Despite Warnings, U.S. Leans on Syria

Not surprisingly, Bush stays the course of regime change in Syria despite loud voices from the Arab world and even Israel worried about a fundamentalist regime emerging in Syria that will most likely to support the Iraqi insurgency.
Los Angeles Times

The Bush administration has embarked on an effort to build strong international pressure on Syria despite warnings from some Arab leaders and Israelis that doing so could lead to a chaotic collapse or even the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Damascus, U.S. officials say. American diplomats have been trying to enlist other nations to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad as the United Nations weighs how to respond to an investigator's report implicating top Syrian officials in the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. MORE

But it does seem that even Bush knows he has limits and needs the support of the Security Council, however, the saber rattling begins because military enforcement is authorized! Shades of Iraqi war preparations.
MSNBC.com

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Monday demanding Syria’s full cooperation with a U.N. investigation into the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister and warning of possible “further action” if it doesn’t. The United States, France and Britain pressed for the resolution following last week’s tough report by the U.N. investigating commission, which implicated top Syrian and Lebanese security officials in the Feb. 14 bombing that killed Rafik Hariri and 20 others. The report also accused Syria of not cooperating fully with the inquiry.


The three co-sponsors agreed to drop a direct threat of sanctions against Syria in order to get support from Russia and China, which opposed sanctions while the investigation is still under way. Nonetheless, the resolution was adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which is militarily enforceable. MORE

But perhaps Assad has some options left for him, assuming he is as ruthless as his father and willing to risk a quick consolidation of power followed by rapid moderation of political policies.
The Daily Star

The political storm caused by the Mehlis report into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has, paradoxically, provided Syria's President Bashar Assad with a golden opportunity. For the first time since he came to power in 2000, he has a unique chance to impose his authority on rival power centers and emerge as the real ruler of Syria.


In their different ways, both the international community and his own public are urging him to act. They are encouraging him to carry out a "corrective movement" against undisciplined barons of his regime, including men close to him, similar to the palace coup which brought his late father, Hafez Assad, to power in 1970. The choice before Assad is clear: either continue to claim that Syria is innocent of the murder of Hariri and that the charges in the Mehlis report are unsound and politically motivated or recognize that mistakes have been made and carry out a purge of the top security officials named in the report.


The first course would inevitably condemn the regime to international isolation and to wide-ranging sanctions, including the freezing of overseas assets of its leading members, a travel ban, and possibly even the issue of international arrest warrants. A destabilized Syria would then be vulnerable to attempts at "regime change" by its enemies.


In contrast, the second course would stabilize the country and the wider region, and win Assad immediate domestic and international support. But to manage a crisis of such unprecedented proportions, Assad would need to display unusual qualities of courage and political acumen. This is the most difficult moment in the president's career. Moreover, he is under pressure to act fast. It is likely that the window of opportunity will be open for only the next few weeks. The United Nations has given Mehlis until December 15 to complete his investigations and submit a more detailed report. Within this limited time-frame, Assad will enjoy a certain freedom of maneuver, largely for the following reasons:


First, although the Mehlis report confirmed his quarrel with Hariri, it did not suggest that he was personally implicated in the murder; second, members of the Security Council have asked Syria to conduct its own investigation into the murder, which Damascus has, in fact, now agreed to do so. This is a clear signal from the international community urging Assad to act; third, tens of thousands of people came out on the streets of Damascus, Aleppo and other cities last week in support of Assad. Although it was not clear whether the demonstrations were organized by the security services, the Baath Party or Assad's own men, the message was clear. The public wants the president to show strength to protect the country from enemies abroad and wild men at home; fourth, even the so-called "patriotic opposition" is ready to back the president against external, largely American, pressures, if he undertakes to clean up corruption and crime, rein in the security services, and give more space to civil rights activists; and fifth, by far the most important factor in Assad's favor is the support he appears to enjoy from the commanders of Syria's armored and mechanized divisions, and from the elite Republican Guard. Among staunch Assad loyalists, for example, is Manaf Tlass, a prominent officer in the Republican Guard, and the son of the former long-serving Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass.


The Syrian Army is a highly secretive organization. The names of the most influential and powerful officers are largely unknown. But the army remains the guardian of the state's legitimacy. Its chiefs were not implicated in the Mehlis report. They obeyed the political leadership in withdrawing from Lebanon. Today, they have a vital role in defending the country's institutions, including the presidency itself.


Observers of the Syrian scene believe that the backing of these men could allow Assad to face down his younger brother, Maher, who commands a powerful praetorian unit, the 4th Corps, which controls the immediate approaches to the capital. If a confrontation were to occur between the brothers, it would be a replay of the clash in 1984 between Assad and his younger brother Rifaat, who at the time also commanded a powerful unit known as the Defense Companies. That confrontation ended in Hafez Assad's triumph and Rifaat's eventual exile.


This is a moment of great fluidity in Syrian affairs. The present situation is untenable. The country is expecting some sort of a showdown between rival forces. In these difficult times, the inclination is to keep one's head down and not take sides. For example, leading luminaries of the Baath Party have not spoken. The new Regional Command formed after the party congress last summer has so far not issued a statement in support of Assad, who is the party's secretary-general. MORE

Control of the government and the military makes him stronger than he is now. Could he then afford to decentralize power and work towards elections? We can only wait and see.

Has the Election in Iraq Made Things Worse?

The election appears to have further polarized the populous in Iraq. Why is there no news of this in the mainstream media?
Informed Comment

Al-Hayat: Northern Iraq is a sectarian tinderbox after Saturday's massive car bombing of a Shiite village near Baqubah in the mixed Diyalah province. The Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) called for calm and avoidance of reprisal killings, seeing the bombing of the Shiites and the killing of 25 Mahdi Army militiamen in an ambush in Baghdad on Friday by Sunni Arabs as steps toward sectarian civil war. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Shiite Badr Corps militia is denying any link to the assassination last week of Saadoun al-Janabi, a defense lawyer for one of Saddam's relatives.


Some 51 clan elders from the Sunni Arab and Kurdish families of Mosul agreed with policemen in the city that they will return it to the control of armed guerrillas if the Interior Ministry implemented its decision to fire Ninevah's police chief, Ahmad Muhammad al-Juburi, who is accused of corruption. Hundreds of armed men surrounded the provincial headquarters on Saturday evening to protest al-Juburi's firing. US troops stopped the protesters from storming the building. The armed protesters, including police and civilians, surrounded a number of government buildings. They shouted through megaphones, complaining of Kurdish domination of provincial offices.


The clan leaders complained in a letter to Jaafari that no official investigation of al-Juburi had been carried out. They threatened to turn the city into a hotbed of insurgency.


Al-Juburi himself charged on Saturday that Kurds and Shiite Arabs had connived at his dismissal because they hoped to roil the province and therefore keep its 1.7 million inhabitants, a majority of them Sunni Arabs, from voting in large numbers in the December 15 parliamentary elections. He warned that they would follow the same tactics in Salahuddin and Anbar Provinces (other Sunni Arab strongholds).


Mosul exploded with violence in November of 2004 when 4,000 policemen suddenly resigned and masked gunmen emerged to police the city of over a million (Iraq's third-largest). The current situation seems so tense that there is a danger of the repetition of that scenario, which helped prevent Sunni Arabs from being properly represented in parliament, since it threw Ninevah into chaos.


Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that many Sunni Arabs in Ninevah are convinced that their province actually defeated the constitution by a 2/3s margin in the Oct. 15 referendum, and that the constitution was therefore in reality shot down and is illegitimate.

A large number of Sunnis believe the constitution referendum was stolen by the Shiites. Election observers did indeed find more votes for the constitution from areas expected to be staunchly against it.
Iraq edges closer to civil war, which will quickly escalate to regional war, which will put in harms way all the oil in the Middle East!

Breaking: Bush Selects Alito for Supreme Court

Cowed by a mutiny in his own party, Bush goes for his base. I think we'll see a brawl on this guy.
Bush Selects Alito for Supreme Court

President Bush today named appeals court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito, 55, serves on the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where his record on abortion rights and church-state issues has been widely applauded by conservatives and criticized by liberals.
Alito, appointed to the appeals court in 1990 by George H.W. Bush, has been a regular for years on the White House's short list for the high court. He was also among those proposed by conservative intellectuals as an alternative to Harriet Miers, the White House counsel who withdrew as the nominee last week.


The Washington Post's Fred Barbash followed the step-by-step process of choosing a new chief justice. He'll continue to blog all of the events as President Bush nominates a candidate for associate justice.

[...]
Alito's resume, including his service in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, is very much unlike Miers's, who had no appellate experience, and very much like that of Chief Justice John Roberts. Like Roberts, Alito served during the Reagan administration in the office of the Solicitor General, which argues on behalf of the government in the Supreme Court. Unlike Roberts, he has opined from the bench on both abortion rights, church-state separation and gender discrimination to the pleasure of conservatives and displeasure of liberals.


While he has been dubbed "Scalito" by some lawyers for a supposed affinity to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his Italian-American heritage, most observers believe that greatly oversimplifies his record. Alito is considered far less provocative a figure than Scalia both in personality and judicial temperament. His opinions and dissents tend to be dryly analytical rather than slashing.


In addition, his appeals court record is not uniformly conservative on the sorts of issues that arise in Supreme Court confirmation battles. In 2004, he ruled in favor of a complaint brought under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act by a boy badly bullied by his classmates who was seeking legal relief but had been rebuffed by a U.S. District Court. He also authored a majority opinion granting federal court review to an African American who could not get state courts to hear his claim of racial bias on the part of a juror in his trial. The case involved a juror who used racial epithets outside the confines of the jury room. His record on the appeals court makes Alito less liable to suggestions made about Roberts, with only two years as a judge, that he is somehow a judicial mystery.


Rather, liberals are likely to focus on his opinions and dissents, most notably in the 1991 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In that case, Alito joined joined a Third Circuit panel in upholding most of a Pennsylvania law imposing numerous restrictions on women seeking abortions. The law, among other things, required physicians to advise women of the potential medical dangers of abortion and tell them of the alternatives available. It also imposed a 24-hour waiting period for abortions and barred minors from obtaining abortions without parental consent. The panel, in that same ruling, struck down a single provision in the law requiring women to notify their husband's before they obtained an abortion. Alito dissented from that part of the decision. Citing previous opinions of O'Connor, Alito wrote that an abortion regulation is unconstitutional only if it imposes an undue burden on a woman's access to the procedure. The spousal notification provision, he wrote, does not constitute such a burden and must therefore only meet the requirement that it be rationally related to some legitimate government purpose.

[...]
While lauded by conservatives, Alito has also been criticized by women's rights organizations for his 1996 dissent in a sex discrimination case, Sheridan v. Dupont , in which he argued that the Third Circuit that had made it too easy for discrimination complaints to reach a jury trial. The standards for deciding when a discrimination case reaches trial are hotly controversial as they determine whether such a case moves forward at all.

Case not closed on Cheney's role

There has been much speculation about what Fitzgerald's continuing investigation means. The initial mainstream media response was that while Rove was still not out of the woods, it was unlikely the indictments would go further. Yet the evidence of conspiracy, though circumstantial, is compelling.
The Seattle Times

Vice President Dick Cheney appears as no more than a background character in the indictment of his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Yet even that secondary role raises questions about whether Cheney played any part in the alleged effort to discredit an administration critic.


Indeed, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said emphatically Friday that, "We make no allegation that the vice president committed any criminal act."


But as the Libby case moves forward, it is likely to focus more attention on the vice president's position as one of the most-powerful behind-the-scenes figures in government.


The five-count federal indictment says Cheney talked to Libby about the fact that Valerie Plame — the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador and administration critic — was a CIA operative. And it suggests that Cheney was close by his chief of staff as Libby took some of the actions that led to the charges of lying and obstruction of justice. MORE

I can't believe Libby acted without Cheney. Juan Cole calls for his resignation.
Informed Comment

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney told Irving Lewis Libby about Plame working for the CIA. Although both Cheney and Libby had security clearances, it is not the case that any two persons with such clearances may properly share any information at will. Classified information is disseminated on a need to know basis and for specific security-related purposes. For Cheney to bandy about classified information merely as a form of office gossip or for partisan political purposes, even with other government officials, is unethical and poor tradecraft at the very least, and would get any junior CIA case officer fired. So surely the same should apply to the vice president of the United States at a time of war.

Emptywheel makes a compelling circumstantial case for conspiracy.
The Next Hurrah

The Barton Gellman article I mentioned this morning has been edited to remove the following italicized bit:

On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.


Libby talked to Miller and Cooper. That same day, another administration official who has not been identified publicly returned a call from Walter Pincus of The Post. He "veered off the precise matter we were discussing" and told him that Wilson's trip was a "boondoggle" set up by Plame, Pincus has written in Nieman Reports.

Apparently, someone doesn't want us to know that Dick Cheney was actively involved in pushing journalists toward that morning's press gaggle.


[...]the competing stories suggest we may have a cast of characters involved in drafting Tenet's speech to include information that may not have been declassified. If Tenet and Hadley and Rove and Libby and Dick and Ari and Condi were all involved in this statement and the subsequent peddling of the story in it, who is responsible for the unauthorized leak, if one occurred?


Perhaps it doesn't matter. Because when you've got such a cast of characters as you have here, that's when you begin to talk about criminal conspiracy.

Cheney's office operated by committee to put together a letter from Tenet taking responsibility for the false report on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium in Niger. It seems unlikely Libby operated alone to out Plame. Now if it can be shown that WHIG already had sufficient doubt about the Niger info, and that bit of false information was placed in Powell's speach deliberately, then I think we have a conspiracy case for defrauding the United States.

10 Reasons Bill Moyers Should Be President

10 Reasons Bill Moyers Should Be President
Very interesting, well worth the read. And you know, I agree with him. I can't think of a better choice.
But could it really happen? He has baggage that will be thrown at him without mercy. Will he want the job? Unfortunately the personal sacrifices involved make it a job only the power hungry want it. I doubt he could relish it enough. But who knows? He sure is pissed off about Bush. Maybe that's enough.

Al-Sistani Said to be Weighing a Demand for US Pullout

mercurynews.com

Iraq's top Shiite cleric is considering demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and foreign troops after a democratically elected government takes office next year, according to associates of the Iranian-born cleric.


If the Americans and their coalition partners do not comply, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani would use peaceful means such as mass street protests to step up pressure for a pullout schedule, according to two associates of the cleric.

Sistani has been looking for the right opportunity. That is why he's refused to meet with Americans. He wants to be sure he looks like the leader that threw the bums out! And after the US leaves, he will encourage the Iranians to help out, something they offered to do months ago.

De la Vega: Bush's War, a Case of Presidential Fraud

TomDispatch.com has a very interesting post today. He presents an article by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega that will appear on the cover of The Nation. She makes what appears to be, from the point of view of a lay person, a credible legal argument that Bush conspired with his Administration to defraud the United States by presenting a false argument to go to war. Very interesting stuff!

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in June, 52% of Americans now believe the President deliberately distorted intelligence to make a case for war. In an Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and completed October 9, 50% said that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war Congress should consider impeaching him. The President's deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States.


So what do citizens do? First, they must insist that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence complete Phase II of its investigation, which was to be an analysis of whether the administration manipulated or misrepresented prewar intelligence. The focus of Phase II was to determine whether the administration misrepresented the information it received about Iraq from intelligence agencies. Second, we need to convince Congress to demand that the Justice Department appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the administration's deceptions about the war, using the same mechanism that led to the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame. (As it happens, Congressman Jerrold Nadler and others have recently written to Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. pointing out that the Plame leak is just the "tip of the iceberg" and asking that Fitzgerald's authority be expanded to include an investigation into whether the White House conspired to mislead the country into war.)


Third, we can no longer shrink from the prospect of impeachment. Impeachment would require, as John Bonifaz, constitutional attorney, author of Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush and co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, has explained, that the House pass a "resolution of inquiry or impeachment calling on the Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into whether grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach George W. Bush." If the committee found such grounds, it would draft articles of impeachment and submit them to the full House for a vote. If those articles passed, the President would be tried by the Senate. Resolutions of inquiry, such as already have been introduced by Representatives Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich demanding that the Administration produce key information about its decision-making, could also lead to impeachment.

Plamegate and Yellow Journalism

Everyone seems to overstate or understate the damage done by the outing of Valerie Plame. Yeah, there has been some hype about damage to national security. But why leave out the real damage done, because it's not sexy enough?
JustOneMinute

Bob Woodward addressed that point on Larry King last night:

WOODWARD: ... They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson's wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone and there was just some embarrassment.

Maybe no one was killed, and no one had to move. The word embarrassment however appears to be a gross understatement of the facts. Woodward has been one of the insider journalists for Bush and, I think, acting as one of his apologists lately. Certainly, there is very little we know about the "embarrassment", but there is some information around. Here is what I know about it:
Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country

The outing of Valerie Plame in the column of Robert Novak has now led to the resignation of Jim Pavitt from the CIA. Mr. Pavitt was Valerie Plame’s superior. His work has been devastated by this catastrophic security leak, and he has apparently chosen to resign as a result.

[...]
The names on the NOC list are among the greatest secrets possessed by our country, and the leaking of this particular name ... has blinded us to the actions of Iran as they are in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Certainly sounds like more than embarrassment here. At least two career officers in the CIA have had a decade of work thrown in the trash. How many of Plame's international contacts lost credibility, are no longer trusted, and have had their career ended or at least severely restricted by this disclosure? I'd bet quite a few. As for Iran's nuclear plans, we didn't have much to start with, while we may be only a little more "blind" now, it would seem unwise to close off ANY channel to this country.
Then there is the problem of the safety of Plame herself:
Informed Comment

I was struck by the information that Plame Wilson has had death threats from al-Qaeda, and that the CIA has declined to offer her any special protection even though she still works there.


So the Bush administration is throwing our own counter-proliferation intelligence operatives to al-Qaeda by outing them, and Porter Goss refuses even to provide any security? Oh, yeah, we're going to recruit a lot of capable, competent people into counter-terrorism after this.

Much more than embarrassment I'd say. Wouldn't you say National Security was affected? Don't you think every CIA employee is thinking they better be sure the information they pass along is politically correct to the Bush Administration or they might be next? That means, the effectiveness of the CIA has been compromised for the next three years! Yes, there is MUCH more than embarrassment here.

Maybe Libby Can Try An Insanity Defense

Libby's actions alleged in the indictment simply don't make sense. Clearly he was trying to protect Cheney. But he built an undeniable trail directly to himself, he told unbelievable lies, and he's still claiming innocence? Just what is he thinking. Tom Maguire says it well:
JustOneMinute

Finally, Libby's general story - he learned about Plame from reporters - was daft. Libby had multiple conversations with government officials (State, CIA, the VP, Ari Fleischer) involving Plame. Did he think they would *all* forget when they talked to investigators? If I weren't reading his testimony, I would not believe he had gone down this road.

[...]
Look, *if* Libby is not insane (likely, actually) and *if* he turned down a plea deal (do we know that?), he must think he can defend this case. But how?

Why the Outing of Plame Is Important

With all the attention riveted on Fitzgerald news conference about the indictment of Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice President Cheney. Fitz is clearly a very competent man. Scooter Libby is the sacrificial lamb for Cheney.
I have to believe that Libby was doing the bidding of his boss. That is why he lied to cover Cheney as the source of the information about Plame. I also believe Rove is Official "A" listed in the document, so do many news sources:
Yahoo! News

It has been known that columnist Robert Novak spoke to Rove on July 9, 2003, saying he planned to report over the weekend that Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, had worked for the CIA. Rove told the columnist he had heard similar information.


Friday's indictment says "Official A" is a "senior official in the White House who advised Libby on July 10 or 11 of 2003" about a chat with Novak about his upcoming column in which Plame would be identified as a CIA employee.


Late Friday, three people close to the investigation, each asking to remain unidentified because of grand jury secrecy, identified Rove as Official A.

During major events, some important news sneaks by. How many people have you heard say the outing of Plame was no big deal? Juan Cole would beg to differ.
Informed Comment

I think this interview by Wolf Blitzer with Larry Johnson on CNN's Situation Room on Wednesday is extremely important and worry that it may be missed. I'm quoting some excerpts below. I was struck by the information that Plame Wilson has had death threats from al-Qaeda, and that the CIA has declined to offer her any special protection even though she still works there.


So the Bush administration is throwing our own counter-proliferation intelligence operatives to al-Qaeda by outing them, and Porter Goss refuses even to provide any security? Oh, yeah, we're going to recruit a lot of capable, competent people into counter-terrorism after this.


At one point former CIA officer Larry Johnson slams Clifford May as "not credible." May, a far rightwing Zionist, has been a hatchet man for the Neocons, smearing Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of Valerie Plame Wilson, with innuendo and half-truths. The principle on American television news (aside from Fox, which gets a pass because Rupert Murdoch is so rich and crazy) is that some sort of partisan balance has to be maintained. So Johnson's going after May required Wolf to step in to defend May's credibility, since he didn't have a guest on to counter Johnson.


Johnson's anger and bitterness, as a US intelligence professional, about the damage done by Rove and Libby in leaking Plame's name to the press for petty political advantage, are well worth considering.

Then read this article from Whitley Strieber. Now read Juan's background article in Salon. MORE

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Calls For The Destruction of Israel

washingtonpost.com

Leaders around the world on Thursday condemned a call by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel be "wiped off the map," and a top Iranian official said that mass demonstrations in his country on Friday would rebuff the rising criticism from abroad.
"I have never come across a situation of the president of a country saying they want to . . . wipe out another country," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a summit outside London of the 25 leaders of the European Union's member states. Blair said Ahmadinejad's comment was "completely and totally unacceptable."


In a joint statement, the E.U. leaders "condemned in the strongest terms" the Iranian president's call, saying it "will cause concern about Iran's role in the region and its future intentions." President Jacques Chirac of France told reporters that Ahmadinejad risked Iran "being left on the outside of other nations." Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Israel, called the Iranian president's statement "unacceptable."

I find it hard to believe that another world leader can be as clueless as Bush. To thumb his nose at the rest of the world inviting sanctions, a military air campaign, and pariah status from the industrial world. He already has invited a change in the advocacy from Russia. This kind of statement may be enough to convince China and India to reconsider it's politically neutral trade policies. Even most of the Mullahs in Iran must be rolling their eyes in disbelief.

BREAKING: Libby Indicted, Accused of Lying to Protect Cheney

Well, it's finally happened. Fitzgerald in the last day of the Grand Jury has accused Libby of lying to protect his boss. Libby has resigned to complete the act of falling on his sword, the ultimate act of loyalty. The problem is, if anyone needs to swing for his criminal actions, it's Cheney. Hang him high!
washingtonpost.com

A federal grand jury today indicted Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, after a two-year investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's identity but spared -- at least for now --President Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove.


Libby was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. The indictment charged that he gave misleading information to the grand jury, allegedly lying about information he discussed with three news reporters. It alleged that he committed perjury before the grand jury in March 2004 and that he also lied to FBI agents investigating the case.


The indictment of Libby, 55, was presented in court today by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, as the grand jury's term expired. Although no indictment was announced for Rove, 54, the White House deputy chief of staff, today's proceedings did not remove him from legal jeopardy. Sources close to the case said the investigation of Rove is continuing.

washingtonpost.com

Vice presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby resigned after indictment on obstruction of justice, false statement and perjury charges.

Major Sunni Parties Position to Join the December Elections

Perhaps Sunni leaders in Iraq don't want a civil war. Truly, if they did, they could have one. All they really have to do is not participate in the elections. These leaders are putting themselves in the line of fire. Islamic fundamentalist insurgents will target their leadership. Many of those standing up now, may not survive the next month.
New York Times

Leaders of three Sunni political parties joined together Wednesday to compete in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections, a sign that the country's embittered Sunni Arab minority might play a more active role in the democratic process.


The alliance, the Iraqi Concord Front, will field candidates in the elections for a new National Assembly and work as a bloc to advance Sunni interests, said leaders of the three groups involved: the Iraqi Islamic Party, the National Dialogue Council and the Iraqi People's Gathering. The leaders' statements suggested that they harbored large ambitions, including the leadership of all of Iraq's estimated five million Sunni Arabs.

[...]
The unveiling of the Iraqi Concord Front on Wednesday suggested that at least some Sunni leaders, even some who opposed the constitution, might be willing to give the process a try. Two of the three parties in the coalition opposed the constitution. The Iraqi Islamic Party was the only major Sunni Arab group to support it.

[...]
Still, some prominent Sunni leaders refused to join the alliance, among them members of the National Dialogue Council. Some of them said they were planning on forming their own coalition. One was Saleh Mutlaq, who became the most vocal Sunni opponent of the constitution this summer. Mr. Mutlaq, a member of the National Dialogue Council, said he intended to join another coalition that included Iraqi leaders of all ethnicities and sects.


But Mr. Mutlaq said his biggest concern was whether the Sunni Arabs would vote in December. He said he believed that the Sunnis would have succeeded in defeating the constitution with a two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces were it not for widespread fraud in two of them, Nineveh and Diyala. "We are not sure if they will vote" in December, Mr. Mutlaq said. "The lesson was very bad. This is what worries us."

Will the UN Cook Assad's Goose?

President Bashar al-Assad is in deep trouble after the UN investigator found high level involvement in the murder of Hariri, a popular leader in Lebanon. US and France have been leading the charge in support of Lebanon. Prior to Syria assuming a dominant role in Lebanon, France had a client state relationship with Lebanon, because of a long standing alliance with the Maronite Christians. The relationship that can be traced back to the First Crusade in 1100AD, an unfortunate association for purposes of propaganda by bin Ladin.
Here is an excerpt from the UN report on the murder conspiracy of Hariri:
New York Times

The situation remains "volatile," the report warned, citing "a number of worrying developments affecting the stability of Lebanon, particularly in the form of terrorist acts and the illegal transfer of arms and people across the borders into Lebanon."
While couched in diplomatic language, the report's clear implication that the Palestinian groups were acting at the behest of Syria appeared certain to increase pressure building against Damascus in the Security Council. The Council's special investigator issued a report last week saying the slaying of Mr. Hariri had been plotted by top-ranking Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers, including the powerful brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad.


Mr. Assad has denied that he or his aides had anything to do with the assassination. He sent a letter to France, Britain and the United States early this week promising to prosecute any Syrian implicated by "concrete evidence."

Many have compared the US response to Syria as similar to the run up to the war in Iraq. Clearly, the US has no immediate military responses to Syria except from the air. Bombing would not likely have much more effect than creating chaos in the already volatile country. Josh Landis in his SyriaComment.com talks about prospects for Assad in coming weeks.

A number of fine American journalists have assured me that Washington is determined that its diplomats are going to do things differently in Syria. "It's going to be different this time around," Deborah Amos of National Republic Radio told me yesterday. She just flew in from London, where she is now based for several months. "The neocons are not in charge any more."


Others have given me the same reassurance. The only fly in the ointment, they say, is John Bolton, who is perched at the UN. "But he will be constrained," they insist, knitting their brows. The French are worried. "It is a big test for him. Ann Patterson is no longer at UN to back him up." Paris fears he will be Samson in the temple.

[...]
But this evening when I got back from iftar, al-Jazeera was running a clip of Bolton saying, "We want a resolution saying that every Syrian will testify if called by the investigation. - even President Asad." Bingo! The improvised explosive devise. (Have I mixed my metaphors enough?)


It was clear. America is still thinking of how to take down the Asad family. No door is going to be left open for a political solution.

I would tend to agree with Landis, the neo-cons are still in charge. In fact, I believe Bush has led the neo-con take over of foreign policy. So what are the propects for regime change in Syria? Is there hope for another "Arab Spring" like the overhaul of the Syrian dominated Lebanese government?
SyriaComment.com

The man seen as the de facto leader of Syria's opposition took a few rapid puffs on a cigarette as he considered the question: Are the country's democrats ready to challenge President Bashar Assad's hold on power if international pressure succeeds in weakening it?


"No," came the one-word confession from Riad al-Turk, the 75-year-old former political prisoner who is Syria's most broadly respected opposition politician.


He acknowledged that the country's democrats, persecuted by the regime and divided until recently into myriad factions, are in no position to stage the sort of mass demonstrations that took place in Lebanon earlier this year, which sparked talk of an "Arab Spring" that optimists hoped might eventually reach Damascus.


But Mr. al-Turk was quick to add that if the United Nations Security Council decides to put even more heat on the Syrian government at its meeting tomorrow, the pendulum could rapidly swing in the opposition's favour for the first time since Mr. Assad's father, Hafez, seized power in 1970.

Landis quote of a prominent leadere in Lebanon repeats a theme we've heard from all of the leaders in the Middle East since Bush started rattling sabers against Saddam.

Adib Farha, a political analyst and former adviser to Lebanon's finance minister, wrote this for the Globe and Mail:

Not that we are or should be enamoured of the Syrian leadership -- but until and unless a viable alternative is ready to replace the Assad dynasty, anything other than a soft landing for the rapidly faltering regime would have severe repercussions on the stability of the entire region. Should the Syrian leadership implode or, worse yet, if the United States and its allies should launch military strikes against it, the ensuing anarchy and the possibilities of a sectarian/tribal civil war or the emergence of a Sunni fundamentalist-led regime would be catastrophic for all the region's countries, friend and foe alike.


We should continue to use every peaceful means to steer the Syrian leadership toward changing its evil ways. The goal should be behavioural change, not regime change. A premature fall of the Assad regime could "open up the gates of hell" (to borrow a phrase the Syrian Prime Minister recently used to threaten the U.S.), and everyone would be in deep trouble.

Yet it would seem that Bush is contining his drive for regime change in Syria, bedamned all the indications that fundamentalist Sunnis with similar views of the world as bin Ladin will be a strong counter force in a destabilized Syria. Syria will lose what little control they have of the border with Iraq as the family ties strengthen the bond with the Iraqi insurgency and towards a regional war.
Could this be Bush's agenda all along? Is he a fundamentalist Christian who wants to bring on the Rapture with global war in the Middle East against the anti-Christ bin Ladin?

Secret Poll by Brits Find Majority of Iraqi Citizens Support Insurgency

Thanks to Doug Ireland for the link to this very interesting article:
Telegraph

The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces. It reveals:

• Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified - rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;


• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;


• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;


• 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;


• 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;


• 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces.

The opinion poll, carried out in August, also debunks claims by both the US and British governments that the general well-being of the average Iraqi is improving in post-Saddam Iraq. MORE

Cheney Wants To Legalize Torture By the CIA

Washington Post

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.


His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.


It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.


The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

The Vice President of the Shining City on the hill wants to change the law Ronald Reagan signed into law outlawing torture by any US citizen or operative. He is effectively admitting that the CIA is already operating outside of US law.
Not only is it immoral and contrary to American values to allow torture, there is plenty of evidence that it simply doesn't work. There are scientific studies that prove that fact, but even the recent experiences of troops in Iraq clearly document the consequences of abuse of prisoners. The prisoners effectively are maimed at least psychologically for life. The information they provide is most often false, along the lines of telling the interogater whatever he wanted to hear that stop the torture.
Thanks to John McCain, we are having an open debate about this critically important subject. As McCain has said many times, we have higher values than those who torture.

The Theory of Development of Complex Organisms in the Process of Evolution

Many of those who remember their high school biology saw a comparison of developmental stages among embryonic vertebrates. This concept of comparing embryonic development led Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) to propose his famous principle "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." This argument while less scientific than intuitive, offering significant face validity and verifying only some predictive validity, non-the-less was offered as basic biological defense of evolution.
PBS.org

All vertebrate embryos follow a common developmental path due to their common ancestry. All have a set of very similar genes (the homeobox genes) that define their basic body plan.

Now however, our understanding of DNA and molecular dynamics has greatly advanced since then. We now have a cohesive understanding of development of complex life from the less complex.
Harvard Magazine

The molecular evidence shows incontrovertibly that species have come into being gradually throughout the history of life on Earth. MORE

Sen. Daschle: REAL ID Is A Modern Day Poll Tax

Senator Daschle and Think Progress today honors Rosa Parks, one of our countries great Civil Rights heroes. Daschel does so by taking a stand against the "REAL ID", a national ID standard legislation pending in Congress.
I have mixed feelings about this idea, mostly about the need to have some sort of standard for IDs for Homeland Security purposes, the possibility of misuse of this ID much like the Social Security number is for identity theft and by a government that seem increasingly inflexible arbitrary and not enforcing Civil Liberties, even those contained in the Bill of Rights. I have similar mixed feelings about using it to identify voters.

Today we’re reminded of the life of Rosa Parks and her commitment to freedom and opportunity for all Americans. She inspired us with her actions, not just with her words. She reminds us with her life that only through action and commitment to the principles of our constitution will we succeed in fulfilling the aspirations of our nation’s founders.


Rosa Parks tried to register to vote for the first time in 1943. Because of onerous requirements, she was denied that basic constitutional right until her third try in 1945. That is my test for any election reform – does is empower voters like this heroic woman? Or does it raise needless impediments to her voting?


I have been very concerned about the increasing calls for States to use the new REAL ID driver’s license for voter identification at the polls. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) already addresses the potential for fraudulent registration by individuals claiming to be someone they are not. I have not yet heard evidence that this reform is not working. Nor have I heard that the potential for fraud in voter registration or multiple voting will not be addressed once States fully implement the HAVA requirement for computerized, statewide registration lists.


REAL ID is a driver’s license, not a citizenship or a voting card. At this moment, 12% of the voting age population lacks a driver’s license – and you could expect that number to be much higher among the poor and others who have faced numerous challenges as they have tried to exercise their right to vote.


The documents required by REAL ID to secure a driver’s license include a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers, a photo identity document, and proof of Social Security number. Obtaining such documents can be difficult, even for those not displaced by the devastation of a hurricane. For all these reasons, I have come to the conclusion that for some, a requirement for photo identification constitutes nothing short of a modern day poll tax.


– Tom Daschle

If one must produce birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers, a photo identity document, and proof of Social Security number to get a REAL ID, then the standard is too high. In Minnesota, proof of residency is all that is needed. A utility bill, a rental lease, tax documents with name stamped, and a ID'd neighbor vouching for another is the current standard for voting. A similar standard with some standard of verification by the government entity could be used for a REAL ID.

Our Democracy Has Been Tainted By Billionaires

Informed Comment

The extraordinary exchanges between New York Times editor Bill Keller and reporter Judith Miller over her role in the Plame scandal and reporting on non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have suggested to me a wider context of the entire matter.


The wider context is that Rupert Murdoch*, and Richard Mellon Scaife^, and other far rightwing billionaires have deeply corrupted our information environment. They are in part responsible for what happened at the NYT.


* Columbia Journalism Review: 'Murdoch uses his diverse holdings . . . to promote his own financial interests at the expense of real news gathering, legal and regulatory rules, and journalistic ethics. He wields his media as instruments of influence with politicians who can aid him, and savages his competitors in his news columns. If ever someone demonstrated the dangers of mass power being concentrated in few hands, it would be Murdoch.


^ The total of Scaife's giving--to conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries--exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much more than any previous estimate.

It's a sad day in America when public opinion in manipulated behind the scenes by media giants whose only interest is to further their own agendas. That is the America that the right-wing of Republican Party has unleashed. They are the closest thing we have to fascists in this country. Indeed, many of them are.
In other news on Plame gate, Empty WheelThe Next Hurrah reports:

NYT management is sacrificing Saint Judy in an attempt to hide their own complicity in the Plame Affair.

Well DUH! Honestly folks, he does a great job of laying his speculation out for all to see.
And then there Think Progress latest insight:

“Scooter” Libby first learned Plame’s identity from a conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ok, well now the big fish will fry? Ummm... We'll have to wait and see.
I swear people are so anxious waiting for the shoe to drop at Fitz's place that they are speculating about speculations. Fun, isn't it? Good news has been a long time a coming....

Ideologues in the White House

Pragmatism is sometimes called the only philosophy with American roots.
Wikipedia

Pragmatism is a school of philosophy which originated in the United States in the late 1800s. Pragmatism is characterized by the insistence on consequences, utility and practicality as vital components of truth. [...] Rather, pragmatism holds that it is only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that theories and data acquire significance. ...pragmatists argue that what should be taken as true is that which most contributes to the most human good over the longest course. In practice, this means that for pragmatists, theoretical claims should be tied to verification practices--i.e., that one should be able to make predictions and test them--and that ultimately the needs of humankind should guide the path of human inquiry.

The old cliche "the proof is in the pudding" comes to mind. "I'm from Missouri, show me." These are American values, a viewpoint on the world that is practical and demonstrated by results, not by pretty concepts or logical arguments.
Ideologues have not faired well in this century of political America. The names of McGovern, Goldwater, both Eugene and Joseph McCarthy are names of ideological leaders fell largely because of their belief in ideas that had little historical basis in practical outcomes. Richard Nixon was basically a pragmatist, but his paranoia made him act in illegal ways when confronted with a challenge. Ronald Reagan on the surface appeared to an ideologue. I think his "success" was largely an artifact of the pragmatic advisors he had around him and his multiple approaches he had to every problem. The "scatter gun" approach appears, at least in the short run, effective.
George Dubya Bush is an ideologue. Some say he believes he is on a mission from God. Certainly, he doesn't respond very well to facts that call to question his assumptions. His strategists such as Rove are pragmatists. His foriegn policy has been driven by Neocon ideologues. Up until now, his spin meisters have enabled to continue acting out his disasterous agenda without being held accountable. That time now seems to be ending.
This week, the facade crumbles. Monday, an interview of Brent Scowcroft, a man from the GWH Bush Administration with broad credibility in Washington, is published in The New Yorker. Later this week Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is expected to indict Administration heavy-weights in the Plamegate investigation.
Here is a teaser from the Scowcroft interview. It pretty well documents the ideological roots of the Bush Administration Iraqi policy. Thanks to Brad Delong for the link.
The Washington Note Archives

A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

[...]
Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts."


Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."


He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature."

Scowcroft's Coming Whipping of the Bush Administration

It seems the New Yorker will quickly sell out tomorrow. Scowcroft's article is expected to be a public whipping of the Bush Administration and to include a lesson from Daddy to Dubya as well. I wait with bated breath. Empty Wheel at The Next Hurrah has some facts and anticipatory speculation about what we might discover down the road about Scowcroft's involvement in Plamegate. The fact is another stunning revelation of the public cover-up of high level complicity in Plamegate by quoting from Wilson's book:

In Fall 2002, as both Scowcroft and Wilson started publishing op-eds against regime change, Scowcroft was at least partially responsible for bringing Wilson to the attention of the Administration. Scowcroft brought a copy of Wilson's San Jose Mercury News column to show some people in the White House.

I sent my article to Scowcroft, Baker, and the president's father out of courtesy, because I referred to the lessons learned in the diplomacy of the first Gulf War.

[...]
Brent called me when he received the article. He kindly asked if he could "take it over to the White House," only about two blocks from his downtown office. He said that he thought senior officials ought to read the views of somebody who actually had experience in Iraq and with Saddam's government. By this, I took him to mean that he intended to share it with the national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, or her deputy, Stephen Hadley. (Wilson 295-6)

So Scowcroft is--at the very least--witness to the fact that someone in the Administration knew about Wilson well before his July 6 2003 article.

He goes on to speculate with some credibility that Wilson and Scowcroft made numerous attempts to get the Bush Administration to correct the record on Niger in the run up to the war. If this is true, it's unconscionable that Scowcroft didn't speak up BEFORE we went to war, rather than just before indictments are handed down to cover his butt.

Condi Wants to Talk to Iran?

RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY

Iran said today it will not engage in direct contact with the United States to discuss Iraq. Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mentioned the United States could seek direct contact with the Iranian government to discuss concerns insurgents are crossing into Iraq from Iran and that Iran was supporting Shi'ite groups in Iraq.


Iran's ISNA news agency cites Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi as saying Rice's suggestion of talks conflicted with the hostile U.S. attitude toward Iran. Assefi said if the U.S. wants direct talks with Iran, Washington would have to change its stance towards Iran.


Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2005 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Either Rice is a well meaning idiot or she wants to continue to stack the cards against Iran by inviting them to talk face to face in a situation that they would look weak to accept. That invitation guaranteed the response.
Informed Comment

Secretary of State Condi Rice suggested Thursday that the United States talk directly to Iran about Iraq. I know about partisan politics and all, but Rice should really be congratulated and praised for daring to say this, and to buck the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the issue. Alas, the Iranian response was not forthcoming. I have a suggestion for Rice: you can't start at this high level. Start with a track two meeting in a neutral country, among academics from both countries who are well connected politically. Things might develop from there.

Juan Cole avoids all condescension by suggesting to Condi that her idea was a good one, but that the initial approach needs to be through informal unofficial channels. Juan teaches Condi a lesson in international diplomacy? I congratulate him on his attempt. But I think Condi learning is about as likely as Iran's Foreign Minister sitting down with Condi anytime soon.
The most likely explanation is the former above. Condi has been actively isolating and rallying the west against Iran, apparently with some success. It's not likely she was really suggesting a sit down. This is just another opportunity to show Iran being uncooperative.

U.N. Report Sees Syrian Involvement in Hariri's Death

Washington Post

A U.N. investigation has implicated senior Syrian and Lebanese officials in the assassination of Lebanon's leading reformer in a move that U.S. and European officials expect will generate new international pressure on the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad.


In blunt language, the report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis concluded that the Valentine's Day bombing of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security forces."

Assad and his government are in deep trouble from these allegations of a conspiracy to kill Hariri. Even Syrian pundits can't foresee the outcome of this.

Brown Was Eating Dinner, Unavailable While New Orleans Drowned

Now the inside story of what FEMA Director Brown was doing while Katrina drown New Orleans. He is still on the FEMA payroll.
Washington Post

For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA's only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city's levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding, the staffer told the Senate yesterday.


Marty Bahamonde, sent to New Orleans by Brown, said he alerted Brown's assistant shortly after 11 a.m. that Monday with the "worst possible news" for the city: The Category 4 hurricane had carved a 20-foot breach in the 17th Avenue Canal levee. MORE

Is Bush Part of the Cover-up of Plamegate?

Talking Points Memo

Perhaps the best example of this was yesterday's Daily News story by Tom DeFrank, which provided the first clear evidence that President Bush has known who the culprits were from the beginning and possibly failed to disclose that to Patrick Fitzgerald in their interview last year. Why would White House officials sell the president out like that? The question becomes more pointed when you note that DeFrank, as we discussed yesterday, has long been close to people in the Bush world.


So what's the story? According to knowledgeable sources, those White House officials behind that story were trying to help the president, not hurt him. The story, in their view, was about his unhappiness with what Rove had done but his loyalty to those who work for him. Now, the first thing you have to say on this is that there are some folks in the White House who are pretty stupid.

If the reader doesn't remember, Bush made a pretty emphatic statement back in April of 2004.
New York Times

The White House took the unusual step last year of specifically denying any involvement in the leak on the part of several top administration officials, including Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has repeatedly said no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Mr. Bush.

If true, this seems to suggest Bush will be indicted for perjury when he failed to tell Fitzgerald of his knowledge in 2003. Perhaps, rather than as Josh suggests, the Bush Administration already knows Bush is to be indicted and they are garnering sympathy.

Poll Says Americans Overwhelmingly Support Medicare and Medicaid

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE


A new Harris Interactive poll that measures support for each of 12 different health-care policies, programs or practices, finds significant public support for a range of issues ranging from the conventional to more controversial.


The online survey of 2,242 U.S. adults found an overwhelming majority (96%) of Americans "strongly" or "somewhat" favor Medicare, the medical assistance program for the elderly and disabled, while 91% say they support Medicaid, the program to assist people with very low incomes.


The poll also showed high support for policies or practices that are considered more controversial. Eighty-seven percent of those polled say they support funding of international HIV prevention and treatment programs, while 75% favor universal health insurance, compared with 17% who oppose it. Another 70% support embryonic stem-cell research, compared with about 19% who oppose it.

So how is it that the new House leadership thinks they can jam a $50 million cut to Medicaid down our throats?

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

Powell's chief of staff has some chilling things to say about the Bush Administration. It certainly explains why Powell bailed after one term after being completely cut out of influence.
New York Times

Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises. The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.
"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."


Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."


Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations." "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said. The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."


Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times - including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq - and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.

Wait until Monday when Brent Scowcroft will publish his critic of the Bush Administration in The New Yorker.

Cheney aide cooperating with CIA outing probe

The indictments are clearly on the way. One target is John Bolton, but I have to wonder how Libby, Cheney, and Rove can dodge the bullet.
The Raw Story

A senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney is cooperating with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, sources close to the investigation say. Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.

[...]
Hannah is currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for his alleged activities in an intelligence program run by the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. According to a Newsweek article, a memo written for the Iraq National Congress (INC) raised questions regarding Cheney’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. During the lead up to the war, Newsweek asserts, the INC was providing intelligence on the now discredited Iraqi WMD program through Hannah and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
MORE

The Real Casualty Count From War

Casualty figures have been manipulated in every war. Starting in Vietnam, the US has made casualty figures a means to maintain support for the war by reporting inflated enemy casualties. Starting with the Gulf Wars, casualty reports have been shorted on our own troops. No, I can't say I know that the US is lying about deaths and wounded among our troops. I do know that the Department of Defense has a number of other catagories of casualties that are not included in the total. Most of these casualties may not have been recognized as such in previous conflicts. However, the services own actions tells us they do count these casualties now, they just don't report them. I'm talking about Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health issues that develop while troops are in combat situations. The figures I've been seeing suggest one can double the number of wounded and come up with roughly a count of those with a medical discharge due to mental health conditions.
Here is some data that suggests it's much worse than that. The more we learn about the consequences of war, the more we need to wonder under what circumstances are the losses worth the gains. Certainly not in Iraq or Vietnam.
USATODAY.com

More than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment, according to the Pentagon's first detailed screening of servicemembers leaving a war zone. (Related: Troops screened as never before)


Almost 1,700 servicemembers returning from the war this year said they harbored thoughts of hurting themselves or that they would be better off dead. More than 250 said they had such thoughts "a lot." Nearly 20,000 reported nightmares or unwanted war recollections; more than 3,700 said they had concerns that they might "hurt or lose control" with someone else.
These survey results, which have not been publicly released, were provided to USA TODAY by the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine. They offer a window on the war and how the ongoing insurgency has added to the strain on troops.
Overall, since the war began, about 28% of Iraq veterans — about 50,000 servicemembers this year alone — returned with problems ranging from lingering battle wounds to toothaches, from suicidal thoughts to strained marriages. The figure dwarfs the Pentagon's official Iraq casualty count: 1,971 U.S. troops dead and 15,220 wounded as of Tuesday.

Rove Told Jury Libby May Have Been His Source In Leak Case

Washington Post published an article today that nicely sums up what is known about Whitehouse culpability in the outing of Plame, including the latest leak from the Grand Jury room.
White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that he thinks I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, "may" have told him that Plame was a CIA agent before her name went public. Rove also claims he "may" have heard it from someone else in the White House too. Although he isn't sure who he talked to, he is sure that the topics discussed were only information they had already heard from reporters. How can a person be unsure about a conversation, yet still be sure about it's source? It's been reported widely that John Hannah, an aide to Cheney, is supposedly telling friends he's expecting to be indicted.
Not only is Rove playing football with the "truth", White House insiders are starting to point fingers. A wedge between Bush and Cheney is looking more likely than ever. The leaks about Cheney most recently may be more about driving that wedge deeper than new information. All this sounds like another pro-active dirty tricks campaign that Karl Rove is known for.
There is one other tidbit I hadn't heard before. Bill Harlow, CIA public affairs director, was contacted by Novak about the Plame information and told Novak not to publish her name or information about her. One would have to wonder why a reporter would act against the wishes of the CIA. This certainly puts to question the ethics of Novak, something I've been wondering about all along. Reporters have a way of creating news by serving as the conduit for leaked information. In this case, leaking this information constituted a violation of the law and a major breach of security with very serious consequences.
MORE

Cheney to Resign?

USNews.com

Sparked by today's Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney's office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.


"It's certainly an interesting but I still think highly doubtful scenario," said a Bush insider. "And if that should happen," added the official, "there will undoubtedly be those who believe the whole thing was orchestrated – another brilliant Machiavellian move by the VP."


Said another Bush associate of the rumor, "Yes. This is not good." The rumor spread so fast that some Republicans by late morning were already drawing up reasons why Rice couldn't get the job or run for president in 2008.


"Isn't she pro-choice?" asked a key Senate Republican aide. Many White House insiders, however, said the Post story and reports that the investigation was coming to a close had officials instead more focused on who would be dragged into the affair and if top aides would be indicted and forced to resign.
"Folks on the inside and near inside are holding their breath and wondering what's next," said a Bush adviser.

Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah has a very interesting theory about how Judy Miller, Cheney, Libby and Rove were involved in a cover-up conspiracy and they all met in Jackson Hole at Cheney's house in August 2003. Details at the link. Stay tuned!

Gunning for the Poor

Gunning for the Poor

Congress is back in session, and it's gunning for the American poor.


A revolt of House conservatives has persuaded that body's Republican leadership to offset the increased federal spending going to rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast by reductions in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the indigent. If things go according to plan, this week the House will begin to cut $50 billion from those efforts.


The emerging Republican response to Katrina, apparently, is to comfort the drenched poor and afflict the dry. For a moment last week, it looked as though the Republicans were going to enact across-the-board spending cuts. That, however, would have meant less money for defense contractors and the highway industry and other contributors to congressional Republicans' campaigns. GOP committee chairmen made that point so forcefully that the idea was scrapped. The beauty of taking the cuts out of Medicaid and student loan programs, by happy contrast, is that it doesn't reduce the flow of funds to the Republican campaign committees by a single dime.


Even before the right-wing House leadership capitulated to the even further right-wing House rank-and-file, the government's response to Katrina already appeared to be driven more by laissez-faire ideology than by need or common sense. The administration has opposed efforts by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley to extend Medicaid coverage to those Katrina survivors who lost their jobs and health insurance in the flood. And by suspending the requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act that construction workers on federally funded reconstruction efforts be paid the prevailing wage, President Bush has ensured that much of that work will be done by illegal immigrants, as one recent New York Times report on the Mexican workers rebuilding Gulfport, Miss., made abundantly clear. (In their ongoing contest of core values, the Republicans are still more anti-labor than anti-immigrant.) More broadly, the administration increasingly acts as if the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast will sprout from the bottom up.


But businesses can't really invest in the region absent assurances that the infrastructure will be rebuilt, that public services will be restored, that taxpayers will be returning to live and work there. That's why Louisiana Republican Rep. Richard Baker has proposed that the federal government create a Louisiana Recovery Corporation to coordinate these massive tasks. But the administration has not only paid little heed to Baker's proposal, it has failed to create any coordinating body of its own.


What we have here is an ideologically driven dereliction of duty. If the Bush White House had been put in charge of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer and Teller would still be puttering around in the New Mexico desert today. And it gets worse. The same Republican zealots who demand fiscal responsibility by cutting $50 billion for the indigent sick are now also demanding a new $70 billion in tax cuts, including the permanent repeal of the estate tax, that would chiefly benefit the rich. For a few brief weeks after Katrina, Republicans actually suspended their advocacy of tax cuts, but this onset of sanity came to a shuddering halt once the cameras were removed from the Superdome.


Not that it seems to bother them in the least, but the Republicans' post-Katrina priorities and those of the American public couldn't be more diametrically opposed. Earlier this month, Peter Hart's polling firm asked respondents if they believed cutting Medicaid and like programs by $35 billion (the GOP's targeted cut had not yet risen to $50 billion) and cutting taxes by $70 billion was the right or wrong priority. By a margin of 67 percent to 24 percent, the respondents said it was wrong. And in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week, 48 percent of those questioned said they wanted the to control the next Congress, while just 39 percent favored the Republicans.

Do these guys understand how many will die without medical coverage? Can the secular right-wing of the Republican party be so calloused? My experience with who populates the secular right-wing are Social Darwinists, those who want to see the poor solve their own problems by dying off.
Is this the kind of America you want?

The Fate of 'Made in the USA'

Wondered why good paying jobs are drying up in the US? It's not soley about globalization, it's about China playing a growth hand at our expense. And Bush policies of borrowing all the China surplus puts them even further in the catbird seat. Remember when the Republicans used to complain the Dems were weak on defense? The US is at it's weakest point it's been since acquiring superpower status. That status is being squaundered on a Bush adventure in Iraq.
Washington Post

But one giant unknown clouds everything: China. Until now, its booming U.S. exports have mostly displaced exports from other countries. As China modernizes -- moves into more advanced industries -- this could change dramatically. The combination of low wages, a huge market and an artificially low currency confers staggering competitive advantages. They constitute a powerful magnet for foreign investment in many sectors, whose output could subsequently be exported. Unless the currency rises substantially, the United States could lose many industries that, by all other economic logic, it shouldn't. Therein lies the real threat of extinction or something close to it.

Judy Miller Had "Security Clearance" To Report Rumsfeld's Spin

Empty wheel at The Next Hurrah has some interesting insight into the supposed "security clearance" Judy had that "embedded" her with the Bush Administration.

Judy's embed rules (and presumably, security clearance) were not approved by military censors. Rather, they came from an agreement she personally struck with Rummy. I go into this in obssessive detail in my series on Judy. But based on her portrayal of 'Secret Squirrel' Yankee Fan and a few others, I'm fairly convinced the sources and methods Judy is hiding are details of veracity, not security. That is, Judy has clearance to report on staged stories. Her clearance is about reporting the details Rummy wants reported and hiding the really sketchy provenance for those stories. It has almost nothing to do with a real security clearance, with trying to prevent any info that would compromise national security from being released. (Although, this is probably more and more true of security clearances in BushCo--they're hiding their lies, not our vital truths.) All this doesn't not definitively explain which side of the security clearance issue Judy comes down on. Perhaps she does have clearance, but getting it was contigent on Judy writing precisely the stories they wanted her to write, on never questioning the stories she was given. Or perhaps she doesn't have clearance at all. When you deal entirely in fictions, why would you need clearance?


One more thing. The nature of her embed suggests Rummy's personal involvement here. Is it possible he gave her "clearance" without going through the normal channels of clearing someone? That is, it possible her clearance isn't clearance at all, just Rummy's carte blanche to circulate classified information? Fitz seems to know a bit about Judy's clearance. I wonder if he knows how she got that clearance?

So, it would appear that Judy Miller was just another instrument of propaganda for the Bush Administration. That certainly makes Judy a reporter to hold in distain. On it's face, this action seems to also violate the covert propaganda law like the bought media hacks for "No Child Left Behind."

Impeach Bush!

The Independent UK

George Bush told the Prime Minister two months before the invasion of Iraq that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea may also be dealt with over weapons of mass destruction, a top secret Downing Street memo shows. The US President told Tony Blair, in a secret telephone conversation in January 2003 that he "wanted to go beyond Iraq". He implied that the military action against Saddam Hussein was only a first step in the battle against WMD proliferation in a series of countries. Mr Bush said he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation", says the letter on Downing Street paper, marked secret and personal.

The Downing Street memos represent the most damning information about any President in many years. Lying to the American people to bring about a war of aggression in the most volital part of the world is unconscienable. Starting that war with a grandiose assessment of our military abilities was simply stupid. Bush needs to be impeached because not only is he willing to say or do anything to get his way and violate his oath of office, but most of all because he is so stupid he is dangerous to America.

Iran: Truth or Disinformation

Now that Bush has taken American credibility to it's lowest point in memory, I find myself doubting most everything I read that has the look of coming from the White House. This article is a good example. Since the author quotes Rice and other American sources, I have to wonder if this is just more disinformation about Iran. It will be interesting to see what France says about this report. I will watch for an article.
Telegraph

Former members of the Russian military have been secretly helping Iran to acquire technology needed to produce missiles capable of striking European capitals.


The Russians are acting as go-betweens with North Korea as part of a multi-million pound deal they negotiated between Teheran and Pyongyang in 2003. It has enabled Teheran to receive regular clandestine shipments of top secret missile technology, believed to be channelled through Russia.


Western intelligence officials believe that the technology will enable Iran to complete development of a missile with a range of 2,200 miles, capable of hitting much of Europe. It is designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, sufficient for a basic nuclear device. MORE

Judy's Collegues Don't Much Like Her Either

Judy Miller's collegues have been speaking out about her for a long time. It is amazing that the NY Times would allow a propaganda plant from the Bush Administration to stay this long.
Washington Post

Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times who teamed up with Miller for a series on Al Qaeda, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors and asked that his byline not appear on one piece. "I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller," wrote Pyes, who now writes for the Los Angeles Times. He added: "I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper." Pyes said yesterday he had no problem with the articles as published, which helped win one of two Pulitzer Prizes he shared at the paper.