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.

Where to now?

In the wake of the Petraeus-Crocker testimony Juan Cole offers an analysis of where we are now vis-a-vis Iraq, and what we can expect in the next few years both in Iraq and at home. And it isn't pretty.

Academic Freedom!

Brian Leiter, professor of law at the University of Texas, tells a troubling tale of neo-McCarthyism at UC-Irvine. Apparently to appease conservative donors and the regents of the UC system, the chancellor of UC-Irvine backed out of an agreement to hire Erwin Chemerinsky -- a scholar of substance and standing -- as dean of the new UC-Irvine law school because he was perceived as too controversial by conservatives.

I expect David Horowitz -- that stalwart defender of free speech on campus -- will be coming to Chemerinsky's defense any minute now...

Still waiting David...

David?

Thanks to Eschaton for calling our attention to this.

Classic freudian slip

Watching PBS NewsHour just now: Lehrer asked Petraeus if he was "spinning" in his congressional presentations, and the General replied that he was just "preventing... er, presenting the facts".

Oops.

More loss, more pain

Editor & Publisher:

The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.

I posted part of their op-ed here. These were thoughtful as well as brave and loyal men. This is just fucking dreadful.

Try to pretend that you're surprised

Washington Post:

Bush to Endorse Petraeus Plan


Wow; can't recall the last time I was so shocked and awed (lemmesee...).

And what's the plan? Draw down the surge just before we run out of troops and then run out the clock until Iraq becomes the next administration's problem and probably even an albatross to try to hang around a Democratic president.

Jeez, you gotta marvel at how the general got Bush to go along with this.

Do I need to say that the Bush administration and the Republican right are spending lives as political currency? Yes, that needs to be said explicitly.

Still more deliberately misleading claims (do we call those 'lies'?) from the Republican battle-bots

Washington Post:

The television commercial is grim and gripping: A soldier who lost both legs in an explosion near Fallujah explains why he thinks U.S. forces need to stay in Iraq.

"They attacked us," he says as the screen turns to an image of the second hijacked airplane heading toward the smoking World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. "And they will again. They won't stop in Iraq."

Every investigation has shown that Iraq did not, in fact, have anything to do with the Sept. 11 attacks. But the ad, part of a new $15 million media blitz launched by an advocacy group allied with the White House, may be the most overt attempt during the current debate in Congress over the war to link the attacks with Iraq.

...Although public support for Bush's handling of terrorism has fallen in his second term -- 46 percent of respondents approved of his handling of the issue in this month's Washington Post-ABC News poll, while 51 percent disapproved -- the White House still views al-Qaeda as its most successful justification for remaining in Iraq. After some critics accused Bush of overstating the connection between bin Laden's group and al-Qaeda in Iraq, the White House quickly arranged a presidential speech to defend and reinforce its assertions.

The reason to emphasize al-Qaeda, aides said, is simple. "People know what that means," said one senior official who spoke about internal strategy on the condition of anonymity. "The average person doesn't understand why the Sunnis and Shia don't like each other. They don't know where the Kurds live. . . . And al-Qaeda is something they know. They're the enemy of the United States."

The new ad campaign drives that home more emotionally than any speech. Sponsored by a group of Bush allies under the name Freedom's Watch, four spots are airing in 60 congressional districts in 20 states. The commercials urge Congress to stick with the president's strategy in Iraq.

Here's the spot in question. Looks like the message didn't get a lot of traction in my district.

The Myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq

Andrew Tilghman writing for Washington Monthly:

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which arguably has the best track record for producing accurate intelligence assessments, last year estimated that AQI's membership was in a range of "more than 1,000." When compared with the military's estimate for the total size of the insurgency—between 20,000 and 30,000 full-time fighters—this figure puts AQI forces at around 5 percent. When compared with Iraqi intelligence's much larger estimates of the insurgency—200,000 fighters—INR's estimate would put AQI forces at less than 1 percent. This year, the State Department dropped even its base-level estimate, because, as an official explained, "the information is too disparate to come up with a consensus number."

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

...no one has more incentive to overstate the threat of AQI than President Bush and those in the administration who argue for keeping a substantial military presence in Iraq. Insistent talk about AQI aims to place the Iraq War in the context of the broader war on terrorism. Pointing to al- Qaeda in Iraq helps the administration leverage Americans' fears about terrorism and residual anger over the attacks of September 11. It is perhaps one of the last rhetorical crutches the president has left to lean on.

PAF hearts

Princess Sparkle Pony

for posting this:



Mitch McConnell musta left his poker face in his other pants. Ahem.

Did Bush lie or did he believe it?

Perhaps the answer is "yes".

Here is further evidence that although there was good intelligence indicating that Saddam had no WMD, and that the President was briefed on this by George Tenet, Bush simply did not want to hear it and so Tenet kept it quiet, instead playing up the scary allegations of a known fabricator -- the infamous Curveball -- and giving the imprimatur of the DCI to Bush's imaginary threat-world.

And here's an account which suggests that as late as April 2006 Bush continued to disbelieve the evidence, all but conclusive after three years of searching, that there was no WMD in Iraq. As of mid-2006, about half of the American public erroneously believed that Iraq had possessed WMD at the time the US attacked:

beliefs about whether the government of Saddam Hussein still had WMD in 2003 were highly related to attitudes about whether going to war in Iraq was justified. Those who believed Saddam Hussein had WMD or an ongoing program to develop such weapons also believed overwhelmingly (85%) that going to war was the right decision. However, those who did not believe the Iraqi dictator had WMD or a major weapons program were overwhelmingly convinced (95%) that the invasion was wrong.

Bush believed what he wanted to believe; he was enabled by toadies, sycophants, neocons and Cheney, who squashed information which did not fit the president's belief-world, exaggerated any information (regardless of quality) that did fit; and then Bush and his administration told us untruths and more untruths which led to war and more war.

Shocked, shocked that there is gambling in Casablanca

Are you sitting down? The Pentagon is not shooting straight with us. Washington Post:

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Bullshit in Anbar

Juan Cole on fraudulant claims of progress and calm in Anbar.

David Addington and the Imperial (Vice-)Presidency

Washington Post on Cheney's legal enabler:

Vice President Cheney's top lawyer pushed relentlessly to expand the powers of the executive branch and repeatedly derailed efforts to obtain congressional approval for aggressive anti-terrorism policies for fear that even a Republican majority might say no, according to a new book written by a former senior Justice Department official.

David S. Addington, who is now Cheney's chief of staff, viewed both U.S. lawmakers and overseas allies with "hostility" and repeatedly opposed efforts by other administration lawyers to soften counterterrorism policies or seek outside support, according to Jack L. Goldsmith, who frequently clashed with Addington while serving as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004.

...he depicted Addington, who served as "Cheney's eyes, ears, and voice" on counterterrorism matters and with whom he was present at roughly 100 meetings on the topic, as having little patience for views contrary to his own.

"After 9/11, they and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," Goldsmith wrote, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs spying by U.S. agencies within the United States.

...Addington reacted angrily to many of Goldsmith's legal opinions, telling him in reference to one concerning detainees in Iraq: "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision," according to the book.

"He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint," Goldsmith wrote. "They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch."

Of course, anyone the executive branch doesn't like is an enemy of America, and we know what can happen to them.

Empire of Stupidity

In the wake of September 11, 2001, these fundamentalist believers in the power of One to twist all other arms on the planet managed to add a second Defense Department -- the Department of Homeland Security (with its own "-industrial complex") -- to the American agenda; they passed ever more draconian laws curtailing American rights in the name of "homeland security"; they went remarkably far in turning what was already an imperial presidency into something like a Caesarian commander-in-chief presidency; they presided over a far more politicized Defense Department (whose commanders today speak out, while in uniform, on what once would have been civilian political matters); they initiated far more sweeping means of government surveillance at home; they opened offshore prisons, giving their covert intelligence operatives the possibility of disappearing just about any human being they cared to target and their interrogators permission to use the most sophisticated kinds of torture. In short, they presided over a striking increase in the state's coercive powers, as embodied in a single, theoretically unrestrained commander-in-chief presidency and the first imperial vice-presidency in American history. (Of course, from the Reagan "revolution" on, the American conservative movement that first took power over a quarter of a century ago never meant to throttle the state, only the capacity of the state to deliver any services except "security" to its citizenry.)

...They truly believed that when you wrapped the flag of American exceptionalism, of American goodness, around the U.S. military, you would have the greatest force for liberation on the planet. Of course, they defined "liberation" in a way that coincided exactly with their desires for remaking the world. Hence, whenever democratic elections didn't produce the results they wanted, they simply rejected the results. In the bargain, they were convinced that, wielding that "greatest force," they could reshape the Middle East to their specifications, establish an unassailably dominant position at the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet, roll back the Russians even further, cow the Chinese, and create a Pax Americana planet.

...As David Walker, U.S. Comptroller and head of the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office, pointed out recently, the American government has also, in a remarkably short period of time, taken on the look of a faltering imperial Rome with "an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government." And imagine -- it was only a few years ago that neocon pundits were hailing the U.S. as a power "more dominant than any since Rome." Think instead: The Roman Empire on crack cocaine.

Tom Engelhardt

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