McCain and the Neocon axis

Remember the neoconservatives, those fine folks who led the way to the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War? I bet you thought they were discredited, exposed to all the world as dangerous zealots and frauds, morally and intellectually bankrupt, banished to the wilderness where they could bicker amongst themselves but do no more real damage to the human race.

Think again.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

If John McCain wins, for all that has happened over the last eight years in Iraq and elsewhere, we would get a new president even more closely tied to the DC neoconservative axis than President Bush has ever been.

You can say that again.

Did I mention that you could say that again?

In fact, this probably can't be said enough. In light of all the damage they've already done, I'm disturbed that McCain's phalanx of neoconservative imperialists is not getting more attention.

Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in The Washington Post, described the neonservatives as "the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history." But Heilbrun also noted that the McCain campaign may enable these flesh-eating zombies to rise from the politically dead and wreak further mayhem upon the living:

Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol ... and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback.

Heilbrunn, at Huffington Post, on the neocon-McCain symbiosis:

McCain represents for the neocons the ultimate synthesis of war hero and politician. And McCain, in turn, has been increasingly drawn to the neocons' militaristic vision of the U.S. as an empire that can set wrong aright around the globe. ...If McCain becomes president, the neocons will be in charge.

If you liked the Iraq War, you'll love a McCain administration.

Where does this deadly deja vu come from? Why are we susceptible time and again to the siren song of militaristic jingoism? Here's part of the answer.

Jon Stewart on GOP gender hypocrisy

Thanks to my buddy Bag for calling my attention to this priceless video clip.

JFC: Cindy McCain was wearing about $300,000 at the RNC!

From Crooks and Liars:

Cindy McCain(’s first night of Republican National Convention outfit)

Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000
Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500
Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000
Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000-$25,000
Shoes, designer unknown: $600
Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100

Wow. That’s about 60 times the health care credit McCain proposes to give families for a year. And according to Huffington Post, George W. Bush helped cover the expense:

According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the McCains have received $313,413 thanks to George Bush’s tax cut.

If John McCain were President, she might have been able to add a bracelet to the ensemble. According to the same study under McCain proposed tax cuts they would have received tax breaks of $367,788.

That GOP is the party of the people, all right.

And you know, what this country needs most right now is a national trophy wife. Let's see Mrs Putin pull that off.

McCain campaign is a fraud

This headline from the Christian Science Monitor sums it up:

McCain appeals to moderates with vow to reform GOP
But his policy agenda largely reflects the Bush administration's stands on tax cuts and the Iraq war.

The kind of change the GOP is offering is skin deep: different faces on the same policies of making the rich even richer, and trying to bully the world militarily.

Change, my ass.

Don't look now, [stage whisper] but people are beginning to notice:

Bases?

We don't need no steeenking bases.

But we have em all over the world.

We are an Empire.

God's Own Surge: Sarah Palin proves my point

From Huffington Post:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

In an address last June, ...Palin asked the students to pray for the troops in Iraq, and noted that her eldest son, Track, was expected to be deployed there.

"Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

Now check out the passage I quoted from Walter Hixson in the post right below this one.

from the Introduction to The Myth of American Diplomacy, by historian Walter Hixson

...National identity drives U.S. foreign policy and reinforces domestic hierarchies. Foreign policy flows from cultural hegemony affirming "America" as a manly, racially superior, and providentially destined "beacon of liberty," a country which possesses a special right to exert power in the world. Hegemonic national identity drives a continuous, militant foreign policy, including the regular resort to war.

Having internalized this Myth of America, a majority, or at least a critical mass, of Americans have granted spontaneous consent to foreign policy militancy over the sweep of U.S. history. While specific foreign policies often provoke criticism, to be sure, national identity contains such criticism within secure cultural boundaries.

This is the deep-seated cultural strain that McCain is tapping in to with his macho warrior ethos, triumphalist "victory" talk, and hyper-patriotic posturing. But the implication of Hixson's argument is that we are culturally primed for those kinds of messages, and that's why they resonate with a large chunk of the American public, perhaps enough of us to make an unrepentent neocon militarist our next president.

And even if we don't elect McWar, we'll be receptive to similar messages from other militarist messengers, until we find another way to understand who we are and how we relate to the world. In various ways large and small, each of us should do what we can to challenge the culture of miltarism and compulsory hyper-patriotism.

thoughts prompted by watching the opening ceremony of the republican convention

overt political repression in America

Glenn Greewald on preemptive raids aimed at protesters in Minneapolis:

here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone.

More from arrested journalist Amy Goodman.

Obama

This was perhaps the best and most important political speech I've seen in my 51 years on this planet.

I don't agree with all of it, and the Obama-Biden ticket is not the second coming, but I've never seen a candidate I thought was so right for the country and the times. We need him now.

Biden's mixed record controversial among progressives

Stephen Zunes on Biden's pro-war record:

Rather than being a hapless victim of the Bush administration’s lies and manipulation, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and making false statements regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of “weapons of mass destruction” years before President George W. Bush even came to office.

As far back as 1998, Biden was calling for a U.S. invasion of that oil rich country. Even though UN inspectors and the UN-led disarmament process led to the elimination of Iraq’s WMD threat, Biden – in an effort to discredit the world body and make an excuse for war – insisted that UN inspectors could never be trusted to do the job.

...In the face of widespread skepticism over administration claims regarding Iraq’s military capabilities, Biden declared that President Bush was justified in being concerned about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Even though Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons arsenal by the mid-1990s, Biden insisted categorically in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war resolution that Saddam Hussein still had chemical weapons. Even though there is no evidence that Iraq had ever developed deployable biological weapons and its biological weapons program had been eliminated some years earlier, Biden insisted that Saddam had biological weapons, including anthrax and that “he may have a strain” of small pox. And, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported as far back as 1998 that there was no evidence whatsoever that Iraq had any ongoing nuclear program, Biden insisted Saddam was “seeking nuclear weapons.”

Said Biden, “One thing is clear: These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.” He did not believe proof of the existence of any actual weapons to dislodge was necessary, however, insisting that “If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear, it could be too late.” He further defended President Bush by falsely claiming that “He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss a new inspection regime. He did not ignore the Congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation.”

...Biden even voted against an amendment sponsored by fellow Democratic senator Carl Levin that would have authorized U.S. military action against Iraq if the UN Security Council approved the use of force and instead voted for the Republican-backed resolution authorizing the United States to go to war unilaterally. In effect, Biden has embraced the neo-conservative view that the United States, as the world’s sole remaining superpower, somehow has the right to invade other countries at will, even if they currently pose no strategic threat.

Pretty depressing stuff. On the other hand,Andy Worthington defends Biden's record since the invasion, highlighting Biden's opposition to an open-ended War on Terror, his vote against the Military Comisssions Act of 2006, Biden's call for the closing of the Guantanamo gulag, and his categorical defense of Habeas Corpus. All of these are as admirable as Biden's earlier support for the war was abominable.

If Biden was a presidential candidate in a primary election, his early support for the war would prevent me from voting for him. As the vice-presidential candidate in a general election against McCain and his stable of neocon zombies, I'll hold my nose and vote for Obama-Biden without hesitation.

Victory and stability close in Iraq?

Leila Fadl, at McClatchy News, on the fragile political situation in Iraq:

A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.

But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn't been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they'd be arrested, he said.

Some militia members say that such a move would force them into open warfare with the government again.

"If they disband us now, I will tell you that history will show we will go back to zero," said Mullah Shahab al Aafi, a former emir, or leader, of insurgents in Diyala province who's the acting commander of 24,000 Sons of Iraq there, 11,000 of whom are on the U.S. payroll. "I will not give up my weapons. I will never give them up, and I will carry my weapon again. If it is useless to talk to the government, I will be forced to carry my weapons and my pistol."

The conflict over the militias underscores how little has changed in Iraq in the past year despite the drop in violence, which American politicians often attribute to the temporary increase of U.S. troops in Iraq that ended in July.

McCain is dead wrong on Iraq. As a moving force of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, he's been up to his neck in this since before the war began, so he has an overwhelming stake in telling us happy "victory" stories about Iraq, but that doesn't make it true.

Former career intelligence officer Ray McGovern lays out crucial aspects of Iraqscam

in the form of an open letter to Colin Powell:

...With the help of Allied intelligence services, the CIA recruited your Iraqi counterpart, Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and Tahir Jalil Habbush, the chief of Iraqi intelligence. They were cajoled into remaining in place while giving us critical intelligence well before the war - actually, well before your speech laying the groundwork for war.

In other words, at a time when Saddam Hussein believed that Sabri and Habbush were working for him, we had “turned” them. They were working for us, and much of the information they provided had been evaluated and verified.

Most important, each independently affirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...

...In case you [Powell] missed it, we now know from former CIA officials that his [Sabri's] information on the absence of WMD was concealed from Congress, from our senior military, and from intelligence analysts - including those working on the infamous National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002.

That NIE, titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for WMD,” was the one specifically designed to mislead Congress into authorizing the president to make war on Iraq.

...Tyler Drumheller, at the time a division chief in CIA’s clandestine service, was the first to tell the story of Naji Sabri, who is now living a comfortable retirement in Qatar. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” on April 23, 2006, Drumheller disclosed that the CIA had received documentary evidence from Sabri that Iraq had no WMD.

Drumheller added, “We continued to validate him the whole way through.”

Then two other former CIA officers confirmed this account to author Sidney Blumenthal, adding that George Tenet briefed this information to President George W. Bush on Sept. 18, 2002, and that Bush dismissed the information as worthless.

Wait. It gets worse. The two former CIA officers told Blumenthal that someone in the agency rewrote the report from Sabri to indicate that Saddam Hussein was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and already had chemical and biological weapons.

That altered report was shown to the likes of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was “duped,” according to one of the CIA officers.

...I hope you are sitting down, Colin, because Habbush also told us Iraq had no WMD. One of the helpful insights he passed along to us was that Saddam Hussein had decided that some ambiguity on the WMD issue would help prevent his main enemy, Iran, from thinking of Iraq as a toothless tiger.

Habbush, part of Saddam’s inner circle, had direct access to this kind of information. But when President Bush was first told of Habbush’s report that there were no WMD in Iraq, Suskind’s sources say the president reacted by saying, “Well, why don’t you tell him to give us something we can use to make our case?”

Apparently, Habbush was unable or unwilling to oblige by changing his story.

Nevertheless, later in 2003, when it became clear that he had been telling the unwelcome truth, Habbush was helped to resettle in Jordan and given $5 million to keep his mouth shut.

Suskind also reveals that in the fall of 2003, Habbush was asked to earn his keep by participating in a keystone-cops-type forgery aimed at “proving” that Saddam Hussein did, after all, have a direct hand in the tragedy of 9/11.

...In sum, the CIA had both the Iraqi foreign minister and the Iraqi intelligence chief “turned” and reporting to us in the months before the war (in Naji Sabri’s case) and the weeks before your U.N. speech (in the case of Tahir Jalil Habbush).

Both were part of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle; both reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

But this was not what the president wanted to hear, so Tenet put the kibosh on Habbush and put Sabri on a cutter to Qatar.

The article by Sidney Blumenthal to which McGovern refers above is here.

McWar

NYT:

Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

...He has made the principle that the exercise of military power sets the bargaining table for international relations a consistent theme of his career ever since, and in his 2002 memoir he wrote that one of his lifelong convictions was “the imperative that American power never retreat in response to an inferior adversary’s provocation.”

Writing in The Nation Robert Dreyfuss offers a scary view of McCain's neoconservative foreign policy proclivities:

To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

In that last sentence, Dreyfuss is quoting Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide.


So McCain combines a simple-minded good guy / bad guy view of the world + an instinctual militarism + neocon foreign policy advisors = a propensity for war and more war. Hey, but at least he tells us those exciting stories about "victory" being just around the corner.

Sometimes I think what Americans most want in political learership is someone who will tell them reaffirming stories about themselves. McCain wants to re-identify Americans as defenders of the free world. Been there, done that.

Either we stop the Rooskies in Georgia or...

According to Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas of the media watchdog FAIR, US mainstream media seem to accept this familiar, and overly simple, Cold War story line without much questioning:

U.S. corporate media frequently evoked the Cold War as a key to understanding the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. This was certainly true of the media themselves, which generally placed black hats or white hats on the actors involved depending on whether they were allied with Moscow or Washington.

On August 11, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams referred to “what’s being called the Russian blitz of the nation of Georgia, former Soviet republic that split away and is now threatening to split apart from within.” NBC reporter Jim Maceda followed up: “The powerful Russian war machine is moving ever deeper into Georgia, and teaching all of us really a lesson about what makes Russia tick.”

Scary Russians. Let's all be scared.

PAF says: We've seen that movie, and it was really dumb the first time, and the second, and it's still dumb.

How US policy helped set the stage for the Russia-Georgia crisis

Stephen Zunes :

A number of misguided U.S. policies appear to have played an important role in encouraging Georgia to launch its August 6 assault on South Ossetia.

The first had to do with the U.S.-led militarization of Georgia, which likely emboldened Saakashvili to try to resolve the conflict over South Ossetia by military means. Just last month, the United States held a military exercise in Georgia with more than 1,000 American troops while the Bush administration, according to The New York Times, was “loudly proclaiming its support for Georgia’s territorial integrity in the battle with Russia over Georgia’s separatist enclaves.” As the situation was deteriorating last month, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a high-profile visit to Saakashvili in Tbilisi, where she reiterated the strong strategic relationship between the two countries.

Radio Liberty speculates that Saakashvili “may have felt that his military, after several years of U.S.-sponsored training and rearmament, was now capable of routing the Ossetian separatists (”bandits,” in the official parlance) and neutralizing the Russian peacekeepers.” Furthermore, Saakashvili apparently hoped that the anticipated Russian reaction would “immediately transform the conflict into a direct confrontation between a democratic David and an autocratic Goliath, making sure the sympathy of the Western world would be mobilized for Georgia.”

According to Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States may have caused Saakashvili to “miscalculate” and “overreach” by making him feel that “at the end of the day that the West would come to his assistance if he got into trouble.”

Another factor undoubtedly involved the U.S. push for Georgia to join NATO. The efforts by some prominent Kremlin lawmakers for formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia coincided with the escalated efforts for NATO’s inclusion of Georgia this spring, as well as an awareness that any potential Russian military move against Georgia would need to come sooner rather than later.

And, as a number of us predicted last March, Western support for the unilateral declaration of independence by the autonomous Serbian region of Kosovo emboldened nationalist leaders in the autonomous Georgian regions, along with their Russian supporters, to press for the independence of these nations as well. Despite the pro-American sympathies of many in that country, Georgians were notably alarmed by the quick and precedent-setting U.S. recognition of Kosovo.

Supporting the Troops means Rethinking US global strategy

Andrew Bacevich:

The four lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan boil down to this: Events have exposed as illusory American pretensions to having mastered war. Even today, war is hardly more subject to human control than the tides or the weather. Simply trying harder -- investing ever larger sums in even more advanced technology, devising novel techniques, or even improving the quality of American generalship -- will not enable the United States to evade that reality.

As measured by results achieved, the performance of the military since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11 has been unimpressive. This indifferent record of success leads some observers to argue that we need a bigger army or a different army.

But the problem lies less with the army that we have -- a very fine one, which every citizen should wish to preserve -- than with the requirements that we have imposed on our soldiers. Rather than expanding or reconfiguring that army, we need to treat it with the respect that it deserves. That means protecting it from further abuse of the sort that it has endured since 2001.

America doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller -- that is, more modest -- foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions. When it comes to supporting the troops, here lies the essence of a citizen's obligation.

On the geopolitics of Oil in the Russia-Georgia crisis

Michael Klare:

In commenting on the war in the Caucasus, most American analysts have tended to see it as a throwback to the past: as a continuation of a centuries-old blood feud between Russians and Georgians, or, at best, as part of the unfinished business of the Cold War. Many have spoken of Russia’s desire to erase the national “humiliation” it experienced with the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago, or to restore its historic “sphere of influence” over the lands to its South. But the conflict is more about the future than the past. It stems from an intense geopolitical contest over the flow of Caspian Sea energy to markets in the West.

This struggle commenced during the Clinton administration when the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin became independent and began seeking Western customers for their oil and natural gas resources. Western oil companies eagerly sought production deals with the governments of the new republics, but faced a critical obstacle in exporting the resulting output. Because the Caspian itself is landlocked, any energy exiting the region has to travel by pipeline - and, at that time, Russia controlled all of the available pipeline capacity. To avoid exclusive reliance on Russian conduits, President Clinton sponsored the construction of an alternative pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then onward to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast — the BTC pipeline, as it is known today.

The BTC pipeline, which began operation in 2006, passes some of the most unsettled areas of the world, including Chechnya and Georgia’s two breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With this in mind, the Clinton and Bush administrations provided Georgia with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, making it the leading recipient of U.S. arms and equipment in the former Soviet space. President Bush has also lobbied U.S. allies in Europe to “fast track” Georgia’s application for membership in NATO.

All of this, needless to say, was viewed in Moscow with immense resentment. Not only was the United States helping to create a new security risk on its southern borders, but, more importantly, was frustrating its drive to secure control over the transportation of Caspian energy to Europe. Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, Moscow has sought to use its pivotal role in the supply of oil and natural gas to Western Europe and the former Soviet republics as a source both of financial wealth and political advantage. It mainly relies on Russia’s own energy resources for this purpose, but also seeks to dominate the delivery of oil and gas from the Caspian states to the West.

Russia-Georgia crisis highlights moral bankruptcy of Uncle Sam's global militarism

Juan Cole:

The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow's actions -- with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration's condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Andrew Bacevich:

In the wake of 9/11, these puerile expectations -- that armed force wielded by a strong-willed chief executive could do just about anything -- reached an apotheosis of sorts. Having manifestly failed to anticipate or prevent a devastating attack on American soil, President Bush proceeded to use his ensuing global war on terror as a pretext for advancing grandiose new military ambitions married to claims of unbounded executive authority -- all under the guise of keeping Americans "safe."

With the president denying any connection between the events of Sept. 11 and past U.S. policies, his declaration of a global war nipped in the bud whatever inclination the public might have entertained to reconsider those policies. In essence, Bush counted on war both to concentrate greater power in his own hands and to divert attention from the political, economic and cultural bind in which the United States found itself as a result of its own past behavior.

So we have pissed away Uncle Sam's moral-diplomatic "soft power" at the same time as we have overcommitted and effectivly broken America's military "hard power," and seriously weakened the republic by allowing an enormous expansion of unaccountable executive power.

Time to re-think? Or do we double down with the neocons?

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

McCain's top foreign policy advisor was a paid lobbyist of the government of Georgia even as he advised McCain on critical foreign policy issues involving the US, Russia and Georgia -- advocating policies which could drag the US into another Cold War.

Can you say "apparent conflict of interest layered on top of geopolitical clusterfuck"? I thought you could.

But Mr. Scheunemann is remarkably accomplished in a number of ways. As former head of the Project for a New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, he was a central player in the neoconservative faction which was one of the major driving forces behind the unneccessary, counterproductive and murderous US invasion of Iraq.

To all of which McCain apparently says: Heckuvajob Scheuney!

But, you know, in a mavericky, straight-talker sort of way.

Obama's challenge

Andrew Bacevich:

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration's entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country's vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

This is a stiff test, not the work of a speech or two, but of an entire campaign. Whether or not Obama passes the test will determine his fitness for the presidency.

More

on Ron Susskind's allegations that the administration forged a WMD document as part of its campaign to mislead the country into Iraq: here, and here .

Uncomfortable coincidences

Robert Scheer on the McCain campaign's neoconservative, anti-Russian hard-line, and a close campaign advisor's connections to the Saakashvili regime in Georgia.

US policy toward Russia and Georgia helped to set the stage for this war, and McCain and his obnoxious pals are happy to exploit this tragedy for their own ends. Would a President McCain lead us unnecessarily into a new Cold War? Robert Scheer :

There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union.

more on the limits of the Surge

from Steve Simon, writing in Foreign Affairs:

The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

This thesis is also supported by the analysis of Lawrence Korb and his co-authors at the Center for American Progress, here. They argue that political reconciliation has not occurred, and is not ocurring, in Iraq and that the fundamental grounds for further conflict remain:

All major ethno-sectarian groups in Iraq still have their own (sometimes very different)vision of what Iraq is and should be. Kurds see a highly federalized Iraq, with a significant degree of autonomy for their own region that includes the capacity to sign oil exploration and production contracts. Shi’a Arabs generally agree on using their electoral supremacy to ensure security for their long-oppressed group, but the two main parties—the Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or ISCI, led by al Sadr rival Abdul Aziz al Hakim—have strong disagreements over the meaning of federalism. ISCI is a strong proponent of highly autonomous super-regions, while the Sadrists favor a unified Iraqi state with a strong central government. Sunni Arabs are even more fractured. The local tribes in the Sunni regions of the country want to contest the forthcoming provincial elections, want money from the central government, and continue to receive support from the United States, while the Sunni insurgency seeks the return of a Sunni-dominated national
political system.

In short, promises of imminent "victory" and stability in Iraq are almost certainly illusory.

the limits of the "surge" and the case for withdrawal

are persuasively set forth by Charles Knight:

It is a very good thing that fewer are dying in Iraq, but that improvement alone is far from sufficient evidence from which to conclude that US policy is now on the right track.

And how did the reduction in violence come about? Not principally by the application of increased US military power or by adopting new counter-insurgency doctrine, but by accommodating and supporting the desire of Sunnis for local control and by “coming to terms” with Moqtada al-Sadr and by his decision, encouraged by Iran, to stand-down his armed contest with the Badr brigades.

As we assess the so-called “surge strategy,” it is important to note its limits:

* The surge has reduced violence by leveraging and reinforcing the inter-communal and intra-communal divisions that plague Iraq — think of the walls American soldiers have built to separate Sunni and Shia enclaves in Baghdad; And,

* The fact remains that none of the powerful Iraqi groups or leaders with whom the US is currently allied share the American vision or purpose — not even the Kurds. US alliances inside Iraq are marriages of convenience — and shaky ones at that.

Indeed, the surge marks the limit of what the United States might accomplish in Iraq by military means. Now the task is to bring into the political process most of the remaining rejectionists and to catalyze the type of international support that will facilitate this inclusion and a national accord. And this requires US military withdrawal.

Some proponents of staying warn us about backsliding if the US leaves, including the specter of a failed state wherein al Qaeda will thrive. This warning displays a basic misunderstanding of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia which was founded as a reaction to the US invasion. When the US leaves Iraq it looses its primary motivation for its adherents and rather than thrive, it is very likely to fade.

In addition, political instability does not equal a failed state — there are many ways of avoiding that outcome that do not involve keeping US troops there indefinitely. Iraq is a traumatized society and that condition is a major contributing factor to why Iraq will be politically volatile for a long time to come. But seeking to shape or control Iraqi politics with Army brigades is to perpetuate the use of a blunt and inappropriate tool that does at least as much harm as it does good. Staying means staying for a very long time! US presence is one cause of the violence — its troops will always be seen as a foreign invader to be resisted.

Knight is co-author of a report by the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq, available here.

Knight references a Pentagon study of Iraqi opinion conducted in November 2007, and reported in the Washington Post:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military...Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military's focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.

more on Tenet's role in Iraqscam

from Gareth Porter:

The disappearance of all that credible evidence reflected a deliberate decision by Tenet. The White House Iraq Group had just rolled out its new campaign to create a political climate supporting war in early September, and Tenet knew what was expected of him. As an analyst who worked on the NIE told Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, ‘The going-in assumption was that we were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind.’ That means Tenet’s account of the CIA’s role in the WMD issue in his 2007 memoirs completely ignored the credible evidence from Habbush, Sabri and the former Iraqi specialists that there was no active program, as well as his own role in suppressing it.

Tenet even brazenly claimed that a ‘very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq’ about whom ‘little has been publicly said’ had ‘reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place’. The reporting from the source, continuing through the NIE and beyond, ‘gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD programmes was correct.’

Tenet was clearly referring to the reporting coming from the Sabri debriefings, but his description of them was a prevarication. As Blumenthal reported, they had written a report on Sabri’s intelligence spelling out his view that there was no active WMD programme, but they later discovered that it had been rewritten and given an entirely new preamble asserting that Saddam already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was ‘aggressively and covertly developing’ nuclear weapons.

Tenet — who was a political operator rather than an intelligence professional — had betrayed the CIA’s mission of providing objective analysis, instead choosing to serve the interests of the Bush administration in preparing the way for war. It is not difficult to imagine how he would have meekly carried out whatever was asked of him by the White House — even forging a document and leaking it to the media, to buttress the administration’s case for war.

some of what the Pentagon doesn't want you to see, or think too much about

in this NYT photo essay.

Be warned: these are hard images.

The accompanying NYT article is here.

Locked into a downward spiral?

political scientist Paul Rogers writing at Open Democracy:

US army and air-force plans for operations in Iraq each imply that Washington intends to establish a near-permanent presence that will remain almost independent of the wishes of any future administration; most analysts believe that even if the violence does continue to decline, the Pentagon envisages a total US military presence of around 50,000 for many years to come, backed up by many thousands more across the border in Kuwait as well as other forces in Qatar and Oman (see "The Iraq project", 30 January 2008).

In itself this forward planning is hardly a surprise, given the long-term strategic significance of the region - and especially its oil reserves - to the United States. The country's need and vulnerability in this regard are highlighted by the steep oil-price rises and the intense competition for resources at a time of breakneck economic development. But a determined focus by Washington on the pursuit of its own perceived interests in Iraq - especially in the context of its close relationship with Israel - will also create further antagonism to the American presence in Iraq and the wider region.

More on preparations for long-term US bases in Iraq here.

Elsewhere, Rogers is clear and explicit about the likely political consequences of prolonged US military presence in the Middle East:

...the United States authorities responsible seem to lack any idea of the impact even of these potential deployments. They appear to be trapped in a remarkable conviction that the US can maintain an extensive arsenal of military power - up to 50,000 troops in Iraq, many thousands elsewhere in the Gulf region, aircraft-carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and bombers and strike-aircraft at bases across the region - in a way that can find acceptability in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

There is a real lack of understanding and imagination here, of just how valuable this scenario is to the radical, jihadi movement. For Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders and strategists, the prospect of a US presence heavily entrenched for at least a decade in the heart of "their" world is a gift. Moreover, in the process of attempting to establish this position, the US will offer numerous (and perhaps expanding) opportunities for militant target-practice.

The key point is that the very best outcome from a US military perspective - a declining insurgency but a long-term military presence in Iraq - is still very good news indeed for al-Qaida. That alone is a predicament for the United States, one far beyond its current official mindset. This is indeed shaping up to be a long war.

This is not a strategy to keep us safe.

General Patraeus himself admitted in Congressional testimony that he could not make a case that this policy in Iraq will make America safer:

Senator John Warner (R-VA), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Navy Secretary, asked Gen. Petraeus during testimony in Sep tember, “If we continue what you have laid before the Congress ... Does this make America safer?” General Petraeus responded, “Well sir, I don’t know.”

Patraeus quote from here.

PAF concludes: America's Iraq policy is not driven by concern for safety or security; it's about long-term bases, geo-strategic dominance, and oil.

McCain's tax policy

Continue to spoon-feed the richest of the rich who (ahem) haven't been doing so badly compared to the rest of us.

More evidence of administration deceit

Salon reviews Ron Susskind's new book on administration fraud regarding Iraq.

In September 2003, according to Suskind, CIA officials -- at the direct command of then-CIA director George Tenet and at the behest of the White House -- deliberately forged a backdated letter from Iraqi security chief Tahir Jalil Habbush to Saddam Hussein. The phony letter claimed that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq and that al-Qaida had facilitated mysterious shipments from Niger to Iraq. The letter was the "slam dunk" the Bush administration had been seeking so desperately: evidence of a direct operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime.

...Since then, that narrative has unraveled thread by thread -- as has the Habbush letter. That it was a forgery can no longer be doubted; that it originated with the White House may be harder to prove. Two former CIA officials -- Rob Richer and John Maguire -- have gone on record as saying they were personally charged with carrying out the forgery, but their marching orders, if they existed, came directly from Tenet (who has fiercely denied the story).

...The irony is that if White House honchos had listened to what Habbush was really saying instead of putting (or wishing) words in his mouth, they might have avoided the war that destroyed their political fortunes. As early as January 2003, writes Suskind, Habbush told a British intelligence officer that Saddam, 12 years earlier, had both ended his nuclear program and destroyed his chemical weapon stockpile and was in no hurry to build them up again. "They're not going to like this downtown," said Tenet, referring to his Pennsylvania Avenue bosses. They didn't. The Habbush report was buried, the war was set in motion, and Habbush himself was spirited to Amman, Jordan, where he was placated with $5 million in CIA hush money (even as his picture showed up as the jack of diamonds in Bush's playing deck of Iraqi war criminals).

More here.


I'm still angry about this whole murderous charade. I'll probably stay angry until they pour me into the urn.

Why the Bush/Cheney 180 on Iran?

Juan Cole:

In December 2007, however, the intelligence community pushed back. Key findings from the National Intelligence Estimate, released that month, showed that Iran had mothballed any weapons-related research since early 2003. The Cheney push for one more war was effectively blocked.

In recent months, several major developments have strengthened the case for dealing with Iran diplomatically rather than militarily. The U.S. military is more overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan than ever. The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan has required a significant increase in the number of U.S. and NATO troops during the past year. Iranian proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan could easily target U.S. bases with Katyusha rockets in retaliation for any U.S. strike on the nuclear research facilities at Natanz near Isfahan.

...The run-up in petroleum prices has also had major implications for Iran strategy. Oil companies and European governments are not happy with U.S. policy toward Iran. American and European energy corporations are losing billions in potential profits because of congressionally mandated third-party sanctions on companies that attempt to develop Iran's oil and gas. ...Sanctions are pushing up the cost of oil -- but a war with Iran would push up the price still more.

...Both the U.S. and its European allies know that the negative fallout from a war could be immense. Its effect on the world oil supply would be catastrophic. Iran's perennial threats to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in the event that it is attacked have to be taken especially seriously when oil supplies are as tight as they are now. Some 40 percent of the world's petroleum flows through that choke point, and any significant interruption of supply under today's conditions could send prices skyrocketing so far as to threaten the world with another Great Depression. In short, Iran is far more powerful when petroleum is $127 a barrel than when it is $25 a barrel, and that power makes it more prudent to negotiate with it than to rattle sabers.

In a nutshell there is no plausible pretext to attack Iran, and Uncle Sam, the US military, and the whole global economy would totally suck wind if they tried to.

PAF has been abroad

No, not like that.

Like this:



I'll post some more photo "postcards" as I process the best images from the trip.

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.

What's PAF reading?

James Caroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the disastrous rise of American power.

This is a weighty book, both literally (over 600 pages) and figuratively (dealing with the militarism at the core of American society and the global order built around it); but it's highly readable, deeply thoughtful, and thoroughly documented. This is one of the most important books I've read in years, and I recommend it very strongly.

If you're a military hero, a little flaming racism is ok, I guess

Does McCain's POW past mean that he get's a blank check to use overtly racist language?

NYRB quoting from a new book about McCain and the press:

Brock and Waldman write:

"And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed forces in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at least the belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical questions. On a 2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon noted that reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or five hundred," to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he served in Vietnam, and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his POW experience is not only the sum total of McCain's "character," but constitutes the lens through which character itself must be viewed in any race in which McCain participates."

So McCain's "character" is axiomatic, even when he says things like this:

"I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." (John McCain, 2000)

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but these words were integral to a project of racialized extermination. Racist epithets such as this made it possible to dehumanize people and justify wholesale abuse, torture and killing like this, and this. Free fire zones and the Phoenix program meant that this kind of killing was not an aberrration, but the norm. The US military killed somewhere between one and two million Vietnamese, both military and civilian, during our part of the war.

The fact that McCain was imprisoned and tortured by Vietnamese forces during this war shouldn't give him a liscense to use the language of racist extermination. I don't want a President who thinks in those terms.

Like this guy isn't scary enough.

New Media: Pentagon Propaganda

Academic freedom under attack

Jane Kramer writes in The New Yorker on the scurrilous effort by pro-Israel forces to destroy the career of Palestinian-American anthropolgist Nadia Abu El-Haj. Larry Cohler-Esses of the Nation refers to this attempt to institutionalize a compulsory pro-zionism in the academy as The New McCarthyism.

But this isn't just about Israel, it's also about America's place in the world. Elsewhere I have discussed this broad anti-intellectual campaign, and the conservative forces behind it, in these terms:

The role of academics in US politics and foreign policy is very controversial. A McCarthyite effort to silence dissent on American campuses has been led by Lynne Cheney’s American Council of Trustees and Alumni, William Bennett’s Americans for Victory over Terrorism, Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, and David Horowtz's Students for Academic Freedom. In the wake of 9-11, these organizations have sought to pressure US academics into eschewing critical reexamination of America’s role in the world and instead to reaffirm what these neoconservatives see as ‘traditional Western values’ – axiomatically identified as ‘the great heritage of human civilization’ (ACTA, Defending Civilization, 2002: 5) - which are understood to be embodied preeminently in the USA and for which US foreign policy is seen as a powerful evangelical vehicle. Their leading personas are drawn from the incestuous tangle of neo-conservative political networks, the ideological visions they project are very nearly congruent, and they are funded by the notorious troika of ultra-conservative and strategically deliberate foundations: Bradley, Scaife, and Olin (on the which, see the data collected by the Media Transparency project). Here's an article at History News Network describing this conservative network and the funders behind it.

Stuck in Iraq Forever?

Thomas Powers offers some scary thoughts about how hard it may be for an incoming president to end the Occupation of Iraq.

America's leading foreign policy expert?

Or one of the great douchebags of our time?

Thomas "Suck on this!" Friedman.

In case we neeeded another reason to let go of network news

Glenn Greenwald on the failure of TV news, and especially NBC, to face up to their role as conduits for pentagon propaganda, and their utter failure to uphold basic journalistic standards of honesty and accountability:

Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as “independent” news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised.

More amazingly still, when Brian Williams is forced by a virtual mob on his blog yesterday finally to address this issue — something he really couldn’t avoid doing given that, the day before, he found time to analyze seven other NYT articles — Williams cited McCaffrey and Downing as proof that they did nothing wrong, and insists that his and their credibility simply ought to be beyond reproach because they are good, patriotic men. But those two individuals in particular had all kinds of ties to the Government, the defense industry, and ideological groups which gave them vested interests in vigorous pro-war advocacy — ties which NBC News knew about and failed to disclose, all while presenting these individuals to their millions of viewers as “independent.” Is there anyone who thinks that behavior is anything other than deeply corrupt?

PAF observes Loyalty Day

Thanks to my buddy Bag for pointing out with irony and relish (not to be confused with onions and relish) that today (May 1) is Loyalty Day.

Loyalty Day, 2008
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America


White House News



Americans believe that every man, woman, and child has unalienable rights, dignity, and matchless value. Advancing these ideals was the honorable vision of our Founders and the mission that helped shape this great country. On Loyalty Day, we celebrate the legacy of freedom and the shared ideals that bind us together.

Our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen demonstrate their love of country by stepping forward when America needs them most. By putting our country's security before their own, the men and women of the Armed Forces have strengthened our Nation and brought hope to millions around the world. All Americans are grateful to the members of the military and their families for their service, sacrifice, and dedication, and we are proud of their accomplishments.

Through their good works, our Nation's volunteers bear witness to their steadfast love for America, as exemplified in their commitment to service and good citizenship. Loyalty to this country brings with it a commitment to aid our family, friends, and fellow citizens all across this broad and welcoming land. These volunteers demonstrate their gratitude for the blessings of freedom by helping build a more hopeful future for our children and grandchildren. All Americans can put their loyalty into practice by learning more about the history of our country, flying the American flag, and contributing to our communities.

Two hundred and thirty-two years after the founding of our country, we remain committed to advancing freedom and renewing the values that sustain our liberty. Through the spirit and determination of our people, our Nation will prosper and our liberty will be secure.

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day." This Loyalty Day, and throughout the year, I ask all Americans to join me in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2008, as Loyalty Day. I call upon all people of the United States to join in support of this national observance and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day as a symbol of pride in our Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-second day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand eight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-second.

GEORGE W. BUSH

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand below the belt in order to wag my weenie toward the White House.

Presumed guilty and tortured to "prove" it

NYT:

The former chief prosecutor here took the witness stand on Monday on behalf of a detainee and testified that top Pentagon officials had pressured him in deciding which cases to prosecute and what evidence to use.

The prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force, testified that Pentagon officials had interfered with his work for political reasons and told him that charges against well-known detainees “could have real strategic political value” and that there could be no acquittals.

...Testifying about his assertions for the first time, Colonel Davis said a senior Pentagon official who oversaw the military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann of the Air Force Reserve, reversed a decision he had made and insisted that prosecutors proceed with evidence derived through waterboarding of detainees and other aggressive interrogation methods that critics call torture.

Call me conservative, but the idea of government presuming someone to be guilty and then torturing him/her to extract "evidence" with which to prove their guilt in a miltary star chamber strikes me as tyrannical on its face.

Some thoughts on listening to The Rising

"the sky is still that same unbelievable blue..."

Will you ever forget what that looked like?

Bruce Springsteen has been with me through many of the most painful and difficult, as well as bittersweet and beautiful, times of my life. Since I was a feshman in college, for decades, like an old friend I never met Bruce has been there to help me find my way. From the irresistable attractions of freedom, girls and cars, to the painful paradoxes of hardship and cruelty in the land of plenty, to the agonizing marathon of trying to sustain love and keep true to yourself, to growing older and facing changes you haven't chosen, to the spectacular horrors and routine heroism of 9-11 and Iraq, Bruce was always there before me, thinking his way through some of the hardest and most wonderful parts of this life. There are lots of musicians and storytellers that I can appreciate on one level or another, but Bruce keeps on telling the story of my life before I even realize what it is. And on top of all that, he fucking rocks. PAF is not generally given to hero worship; but if I could choose someone to buy a beer and say thanks for making my life a little clearer, a little better: Bruce.

Rummy's Media Hos

Donald Rumsfeld, Laurence Di Rita, Victoria Clarke and the Pentagon pimped out a stable of retired generals to act as media military experts and recite Pentagon talking points in order to incite public support for the Iraq War, downplay public fears about Guantanamo, and otherwise achieve what Ms. Clarke called "information dominance" - that is, "information dominance" over the US public.

Got democracy???



P.S. PAF encountered a Pentagon propaganda campaign just a few months ago. You wouldn't believe the hate-mail I got when I declined to participate in that little circus and got outed to the press as a terror-symp disloyal academic of dubious masculinity. My favorite one began "Dear Pussyboy" and didn't get any better after that.

Says Yoo

Washington Post on John Yoo's 2003 memo for the White House Office of Legal Counsel:

According to Mr. Yoo, during wartime the President as Commander in Chief is not limited by laws which otherwise prohibit "maiming" a prisoner by, say, poking out his/her eye, throwing scalding hot liquid or acid on the prisoner, or slicing an ear, nose or lip. No problem. Perfectly legal, says Yoo. Mind altering drugs, pain-inducing stress positions, all okeydokey according to Yoo's OLC memo. And that pesky Bill of Rights? Fuggeddabowdit.

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language.

More on Uncle Sam's Torture Team in Vanity Fair.

What's up with Iraqi Shiites?

Juan Cole explains the politics behind the recent fighting in southern Iraq.