay.

(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.

Al Qaeda and Iran

Saying that Iran and al Qaeda are in cahoots is just about as non-sensical as saying that Osama and Saddam were buddies.


Published on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 by Inter Press Service

Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Brzezinski suggested that new constraints were needed on presidential war powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran based on such a false pretense. Such constraints, Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president from using force in response to an attack on the United States, but should make it more difficult to carry out an attack without an adequate justification.
Brzezinski’s warning came a few weeks after the publication in late April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet’s memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush administration would hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the United States that was planned from Iranian territory.

The Bush administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that Iran has harboured al Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning terrorist actions — claims that were not supported by intelligence analysts.

Pentagon officials leaked information to CBS in May 2003 that they had “evidence” that al Qaeda leaders who had found “safe haven” in Iran had planned and directed terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld also encouraged that inference when he declared on May 29, 2003 that Iran had “permitted senior al Qaeda officials to operate in their country.”

The leak and public statement allowed the media and their audiences to infer that the “safe haven” had been deliberately provided by Iranian authorities.

But most U.S. intelligence analysts specialising on the Persian Gulf believed the al Qaeda officials in Iran who were still communicating with operatives elsewhere were in hiding rather than under arrest. Former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia Paul Pillar told IPS in an interview last year that the “general impression” was that the al Qaeda operatives were not in Iran with the complicity of the Iranian authorities.

Former CIA analysts Ken Pollock, who was a Persian Gulf specialist on the National Security Council staff in 2001, wrote in “The Persian Puzzle”, “These al Qaeda leaders apparently were operating in eastern Iran, which is a bit like the Wild West.” He added, pointedly, “It was not as if these al-Qaeda leaders had been under lock and key in Evin prison in Tehran and were allowed to make phone calls to set up the attacks.”

Although most elements in the Bush administration appear to oppose military action against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney has reportedly advocated that course. He has also continued to raise the issue of al Qaeda officials in Iran.

Cheney told Fox News in an interview May 14, “We are confident that there are a number of senior al Qaeda officials in Iran, that they’ve been there since the spring of 2003.

About the time that we launched operations into Iraq, the Iranians rounded up a number of al Qaeda individuals and placed them under house arrest.”

Cheney did not say that the al Qaeda officials who were communicating with other operatives outside Iran were under house arrest.

As recently as last February, Bush administration officials were preparing to accuse Tehran publicly of cooperating with and harbouring al Qaeda suspects as part of the administration’s strategy for pushing for stronger U.N. sanctions against Iran. The strategy of portraying Iran as having links with al Qaeda was being pushed by an unidentified Bush adviser who had been “instrumental in coming up with a more confrontational U.S. approach to Iran,” according a report by the Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer on Feb. 10.

As Linzer revealed, the neoconservative faction in the administration was still pushing to link Iran with al Qaeda despite the fact that a CIA report in early February had reported the arrest by Iranian authorities of two more al Qaeda operatives trying to make their way through Iran from Pakistan to Iraq.

The danger of an al Qaeda effort to disguise an attack on the U.S. as coming from Iran was raised in an article in Foreign Affairs published in late April by former NSC adviser and counterterrorism expert Bruce Reidel.

In the article, Reidel wrote that Osama bin Laden may have plans for “triggering an all-out war between the United States and Iran,” referring to evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq now considers Iranian influence in Iraq “an even greater problem than the U.S. occupation”.

“The biggest danger,” Reidel wrote, “is that al Qaeda will deliberately provoke a war with a ‘false-flag’ operation, say, a terrorist attack carried out in a way that would make it appear as though it were Iran’s doing.”

In a briefing for reporters about the article, Reidel said al Qaeda officals have “openly talked about the advisability of getting their two great enemies to go to war with each other”, hoping that they would “take each other out”.

Reidel, now a senior fellow with the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was one of the leading specialists on al Qaeda and terrorism, having served in the 1990s as national intelligence officer, assistant secretary of defence and NSC specialist for Near East and South Asia up to January 2002.

Supporting the warnings by Brzezinski and Reidel about an al Qaeda “false flag” terrorist attack is a captured al Qaeda document found in a hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006. The document, translated and released by the Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafek al-Rubaie, said “the best solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the U.S. forces in waging a war against another country or any hostile groups”.

The document, the author of which was not specified, explained, “We mean specifically attempting to escalate tension between America and Iran, and America and the Shiite[s] in Iraq.”

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in June 2005.

© 2007 Inter Press Service


(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.

Sy Hersh: The Plan To Bomb Iran

Cheney's Nemesis

For forty years, Seymour Hersh has been America’s leading investigative reporter. His latest scoop?

The White House’s secret plan to bomb Iran
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Apr 02, 2007 11:31 AM

On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times. "Problem," the aide wrote. "Unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT."

He then laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an FBI investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the least offensive ("Discuss informally with NYT" and "Do nothing").

Number three on the list, however, read, "Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt."

The note's author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.

This year, an almost identical note in Cheney's same tight-looped, anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how little has changed in America in the past three decades.

Then as now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.

But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour Hersh outlined the White House's secret plans for a possible invasion of Iran in The New Yorker. As amazing as it is that Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark Nixonian past, it's even more amazing that Hersh is still the biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that seemingly only a person hiding in the veep's desk drawer would be privy to.

"The access I have -- I'm inside," Hersh says proudly. "I'm there, even when he's talking to people in confidence."

America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us -- and that still pisses Hersh off.

During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of time to Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about this administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus on?

Absolutely. If there's a Kissinger person today, it's Cheney. But what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now! If we did, we'd know that the madness of going into Iraq would have been explained by something -- maybe a clandestine deal for oil -- that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had some back-channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war, what you see is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the Middle East, and yet we're at war with the Middle East. It doesn't make sense.

Kissinger's genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now, a lot of people on the inside know it's over in Iraq, but there are no plans for how to get out. You're not even allowed to think that way. So what we have now is a government that's in a terrible mess, with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said, the "fail forward" idea of going into Iran. So we're really in big trouble. Real big trouble here.

Is what's gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?

Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he's doing the right thing. I think he's a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He's a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he's very dangerous, because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer.

A lot of people interpreted your last article in "The New Yorker" as a prediction that we're going into Iran. But you also make clear that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from attacking Iran.

I've never said we're going to go -- just that the planning is under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple of weeks, it has become nonstop. They're in a position right now where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh -- ---His what? His nose, and say, "Let's go." And they'd go. That's new. We've made it closer. We've got carrier groups there. It's not about going in on the ground. Although if we went in we'd have to send Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm missile sites.

So the notion that it would just be a bombing campaign isn't true at all?

Oh, no. Don't forget, you'd have to take out a very sophisticated radar system, and a guidance system for their missiles. You'd have to knock out the ability of the Iranians to get our ships.

So this is the "fail forward" plan?

I think Bush wants to resolve the Iranian crisis. It may not be a crisis, but he wants to resolve it.

The other implication of your piece is that we went into Iraq as a response to Sunni extremism, and now we are realigning ourselves with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiites. Is it really that simple? Are we really that stupid?

From what I gather, there's no real mechanism in the administration for looking at the downside of things. In the military, when they do a major study, they say something like "We give it to you with the pluses and minuses." They usually show it to you warts and all. But these guys in the White House don't want the warts. They just want the good side. I don't think they know all of the consequences.

This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government unto itself.

One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed. The courts . . . the jury's not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.

In the Nixon years, you had the press turning against the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive, you had Watergate, you had all these reasons why the press became involved in bringing the Nixon administration to an end. But it hasn't performed that function in Bush's case. Why do you think that is?

I don't know. It's very discouraging. I've had conversations with senior people at my old newspaper, the Times, who know that there are serious problems there. It's not that they shouldn't run the stories that they run. They run stories that represent the government's view, because there are people at the Times who have access to senior people in the government.

They see the national security adviser, they see Condoleezza Rice, and they have to reflect their view. That's their job. What doesn't get reported is the other side. What I always loved about the Times when I worked there is that I could write what the kiddies down the line said. But that doesn't happen now. You're not getting broad, macro coverage from the White House that represents anything like opposition. And there is opposition -- the press just doesn't know how to deal with it.

But why isn't there more of an uproar by the public at atrocities committed by American troops? Have people become inured to those stories over the years?

I just think it's because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it. Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man's burden? You tell me what it is, I don't know.

You talk a lot about the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam: how Lynndie England is the new Lt. Calley, how it's lower-middle-class white kids from America killing nonwhite people overseas.

Yes, there's this similarity -- but why is this same kind of war happening again? Is this a pattern that's built into the way our government works?

I don't know. Why would you go to war when you don't have to go to war? It takes very little courage to go to war. It takes a lot of courage not to go to war.

I once had a friend -- this was thirty years ago -- from a major university. He studied the scientific problem the government had of detecting underground missile tests in Russia. It took him a couple of years, but he solved the problem. At that point the Joint Chiefs of Staff was against any treaty with the Russians on testing, because we couldn't detect when they cheated.

My friend attended a meeting of the Joint Chiefs and demonstrated conclusively that there was a technical way of monitoring missile explosions inside Russia, even without being on-site. But when the meeting was over, the Joint Chiefs just issued a sigh and said, "Well, we better go back to a political objection to the treaty now." Where there had been a scientific objection to a treaty, now there was a political objection. So you begin to see that pushing for peace is very hard.

There is safety in bombing, rather than negotiating. It's very sad.

Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?

You mean learn from the past? America?

Yes.

No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The Chinese were behind everything -- we saw them and North Vietnam as one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the Vietnamese hated each other -- they had fought each other for 1,000 years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the entire premise of the war. And it's the same dumbness in this war, with Saddam and the terrorists.

On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years.

From the press?

Oh, come on, how hard is it to hide things from the press? They don't care that much about the straight press. What these guys have figured out is that as long as they have Fox and talk radio, they're OK in the public opinion. They control that hard. It kept the ball in Iraq in the air for a couple of years longer than it should have, and it cost Kerry the presidency. But now it's over -- Iraq's done. A lot of the conservatives who promoted the war are now very much against it. Some of the columnists in this town who were beating the drums for that war really owe an apology. It's a sad time for the American press.

What can be done to fix the situation?

[Long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You'd actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn't think you could control. And they're not going to do that.

What's the main lesson you take, looking back at America's history the last forty years?

There's nothing to look back to. We're dealing with the same problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers -- and to me they were the most important documents ever written -- that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I read them. So . . . duh! Nothing's changed.

They've just gotten better at dealing with the press. Nothing's changed at all.

(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.

Vice Presidential Insubordination?

Or Good Cop Bad Cop?

Either way, we are screwed if we don't find a way to stop this madness.

Get the word out!

Clemons isn't saying who the Cheney staff member is, but we will make an educated guess; David Wurmser, neocon from hell.

Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush's Choices on Iran Conflict:
Staff Engaged in Insubordination Against President Bush

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney's team and acolytes -- who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice's efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran's various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well -- as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.
The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf -- which just became significantly larger -- as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

There are many other components of the complex game plan that this Cheney official has been kicking around Washington. The official has offered this commentary to senior staff at AEI and in lunch and dinner gatherings which were to be considered strictly off-the-record, but there can be little doubt that the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view. This official is beating the brush and doing what Joshua Muravchik has previously suggested -- which is to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.

The zinger of this information is the admission by this Cheney aide that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.

According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the "right decision" when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President's hands.

On Tuesday evening, I spoke with a former top national intelligence official in this Bush administration who told me that what I was investigating and planned to report on regarding Cheney and the commentary of his aide was "potentially criminal insubordination" against the President. I don't believe that the White House would take official action against Cheney for this agenda-mongering around Washington -- but I do believe that the White House must either shut Cheney and his team down and give them all garden view offices so that they can spend their days staring out their windows with not much to do or expect some to begin to think that Bush has no control over his Vice President.

It is not that Cheney wants to bomb Iran and Bush doesn't, it is that Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.
-- Steve Clemons

(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.

Congressional Probe of Abramoff Ties To W.H.

House Democrats expand Abramoff probe

By ERICA WERNER
Associated Press Writer
Tue Jun 5, 7:27 PM ET

House Democrats are expanding their investigation into ties between jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the White House and have contacted several Abramoff associates recently about testifying to Congress.

The contacts were disclosed Tuesday by a House Democratic aide and an attorney familiar with the matter who both spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is ongoing.

The aide declined to identify those the committee wants to talk to. Last month committee Chairman Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., indicated he intended to seek testimony from people who'd worked as lobbyists with Abramoff as well as from former and current White House and administration officials who might have knowledge of Abramoff's connections with the White House.

A committee spokeswoman declined comment. A message for a White House spokesman wasn't immediately returned.

The Government Reform Committee released a report last year saying that Abramoff and his associates had 485 lobbying contacts with White House officials between January 2001 and March 2004.

But Waxman, who became committee chairman in January after Democrats retook control of Congress, says important questions remain unanswered. These include whether White House officials paid for sports and concert tickets and meals they got from Abramoff and his associates, and whether they took official actions as a result, Waxman says.

Abramoff last year pleaded guilty to conspiracy and other charges and admitted defrauding his clients. A two-year investigation into his influence peddling has led to the conviction of a congressman along with 10 former House aides and Bush administration officials. One sitting congressman, GOP Rep. John Doolittle (news, bio, voting record) of California, remains under investigation.

Susan Ralston, a key aide to presidential political strategist Karl Rove who had worked for Abramoff, resigned last October after the Government Reform report showed she had extensive contacts with Abramoff.

Waxman wants Ralston to testify, but she is refusing to do so without a grant of immunity, according to a memo Waxman released last month after lawyers for his panel questioned her in private. Meanwhile Waxman wants to talk to others.

Abramoff associates named in his committee's report last year as having extensive contacts with the White House include Neil Volz and Tony Rudy, who have both pleaded guilty to federal charges; Kevin Ring, a one-time Doolittle aide who is under federal investigation; and Todd Boulanger and Shawn Vasell, both still lobbyists.

Boulanger declined comment. Neither Vasell nor Ring's attorneys immediately returned calls for comment.

(This version CORRECTS that Vasell, not his attorney, did not return call seeking comment.)


(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.

It's Your Turn, Senator Clinton

Something had damned well better be done about healthcare in this country and soon.

I have wondered from day one why national healthcare is not a national security issue. If there is even a moderate chance that a serious outbreak of some deadly virus or bacteria could be unleashed by terrorists in this country, national healthcare should have been priority the minute antrax began flying around the mail system.

That never seemed to occur to anyone, which makes me wonder about the level of smarts we have in Washington or about true nature of the anthrax attacks and all the horror stories the adminstration has waved around as a an excuse for an illegal war.

Obama in Second Place

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 04 June 2007

One of the lessons journalists should have learned from the 2000 election campaign is that what a candidate says about policy isn't just a guide to his or her thinking about a specific issue - it's the best way to get a true sense of the candidate's character.

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that, and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy proposals.

That's why I'm not interested in what sports the candidates play or speculation about their marriages. I want to hear about their health care plans - not just for the substance, but to get a sense of what kind of president each would be. Would they hesitate and triangulate, or would they push hard for real change?

Now, back in February John Edwards put his rivals for the Democratic nomination on the spot, by coming out with a full-fledged plan to cover all the uninsured. Suddenly, vague expressions of support for universal health care weren't enough: candidates were under pressure to present their own specific plans.

And the question was whether those plans would be as bold and comprehensive as the Edwards proposal.

Four months have passed since then. So far, all Hillary Clinton has released are proposals to help reduce health care costs. It's worthy stuff, but it's hard to avoid the sense that she's putting off dealing with the hard part. The real test is how she proposes to cover the uninsured.

But last week Barack Obama, after getting considerable grief for having failed to offer policy specifics, finally delivered a comprehensive health care plan. So how is it?

First, the good news. The Obama plan is smart and serious, put together by people who know what they're doing.

It also passes one basic test of courage. You can't be serious about health care without proposing an injection of federal funds to help lower-income families pay for insurance, and that means advocating some kind of tax increase. Well, Mr. Obama is now on record calling for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

Also, in the Obama plan, insurance companies won't be allowed to deny people coverage or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history. Again, points for toughness.

Best of all, the Obama plan contains the same feature that makes the Edwards plan superior to, say, the Schwarzenegger proposal in California: it lets people choose between private plans and buying into a Medicare-type plan offered by the government.

Since Medicare has much lower overhead costs than private insurers, this competition would force the insurance industry to cut costs - making our health-care system more efficient. And if private insurers couldn't or wouldn't cut costs enough, the system would evolve into Medicare for all, which is actually the best solution.

So there's a lot to commend the Obama plan. In fact, it would have been considered daring if it had been announced last year.

Now for the bad news. Although Mr. Obama says he has a plan for universal health care, he actually doesn't - a point Mr. Edwards made in last night's debate. The Obama plan doesn't mandate insurance for adults. So some people would take their chances - and then end up receiving treatment at other people's expense when they ended up in emergency rooms. In that regard it's actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan.

I asked David Cutler, a Harvard economist who helped put together the Obama plan, about this omission. His answer was that Mr. Obama is reluctant to impose a mandate that might not be enforceable, and that he hopes - based, to be fair, on some estimates by Mr. Cutler and others - that a combination of subsidies and outreach can get all but a tiny fraction of the population insured without a mandate. Call it the timidity of hope.

On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn't quell my worries that Mr. Obama's dislike of "bitter and partisan" politics makes him too cautious. But at least he's come out with a plan.

Senator Clinton, we're waiting to hear from you.

(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.