by Margie Burns
Multiple references to George W. Bush’s “loyalty” to his personnel are a symptom of chronic shallow assumptions. Some fundamentals, here:
• The Chief Executive of the United States owes his loyalty to his country, not to a few insiders. If John Bolton and Stephen Hadley and Condoleezza Rice did wrong in their responses to 9/11 and their war-boosting against Iraq – and they did do wrong, repeatedly – then they should be asked to resign. If they won’t resign voluntarily, they should be fired. A genuinely loyal president would ask his longsuffering speechwriters to address the firings with the most graceful language possible, under the disgraceful circumstances.
• The apparent assumption that George Walker Bush proceeds in personnel matters on a basis of “loyalty” is not borne out by his treatment of Richard Clarke, Lawrence Lindsey, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, General Shinseki, Joseph Wilson and General Zinni among others. If a theory doesn’t fit the known facts, you can’t make it viable by simply throwing out any facts that the theory does not fit.
• Of the three legs to the footstool of case – motive, means and opportunity – the weakest by far is motive, when one is trying to evaluate a stranger or a complex history. A “motive” is too easy to come up with. If you had told me that the late Mother Theresa was moonlighting as an exotic dancer, I could come up with a motive – but the facts should come first. Imagining a motive, for good or ill, and then becoming wedded to that motive as an explanation for some person’s actions is self-delusion, Pygmalion in reverse. Logically, when we’re dealing with a large number of unknowns (like the numerous people working for Bush and their often-unnamed allies out of office), it’s better to focus on facts. It is a fact that Bush has gotten rid of some people. It is a fact that he has not gotten rid of others. My conclusion thus far is that several people he has not gotten rid of have harmed this nation and the globe. But rather than trying to fathom all the motives of an odd individual whose talent never matched his ambition, it’s better to ascertain the who, what, when, where and how behind the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, for example.
• More fundamentally, the core mistake in evaluating the Bush administration through the prism of an assumed “loyalty” is that it is arguing from a conclusion. In informal logic, this is called circular argument or begging the question (which does not mean asking for or raising a question). It is not a given that Bush is loyal just because some well-established journalist said he was.
• Once we recognize logically that “loyalty” as a motive is not a given, it becomes possible to come up with other hypotheses. For example, it is highly possible that Bush fears to fire some personnel who could then drop the dime on him or on others in his administration. John R. Bolton is not only a basket case who flunks the one-look-from-across-a-crowded-room test, he also reportedly pushed the false notion that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. Stephen Hadley, formerly on the board of ANSER (getting a big boost from the “war on terror”) was associated with efforts to pump up and to profit from militarism and “homeland security” in the 1990s, well before 9/11. Condoleezza Rice has been a Republican operative, to use Robert Novak’s phrase, since the 1980s, dating at least from when she was part of GOP Governor Pete Wilson’s attempt to redistrict California to benefit Republicans. She was also a delegate to the Republican national convention back when. None of these individuals have worked alone.
• It is also highly possible that Bush simply may not have the clout to fire anyone who works for Cheney, even with ample cause. If so, the Bush-Cheney administration is basically one big security breach.
By the way, logically, it is also possible that some of Bush’s people are sticking with him from motives other than loyalty. Financial remuneration, direct or indirect, might be one of them. The White House press corps seemingly does not ask whether key personnel, officially working for the public, are receiving money or other things of value (the phrase used in federal courts) from some source other than the taxpayers. Are all these individuals so intently harming the public really being paid only by the public? --posted August 13, 2005
“Shoot to kill”: hopeless failure from the get-go
by Margie Burns
Clearly, too few people saw the 1994 popcorn movie Speed, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.
This is a comment I never would have predicted someday making – ever in a million years, in fact. But clearly, reporters and commentators implying that a police “shoot to kill” order would prevent a suicide bomber fail to remember Dennis Hopper in his mad-bomber role.
Hopper, those of you who saw the movie may recall, was perfect for the role of deranged revenge-seeker. Not much news there. His character also had the perfect riposte to any putative attack, all figured out and ready to go beforehand: if anything took out his hapless bomber (Bullock, strapped into a torso full of bombing gear), or him, he would RELEASE his grip on the button. Then – and follow me closely here, Messers Bush, Card, Cheney, Krauthammer, Kyl, Libby, Limbaugh, McCain, O’Reilly, Rumsfeld, Scarborough, Will, etcetc – the bomb would be detonated by the RELEASE. In other words, a bomb can be set up, rigged, so as to be detonated by a RELEASE on the button (or whatever device is used), not only by pressure on the button.
Anyone out there getting this? Hello? Want it in one syllable, instead of two? A bomb can be rigged to blow off if you take your finger OFF a button. Not just by pressing ON it.
There. Does that help?
What’s more, the very fact that these “shoot to kill” orders are being broadcast around the world pretty much ensures that some such means to circumvent them will be employed. Thus we can figure that the preliminary set-up to any future bombing will be more elaborately developed than previously. But – anything to sound tough, for some of these people. Not that you catch them stopping their business cronies and donors from shipping yet more ordnance to the world’s hot spots.
Indeed, George W. Bush now apparently wants to send more landmines into the Middle East – with the guarantee that they too, like all ordnance shipped there by this country heretofore, will one day be targeting Americans as well as innocent civilians abroad. Not that Bush shows much sign of qualm about that. He passed up his own chance to fight overseas, after all; he has no family members joining up. And he’s rather eager to take on the protective coloration of the threatened troops he never joined AND the protective mimicry of any loudmouthed threat from a Middle Easterner, too. Somehow Bush seems pretty bent on positioning himself – as they say in public relations – as a target, the one picked on, the pickee if you will, rather than the cheap bully he actually is, with the help of a staff and a White House serving as the Betty Ford Clinic.
But this eagerness to sound tough – while doing little or nothing that would actually reduce harm to others – seems to be contagious, judging from the established journalists who go around saying/writing that in the spy game, for example, “we have to be willing to do business with some pretty dirty types” etcetc. Funny, you never hear them say that we might have to be willing to do business with individuals of genuine refinement and dignity. Or with individuals more courageous and dedicated, more self-denying and self-sacrificing, than they themselves are. Or with persons of genuine patriotism, who might hesitate to sell out their own countries and their own people for the sake of pleasing the outsourcing Bush clan and its cronies. --posted August 8, 2005
Miller and Cooper: Two Different Cases
by Margie Burns
In spite of all the publicity over the cases of Time reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller – cases the Supreme Court declined to hear – little is known definitively even now about how many times reporters were contacted by those unnamed “administration officials” who leaked the item that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative.
In his July 14, 2002, column utilizing this leak, conservative pundit Robert Novak stated, “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. 'I will not answer any question about my wife,' Wilson told me.” This sentence sequence, of course, clearly implies though it does not state that the same “two senior administration officials” informed Novak that Plame was a CIA operative.
The thoroughness of this outing should not be underestimated, or doubted. A search of the published journalism database in Lexis-Nexis yields zero results for the name “Valerie Plame” for 2002 in all major newspapers, wires or transcripts (and precious few mentions of Joseph Wilson, whose ill-fated Niger trip was obviously never intended by the administration to bring light). For 2003, it yields 642 – all dating from after Novak’s column. (For the record, Lexis yields zero mentions of Valerie Plame in all major categories from 1980 to mid-2003.) When this administration outs someone, that person gets outed and stays outed.
The ability of the man in the White House to exert pressure on any senior administration official, from his own Chief of Staff on down, should also not be doubted. Had the White House acted affirmatively, the identity of the leaker – who surely was not acting unconsciously – would be known by now without putting the taxpayers to the expense of a federal investigation. “Senior” is code for a pretty small and well-placed group.
It is hard to understand why Miller’s case, in particular, is about “protecting sources.” This was not a source but a user; the object was not to disclose something in the public interest but to help a White House bent on deceitful and destructive secrecy – by punishing someone, Joseph Wilson, who HAD disclosed things to the public, by outing his wife as a CIA operative. The public has not been told definitively whether Miller did promise to keep the “source” – that is, the administration official – secret. The implication is that the source called her, rather than the other way around, and reportedly they did the same with several prominent news outlets.
I sympathize with Matthew Cooper and do not understand why his case is tied to Miller’s. If Cooper picked up the ball and ran with it by doing further investigation and then writing an actual article on the topic, something Miller did not do, then his administration contact became arguably an actual source. That makes his case less like Miller’s, and more like that of freelance writer Vanessa Leggett in Texas. I hope he ends up with a book deal like hers.
But as Miller’s defense has repeatedly pointed out, she never even wrote an article on this outing. Therefore her defense seems to be not that she was working as a journalist at the time but merely that she is a journalist, and that’s why she received the phone call/contact.
To a non-lawyer, this seems like arguing that a priest has the protected secrecy of the confessional, even when he’s just sitting at a bus stop and some murderer confesses a crime to him.
Giving that kind of blanket protection – that we do not give even to priests – as a journalist to every journalist who gets a phone call would give a blanket incentive to call up reporters and tell them things, just so they will never be reported. This official, be it again noted, was no Daniel Ellsberg releasing papers the public needed to see, and no staffer who had things wormed out of him by a persevering reporter under a promise of secrecy. It was someone – perhaps in the White House itself – who called up at least six reporters to tell them a highly selective item of information, about somebody’s wife at that, and at the expense of both full disclosure to the public and national security. Not a feat everybody could pull off. --posted July 6, 2005
Vice-President George W. Bush?
by Margie Burns
Mr. Bush was looking awfully vice-presidential last night, in his televised address to the nation on Iraq. If Tuesday, June 28, 2005, goes down in history, it will be as the occasion that George Walker Bush came across looking maybe not blue but with more baby blue than ever in the picture. Entering before an absolutely silent audience of about 800 military personnel at Fort Bragg, coming quickly to a standstill at the podium before a pastel backdrop, placatory and ingratiating in expression -- he kept looking vice-presidential.
It may have started when Bush senior, Clinton and the younger Bush all attended the Pope?s funeral in Rome. Historically, American presidents do not attend the funerals of popes, in deference to our proud tradition of not playing favorites, as a sovereign nation and a beacon of religious freedom, with regard to religion. In fact, U.S. presidents generally do not attend even the funerals of heads of state. One of the older Bush?s best witticisms came when former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro asked him something about preparing for the vice presidency; he told her to be ready to attend a lot of funerals. The U.S. vice president has traditionally stood in for the president, at various ceremonial functions. One can see why the two most recent presidents along with Bush would want to look as presidential as possible, of course, but the result was that together, they all came out looking vice presidential.
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward appeared on one of the Sunday morning talk shows recently, in a panel discussion partly about possible GOP nominees for 2008. His prediction or suggestion was Dick Cheney, who will be somewhat younger in 2008 than Ronald Reagan was when he ran in 1980. No one knew what to make of the idea, so it dropped out of the conversation fairly quickly.
I don?t have a prediction and am not interested in 2008, yet. But one must admit it would be just like these people to mull the possibility of running Cheney for president, with George W. Bush as his vice president. Neither the 22nd amendment to the Constitution, limiting a president to two terms, nor the 25th amendment, on replacing an ill president with the vice president, keeps either a vice president from running for the presidency ? as we know ? or a president from running for the vice presidency, so far as I can tell.
In the dream world some of these political personnel inhabit, that would be the kind of ?bold? move ?characteristic of this president,? to use the wording characteristic of some of our national political reporters. In a country shaped by another 9/11 ? if these people allow another one to happen ? it would ?leave the Democrats reeling? and ?take the Beltway by surprise? and blahblahblah. Even if the push didn?t work, it could still help pave the way for Jeb Bush, some of whose longtime Florida associates and political allies have already been moved into the vicinity of the White House in an odd personnel shakeup earlier this year ? with Wayne Berman people taking over offices connected to those of the First Lady.
Meanwhile, anyone watching the address last night surely had to be continually distracted by that backdrop behind the podium. It was made of panels, alternating panels of the American flag, in pastel -- hung vertically with wavering edge like a bacon illustration ? with panels of the presidential seal, also pastel. But the panels were not only pastel baby blue, exactly matching Bush?s necktie, but as though seen through a film of watery baby blue, underwater or with-a-scarf-over-the-lens-color, with a repeat pattern like wallpaper or some drawer lining paper found in department stores. Why did they use it? --posted 06.30.05
Here my condolences to the Walton family, who lost a brother, John Walton, in the fatal crash of an experimental private plane yesterday; he sounds like a good, charitable man.
Get Ready For An Osama "Shoot-out"
by Margie Burns
As IÕve written before, I still believe the authority figures who told us earlier that Osama bin Laden is dead. Several authoritative voices said so, around the end of 2001, and an unscripted chorus is more likely to be spontaneous than a scripted chorus.
US forces crushed the Taliban in late fall of 2001 (except for the ones who got away, protected by PakistanÕs Inter-Services Intelligence). US forces pounded the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December of 2001. Bin Laden had already been reported to suffer from a kidney ailment requiring him to be on dialysis.
Shortly after the pounding of Tora Bora, PakistanÕs military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, told more than one news agency that he thought bin Laden was dead, either directly from the bombing or indirectly from not being able to get medical treatment. Musharraf was in a position to know: news reports about bin LadenÕs kidney condition indicated that Pakistan had provided UBL with his medical treatment. As the report of the 9/11 Commission makes clear (belatedly), the intelligence community is well aware that bin Laden and the Taliban were in many ways hand-in-glove with PakistanÕs ISI.
MusharrafÕs conjectures, quoted worldwide, paralleled similar guesses and statements made at the same time by both the Pentagon and the FBI. Military and FBI press briefings strongly suggested that bin Laden was history.
Unfortunately, the White House, presumably not wishing the Òwar on terrorÓ (bombing) in Afghanistan to be over that fast, frowned them down. Bush, whose Òdead or aliveÓ gave permission to kill UBL rather than to capture him for questioning, has never shown the slightest curiosity about bin Laden since that time.
Neither Bush nor Cheney nor anyone else in the administrationÕs top crust has suggested that bin Laden might have been a good asset, if captured. Nobody minding the store has speculated on whether UBL might have valuable information, if combating terrorist strikes is really the agenda here.
Neither do major media outlets. Well-qualified intelligence analysts suggest that bin Laden is dead, but none of the Sunday-morning talking heads say so. ItÕs odd: with the administration causing loss of life and doing everything except award contracts for a Special Bin Laden-Hunting-and-Bug-Catching Machine (cost, $60M) from some company employing DubyaÕs relatives, why arenÕt Chris Matthews and the rest raising more questions?
Now, some prominent Democrats have adopted a campaign tactic that threatens to be self-defeating. Kerry and some Democratic ads have been saying that BushÕs war on Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror and from the hunt for bin Laden. TheyÕre right about the first, wrong about the second. The Iraq invasion is unquestionably a diversion of resources as well as a moral abomination, a point made by the 9/11 Commission report. But BushÕs wide-open credibility gap on terrorism should not blind the Dems to realistic probabilities on bin Laden.
I donÕt foresee that bin Laden will be caught in an ÒOctober surprise,Ó because, as said above, I donÕt think heÕs out there to be caught. You donÕt bounce back from renal shutdown. But the DemsÕ seizing a superficial opportunity could still turn out to be the sucker play of all time.
ÒShoot-outÓ is the key concept here. Given our malleable television networks and the administrationÕs sneaking, it would be only too easy for Team Bush to set up, or report back on, a dramatic purported Òshoot-outÓ somewhere in Pakistan. In that event, I wouldnÕt give much for the actuarial chances of any tall Muslim man who happened to be in the locality. He would be represented to the American and world press, of course, as the late Osama.
That Musharraf is now making little noises about bin Laden worries me. He very nicely went quiet about his earlier idea, while Pakistan was garlanded as our Òpartner against terrorÓ and was given terror-fighting funds. Carrot, meet stick. Stick, meet carrot. Recently, Musharraf reneged on resigning his military commission: heÕs basically PakistanÕs sole leader, facing little criticism from the Bush administration.
If this is the scenario, I feel sorry for the Pakistani troops and local villagers to be caught in a gratuitous Òshoot-out,Ó somewhere in hard terrain, with no one to report accurately what happened or even to identify the dead. And back home, the top of the Democratic ticket will be crushed by the talking heads. --posted 09.29.04
Those Memos Are Genuine
by Margie Burns
Now comes information that the putative typewriter expert or computer expert who attacked the National Guard memos shown by CBS is not a font or typewriting specialist, but just an activist GOP lawyer in a Bush-connected Atlanta law firm:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-091704buckhead_lat,1,494535.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for printing this information. High time somebody did.
I didnÍt pay much attention to the initial GOP accusation of ñforgeries.î It was the typical knee-jerk attack, and rather lame at that. Then the Washington Post gave the ridiculous allegations an artificial respectability and prominence on its front page, as a ñcontroversyî over the memos. Journalistic envy, competitiveness and insecurity may be in the picture here; CBS acquired documents that the PostÍs investigative aces should have acquired, preferably before 2000, when George Dubya Bush was supposedly being vetted as a candidate (for PRESIDENT?!?).
CBS, to its credit, posted the four memos on its web site:
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay19.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust1.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust18.pdf
Belatedly scrutinizing the memos themselves, I didnÍt know whether to laugh or cry. I personally have written and typed since high school, though not often for newspapers before 1996; I have typed thousands of pages for myself and other people; I used a series of IBM Selectric typewriters, beginning in the 1970s, before switching to the computer. My second-to-last "word processor" had a memory so large, a vertical tower, that I used it as a typewriter stand (it created an st and th suffix after numbers, by the way); I still have an IBM Selectric III sitting on the floor of an upstairs room with other storage, which I use occasionally for addressing envelopes. I donÍt like using it, because its lines are wavering and its font spacing is uneven, as in the memos. There is no realistic possibility that these memos are computer-generated.
Let me repeat that. THERE IS NO REALISTIC POSSIBILITY THAT THESE MEMOS ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED. Their wavering lines, the inconsistent spacing between letters, the stuck-key spacing between some words all indicate a typewriter keyboard, and I know the feeling.
Furthermore, Lt. Colonel KillianÍs longtime secretary appeared on last weekÍs Sixty Minutes to confirm the content in the memos. (Oh yes, the content remember that?) She also confirmed the content in an interview with the New York Times. She said she did not type them herself and indeed they show signs of amateur rather than professional typing (not executive-secretary quality), particularly the three shortest memos. Perhaps those were typed by the late Col. Killian himself, using the one-finger method. It wouldnÍt be the only time in history that someone went into his office on a Saturday and typed what his eighty-six-year-old former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, called a ñcover-your-behind memo.î
The Bush campaign is toeing a thin line, here. They can count on the fact that only half of households in America are online, and anyone not online will have trouble seeing the memos. They're also facing the unwelcome fact, however, that many not-online households have pink-collar workers with typing experience similar to mine, on a series of word processors. The administration just has to hope that a lot of women never see the memos. --posted 09.20.04
æMore Questions for the 9/11 Commission
by Margie Burns
Within two weeks after September 11, 2001, with commercial flights grounded in the United States, the Bush administration allowed select commercial jets to fly out of the country. Four manifests from these flights have now been released by Craig Unger, author of the nonfiction bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud. These passenger lists are posted online.
When former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke was asked about these flights at the commission's last hearing, he responded that "someone" in the Saudi embassy requested them and that he refused. The FBI, dominated by the White House, permitted them.
Among passengers jetting away were some individuals who would have been "persons of interest" in any traditional investigation, and others with round-the-clock access to them. A September 13 flight from Lexington KY to London carried fifteen passengers including eight Saudis; a Las Vegas-to-Switzerland flight the next day carried seven Saudis; a New York-to-Paris flight on September 22 carried twelve passengers including four Saudis; and a Las Vegas-to-Paris flight on September 24 carried 24 passengers including 11 Saudis.
Questions abound: if Saudi royals and other Muslims feared reprisals, and were allowed to leave for their personal safety, how could that same rationale have applied to Britons Jack Rusbridge and Anthony John Stafford, on the flight out of Lexington, or to US citizen Dean Earl Knect, on the Vegas-Paris flight? Assuming that diplomatic immunity covers members of the 20,000-member Saud family, does it also cover their employees of other nationalities, including British and American? Why was a CEO of a middle eastern bank on one of these flights, given the importance of the "money trail" in investigating terrorism? If allowing the Saudis' servants out of the country was a humanitarian gesture, why was an Egyptian physicist also aboard?
Two of these dubious flights departed from Las Vegas, where at least five of the September 11 suspects visited several times between May and August 2001. At least one suspect from each of the four planes hijacked stayed in Las Vegas; all together, the hijackers made at least six trips there. Yet, a few days after 9-11, 31 passengers were allowed to fly out of Vegas, only three or four of them youngsters born in the 1980s or 1990s. One Saudi royal passenger was Prince Turki bin Faisal, more famous as the head of Saudi Arabia's bloodstained and much feared intelligence service from 1977 until he was abruptly fired in August 2001.
Time out. What, exactly, was the longtime head of Saudi Arabia's secret police doing in the United States, while fifteen young Saudi professionals were carrying out their attacks? A brother of Prince Turki's was also on board the Vegas flight; Saudi Arabia's foreign minister is another brother of theirs. Why, exactly, did the fired head of Saudi intelligence hotfoot it over to this country, right after getting the boot? Or was he in the US when he was fired? His replacement was officially announced on August 31, 2001. Did Ms. Rice, or anyone in national security, even know that these persons were in the United States? Given Prince Turki's documented contacts with Osama bin Laden and Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence, which propped up the Taliban, why did the White House let these persons leave?
What were they doing in Las Vegas, where ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers had stayed on several visits? When did these officials and those connected with them go to Las Vegas, and how long were they there? What reason could the hijackers have had for trips to Vegas in the first place other than to rendezvous with higher-ups, given that any extra movement increased their chances of getting caught? Is the White House really going to pretend that the skyjackers went to Vegas, separately and together at different times, some of them devout Muslims, to fit in a little gambling?
A bit of follow-up: at the end of 2002, Prince Turki became Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Great Britain, succeeding a cultured and scholarly Saudi whose avocations include writing poetry. Why did our ally, Great Britain, accept him as Saudi ambassador? Did the US government oppose his appointment, which gave him another layer of diplomatic immunity?
Let's hope the Commission can raise these and related questions. But if the Commission does not ask them, someone else must. --posted 08.04.04. first published in Democratic Underground, April 8, 04
Margie Burns writes freelance in the DC area. She can be reached at margie.burns@verizon.net
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