Seymour Hersh on the administration's secret war against Iran

This is just really bad in a whole bunch of ways: ranging from 'we don't need another war' to 'the imperial presidency rides again'. The one bright spot here is the integrity of uniformed military officers trying to prevent the administration from pulling the trigger. As I've said before, though, we really shouldn't have to rely on uniformed military officers to save the republic from a White House run amok, and it signals a serious problem with the separation of powers when these guys have to put their careers on the line to keep us out of the shit.

Stewart analyzes McCain strategy

Boo.

Atrios on another media meathead

The deeply thoughtful Thomas Friedman

Fair and Balanced

Thanks to Crooks and Liars.

Bush invasion opens the way for Big Oil to get back into Iraq

NYT:

Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

Reduced violence in Iraq means Victory is within reach, Right?

Not so much.

NYT:

The government victories in Basra, Sadr City and Amara were essentially negotiated, so the militias are lying low but undefeated and seething with resentment. Mr. Maliki may be raising expectations among Sunnis that he cannot fulfill, and the Sunni Awakening forces in many cases are loyal to their American paymasters, not the Shiite government. Restive Iraqis want to see the government spend money to improve services. Attacks like the bombing that killed 63 people in Baghdad’s Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday showed that opponents can continue to inflict carnage.

Perhaps most worrisome, more than five years after the American invasion, which knocked Mr. Hussein from power but set off great chaos, Iraq still lacks the formal rules to divide the power and spoils of an oil-rich nation among ethnic, religious and tribal groups and unite them under one stable idea of Iraq. The improvements are fragile.

... the improvements in Iraq face an array of destabilizing provincial, national and regional forces. The Sunni insurgency — now in many places operating as pro-American Awakening groups — continues to wait to see whether the government makes good on promises of jobs and a less sectarian administration of security and public services and infrastructure.

The Sadrists remain powerful and may not forgive what many consider a betrayal by Mr. Maliki, who could not have become prime minister two years ago without their blessing. Mohanned al-Gharrawi, a senior Sadrist cleric in Baghdad, said, “We feel like a bridge that they used to reach their aims and goals, and then they left us behind.”

Despite their newfound confidence, some senior Iraqi officials close to Mr. Maliki said that without an American military safety net they are vulnerable to threats from outside and inside their borders. One important but less-noticed element of the security negotiations has been Iraq’s effort to extract an American pledge to defend the government against foreign or domestic aggression. Mr. Adeeb, the top Maliki adviser, said officials wanted the Americans to protect the Iraqi government against anything the government viewed as a threat — not just what the Americans saw as a threat.

The fighting in Iraq isn't over, not by a longshot; and neither is US military involvement.

General Taguba: US Torture and War Crimes

Retired Major General Antonio Taguba:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.

More here and here.

Pride and Shame

As the son of a former JAG officer, I am as proud of the fact that JAG officers resisted Rumsfeld and Cheney's torture policy as I am ashamed that they were overuled by the administration and its lawyers.

According to McClatchy, the adminisrtration lawyers most responsible for undermining the laws against torture were Cheney's man David Addington, former White House Counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Justice Department legal advisor John Yoo, former pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, and former Gonzales deputy Timothy Flanigan.

The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council,” drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone - from soldiers on the ground to the president - from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

...A handful of legal opinions opened the way to the abuses documented in McClatchy’s investigation. Among them:

In a Jan. 9, 2002, memorandum for Haynes, co-author Yoo opined that basic Geneva Convention protections known as Common Article Three forbidding humiliating and degrading treatment and torture of prisoners didn’t cover alleged al Qaida or Taliban detainees - the entire incoming population of detainees in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

In a memorandum to Bush dated Jan. 25, 2002, Gonzales said that rescinding detainees' Geneva protections “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.” Doing so, Gonzales wrote, also would create a solid defense against prosecutors or independent counsels who may in the future “decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441,” the U.S. War Crimes Act, which prohibits violations of the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales added that by withholding Geneva protections and prisoner-of-war status, Bush could avoid case-by-case reviews of detainees’ status.

On Feb. 7, 2002, Bush issued a memorandum declaring that alleged al Qaida or Taliban members wouldn’t be considered prisoners of war and, further, that they wouldn’t be granted protection under Common Article Three. Most nations accept Article Three, common to all four Geneva Conventions, as customary law setting the minimum standard for conduct in any conflict, whether internal or international.

An Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum that Gonzales requested from the Justice Department defined torture as “injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions,” a high bar for ruling interrogation techniques or detainee treatment illegal. U.S. law, according to the memorandum’s analysis, “prohibits only extreme acts.”

A March 14, 2003, memorandum that Yoo prepared at Haynes’ request concluded that even if an interrogation method violated U.S. criminal statutes - such as the one against war crimes - the interrogators involved most likely couldn’t be prosecuted because they were operating within the scope of Bush’s constitutional authority to wage war against al Qaida and other militant groups. “In wartime, it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy,” Yoo wrote.

My father was both an attorney and a career army officer, a passionate believer in protecting the rights of the accused in order to keep us all safe from abusive treatment: This would break his heart if he were here to see it.

Why America loves the G O P

More info from this film's producers here.


Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting this.

Key Findings: Senate Intelligence Committee Report

Since this came up in the comments to another post (below), I wanted to provide another perspective on this report. Jim Lobe reporting on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report:

The latest report was focused on comparing statements made by top
administration officials, particularly Bush and Cheney, between August 2002 and the actual invasion in March 2003 with intelligence reports that were available to them at the time.

It found that the White House consistently exaggerated ties between al Qaeda and Iraq by repeatedly suggesting or outright asserting that the two forged an operational relationship that included the provision of weapons training and possibly WMD expertise. The report found that these allegations “were not substantiated by the intelligence” at the time they were made. The report also found that the intelligence also contradicted the White House’s assertions that Saddam Hussein “was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attack against the United States.”

And it said that the intelligence community never confirmed the allegation, made repeatedly by Cheney in particular, that one of the 9/11 organisers, Mohammed Atta, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague several months before the attack.

“The president and his advisors undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (9/11) attacks to use the war against al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Rockefeller said. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises.”

The intelligence community, according to the report, was also considerably more sceptical about the state of Iraq’s chemical weapons programme and especially its alleged nuclear weapons programme than was indicated by top administration officials at the time. Testimony by then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the Iraqi government hid WMD in facilities buried deep underground did not reflect any of the intelligence held by the intelligence community at the time.

Graphic from McClatchy

McClatchy to McClellan: We knew all this back when you were lying to us about it

OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

The McClatchy crew are among the few journalistic sources who had this story right from the beginning. So don't let anyone tell you the administration was a victim of bad intelligence just like everybody else, or that the press had to take the administration's claims at face value because they could not possibly have fact-checked super-secret intel. Bullshit. McClatchy was all over this, and their readers knew the administration was cooking the intelligence before the war began. If the administration hadn't been spoon-feeding their pre-cooked WMD/Al-Qaeda/Iraq pablum to the mainstream media, and pundits, anchors, reporters and editors hadn't been eagerly lapping it up, more people might have known what McClatchy knew and we might have avoided this unnecessary bloodletting.

Sweet irony

This video is just delightful on so many levels.

Porter Barry, one of O'Reilly's second-rate hit men, attempts to ambush Bill Moyers and gets outclassed, outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and to top it all off Barry winds up getting ambush-interviewed himself by journalists who just witnessed Barry's own failed ambush attempt.





Almost makes you feel sorry for him. Almost; but not quite. O'Reilly and his crew are thugs with cameras. Poor Barry is a failed thug.

And Moyers is a national fucking treasure.