PAF loves cats

But I'm really glad I'm 15 times bigger than they are.

At any lesser ratio, these guys are formidable creatures indeed.

More on the Israel Lobby

from the thoughtful and well-informed Stephen Zunes:

There is no question that the Israel Lobby is one important factor influencing U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not, however, the only factor or the most important factor.

There is also no question that the Israel Lobby has made informed debate on U.S. support for Israeli policy far more difficult than it would be otherwise and, as a result, has made it much harder for peace and human rights activists to make as much headway in challenging U.S. policy as we would otherwise be able to do. However, while this is certainly not insignificant, this is very different than the assertion of Mearsheimer and Walt that U.S. policy would be considerably more enlightened without the Lobby’s influence.

The US is, after all, an imperial power. The neocons and the Israel Lobby are, in that sense, as much a symptom as a cause.

He's baaack

When Rambo returns, you know Uncle Sam is losing a war somewhere and our hyper-masculine militarized culture needs a dose of viagra. And beautifully timed so that we have the season of "peace on earth" out of our systems and we're ready to start the new year with some glorious gore. I feel more manly already.

The Wicked Queen's sinister plan

We're not talking poisoned apples here, kids:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said. ...Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

Hoover was such a patriot, he was willing to sacrifice our most basic rights to keep this country free. If only we had more like him.

Oh wait, we do!

P.S. And the "queen" part, that's just fine by us. Hoover was a consenting adult who should not have been closeted and locked into a self-loathing and self-destructive homophobic ideology. Homophobia, anti-communism and compulsory patriotism are not strangers after all.

Just for Mike Huckabeee

As an "ideological secularist" and "fanatically twisted fringe" element, PAF is happy to support publicly endorsed and institutionally supported Necrophilia. Yeah baby, that's right at the top of my agenda. Makes a dandy bumber sticker, too.

On the other hand, I can think of worse things to do with our tax dollars (like for example waging unnecessary wars and creating hundreds of thousands more cadavers for Mike Huckabeeee to fantasize about).

More Huckabeee here.

Adventures in Jesusland

NYT on Creationism Institute for training (drumroll please) science teachers:

HOUSTON — A Texas higher education panel has recommended allowing a Bible-based group called the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education.

The action comes weeks after the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, lost her job after superiors accused her of displaying bias against creationism and failing to be “neutral” over the teaching of evolution.

The state’s commissioner of higher education, Raymund A. Paredes, said late Monday that he was aware of the institute’s opposition to evolution but was withholding judgment until the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board meets Jan. 24 to rule on the recommendation, made last Friday, by the board’s certification advisory council.

Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks “from all the top schools” along with, he said, the “value added” of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.

“Where the difference is, we provide both sides of the story,” Mr. Morris said. On its Web site, the institute declares, “All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week” and says it “equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.”

It also says “the harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality and many others) are evident all around us.”

Asked how the institute could educate students to teach science, Dr. Paredes, who holds a doctorate in American civilization from the University of Texas and served 10 years as vice chancellor for academic development at the University of California, said, “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.”

What a state. What a country!

Representatives Wexler, Gutierrez, and Baldwin call for Cheney Impeachment Hearings

John Nichols writes in The Nation:

Three senior members of the House Judiciary Committee have called for the immediate opening of impeachment hearings for Vice President Richard Cheney.

Democrats Robert Wexler of Florida, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin on Friday distributed a statement, “A Case for Hearings,” that declares, “The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our constitution. The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation, and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens.”

In particular, the Judiciary Committee members cite the recent revelation by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan that the Vice President and his staff purposefully gave him false information about the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert agent as part of a White House campaign to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. On the basis of McClellan’s statements, Wexler, Gutierrez and Baldwin say, “it is even more important for Congress to investigate what may have been an intentional obstruction of justice.” The three House members argue that, “Congress should call Mr. McClellan to testify about what he described as being asked to ‘unknowingly [pass] along false information.’”

Adding to the sense of urgency, the members note that “recent revelations have shown that the Administration including Vice President Cheney may have again manipulated and exaggerated evidence about weapons of mass destruction — this time about Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Corporate Power and Energy Policy

NYT:

Pared-down energy legislation cleared the Senate on Thursday by a wide margin after the oil industry and utilities succeeded in stripping out provisions that would have cost them billions of dollars.

The legislation still contains a landmark increase in fuel-economy standards for vehicles and a huge boost for alternative fuels. But a $13 billion tax increase on oil companies and a requirement that utilities nationwide produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources were left on the floor to secure Republican votes for the package.

The tax measure and the renewable electricity mandate were included in an energy bill that easily passed the House last week. But industry lobbyists focused their attention on Republican members of the Senate and on the White House, which repeatedly threatened to veto the bill if the offending sections were not removed.

...Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth Action, accused Senate Democrats of “capitulating” to Senate Republicans and the White House.

“When the Republican leadership and the polluter lobby have blocked important legislation, Senate Democrats have been all too willing to move in their direction,” Mr. Blackwelder said in a statement. “The result is that the two most positive provisions of the energy bill — a clean energy mandate and a tax package reining in handouts for fossil fuels and promoting clean energy — are being removed, while detrimental provisions, such as a radical five-fold increase in unsustainable biofuel use, remain.”

Jews ≠ neocons

Glenn Greenwald:

A new survey of American Jewish opinion, released by the American Jewish Committee, demonstrates several important propositions: (1) right-wing neocons (the Bill Kristol/Commentary/ AIPAC/Marty Peretz faction) who relentlessly claim to speak for Israel and for Jews generally hold views that are shared only by a small minority of American Jews; (2) viewpoints that are routinely demonized as reflective of animus towards Israel or even anti-Semitism are ones that are held by large majorities of American Jews; and (3) most American Jews oppose U.S. military action in the Middle East — including both in Iraq and against Iran.

Tex refusal protest

Chris Hedges has decided that he can no longer in good conscience pay taxes that fund America's wars. This is a deeply admirable decision, defended with both clarity and passion. Why aren't we all tax refusers, or in jail for some form of civil disobedience?

PAF has been arrested for CD before, part of a protest against an earlier war. It made me feel a little better, kind of. Business as usual over our dead bodies, goddamit. For about 15 minutes, our protest action impeded the ability of federal civil servants to get to their offices through the front door of the building. Then we were politely arrested and taken in a police bus to be booked in the police department auditorium. Whether we liked it or not we got our names in the paper. A few people thought we were heros, we were villified by many more, but most ignored us. All of us took personal risks to do this. I truly believed my career was at risk. And what did we accomplish? We risked arrest for political reasons. We fucking courted arrest. We were arrested. The war went merrily on, and almost no one noticed or cared about what we had done.

Over the years I have come to think about this as a moral statement that I believed I needed to make at the time. We felt better about ourselves for having made the statement and for having taken some risks to do so. But it was certainly not politically effective in any way whatever. In short, it was as much about me and my fellow protesters as it was about the war.

I admire Chris Hedges for doing what he is doing. He is taking much more serious risks than I did, or than I would be willing to do, especially now that I am a parent. I wish him well. But I think these sorts of individually defiant gestures are unlikely to stop the war or change the direction of the country. Having said that, I must also confess that I have no better answer. Perhaps that makes me one of the Good Germans.

Establishment Dems complicit in torture?

Your opposition party at work:

According to the Washington Post, since 2002 leading Democrats lawmakers received "about 30 private CIA briefings, some of which included descriptions of waterboarding, overseas rendition sites, "and other harsh interrogation methods." Officials present at some of the meetings, told the Post that the reaction from legislators "was not just approval, but encouragement."

More here.

American as Apple fucking Pie

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture

Proto-fascist tendencies

Scapegoating and eliminationist rhetoric have become increasingly pervasive in "mainstream" conservatism.

Ron Paul

may not be as stupidly militant (or militantly stupid) as Rudy Fucking Guiliani.

But he does flirt with some pretty nasty shit in the form of "New World Order" conspiracy theories.

Name that tune

"Jesus blows up balloons all day"


Answer

PAF wonders

if these guys weren't onto something.

Cause it's hard to be free if you're not attacking someone

Remember those fun folks at Freedom's Watch?

They're doing focus groups to figure out how to sell an attack against Iran to the American public.

What fun!

gobsmacked

Tom Tomorrow ponders the fact that we are actually debating how much torture is ok.

Of course, one person's torture is another person's daily hydration requirement.

It's "assisted hydration," don'tchaknow; kinda like "enhanced interrogation."

The United States Does Not Torture People. We just enhance their experience with a hydrational assist.

Re-runs

Cheney is trying to diddle the intelligence on Iran.

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

Haven't we seen this show before?

As I recall, it wasn't very good the first time around.

Can we change the channel?

David Horowitz is bonkers?

Who knew???

Bush's "Osama card"

and why the Dems suck.

courtesy of AmericaBlog.

As if we needed another reason

to oppose Giuliani

More from Crooks and Liars.

Implausible deniability

The United States does not Torture.

No sir.

Not us.

Who knows what can happen when Uncle Sam hands people over to authoritarian allies and, with a wink and a nod, says "We'd sure like to know what this guy knows about such and such." We can hardly be resposible if they beat the guy half to death and lock him in a tiny box for hours on end.

I guess, you know, stuff happens. Not our fault. Nope.

Talk of Iranian nuclear threat "hyperbolic"

In the run up to the Iraq war, Knight-Ridder/McClatchy News Service was one of the few major news outlets to explicitly call into question administration falsehoods about Iraq. This was an enormous public service. Now they are reporting on the "hyperbolic" nature of administration fear-mongering of Iran.

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

And even if Iran did acquire a nuclear weapons capability at some point in the future, they would be effectively deterred from using it by the threat of total annihilation - the very same logic of deterrence which we relied upon to prevent nuclear war with the Soviet Union (remember them? PAF enjoys a moment of nostalgia).

Ahmadinejad's alleged threats against Israel have been similarly exaggerated and distorted, and in any case his office is not equivalent to the American Presidency and he is not in control of Iranian Foreign Policy.

There is no reason to believe that Iran poses a grave threat to the existence of Israel or to the security of the US. But a nuclear-armed Iran would be harder for Uncle Sam to push around insofar as they too would possess some deterrent capability. So PAF thinks the reason for the push to attack Iran now is to forestall a situation in which Iran might have some ability to deter or limit US military expansionism in their neighborhood. US imperial domination of the region may be at stake, but US or Israeli survival and security is not.

Imperial Petro-politics: the new 'Washington Consensus'

Michael Klare:

The New 'Washington Consensus'

The need for a vigorous US military role in protecting energy assets abroad has been a major theme in American foreign policy since 1945, when President Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and promised to protect the kingdom in return for privileged access to Saudi oil.

In the most famous expression of this linkage, President Carter affirmed in January 1980 that the unimpeded flow of Persian Gulf oil is among this country's vital interests and that to protect this interest, the United States will employ "any means necessary, including military force." This principle was later cited by President Reagan as the rationale for "reflagging" Kuwaiti oil tankers with the American ensign during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 and protecting them with US warships--a stance that led to sporadic clashes with Iran. The same principle was subsequently invoked by George H.W. Bush as a justification for the Gulf War of 1991.

In considering these past events, it is important to recognize that the use of military force to protect the flow of imported petroleum has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Washington. Initially, this bipartisan outlook was largely focused on the Persian Gulf area, but since 1990, it has been extended to other areas as well. President Clinton eagerly pursued close military ties with the Caspian Sea oil states of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan after the breakup of the USSR in 1991, while George W. Bush has avidly sought an increased US military presence in Africa's oil-producing regions, going so far as to favor the establishment of a US Africa Command (Africom) in February.

One might imagine that the current debacle in Iraq would shake this consensus, but there is no evidence that this is so. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: possibly fearful that the chaos in Iraq will spread to other countries in the Gulf region, senior figures in both parties are calling for a reinvigorated US military role in the protection of foreign energy deliveries.

Perhaps the most explicit expression of this elite consensus is an independent task force report, National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency, backed by many prominent Democrats and Republicans. It was released by the bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), co-chaired by John Deutch, deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration, and James Schlesinger, defense secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, in October 2006. The report warns of mounting perils to the safe flow of foreign oil. Concluding that the United States alone has the capacity to protect the global oil trade against the threat of violent obstruction, it argues the need for a strong US military presence in key producing areas and in the sea lanes that carry foreign oil to American shores.

An awareness of this new "Washington consensus" on the need to protect overseas oil supplies with American troops helps explain many recent developments in Washington. Most significant, it illuminates the strategic stance adopted by President Bush in justifying his determination to retain a potent US force in Iraq--and why the Democrats have found it so difficult to contest that stance.

Consider Bush's September 13 prime-time speech on Iraq. "If we were to be driven out of Iraq," he prophesied, "extremists of all strains would be emboldened.... Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply." And then came the kicker: "Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East." In other words, Iraq is no longer about democracy or WMDs or terrorism but about maintaining regional stability to ensure the safe flow of petroleum and keep the American economy on an even keel; it was almost as if he was speaking to the bipartisan crowd that backed the CFR report cited above.

It is very clear that the Democrats, or at least mainstream Democrats, are finding it exceedingly difficult to contest this argument head-on. In March, for example, Senator Hillary Clinton told the New York Times that Iraq is "right in the heart of the oil region" and so "it is directly in opposition to our interests" for it to become a failed state or a pawn of Iran. This means, she continued, that it will be necessary to keep some US troops in Iraq indefinitely, to provide logistical and training support to the Iraqi military. Senator Barack Obama has also spoken of the need to maintain a robust US military presence in Iraq and the surrounding area. Thus, while calling for the withdrawal of most US combat brigades from Iraq proper, he has championed an "over-the-horizon force that could prevent chaos in the wider region."

Given this perspective, it is very hard for mainstream Democrats to challenge Bush when he says that an "enduring" US military presence is needed in Iraq or to change the Administration's current policy, barring a major military setback or some other unforeseen event. By the same token, it will be hard for the Democrats to avert a US attack on Iran if this can be portrayed as a necessary move to prevent Tehran from threatening the long-term safety of Persian Gulf oil supplies.

Nor can we anticipate a dramatic change in US policy in the Gulf region from the next administration, whether Democratic or Republican. If anything, we should expect an increase in the use of military force to protect the overseas flow of oil, as the threat level rises along with the need for new investment to avert even further reductions in global supplies.

Calling Bullshit on the War-bots

Daily Kos has a very thorough and persusaive debunking of the hard-liners' drive for war with Iran.

This is definitely worth taking the time to read. Especially since a majority of Americans apparently now accept that a military strike on Iran would be warranted to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program (of which there is no evidence).

Is the US planning to attack Iran..

...to protect Israel's regional nuclear monopoly?

Ray McGovern ponders.

PAF meets DoD Outreach program

In my mild-mannered secret identity alter-ego real life, I received an e-mail from a Marine Major Christian Devine who is in charge of a Pentagon outreach program called the "Why We Serve" program. Major Devine asked me whether I would be willing to invite "recently returned warriors" from the "Global War on Terror (GWOT)" into my classroom or to a special event on campus which would offer "an avenue to meet the men and women who are making history in the GWOT".

The official Why We Serve web page depicts a smiling soldier with an Iraqi child enjoying a lollipop, and tells readers that:

By hosting uniformed service members to speak about their individual experiences in the Long War, audiences around the country are offered a personal view on military service.
The Why We Serve speakers do not address issues of Department of Defense policy (emphasis added). Rather, each member relates his or her own experience in a manner that offers Americans a glimpse of military service as can only be seen through the eyes of our uniformed men and women.

I wrote back to Major Devine expressing skepticism about this program. It seemed to me that it was intended

to substitute an allegedly 'non-political' meet and greet with the troops for a direct and explicitly political discussion of the issues. I think the effect of de-politicizing and personalizing the discussion in this way is to immunize US policy from criticism while fostering warm fuzzy feelings about the US military as represented by individually admirable service members.

Major Devine responded assuring me that this was not a domestic propaganda campaign:

...let me assure you that although we at the DoD view this program as a community outreach tool, we offer these returning vets to the general public without any stump-speech or overall communication agenda. All we ask of them is that they try their best to effectively communicate why they have decided to volunteer to wear the uniform of their country in a time of conflict.
...The reason I am reaching out to colleges/universities is directly related to what you mention —free thinking, open dialogue, learning, and shared experience. This is not a “pro-war” or “pro-administration” program intended to “win the hearts and minds,” nor is it a recruiting campaign. I merely want to offer people another resource in order to make more informed opinions...

This did not reassure me, since my point was that this program appears to want to substitute one kind of discussion (personalized, non-political) for another (explicitly political policy-oriented dialogue).

As I looked into this further I found an article from the American Forces Press Service entitled "Outreach Program Puts Human Face on Military Service" in which Major Devine described the Why We Serve program in the following, more directly political, terms:

"What this program is doing is helping us win the ‘war on narratives,’ especially in the mainstream media,” Devine noted. The program, he added, offers a different perspective about the war on terrorism, from the viewpoints of military members who’ve served in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Horn of Africa.

Similarly, an Army officer who is one of the programs hand-picked speakers explained:

Meeting one-on-one with the American public helps to combat misperceptions about the U.S. effort in Iraq, he said. “It’s a new fight. It’s a very, very powerful information war...”

So it appears that when the program is discussed within the Defense establishment (the AFPS article) they are more willing to link it clearly to the overall war effort, part of the "war on narratives" or "information war"; but when they contact university professors and ask to be invited to speak to students, they present the program as apolitical, just one more source of information.

I am catching some shit for declining this invitation. Some see my "thanks, but no thanks" as left-wing academic intolerance of establishment or conservative voices. They want to interpret this as a free speech issue. I think that's lame. This is clearly a domestic propaganda operation, and as the statements above reveal, the military personnel in charge of the program view it as such (‘war on narratives,’'information war,' etc.). But that's not what was decisive in my mind. The clincher for me was that they are presenting this in the guise of a personal interaction with "recently returned warriors" rather than as an honestly and directly political dialogue about US military policy. That seems to me to be disingenuous, and I feel no obligation to deliver up students to a such a "bait and switch" operation.

scha·den·freu·de

Heh, heh. Tough luck Rummy.

I guess, you know, freedom is untidy and stuff happens. Like the possibility of justice for assholes like you who think they enjoy impunity for war crimes and torture.

PAF says: Thank you, France.

Islamofascist bogeyman

Crooks and Liars quoting Paul Krugman:

[T]here isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s. […]
Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.
All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

Must have overslept; or maybe I blinked

Appears I missed Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week altogether. Did anything happen? Around here everybody seemed unaware of any heightened Awareness.

Daddy Neocon

Wants to Bomb Iran as part of World War IV

Mr. Podhoretz and neocons even more Islamophobic (if such a thing is possible) are advisors to Rudy Fucking Giuliani, who is so tough he eats small children whole. And if that doesn't qualify someone to be President of the United States these days, what does?

Iranian bombs killing US Soldiers???

Gareth Porter:

When the U.S. military command accused the Iranian Quds Force last January of providing the armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing U.S. troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.

The record also shows that the U.S. command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi army had gotten the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah rather than Iran. The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale for the present aggressive U.S. stance toward Iran. Although the George W. Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are responsible for arms that are killing U.S. troops.

British and U.S. officials observed from the beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for using them.

Hezbollah was known as the world’s most knowledgeable specialists in EFP manufacture and use, having perfected them during the 1990s in the military struggle against Israeli forces in Lebanon. It was widely recognised that it wasn Hezbollah that had passed on the expertise to Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups after the second Intifada began in 2000. U.S. intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of Mahdi army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shiite fighters had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials. In late November 2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN and the New York Times that Hezbollah troops had trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi army fighters in Lebanon. The fact that the Mahdi army’s major military connection has always been with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armour weapon.

...In addition, the U.S. military also had its own forensic evidence by fall 2006 that EFPs used against its vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq, according to Knights. He cites photographic evidence of EFP strikes on U.S. armoured vehicles that “typically shows a mixture of clean penetrations from fully-formed EFP and spattering…” That pattern reflected the fact that the locally made EFPs were imperfect, some of them forming the required shape to penetrate but some of them failing to do so.

Then U.S. troops began finding EFP factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that U.S. troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in November 2006 and discovered “a pile of copper discs, 5 inches in diameter, stamped out as part of what was clearly an ongoing order”.

In a report on Feb. 23, NBC Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf quoted “senior military officials” as saying that U.S. forces had “have been finding an increasing number of the advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops here.”

Nevertheless, the Bush administration decided to put the blame for the EFPs squarely on the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, after Bush agreed in fall 2006 to target the Quds Force within Iran in order to make Iranian leaders feel vulnerable to U.S. power. The allegedly exclusive Iranian manufacture of EFPs was the administration’s only argument for holding the Quds Force responsible for their use against U.S. forces.

Of course, Cheney's war-bots are going to claim that Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, but supplying weapons and aid does not translate into complete Iranian control. Clients can act independently of their patrons, even at the expense of their patron's interests, as US experience both with Saddam's Baath regime and with the Mujahedin of the Afghan jihad clearly demonstrates.

Uncle Sam implicitly threatening Iran with bombing

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3771522

ABC News October 24, 2007

Bomb Iran? U.S. requests bunker-buster bombs

White House bomber request leaves some wondering if U.S. is preparing action in Iran

By Jonathan Karl

Tucked inside the White House's $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran.

The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.

The MOP is the the military's largest conventional bomb, a super "bunker-buster" capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to "an urgent operational need from theater
commanders."

What urgent need? The Pentagon referred questions on this to Central Command.

ABC News called CENTCOM to ask what the "urgent operational need" is. CENTCOM spokesman Maj. Todd White said he would look into it, but, so far, no answer.

There doesn't appear to be any potential targets for a bomb like that in Iraq. It could potentially be used on Taliban or al Qaeda hideouts in the caves along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there would be no need to use a stealth bomber there.

So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran's flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.

"You'd use it on Natanz," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "And you'd use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly."

"It's kind of strange," Pike said. "It sends a signal that you are preparing to bomb Iran, and if you were actually going to bomb Iran I wouldn't think you would want to announce it like that."

The MOP is a massive bomb -- 20 feet long and encased in 3.5 inch thick high-performance steel. It is designed to penetrate up to 200 feet underground before exploding.

The bomb was developed by Northrop Grumman and Boeing for the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

In an interview earlier this year with Air Force Times, Bob Hastie, the manager of the MOP program explained its purpose: "We have a mission to defeat ... hard and deeply buried targets where our adversary would have the support structure for WMD-type systems."

WE are the fucking Evil Empire

John Judis writing at American Prospect:

Bush's foreign policy has been variously described as unilateralist, militarist, and hyper-nationalist. But the term that fits it best is imperialist. That's not because it is the most incendiary term, but because it is the most historically accurate. Bush's foreign policy was framed as an alternative to the liberal internationalist policies that Woodrow Wilson espoused and that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton tried to put into effect as an alternative to the imperialist strategies that helped cause two world wars and even the Cold War. Bush's foreign policy represents a return not to the simple unilateralism of 19th-century American foreign policy, but to the imperial strategy that the great powers of Europe -- and, for a brief period, America, too -- followed and that resulted in utter disaster.

...In the buildup to the war, and during the invasion and occupation, Bush officials, who were eager to advertise Iraq's nuclear threat, were reluctant to talk about oil, but in off-the-record interviews I conducted in December 2002, neo-conservatives waxed poetic about using Iraq's oil wealth to undermine OPEC. After he left office, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounted National Security Council discussions about Iraqi oil. And in his recently published memoir, Alan Greenspan wrote, "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows -- the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Bush and other administration officials denied that the United States was trying to create a new empire. But they were less guarded in their private communications. When the White House offered former Sen. Bob Kerrey the job of head of the Provisional Authority in Iraq -- the job that eventually went to Paul Bremer -- officials asked him if he were interested in being "viceroy." Kerrey, taken aback, turned down the job.

The administration's actions also belied its denials. In March 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that the U.S. Army was constructing what it called 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq. These would provide a continuing American military presence in Iraq. And the administration continues work on these bases, including a new one perched on the Iranian border, even as it professes to be committed to turning Iraq over to its government and army.

...Indeed, this brand of imperialism, as practiced by the Bush administration, is remarkably similar to the older European variety. Its outward veneer is optimistic and even triumphalist, when articulated by a neo-conservative like Max Boot or William Kristol, and is usually accompanied by a vision of global moral-religious-social transformation. The British boasted of bringing Christianity and civilization to the heathens; America's neo-conservatives trumpet the virtues of free-market capitalism and democracy. And like the older imperialism, Bush's policy toward Iraq and the Middle East has been driven by a fear of losing out on scarce natural resources. Ultimately, his policy is as much a product of the relative decline of American power brought about by the increasingly fierce international competition for resources and markets as it is of America's "unipolar moment."

Osama who?

Once again, diversion of elite forces to conquer and occupy Iraq may have resulted in a failure to strike an actual terrorist.

Good thing we're not all that concerned about him.



After all, it's not like those guys are dangerous or anything.

Very Scary

Two former Bush administration Middle East experts are afraid that Cheney's hard-liners are dead-set on war with Iran. From Esquire:

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. "If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of '08," says Leverett, "what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone."

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran's resistance to the Great Satan. "As disastrous as Iraq has been," says Mann, "an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world."

PAF thanks my friend Mike for the link.

What's in PAF's CD player?

For the last couple of weeks I have been captivated by two superb new records from some old dudes who have still got it together:

• Mark Knopfler, Kill to get Crimson

and

• The Boss's new record, Magic

JFC, these are some talented people.

TPMTV on Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Gut check for conservatives

Gary Kamiya in Salon:

Bush covertly and duplicitously laid the groundwork for one of the longest and most expensive wars in American history. Bush declared that habeas corpus, a magnificent cornerstone of Western law, did not apply to those he designated, without judicial review, "enemy combatants." He claimed the right to lock those individuals up forever, without allowing them to bring their case before a jury. He made torture official U.S. policy, and was directly responsible for the American-run torture factory at Abu Ghraib. His approval of warrantless wiretapping constitutes perhaps the most serious frontal attack on the right of privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment in American history. He has made unprecedented use of "signing statements" to disobey laws he disagrees with, marginalizing Congress in the process. His radical theory of the "unitary executive" runs roughshod over the balance-of-powers doctrine that has guided American governance since the Founders.

These Bush policies all represent a direct assault on the U.S. Constitution, long-established legal and political traditions, and accepted American values -- in short, on the heart and soul of American civic life. If American conservatism will not take its stand in defense of these things, what will it take a stand for?

Bushworld unravelling

Juan Cole in Salon:

The Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.

On Sunday, just days after the Turkish Parliament authorized an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed 17 Turkish soldiers inside Turkey. In Karachi, Pakistan, a massive bomb nearly killed U.S.-backed Benazir Bhutto, who was supposed to help stabilize the country. The Bush administration's entire Middle East policy is coming undone -- if it even has a policy left, other than just sticking its fingers in the multiple, and multiplying, holes in the dike.

It's

Islamo-fascism Awareness Week


Boo.

No such thing

as Class in America:

Wealth is being redistributed from poorer to richer.

Between 1983 and 2004, the average wealth of the top 1 percent of households grew by 78 percent, reports Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University. The bottom 40 percent lost 59 percent.

In 2004, one out of six households had zero or negative net worth. Nearly one out of three households had less than $10,000 in net worth, including home equity. That’s before the mortgage crisis hit.

In 1982, when the Forbes 400 had just 13 billionaires, the highest paid CEO made $108 million and the average full-time worker made $34,199, adjusted for inflation in $2006. Last year, the highest paid hedge fund manager hauled in $1.7 billion, the highest paid CEO made $647 million, and the average worker made $34,861, with vanishing health and pension coverage.

The Forbes 400 is even more of a rich men’s club than when it began. The number of women has dropped from 75 in 1982 to 39 today.

The 400 richest Americans have a conservatively estimated $1.54 trillion in combined wealth. That amount is more than 11 percent of our $13.8 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the total annual value of goods and services produced by our nation of 303 million people. In 1982, Forbes 400 wealth measured less than 3 percent of U.S. GDP.

War crimes??

What war crimes?

Rahul Mahajan

PAF supports third party ticket

PAF doesn't think either Hillary or Rudy F. Giuliani have what it takes to be a truly great President. Since they're both preoccupied with proving their toughness, it's clear that both have something to prove. And since American political culture seems to demand toughness above all things in its political leaders, PAF modestly suggests a Third party ticket:

Vlad/Genghis 2008

Transparent Cruelty for the 21st Century

No more pussyfooting around with ambiguous "signing statements" to evade that pesky legislative branch, or secret orders from the Justice Department suggesting that there is really no need to worry about all that Geneva Convention nonsense. No more hiding our torture away in super-secret Black Sites, and refusing to discuss it, like we're embarrassed by it or something. Let's just cut to the chase and have mass impalements on the National Mall supervised directly by the chief executive. Enemies foreign and domestic served up like a forest of bloody Popsicles. Now that would send a signal (and make for some fine Reality TV). And if George and Dick, or Rudy F. and Hillary, are just too squeamish to go there, then it's time for some real leadership.

Military-Industrial Complex hearts Hillary

The Independent UK:

After her election to the Senate, she became the first New York senator on the armed services committee, where she revealed her hawkish tendencies by supporting the invasion of Iraq. Although she now favours a withdrawal of US troops, her position on Iran is among the most warlike of all the candidates - Democrat or Republican.

This week, she said that, if elected president, she would not rule out military strikes to destroy Tehran’s nuclear weapons facilities. While on the armed services committee, Mrs Clinton has befriended key generals and has won the endorsement of General Wesley Clarke, who ran Nato’s war in Kosovo. A former presidential candidate himself, he is spoken of as a potential vice-presidential running mate.

Mrs Clinton has been a regular visitor to Iraq and Afghanistan and is careful to focus her criticisms of the Iraq war on President Bush, rather than the military. The arms industry has duly taken note.

...The industry’s strong support for Mrs Clinton indicates that she is their firm favourite to win the Democratic nomination in the spring and the presidential election in November 2008.

This adds to my fear that Hillary represents -- at best -- Empire light, as opposed to Rudy F. Giuliani's overt blood lust. You gotta love democracy because it offers you these kinds of choices.

Running for "velociraptor-in-chief"

Juan Cole in Salon:

The Republicans are competing to see who can wax most bellicose. The two candidates with the greatest need to compensate for their socially liberally pasts, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, have been extra warlike. Giuliani in particular seems to be running for velociraptor-in-chief.

...Among the Republican front-runners, debate about Iran occurs in a dark, upside-down fantasy land, where a weak third-world regime with no air force to speak of plots a military strike on the planet's sole superpower. The third-world regime is led by a genocidal commander-in-chief who serves a global conspiracy; to stop him, the president of the superpower might be compelled, after a quick chat with a lawyer and a few bars of a golden oldie, to launch an aggressive war. (And even the part about a conversation with an attorney is seen by some of the candidates as an abdication of manhood.)

Perhaps because of his chest-thumping contest with Giuliani, Romney especially has shown a talent of late for putting the ignorant in fear-mongering. During the Dearborn debate, Romney alleged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had "spoken about genocide," and said it was important not to "allow that individual to have the control of launching a nuclear weapon." In an ad released after the debate, in a clear attempt to out-Giuliani Giuliani, Romney declaimed, "It's this century's nightmare, jihadism -- violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism." He told the cameras that the fundamentalists' goal is to establish a "caliphate," and wanted to "collapse" countries such as the United States as part of that goal. "We can and will stop Iran," he added, "from acquiring nuclear weapons."

President Ahmadinejad, whose job is more or less ceremonial, is not the commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces. He has never advocated "genocide," and his expressed wish that the "occupation regime over Jerusalem" (i.e., the Israeli government) eventually vanish has been mistranslated.

As for the rest, the candidates simply assume that Iran has a nuclear weapons research program, which has not been proven. It certainly does not have a nuclear weapon at present, and the National Intelligence Estimate indicates that if it were trying to get one, it would take until at least 2016 -- and then only if the international environment were conducive to the needed high-tech imports. (Ahmadinejad, by the way, will not be in power in 2016.) Also, someone really needs to let the Republicans know that Iran is Shiite, meaning it abhors Sunni fundamentalists and rejects the caliphate.

...Of the four senators among the Democratic candidates, only Hillary Clinton voted for the non-binding Kyl-Lieberman resolution on Sept. 26. The Kyl-Lieberman resolution, which passed 76-to-22, with 29 Democrats voting in favor, says, "the United States should designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization ... and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists." Jim Lobe, among the best journalists covering neoconservatism in Washington, wrote that unnamed "Capitol Hill sources" told him that the resolution was crafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, interviewed on "Democracy Now," concurred that the amendment was pushed by the Israel lobby.

So Rudy is running as a mad dog -- just what you need when you're already losing two wars and aggravating the terrorist threat in the process -- and Hillary is trying to maintain her toughness cred and her popularity with the Israel lobby. These are our front-runners.

PAF wonders: Is our children learning?

Rudy F. Giuliani's rabid foreign policy advisors

Josh Marshall from TPM media:

Cheney's Law

PBS Frontline:

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.

Only nine more shopping days until...

Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week

I can barely contain my excitement.

Every sentient being in the galaxy believes that the Neocons have thoroughly discredited themselves...

... except Rudy Fucking Giuliani:

One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement.

Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a "world war" with "Islamofascism" and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war—what I call World War IV—is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."

...Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. (He's argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was not the moral offense it's been portrayed as, though he doesn't say Muslims should suffer the same.)

Iraq Occupation: No end in sight

Washington Post:

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who led U.S. forces in Iraq for a year after the March 2003 invasion, accused the Bush administration yesterday of going to war with a "catastrophically flawed" plan and said the United States is "living a nightmare with no end in sight."

..."From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration's latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power," Sanchez said.

...He told reporters in response to questions that, when he assumed command in Iraq, he realized the situation had come unglued, in large part because there was high-level disregard for addressing what U.S. forces should do after the major combat operations conquered Baghdad. He said the U.S. presence has been an occupation.

No Such Thing

as class in America:

The gap between America’s richest and poorest is at its widest in at least 25 years, with the wealthiest taking home a record share of the nation’s income that exceeds even the previous high in 2000.

According to recent data from the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all U.S. income earned in 2005. That is a significant increase from 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of the nation’s income.

The previous high over the past 25 years, when such data were compiled, was in 2000 when a bull market brought the figure up to 20.81 percent.

of Occupation and Oil

Jim Holt in LRB:

...the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.

...How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.)

...But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

Hillary is failing us again

Nancy Kricorian of Code Pink:

On September 26, 2007, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton voted yes on the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment that effectively labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a “terrorist organization.” The Revolutionary Guard Corps is the largest branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s military. It is unprecedented in American history that the armed forces of a sovereign nation have been named “a terrorist organization.” In response to the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, Iran’s Foreign Ministry and parliament have designated the U.S. Army and CIA as terrorist organizations.

Clinton was the lone Democratic presidential candidate to support this legislation that many view as giving President Bush authority to launch an air war against Iran. Senator Chris Dodd, in explaining his negative vote, said, “We learned in the run up to the Iraq war that seemingly nonbinding language passed by this Senate can have profound consequences. We need the president to use robust diplomacy to address concerns with Iran, not the language in this amendment that the president can point to if he decides to draw this country into another disastrous war of choice.” He added, “We shouldn’t repeat our mistakes and enable this President again.”

In her statement released the same day as the vote, Clinton claimed, “I voted for this resolution in order to apply greater diplomatic pressure on Iran. This resolution in no way authorizes or sanctions military action against Iran and instead seeks to end the Bush Administration’s diplomatic inaction in the region.”

Does this sound familiar? It is an uncanny echo of statements Clinton had made about her 2002 Iraq War authorization vote. At the time she said, “So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him - use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein - this is your last chance - disarm or be disarmed.”

As we now know, and some of us recognized at the time, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The President used the powers granted to him by Senator Clinton and her colleagues neither wisely nor as a last resort. He instead plunged Iraq and the United States into an illegal and catastrophic war and occupation that has cost, in human terms, over a million Iraqi lives, displaced over four million Iraqi civilians, killed over 3,800 U.S. troops and injured over 26,000 of them.

In December 2006, Hillary Clinton said of the War Authorization vote, “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn’t have been a vote, and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.’” When the bombs start dropping on Teheran, without Congressional authorization, what will Hillary Clinton say then? “That is not what I intended by my vote, that is not what I intended at all. Who knew the President would abuse his power and misread the will of Congress and the people?”

Leading Dems complicit in Fraudulant War

Steven Zunes, who got it right before the war, reminds us that some of the leaders of the "opposition" party not only didn't get it right, but allowed themselves to be used as part of the fraud. Now some of these same people want to make a claim to "leadership".

Last ditch defenders

What does it mean when the more prudent elements of the uniformed military are the last possible brake on the runaway train of the imperial state? Separation of powers; checks and balances; electoral accountability; constitutional protections; peace movement mobilizations; all of that is failing us, putting uniformed military officers in the position of having to resist the will of the executive to prevent another disastrous imperial war. So here we are, hoping that civilian control of the military can be weakened enough to avert an attack on Iran.

Jeeezus.

PAF is old enough to think this is a scream

Meet the Neocons

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting this.

What's wrong with this picture?: Reinterpreting the law, in secret, in order to continue to torture detainees

NYT:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

...the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

"Harsh tactics". Makes me feel proud to be an American.

Actually, it makes me want to barf.

And who was behind this abhorrent scam?

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress.

Gonzales was a tool. Cheney and Addington called the tune.

"Guns don't kill people...

We kill people."

It's a Dick thing

The invaluable Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker:

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and
members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing
degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. ...The
President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in
Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront
the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White
House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the
Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran,
according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Since the whole "greeted as Liberators; Iraq becomes the 51st state" scenario has unravelled catastrophically, it's quite clear that the Iranians are the main geopolitical beneficiary of the destruction of the Iraqi Baathist regime and the failure of the US occupation. Entirely predictable, of course, for anybody but Cheney's war-bots. So having totally dicked up Iraq in the unsuccessful pursuit of regional military dominance, administration officials are now looking for a reason to knock Iran down a peg in order to restore what they see as the rightful state of the Universe -- Uncle Sam rules; everybody else drools. But attacking Iran could unleash some serious ugliness, and leave Uncle Sam dazed, wounded and drooling. Not to mention, you know, lots of people killed.

We're already losing two wars in the region, killing boatloads of people (many of them non-combatants), alienating great swaths of the Muslim world, and providing the Islamists with the political credibility they would not otherwise have; and attacking Iran would aggravate all these problems even if it did provide a temporary testosterone infusion to administration officials whose martial prowess has not lived up to their hyper-masculine posturing.

No oil in Waziristan

Washington Post:

Pakistan's government is losing its war against emboldened insurgent forces, giving al-Qaeda and the Taliban more territory in which to operate and allowing the groups to plot increasingly ambitious attacks, according to Pakistani and Western security officials.

The depth of the problem has become clear only in recent months, as regional peace deals have collapsed and the government has deferred developing a new strategy to defeat insurgents until Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can resolve a political crisis that threatens his presidency.

Meanwhile, radical Islamic fighters who were evicted from Afghanistan by the 2001 U.S.-led invasion have intensified a ruthless campaign that has consumed Pakistan's tribal areas and now affects its major cities. Military officials say the insurgents have enhanced their ability to threaten not only Pakistan but the United States and Europe as well.

But, you know, we're really not all that concerned about those guys.

Beauty may be only skin deep...

You know, PAF has been called a lot of things, but 'good looking' is not usually one of them. Partly for that reason, and also because it's generally a cheap shot, I tend to avoid making fun of other people's appearance. But when the person in question is a 'responsible' policy maker who is making remarks with genocidal implications, I'm inclined to relax that rule a bit: I'll link to other pages who are happy to make fun of someone's appearance.

Warning:

It might be wise to criss-cross your monitor with masking tape and hang garlic around your neck before you click through.


the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Coalition Affairs

Feeding the Jingoes

NYT on Fredom's Watch,

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

...With a forceful message and a roster of wealthy benefactors, Freedom’s Watch has quickly emerged from the crowded field of nonprofit advocacy groups as a conservative answer to the nine-year-old liberal MoveOn.org, which vehemently opposes the Iraq war.

The idea for Freedom’s Watch was hatched in March at the winter meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Manalapan, Fla., where Vice President Dick Cheney was the keynote speaker, according to participants. Next week, the group is moving into a 10,000-square-foot office in the Chinatown section of Washington, with plans to employ as many as 50 people by early next year.

One benefactor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the group was hoping to raise as much as $200 million by November 2008. Raising big money “will be easy,” the benefactor said, adding that several of the founders each wrote a check for $1 million. Mr. Blakeman would not confirm or deny whether any donor gave $1 million, or more, to the organization.

Since the group is organized as a tax-exempt organization, it does not have to reveal its donors and it can not engage in certain types of partisan activities that directly support political candidates. It denies coordinating its activities with the White House, although many of its donors and organizers are well connected to the
administration, including Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary.
“Ideologically, we are inspired by much of Ronald Reagan’s thinking — peace through strength, protect and defend America, and prosperity through free enterprise,” Mr. Fleischer said.

I don't recall Ronald Reagan doing all that much thinking, but Freedom's Watch is clearly going to pay big bucks to pump Lizard Brain slogans into the Republican Base until they quiver with fear and loathing for Ahmadinijad and are prepared to accept yet another war of aggression against a country with poses no threat to the US.

Antiwar Demo

PAF participated in an anti-war rally yesterday. I'm of two minds about it.

On the one hand, it was great to see everybody, lots of old friends, lots of strangers, by our standards a big crowd of maybe three thousand people: vets, unionists, religious groups, peace and justice groups, students, families, young and old, people in wheelchairs. Gives you that "I am not alone" feeling.

But at the end of the day I don't know if it matters that much that we did this. There are enough lizard-brain jingoes in the electorate -- people who despite all evidence to the contrary continue to believe that Saddam was involved in 9-11 and that Iraq did possess WMD -- to prevent an overwhelming, veto-proof majority in Congress which might actually end this damn war, and the administration clearly could not care less about our demos, rallies, signs, and speeches. Part of me feels disempowered, disenfranchised, held hostage in a republic of idiots.

I think we had to do this demo for us, for ourselves, for each other; but I have little faith that we can end this war, or prevent a future attack on Iran.

A republic, if you can keep it

Washington Post:

A federal judge in Oregon ruled yesterday that two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional, marking the second time in as many weeks that the anti-terrorism law has come under attack in the courts.

In a case brought by a Portland man who was wrongly detained as a terrorism suspect in 2004, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Patriot Act violates the Constitution because it "permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment."

"For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law -- with unparalleled success," Aiken wrote in a strongly worded 44-page opinion. "A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised."

Academic Freedom for Rumsfeld?

Rumsfeld to join Hoover Institution at Stanford:

Academics and students at California’s prestigious Stanford University have launched a vigorous protest against the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting fellow to a right-wing campus think-tank, saying the former defence secretary and architect of the Iraq war offends their ideals of truth and tolerance.

Outrageous hypocrisy for defenders of academic freedom to attack Stanford/Hoover for offering Rummy a fellowship?

I don't think so. While he may or may not be guilty of crimes against humanity, there is little doubt that Rumsfeld is directly implicated in a war of aggression built upon lies, and authorized interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere which approach the threshold of torture. Rumsfeld enjoys the right of free speech along with the rest of us. I would not try to prevent him from speaking on my campus; in fact I would welcome it as an opportunity to express dissenting views in his presence. But a fellowship is not a speech. What does it mean to extend to such a person the privilege (not, let us be clear, the right) of a campus fellowship? It implies welcoming him into the community of knowledge seekers whose highest value is to present reasons and evidence without deliberate distortion, manipulation, or prevarication. But he stands exposed as someone who does not respect the core values of this community he now wishes to join, so that it may shelter him in its fellowship. He does not deserve that privilege.

They will surely be painted by O'Reilly and Horowirtz as left-wing hypocrites, but the Stanford faculty are right not to welcome Rumsfeld into their community. By his own words and actions he has proven that he is not, and cannot be, a member of the academic community, and is not entitled to its privileges.

Song of Anger: Dear Mr. President

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting this.

Shooting ourselves in both feet

Peter W. Galbraith offers an excellent overview of the Iran-Iraq nexus, and how Uncle Sam has dicked it up entirely (i'm like, you know, paraphrasing).

in case you just can't get enough irony in your life

Tom Tomorrow.

Another shocker

(stage whisper) The war was about... oil.


More from Ray McGovern.

and George Lakoff adds:

The contracts that the Bush administration has been pushing the Iraqi government to accept are not just about the distribution of oil among the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. The contracts call for 30-year exclusive rights for British and American oil companies, rights that cannot be revoked by future Iraqi governments. They are called “production sharing agreements” (or “PSA’s”) - a legalistic code word. The Iraqi government would technically own the oil, but could not control it; only the companies could do that. ExxonMobil and others would invest in developing the infrastructure for the oil (drilling, oil rigs, refining) and would get 75% of the “cost oil” profits, until they got their investment back. After that, they would own the infrastructure (paid for by oil profits), and then get 20% of oil profits after that (twice the usual rate). The profits are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And the Iraqi people would have no democratic control over their own major resource. No other Middle East country has such an arrangement.

Greeted as liberators? Not so much.