Sunday, February 19, 2006

Bush's House of Cards Collapsing

By Bill Gallagher
The frauds and deceptions are unraveling every day and cascading truths are forcing the Busheviks to do more of what they do best: lie. We now have the first eyewitness account from a CIA officer confirming what the reality-based community has long known—that President George W. Bush and company cherry-picked and distorted intelligence to make their phony case for war in Iraq.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were not only aware that the identity of an undercover CIA operative was leaked, we now are learning they ordered the treasonous deed themselves. Oh, yes, another eyewitness account provides the testimony.

Bush lied through his teeth when he said he didn’t even know corrupt former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In fact, Bush met with him personally about a dozen times at the White House, and at countless fund-raisers where Abramoff helped buy the favor-seeking crowd.

Bush forgets warnings of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, but he always remembers the big money people. Bush allowed Abramoff access to the White House and invited him to visit the Crawford ranch. Abramoff has the photos and e-mails to prove it.

The U.S. attorney general denies any wrongdoing and says the president can make his own rules, even when Congress has enacted a federal statute prohibiting warrantless electronic surveillance.

We now know—through another eyewitness account—that Bush and his minions lied about when they were warned about the breach of the New Orleans levees.

It is stunning to realize the lid was blown off all these monumental lies in a single week.

On top of that, our squirmer in chief had to endure Coretta Scott King’s funeral, where he had to listen to criticism of his war and his assaults on the Constitution.

Cheney was forced to leave his bunker and defend lawlessness, declaring that “we have all the legal authority we need” to trample on the Fourth Amendment and wiretap anyone without probable cause or judicial review.

The vice president made his wild assertions on “NewsHour” with Jim Lehrer. Cheney, in a rare interview with someone other than his pal Rush Limbaugh, was in legal limbo, declaring the president can do as he damn well pleases in matters of foreign policy and national security. Congress, Cheney claimed, only has the right to “suggest” in these matters.

A CIA veteran said the Bush administration engaged in the “politicization” of intelligence relating to Iraq. Paul R. Pillar, who recently retired from his post as the CIA’s top counterterrorism analyst, reviewed assessments on Iraq from 15 agencies in the intelligence community.

In an article in “Foreign Affairs” magazine, Pillar provides a scathing indictment of the White House interference, revealing that “it has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made.”

All those Saturday morning visits Cheney and his top aide, “Scooter” Libby, made to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., paid off for the cabal that had already decided to invade Iraq.

“If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war—or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath,” Pillar wrote. “What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policy-makers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades.”

Pillar joins the growing list of truth-tellers: Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief; Paul O’Neill, former secretary of the Treasury and National Security Council member; and Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for former secretary of state Colin Powell. They all say Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld first made the decision to attack Iraq, and then fabricated the reasons and justifications for what they were going to do.

Libby is preparing his defense, which will pivot on a claim that he was just following orders. Murray Waas of the “National Journal,” who did the finest reporting on the CIA leak investigation, has learned that Libby has already testified to a federal grand jury that he was “authorized” by Cheney and other “superiors” to disclose classified information to reporters in order to “defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq.”

Libby’s twin titles at the White House were chief of staff to the vice president and special assistant to the president. Bush and Cheney had to know what Libby was doing. My theory is that Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, had a hand in encouraging the treachery.

Amazingly, the White House has “lost” relevant e-mails, in a clear attempt to impede special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation. Whoever destroyed the e-mails obstructed justice and should be charged.

Bush’s “brain,” Karl Rove, certainly was a key player in the plot to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson for his report debunking the administration’s bogus claim that Saddam Hussein was buying enriched uranium in Niger. That lie was so pivotal in the case for war that the conspiring Busheviks blew Wilson’s wife’s cover.

Waas cites “people with firsthand knowledge of the matter,” indicating that Libby will structure his defense on the argument “that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war.”

After the war began, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the National Intelligence Estimate report, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war. Cheney and his boy in the Oval Office should be indicted for that crime.

“I don’t know him,” Bush said of admitted felon, influence-peddler and bagman for Republican causes, Jack Abramoff. Bush’s amnesia baffled Abramoff. Abramoff wrote in an e-mail to Kim Eisler, national editor of “Washingtonian” magazine, “The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything.”

Hell, Bush forgot the entire year of 1972, when he was supposed to be reporting for Air National Guard meetings in Alabama. He still can’t remember why he skipped his required pilot’s flight physical.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales forgot the Constitution when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the administration’s illegal searches. Gonzales sounded more like a mob mouthpiece than our nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Without being required to take an oath swearing to speak the truth—courtesy of the shameless committee chairman, Arlen Specter, and the other gutless knaves on the panel—Gonzales ducked and weaseled as he defended the indefensible. A New York Times editorial aptly described his performance as “a daylong display of cynical hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling.”

The soft-spoken Gonzales is, in fact, an advocate of monarchical powers for the president, and should be fitted with the brown shirt his fondness for fascism merits. He, too, should be indicted.

Michael “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” Brown, the disgraced former FEMA director, got his licks in, blaming top White House staffers for the disgracefully delayed response to Hurricane Katrina.

Brown—who did take an oath to tell the truth—appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last week. Brown said it was “baloney” for Department of Homeland Security officials to claim they only learned of the extent of the flooding in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30. Brown testified that, the day before, he had informed senior White House officials of the unfolding disaster and the dire need for more help from the federal government. He said he probably spoke with Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, and he may have informed chief of staff Andrew Card of his concerns.

Either the White House staffers did not inform the president about the crisis—in which case, they should have been fired—or they did and he did nothing. The latter is more plausible. Bush was in California at a political fund-raiser and probably just shrugged off the warning. Recall, his staff had to sit him down to show him videos of the devastation, because “Bubble Boy” had not bothered to watch it on live television.

Bush works to frustrate our freedom on every level, especially with his incessant lying and isolation from the reality of the horrible failures his deceit and incompetence have wrought.

Friday, February 17, 2006

The Enemy

By William Rivers Pitt
Friday 17 February 2006

They called it “Cyber Storm,” and it was a war-game exercise run last week by the Department of Homeland Security. The war game had nothing to do with testing the security of our shipping ports, borders, infrastructure or airports. “Cyber Storm” was testing the government’s ability to withstand an onslaught of information and protest from bloggers and online activists.

“Participants confirmed,” wrote the Associated Press, that “parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose “Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events.”

Say what? Online expressions of political opinion are so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security must war-game scenarios to deal with them? Bloggers are potential terrorists now? Bloggers are the enemy? Last week, as far as DHS was concerned, they were.

We hear a great deal about enemies these days. Don’t criticize the war, or you’ll embolden the enemy. The enemy is clever and cruel. Stick with the White House and we’ll defeat the enemy. Since the Bush administration no longer likes to mention the name Osama bin “Stayin’ Alive” Laden in public, lest everyone remember a dramatic promise long broken, any specific definition of an enemy changes with the moment.

Sometimes, the enemy is in Iraq, and we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Sometimes, the enemy is in Iran, allegedly toiling with all its collective might to manufacture nuclear weapons. Sometimes, the enemy is in Palestine, where Hamas used George W. Bush’s exported democracy to take over the government. Sometimes, the enemy is an American face on a television offering criticism of the White House. Last week, the enemy was a blogger making a political expression.

The enemy is never in Saudi Arabia, though that nation is the very birthing bed of international terrorism. The enemy is never in Israel, though that nation’s far-right leadership has been a good deal of the impetus behind the Bush administration’s calamitous push into Iraq. The enemy is never in China, even when they smack our planes out of the sky, because they own a substantial portion of our debt. The enemy is never in Pakistan, though that nation’s fundamentalist wing allies itself with the Taliban, and though they actually do possess nuclear weapons. The enemy is occasionally mentioned as being in North Korea, but not often, because we want no part of that fight.

For a time, the enemy was in the United Arab Emirates. Two of the hijackers of the September 11 aircraft were citizens of the United Arab Emirates, and the funding behind those attacks was wired through the UAE’s banking system. Republican and Democratic Senators believe the UAE has been used as a conduit for the proliferation of nuclear technology.

That was then, however. A company named Dubai Ports World intends to spend $6.8 billion to gain control of the management of shipping ports in New York and New Jersey, as well as in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami. Dubai Ports World is foreign-owned, but is backed financially by the government of the United Arab Emirates. In other words, a nation suspected of being a significant player in the September 11 attacks is being allowed to take control of our borders. For the record, US ports handle an estimated two billion tons of cargo annually, with only 5% of that cargo undergoing inspection. The deal has already been granted regulatory clearance by the White House.

We hear a great deal about enemies, both real and contrived. Let us ponder, for a moment, the existence of another enemy so insidious that it operates fully in daylight but beyond control. This enemy seeks to destroy the rule of constitutional law in the United States. This enemy seeks to destroy the seed-corn defense against tyranny in this nation, the separation of powers. This enemy gathers more and more power to itself to achieve these goals, and uses fear and division to do so. This enemy will lie with impunity, stonewall endlessly and ruin anyone who might disrupt its plans.

This enemy stood by and did nothing while a major American city was devoured by the ocean. When New Orleans was drowned, many voices were raised in panicked unison that the White House must do something, and do something now. A conference call was held between key members of the Department of Homeland Security and other administration officials on August 29th, the day the catastrophe began for real. Investigators are seeking the transcript of this call, but administration officials claim the transcript has somehow disappeared. There are many transcripts of calls before and after this one, but the five-hour call on August 29th, the specific call investigators want to see, simply cannot be found.

This enemy deliberately reached out and destroyed the career of a deep-cover CIA agent named Valerie Plame, because her husband dared to criticize the White House about its “uranium from Niger” lie regarding Iraq. Plame, among other things, worked clandestinely to track any person, group or nation that would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists; in other words, Plame worked to track the individuals this White House never fails to label as the enemy. Her work was derailed and her network destroyed because this White House did not want any discussion of the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, despite miles of claims that the stuff was there.

TruthOut correspondent Jason Leopold reported this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is refusing to turn over incriminating emails to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, emails that allegedly indicate the involvement of Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials in the unmasking of Agent Plame. “The emails Gonzales is said to be withholding contained references to Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity and CIA status and developments related to the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” reported Leopold. “Moreover, according to sources, the emails contained suggestions by the officials on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments [Plame’s husband] Joseph Wilson had been making about the administration’s pre-war Iraq intelligence.”

I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was recently indicted by Fitzgerald for lying under oath during the investigation into this matter. Recently, Libby stated that he was authorized by his superiors to expose the classified name of Valerie Plame. Given his position, Libby’s main superior is none other than Cheney himself. Cheney recently claimed that he is authorized by an Executive Order to declassify any information he pleases. “I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions,” said Cheney this week. “There’s an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.”

This is a new trend for the White House: rendering an illegal act legal retroactively by fiat. The trend manifested itself in another area of illegal activity by the White House, the warrantless wiretapping of thousands of American citizens by the National Security Agency, in defiance of the black-letter law contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. For several weeks now, Congress has been threatening to hold hearings on the matter. Bush advisor Karl Rove worked feverishly behind the scenes to keep such hearings from taking place, and has succeeded. Rather than investigate the matter, Congress will instead rewrite the FISA law, thus rendering retroactively legal White House activities that blatantly broke the law.

We hear a great deal about enemies these days, and many of them are quite real and quite perilous. It is difficult to imagine a more perilous enemy, however, than the one operating out of Washington today. This enemy would set itself on high, beyond control or censure, and create of itself that permanent faction James Madison so earnestly warned us of. This enemy deletes or hides evidence of its calumny, or simply alters existing laws that would otherwise derail its plans. This enemy destroys lives out of hand, lives by the tens of thousands, and reaps a pretty profit in the process.

The difference between the enemies we hear about and the one in Washington is simple and deadly: only the enemy in Washington can annihilate the constitutional government we have enjoyed for more than two centuries. The idea that is America cannot be terminated by terrorists or rogue states. Were the nation entire to be somehow obliterated, the idea that is America would endure. Only its keepers can kill it completely. They are well on their way.

“As nightfall does not come at once,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas, “neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become victims of the darkness.”

We must deal with the enemy within the halls of our government, the enemy whose power to destroy far outstrips any enemy beyond our borders. In doing so, we save that which is unique in the world. In doing so, we deal a death blow to all other enemies. In doing so, we save ourselves from that darkness. 

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Ex-CIA official rips war case

Says Iraq data distorted to sway public
Cam Simpson
Chicago Tribune
February 11, 2006

WASHINGTON—The former CIA official charged with managing the U.S. government’s secret intelligence assessments on Iraq says the Bush administration chose war first and then misleadingly used raw data to assemble a public case for its decision to invade.

Paul Pillar, who was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, said the Bush administration also played on the nation’s fears in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein’s regime even though intelligence agencies had not produced a single analysis supporting “the notion of an alliance” between the two.

Instead, Pillar writes in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, connections were drawn between the terrorists and Iraq because “the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the `war on terror’ and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country’s militant post-9/11 mood.”

The specific critiques in Pillar’s 4,500-word essay, titled, “Intelligence, Policy and the War in Iraq,” are not new. But it apparently is the first time such attacks are being publicly leveled by such a high-ranking intelligence official directly involved behind the scenes--before, during and after the invasion of Iraq nearly three years ago.

Because of his position, Pillar would have had access to, and likely intimate knowledge about, virtually every piece of Iraq-related intelligence maintained across all agencies within the U.S. government.

Pillar also wrote in his essay that the administration went to war without first considering any strategic-level intelligence assessments “on any aspect of Iraq” and that the intelligence community foreshadowed many post-Hussein woes, though the findings were largely ignored before the March 2003 invasion.

Excerpts from Pillar’s article were first reported by The Washington Post on Friday. Foreign Affairs released a copy of the essay later in the day.

Pillar, a career intelligence official, retired from the CIA last year and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

The administration responds

The White House did not respond specifically to Pillar’s charges Friday, but Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council, did point to previous administration statements defending its use of intelligence.

The administration first went on the offensive last fall in an effort to thwart what President Bush, in a Veteran’s Day speech, called a “deeply irresponsible” effort “to rewrite the history of how that war began.”

Jones said Friday that the administration’s prewar statements “about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community.”

But in his essay, the man responsible for coordinating the intelligence community’s collective view of Iraq directly challenged the notion that the prevailing wisdom within the nation’s spy services supported the decision to invade. In fact, Pillar wrote, “If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war .”

He also wrote that the Bush administration “used intelligence not to inform decision-making but to justify a decision already made"--to topple Hussein’s regime.

In making its case, the administration aggressively promoted pieces of “intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war,” Pillar said.

He also said: “This meant selectively adducing data--`cherry-picking’--rather than using the intelligence community’s own analytic judgments.”

Pillar’s allegations about the public use of selective intelligence on Iraq comes in the wake of news that Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his bosses to leak classified information about Iraq in summer 2003 to defend the administration’s case for war. The statement about Libby’s secret testimony was contained in court papers filed in connection with his obstruction-of-justice case.

Misleading statements

Although he acknowledged the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities, Pillar said that intelligence “was not what led to the war.” And he saved some of his sharpest criticisms for the administration’s repeated public statements in 2002 and 2003 about “links” between Iraq and Al Qaeda--statements that have been repeated despite findings from the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no collaborative relationship between the two.

“The issue of possible ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda was especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a public case for war,” Pillar wrote. “In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be `linked’ to almost anyone else if enough effort is made . . . . [But] the intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda.”

He said the administration constantly pressed for more data to support the purported link, just one way it politically influenced the outcome.

“Feeding the administration’s voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-Al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention at multiple levels, from rank-and-file counterterrorism analysts to the most senior intelligence officials,” he wrote. “It is fair to ask how much other counterterrorism work was left undone as a result.”

Although he acknowledged analysts were not strong-armed by anyone in the administration to bolster the case for war, Pillar said intelligence officials were more subtly influenced.

Analysts, who often measure success by the attention they receive from policymakers, “felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious,” he said.

He also said he never received a request from any administration policymaker for any assessments of Iraq “until a year into the war.”

Nicholas Cullather, the former official historian for the CIA who now teaches at Indiana University, said the article represents a defense of the longstanding tradition within the CIA of maintaining a strict separation between intelligence analysis and policymaking.

But Cullather said that tradition has long been aggressively opposed by officials who now hold senior positions in the Bush administration.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Muffled warnings on global warming

By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe
February 4, 2006

THE BURNING issue was the thin ice encrusted on the boulders. The rocks were half-submerged in a small stream at the foot of the White Mountains in Maine. Ribbons of water swirled around them, propelled by two days of nonstop rain.

That was the first problem. It was mid-January. In northern New England, the rain usually would have been a foot of snow. The boulders would have been smothered into giant marshmallows. This aberration was amplified by the seductive warmth in Boston. For the first time in about a quarter century of Januarys, I jogged around the Charles River on consecutive weekends in shorts. The only true blast of winter I have felt this season was with my Scouts, snowshoeing in the White Mountains to 2,700 feet.

The coup de ice came at the end of January when NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen, said Bush administration minions were muffling his warnings on global warming. Hansen said officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in recent months have canceled or rejected interview requests for him and appointed monitors for approved interviews. He reportedly was ordered last fall to remove preliminary information from the Internet that said last year might be the warmest year on record. Last week, NASA announced that 2005 was indeed the warmest on record.

‘’In my three decades in government, I’ve never seen control of communications to the public so constrained,” Hansen said over the phone this week. ‘’Communications from government scientists have never been so constrained.”

Hansen, 63, said NASA, which denies any censorship, seemed particularly petrified by a December speech he gave in San Francisco before other earth and space scientists. He said of the nation’s stonewalling on climate change, ‘’It seems to me that special interests have been a roadblock wielding undue influence over policymakers. The special interests seek to maintain short-term profits with little regard to either the long-term impact on the planet that will be inherited by our children and grandchildren or the long-term economic well-being of our country.”

Hansen said ‘’business as usual” will lead to a ‘’different planet.” The temperature will rise about 5 degrees Fahrenheit over this century to a warmth not seen for 3 million years, a time when sea levels were eight stories higher than today. The human-induced melting of polar ice could bring those eight stories of water back in mere centuries, not a more natural timing of many thousands of years.

Hansen said we can beat the tipping point for runaway change if the United States leads global efforts to limit or eliminate greenhouse gases and pollutants. There is no margin for business as usual. ‘’We can’t afford to wait another 10 years,” he said.

It appears we will lose more time. In his State of the Union address, Bush said, ‘’America is addicted to oil,” but did not mention the top first step environmentalists and scientists say the United States must take to fight global warming—higher fuel efficiency for cars. He said he wanted to support more math and science for schoolchildren and more research in the physical sciences.

But if his minions ignore and stifle the best scientists we have today, there is no point.

In the early days of the Bush administration, Hansen’s credentials earned him two invitations to address Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive, industry-packed energy task force. He spoke two years ago to US auto executives at ExxonMobil headquarters.

The White House went on to urge energy drilling at all costs. Auto execs rebuffed Hansen on fuel efficiency by saying they only give consumers what they want. ‘’After the meeting, I watched TV and saw all these ads, with cars on top of mountain peaks and fantastic vistas of the American West,” Hansen said. ‘’It’s like the cigarette ads that use sex to sell. All the average person does with an SUV is commute to work or the store. They’re creating a market they claim the public is demanding.”

Listening to Hansen, it was clear he will continue to speak out for science despite the special interests. He said the last time he checked, democracy only works when the public is well informed. ‘’For instance, they’re using the economy as the reason not to consider taking action,” Hansen said. ‘’I’ve been chastised for being a scientist saying we are damaging the economy in the long run. But you need to look at the broad problem. I think I’m free to do so and free to have my opinion.”

The melting polar ice and the thin ice cap on the river boulder in Maine wait for America to listen to the right opinion. The ice cube is the new canary warning of doom. If we do not listen, it will melt in one place, and drown us in another.