Grotius

More Downing St. revelations, media ignores

2006-03-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

Yet another Downing Street memo. While the President and his men were telling us they were working on a diplomatic option to war, he was telling Tony Blair none of that mattered.

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser.

Most of the SCLM, meanwhile, failed to cover the story. Fox News unsurprisingly ignored it entirely, but so did The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Associated Press, and Reuters. United Press International ran two articles, one on the memo and one on the reaction from the White House.

Occupation "an unbelievable mess" from the start

2006-03-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos.

[A] series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures ... [w]ith unusual frankness, ... described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were "well-meaning but out of their depth".

The memos identified a series of US failures that contained the seeds of the present insurgency and chaos. Some of the problems identified as early as May 2003:

· A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the post-invasion phase.
· The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which took a heavyhanded approach to security.
· Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.
· Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to reconnect basic services, such as electricity and water.
· Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.
· Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many of them held relatively junior posts.

All of these difficulties could have been easily foreseen and dealt with, but the PNAC'ers thought it could be done on the cheap and dismissed the warnings of the "experts."

Good intel ignored, bad intel pushed for war

2006-03-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

Criticism of the Iraq war is mostly dismissed as hindsight, but recent reports illustrate that the President was told of what might go wrong -- what did go wrong -- but ignored the information, and actively deceived the nation about it.

Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein.

A summary from the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), delivered to the President in October 2002, concluded that high-strength aluminum tubes procured by Iraq were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

The President and others continued to state conclusively that the tubes were to be used in WMDs, and never mentioned that experts in his administration did not support the claim.

Another summary from the NIE, delivered in early January 2003, stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Saddam was unlikely to attack the US except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault.

So intelligence believed Saddam posed no threat. The aluminum tubes, along with the Niger uranium, were known to be nothing. Yet the intel agencies were blamed when they turned out to be wrong! They were actually right, but the administration suppressed the dissent and beat the war drums.

And then...

U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned the White House beginning more than two years ago that the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war, according to former senior intelligence officials who helped craft the reports.

The NIE report completed in October 2003 concluded that the Iraq insurgency was fueled by local conditions -- not by foreign terrorists -- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the very presence of US troops. As with the earlier case, the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists, even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise.

"No one could have expected" has been a mantra for this administration, but in fact so much of this situation was foreseen, and should have been avoided. They were unshakable in their belief of what would happen, and refused to listen to better-informed experts. Why does anyone still grant them credibility?

Katrina briefing explodes "no one knew" dodge

2006-03-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the Katrina fiasco, the President told us that no one could have foreseen the damage that the storm could do. That was patently false to begin with, but now we have video showing the President himself being warned not only of the possibility that the levees could be breached but also of the risk to evacuees.

The Republican War on Science

2005-09-20T21:11:00.000-06:00

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.
- Internal strategy document of tobacco company Brown and Williamson, circa 1969

Welcome to the “antiscientific counterrevolution.”

"The Republican War on Science" is nothing short of a landmark in contemporary political reporting. [Author Chris] Mooney compiles and presents an extraordinary mountain of evidence, from several different fields, to demonstrate that the conservative wing of the Republican Party has launched an unprecedented and highly successful campaign to sow widespread confusion about the conclusions of science and its usefulness in political decision making. Using methods and strategies pioneered under the Reagan administration by the tobacco industry and anti-environmental forces, an alliance of social conservatives and corporate advocates has paralyzed or obfuscated public discussion of science on a whole range of issues. Not just climate change but also stem cell research, evolutionary biology, endangered-species protection, diet and obesity, abortion and contraception, and the effects of environmental toxins have all become arenas of systematic and deliberate bewilderment.

Mooney compiles documentary evidence that many conservatives have stopped regarding science as an objective search for truth, and now treat it as yet another cynical political power struggle. A smokescreen of doubt obfuscates science with corporate-funded pseudo-studies and faith-based anti-science like "intelligent design." The effort uses disinformation to give the impression of scientific controversy where there is none.

Mooney links disparate elements of the Republican party through their interests in undermining science. Thus, global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," according to oil-soaked Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, while Sen. Rick Santorum amends the law to recognize teaching intelligent design as part of a "quality science education."

The press proves an easy foil for peddling false science, as they uncritically balance the findings of scientists with the claims of charlatans. Despite an overwhelming consensus on the science of global warming, the unsupported denials of flat-earthers gets equal time from the credulous media. Similar efforts by conservative groups, and the administration, cloud scientific findings regarding abortion, stem-cell research, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and others.

Federal scientific agencies are increasingly staffed by political-appointees rather than qualified experts, and their once fierce independence has given way to partisan advocacy. Meanwhile the administration gives the impression of embracing science while in exercise stifling or ignoring findings it doesn't agree with.

Mooney documents an "immense stealth campaign" to undermine science through regulatory subtleties, giving industry some of its biggest victories against oversight. The two sentence "Data Quality Act," inserted into an appropriation bill, gives industry the ability to tie up most regulations in an endless review process that may be distorted with "junk sciemce." These changes are designed to disable clean air and water efforts, and to dismantle safeguards aimed at providing Congress with unbiased advice.

Challenging scientific consensus is an essential step in the advancement of science itself. Muddying scientific consensus to advance faith or profit distorts reality and blinds us to health and safety dangers.

"Clear Path to Victory"

2005-06-28T11:34:00.000-06:00

President Curveball gives the nation a little pep talk this evening to assure us he sees a "clear path to victory" in Iraq. Meanwhile...

The news now from Iraq is only depressing. All the roads leading out of the capital are cut. Iraqi security and US troops can only get through in heavily armed convoys. There is a wave of assassinations of senior Iraqi officers based on chillingly accurate intelligence. A deputy police chief of Baghdad was murdered on Sunday. A total of 52 senior Iraqi government or religious figures have been assassinated since the handover. In June 2004 insurgents killed 42 US soldiers; so far this month 75 have been killed.

And the beat goes on. General John Abizaid, who heads U.S. Central Command, told Congress, "the insurgency has not weakened." He continued,

Our men and women in uniform are serving with great honor. They deserve an objective assessment of the situation in Iraq. They deserve a clear layout of the next steps there. They're not getting either from the administration.

The administration believes that the only problem with Iraq is public relations and that the right sales pitch will smooth everything over. They seem incapable of understanding that the public recognizes the disconnect from reality between their words and what we are seeing and hearing from those on the ground. How can we trust their ability to solve a problem they will not acknowledge exists?

North Korea Policy Adrift

2005-06-24T10:40:00.000-06:00

As critics like John Newhouse have explained, the Bush administration has botched its North Korea policy at virtually every turn. They have provoked North Korea while failing to follow a discernable policy direction. While we dally, the North Koreans may have built several nuclear weapons.

Now we learn that the North Koreans approached the administration in 2002 with a proposal for a resolution to the nuclear issue but were spurned. North Korea wishes to have recognition of its sovereignty and non-aggression assurances. If we refuse to even discuss these valid concerns, then we will remain at an impasse. And North Korea will continue to build its nuclear program.

Lawrence on Baghdad

2005-06-19T03:08:00.000-06:00

Via Arianna reader R.M.:

[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. [We] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows... Our unfortunate troops,... under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.

- T.E. Lawrence, Sunday Times of London, August 22, 1920

Srebrenica Video Grips Serbs

2005-06-10T10:48:00.000-06:00

The massacre at Srebrenica will reach its ten-year anniversary in July, but the truth is only beginning to penetrate Serb nationalism. The state-controlled media bore much to blame for Serbs not knowing what actually happened in Bosnia, as documented by Eric Gordy in The Culture of Power in Serbia. As in Rwanda contemporaneously and so many other institutionalized mass killings, a compliant-to-propagandistic media acts as catalyst and apologist, stoking fear and anger against perceived, often invented, wrongs. As we see in Serbia today, correcting such lies can take generations, and for some they will never die.

Abu Ghraib - Gitmo - Bagram links III

2005-06-09T12:34:00.000-06:00

A wave of new stories on detainee abuse to supplement the previous lists:

Command Responsibility for U.S. Abuse of Detainees - (HRW) 4/05

Comprehensive Abu Ghraib Report Documents Psych Torture - (PHR) 5/1/05

Independent Contractors in Iraq - (AFP) 5/11/05

Brutal Deaths of Inmates at Bagram (NYT) - 5/20/05

Torture at Bagram Requires Investigation (PHR) - 5/20/05

Gitmo Prisoner Stories Revealed in FOIA release - (AP) 5/23/05

Amnesty report on US detention centers - (AI) 5/26/05

Press on Amnesty report - (CSM) 5/26/05

Judge Rules Public Has a Right to See Abuse Photos - (AP) 5/26/05

Interactive Primer on U.S. Interrogation Techniques - (Slate) 5/26/05

Gitmo Prisoners Tell of Abuse - (AP) 5/30/05

Pentagon Admits Incidents of Koran Mishandling - (Rtrs) 6/3/05

Press on Amnesty report - (PBS) 6/3/05

Attacks Surge in Afghanistan; General Has High Hopes

2005-06-08T15:16:00.000-06:00

The Afghanistan government states that Al Qaeda and Taliban rebels launched a violent campaign last week to subvert legislative elections in September with a deadly suicide bombing and a failed attempt to down a US military aircraft with a shoulder-launched missile. Suspected Taliban rebels also attacked a fuel tanker yesterday that had delivered petrol to a US base, killing a Pakistani driver and his assistant.

During the past three months a major upsurge in violence has spread across Afghanistan. Over 200 suspected rebels have been killed according to US and Afghan officials.

“The remnants of the Taliban, al-Qaida elements ... have chosen this time to obviously set a plot in motion,” said a government official. “They may have gathered all their resources.” He called for cooperation from his country’s neighbours, a comment apparently aimed at encouraging Pakistan to secure its side of the border.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Lance L. Smith, Deputy Commander of Centcom, met separately with Pakistan military officials yesterday, with both sides reiterating their commitment seeing stability in Afghanistan.

The US general briefed the interior minister on the situation in Afghanistan and hoped that it would soon become conducive for the Afghan refugees to return to their country.

The disconnect from reality continues. Violence in Afghanistan has been on the rise for three months, yet the government calls the latest attacks a new campaign directed at the election three months away. An American General hopes refugees can return soon, despite increased attacks countrywide. Blind optimism drives American foreign policy.

Inequality in America Revisited

2005-06-07T18:59:00.000-06:00

I wrote a series of posts on inequality in the U.S. a few years ago [Oct. 21-24].

A new report by David Cay Johnston shows that the gap between the rich and poor continues to grow, but the hyper-rich are leaving behind even those considered very well off. The following chart sums up the findings:

Some of the other findings:

The top 0.1 percent of income earners includes about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more. The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available.
The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.
Although Bush said last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans, 53 percent will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, and more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.
Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.
Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.

Middle-class taxpayers are now paying the same or a greater percentage of their incomes as hyper-wealthy Americans who make over ten million dollars per year. We are literally mortgaging the future of this country so that the ultra-wealthy can make more money. We are creating an aristocracy while putting a greater burden on people who work.

It doesn't take a nuanced analysis of the chart above to see what brought the last inequality boom back to earth. Now the Bu$h tax-cuts and deregulation are driving us straight toward a collapse. The hyper-wealthy will survive just fine; the other 95% may not be so lucky.

Embassies Clear Out, More Violence Foreseen

2005-06-06T14:18:00.000-06:00

Israel and the U.S. authorized evacuation of most of their embassy personnel from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. The U.S. issued a warning saying it has information that Islamic terrorist groups were planning attacks, perhaps against Americans. Israel also received "a specific threat against an Israeli target by an extremist element." After the threat was evaluated, it was quickly decided to evacuate most of the diplomatic corps.

Three suicide bombers struck nearly simultaneously last July, one each at the Israeli Embassy, the U.S. Embassy and the Uzbek general prosecutor's office in Tashkent.

The Uzbek government also refused to renew the visas for 54 Peace Corps volunteers, who were forced to leave the country. Always an ominous sign when embassy personnel and aid workers clear out.

Experts at a forum hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that more violence in Uzbekistan is likely.

"What we have to do is start thinking about how we would cope with a significant rise in violence in this country. What would we do if Uzbekistan breaks out into a civil war?," said Robert Templer, Asia director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

Michael Cromartie, of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, agreed that the former Soviet republic faces potentially destabilizing violence verging on civil war.

"In light of the man ruling the country, I would expect more violence." Washington may have to threaten to stop all aid and abandon its air base in order to bring about change, Cromartie said.

Templer warned that further violence could quickly spread to neighboring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. "One very clear thing we know about contemporary conflicts is that they cross borders very, very rapidly," he said.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues negotiations on long-term use of a major military base in Uzbekistan. The talks have gone on behind the scenes for several months, but the violent crackdown in Andijan last month has put the administration in an awkward position. Human rights advocates charge that a new pact would undermine the goal of spreading democracy in the Islamic world.

U.S. Special Operations Forces, intelligence and reconnaissance missions, and air logistics flights all use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airfield in southeastern Uzbekistan, according to an official report on U.S. basing. "Access to this airfield is undeniably critical in supporting our combat operations" and humanitarian deliveries, said a Pentagon spokesman. The U.S. has paid $15 million to Uzbek authorities for use of the airfield since 2001.

Some U.S. officials and human rights advocates are concerned that U.S.-trained military units might have participated in the Andijan violence and are pressing the administration to investigate that possibility.

"Efforts to bring about democracy have hit a wall and are going backwards," said Sen. John McCain. "We have a military interest in maintaining our base in that country," but also in "restricting our relations with brutal governments." The Uzbek government "must understand" that the Andijan events "come with real consequences."

Further detail on Andijan and background on the conflict provided here.

Update, 6/7/05: Human Rights Watch issued the most complete report yet on what it terms the "massacre" in Andijan. Timeline, press report with map, and the complete report.

Aral Sea Essay Moved

2005-06-06T12:01:00.000-06:00

My essay, Aral Sea to Aral Desert: Environmental Worst-Case Scenario, has a new home.

Chechens Involved at Andijan?

2005-06-04T15:51:00.000-06:00

Russia lent support to the Uzbek regime in the face of calls for an investigation into the Andijan uprising. But now the Russian government has its own idea who the culprits are, and it turns out the Uzbeks and Russians have a conveniently common enemy: Chechen rebels.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claims to possess information indicating that Chechen terrorists were involved in the recent rioting in Uzbekistan.

"We have information that Islamic extremists, structures of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, remnants of the Taliban, and some Chechen terrorists were involved in this," Lavrov said at a press conference in Vladivostok, referring to the rioting in Andizhan last month.

But, alas, Chechen President Alu Alkhanov denied the so-called Chechen trace in the recent events in Uzbekistan. "There is no Chechen trace in Uzbekistan," Alkhanov told the press outside St. Petersburg. "I know that they have nothing in common with the Chechen republic or the Chechen people," he said.

What a great stroke of luck this would be for Russia, expanding its influence and drawing Uzbekistan closer -- based on "information" that no one will ever examine. And, moreover, how convenient for Vladimir Putin to have the Chechens to blame for all the woes of everyone everywhere. So much more immediate and personal than the nefarious "tur'rists" our pols are stuck trying to scare us with.

Get Yer Uzbeki-kitty On

2005-06-04T00:46:00.000-06:00

Karimov Supporters March, Refugees Seek Asylum

2005-06-03T17:23:00.000-06:00

Thousands of demonstrators rallied in support of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov in the city of Jizzakh, bolstering the government in the face of international criticism.

Many protesters waved portraits of President Karimov and shouted slogans against those who oppose him or question the government line.

One banner read "Human rights activists are enemies of the motherland".

A busload of government supporters travelled round the city, attacking human rights activists with sticks and vilifying them as traitors.

Which may explain why the Uzbek refugees seeking asylum in Kyrgyz are adamant that they do not want to return to their homeland. "We have heard rumours that the authorities are arresting anyone suspected of taking part in the anti-government protests," said a teenage girl from Andijan in the camp where the refugees are living.

The Kyrgyz government has yet to decide what to do with the asylum seekers, though the UN and international human rights groups have urged Bishkek not to repatriate them, as is its obligations as a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees. The government has stated that no Uzbeks will be forced to return, though some officials have attenuated that statement.

Poverty, Repression Hobbling Uzbeks

2005-06-03T14:50:00.000-06:00

The U.S. continues to walk a tightrope in the aftermath of the Uzbek unrest, offering a tepid response but wary of appearing to close to Karimov, even as Bush slipped and called him a “friend.”

Meanwhile the attention from the massacre has shed light on living conditions in Uzbekistan. Tales of crippling poverty are common as adequate food has become difficult for many to afford, especially in the south, the Aral basin in the west, and in the Ferghana valley, the scene of last month’s violence.

The World Bank reported that the proportion of Uzbeks living below the national poverty line was 28 percent of the population in 2002. However, some analysts believe that the real figure is much higher, with the number of poor being especially high in remote provinces.

"We eat only bread at home," said an eight-year-old schoolgirl, adding that meat had become a luxury for her family. She recalled eating meat the last time when she visited relatives in a neighbouring province.

The plight of the people in the Aral basin of western Uzbekistan was initiated by myopic policies of the Soviet Union. The Soviet state is gone, but the Karimov regime is a close replica, especially for the sharecropper farmers.

“The government controls our lives very tightly. If we don’t obey, we’ll end up in trouble,” said an Uzbek farmer. “All we want is freedom, and the state is punishing us for wanting freedom.”

Farmers are still subject to severe Soviet-style regulations and penalties. They are banned from buying their own land and have to sell cotton to the government at fixed, below-market prices. Planting and picking cotton is still done by hand, with children, students and women from all over the country being drafted in to help every year. Farmers are allowed to lease plots from big Soviet-style collective farms, but they can be stripped of their allotments if they fail to fulfill state output quotas.

Karimov controls agriculture and trade almost as harshly as he does political dissent, so most farmers are reluctant to discuss their hardships. Some of those who resist get arrested. None of the farmers would give their full names to the reporter.

“I’ve heard of many farmers who ended up in real trouble. I don’t want to talk about it. Of course we are afraid,” said one farmer as his wife and daughter turned the soil nearby.

The head of the IMF mission to Uzbekistan has called on the government to allow farmers to grow and sell whatever they felt was necessary under given market circumstances. “This would be key to improving living standards in the rural areas.” The Karimov government has promised to gradually dismantle the collective farms, but the farmers are skeptical.

The government also tightly controls religious practice. Lawrence A. Uzzell, president of International Religious Freedom Watch, an independent research center that investigates state-enforced religious conformity, spent seven years in Russia monitoring religious freedom in the former Soviet Republics. He reports here on a recent survey of religious freedom in Uzbekistan.

Unregistered religious activity is still illegal, with believers often punished simply for holding prayer meetings in private homes... It is almost impossible for minorities to register new congregations, with only one (a Jewish community) receiving official registration during all of 2004. Religious literature is censored: Imported books such as Bibles have been confiscated and destroyed. Muslims cannot travel as pilgrims to Mecca without specific permission from the state. All missionary activities are banned.

Last autumn saw a new surge of prosecutions of Protestants... The regime continues to ‘see any informal group of Muslims as a potential terrorist organization and [to] sentence its members to lengthy prison terms. It is clear that the majority of Muslims arrested after the terrorist attacks in March and April 2004 were 'guilty' only of meeting to read the Koran and talk about God.’

The US advisory commission on international religious freedom recently recommended that Washington add Uzbekistan to its official list of "countries of particular concern" - the world's most brazen persecutors of religion. The commission also urged that aid to the Uzbek government "be made contingent upon establishing and implementing a specific timetable for the government to take concrete steps" in observing human rights standards.

That would be a dramatic change from what happened last summer. As required by US human rights law, the State Department cut aid to Uzbekistan by $18 million. Within weeks, the Pentagon gave Karimov a new infusion of $21 million.

Apparently the faith-based community looks the other way when an air base is on the line.

Prog Rock in Uzbekistan

2005-06-02T20:48:00.000-06:00

The question foremost on the minds of many observers these days has been answered unequivocally: Yes, there are prog rock fans in Uzbekistan! Er, or maybe from Uzbekistan, as their contact page makes crystally un-clear:

Geographical location: London, United Kingdom
Headquarters: Tashkent, Uzbekistan, CIS
Second office: Prairie Village, KS, USA

Wherever they are, they have a well-designed and informative page, not to mention excellent taste in music, and here's hoping none of them gets hauled away by Karimov's police goons.

Bush Joins Calls For Andijan Inquiry

2005-05-31T13:19:00.000-06:00

Noting that the Senators calling for an investigation into Andijan had not been ripped to shreds by the cable tv talking whores, Curveball his-self is now calling for a full inquiry. And only eighteen days after hundreds were slaughtered by an ally to whom we send detainees for "aggressive" interrogation.

And along the way he slipped and referred to Karimov as one of "our friends" before catching himself.

To be fair, Washington, with the UN and the EU, has told Karimov he faces international isolation and the prospect of having aid cut off unless he allows a full inquiry. The U.S. leases a base in Uzbekistan, giving the President a powerful axe to wield against Karimov, who needs the funds provided by the lease.

With so much at stake, however, I expect the President's bark to be a lot worse than his bite.

Senators Stir, Rattle Sabers; Crackdown Continues

2005-05-30T22:53:00.000-06:00

Three U.S. senators shook themselves out of their stupor and denounced (two weeks late) the violence at Andijan, called for an international investigation, and issued a stern rebuke to the Uzbek government. The three Republican senators, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Sununu, were then sealed back into their isolation tubes for later activation.

The Democratic leadership also leapt into action, establishing a committee to determine where exactly Uzbekistan is and clarify once-and-for-all how to pronounce its name.

McCain said the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a security organization with 55 member nations, including Uzbekistan, should conduct an independent review. The European Union, the United Nations, NATO and several Western governments have also called for an outside review, a proposal Mr. Karimov has rebuffed.
* * *
Uzbekistan has said that it will conduct its own parliamentary investigation, but that the investigation will work from the premise that the uprising was "a planned and well-prepared terrorist act organized by international radical-extremist groups," according to statement released by the Uzbek consulate general.

Meanwhile, new details on the conduct of the Uzbek security forces during and after the uprising emerged, "including claims that injured victims have disappeared from hospitals and that troops had fired on a civilian ambulance during the crackdown, killing three medical workers inside." These accounts give support to similar statements from survivors in a refugee camp in Kyrgyzstan, who have insisted that injured people were killed by troops and that medical care was severely limited.

The status of the refugees remains uncertain. The governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have agreed to set up national commissions with help from the United Nations to identify refugees and determine whether there are criminals hiding among them. Human Rights Watch and the three still-lucid senators urged Kyrgyzstan to allow the refugees to stay.

Several families say that victims who made it to hospitals alive on the day of the uprising have since vanished, apparently into police custody. In addition, the BBC reports that armed police have arrested 28 people planning to hold a protest rally in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. "The officers raided an apartment before dawn, taking away the owner, well-known opposition figure Vasilia Innoyatova, and 27 others. The group had been planning to protest the killings in Andijan two weeks ago."

Outrage-Free Over Uzbek Massacre

2005-05-28T22:49:00.000-06:00

David Corn contrasts the lackluster response of the Bush administration to the Uzbek uprising to its “huffing and puffing” over the ill-fated Newsweek story that caused such a commotion (yet turned out to be more true than false). Two weeks after the Andijan incident, the White House is yet to make a strong statement denouncing the massacre.

Mr. Bush talks of principles, Corn points out, but fails to act on them.

When George W. Bush was in Latvia several weeks ago, he pronounced, "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable." Well, since the massacre happened, he and his aides have not rushed to put that principle into practice regarding Uzbekistan.

“Crusaders cannot afford hypocrisy,” concludes Corn, but Mr. Bush “cannot expect to be taken seriously as a champion of democracy and freedom if he makes excuses for thugs like Karimov or chooses not to confront them and their murderous excesses.”

Sidebar

In my initial post on the Andijan massacre, I noted that none of the media reports on the incident even mentioned the story from only two weeks earlier that Uzbekistan is a destination for U.S. prisoners under the “extraordinary rendition” program.

Now, over two weeks after the event, still, no American news organization has mentioned the rendition story. Many have discussed the difficult position the U.S. is in with a key ally that slaughtered a bunch of its citizens. But none have even mentioned that we are sending detainees there ourselves for interrogation by a regime known to boil its prisoners.

Uzbekistan & "The Great Game"

2005-05-28T01:30:00.000-06:00

Kipling would instinctively recognize the jockeying as a continuation of “The Great Game.”

Just as in his time, positioning for power in Central Asia among Russia, China, and the west is a high drama of often low deeds. Uzbekistan is the ball in play this chukka and the mallets and hoofs are flying high and fast.

After NATO joined the UN in calling for an international inquiry into the Andijan uprising, both Russia and China threw their support behind the Karimov regime, defending the actions of the government and condemning the insurgents as terrorists. The support of Russia and China is rooted in their own threats from the Muslims in their frontier regions, but also reflects the classic struggle for influence over Central Asian territories.

The Kremlin worries that the disorder in Uzbekistan could spread through the region, a prospect that the president of neighboring Tajikistan warned “would be worse than the Balkan wars” of the last decade. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seconded Karimov's assertion that Islamic militants were to blame for the crisis. While expressing concern about casualties, Lavrov called the unrest a provocation “staged by groups similar to the Taliban.”

Moscow also denounced calls for an international investigation as unfair and charged that NATO was not treating Uzbekistan as a full partner in the war on terror. Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Chizhov told reporters, “If one partner says it can carry out an investigation itself, that should be respected.”

Critics say Russia's war to hold on to Chechnya is already fueling Islamic radicalism in the North Caucasus. On the possibility of Russia using the Andijan events to shore up its position in Central Asia, a U.S. diplomat said that if it means further repression of the Uzbek people, any Russian gain could be short-lived. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, agreed, saying Moscow's influence is limited, and that strong support for Uzbekistan's authoritarian leader could backfire on the Kremlin and spawn wider chaos.

“Both Russia and the United States want Uzbekistan in their camp,” said Yevgeny Volk, a strategic analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Moscow. “And neither wants to destabilise the Karimov regime.” Volk continues,

Uzbekistan is a major producer of gold and its location, ideal for transport of energy resources through oil pipelines and other means, for example, makes it of top strategic priority and of importance to control.

Volk points to fundamental differences between US and Russian strategists in evaluating the recent unrest. The Russian analysis has emphasised ‘external forces,’ such as international terrorism in general and the ousted Taliban regime in neighbouring Afghanistan in particular as the source of violence in Uzbekistan. The U.S. sees the roots as more internal than external.

The head of the Russian intelligence and security service, Nikolai Patrushev, highlighted that difference in recent comments pointing to lingering instability in Afghanistan as a source for terrorism.

“The events that took place in Uzbekistan are the result not just of internal problems” but of external factors, said Patrushev. “Despite the measures taken by the international community, the situation in Afghanistan is not stable. There continue to be camps used to train international terrorists,” Patrushev told the Interfax news agency.

China also registered its support for Uzbekistan and defended the response to the uprising. China faces unrest in its Central Asian province of Xinjiang, home to a sizable Muslim Uighur minority, and along its borders with “the stans.”

In addition, China is eager for new sources of energy to feed its booming economy. The Chinese government signed fourteen new agreements with visiting Uzbek President Karimov this week, including a $600 million oil joint venture and a treaty of friendship and cooperation. China made clear its support for Karimov with a red-carpet welcome.

“China and Uzbekistan are friendly neighbors,” said a Chinese official. “For the time being in the Central Asian region they face the challenge of the three forces of extremism, terrorism and separatism.”

Both countries are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Central Asian regional security forum. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing is to attend its next meeting in Kazakhstan in June.

Kipling’s character, Kim, found adventure and an analogy for life in The Great Game:

[W]hat he loved was the game for its own sake -- the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a water-pipe . . . the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark. (Ch.1, p.51)

But then Kim’s journey did not include hundreds of innocent by-standers getting shot down in the town square, or suicide bombers blowing up women and children in markets day after day. The Game has always been nasty and violent, but the carnage has never been greater.

Arms For Sale, Brutal Dictators Welcome

2005-05-27T12:13:00.000-06:00

A new report by the Arms Trade Resource Center examines the U.S. policy of selling arms to some of the world's most repressive and undemocratic regimes.

Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition allies in conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these alleged benefits often come at a high price. All too often, U.S. arms transfers end up fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of U.S. adversaries.

U.S. arms and military technology frequently end up being used against American troops, as happened in Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They are also used in actions such as the recent uprising in Uzbekistan in which hundreds were killed by government troops. The repressive Uzbek government received $33 million in aid and arms from the U.S. in 2003 alone.

Veteran analysts from the World Policy Institute provide recommendations that ''would further the Bush administration's counter-terrorism agenda much more effectively than the disastrous arms deals documented in this report.''

They urge the U.S. government to follow closely the requirements under federal law that arms transfers be used only for self-defense, internal security, and in UN operations that preclude military aid and arms sales to countries with poor human rights records. The U.S. should also ratify an Organization of American States firearms convention that it helped draft, and should cooperate with other governments to ratify an international arms trade treaty that would create legally binding arms controls with unifomr standards.

They also recommend enactment of the Conventional Arms Threat Reduction Act, which would authorize the State Department to eliminate or secure surplus and unguarded stocks of weapons. Lastly, the analysts recommend that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies publish regular reports on the use of U.S. weaponry in ongoing conflicts and assess how arms transfers are affecting counter-terrorism operations.

Our laissez-faire attitude about arms sales results in a world awash in weapons, which are frequently used against our own troops and allies. We are literally selling our enemies the rope to hang us.

Spreading Freedom & Democracy in Uzbekistan

2005-05-26T21:12:00.000-06:00

This piece by Ted Rall, who has traveled extensively in “the stans,” is especially interesting on life in Uzbekistan, where every cent from the country’s burgeoning oil and gas industries go to ruler Islam Karimov. In lieu of pay, the state police force receive carte blanche to terrorize the citizenry, who go out of their way to avoid police checkpoints where they are beaten and robbed.

Karimov once observed that the fatal error leading to the ouster of former Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev was ordering his troops not to open fire on demonstrators. Andijan, then, is Karimov’s political philosophy at work. A key U.S. ally in “spreading freedom and democracy,” his response to complaints by his people is to gun them down.

Rall writes, “although Karimov now claims that police acted independently, the UK Independent reports, ‘he was in command of the situation having flown to Andizhan from the capital Tashkent and almost certainly personally authorized the use of...deadly force,’” referencing this excellent report on the events in Andijan.

More from the Independent report:

A military helicopter was used for reconnaissance purposes and Uzbek troops armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles opened fire on the demonstrators creating a deadly field of fire with the BTR-80s from which there was no escape. The soldiers made sure they had done their work well. After the shooting had finished they went from body to body delivering 'control shots' to the back of people's heads and scoured the town's streets for survivors to finish off.

The report goes into the greatest detail yet on the actions of the insurgents and demonstrators immediately before the massacre. After storming the detention center and some administrative offices, “the insurgents encouraged the crowd to vent their fury on the 40 or so hostages they had captured - policemen, judges and soldiers. Hostages were beaten and received gunshot and stab wounds before being made to parade through Andizhan's streets.”

It continues, “the insurgents used loudspeaker equipment to begin voicing their grievances -- injustice, poverty and corruption in government. People in the crowd joined in and began to berate the hostages who were hauled before them.”

When the government troops unleashed their fire, however, insurgents, demonstrators, by-standers -- and hostages -- were killed indiscriminately. The Uzbek government “perpetrated an atrocity against its own civilians and failed to distinguish between "insurgents" and ordinary protesters.”

Rall concludes with this key question:

How can the United States claim to be fighting a war on terrorism when its biggest allies are terrorists themselves?

Sidebar

Dear ~~Governor~~ George, Love Kenny Boy

Meanwhile, circling back to earlier scandals, here is our man Curveball making friendly with Uzbekistan on behalf of his buddies at Enron...

Andijan Aftermath

2005-05-26T18:29:00.000-06:00

Tension remains thick in the ten days after the violence in Andijan.

We caught some of the terrorists on Friday night, [a policeman manning a checkpoint] says with a smile.

We beat them so hard that even their own mothers would not recognise them. We beat some of them to death.

At the graveyard stories of corpses with bullets through the head and of men who had gone to the square just to see what the commotion was. Survivors and witnesses fear they will be killed; young men have been rounded up. Human rights workers and activists have fled the country, and reporters find themselves threatened and their movements restricted.

Human Rights Watch accused the Uzbek government of covering up the truth about the massacre and called for an international inquiry.

"The Uzbek authorities are trying to shut Andijan off from the world," said the statement. "They're going to succeed unless other governments insist on a full international investigation, and soon."

The organization further urged the U.S. to halt talks on making its military base in Uzbekistan permanent and called on the E.U. to suspend a trade agreement until the Uzbek government allows an independent, international inquiry into the unrest.

"The U.S. and the EU have to make clear that there will be real consequences for a cover-up if there is no independent investigation, and they have to set a deadline for it to take place."

Will Newsweek Have to Retract Its Retraction?

2005-05-25T19:01:00.000-06:00

Newly declassifed FBI records reveal allegations of Quran abuse by military guards -- including the tantalizing flushing angle -- from three years ago:

Terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison told U.S. interrogators as early as April 2002, just three months after the first detainees arrived, that military guards abused them and desecrated the Quran, declassified FBI records say.

"Their behavior is bad," one detainee is quoted as saying of his guards during an interrogation by an FBI special agent on July 22, 2002. "About five months ago the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Quran in the toilet."

* * * *

The statements about guards disrespecting the Quran echo public allegations made many months later by some detainees and their lawyers after the prisoners' release from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The once-secret FBI documents show a consistency to the allegations and are the first indication that Justice and Defense department officials were aware in early 2002 that detainees were accusing their guards of mistreating the Quran.

One told an interrogator in March 2003 that guards had repeatedly mishandled the Quran. This detainee asked why the United States, as a supporter of freedom of religion, was using the Muslim holy book as a weapon.

There are competing allegations that detainees have been trained to complain about abuse of the Quran. This might effectively rebut the allegations if not for our own pattern of using culturally sensitive areas to attack detainees -- e.g., menstrual blood and public nudity. Since these allegations fall into the pattern of other documented abuse by military and intelligence personnel, they have the sheen of truth, whether they are true or not.

And we cannot complain about that, since we have brought it upon ourselves. Another deleterious side effect of using "aggressive" interrogation methods.

Uzbek Update

2005-05-23T13:51:00.000-06:00

Further detail on the Uzbekistan uprising.

Extensive interviews with more than thirty survivors of the Uzbek uprising who fled to Kyrgyzstan, combined with accounts collected by opposition workers and human rights groups, consistently indicate that what happened was not as the official version pushed by the Karimov government claims.

Rather it appears that a poorly organized armed revolt and prison break unleashed a popular uprising. Troops then suppressed the mixture of escaped inmates and distressed townspeople with machine gun fire, causing chaos in the narrow streets of Andijon.

The number of people killed remains fiercely contested. Karimov says 32 Uzbek troops and 137 other people had been killed. An opposition party says that at least 745 civilians died in Andijon and nearby Pakhtaabad. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights says Uzbek troops may have killed 1,000 unarmed people.

A New York Times photographer saw bodies with toe tags numbers ranging from the teens to the hundreds. He was shown specific tags for bodies number 284 and 378.

The Uzbekistan prosecutor general stated at a news conference in Tashkent, that Friday just after midnight, armed Uzbeks seized a police station, killed four policemen and removed firearms, grenades and ammunition. They then raided a military post, killed two soldiers and took a hostage, more weapons and a truck. The men then rammed the gate at the regional detention center with the truck, killed three guards, and released the prisoners. How well armed the men were, and how many of the men had arms, are also disputed.

The prosecutor's account cannot be verified, but survivors agree that violence developed at the detention center where, among hundreds of others, were 23 Muslim businessmen accused of Islamic extremism, separatism and other charges.

The families of the businessmen and their employees in furniture factories, bakeries, fabric stores, scrap-metal yards and other businesses say the charges were contrived, another example of the abuse of state power to squelch political dissent documented by Western governments and human rights groups. Some survivors said the men were punished because they refused to pay all the requisite government bribes.

Today's report includes harrowing details of the mostly unarmed crowd fleeing gunfire.

With fire from snipers and other riflemen in apartment buildings raking the crowd from the left, and automatic fire head-on from soldiers and armored personnel carriers, the survivors said, Chulpon Prospect became a nightmare of bullets thwacking into buildings, poles, people and trees. Shrieks pierced the air, they said. Red tracers zipped past.

The first rows of the crowd all but disappeared in the initial bursts, they said, either having been shot or having dropped to the ground, exposing the ranks behind.

More than 500 survivors walked 15 miles through the night to the border where they were fired on briefly, losing eight more people, before an official allowed them to cross the bridge over the Karadariya River into Kyrgyzstan.

The official version of the events continues to raise questions. Karimov, for instance, claimed that the the Kyrgyz border guards found 73 rifles on the refugees. But four of the Kyrgyz guards who searched the refugees and the deputy chief of the border service, said they all arrived unarmed.

Uzbekistan Uprising

2005-05-18T13:57:00.000-06:00

Uzbekistan

[ detail . region ]

“There was no fight. It was just mass death."

Initial reports from Uzbekistan note that the government maintains it tried to minimize the use of force in stopping a prison break and demonstration in the Ferghana valley on Friday. Details are murky, as the government has blocked foreign journalists and nongovernmental organizations from the area.

Survivors of the crackdown, however, charge that security forces fired indiscriminately at unarmed civilians, including women and children. They blasted the government of President Islam A. Karimov, saying the authorities opened fire on civilians in the public square in Andijon with little warning and describing scenes of one-sided violence and chaos.

Armed demonstrators, protesting what they said was the unjust prosecution of 23 businessmen, stormed a local prison and released the businessmen and about 2,000 other prisoners. Rumors circulated that Mr. Karimov would be traveling to Andijon, and a crowd of civilians gathered in the city square to present their complaints of joblessness, sporadic utility services, and poverty.

Instead, they were met by advancing government troops. Many in the crowd tried to flee the melee by crossing the bridge into Kyrgyzstan but were met by border troops who also fired on them.

The Uzbek government blamed the violence on those who stormed the prison, defending the response as necessary, and claimed troops fired only after being fired upon. Karimov blamed the unrest specifically on Kyrgyz instigators and Islamic extremist groups, a description he has used for political opponents in recent years that his critics say is a pretext for maintaining a repressive state.

Unverified accounts report hundreds killed in several clashes, mostly instigated by government action. Estimates of the number of dead range from three to eight hundred. The government said ten troops had been captured by the protestors and killed.

On Saturday men in Andijon were digging what appeared to be a large common grave at a local cemetery under the watch of many Uzbek security service agents.

“It is sheer genocide against the people,” a local human rights advocate said. “The people now are more afraid of government troops than of any so-called militants.”

The reports also note that the unrest is a problem for the U.S., which relies on Uzbekistan as an allie in the war on terrorism. Reports of gross human rights abuses by the Karimov government, have already made the relationship problematic. (In addition, the IMF calculates that 27.5 percent of the country's nearly 26 million people live in poverty.)

"This is a big mess for the U.S. because we've seen this coming for a long time," said Fiona Hill, a specialist in the region at the Brookings Institution. "People have been saying for a while now that instead of being a strategic asset, Uzbekistan has become a strategic liability."

Postscript

Curiously, neither the New York Times, Washington Post, nor AP stories on the attacks even mention the revelation merely two weeks ago that Uzbekistan had become a destination country in the U.S. government’s “extraordinary rendition” program. If Uzbekistan has become a “strategic liability,” shouldn’t we stop sending our prisoners there to be tortured?

Halliburton, The Charmed One

2005-05-12T12:49:00.000-06:00

“It must be nice being Halliburton,” the company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, reports the Center for American Progress:

Halliburton can lose radioactive material.

Halliburton can overcharge taxpayers...

... (or charge for work never done) ...

... without having to justify any of its charges.

Halliburton can even keep any negative, image-damaging news from getting out.

The White House allowed Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) to scrub out [pdf] negative information from a U.N. report which documented the company's corrupt accounting practices in Iraq. Blacked out of the redacted report on Iraqi reconstruction was the fact that Halliburton may have bilked the U.S. military out of about $100 million. Also blacked out were statements like, "KBR was unable to reconcile the proposed costs to its accounting records" and "KBR did not always provide accurate information." A letter from KBR dated 9/28/04 to the Army Corps of Engineers states, "we have redacted the statements of DCAA that we believe are factually incorrect or misleading and could be used by a competitor to damage KBR's ability to win and negotiate new work." KBR was the recipient of a $1.6 billion no-bid contract in Iraq.

And what is the punishment? Yesterday, the Army announced that "it had awarded $72 million in bonuses to Halliburton Co. for logistics work in Iraq."

In a second slap to the face of the American taxpayer, the Army claimed to have "protected the taxpayer first" since it "had denied $10.1 million more in bonuses to Halliburton … and had not paid the maximum allowed on any of six task orders it reviewed." Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) remarked, "It is outrageous that the Bush administration would give Halliburton a bonus after we have seen its overcharges, sloppy accounting and kickback schemes in Iraq. Giving Halliburton a bonus is like giving your worst employee a raise."

Is this what it meant when we were told this would be the CEO-MBA administration?

Bolton

2005-05-11T15:53:00.000-06:00

It isn't his temperament, it's his record.

Even as it becomes undeniable that the administration exaggerated and manipulated Iraq intel, it seeks to elevate a repeat offender. His supporters claim he is just the tough-guy needed to reform the UN, but how is he going to get anything done when no one will believe a thing he says?

Security Problem Hampering Iraq Reconstruction

2005-05-09T23:14:00.000-06:00

An audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction finds that U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq are being hindered by management lapses and security problems, including mounting casualties among foreign contractors, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The report outlines challenges facing the $18.4 billion rebuilding effort, for which there is little yet to show. For example, while billions of dollars have been used to improve Iraq's power supply, the electric system remains unable to meet demand, the audit found.

The slow pace of reconstruction and restoring essential services is a growing source of public anger at the U.S. and skepticism about the new Iraq government. Most of the problems stem from the country's security situation, forcing the U.S. to spend more on protection and requiring contractors to suspend or abandon projects. The audit also identified widespread management failings, however, as well as instances of corruption, fraud and embezzlement.

The report further contains the most comprehensive government account available of contractor casualties, stating that at least 276 civilians working on U.S. government-funded projects had died in Iraq as of March 31, 2005, and at least 2,582 wounded. Since the end of 2004, the number of contractor deaths has climbed 19% to 44 in the first quarter of 2005.

Security costs accounted for 4.2% of the $440 million spent by the United States Agency for International Development on projects completed in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2004. For the final nine months of 2004, by contrast, security costs constituted 22% of the agency's contracts.

Government investigators continue to probe 69 potential criminal cases, most involving procurement fraud, theft and bribery. Investigators are conducting a probe into what happened to millions of dollars in Iraqi money entrusted to American officials in south-central Iraq after finding "indications of potential fraud" in how it was spent. The report said that of the $119.9 million in Iraqi money allocated for rebuilding efforts overseen by the U.S. there, $7.2 million couldn't be accounted for at all and $89.4 million lacked proper documentation.

We can take solace, I suppose, that only seven million dollars are missing. That's chump change compared to the $8.8 billion that went missing last year.

Energy Bill Would Raise Gas Prices

2005-05-09T20:15:00.000-06:00

As the average price for a gallon of gas surges to record levels, President Bush is again pushing his industry-friendly energy bill. Never mind that his administration's own Energy Information Administration found that his energy bill would actually raise gas prices and increase oil demand nearly 14 percent by 2010. Hardly a surprise, really, since the bill was drafted by the oil industry.

But in case the industry still can't keep on its feet, the bill hands it a whopping $3.275 billion in new tax breaks. That's kind of a tough break, actually, since the big headache for oil execs these days is managing the cash flow avalanche that has overwhelmed their coffers in the last few years.

Can there be any remaining pretext that this is not an administration by-and-for the oil industry, and the consumer be damned?

Intel, Facts "Fixed" Around Iraq Invasion

2005-05-08T13:20:00.000-06:00

During the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration insisted that it was pursuing all options and that war would be the last resort. Supporters of the war continue to reject criticism that the administration manipulated intelligence to advance the attack.

Yet a highly classified British memo, leaked during the recent election campaign, indicates that President Bush had decided by summer 2002 to overthrow Saddam Hussein and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The document summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, including the report by the head of the MI-6 intelligence service on a visit to Washington.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," the MI-6 chief said, according to the memo. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The newly disclosed memo has not been disavowed by the British government, while a former senior U.S. official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" during the senior British intelligence officer's visit to Washington.

Has the revelation that the President lied to induce the American public to support his war campaign led to outraged protest and calls for heads to roll? Well, no, especially since the media have mostly ignored this important story. So it is now official: Lying about a blow job is an impeachable offense; lying to start a war doesn't even warrant mention.

Judge Rules England Following Orders

2005-05-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

The judge in the case of former Abu Ghraib prison guard Pfc. Lynndie England tossed out her gulity plea and declared a mistrial, finding that the testimony of Pvt. Charles Graner Jr., the reputed ringleader of the abuse, contradicted England's testimony.

Under military law, the judge could accept her guilty plea only if he was convinced that she knew at the time that what she was doing was illegal. It was her duty to follow the orders of her superior unless she knew she was being ordered to do something illegal.

Graner is serving a 10-year sentence for his role in the abuse and is said to be the father of England's infant son. He maintains that the Abu Ghraib guards were following orders from higher-ranking interrogators when they abused the detainees.

The ruling undermines the Pentagon's assertion that the Abu Ghraib scandal was solely the fault of a few enlisted soldiers. A military doctor who worked at the prison, Col. Anthony Auch, said, "I do not condone what [England] did, but we cannot ignore the lack of leadership her unit received. The chain of command as a whole failed her."

"Smoking Gun" on Global Warming

2005-05-06T22:04:00.000-06:00

More evidence that global warming is a growing problem that we deny at great risk.

Using satellites, data from buoys and computer models to study the Earth’s oceans, scientists have concluded that more energy is being absorbed from the Sun than is emitted back to space, throwing the Earth’s energy "out of balance" and warming the planet.

"This energy imbalance is the ’smoking gun’ that we have been looking for," says James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the lead author of the study. "It shows that our estimates of the human-made and natural climate forcing agents are about right, and they are driving the Earth toward a warmer climate."

The current imbalance will cause an additional warming of 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. That warming is already "in the pipeline." Even if there were no further increase of human-induced gases in the air, climate would continue to warm about that much over the next century.

Warmer temperatures mean melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Since 1993, the world’s oceans have risen by 1.26 inches per decade, twice as large as sea level rise in the last century.

The researchers, some of them working for NASA and the Energy Department, went further, criticizing the Bush Administration for not taking stronger action to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

“There can no longer be genuine doubt that humanmade gases are the dominant cause of observed warming,” said Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “This energy imbalance is the ‘smoking gun’ that we have been looking for.”

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego say their as yet unpublished research also shows a close correlation between climate models and the observed temperatures of oceans, further defusing criticism of uncertainties in the modeling.

But why would anyone question global warming? Perhaps due to the efforts of forty-odd ExxonMobil-funded organizations that work to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change, usually through press releases and opinion pieces rather than with science. One such piece published by FoxNews.com and the Washington Times claimed the study "debunks itself" on grounds that would themselves refute hundreds of scientific papers on climate.

Internal strategy papers reveal that the purpose of the campaign was “to reposition global warming as theory (not fact),” with an emphasis on targeting “older, less educated males,” and “younger, low-income women” in districts that received their electricity from coal, and who preferably had a representative on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Bush Administration has joined in the campaign, denying global warming again and again.

Uzbek Express

2005-05-04T16:10:00.000-06:00

Add Uzbekistan to the list of countries to which the U.S. government has been rendering suspects for, a-hem, aggressive interrogation:

[T]here is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

Indeed, the State Department writes that Uzbek police “repeatedly tortured prisoners," noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” A number of prisoners are believed to have died over the past several years from prison disease and abuse.

Reports from human rights organizations detail other torture methods used in Uzbek jails, including boiling body parts, using electroshock on genitals, and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were reportedly boiled to death.

According to a new report, “Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States." One intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the U.S. to Tashkent was in the dozens.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, learned that the CIA was holding foreign terrorism suspects, saying, "CIA flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week," during 2003 and early 2004. Murray wrote a confidential memo last year to the British Foreign Office accusing the CIA of violating the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

He urged his colleagues to stop using intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan from terrorism suspects because it had been elicited through torture and other coercive means. Murray said he knew about the practice through his own investigation and interviews with scores of people who claimed to have been brutally treated inside Uzbekistan's jails. He has also stated that a CIA station chief confirmed that torture was taking place.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits states from extraditing a person to another state if there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. The Convention notes that grounds include a pattern of gross, flagrant violations of human rights.

President Bush assured the world in January that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” It is becoming increasingly clear that this is simply not true.

The Gitmo Sex-Up

2005-05-03T18:34:00.000-06:00

Sgt. Erik Saar spent three months in the interrogation rooms at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a new book about his experiences at Gitmo, "Inside the Wire," Saar describes bizarre and sadistic treatment of detainees in the American prison camp. Emails from FBI agents to headquarters corroborate Saar’s account and warned Washington that prisoners were being tortured.

"I think the harm we are doing there far outweighs the good, and I believe it's inconsistent with American values," says Saar. "In fact, I think it's fair to say that it’s the moral antithesis of what we want to stand for as a country."

Saar says that the interrogation training he received emphasized adherence to the Geneva Conventions. But when he arrived at Gitmo, he was instucted that the Conventions did not apply. Asked what rules did apply, Saar responded, "I don't think anybody knew that."

The result was that some U.S. military intelligence personnel used cruelty, and even bizarre sexual tactics, against the prisoners. The tacitics entered the lingo, as uncooperative prisoners were deemed in need of a "sex-up."

Saar tells of one incident in which a female interrogator smeared what she said was menstrual blood on a prisoner and then deprived him of water to wash himself. The tactic was designed to humiliate the man and to keep him from being able to pray.

Saar says that these methods are not effective, debase the interrogators, and drive a wall between them and the prisoners, defeating the goal of drawing information.

FBI emails paint a similarly grim picture, describing prisoners “chained hand and foot in a fetal position” for up to 24 hours at a time, and those who had “urinated or defecated on themselves." One interrogator grabbed a detainee’s thumbs and “bent them backwards” and “grabbed his genitals.” Another agent reported he saw a detainee “gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head.” The interrogator explained that the prisoner had been “chanting the Koran and would not stop.”

Army Col. Patrick Lang, fomer head of human intelligence gathering at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, likened the reports to a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

"Unimaginable to me,” said Lang, “I just can not imagine what people think they were doing."

Asked if this treatment is torture, he responded, "I think that a lot of this behavior which has been allowed is so far outside the pale, that I think that it would have to be considered to be something not allowed in international law or U.S. military law."

But is it torture?

"Yeah," said Lang. "I think it's torture."

One FBI agent agreed, warning FBI headquarters that torture was being employed and expressing concern that the interrogators were ruining any chance of getting good information from the detainees.

The stories are now being investigated, but Saar also reveals that the military had set up “mock interrogations” to fool visitors into believing all was well at the camp.

Perhaps this explains why the report prepared for the Department of Defense by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church III praised the camp as "an effective model" that should be replicated elsewhere. The Church report absolved all senior officials of any blame in the matter of detainee abuse, saying it was "clear that none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater." Unfortunately, that statement is demonstrably untrue.

Col. Lang concludes, "if we do things like this, if we beat people and we neglect them and we try to use their religion against them, however stupidly, I mean, in fact, we're debasing ourselves to the point in fact in which we're losing something, that we should be trying to protect in this war."

Subsidizing the Strong

2005-05-01T21:15:00.000-06:00

AP reports that "a provision in a House-passed energy bill would require federal compensation to private companies for costs associated with oil and gas leases that can't be developed." The plan would force taxpayers to pay, for instance, for multi-billion-dollar undeveloped leases off the shores of California and elsewhere.

What a generous hand out to an industry whose number one problem right now is they are making money too fast to manage their cash flow! Exxon-Mobil has a cash hoard of more than $25 billion that is keeping its CEO up at night. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group both reported huge increases in first-quarter income, benefiting from the industrywide bonanza also swelling the coffers of their peers: high prices for the oil they pump and high margins for refining it."

So reimbursing the expenses of the industry's failed investments is necessary to, um, prop up a, er, booming industry. But I'm sure all those former oil execs in the Adminstration are only doing what they think is right for America.

Genocide Watch

2005-04-19T17:29:00.000-06:00

The Genocide Watch web-site has links to articles, legal texts, and other research on genocide and its prevention. The site also functions as a teaching tool, for example with this useful breakdown of the eight stages of genocide.

More Evidence Admin Misled Nation on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link

2005-04-18T14:26:00.000-06:00

Senator Carl Levin released formerly classified documents that undercut pre-war claims of a link between Saddam Hussein regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

"These documents are additional compelling evidence that the intelligence community did not believe there was a cooperative relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, despite public comments by the highest ranking officials in our government to the contrary," Senator said.

The documents undermine the claims of the Bush administration regarding Iraqi involvement in training al-Qaeda operatives and the likelihood of a meeting between September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001.

In October 2002, Mr Bush said: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
But a June 2002 CIA report, titled Iraq and al-Qa'ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship, said "the level and extent of this is assistance is not clear."

The report said that there were "many critical gaps" in the knowledge of Iraq-al-Qaeda links due to "limited reporting" and the "questionable reliability of many of our sources", according to excerpts cited by Senator Levin.

In December 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague was "pretty well confirmed." A CIA report from June 2002, however, states that "[r]eporting is contradictory on hijacker Mohammed Atta's alleged trip to Prague and meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer, and we have not verified his travels." A report from January 2003 says "the most reliable reporting to date casts doubt on this possibility."

Both Bush and Cheney made claims not supported by the intel, and misrepresented what the intelligence community believed. Administration officials repeatedly made claims overstating the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda while actively hiding countervailing evidence.

We kicked a hornet's nest in Iraq, and thousands are dying. Neither the world nor the US is demonstrably safer now than before the invasion. Casualites and attacks are on the rise. Yet lying to start a disastrous war remains less serious than lying about a few blow jobs. Whatta country!

D.U. Hockey, Bitch!

2005-04-10T10:12:00.000-06:00

Back-to-back, baby!

More pix.

Did North Korea Cheat?

2005-02-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Asia specialist Selig Harrison questions whether North Korea has the technical capability to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to build nuclear warheads. An exchange between Harrison and other experts goes into great technical detail, but the critics largely by-pass Harrison's central argument.

Abu Ghraib - Gitmo - Bagram links II

2005-02-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of links to supplement the earlier list:

The Torture Papers Describe Interrogation Techniques - (NPR) 1/25/05

Army Destroyed Mock Execution Photos - (AP) 2/18/05

Rice Briefed on Al-Qaeda, Given Proposals for Attack, Jan. '01

2005-02-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Not only was in-coming National Security Advisor Condileeza Rice given a memo briefing warning her of the threat from al-Qaeda in January 2001, the document included proposals for eliminating the threat. The document, prepared for Rice by her top counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, outlined a number of moves for the administration to make in the short- and medium- terms.

Administration officials respond that the document did not amount to a plan of attack, but it clearly lays out actions for the US to take to attack al-Qaeda training and finance networks in Afghanistan and beyond.

The administration has long underplayed warnings about al-Qaeda received before the 9/11 attacks. But along with the briefing memo of Aug. 2001, "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US," this document shows well that the administration received specific warnings of an al-Qaeda attack as well as proposals for preventing it, yet did nothing.

'Extraordinary Rendition': Complicity to Torture

2005-02-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

Maher Arar is a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria. On the way home from visiting family in Tunisia, Arar was arrested at JFK airport as a terror suspect. After two weeks of questioning, Arar was sent by executive jet to Jordan where he was handed over the Syrian authorities. He was then beaten and held in an underground cell for a year before his release was secured by Canadian officials. The Syrian ambassador in Washington announced that his government had found no link between Arar and terrorist organizations.

Maher Arar was sent to Syria under a program called “extraordinary rendition,” devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment by Syrian officials. He and other critics contend that the program allows suspects to be subjected to aggressive methods of persuasion, including torture, that are illegal under America law.

Most suspects rendered under the program are sent to Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects.

To justify the program, the Administration offers a deceptive and incomplete interpretation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, ratified by the U.S. in 1994. Article 3 of the Convention states:

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Martin Lederman, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel until 2002, says, “The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That’s not enough. So there are ways to get around it.”

But “getting around” the Convention is clearly inconsistent with the intent of the law, and Mr. Lederman’s reading ignores the second paragraph of the Article he refers to:

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Ignoring the pattern of human rights violations of our outsources amounts to complicity to torture. We cannot exonerate ourselves from involvement in torture simply by closing our eyes.

The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix

2005-02-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

How the mainstream media became a conservative message board.

Conservatives still charge that the media harbors a liberal bias, though studies on the issue do not support the claims. Indeed, conservative issue organizations, supposedly non-partisan but demonstrably one-sided, are a $400 million per year industry providing the sheen of legitimacy to an array of views unsupported scientifically. The aim of these groups is often to confuse matters that are scientifically straight-forward, such as global warming, or to advance dubious and unscientific theories such as intelligent design.

Along with providing material for talk radio and Fox News, these organizations publish extensively and train opinion leaders and spokespersons on spreading their ideology. No comparable liberal message machine exists to slant the news as does on the conservative side.

Let them eat cake!

2005-01-31T21:50:00.000-07:00

The budget deficit continues to look gloomy, according to the Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2006 to 2015 report issued by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week. The report projects that the federal budget deficit will reach a record $448 billion this year, exceeding last year's record $412 billion.

The White House claims the new report shows its economic plan is on track but ignores that the budget deficit stops growing only when the recent tax cuts phase out. If the White House gets its wish and the tax cuts are made permanent, $2.5 trillion dollars will be lumped onto the deficit numbers, dwarfing our current record pace.

In addition, the report leaves out spending on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The administration is expected to ask for another $80 billion appropriation for the war later this month, and we will continue spending comparable amounts in 2006 and beyond.

The report also does not include the $2 trillion Social Security package that the President is trying to sell to fix a crisis that does not exist.

The following chart summarizes the budget outlook as projected in the CBO report, along with the numbers when military numbers are added in and if the tax cuts are made permanent. How can this be considered anything other than grossly irresponsible?

About half of this year’s deficit is the result of tax cuts that have gone overwhelmingly (90-to-1) to those with the highest 1% of income . The other half of the deficit is accounted for by homeland security and military spending. So at least we know that money is being spent wisely, right?

According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Pentagon is more prone to "fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement of funds" than any other department in the federal government! Comptroller General David M. Walker states that the failure to turn around problem areas at the Pentagon "results in billions of dollars in waste each year and inadequate accountability to the Congress and the American taxpayer."

Add nine more billion to the waste total. According to a report released this week, the Coalition Provisional Authority run by Paul Bremer lost track of nearly nine billion dollars into "a black hole of fraud, kickbacks and fund misappropriation." The report notes lax accounting, inadequate disclosure, ghost employees, and no paper trail to trace payments.

But why should you sorry about budget deficits and squandered money? A rule of thumb is that each $100 billion of deficit adds 1% to the cost of borrowing money. That translates to higher prices and credit costs, as well as bolstering tax rates over the long-run, since all that borrowing has to be paid off eventually.

Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. " Deficits during the Reagan years amounted to $1.77 trillion, which at current interest rates is still costing us about $80 billion per year, and will continue to do so into the next decade. The Bush deficits as projected right now -- without war costs, tax cut extension, or Social Security overhaul -- will run about $2.5 trillion, or about $120 billion per year for over twenty years. Thus, the Irresponsibility Tax for running high deficits will continue to bolster tax rates for decades.

Middle-class Americans do get one consolation: At least they get to watch Paris Hilton spend her tax cut.

Big Oil Bamboozle

2005-01-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Lobbyists for the US oil industry have been playing down the science on global warming and spreading the belief that there is uncertainty on issues that are supported by extensive science. ExxonMobil alone funnels tens of thousands of dollars to industry front groups that produce reports that claim to "undermine" growing scientific consensus about climate change.

Social Security: There Is No Crisis

2005-01-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

When there are forty or fifty years to make up for a possible shortfall, there is no crisis:

President Bush has been working hard to promote belief in a Social Security crisis. Unfortunately for him, the numbers refuse to cooperate. The latest numbers from the Social Security trustees show that the program can pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2042 with no changes whatsoever.

An independent assessment from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the program can pay all benefits through the year 2052. Even after these dates, the projections from both the trustees and CBO show that the program will always be able to pay a higher benefit than that received by current retirees, although not the full scheduled benefit.

Scandal Sheet

2005-01-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Bu$h Scandal Sheet: Thirty-four scandals, each of which makes the Clinton scandals look like kid's play, going mostly uninvestigated, with no accountability in sight. Hail to the chief!

IOKIYAR

2005-01-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

The CBS firings this week leads me to revisit "Rathergate."

CBS Anchorman Dan Rather blundered by failing to adequately verify a memo at the heart of a story he did about President Bush’s failure to show up for a physical exam when he was in the Air Force Reserve. Rather apologized once it became clear the memo was not authentic.

The memo, however, was not a smoking gun. The White House did not even dispute its content. Questions about Bush’s National Guard service remain whether the memo was authentic or not, and the secretary who typed the original memo stated the text of the falsified document was accurate.

Yet the reaction was that Rather should resign, and that his credentials as a liberal had been confirmed.

On Nightline, Dec. 19, 1995 , Ted Koppel reported on a press conference on Whitewater given by Hillary Clinton. She responded to a question regarding billing at the Rose Law Firm. Nightline edited out a paragraph from what she said, then accused her of lying about the very statement they left out. The story that Hillary was lying was picked up by CNN, the New York Times, and it was repeated on ABC News. Indeed, the story remains one of the marks against the Clintons on the right.

The transcript from the press conference, however, shows that she explained the billing question clearly. ABC omitted her explanation and invented a lie. There were no consequences, and the lie became common knowledge. Who called for Koppel’s scalp? Were his credentials as a conservative confirmed?

The media ran countless stories about Whitewater charges and other concocted Clinton scandals that were completely bogus, without firings or resignations.

Then there is the incident where Fox political reporter Carl Cameron posted a story on the Fox News web-site quoting John Kerry as saying he "does manicures" and various other things.

Cameron made the story up as a joke, Fox explained, and it was erroneously posted to the web. Cameron was not disciplined, and he continued as the lead Fox reporter on the Kerry campaign.

So, a reporter makes a mistake on a story about a Republican that was substantively correct. He is forced to resign, four of his colleagues are fired in disgrace, and the case is held up as a paradigm of the "liberal media" in action. But when utter fabrications about Democrats are reported, there is no uproar, no disclipinary actions taken, and certainly no suggestion that the media has a conservative bias. Some "liberal media."

Iraq Unwinnable?

2005-01-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

Unless we change direction, we are rushing headlong toward utter failure.

James Dobbins, in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Winning the Unwinnable War:

The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the ongoing war in Iraq is not one that the United States can win. As a result of its initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation, Washington has lost the Iraqi people's confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back. Every day that Americans shell Iraqi cities they lose further ground on the central front of Iraqi opinion.

The ICG report, What Can the U.S. Do in Iraq?, concludes that "staying the course" is exactly what we cannot do:

[D]espite valiant and ongoing corrective efforts, the transition process no longer can succeed as currently fashioned – that is, as the linear culmination of the process underway since the fall of the Baathist regime. It has become too discredited, too tainted, and too closely associated with a U.S. partner in which Iraqis have lost faith for it to be rescued by minor course corrections. To preserve the possibility of a united, cohesive Iraq rallying around a credible central state, elections -- together with their aftermath, the establishment of a sovereign constituent assembly -- must be perceived by its people not as a continuation of what has occurred so far, but as a fundamental break from it.

The ICG provides recommendations for the involved parties, though no change in direction is possible so long as the Bush administration will not acknowledge that there is a problem.

Incompetents R US

2005-01-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

Post-war planning for Iraq was non-existent, or in the Pentagon's words, "To Be Provided" later.

The CIA station chief in Baghdad says Iraq is descending into chaos.

The Defense Science Board says that we are defeating ourselves with incompetence.

Yet we continue to reward those who have made numerous, palpably awful decisions.

Going Soft on Terrorist Financing

2004-11-10T16:19:00.000-07:00

Security and the war on terror were the centerpieces of the Bush re-election campaign. Yet now comes further confirmation that the administration was never serious about combatting the network that finances terrorist organizations, even after the 9/11 attacks.

Penalties imposed by the government against companies for doing business with terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the 9/11 attacks. The average penalty for doing business with Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to analysis of federal records.

Surely there is no connection between this lax policy and the many deals Dick Cheney's Halliburton made with terror-sponsors, including helping Saddam Hussein siphon billions from the UN Oil-for-Food Program:

U.N. documents show that Halliburton's affiliates ... had controversial dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney's tenure at the company and played a part in helping Saddam Hussein illegally pocket billions of dollars under the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. The Clinton administration blocked one deal Halliburton was trying to push through ... because it was "not authorized under the oil-for-food deal," according to U.N. documents. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell nearly $1 million in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya. Still, Halliburton used one of foreign subsidiaries to sell Iraq the equipment it needed so the country could pump more oil, according to a report in the Washington Post in June 2001.

I suppose it would be hypocritical for the administration to penalize companies for doing what Cheney himself did. But it is even more hypocritical for the administration to run on its security policies when it prizes oil industry profits above fighting terrorist financing.

Bush Fails to Address Most Acute Security Vulnerabilities

2004-10-19T17:53:00.000-06:00

The Hart-Rudman Task Force on Homeland Security identified chemical and nuclear plants, ports, and other industrial and public works installations as vulnerable potential primary terror targets over six years ago.

After 9/11, concerns about addressing these weak spots have been repeated to little avail. A related story revealed that the administration is spending seven times more money per capita on security in low-risk, GOP-dominated Wyoming than in New York, the prime target for al-Qaeda attacks in the past. Anti-terror funds are being spent to protect electoral college votes, not lives.

A new report revives charges that the administration's hostility to regulation and ties to industry have repeatedly put politics above security.

The Bush administration has consistently ignored or opposed commonsense measures to protect Americans from potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks – an inaction that reflects officials’ aversion to regulating private industry and allegiance to key campaign contributors, a new Public Citizen report shows.

The report, Homeland Unsecured: The Bush Administration’s Hostility to Regulation and Ties to Industry Leave America Vulnerable, details how the Bush administration has failed to harden our defenses against terrorism and secure the most vulnerable, high-impact targets. The report is based on an analysis of five key areas – chemical plants, nuclear plants, hazardous material transport, ports and water systems.

While the media spends hours fidgeting about where John Kerry was on Christmas Eve thirty-five years ago, isn't the venal failure of the so-called War President to address basic security threats at all relevant?

Intelligence Matters

2004-09-10T15:39:00.000-06:00

Intelligence Matters, the new book by former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, reveals that the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into the support network in the U.S. for two Sept. 11th hijackers that included agents of the Saudi government.

The discovery of the financial backing of the two hijackers ''would draw a direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia, and trigger an attempted coverup by the Bush administration,'' Graham wrote.

Graham also reveals that Gen. Tommy Franks told him on Feb. 19, 2002, just four months after the invasion of Afghanistan, that important military resources were being shifted to prepare for a war against Iraq.

Graham recalled this conversation at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa with Franks, then head of Central Command, who was "looking troubled'':

"Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.''

''Excuse me?'' I asked.

''Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,'' he said.

The Administration claimed up until the eve of war that no decision had been made and that diplomatic efforts were still paramount. But in fact key resources were being moved out of Afghanistan and into the Iraq theater over a year before the decision to invade was supposedly reached.

Our Man in Baghdad

2004-07-19T16:56:00.000-06:00

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

Abu Ghraib - Gitmo - Bagram links

2004-07-09T12:02:00.000-06:00

Stories on the abuse of detainees at U.S. detention centers over the past couple of months:

Background on Gitmo prison, policy - (WP) 5/2/04

Gitmo background, timeline - (Obs) 5/9/04

Hersh on Taguba report, (NY) 5/9/04

Abu Ghraib spins out of control - (WP) 5/9/04 [1/3]

As insurgency grew, abuse escalated - (WP) 5/10/04 [2/3]

From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Bagram - (WP) 5/11/04 [3/3]

Red Cross warned of abuse repeatedly - (Times) 5/11/04

Allegations of prisoner abuse go beyond Abu Ghraib, “few bad apples” - (NBC) 5/17/04

Rumsfeld & Abu Ghraib policy - (NBC) 5/17/04

Ashcroft memo justifying torture policy [pdf] - (NW) 5/17/04

GIs charged in detainee death - (AP) 7/2/04

Lost Translators

2004-07-08T20:08:00.000-06:00

FBI translator Sibel Edmonds discovered mistakes in translations, so the FBI fired her.

Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,
she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English.

Ms. Edmonds alerted her supervisor about the mistake, as well as a number of others she found in the next several months. For her efforts she was fired, and now Attorney General John Ashcroft has taken the extraordinary move of retroactively classifying documents relevant to the case to block her wrongful termination law suit.

Rather than get the translations correct, a necessity if the intelligence is to be of any use, the FBI and the Department of Justice are trying to cover their tracks.

The U.S. war on terror suffers because of a shortage of Arab linguists, endangering soldiers. Yet we are firing qualified linguists because they are gay or because they point out when mistakes are made. What is more important, winning a war or retaliating against qualified employees?

The Devil's Tears

2004-06-12T20:11:00.000-06:00

Two recent books examine the history of the Caspian region, the involvement of Russia in region affairs, and its emergence (immersion?) in oil politics in recent years.

Whitlock helps explain how the Caspian area became such a mess, while Kleveman takes confusion and borderline anarchy as his point of departure. But both books share an underlying message: that the United States is the latest on the laundry list of countries with imperial designs, albeit of different stripes, on the region -- and that, if history is any guide, the odds are heavily stacked against sustainable success.

Spreading Democracy

2004-06-07T22:11:00.000-06:00

Colorado Republicans Lose Redistricting Effort, as the headline says, but the ruling has little effect outside the state.

The Supremes declined to hear an appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that the state Constitution allowed Congressional redistricting to be conducted only once per decade. The decision meant that district lines reverted to those drawn by a state court in early 2002 after the legislature failed to agree on how to draw new lines following the 2000 census, which gave Colorado a new Seventh District (now on the west side of metro Denver).

Bob Beauprez won the Seventh District in the 2002 election by fewer than 200 votes. The decision then keeps at least one district in Colorado in play.

Score one for democracy, but don’t get too excited. The ruling would only be relevant to other districting cases where a state constitution limited redistricting. In other words, this is a unique case that will not impede, for instance, the Texas district-rigging battle.

Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas dissented, opining that the rights of states are preempted when the they lead to results the Justices don't like. Federales!

Comparing Reagan to W

2004-06-06T22:59:00.000-06:00

Digby notes that Republicans are split whether W fares well in comparisons to The Gipper. But comparing Reagan's Capra-esque performance with W's Brechtian interpretation is an empty exercise.

For instance, I like it when W gets that petrified look in his eyes, when he's saying something blatantly and ridiculously untrue and he's looking around at the audience to see if they're buying it. Reagan was never that funny.

And then there was the bit when W couldn't think of any mistakes he’d made because he was too nervous. Reagan would've said something reassuring, like a grandpa. But Bush went for the big laughs, and got them! Pure comedic genius.

See, most people just don't get W's deconstructed interpretation of the role. Reagan played it straight up, like in a western. The daring Bush plays it more broadly, riffing on a Jerry Lewis-meets-The Three Stooges reading of the part.

This brilliant lampooning of the character, and of American politics in general, has the whole country lost in a state recalling Andy Kaufman: "is he really nuts or is it all an act?" Absolutely riveting. These guys have taken the show from predictable sex romp to all out absurdist farce!

Indeed, the current White House is more accurately portrayed in the play and film, "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." The loonies take the stage, and the audience watches in dazzled horror.

Krugman Today

2004-06-01T21:37:00.000-06:00

These two paragraphs from Paul Krugman today raise several questions that should be central to this year’s election and to the policy direction taken by the U.S. government:

The end result of current policies will be a large-scale transfer of income from the middle class to the very affluent, in which about 80 percent of the population will lose and the bulk of the gains will go to people with incomes of more than $200,000 per year.

I can't back that assertion with official numbers, because under Mr. Bush the Treasury Department has stopped releasing information on the distribution of tax cuts by income level. Estimates by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which now provides the numbers the administration doesn't want you to know, reveal why. This year, the average tax reduction per family due to Bush-era cuts was $1,448. But this average reflects huge cuts for a few affluent families, with most families receiving much less (which helps explain why most people, according to polls, don't believe their taxes have been cut). In fact, the 257,000 taxpayers with incomes of more than $1 million received a bigger combined tax cut than the 85 million taxpayers who make up the bottom 60 percent of the population.

Do the 85 million taxpayers in the bottom 60 percent support shifting even more resources to the 257,000 who already make over a million bucks a year? When Dick Cheney says that John Kerry will repeal "most of the tax cuts" during his first 90 days in office, how many people realize that Kerry has proposed repealing tax cuts only on those earning over $200,000 a year? Or is he acknowledging that most of the tax cuts go to the wealthiest?

No matter, Sparky the Republican Penguin knows who to blame: The Messengers!

Weak Links

2004-05-31T23:21:00.000-06:00

Another in our continuning series on The New Meaning of Responsibility...

Misperceptions on Iraq Spread by Fox News

2004-05-31T17:19:00.000-06:00

A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes [pdf] found that those who got their news primarily from Fox News were most likely to hold one or more of four major misperceptions about the Iraq invasion. The misperceptions studied were of a link between Iraq, al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks; the presence of WMDs in Iraq; the use of WMDs by Iraq during the invasion; and world opinion in support of the war. In each case, Fox viewers were more likely to misperceive the facts than those who get their news primarily from other sources.

No wonder that Dick Cheney “ends up spending a lot of time watching Fox News" and believes that "they’re more accurate.” They may more accurately reflect your point of view, Mr. Vice President, but they are demonstrably less accurate factually. They report (distortions), you decide (uninformed).

One can readily see why Mr. Cheney prefers the Fox version to reality, since the misperceptions they spread mirror the deceptions upon which he based the case for war. It must be exhilarating to watch an entire network ardently spreading your own lies.

Iraq Invasion Bolsters al-Qaeda

2004-05-29T17:01:00.000-06:00

Has the invasion of Iraq made Americans or the world safer? Not according to the influential International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

The annual report from the IISS charges that the war in Iraq has focused the energies and resources of al-Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counter-terrorism coalition. The war has further split the US and its major European partners and has left Britain uncomfortably in the middle. The report says American forces in Iraq present al-Qaeda with its most attractive "iconic" target outside the US itself, while concluding that if Iraq becomes a failed state or revert to dictatorship, it would be a "strategic nightmare" for the West.

The administration justifies the war by insisting that we are safer with Saddam out of power. Iraq was no threat to anyone before the war, however, and it now presents a direct threat to US forces. We are making little progress building a viable state, and if the effort fails the situation could become much worse. So just how are we safer?

One for the ages

2004-05-23T20:39:00.000-06:00

The Simpsons finale was about blogs. Lisa was frustrated with the media, commandeered by Mr. Burns, so she published her own newspaper. By the end of the episode, everyone in town had their own paper.

Of course, they did refer to such enterprises as the "insane opinions" of "a thousand freaks." But still.

Also, a quote for the ages, lampooning the jus gentium:

"I can't be held responsible for what my goons were ordered to do!"
- C.Montgomery Burns

Concurring: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cambone, Sanchez, Karpinski...

Breaking News

2004-05-19T10:59:00.000-06:00

"A protester hit British Prime Minister Tony Blair with a purple powder as he was speaking in the House of Commons."

"Mr. Blair flinched visibly as he was hit by the powder."

If someone in the peanut gallery threw a powdered substance onto the floor of the House while the President was speaking:

a) Bush and Cheney would spend the rest of the day flying around from one air base to another, only to surface in the evening for a quick "everything is under control" address;

b) The Capitol would be closed for the rest of the week while scientists in airtight suits performed tests;

c) Visitors would no longer be allowed in federal buildings;

d) The person who threw the powder would be deemed an enemy combatant and detained at an undisclosed location forever;

e) Residents of NY and DC would be advised to stay home, duct tape their windows shut, and not turn on the lights;

f) Fox News would say that voting for John Kerry means voting for terrorism, and Rush Limbaugh would agree;

g) All powdered substances would be banned on airline flights;

h) Roughing up swarthy prisoners would become accepted as necessary for national security.

Wild, Wild West

2004-05-15T17:11:00.000-06:00

Two military intelligence specialists say the blame for Abu Ghraib goes beyond the military police at the site. The two soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said in interviews that abuses at the facility were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted instead from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police.

The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.

"I was told, 'Don't worry about it - they probably deserved it,'" one of the soldiers said ... referring to complaints he made while trying to persuade the Army to investigate. "I was appalled."

Interrogation procedures initially called for two sets of coercion techniques. The "A" list included directly asking for information as well as relatively mild techniques such as becoming angry with the prisoner or threatening to withhold meals. The "B" list included harsher techniques, such as sleep deprivation and withholding meals.

Around November, with casualties rising and Saddam Hussein still in hiding, solid intelligence was becoming more urgent. Col. Thomas Pappas issued an order that broadened acceptable interrogation methods.

"I think he was referring to any techniques on the A and B lists," the soldier said. "But there was kind of the third list, the unofficial list. Guys called that the 'made-up list.' The made-up list spawned a couple of other terms, the soldiers said: "going cowboy" and "wild, wild west."

"I don't know where they got this from, but the MPs would say it all the time," one of the soldiers said. "MI would drop off a guy who wasn't talking, and the MP would say, 'So looks like I'll be going cowboy on him' or 'Looks like he needs some wild, wild west.'"

The terms meant beatings, they said, and the military intelligence interrogators and private contractors did nothing to discourage them.

Many of the military intelligence interrogators were paired with private contractors from CACI International and with linguists from Titan Inc. The soldiers said most of those employees seemed to operate with autonomy, seemingly answerable to nobody in the command.

M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-o-r-e

2004-05-15T00:38:00.000-06:00

Lewis Black on Michael Moore's film distribution difficulty.

The Payphone Project

2004-05-13T21:22:00.000-06:00

Ever answered a ringing pay phone? Ever called a pay phone just to see who might answer? Letterman used to call payphones and bring the people who answered onto his show.

When Mark Thomas was bored as a teenager, he used to call payphones in the seedy part of town to chat with colorful locals. He started compiling payphone numbers and and publishing them on his web-site, The Payphone Project. The site also features pictures of some of the phones. (Prints available!)

Thomas hoped people would call and talk to random strangers, but soon people were trying to get hold of him. More than a few frantic parents have sought his help after receiving calls from missing children. They knew the number where the call came from, but not the location of the phone. Phone companies will not release lists of payphone numbers, despite the pleas of organizations seeking missing children. Thomas now asks that people send him the numbers of payphones near them to add to the database.

So if you’re bored and fancy a conversation with a potentially colorful random stranger, try calling 303-832-9841, a payphone outside the King Soopers on Capitol Hill in Denver (aka Queen Soopers). Or if you’re feeling civic-minded, jot down the number of your favorite payphone and send it to Mark Thomas.

Black Bush

2004-05-12T02:57:00.000-06:00

M-A-R-S, bitches!

Shocked, Shocked!

2004-05-11T23:24:00.000-06:00

Bush and Blair both claim to be shocked(!) by the allegations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, but they have known about the reports for at least a year. Shocking.

Since April 2003, US authorities in Baghdad have got monthly reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
A senior source at the ICRC said: “It doesn’t matter which report it was, we had been telling the US and UK authorities in Baghdad for over a year about the scale of this [abuse and torture] problem. They had been given 10 or more reports. All detailed the same findings. They knew this had been going on for a year.”

Last week Secretary of State Rumsfeld said he was "stunned", Bush apologised and said he would investigate. Tony Blair said the images were deplorable. Yet all of them knew about this and did nothing until the pics went public.

Whatever Became of 'Responsibility'

2004-05-11T12:47:00.000-06:00

Middle East analyst Fareed Zakaria supported the invasion of Iraq. Now he is beside himself over the refusal of the administration to face the problems its policies have caused. Mostly he seems confounded by the new meaning of the word 'responsibility' embraced by this administration for over three years now.

Zakaria points out the line in the President's stump speech that "America is ushering in a new responsibility era where each of us understands we're responsible for the decisions we make in life." Yet in Mr. Bush's administration, "taking responsibility" never means facing the consequences that accompany accepting blame. Just say, "my bad," and all is forgiven:

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."

Rumsfeld blamed the abuses at Abu Ghraib on a few people. Zakaria agrees, but he has a different set of perps in mind:

Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president's office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world.

Officials at the very top of the administration decided that legal niceties are inconvenient during time of war. The result has been perhaps the country's greatest foreign policy blunder. Zakaria sums it up in brutal fashion:

As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq — troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani — Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong... This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

And while no one in the administration is taking 'responsibility' for all this "arrogance and incompetence," there are lots of folks having the consequences forced upon them. Apparently that's how the "new responsibility era" that Mr. Bush likes to talk about works.

"Bulletproof" Job Security

2004-05-09T10:37:00.000-06:00

"Today our forces in Iraq are undermanned, under-resourced, inadequately trained and poorly supervised. There's a lack of leadership, stemming from the very top.”
- Rep. John Murtha, conservative and highly influential Democrat close to the Pentagon

Democrats are not alone in seeking the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Abu Ghraib represents merely the latest costly blunder to originate in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Republican lawmakers have privately told reporters that they are fed up with [Rumsfeld’s] arrogance and inflexibility, particularly on the issue that Murtha is most angry about -- the administration's failure to provide more troops to secure Iraq, and their own safety, both during and after the invasion.

John Stewart on The Daily Show asked the question on many minds: “Just what the #@%&! does Donald Rumsfeld have to do to get fired?!?”

Bush Gets Al Qaeda Endorsement

2004-05-08T13:33:00.000-06:00

The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, the Al Qaeda-linked group that claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombings earlier this year, issued a statement supporting President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign. The group addresses President Bush directly, telling him it prefers him to win re-election because it would not be possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."

The group went on,

Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation. Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected.

The Bush-Cheney '04 web-site has taken a muted response to the endorsement...

Ghost Detainees update

2004-05-06T20:44:00.000-06:00

Billmon has more on the undocumented prisoners revealed by the Taguba Report.

Ghost Detainees

2004-05-06T12:57:00.000-06:00

Among the more troubling revelations of the Taguba Report on Iraqi prisoner abuse is that some number of "ghost detainees" were/are present at the facility. These are "off the books" prisoners, not assigned numbers, charged, or identified. General Taguba notes that holding prisoners in such an unofficial capacity violates Army doctrine and international law.

Six months ago, Amnesty International cited secret detentions as a factor leading to the sort of abuse documented at Abu Ghraib, as well as to unexplained deaths in Afghanistan.

Extra-legal gulags have been a common feature of our enemies in war. How shameful that we now run such ghoulish places.

Perspective

2004-05-05T12:46:00.000-06:00

Crimping on the Hearts and Minds

2004-05-04T02:18:00.000-06:00

William Kristol announced that Fox News will be celebrating Accomplishment in Iraq Week to try and clear our minds of all the failures. Too bad "accomplishments" are not on the agenda of the administration:

Seven months after Congress approved the largest foreign aid package in history to rebuild Iraq, less than 5 percent of the $18.4 billion has been spent and occupation officials have begun shifting more than $300 million earmarked for reconstruction projects to administrative and security expenses.

Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz blamed the delays on contracting snafus, while State Department official Richard Armitage "refused to make 'excuses'" (which is why he's a second-tier Bushie).

Self-inflicted wound

2004-05-02T22:20:00.000-06:00

More signs that the Abu Ghraib prison abuse stems from policy originating far up the ladder of command.

And the diary of an interrogator working at Abu Ghraib indicates that no response was made to the Taguba report until after the pictures reached the press. It also betrays how poorly one soldier understood what was going on outside the prison walls.

Blame Clinton

2004-05-01T22:32:00.000-06:00

Abu Ghraib

2004-05-01T21:45:00.000-06:00

Seymour Hersh's article, Torture at Abu Ghraib, illustrates that the abuse of prisoners was not merely the actions of a bunch of kids. The failure of command goes well up the ladder, especially to those who failed to properly plan and provide for viable detention facilities. Professor Juan Cole highlights the blowback.

More important is the acceptance of torture as an interrogation tool by U.S. authorities. Aside from the practice being illegal under international law and the Geneva Conventions, it is counter-productive. Intelligence gathered through duress tends to be highly unreliable, along with aggravating tension among already wary Iraqis. How do we distinguish our rule from Saddam's if we run Abu Ghraib in the same manner?

Unfortunately, as David Neiwert points out, the use of torture has been reported in Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo detention center as well. Amnesty International has denounced this pattern of abuse at U.S. detention camps.

While we face an enemy that does not conform to legality, we cannot expect to establish the rule of law by unlawful means. A quote I heard last week bears repeating: "Ignoble means lead to ignoble ends."

Ann the Man Does Popejoy

2004-04-30T00:16:00.000-06:00

Popejoy Hall on the campus of the University of New Mexico has perfect pitch acoustics, a top notch concert theater.

All the better to hear Ann Coulter lie. I'm amused by her "logic" that more people die on American highways than soldiers in Iraq. Nevermind that billions of car trips are made every two weeks on American highways versus the hundred and thirty thousand soldiers in Iraq (nine more dead today). And nevermind that using cars is a necessary function in our society, while invading Iraq was a ill-conceived choice.

Or maybe she is right. Maybe my mostly public school education, including in the building where she was speaking, failed to prepare me for the sort of logic that asserts that a watermelon is smaller than a grape.

Tiny URL

2004-04-27T14:43:00.000-06:00

Tiny URL is pretty cool. You can quickly turn a url like this,

http://www.comedycentral.com/mp/play.php?reposid=/multimedia/chappelle/showclips_s2/204_rickjames2.html

into this,

http://tinyurl.com/3eh3p

Neato.

Hart-Rudman Task Force on Homeland Security

2004-04-24T16:59:00.000-06:00

Report of the Hart-Rudman Task Force and other related resources.

Was there an assassination attempt on Bush on 9/11?

2004-04-24T15:55:00.000-06:00

While looking over this rundown of Bush’s “interesting day,” I noticed this tid-bit.

How did this story not get huge play in late September 2001? As pointed out
in the first link, this was the exact same way General Massoud was assassinated two
days earlier in Afghanistan.

How is a local newspaper the only mention of this? Even if it was just a
coincidence, how did this not become part of the day's folklore. Indeed, the
White House could have used it to explain Bush’s movements later in
the day. Curious.

Letting Zarqawi Live to Kill

2004-04-22T17:28:00.000-06:00

What's more important, bolstering an already tenuous case for invading Iraq, or eliminating a known, extremely dangerous terrorist?

NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

What was to debate?

“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

Along with the ricin lab linked to Zarqawi, he is also blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. "[D]espite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today." But Bush got his invasion, that's the important thing.

Point of Departure

2004-04-20T16:20:00.000-06:00

"What do we do when our TV and newspapers tell us lies but insist we should regard this information as truth? What do we do when the vast majority of people in our society accepts these lies as truths and ridicule us when we call these statements lies?"