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Mini-Ed: Bush And Terrorism: A Neglected Back Story, Jerry Politex

In the opinion piece by William Fisher that follows, we learn that on Tuesday "A former Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, 47, accused of helping to lead a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel, was acquitted on nearly half the charges against him and the jury deadlocked on the rest including charges he aided terrorists. The case was seen as one of the biggest courtroom tests yet of the Patriot Act's expanded search-and-surveillance powers."

While this story is being reported in the U.S. mainstream press this week, what we're not being reminded of is its previous news reports: Al-Arian, a Muslim leader and Democrat, worked to get out the Bush vote in Tampa during the 2000 presidential campaign (Washington Post), Newsweek published a photo of Bush, Laura, and the Al-Arian family at a Florida campaign stop (Boston Globe) [photo here], where Bush called Al-Arian's son "Big Dude" (Newsweek), and Al-Arian discussed the Justice Department's terrorism policy on secret evidence with Bush. "When he debated Al Gore later in the year, Bush even made a point of bringing up the secret-evidence issue."(MSNBC). According to the National Review, " The Bush campaign in 2000 very determinedly reached out to Muslim voters. Indeed, Muslim-Americans may have tipped the election to George Bush. One survey suggests that the 50,000 Muslim voters of Florida, normally staunch Democrats, reacted to Al Gore's selection of Joe Lieberman as his running mate by voting 80% for Bush."

In 2001 Al-Arian was invited to the White House to attend a briefing of Muslim-American leaders, his son was given a congressional internship, and, when "Big Dude" was later ejected from a White House meeting on faith-based initiatives, Bush sent the Al-Arians a letter of apology (Washington Post) "and ordered the deputy director of the Secret Service to apologize as well." (National Review) In Mike Isikoff's MSNBC story, we learned that the "Secret Service had flagged Al-Arian as a potential terrorist prior to his visit to the White House." One would think the mainstream press would have found all of this to be an interesting back story to this week's turn of events. (documentation) --Politex

You Be The Judge: Progress In U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions? , William Fisher

Amidst charges that President Bush and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) are inflating the number of criminal prosecutions for terrorism, five cases shed light on the administration’s mixed record of convictions during 2005....These cases provide context for assertions by President Bush, his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and many other senior administration officials, that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."

But, according to an analysis of the DOJ’s own records by the Washington Post, the numbers are misleading. The paper claimed that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied – have been convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security”. “Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism”, the analysis shows. “For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.” Said The Post, “Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here.

The DOJ’s campaign to round up and detain alleged terrorists began under then Attorney General John Ashcroft almost immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. During that period, large numbers of people -- primarily Arabs and other Muslims as well as South Asians – were arrested by the DOJ and held without charges or lawyers in jails run by immigration agencies. No one caught up in this dragnet was ever accused of any terror-related crime. Some were released, often after being held incommunicado for months. Some claimed to have been beaten or otherwise mistreated. Most were deported for immigration violations – not a criminal offense under U.S. law. David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and author of "Enemy Aliens," asserts that the "centerpiece of the domestic war on terrorism has been preventive detention."

"In the first seven weeks after Sept. 11, the DOJ admitted to detaining nearly 1,200 men as suspected terrorists, nearly all foreign nationals," he said. "It subsequently adopted two anti-terrorism immigration initiatives that were aimed at men from Arab and Muslim countries on the theory that they were more likely to be terrorists. Those programs led to the detention of nearly 4,000 more people. Yet of these, not one stands convicted of any terrorist offense. The administration's record is zero for 5,000." In a number of cases since then, the DOJ has conducted numerous high-profile press conferences accusing people of terror-related offenses, only to be prevented from bringing these charges in court because torture had been used to extract confessions from the targets. Evidence obtained through torture is not admissible as evidence in a U.S. court....

Xmas: How The Theocon Grinches Are Trying To Steal Christmas, Adam Cohen (excerpts)

Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda. The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.

The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states. Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders' worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920's, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the "Christmas shopping season."

Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a "profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy's advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find" and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day. This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization - they're insisting on it....The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools. It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own.

Verse: Would Jesus?, Doug Long

George, you've done a lot of killing.
And you do it with aplomb.
Perhaps you would be willing
to say: Who would Jesus bomb?

You've killed thousands in Iraq,
And you keep on killing more.
There's some info that we lack:
Would Jesus start a war?

You knew before your war began
Your reasons wouldn't fly.
So won't you tell us if you can:
To whom would Jesus lie?

It's almost time now to adjourn,
So won't you let us court your
Opinion on this big concern:
Who would Jesus torture?

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Today's 100+ bush headlines: Selected from around the world
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Insta-Ed: Who does Judge Samuel Alito Jr. think he's fooling by presenting himself as a reasonable jurist? Here's a guy whose entire career seems to be based on interfering with women's lives. He wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, condoned the strip search of a 10-year-old girl and belonged to a conservative alumni club that resisted the admission of women to Princeton. --Maureen Dowd

Opinion: How To Stop Bully Bush, Bernard Weiner

During the campaign [Bush] almost always appeared before hand-picked supportive audiences, and how he almost never gives major foreign-policy speeches these days except before supportive military audiences. Ordinary American civilians who may or may not agree with all his policies are not to be included in the democratic process; as Bush famously told one citizen who expressed mild disapproval, "What do I care what you think?"...

It's plain that the Bush Administration believes (or at least suspects) that its own arguments, if presented straight, won't pass muster with the American populace, or, in the case of the purchased news stories in Iraq, that country's public. The Administration's versions of the truth won't be enough to convince readers, viewers or voters-- for good reason, as they derive from a greedy, mean-spirited ideology -- so propaganda is employed to fool the public. You'll recall that the White House Iraq Group, the unit established to "market" the war to the American people, had a devil of a time coming up with a successful selling tool. Should they tell the truth, that the war was necessary as part of a long-term campaign to control the huge oil/gas energy fields in the Mideast and to alter the geopolitical map of that region? No, that wouldn't fly with the citizenry, they figured; nobody wants their kids killed or maimed for imperial adventures created by ivory-tower ideologues who made sure never to put on their country's uniform in times of war....

Bush may make a few accommodations prior to the 2006 election -- withdraw thousands of Guard and Reserve troops, for example, and promise more withdrawals -- in order to seem to be in line with the public mood. But the war will continue, with bombing from the air taking the place of any boots missing on the ground, and the imperial goals of dominating the region and controlling the energy fields will remain operative. No matter how long it takes, Bush is willing to sacrifice the lives of U.S. troops and spend the treasury into bankruptcy for "the mission"; he believes the war against radical Muslims is his holy work and he won't back down unless absolutely required to do so. Besides, keeping the American citizenry on a constant fear-boil, Rove believes, provides openings through which to slip Bush&Co.'s domestic agenda. In short, it's long since time for us to respond to the bullies in charge of our foreign and domestic policy, to remember the lessons of history when insecure leaders are not confronted early enough...

Opinion: Condi's Tortured Prose, Maureen Dowd (excerpts)

Our secretary of state's tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.... But in Bill's case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints. "The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said. It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees." Ms. Rice also claimed that the U.S. did not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture." But, hey, as Rummy likes to say, stuff happens.

The president said he was opposed to torture and then effectively issued regulations to allow what any normal person - and certainly a victim - would consider torture. Alberto Gonzales et al. have defined torture deviancy downward to the point where it's hard to imagine what would count as torture. Under this administration, prisoners have been hung by their wrists and had electrodes attached to their genitals; they've been waterboarded, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and threatened with death - even accidentally killed.

Does Ms. Rice think anyone is buying her loophole-riddled defense? Not with the Italians thinking of rounding up C.I.A. officers to ask them whether they abducted a cleric in Milan. And with Torquemada Cheney slouching around Capitol Hill trying to circumvent John McCain, legalizing torture at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, by preventing Congress from requiring decent treatment for U.S. prisoners.... When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip. Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition.

Quips: Rejected Pentagon stories for Iraqi papers:
"Osama's Orgy: The Tape Al Jazeera Won't Show You"
"Iraqi Security Forces Cheer Tot With Kitten Rescue"
"Bomber's Report From Afterlife: No Virgins!" --John Tierney

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005

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Inside Bush Watch: Today's Opinions and Features From Bush Watch Columnists,
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Insta-Ed: Just in time for Christmas travel, our Department of Homeland Security will allow scissors with 4" blades to be taken on board airplanes, along with screwdrivers up to 7" to unscrew them, turning the scissors into 2 knives that looked just as lethal as boxcutters when a congressman showed the makeshift weapons on TV last night. The excuse for providing take-on weapons to would-be terrorists given by a government rep was limited funds for security checks. I guess that 1% of the population that received the lion's share of the Bush tax cuts travels in private or government jets. Australia has announced it will not follow the U.S. lead. --Politex

Opinion: THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF FAKE NEWS, William Fisher

The story of the Pentagon’s latest PR efforts was revealed last week by the Los Angeles Times. It said that many of the articles were presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. The Times reported that while the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year, the newspaper wrote. The articles are received from the military and translated into Arabic and then placed with Iraqi media, both print and broadcast, by the Lincoln Group, a Washington D.C.-based public relations firm which is under contract to the Pentagon. Lincoln’s website boasts of its extensive network of relationships with Iraqi journalists....

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) recently returned from a trip to Iraq and wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal in which he pointed to Iraq's "independent television stations and newspapers" as evidence of the "remarkable changes" there. “I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. Last week, I was thrilled to see a vigorous political campaign, and a large number of independent television stations and newspapers covering it.” In coordination with President Bush’s speech last week at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, the administration published a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq". Among its claims: "A professional and informative Iraqi news media has taken root…More than 100 newspapers freely discuss political events every day in Iraq.”...

Congressional Democrats said the Lincoln Group’s activities were the latest example of questionable public relations practices by the administration. In an earlier case, payments were made to columnists, among them conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, who secretly received $240,000 for promoting “No Child Left Behind”, the administration's education initiative. "From Armstrong Williams to fake TV news, we know this White House has tried multiple times to buy the news at home," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said. "Now, we need to find out if they've exported this practice to the Middle East."...

Martin Kaplan, Associate Dean at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and director of its Norman Lear Center, told IPS, “Anyone who recalls the good-news propaganda than ran in the state-run communist press even as the Soviet Union was collapsing will find what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq creepy.  It sends a deeply troubling message about what they think democracy is.  But given their demonization of dissent in the United States, it sadly comes as no surprise.”

Opinion: Fight Theocon Illiteracy By Studying Science, Nicholas Kristof (excerpt)

The best argument against "intelligent design" has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for "mediocre design. But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole. One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people. "The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had," C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, "The Two Cultures."

Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors* and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines....This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change. In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

Intellectuals have focused on the challenge from the right, which has led to a drop in the public acceptance of evolution in the U.S. over the last 20 years, to 40 percent from 45 percent. Jon Miller, a professor at the Northwestern University medical school who has tracked attitudes toward evolution in 34 countries, says Turkey is the only one with less support for evolution than the U.S...."

*Of course there's no guarantee that having more doctors in Congress will improve the scientific sophistication of that august body. Senate majority leader Bill Frist is a doctor; yet, he was perfectly willing to throw out what he learned in med school to get evangelical votes during the Schiavo fiasco. --Politex

Big Bush Lies: Definition of a Lie: "2. Something that misleads or deceives" (Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
Bush Lie #4 (of 55): "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
Source: Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, White House (5/29/2003).
Why This Statement is A Lie: This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.

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Monday, December 5, 2005

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Insta-Ed: Want to be an op-ed writer in the mainstream press but want to tell the truth? Be like the clown in King Lear: write comedy. That way, you can be truthful and your readers can pretend they don't believe you. Who's going to believe a clown! Here's an example to get you started. --Politex

South America: Why American Corporations Say "No MAS" to Morales , Jason Miller

According to an entry in Wikipedia, " As of December 4th, 2005, [Socialist Evo] Morales is consistently ahead in the [Bolivian presidential polls] at around 32% of the vote. There have been over 100,000 election judges sworn in as the country prepares for the elections on December 18th....Preliminary polls have placed Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism in an uncomfortable three-way tie with center and right wing forces and urban majority leaders Jorge Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina, with only a few points' difference, showing how much of a "close call" the 2005 Bolivian presidential election will be." What follows is a defense of Morales by Jason Miller, an American activist whose affiliations include Amnesty International and the ACLU....

Opinion: What's Trickling Down Isn't Cash, Paul Krugman (excerpt)

it's hard to convince people that the economy is booming when they themselves have yet to see any benefits from the supposed boom. Over the last few years G.D.P. growth has been reasonably good, and corporate profits have soared. But that growth has failed to trickle down to most Americans. Back in August the Census bureau released family income data for 2004. The report, which was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, showed a remarkable disconnect between overall economic growth and the economic fortunes of most American families.

It should have been a good year for American families: the economy grew 4.2 percent, its best performance since 1999. Yet most families actually lost economic ground. Real median household income - the income of households in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation - fell for the fifth year in a row. And one key source of economic insecurity got worse, as the number of Americans without health insurance continued to rise. We don't have comparable data for 2005 yet, but it's pretty clear that the results will be similar. G.D.P. growth has remained solid, but most families are probably losing ground as their earnings fail to keep up with inflation.

Behind the disconnect between economic growth and family incomes lies the extremely lopsided nature of the economic recovery that officially began in late 2001. The growth in corporate profits has, as I said, been spectacular. Even after adjusting for inflation, profits have risen more than 50 percent since the last quarter of 2001. But real wage and salary income is up less than 7 percent. There are some wealthy Americans who derive a large share of their income from dividends and capital gains on stocks, and therefore benefit more or less directly from soaring profits. But these people constitute a small minority. For everyone else the sluggish growth in wages is the real story. And much of the wage and salary growth that did take place happened at the high end, in the form of rising payments to executives and other elite employees. Average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, are lower now than when the recovery began.

So there you have it. Americans don't feel good about the economy because it hasn't been good for them. Never mind the G.D.P. numbers: most people are falling behind....

Tom Tomorrow: A Neocon Dialogue

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Sunday, December 4, 2005

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Mission Accomplished: Big Oil's Occupation Of Iraq, Heather Wokusch

The Bush administration’s covert plan to help energy companies steal Iraq’s oil could be just weeks away from fruition, and the implications are staggering: continued price-gouging by Big Oil, increased subjugation of the Iraqi people, more US troops in Iraq, and a greater likelihood for a US invasion of Iran. That’s just for starters. The administration’s challenge has been how to transfer Iraq’s oil assets to private companies under the cloak of legitimacy, yet simultaneously keep prices inflated.

But Bush & Co. and their Big Oil cronies might have found a simple yet devious solution: production sharing agreements (PSAs). Here’s how PSAs work. In return for investment in areas where fields are small and results are uncertain, governments occasionally grant oil companies sweetheart deals guaranteeing high profit margins and protection from exploration risks. The country officially retains ownership of its oil resources, but the contractual agreements are often so rigid and severe that in practical terms, it can be the equivalent of giving away the deed to the farm.

Since Iraq sits on the world’s third largest oil reserves, the PSA model makes little sense in the first place; Iraq’s fields are enormous and the exploration risks are accordingly miniscule, so direct national investment or more equitable forms of foreign investment would be in order. But as a comprehensive new report by the London-based advocacy group PLATFORM details, the PSA model “is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost.”...

On Bob Woodward: All The President's Media Whores, Frank Rich (excerpt)

Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends....In her famous takedown of Mr. Woodward for The New York Review of Books in 1996, Joan Didion wrote that what he "chooses to leave unrecorded, or what he apparently does not think to elicit, is in many ways more instructive than what he commits to paper." She was referring to his account of Hillary Clinton's health care fiasco in his book "The Agenda," but her words also fit his account of the path to war in Iraq. This time, however, there is much more at stake than there was in Hillarycare.

What remains unrecorded in [Woodward's] "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Near the book's end, Mr. Woodward writes of some "troubling" tips from three sources "that the intelligence on W.M.D. was not as conclusive as the C.I.A. and the administration had suggested" and of how he helped push a Pincus story saying much the same into print just before the invasion. (It appeared on Page 17.) But Mr. Woodward never seriously investigates others' suspicions that the White House might have deliberately suppressed or ignored evidence that would contradict George Tenet's "slam-dunk" case for Saddam's W.M.D.'s. "Plan of Attack" gives greatest weight instead to the White House spin that any hyped intelligence was an innocent error or solely the result of the ineptitude of Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A....

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli....

We're Watching: Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda" (MGM)

Sunday Funnies:

A story by Republican House leaders (By Mark Fiore)
America: A Brief Parable (By Tom Tomorrow)
Nixon vs. Cheney (By Ward Sutton)
Cartoon: Bush's "Victory" Strategy, Steve Bell

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Saturday, December 3, 2005

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Chaos In Iraq: Gross Incompetence or Sinister Policy?, Chris Floyd

The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: "Jeez, these bozos couldn't boil an egg without causing collateral damage."

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

Investigative journalist Max Fuller marshals a convincing case for this conclusion in a remarkable work of synthesis based on information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents. Piling fact on damning fact, he shows that the vast majority of atrocities attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias are in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets, Global Research reports.

Opinion: Bush Failing Democracy At Home And Abroad, Maureen Dowd (excerpts)

When Bush officials weren't telling us fairy tales about the big, bad W.M.D. in Iraq, they were assuring us that the unprovoked war would be a kindness for Iraq, giving it democracy. But they are not just failing to bring democracy to Iraq as they help Iranian-backed mullahs install an Islamic republic with Saddamist torture chambers. They are also degrading democracy in America. They've tarnished American moral leadership with illegal detentions, torture, secret C.I.A. prisons in countries only recently liberated from the Soviet gulag, and Soviet-style propaganda both at home and in Iraq.

Guess the Bush administration didn't learn anything this fall when federal auditors said it had violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of its education polices. Bush officials got right back into the fake news business, paying to plant propaganda in the Iraqi press. They outsourced this disinformation campaign to something called the Lincoln Group - have they no shame? You have to admire Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman. He kept a straight face when he called the U.S. "a leader when it comes to promoting and advocating a free and independent media around the world." He added, "We've made our views very clear when it comes to freedom of the press."

Exceedingly clear. The Bushies don't believe in it. They disdain the whole democratic system of checks and balances.

We're Listening: John Taverner's "Akathist Of Thanksgiving" (Sony)

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Friday, December 2, 2005

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Today's 100+ bush headlines: Selected from around the world
by the editors of Bush Watch ...get our headlines in your e-mail

Inside Bush Watch: Today's Opinions and Features From Bush Watch Columnists,
Excerpts From World Opinion ...get our opinions and features in your e-mail

Impeachment: Faith-Based Bush Vs. His Reality-Based Job, Walter C. Uhler

...Like America's evangelicals, we should have taken Bush at his word in 1999, when he smugly asserted: "Nobody needs to tell me what I believe. But I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is." Unfortunately, too few of us failed to state that what he was offering us—a core of ignorance and incompetence, especially in foreign affairs, shrouded by faith in Jesus—was inadequate for presidential decision making. As a consequence, America not only got a President to whom God supposedly confides, but also a President who permitted a cabal led by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and a handful of Zionist neocons to show him where Iraq is. Now—given his debacle in Iraq—it should be obvious to all Americans that even confiding with God doesn't compensate for Bush's brain....

But while the American public has allowed its views to be influenced by facts—even if belatedly—President Bush has not. And that's...why Americans should pay no attention to his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It's based upon pure faith! His record as a candidate and as President richly supports the conclusion that no set of facts can compete with the faith Bush places in his faith.... Readers of Ron Suskind's excellent New York Times Magazine article, "Without a Doubt" (October 17, 2004) will recall Bruce Bartlett's troubling observation about Bush. Although a Republican and former adviser to Ronald Reagan, Bartlett nevertheless said: Bush 'truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith."

A senior adviser to Bush told Ron Suskind that guys like Suskind were "'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'" Then he added: "'That's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors …and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Is there anyone out there who can't envision an Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin implementing such evil, totalitarian practices? For me, it's simply the...reason to refuse to take Bush's "new" strategy seriously. It's simply one more "new reality" that "history's actors" want us to study.

Why attempt to sort out this bogus document when we know both the dishonesty inside it and the totalitarian tactics behind it? And, if it's true (as "current and former military and intelligence officers" have told Seymour Hersh) that Bush "disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding," then there is no alternative for us fact-based folks—other than pressuring Congress to remove him (and the nefarious Cheney) from office by way of impeachment.

Big Bush Lies: Bush Lied In Iraq "Victory" Speech, Think Progress (excerpt)

[In his recent "victory" speech,] President Bush claimed that Iraqi security forces “primarily led” the assault on the city of Tal Afar. Bush highlighted it as an “especially clear” sign of the progress Iraq security forces were making in Iraq: "The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year’s assault in Fallujah. In Fallujah, the assault was led by nine coalition battalions made up primarily of United States Marines and Army — with six Iraqi battalions supporting them…This year in Tal Afar, it was a very different story. The assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces — 11 Iraqi battalions, backed by five coalition battalions providing support. "

[After the speech,] TIME Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who is embedded with the U.S. troops in Iraq who participated in the Tal Afar battle, appeared on Anderson Cooper. He said Bush’s description was completely untrue: "I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them. Green berets who were following an American plan of attack who were advancing with these Iraqi units as and when they were told to do so by the American battle planners. The Iraqis led nothing."

Cartoon: Bush's "Victory" Strategy, Steve Bell

We're Reading: Paul Waldman's "Fraud: The Strategy Behind The Bush Lies..." (Sourcebooks, Inc.)

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Thursday, December 1, 2005

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Today's 100+ bush headlines: Selected from around the world
by the editors of Bush Watch ...get our headlines in your e-mail

Inside Bush Watch: Today's Opinions and Features From Bush Watch Columnists,
Excerpts From World Opinion ...get our opinions and features in your e-mail

Opinion: New Bush Iraq War Plan Divorced From Reality, NYT Editorial (excerpts)

It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war....

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat....

Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."...A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.

Opinion: "Complete Victory" Doesn't Square With Bush Plan, Burns and Filkins (excerpts)

Shortly after formal Iraqi sovereignty was restored in June last year, a new American commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., joined with a new American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, to order a complete review of the way the Iraq war was being fought. At that point, officers involved in the review have acknowledged, the war on the ground, with insurgents running rampant in Falluja and elsewhere, bore little relationship to what one senior commander called the "illusionist" version put out by the American occupation authority, or by Mr. Bush and other top officials in Washington....

[In his Annapolis speech Bush] acknowledged problems that have hobbled the American enterprise since the 2003 invasion: An American effort to build up Iraqi forces that went through a top-to-bottom makeover after early deployments of Iraqi troops saw them "running from the fight." Iraqi units that are "still uneven," despite the new American effort to train and equip them that has cost more than $10 billion. A Sunni Arab community that remains largely unyielding, despite months of efforts by Americans seeking to draw them back into the corridors of power....

Mr. Bush closed with a vow to "settle for nothing less than complete victory," without saying how that squared with the plan to hand over the main burden of the war to the newly trained Iraqi troops who, American field commanders say, have done well in some recent battles but much less impressively in others. Nor did the president say how his rejection of "artificial timetables" would be sustained politically if the plan for American troops to step back decisively in 2006, and for Iraqi units to step forward, falters in the face of the unrelenting insurgency.

Opinion: Bush Defines Victory In Iraq. Yeh, Right, Bob Herbert (excerpts)

"We will never back down," said Mr. Bush in his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy yesterday. "We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory." I don't think there were many people who believed him. Members of Mr. Bush's own party are nervously eyeing next year's Congressional elections. They would abandon Iraq in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between getting re-elected or having to hunt for a real job. This war (which has already cost the lives of more than 2,100 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis) was cynically launched (it was never about Sept. 11) and incompetently fought (we have never sent enough troops or sufficient equipment), and will be brought to a close by people obsessed not with the security of the United States and the welfare of the troops, but with the political calendar.

"I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," said Mr. Bush. He then dutifully defined victory as follows: "Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation." Those were some of yesterday's talking points. Here's today's reality: the $6-billion-a-month U.S. military mission in Iraq is unsustainable, as is the political support for the war. There is now a virtual consensus that a significant American troop withdrawal will get under way in 2006. Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces are ill equipped, understaffed and widely infiltrated by private militia members and insurgents. In many ways, it's an amateurish operation....

The picture in Iraq is not a pretty one, and there is no indication that substantial improvements are coming soon. If the president gets any of this, you couldn't tell it by his appearance yesterday. He stuck to his talking points. "To all who wear the uniform," he said, "I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander in chief." We may not cut and run in Iraq, but with the G.O.P. sweating out next year's elections, the plans are already under way for American forces by the tens of thousands to cut and speed-walk toward the exits. Mr. Bush could have been honest about this yesterday, but he chose not to be....A president who's little more than a bundle of talking points cannot possibly maintain the long-term trust and confidence of the public. There's a disturbing remoteness to President Bush that seems especially odd in a politician who was selected by his party because of his supposed ability to project warmth and the kind of fundamental authenticity that his Democratic opponents lacked.

Opinion: Key Pillar of Bush Middle East Democracy Initiative Has Collapsed, William Fisher

A key pillar of the much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative of President George W. Bush has collapsed – brought down by Egypt’s insistence that Arab governments should have more control over grants from a new fund designed to help indigenous pro-democracy organizations. At an international conference attended by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and designed to strengthen local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society in the Middle East, Egyptian officials pressed for language stipulating that only organizations legally registered with their governments were covered by the new fund, known as the Foundation for the Future.

Egypt’s law governing NGOs places numerous restrictions on these organizations. The U.S. characterized the Egyptian position as inappropriate. "In our view and in the view of other delegations, this would have circumscribed NGO activity," said a senior U.S. official, who briefed reporters traveling with Rice. The U.S. delegation expressed disappointment with Egypt, which has been a major American ally on key issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Bush administration's international fight against terrorism. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit reportedly left before the conference ended The foundation has commitments of over $50 million to help nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions and professional associations foster freedom and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States has pledged $35 million.

Verse: Bush's Recent Speech In Mongolia, Jerry Politex

Papers at home are talking trash
So I came here to give you cash
You folks still back me in Iraq
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!)

Just help me finish up my mission
And we'll have those Chinese wishin'
They helped us out in Iraq
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!)

Even though you drink that rancid milk
And Genghis Khan is of your ilk
You smoke lots of our tobac
And I really love your yaks
(Ya' don't talk back!) more

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GOP Words: Intelligence n: What Dick Cheney wants and the CIA must provide -- or else. (See, Iraq, weapons of mass destruction)

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