Woodward Turning Against Bush Is Sign That Shakeup May Be Coming

I have repeatedly mentioned here that when the real owners of the United States decide that President Bush has reached the point where he is giving American-style fascism a bad name, they will arrange for one of the many questionable actions of the administration to metastasize into a full blown scandal and wash Bush from the scene.

Exactly like they did (and for the exact same reason) to President Nixon in 1974.

I had not really expected them to use one of the same hatchet men that they employed in Nixon's day.

After two ass-kissing books on the Bush administration, Bob Woodward is bringing out a work of non-fiction this time that approaches his subject from a position of new-found skepticism. Despite Woodward's claim that he has learned details of which he was previously not aware, this is not a case of a "foolish consistency" being corrected by the facts.

There are no earth-shaking revelations in Woodward's new book, but that isn't really the point of the exercise.

Woodward's volte face is a signal that the Bush and crew can expect things to begin going worse for them, at least politically.

Dick Cheney is likely to make a departure soon after the midterm elections to prepare the team for a change--if necessary--in head coach.

Torture As Political Cudgel

The torture-embracing Republicans are eager to use the despicable detainee legislation to abuse the Democrats:

Republicans, especially in the House, plan to use the military commission and wiretapping legislation as a one-two punch against Democrats this fall. The legislative action prompted extraordinarily blunt language from House GOP leaders, foreshadowing a major theme for the campaign. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) issued a written statement on Wednesday declaring: "Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and 159 of her Democrat colleagues voted today in favor of MORE rights for terrorists."

GOP leaders continued such attacks after the wiretapping vote. "For the second time in just two days, House Democrats have voted to protect the rights of terrorists," Hastert said last night, while Boehner lashed out at what he called "the Democrats' irrational opposition to strong national security policies."

Scum like Hastert and Boehner are worthy of the utmost contempt of every decent American.

I prefer the opinion of someone who is better acquainted with the constitution and the American way:

Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it's not clear that most of the members understand what they've done."

State Department Poll Shows Most Iraqis Want U.S. To Leave Now

The Iraqi people must be tired of being such gracious -- if unwilling -- hosts.

A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers.

In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout, according to State Department polling results obtained by The Washington Post. ...

"Majorities in all regions except Kurdish areas state that the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) should withdraw immediately, adding that the MNF-I's departure would make them feel safer and decrease violence," concludes the 20-page State Department report, titled "Iraq Civil War Fears Remain High in Sunni and Mixed Areas." The report was based on 1,870 face-to-face interviews conducted from late June to early July. ...

The director of another Iraqi polling firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared being killed, said public opinion surveys he conducted last month showed that 80 percent of Iraqis who were questioned favored an immediate withdrawal. Eight-five percent of Sunnis in that poll supported an immediate withdrawal, a number virtually unchanged in the past two years, except for the two months after the Samarra bombing, when the number fell to about 70 percent, the poll director said.

"The very fact that there is such a low support for American forces has to do with the American failure to do basically anything for Iraqis," said Mansoor Moaddel, a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, who commissioned a poll earlier this year that also found widespread support for a withdrawal. "It's part of human nature. People respect authority and power. But the U.S. so far has been unable to establish any real authority."

Interviews with two dozen Baghdad residents in recent weeks suggest one central cause for Iraqi distrust of the Americans: They believe the U.S. government has deliberately thrown the country into chaos.

CIA Leak Investigation Done On The Cheap

This is a good measure of the relative importance of two Washington scandals, at least to the establishment.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who investigated whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of a CIA operative for political payback, has spent $1.4 million in his probe over the past three years, his office reported yesterday -- a figure that establishes him as remarkably frugal in the ranks of recent special investigators.

Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigations of President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica S. Lewinsky and his ties to the failed Whitewater land investment cost $71.5 million and took eight years. Independent Counsel David M. Barrett's examination of Clinton housing secretary Henry G. Cisneros over an extramarital affair and potential illegal payments cost $21 million and lasted 10 years. ...

The true cost to taxpayers of Fitzgerald's operation is actually $333,000, according to his spokesman Randall Samborn, because Fitzgerald has relied on a handful of federal prosecutors in Chicago, where he is the U.S. attorney, and in the Justice Department in Washington, and made use of government offices in both locations.

The government would pay rent and utilities for that office space anyway, and those prosecutors would be getting a government paycheck even if they weren't now spending their work hours marshaling evidence against Libby and duking it out with his defense lawyers in pretrial skirmishes. The probe's salary and building costs total $1.1 million.

It seems that the days of loading the boat with prosecutors for a big politically tinged investigation are over.

At least until the next Democrat is suspected of wrongdoing.

EU Questions "Sharing" of SWIFT Data

The Europeans probably suspect that the Americans might use this data for non-"counter terror" related purposes.

They don't realize that the U.S. would never do anything questionable.

Especially when dealing with financial matters.

A European Union panel has serious doubts about the legality of a Bush administration program that monitors international financial transactions, the group's leader said Monday, and plans to recommend tighter controls to prevent privacy abuses.

"We don't see the legal basis under the European law, and we see the need for some changes," said Peter Schaar, a German official who leads the panel, in a telephone interview. The group is to deliver a final report this week in Brussels, and Mr. Schaar said he expected it to conclude that the program might violate European law restricting government access to confidential banking records.

The program, started by the Bush administration weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, allows analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence agencies to search for possible terrorist financing activity among millions of largely international financial transactions that are processed by a banking cooperative known as SWIFT, which is based in Belgium.

The European Union panel will not call for the program to be stopped, officials said. But it is expected to recommend that additional safeguards be put in place to check how financial records are shared with American intelligence officials. For the last three years, a Washington consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, has audited the program, but Mr. Schaar said his panel would recommend that an outside auditor from Europe be brought in to protect against abuses. ...

Critics, including many privacy advocates and some banking industry executives, have questioned the propriety of giving American intelligence officials broad access, without court orders, to private data.

The disclosure of the program prompted several investigations in Europe and Canada. The European Union panel, which includes representatives from 25 countries and is formally known as the Article 29 data protection working party, would be the first international group to weigh in on the legal issues. Its findings, while advisory in nature, are expected to carry considerable influence in Europe in the debate over the program, officials say.

The European Union panel begins meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, and Mr. Schaar said he expected it would adopt a report based on a draft that has already been circulated among the members. While he would not discuss the exact language because it had not been finalized, he said the report would be "critical" of the legal basis for the American government's use of the SWIFT data. ...

The Treasury Department has used broad administrative subpoenas to get access to transactions from SWIFT, often millions of records at a time. While a small proportion of the transactions route money entirely within the United States, the program is focused on tracking money coming into and out of the United States or foreign-to-foreign transactions. American officials say the intelligence gleaned from the transactions has been valuable in identifying possible terrorist financiers. ...

(L)egal experts say banking privacy restrictions imposed by the European Union and others in Europe impose tight restrictions on how private banking data can be shared, even in the course of law enforcement and intelligence-gathering investigations.

"The main item from my point of view is that the fundamental civil rights of the European citizens have to be safeguarded," said Mr. Schaar, who also serves as the federal data protection commissioner for Germany. "There are doubts about the legality of this program."

As part of the European Union panel's review, Privacy International and the American Civil Liberties Union prepared a report criticizing Booz Allen's role in monitoring the program. The report raised questions about the firm's objectivity, citing its long history as a government contractor and the fact that former intelligence officials are among its executives.

But Booz Allen rejected such charges on Monday. "What clients are buying from us," said Marie Lerch, a spokeswoman for the firm, "is independence and objectivity."

Army Chief of Staff Protests Rumsfeld's Funding Cuts

Rumsfeld over-extends the Army, and now tries to cut its budget.

It is not going over too well.

The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials. ...

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months. ...

Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.

After Schoomaker confronted Rumsfeld with the Army's own estimates for maintaining the current size and commitments — and the steps that would have to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat brigades and an entire division headquarters unit — Rumsfeld agreed to set up a task force to investigate Army funding.

Although no formal notification is required, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, who has backed Schoomaker in his push for additional funding, wrote to Rumsfeld early last month to inform him that the Army would miss the Aug. 15 deadline for its budget plan. Harvey said the delay in submitting the plan, formally called a Program Objective Memorandum, was the result of the extended review by the task force.

The study group — which included three-star officers from the Army and Rumsfeld's office — has since agreed with the Army's initial assessment. Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget Director Rob Portman.

"Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy or do we raise our resources?" said the senior Pentagon official. "That's where we're at."

I think "lower our strategy" would be the wise move at this juncture.

The Torture Bill Makes All Americans Morally Culpable

Thought for the day:

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

The "compromise" reached between the administration and the GOP "dissidents" to codify torture of detainees transforms an abusive program that could be attributed to the overzealousness of a limited number of terror-fighters into a state sanctioned policy conducted in the name of all Americans.

Clinton Smacks Down FOX News' Chris Wallace Over 9/11 Blame

This is good:

President Bill Clinton taped an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace, which is scheduled to be aired Sunday. He was told the interview would focus on his nonpartisan efforts to raise over $7 billion to combat the world's biggest problems.

Early in the interview, Wallace attempted to smear Clinton with the same kind of misinformation contained in ABC's Path to 9/11. Clinton was having none of it.

ThinkProgress has obtained a transcript of the interview. Here are some highlights:

Wallace repeats Path to 9/11 misinformation, Clinton fights back:

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn't you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President? There's a new book out which I suspect you've read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops." Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

CLINTON: OK..

WALLACE: ...may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20.

CLINTON: No let's talk about...

WALLACE: ...but the question is why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let's talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network... ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn't do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush's neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn't have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn't do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

Clinton takes on Fox News bias:

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn't get him.

WALLACE: Right...

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn't... I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke... So you did FOX's bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..

WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir...

CLINTON: ...

WALLACE: I asked a question. You don't think that's a legitimate question?

CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn't you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know...

WALLACE: We asked...

CLINTON: ...

WALLACE: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir?

CLINTON: I don't believe you ask them that.

WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of ...

CLINTON: You didn't ask that did you? Tell the truth.

WALLACE: About the USS Cole?

CLINTON: Tell the truth.

WALLACE: I... with Iraq and Afghanistan there's plenty of stuff to ask.

CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about...

WALLACE: [laughs]

CLINTON: You said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care.

Clinton on his priorities and the Bush administration priorities:

CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke's book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you've got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you've so clever...

WALLACE: [Laughs]

CLINTON: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get Bin Laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces into Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise... We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that's strange.

U.S. Moving Against Sadr's Militia

There is speculation that the U.S. intends to deal with Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army before any attack on Iran.

The thought is that this would help mitigate any inevitable Iraqi Shiite retaliation against U.S. interests in Iraq.

Today's news would seem to fit into the plan.

U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested top aides to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in pre-dawn raids Thursday, according to Sadr officials who called the move a provocation designed to trigger a full-blown battle between the groups.

"It is obvious they want to draw the Sadr movement into a military confrontation," said Abdul Razzak al-Nedawi, a leader of the Sadr movement in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad. "But we are trying our best to avoid such confrontation and find alternative ways to armed confrontation."

Although the U.S. military and Sadr forces have fought some of the fiercest battles here since the 2003 American-led invasion, the relationship between the two sides has become even more convoluted since Sadr's political party became one of the largest blocs in parliament. Now, U.S. military and Iraqi officials are grappling with how to handle the Shiite Muslim cleric as he evolves from guerrilla fighter to political kingmaker.

The raids, which took place in Baghdad and Najaf, included the arrest in Najaf of a top spokesman for the group, Salah al-Obaidy, Sadr officials said. In response, Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, was deployed throughout the Shiite holy city to protect the movement's offices and the personal residence of its leader.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman, said he had no information about the raids.

No statement about a "limited" effort against a few dead enders?

Hmm...

Gonzales Not A Reality-Based AG

The AG takes a dip into a famous river in Africa:

In an embarrassing turnabout, the Department of Justice backed away Wednesday from a denial by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales of responsibility for the treatment of a Canadian who was seized by American authorities in 2002. The man was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and beaten.

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission's finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Mr. Gonzales replied, "Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria." He added, "I'm not aware that he was tortured."

The attorney general's comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Mr. Arar's supposed terrorist ties, American officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesman said Mr. Gonzales had intended to make only a narrow point: that deportations are now handled by the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice.

The spokesman, Charles Miller, said the attorney general forgot that at the time of Mr. Arar's deportation, such matters were still handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Department of Justice.

"He had his timeline mixed up," Mr. Miller said.

Yeah right, more likely he was simply engaging in defensive denial of a miscarriage of justice.

Asked why Mr. Gonzales appeared to cast doubt on the Canadian finding that Mr. Arar had been tortured, Mr. Miller said, "I wouldn't go beyond what he said."

Another can of worms altogether.

Asked about Mr. Gonzales's remarks, Mr. Arar said in an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio that American officials had sent him to Syria despite his protests that he would be tortured there.

"The facts speak for themselves, you know," Mr. Arar said. "The report clearly concluded that I was tortured. And for him to say that he does not know about the case or does not know I was tortured is really outrageous."

Maria C. LaHood, Mr. Arar's lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, called Mr. Gonzales' comments "unbelievable."

"I had hoped that they would actually step up and say, 'We made a mistake, we accept the report's findings, we clear Mr. Arar's name and we apologize,' " Ms. LaHood said.

Apologies? Never.

In September 2002, as he changed planes at Kennedy International Airport in New York on his way home to Canada, he was detained because his name was on a terrorist watch list. His name was included on the basis of incorrect information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he was linked to Al Qaeda, the commission found.

American officials wanted more information about what threat he might pose and decided to deport him to Syria, an option legally possible because he had been born there. Officials have said that as is standard in such cases, the United States sought "assurances" from Syria that Mr. Arar would not be tortured.

In fact, he was held there in a dank cell that measured 3 feet by 6 feet by 7 feet and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable, according to Mr. Arar's description and the commission report.

What other reason would there have been to send him to Syria? Especially if we "wanted more information about what threat he might pose"?

The "assurances" are more ass-covering sophistry, of course.

It would be not be difficult to persuade a secret police official of a nation that has agreed to conduct a hostile interrogation of a prisoner sent to them by the U.S. to give such an "assurance." For proper compensation, the foreign official would doubtlessly sign an affidavit that no torture would be forthcoming.

President Bush's former lawyer Gonzales is still protecting his boss.

Bush Attempting Ex Post Facto Shenanigans

From Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy:

Bush is in a heap of trouble. Whatever torture compromise may work its way through an intimidated Congress, it cannot help Bush. The US Constitution requires nothing less than a Constitutional Amendment to relieve US obligations under the Geneva convention; and, at least one Constitutional provision means that nothing legal can get Bush off the hook for the crimes that he has already committed.

Let's take the second one first. Bush seeks an ex post facto law that will make legal -- after the fact -- his violations of the Geneva Convention having to do with torture.

---

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

--US Constitution, Article I

---

That means that Bush cannot commit crimes, possibly including having ordered summary executions and brutal tortures, only to have them made legal later on. The Constitution flatly states that it doesn't work that way! I've been screaming about this for a long time now. Maybe the time has come to be vindicated:

George Washington University Professor and Countdown resident Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley joined Keith tonight to discuss the legal implications of President Bush's proposed changes to Article III of the Geneva Conventions. Keith raises an obvious yet seldom mentioned point: Is the Bush administration trying to retroactively legalize crimes it very well may have already committed? Wouldn't be the first time.

--John Amato, Crooks and Liars

Bush is beyond help from a mere act of Congress at this point. It'll take either the second coming or a constitutional amendment to change any US treaty obligation; the chances of that happening are very, very slim.

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This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

--US Constitution, Article VI, Annotations

---

Therefore, the Geneva Convention is the supreme law of the land and Bush is subject to it even if Congress should pass a measure that attempts to pardon him or, in any other way, absolve him of the capital crimes that he has already committed. Even US Codes, Title 18, § 2441. War crimes bind the US to the those international treaties which address the issue of war crimes, crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity. The case can be made that Bush has deliberately violated all of them. There is probable cause to bring severe criminal charges against Bush now. If the US government had not been hijacked by a handful of crooked corporations, Bush would already have been impeached, tried, and removed from office to stand trial in ordinary criminal courts. Only partisan politics has kept him in office.

I would add that Sen. Arlen Spector's bill to legalize the extra-legal warrantless NSA surveillance suffers from the same ex post facto problems since it contains language absolving the eavesdroppers and those who ordered same from legal jeopardy for having violated FISA.

Joan Didion On Cheney

Joan Didion has a new composition that (as per usual for this great American essayist) gets directly to the truth of the matter, in this case the political philosophy of Dick Cheney.

Watergate, Cheney has long maintained, was not a criminal conspiracy but the result of a power struggle between the legislative and executive branches. So was the 1973 War Powers Act, which restricted executive authority to go to war without consulting Congress and which Cheney believed unconstitutional. So was the attempt to get Cheney to say which energy executives attended the 2001 meetings of his energy task force. This issue, both Cheney and Bush explained again and again, had nothing to do with Enron or the other energy players who might be expecting a seat at the table in return for their generous funding (just under $50 million) of the 2000 Republican campaign. "The issue that was involved there," Cheney said, misrepresenting what had been requested, which was not the content of the conversations but merely the names of those present, "was simply the question of whether or not a Vice President can sit down and talk with citizens and gain from them their best advice and counsel on how we might deal with a particular issue."

The 1987 minority report (on Iran-Contra -- drafted with then-congressman Cheney's input) prefigures much else that has happened since. There is the acknowledgment of "mistakes" that turn out to be not exactly the mistakes we might have expected. The "mistake" in this administration's planning for the Iraq war, for example, derived not from having failed to do any planning but from arriving "too fast" in Baghdad, thereby losing the time, this scenario seemed to suggest, during which we had meant to think up a plan. Similarly, the "mistakes" in Iran-contra, as construed by the minority report, had followed not from having done the illegal but from having allowed the illegal to become illegal in the first place. As laid out by the minority, a principal "mistake" made by the Reagan administration in Iran-contra was in allowing President Reagan to sign rather than veto the 1984 Boland II Amendment forbidding aid to contra forces: no Boland II, no illegality. A second "mistake," to the same point, was Reagan's "less-than-robust defense of his office's constitutional powers, a mistake he repeated when he acceded too readily and too completely to waive executive privilege for our Committees' investigation."

The very survival of the executive species, then, was seen by Cheney and his people as dependent on its brute ability to claim absolute power and resist all attempts to share it. ...

Didion points out that Cheney is not really a neo-con:

To what end the (pre-Iraq war intel) story was being cooked was hard to know. The Vice President is frequently described as "ideological," or "strongly conservative," but little in his history suggests the intellectual commitment implicit in either. He made common cause through the run-up to Iraq with the neoconservative ideologues who had burrowed into think tanks during the Clinton years and resurfaced in 2001 in the departments of State and Defense and the White House itself, but the alliance appeared even then to be more strategic than felt. The fact that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams shared with Cheney a wish to go to war in Iraq could create, in its confluence with September 11, what many came to call a perfect storm -- as if it had blown up out of the blue beyond reach of human intervention -- but the perfect storm did not make Cheney a neocon.

He identifies himself as a conservative, both political and cultural. He presents himself as can-do, rock-solid even if he is forced to live in Washington (you know he only does it on our behalf), one politician who can be trusted not to stray far from whatever unexamined views were current in the intermountain West during the 1950s and 1960s. He has described a 1969 return visit to the University of Wisconsin, during which he took Bill Steiger and George H.W. Bush to an SDS rally, as having triggered his disgust with the Vietnam protest movement. "We were the only guys in the hall wearing suits that night," he told Nicholas Lemann.

UFB. I wonder how that looked on their FBI files.

Cheney leaves no paper trail. He has not always felt the necessity to discuss what he plans to say in public with the usual offices, including that of the President. Nor, we learned from Ron Suskind, has he always felt the necessity, say if the Saudis send information to the President in preparation for a meeting, to bother sending that information on to Bush. ...

Bob Woodward, in Plan of Attack, describes an exchange that took place between Cheney and Colin Powell in September 2002, when Cheney was determined that the US not ask the UN for the resolution against Iraq that the Security Council, after much effort by Powell, passed in November:

Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of unilateral action.... He added a new dimension, saying that the international reaction would be so negative that he would have to close American embassies around the world if we went to war alone.

That is not the issue, Cheney said. Saddam and the clear threat is the issue.

Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president thinks, Powell said. War could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences....

Not the issue, Cheney said.

In other words the Vice President had by then passed that point at which going to war was "not about our analysis." He had passed that point at which going to war was not about "finding a preponderance of evidence." At the point he had reached by September 2002, going to war was not even about the consequences. Not the issue, he had said.

The Bush Family Consigliere Goes To Iraq

Is Jim Baker bailing out the Bushes once again?

The former secretary of state, James A. Baker III, a confidant of President George H.W. Bush, visited Baghdad two weeks ago to take a look at the vexing political and military situation. He was there as co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, put together by top think tanks at the behest of Congress to come up with ideas about the way forward in Iraq. ...

Baker is not revealing much of his hand. He has indicated that recommendations will not be forthcoming until after the November elections, in an effort to keep the group above the political fray. He has also asked those involved in the study group -- members and staffers alike -- not to talk to the media, so most of those interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity. Baker's assistant said the co-chairman would not be available to be interviewed.

Baker has offered some hints of his thinking -- and his dismay with the way the Iraq occupation has been handled by the administration.

"The difficulty of winning the peace was severely underestimated," Baker wrote in a recent memoir, citing "costly mistakes" by the Pentagon. These included, he wrote, disbanding the Iraqi army, not securing weapons depots and "perhaps never having committed enough troops to successfully pacify the country."

But in an interview in the current issue of Texas Monthly, Baker dashed the idea of "just picking up and pulling out" of Iraq. "Even though it's something we need to find a way out of, the worst thing in the world we could do would be to pick up our marbles and go home," he said, "because then we will trigger, without a doubt, a huge civil war. And every one of the regional actors -- the Iranians and everybody else -- will come in and do their thing."

The study group appears to be struggling to find some middle ground between such a pullout and the administration's strategy of keeping a heavy American troop presence until the Iraqi government can maintain security on its own. ...

Some are skeptical that the president will be open to advice seeming to come from one of his father's top advisers. In some ways, Bush has distanced himself from the people and policies of the first Bush administration -- though Baker has been called on occasion to perform sensitive missions, such as heading the Bush campaign's efforts in the 2000 Florida recount and leading negotiations to provide debt relief to Iraq.

The administration's more hawkish supporters, meanwhile, are nervous about Baker's involvement, counting him as one of the "realist" foreign policy proponents they see as having allowed threats against the United States to grow in the '80s and '90s. Gary J. Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute voiced concern that the Iraq group was not listening to those advocating a more muscular military strategy to defeat the insurgency.

Publicly, the administration is supportive, though inside the foreign policy apparatus there appears to be skepticism that the Iraq Study Group will come up with any breakthroughs. At first, the administration was divided about whether to cooperate with the panel. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave her support only after being assured by officials with the federally funded U.S. Institute of Peace, under whose aegis the group was formed, and other think tanks involved in the project that the venture would be a forward-looking exercise and not an examination of past mistakes, according to people familiar with the project.

Interrogation Technique "Debate"

There is more to this story than is being reported.

On the surface, Bush's proposal (for legislation that narrowly defines U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions) requires that interrogations in the previously secret CIA prison system comply with legal rules written by Congress last year. Privately, the administration has concluded that doing so would allow the CIA to keep using virtually all the interrogation methods it has employed for the past five years, the officials said.

That conclusion is based on an unpublicized memo to the CIA from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which named the precise interrogation methods the department believed to be sanctioned by last year's broadly written congressional requirement that no U.S. detainees "shall be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" as those terms are defined in U.S. laws. ...

The administration says its intent is to define the explicit meaning of Common Article 3 so that CIA officers know exactly what they can do. But the senior official who addressed the legal issue yesterday said the standard the administration prefers is "context-sensitive," a phrase that suggests an endlessly shifting application of the rules.

The reason is that the administration's language would in effect ban only those interrogation techniques that "shock the conscience." That phrase, drawn from a judicial interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, is a "flexible" standard, the official said. Others have said that standard would allow interrogators to weigh how urgently they felt they needed to extract information against the harshness of their techniques, instead of following rigid guidelines.

The official did not try to explain how embracing such an inherently flexible standard would actually create clarity, the watchword of the administration's public campaign for its version of the bill.

Bush yesterday threatened to blame Congress for not letting this "valuable" interrogation program proceed if they do not acquiesce to the administration's desire for carte blanche in dealing with CIA detainees.

The spin in the media (helpfully provided by the administration) is that Bush himself will stop the program.

Rumor has it that CIA officers are refusing to use any of the questionable techniques without some "clarity." In other words, they are refusing to carry out a White House policy that has been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

House GOP Intel Report On Iran Denounced By U.N.

Last month's report on Iran sponsored by the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee (see Politicization Of Iran Intelligence Requested By GOP) turns out to be -- as some suspected -- a manipulation of the intel reminiscent of that seen in the months leading to the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna. ...

Yesterday's letter, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, was the first time the IAEA has publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the committee's 29-page report, which said Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring. ...

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. ...

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer (Fredrick Fleitz) with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons. ...

Hoekstra's committee is working on a separate report about North Korea that is also being written principally by Fleitz. A draft of the report, provided to The Post, includes several assertions about North Korea's weapons program that the intelligence officials said they cannot substantiate, including one that Pyongyang is already enriching uranium.

The intelligence community believes North Korea is trying to acquire an enrichment capability but has no proof that an enrichment facility has been built, the officials said.

NSA Coached GOP Lawmakers In Defense of Extra-Legal Surveillance

When the administration got caught violating FISA, the NSA reached out to the opinion makers that matter -- Republican lawmakers who could derail any congressional investigations into the affair.

Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee are complaining that the National Security Agency has played politics in support of the secret program to intercept phone calls between alleged terrorists in the United States and abroad.

On July 27, shortly after most members of the committee were briefed on the controversial surveillance program, the NSA supplied the panel's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), with "a set of administration approved, unclassified talking points for the members to use," as described in the document.

Among the talking points were "subjective statements that appear intended to advance a particular policy view and present certain facts in the best possible light," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said in a letter to the NSA director.

The cleared statements included "I can say the program must continue" and "There is strict oversight in place . . . now including the full congressional intelligence committees," as well as "Current law is not agile enough to handle the threat posed by sophisticated international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda" and "The FISA should be amended so that it is technologically neutral." FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the current law.

Rockefeller and six Democrats on the panel wrote Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the NSA's director, on Aug. 29 that they believed those statements "appear intended to advocate particular policies rather than provide guidance on classification." The letter added: "We believe that it is inappropriate for the NSA to insert itself into this policy debate." ...

One element particularly troubling to the Democrats was the statement that there was "strict" congressional oversight of the program, because, as one senior Democrat said yesterday, committee members are still awaiting requested documents such as the original authorization by President Bush that initiated the program.

Fear Mongering Sophistry By The CINC in 9-11 Speech

Gotta call bullshit on the Commander in Chief on this one:

"Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq," Bush said last night in a prime-time address from the Oval Office, "the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad."

If the administration really thought that a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would result in the Iraq-based terrorists following us here to strike our cities and towns, they would be vastly increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to a number that would preclude such an eventuality.

The president would have no problem gaining the support of Congress for such a move.

Surely the intelligence community would have -- by now -- been able to produce at least one captured Iraqi insurgent or terrorist to testify to such a plan. Even in secret intelligence committee session.

In fact, if such a scenario was plausible, the White House would already be catching blame from the supporters of the war for endangering the nation by not demanding a return to a draft.

The "we can't leave Iraq because they will follow us here" meme is crass fear-mongering of the most vile sort.

And is further evidence that the real danger to our country comes from the Bush administration.

Looking Bad For U.S. In Anbar

A realistic voice checks in from Iraq:

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.

One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost."

The "very pessimistic" statement, as one Marine officer called it, was dated Aug. 16 and sent to Washington shortly after that, and has been discussed across the Pentagon and elsewhere in national security circles. "I don't know if it is a shock wave, but it's made people uncomfortable," said a Defense Department official who has read the report. Like others interviewed about the report, he spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name because of the document's sensitivity.

Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.

Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence.

Those conclusions are striking because, even after four years of fighting an unexpectedly difficult war in Iraq, the U.S. military has tended to maintain an optimistic view: that its mission is difficult, but that progress is being made. Although CIA station chiefs in Baghdad have filed negative classified reports over the past several years, military intelligence officials have consistently been more positive, both in public statements and in internal reports. ...

"In the analytical world, there is a real pall of gloom descending," said Jeffrey White, a former analyst of Middle Eastern militaries for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who also had been told about the pessimistic Marine report. ...

Anbar is a key province; it encompasses Ramadi and Fallujah, which with Baghdad pose the greatest challenge U.S. forces have faced in Iraq. It accounts for 30 percent of Iraq's land mass, encompassing the vast area from the capital to the borders of Syria and Jordan, including much of the area that has come to be known as the Sunni Triangle. ...

Devlin's report is a work of intelligence analysis, not of policy prescription, so it does not try to suggest what, if anything, can be done to fix the situation. It is not clear what the implications would be for U.S. forces if Devlin's view is embraced by top commanders elsewhere in Iraq. U.S. officials are wary of simply abandoning the Sunni parts of Iraq, for fear that they could become havens for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

One possible solution would be to try to turn over the province to Iraqi forces, but that could increase the risk of a full-blown civil war. Shiite-dominated forces might begin slaughtering Sunnis, while Sunni-dominated units might simply begin acting independently of the central government.

Today's Dirt On Rumsfeld

Today's revelation in the recent flood of leaked complaints about the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- and as befits tomorrow's anniversary -- has to do with the search for Osama bin Laden.

Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.

In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation.

Ho ho ho.

At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007. ...

In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the "Global War on Terrorism."

Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. "There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., who recently stepped down as deputy director of counterterrorism under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "In order to find Osama bin Laden, certain departments will come together. . . . It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy, but in terms of advancing United States power for that mission, I think that process is effective."

Rumsfeld's Bullying and Arrogance Substituted For Postwar Policy Planning

Rumsfeld Forbade Planning For Postwar Iraq, General Says:

Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said.

Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid told the Newport News Daily Press in an interview published yesterday that Rumsfeld had said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld "told us to get ready for Iraq."

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4" -- plans that covered post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, said Scheid, who is retiring in about three weeks, but "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that."

It is revealing that now -- with people coming out of the woodwork to criticize Rumsfeld -- Bush continues to support his Defense Secretary.

The thinking in the White House must be that the firing (or accepting the resignation) of Rumsfeld at this point would be a tacit admission of the failure of the war.

However, this has to be a tough call for the president's political advisors (Rove, et al.), because there is no one move that would potentially shift the blame for the shortcomings in performance in Iraq away from Bush and vulnerable Republicans than to jettison their fractious DOD chief.

The political team must fear that the obstreperous old fart would exact a painful revenge.

The Politico-Media Complex

Simon Jenkins examines how the "politico-media complex" helps terrorists achieve maximum disruption of the global system.

Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible. This response has become 24-hour, seven-day-a-week amplification by the new politico-media complex, especially shrill where the dead are white people. It is this that puts global terror into the bang. While we take ever more extravagant steps to ward off the bangs, we do the opposite with the terrorist aftershock. We turn up its volume. We seem to wallow in fear.

Were I to take my life in my hands this weekend and visit Osama bin Laden's hideout in Wherever-istan, the interview would go something like this. I would ask how things have been for him since 9/11. His reply would be that he had worried at first that America would capitalise on the global revulsion, even among Muslims, and isolate him as a lone fanatic. He was already an "unwelcome guest" among the Afghans, and the Tajiks were out to kill him for the murder of their beloved leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud (which they may yet do). A little western cunning and he would have been in big trouble.

In the event Bin Laden need not have worried. He would agree, as did the CIA's al-Qaida analyst in Peter Taylor's recent documentary, that the Americans have done his job for him. They panicked. They drove the Taliban back into the mountains, restoring the latter's credibility in the Arab street and turning al-Qaida into heroes. They persecuted Muslims across America. They occupied Iraq and declared Iran a sworn enemy. They backed an Israeli war against Lebanon's Shias. Soon every tinpot Muslim malcontent was citing al-Qaida as his inspiration. Bin Laden's tiny organisation, which might have been starved of funds and friends in 2001, had become a worldwide jihadist phenomenon.

I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his sleeve for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The western media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the screaming, turning the base metal of violence into the gold of terror. They would replay the tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus remind the world of his awesome power. Americans are more afraid of jihadists this year than last. In a Transatlantic Trends survey, the number of them describing international terrorism as an "extremely important threat" went up from 72% to 79%. As for European support for America's world leadership, that has plummeted from 64% in 2002 to 37% this year.

Bin Laden might boast that he had achieved terrorism's equivalent of an atomic chain reaction: a self-regenerating cycle of outrage and foreign-policy overkill, aided by anniversary journalism and fuelled by the grim scenarios of security lobbyists. He now had only to drop an occasional CD into the offices of al-Jazeera, and Washington and London quaked with fear. The authorities could be reduced to million-dollar hysterics by a phial of nail varnish, a copy of the Qur'an, or a dark-skinned person displaying a watch and a mobile phone.

A feature of democracy is freedom of information and speech. News of violence cannot be concealed since concealment fuels the climate of fear. The state should not censor news of terrorist incidents. As Milan Kundera asserted, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". But there are ways of not forgetting. A feature of democracy is also to reject arrest without trial, reject the use of torture, and reject retaliatory violence against people or groups. Democracy can apparently sacrifice these legal principles to guard against the 10% of terrorism that is bang. Why not restrain the publicity that fuels the other 90%, the aftershock? The boundary between news and scaremongering may be hard to define. But so is any boundary between liberty and security. What is so sacred about publicising terror as against habeas corpus?

Conceding the kudos of state censorship to jihadists should be as unthinkable as conceding arrest without trial. That does not excuse the politico-media complex from any responsibility for caution, a sense of proportion and self-restraint. The gruelling re-enactment of the London bombings in July and this weekend's 9/11 horror-fest are not news. They exploit grief and horror, and in doing so give gratuitous publicity to Bin Laden and al-Qaida. Those personally affected by these outrages may have their own private memorials. But to hallow the events with repetitious publicity turns a squalid crime into a constantly revitalised political act. It grants the jihadists what they most crave, warrior status. It more than validates terrorism as a weapon of war, it glorifies it.

The best way to commemorate 9/11 is with silence. Instead, Bin Laden must be laughing.

SSCI Still Delaying Report on Pre-War Manipulation of Intelligence

The administration's manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war has been an issue for the past three years and a half years. If the White House has nothing to be ashamed about from their performance back then, why has the Senate intelligence committee so steadfastly dragged their feet in examining the facts?

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the committee, has been actively impeding the search for the truth. Now we find out that a report on the cooked intelligence will not be ready before the midterm elections.

To appease the pesky Democrats on the committee, Roberts has now deigned to schedule a vote to authorize the declassification and release of two non-threatening portions of the unfinished work in progress.

A long-awaited Senate analysis comparing the Bush administration's public statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein with the evidence senior officials reviewed in private remains mired in partisan recrimination and will not be released before the November elections, key senators said yesterday.

Instead, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will vote today to declassify two less controversial chapters of the panel's report, on the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, for release as early as Friday. One chapter has concluded that Iraqi exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, who were subsidized by the U.S. government, tried to influence the views of intelligence officers analyzing Hussein's efforts to create weapons of mass destruction. ...

The second compares prewar estimates of Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear programs with the findings of U.S. weapons hunters, who wrapped up their work empty-handed in December 2004.

The INC subterfuge is an old story, dating from the mid-1990's. Besides, it is not the greedy exiles who are to blame for spinning their yarns, it is the civilians at DOD who are to blame for buying their product.

The second part of the report -- about the missing WMD -- leaves huge openings for sophistry by apologists who can always claim that the weapons were spirited away to neighboring countries in the confusing days before our invasion. Some goopers are even now saying that we did actually find Saddam's weapons.

Everything here boils down to the fact that it is essential that no report that contains any real dirt is issued any time soon.

The White House will be needing to use the gambit again in the near future to prepare public opinion for the necessity of attacking Iran.

Rev. George Bush's "Life of Mohammed"

From a clarification posted in December on the website of the U.S. State Department's "Identifying Misinformation Team" in response to the claim by Cairo's Al-Azhar Islamic Academy that President George W. Bush had a grandfather, also named George Bush, who wrote Life of Mohammed, an out-of-print book insulting to Muslims.

U.S. biblical scholar Reverend George Bush did write a book titled Life of Mohammed in 1830.

Reverend Bush was NOT the grandfather of the current president. Reverend Bush was the cousin of Obadiah Bush, who was the great-great-great-grandfather of the current president. This makes the Reverend Bush a distant relative of the current president, five generations removed, but NOT his direct ancestor.

The Al-Azhar Department of Research, Translation, and Writings claims that the book describes Arabs and Muslims as being "degenerate races, insects, rats, and snakes."

The word "degenerate" is used twice, both times in a characterization of the state of the Christian Church at the time of Mohammed. There are two references to snakes, neither of them in a characterization of Arabs or Muslims. Word searches find no instances of the words "insects" or "rats," although in one section Reverend Bush does compare Muslims to locusts.

The New Yorker: The World After 9-11

The New Yorker Magazine, in their 9-11 anniversary issue, has a roundtable discussion (posted online this morning) on the aftereffects of the Bush administration's reaction to the attacks five years ago.

(SEYMOUR) HERSH: In the fall of 2001, I was learning a lot about a great debate inside the Administration about what to do in Afghanistan. There were a lot of people who argued very bitterly against the air war -- I'm talking about people on the inside, tough guys -- arguing against what we all assumed to be the one just aspect of this whole post-9/11 process, which was the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan and the Special Forces operation. That was the beginning of the whole torture issue with Guantanamo, and the buying of prisoners. All of that stuff was debated before late October, when the President authorized the bombing. There was a huge debate about even whom to support in Afghanistan -- whether or not we should do more real counterinsurgency, and take up the Taliban and consider them more seriously as people you could actually talk to, and the decision was that we ought to go with the warlords. Like a lot of people, I accepted the premise of the Afghan war; I accepted the premise that it wasn't that irrational, that we had to do something. I didn't accept it the second time, in Iraq. If the Administration wants a role model for how to respond to grave abuses in terms of international terrorism, look at the Indian government and Mumbai, the train bombing there. The government treated it like a criminal activity. By going to war, instead of criminalizing what Osama bin Laden and his minions did -- there's no question that, in terms of military operations, this is the worst government in the history of America.

(AMY) DAVIDSON: George, this is something you've written about. Do you think that we've learned something since 9/11 about the limits of what military action can accomplish?

(GEORGE) PACKER: Some of us have, including some people in the government and in the military, but they're not in the key positions. Sy's most recent article, on the Lebanon war, suggests that the people who are in the key positions continue to learn the wrong lessons, which is that air power can destroy deeply entrenched groups that are as much political as they are military. Which is very worrying, because it shows that what one hears -- that no unwelcome information reaches the President, that it is generally stopped at his door by people from the Vice-President's office or by his immediate staff -- is true. It's something I hear over and over again. So I don't think anyone in a position to make decisions has learned. I think what those people have done is protected themselves from learning by counterpunching every time anyone lands a blow and turning what should be very difficult strategic policy questions into, essentially, part of a permanent campaign at home to win a political argument. I think they've taken that more seriously, they've given it more energy, and they consider it more important, in a way, than they do the actual conflict outside of our borders. But I also want to say, there's a huge ideological battle that is not of our making, but which is now the world we live in. That's where I think the real key questions are. I think Sy's absolutely right that war is far too blunt an instrument, that crime and intelligence work are where we -- and the Brits, and other countries -- have had our few successes. But, beyond that, there is this ideological problem, which anyone who travels in that part of the world gets a heavy dose of. And we don't know what to do about it. And that is a failure of leadership.

Uzbek Cooperation in "War On Terror" Detailed

Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan during the early days of the "war on terror," has a story to tell about the situational ethics involved in the shadowy battle against the freedom hatin' Muslims.

In a piece in today's Outlook section of the Washington Post, Murray references pissing contests between his embassy in Tashkent and the British Foreign Office over human rights violations against the Uzbek people, and the excesses in the fight against Islamic terrorist groups.

There is also the requisite description of a terrorist suspect having been boiled in oil.

And the cozy relationship between the Uzbek torturers and U.S. officials:

At the same time that I was receiving word from Uzbek citizens about the gruesome affronts to their humanity, I was also getting CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan, under the U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing agreement. This information -- fed to the CIA by Karimov's security services -- revealed the same pattern of information as those forced confessions.

And it was a pattern that was false, often demonstrably so. One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah's Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty.

The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem "in the context of the war on terror." (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity.

In November 2002 and again in January 2003, I made formal, written complaints to London, arguing that it was morally, legally and practically wrong to obtain intelligence under torture. The law was embodied in the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and in practical terms, torture pollutes intelligence. I was summoned back in early March 2003 for a meeting with Matthew Kydd, head of liaison with the British security services, and Michael Wood, legal adviser to the Foreign Office. Kydd informed me that the intelligence from Uzbekistan was "operationally useful." Wood later wrote that I was incorrect to believe it was an offense to "receive or possess information [obtained] under torture." ...

During this period, the key challenge facing then- Secretary of State Colin Powell was the need to keep certifying Uzbekistan's human rights record to Congress. By spring 2004, Congress was waking up to a human rights problem, and in July of that year, the Bush administration announced that it would cut $18 million in military and economic aid to Uzbekistan.

However, just before certification was due, the Uzbek government said that al-Qaeda suicide bombers had attacked Tashkent. I visited each of the alleged bomb sites within hours and saw virtually no damage. The evidence on the ground did not fit the official explanation. I knew al-Qaeda was not behind whatever had occurred: The British embassy had received National Security Agency intercepts of senior al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and the Middle East, phoning each other to find out what was going on in Tashkent. Nevertheless, Powell's subsequent claim that Tashkent was under attack by Islamic extremists helped smooth the path for continuing U.S. aid.

'Islamofascism' as Propaganda Catchword

A concise slapdown of the right-wing blogger term "Islamofascism" -- recently adopted by the Bush administration -- is found in an essay by Eric Margolis.

The term 'Islamofascist' is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. It is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbels, and the latest expression of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington's propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.

This ugly term was coined -- as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, 'terrorism' to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

Both the terms 'terrorism' and 'fascist' have been so abused and over used that they have lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I've read of fascism comes in former Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton's superb 2004 book, 'The Anatomy of Fascism.'

Paxton defines fascism's essence, which he aptly terms its 'emotional lava' as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one's group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign 'contamination.'

Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.

None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton's definitive analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast was Lebanon's Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930's which, ironically, became an ally of Israel's rightwing in the 1980's. ...

The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America's allies.

Nor do underground Islamic militant groups ('terrorists' in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing 'un-Islamic' regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.

Claims by fevered neoconservatives that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.

As Prof. Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, "Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism."

However, there are plenty of modern far rightists with neo-fascist tendencies. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. They advocate 'preemptive attacks against all potential enemies,' grabbing other nation's resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of 'liberal' political rights.

They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex, colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people's children. They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.

And now they are furiously whipping up war fever against Syria and Iran as a last desperate effort to keep themselves in power after the debacles they created in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Lebanon.

Pentagon Issues New Edition of "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq"

Though it is not yet available on defenselink.mil, the DOD has released the latest version of its congressionally mandated progress report "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq".

All that good news that Donald Rumsfeld complains that the U.S. media ignores is overshadowed in the Pentagon report by some revealing statistics.

Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent during the roughly three-month period ending in early August, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains "potent and viable," the Pentagon noted today in an comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.

In a grim 63-page report, the Pentagon chronicled bad news on a variety of fronts. One telling indicator was the number of weekly attacks, which reached an all-time high in July. ...

The Pentagon report on "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq" is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly. It covers a broad range of subjects, ranging from the economy to public attitudes to the training of Iraqi security forces.

This time, the study has been the focus of special interest because of increasing fears that Iraq is sliding into civil war. And its grimmer notes, echoing recent Congressional testimony by military commanders, come at a time when President Bush and members of his cabinet have been trying to present a strong case in support of the war, in the face of vehement criticism from Democrats.

Addressing that scenario, the report notes: "Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, especially in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi population has increased in recent months."

As a consequence of the rising violence, the number of Iraqi casualties -- civilian and well as military -- has jumped to almost 120 a day. Further, the confidence of Iraqis in the future has diminished, according to public opinion surveys cited in the Pentagon report. Still, the study asserts that the fighting in Iraq does not meet the "strict" legal definition of a civil war.

The assessment provides bad news on a variety of fronts.

It said that Al Qaeda is active despite the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because of the group's "cellular structure," that the Sunni insurgency is strong and that militias are undiminished.

The Pentagon distributed the report on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a common time for government officials to put out bad news. A Pentagon officials denied that this was the intent and said the report was issued when it completed.

This report will provide excellent ammo for the necessary discrediting of the kook who heads the Defense Department:

Under assault from Republicans on issues of national security, congressional Democrats are planning to push for a vote of no confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month as part of a broad effort to stay on the offensive ahead of the November midterm elections.

In Rumsfeld, Democrats believe they have found both a useful antagonist and a stand-in for President Bush and what they see as his blunders in Iraq. This week, Democrats interpreted a speech of his as equating critics of the war in Iraq to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, an interpretation that Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff disputed. But Democrats said the hyperbolic attack would backfire. ...

But Democrats -- and some Republicans -- say a debate on Rumsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon will present a quandary to embattled GOP incumbents in districts that have turned solidly against the war.

"We are approaching 2,700 dead Americans, 20,000 wounded, many of them missing eyes, missing limbs, facing paralysis," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). "They want to debate that; we're happy to debate that."

There are "known knowns" and "known unknowns", and there are absolute certainties as well.

Such as the fact that Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense puts a public face on a singularly American form of fascism that has been revealed to the world by the imprudent actions of the Bush administration.

The real owners of the country hate when their game is exposed to the clear light of public scrutiny by rash and careless actors.

When they got fed up with Nixon, they had no problem consigning him to the dustheap in 1974.

The Bush regime has less to fear at this point from Democratic voters and public opinion than from the harsh judgment of the puppetmasters who installed them in the first place.