The Era

Reign of Error

2006-07-28T16:06:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Amid everything else that’s going wrong in the world, here’s one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.

At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.

But it’s dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.

Here’s how the process works.

First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts.

Sometimes the officials simply lie. “The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,” Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave.

Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice’s response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, “as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.” (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it’s still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) “But,” she went on, “that’s a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11.”

Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.

Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)

Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.

And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?

The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.

It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?

W.'s Kiss

2006-07-28T16:01:00.000+09:00

By Nick Anderson

Black And Blue

2006-07-24T12:59:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman from The New York Times

According to the White House transcript, here’s how it went last week, when President Bush addressed the N.A.A.C.P. for the first time:

THE PRESIDENT: “I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party.”

AUDIENCE: “Yes! (Applause.)”

But Mr. Bush didn’t talk about why African-Americans don’t trust his party, and black districts are always blue on election maps. So let me fill in the blanks.

First, G.O.P. policies consistently help those who are already doing extremely well, not those lagging behind — a group that includes the vast majority of African-Americans. And both the relative and absolute economic status of blacks, after improving substantially during the Clinton years, have worsened since 2000.

The G.O.P. obsession with helping the haves and have-mores, and lack of concern for everyone else, was evident even in Mr. Bush’s speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Mr. Bush never mentioned wages, which have been falling behind inflation for most workers. And he certainly didn’t mention the minimum wage, which disproportionately affects African-American workers, and which he has allowed to fall to its lowest real level since 1955.

Mr. Bush also never used the word “poverty,” a condition that afflicts almost one in four blacks.

But he found time to call for repeal of the estate tax, even though African-Americans are more than a thousand times as likely to live below the poverty line as they are to be rich enough to leave a taxable estate.

Economic issues alone, then, partially explain African-American disdain for the G.O.P.

But even more important is the way Republicans win elections.

The problem with policies that favor the economic elite is that by themselves they’re not a winning electoral strategy, because there aren’t enough elite voters. So how did the Republicans rise to their current position of political dominance? It’s hard to deny that barely concealed appeals to racism, which drove a wedge between blacks and relatively poor whites who share the same economic interests, played a crucial role.

Don’t forget that in 1980, the sainted Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign with a speech on states’ rights in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

These days the racist appeals have been toned down; Trent Lott was demoted, though not drummed out of the party, when he declared that if Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign had succeeded “we wouldn’t have had all these problems.” Meanwhile, the G.O.P. has found other ways to obscure its economic elitism. The Bush administration has proved utterly incompetent in fighting terrorists, but it has skillfully exploited the terrorist threat for domestic political gain. And there are also the “values” issues: abortion, stem cells, gay marriage.

But the nasty racial roots of the G.O.P.’s triumph live on in public policy and election strategy.

A revelatory article in yesterday’s Boston Globe described how the Bush administration has politicized the Justice Department’s civil rights division, “filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights.”

Not surprisingly, there has been a shift in priorities: “The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.”

Above all, there’s the continuing effort of the G.O.P. to suppress black voting.

The Supreme Court probably wouldn’t have been able to put Mr. Bush in the White House in 2000 if the administration of his brother, the governor of Florida, hadn’t misidentified large numbers of African-Americans as felons ineligible to vote. In 2004, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state tried to impose a ludicrous rule on the paper weight of voter registration applications; last year, Georgia Republicans tried to impose an onerous “voter ID” rule. In each case, the obvious intent was to disenfranchise blacks.

And if the Republicans hold on to the House this fall, it will probably only be because of a redistricting plan in Texas that a panel of Justice Department lawyers unanimously concluded violated the Voting Rights Act — only to be overruled by their politically appointed superiors.

So yes, African-Americans distrust Mr. Bush’s party — with good reason.

Ben & Jerry's Nuclear Demonstration

2006-07-24T12:45:00.000+09:00

See Ben's demonstration on America's nuclear stockpile.
It's just Ben, 10,000 BB's, and some startling facts about nuclear proliferation.

Click on Image to view video
Via The Rachel Maddow Show

Our achilles heel in Iraq, or Bush checkmates himself?

2006-07-24T12:40:00.001+09:00

With the Shia dominated Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon under attack from Israel, with our tacit support and using our weaponry, their cousins in southern Iraq may indeed feel the call to begin attacking American supply lines (see below). Al Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shia, who has been a moderating voice, has just issued a Fatwa condemning Israel's disproportionate use of military might in Lebanon and Gaza.

If Israel invades south Lebanon again to establish a "buffer zone" (almost a certainty now), it will involve many more deaths of Shia civilians which will be broadly telecast over Al Jazeera television. Given the Arab sense of honor, and dutiful revenge, we may see attacks on our convoys increase dramatically in southern Iraq. With this, many contracted drivers will most likely choose life over green dollars and refuse further employment. The precarious artery of supply may be shut off or slowed to a trickle and we will find ourselves stranded like a beached whale, like the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, barely holding on with emergency supplies by air. Off will go the generators, closed will be the Pizza Huts and McDonalds on the huge permanent appearing military bases, and subsistance living in a grimy, hot, hostile land will ensue. It could turn from bad to much worse in short order. A second supply line through Anbar is unrealistic and Turkey cannot risk alienating its own population with too much cooperation with the largely despised Americans. As with Napoleon in Moscow, we may find ourselves trapped by forces beyond our control and forced into retreat. Defending an 800 mile long road supply line against sabotage and guerilla attack is not possible. All it takes is one well placed IED in the middle of the road to stop all traffic, both ways, for a long time. Mr. Bush, again with rhetoric that only inflames our adversaries, and sweeps the floor from under moderate voices in the region, courts catastrophe of immense proportion with his unqallified support of the Israeli terror released on the Lebanese and Palastinian civilian population.

John R. Bomar

Related

The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq

By Patrick Lang
ALEXANDRIA, VA.
American forces in Iraq are in danger of having their line of supply cut by guerrillas. Napoleon once said that "an army travels on its stomach." By that he meant that the problem of keeping an army supplied is the prerequisite for the very existence of the force.

A 21st-century military force "burns up" a tremendous volume of expendable supplies and continuously needs repairs to equipment as well as medical treatment. Without a plentiful and dependable source of fuel, food, and ammunition, a military force falters. First it stops moving, then it begins to starve, and eventually it becomes unable to resist the enemy.

In 1915, for example, this happened to British forces that had invaded Mesopotamia. A British-Indian force traveled up the line of the Tigris River, advancing to Kut, southeast of Baghdad. They became besieged there after their line of supply was cut along the river to the south. Some 11,000 troops ultimately surrendered, after the allies suffered another 23,000 casualties trying to rescue them.

American troops all over central and northern Iraq are supplied with fuel, food, and ammunition by truck convoy from a supply base hundreds of miles away in Kuwait. All but a small amount of our soldiers' supplies come into the country over roads that pass through the Shiite-dominated south of Iraq.

Until now the Shiite Arabs of Iraq have been told by their leaders to leave American forces alone. But an escalation of tensions between Iran and the US could change that overnight. Moreover, the ever-increasing violence of the civil war in Iraq can change the alignment of forces there unexpectedly.

Southern Iraq is thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian special operations forces working with Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades. Hostilities between Iran and the United States or a change in attitude toward US forces on the part of the Baghdad government could quickly turn the supply roads into a "shooting gallery" 400 to 800 miles long.

At present, the convoys of trucks supplying our forces in Iraq are driven by civilians - either South Asians or Turks. If the route is indeed turned into a shooting gallery, these civilian truck drivers would not persist or would require a heavier escort by the US military.

It might then be necessary to "fight" the trucks through ambushes on the roads. This is a daunting possibility. Trucks loaded with supplies are defenseless against many armaments, such as rocket-propelled grenades, small arms, and improvised explosive devices. A long, linear target such as a convoy of trucks is very hard to defend against irregulars operating in and around their own towns.

The volume of "throughput" would probably be seriously lessened in such a situation. A reduction in supplies would inevitably affect operational capability. This might lead to a downward spiral of potential against the insurgents and the militias. This would be very dangerous for our forces.

Are there alternatives to the present line of supply leading to Kuwait? There may be, but they are not immediately apparent.

A line of supply consists of the route and the facilities at both ends. Our present line of supply now originates in Kuwait with its ports, stevedores, warehouses, etc.

A new line of supply leading from Turkey or Jordan would require similar facilities. Turkey has not been very cooperative in this war, and a supply line leading from Jordan would have to pass through Anbar Province, the very heart of the Sunni Arab insurgencies. Creating new facilities in these countries would be possible but politically difficult, and it would take time.

Few of the permanent requirements for uninterrupted resupply can be satisfied out of the local economy. Iraq lacks reserves of these supplies, and there would not be anything like enough "left over" for our forces to subsist on.

What about air resupply? It appears that only 5 to 10 percent of day-to-day military deliveries into Iraq are currently transferred by air. Inside Iraq, local deliveries by air probably amount to more. In a difficult situation, the tonnages delivered could be increased, but given the bulk in weight and volume of the needed supplies, it seems unlikely that air resupply could exceed 25 percent of daily requirements. This would not be enough to sustain the force.

Compounding the looming menace of the Kuwait-based line of supply is the route followed by the cargo ships en route to Kuwait. Geography dictates that the ships all pass through the Strait of Hormuz and then proceed to the ports at the other end of the Gulf. Those who are familiar with the record of Iran's efforts against Kuwaiti shipping in the Iran-Iraq War will be concerned about this maritime vulnerability.

Potential adversaries along the line of supply include many combat-experienced and well-schooled officers and former officers. We can be sure that they are acutely aware of this weakness in our situation.

The precarious nature of our supply line is well-known to our military leadership. Unfortunately, this is one of the many problems in Iraq that has not been adequately addressed because of a shortage of troops. We should start building ourselves another line of supply as a backup, and we should do it soon.

• Patrick Lang is former head of human intelligence collection and Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Price of Fantasy

2006-07-21T21:17:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman from The New York Times

Today we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as “the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy.

But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the White House to a man who, although he may be 60, doesn’t act like a grown-up. The second President Bush obviously confuses swagger with strength, and prefers tough talkers like the crazies to people who actually think things through. He got the chance to implement the crazies’ vision after 9/11, which created a climate in which few people in Congress or the news media dared to ask hard questions. And the result is the bloody mess we’re now in.

This isn’t a case of 20-20 hindsight. It was clear from the beginning that the United States didn’t have remotely enough troops to carry out the crazies’ agenda — and Mr. Bush never asked for a bigger army.

As I wrote back in January 2003, this meant that the “Bush doctrine” of preventive war was, in practice, a plan to “talk trash and carry a small stick.” It was obvious even then that the administration was preparing to invade Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but because it looked like a soft target.

The message to North Korea, which really did have an active nuclear program, was clear: “The Bush administration,” I wrote, putting myself in Kim Jong Il’s shoes, “says you’re evil. It won’t offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won’t even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.” So “the best self-preservation strategy ... is to be dangerous.”

With a few modifications, the same logic applies to Iran. And it’s easier than ever for Iran to be dangerous, now that U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.

Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’ agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might on his war of choice.

So what happens next?

Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the invasion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.”

But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?

The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.

Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare ground troops — against Iran.

“Yes, there would be repercussions,” he wrote in his magazine, “and they would be healthy ones.” What would these healthy repercussions be? On Fox News he argued that “the right use of targeted military force” could cause the Iranian people “to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.” Oh, boy.

Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.

And what about The Decider himself?

For years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation of the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have been too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.”

Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure? I report, you decide.

Beyond Chastity Belts

2006-05-02T16:56:00.000+09:00

By Nicholas D. Kristof from The New York Times

Abortion may be the single most polarizing issue in America today, but there's one thing Democrats and Republicans mostly agree on: it would be better if Americans had fewer abortions.

The best way to reduce the number of abortions, in turn, would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Every year, Americans have three million unplanned pregnancies, leading to 1.3 million abortions.

So it should be a no-brainer that we increase access to contraception, and in particular make the "morning after" pill available over the counter. That would be the single simplest step to reduce the U.S. abortion rate, while also helping hundreds of thousands of women avert unwanted pregnancies.

Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, normally prevents pregnancy when taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex — although it is most effective when taken within 24 hours. It is now available in most of the U.S. only by prescription, but the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have both endorsed it for over-the-counter use.

President Bush's Food and Drug Administration has blocked that, apparently fearing that better contraception will encourage promiscuity. But unless the libidophobes in the administration mandate chastity belts, their opposition to Plan B amounts to a pro-abortion policy.

One study, now a bit dated, found that if emergency contraceptives were widely available in the U.S., there would be 800,000 fewer abortions each year. And even though they are generally available only by prescription, emergency contraceptives averted 51,000 abortions in 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

That's one of the paradoxes in the abortion debate: The White House frequently backs precisely the policies that cause America to have one of the highest abortion rates in the West. Compared with other countries, the U.S. lags in sex education and in availability of contraception — financing for contraception under the Title X program has declined 59 percent in constant dollars since 1980 — so we have higher unintended pregnancy rates and abortion rates.

Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have abortion rates only one-third of America's, and France's is half of America's. France has made a particular push for emergency contraception to lower its abortion rate by making free morning-after pills available to French teenagers, without informing the parents. Nurses in French junior high and high schools are authorized to hand out emergency contraception pills.

That broad availability is the global pattern. While American women cannot normally obtain emergency contraception without a prescription (by which time the optimal 24-hour window has often passed), it is available without a prescription in much of the rest of the world, from Albania to Tunisia, from Belgium to Britain.

One thought that paralyzes the Bush administration is that American teenage girls might get easy access to emergency contraception and turn into shameless hussies. But contraception generally doesn't cause sex, any more than umbrellas cause rain.

The reality is that almost two-thirds of American girls have lost their virginity by the time they turn 18 — and one-quarter use no contraception their first time. Some 800,000 American teenagers become pregnant each year, 80 percent of the time unintentionally.

So we may wince at the thought of a 15-year-old girl obtaining Plan B after unprotected sex. But why does the White House prefer to imagine her pregnant?

Indeed, Plan B may be more important for teenagers than for adults, because adults are more likely to rely on a regular contraceptive. Teenagers wing it.

Granted, making contraceptives available — all kinds, not just Plan B — presents a mixed message. We encourage young people to abstain from sex, and then provide condoms in case they don't listen. But that's because we understand human nature: We also tell drivers not to speed, but provide air bags in case they do.

The administration's philosophy seems to be that the best way to discourage risky behavior is to take away the safety net. Hmmm. I suppose that if we replaced air bags with sharpened spikes on dashboards, people might drive more carefully — but it still doesn't seem like a great idea.

So let's give American women the same rights that they would have if they were Albanians or Tunisians, and make Plan B available over the counter. It's time for President Bush to end his policies that encourage abortions.

The Shadow Government

2006-05-02T13:06:00.000+09:00

By Cenk Uygur from The Huffington Post

The Boston Globe is now reporting that the president believes he has the authority to disobey over 750 laws passed by Congress. And those are just the laws passed on his watch. As we've already seen with the FISA statute, the president also feels he has the right to ignore laws passed by previous administrations as well.

If the president feels he is free to ignore a great number of laws - and he is on the record as implementing that belief by disobeying some long established laws - there is a whole different government running the country than we think there is.

There is the government with the laws we think we have. And the government with the laws the president secretly says we have. This secret set of decisions on which laws will and won't be applied is what makes up the new shadow government.

The idea that the president would say he has the authority to ignore the strictures of laws passed by the United States Congress might seem like some sort of liberal exaggeration to some. It seems so outlandish. But don't take anyone's word for it, ask the administration -- they readily confirm it.

In fact, they're proud of it. They think they are reinstating the real executive powers of the presidency. Powers that the Courts or Congress have never agreed to and that are outside of the plain, or any reasonable, reading of the Constitution, but nonetheless, the administration believes is owed to them.

This makes Nixon's imperial presidency look like child's play. In a democracy, we have a president who is literally saying he is above the law. There are 750 laws he does not have to faithfully execute.

Now, the media has a herculean task in front of it -- identify all the laws the president is actually breaking. He claims the right to break 750 of them, at least. We already know he's breaking one of them - the FISA statute on warrantless spying (which by the way was passed by a previous administration, so it is not even one of the 750 he claims the right to ignore).

Attorney General Gonzales has hinted in his testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee that there might be more laws the president is already violating, including warrantless spying on Americans in purely domestic communications.

Most of the implementation of these laws is done in secret under the guise (and sometimes reality) of national security. Though some are on domestic issues like affirmative action, which I can't imagine even this administration could argue is a national security matter. But the media now must pick through all these laws to uncover what is and is not being followed by this administration.

They must unearth what the shadow government is actually doing, not what we think they're doing based on laws we thought were being followed.

This is an extraordinary power grab. There is no precedent for it, or justification. It is grossly undemocratic. I cannot believe the President of the United States of America says he has the power to ignore laws passed by the people's representatives.

George Bush has crossed the Rubicon. These are not the powers of a president. They are the powers of a dictator. If that seems like an extreme statement, I assure you that it is not my words that are extreme but their actions. The words fit the gravity of the situation. As Sandra Day O'Connor warned recently on a similar issue:

"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

I do not subscribe to the school of thought that we are already at those ends. But we are also clearly past the beginning stages of this unprecedented power grab. And if we don't act soon on Justice O'Connor's warning, we might be at the end before we know it.

We have a president who says he doesn't have to follow all the laws of our democracy -- and who ironically claims to spread democracy throughout the world. We have a rubberstamp Congress that absolutely refuses to check this out of control president. We have an administration that assiduously avoids court review of its actions, as it continues to pack the court with right wing extremists (Sam Alito advocated using signing statements to exercise presidential power when he worked under Reagan, though even he didn't suggest going as far as this administration has).

Our final check in this democracy is the people. It might sound clichéd, but it is entirely true. But the people must have the right information so that they make the right decisions. This is where the press comes into play.

The media fell asleep at the wheel before the Iraq invasion and we had an electorate that believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the September 11th attacks against us. Forty percent of Americans still believed that going into the 2004 election and nearly ninety percent of our soldiers in Iraq still believe that today. If I believed Saddam had ordered 9/11, I'd want to attack Iraq, too.

Wrong information equals wrong decisions. People can't be blamed if they don't know. It is the job of the press to let them know. The 2006 elections are the last chance to check this imperial presidency. If the press fails our democracy at this critical juncture and the electorate doesn't know what we know by the time they step into that voting booth, we will have done great damage to our country and its principles.

We already know what laws this administration thinks it doesn't have to follow. Now, the press has six months to figure out exactly what laws they are and are not following in reality. We have six months to figure out what exactly this shadow government is up to.

Cenk Uygur is co-host of The Young Turks, the first liberal radio show to air nationwide. The Young Turks began as Sirius Satellite Radio’s first original program, and, while still on Sirius, is now nationally syndicated and available on itunes and online at www.theyoungturks.com and www.radiopower.org.

Media Silence?

2006-05-02T07:49:00.000+09:00

Stephen Colbert's Take at the White House Correspondents Dinner
From Daily Kos

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin, I've been asked to make an announcement. Whoever parked 14 black bulletproof S.U.V.'s out front, could you please move them? They are blocking in 14 other black bulletproof S.U.V.'s and they need to get out.

Wow. Wow, what an honor. The White House correspondents' dinner. To actually sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I'm dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I'm a pretty sound sleeper -- that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? Dammit. The one guy who could have helped.

By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail. Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it's my privilege to celebrate this president. We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. That's cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the "No Fact Zone." Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term.

I'm a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states. And I cannot wait to see how the Washington Post spins that one tomorrow. I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.

In fact, Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, welcome. Your great country makes our Happy Meals possible. I said it's a celebration. I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible -- I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical. And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it's yogurt. But I refuse to believe it's not butter. Most of all, I believe in this president.

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So, Mr. President, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half full. 32% means the glass -- it's important to set up your jokes properly, sir. Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash. Okay, look, folks, my point is that I don't believe this is a low point in this presidency. I believe it is just a lull before a comeback.

I mean, it's like the movie "Rocky." All right. The president in this case is Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed is -- everything else in the world. It's the tenth round. He's bloodied. His corner man, Mick, who in this case I guess would be the vice president, he's yelling, "Cut me, Dick, cut me!," and every time he falls everyone says, "Stay down! Stay down!" Does he stay down? No. Like Rocky, he gets back up, and in the end he -- actually, he loses in the first movie.

OK. Doesn't matter. The point is it is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face. So don't pay attention to the approval ratings that say 68% of Americans disapprove of the job this man is doing. I ask you this, does that not also logically mean that 68% approve of the job he's not doing? Think about it. I haven't.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Now, there may be an energy crisis. This president has a very forward-thinking energy policy. Why do you think he's down on the ranch cutting that brush all the time? He's trying to create an alternative energy source. By 2008 we will have a mesquite-powered car!

And I just like the guy. He's a good joe. Obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She's a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma'am.

I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen.

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

Now, it's not all bad guys out there. Some are heroes: Christopher Buckley, Jeff Sacks, Ken Burns, Bob Schieffer. They've all been on my show. By the way, Mr. President, thank you for agreeing to be on my show. I was just as shocked as everyone here is, I promise you. How's Tuesday for you? I've got Frank Rich, but we can bump him. And I mean bump him. I know a guy. Say the word.

See who we've got here tonight. General Moseley, Air Force Chief of Staff. General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They still support Rumsfeld. Right, you guys aren't retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld.

Look, by the way, I've got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble: don't let them retire! Come on, we've got a stop-loss program; let's use it on these guys. I've seen Zinni and that crowd on Wolf Blitzer. If you're strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows, you can stand on a bank of computers and order men into battle. Come on.

Jesse Jackson is here, the Reverend. Haven't heard from the Reverend in a little while. I had him on the show. Very interesting and challenging interview. You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants, at the pace that he wants. It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

Justice Scalia is here. Welcome, sir. May I be the first to say, you look fantastic. How are you? [After each sentence, Colbert makes a hand gesture, an allusion to Scalia's recent use of an obscene Sicilian hand gesture in speaking to a reporter about Scalia's critics. Scalia is seen laughing hysterically.] Just talking some Sicilian with my paisan.

John McCain is here. John McCain, John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you it wasn't a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There's no predicting him. By the way, Senator McCain, it's so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican fold. I have a summer house in South Carolina; look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University. So glad you've seen the light, sir.

Mayor Nagin! Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city! Yeah, give it up. Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington, D.C., the chocolate city with a marshmallow center. And a graham cracker crust of corruption. It's a Mallomar, I guess is what I'm describing, a seasonal cookie.

Joe Wilson is here, Joe Wilson right down here in front, the most famous husband since Desi Arnaz. And of course he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said? [looks horrified] I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife Joe Wilson's wife. Patrick Fitzgerald is not here tonight? OK. Dodged a bullet.

And, of course, we can't forget the man of the hour, new press secretary, Tony Snow. Secret Service name, "Snow Job." Toughest job. What a hero! Took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq.

Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Big shoes to fill. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else. McClellan, of course, eager to retire. Really felt like he needed to spend more time with Andrew Card's children. Mr. President, I wish you hadn't made the decision so quickly, sir.

I was vying for the job myself. I think I would have made a fabulous press secretary. I have nothing but contempt for these people. I know how to handle these clowns. In fact, sir, I brought along an audition tape and with your indulgence, I'd like to at least give it a shot. So, ladies and gentlemen, my press conference.

BEGINNING OF "AUDITION TAPE"

Colbert shows a video of a mock press conference. It opens with him at a podium, addressing the assembled Washington press corps.

COLBERT: I have a brief statement: the press is destroying America. OK, let's see who we've got here today.

COLBERT (acknowledging various reporters): Stretch! (David Gregory nods)

Sir Nerdlington! (reporter nods)

Sloppy Joe! (reporter nods)

Terry Lemon Moran Pie! (Terry Moran nods)

Oh, Doubting Thomas, always a pleasure. (Helen Thomas smiles)

And Suzanne Mal -- hello!!

(Suzanne Malveaux stares at Colbert, looking unhappy. Colbert mimics putting a phone to his ear and mouths "call me.")

REPORTER: Will the Vice President be available soon to answer all questions himself?

COLBERT: I've already addressed that question. You (pointing to another reporter).

REPORTER: Walter Cronkite, the noted CBS anchor, . . .

COLBERT (interrupting): Ah, no, he's the former CBS anchor. Katie Couric is the new anchor of the CBS Evening News. Well, well, how do you guys feel about that?

You, tousle-haired guy in the back. Are you happy about Katie Couric taking over the CBS Evening News?

DAN RATHER: No, sir, Mr. Colbert. Are you? (Laughter)

COLBERT: Boom! Oh, look, we woke David Gregory up. Question?

DAVID GREGORY: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?

COLBERT: I don't know. I'll ask him.

(Colbert turns to Rove) Karl, pay attention please! (Rove is seen drawing a heart with "Karl + Stephen" written on it.)

GREGORY: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003 when you were asked specifically about Karl, and Elliott Abrams, and Scooter Libby, and you said "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me that they are not involved in this." Do you stand by that statement?

COLBERT: Nah, I was just kidding!

GREGORY: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything! You stood at that podium and said . . .

COLBERT (interrupting): Ah, that's where you're wrong. New podium! Just had it delivered today. Get your facts straight, David.

GREGORY: This is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us after having commented with that level of detail and tell the people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk. You've got to . . .

(Colbert is seen looking at three buttons on the podium, labeled "EJECT," "GANNON" and "VOLUME." He selects the "VOLUME" button and turns it. We see Gregory's lips continue moving, but can't hear any sound coming out.)

COLBERT: If I can't hear you, I can't answer your question. I'm sorry! I have to move on. Terry.

TERRY MORAN: After the investigation began, after the criminal investigation was underway, you said . . .

(Colbert presses a button on the podium and fast-forwards through most of Moran's question.)

MORAN (continuing): All of a sudden, you have respect for the sanctity of a criminal investigation?

COLBERT (seen playing with rubber ball, which he is bouncing off attached paddle): No, I never had any respect for the sanctity of a criminal investigation. Activist judges! Yes, Helen.

HELEN THOMAS: You're going to be sorry. (Laughter)

COLBERT (looking vastly amused, mockingly): What are you going to do, Helen, ask me for a recipe?

THOMAS: Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands (Colbert's smile fades) of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime.

COLBERT (interrupting): OK, hold on Helen, look . . .

THOMAS (continuing): Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is why did you really want to go to war?

COLBERT (again interrupting): Helen, I'm going to stop you right there. (Thomas keeps talking.) That's enough! No! Sorry, Helen, I'm moving on. (Colbert tries to turn her volume off, but the knob falls off his controls.)

(Various reporters start shouting questions at Colbert.)

COLBERT (agitated): Guys, guys, please don't let Helen do this to what was a lovely day.

(Reporters keep shouting at him.)

COLBERT (putting his fingers over his ears and shouting in a high-pitched voice): Bllrrtt! No, no, no, no, no. I'm not listening to you!

Look what you did, Helen! I hate you!

(Helen Thomas glowers at Colbert.)

COLBERT (frantic): I'm out of here!

(Colbert pulls back the curtain behind him, desperately trying to flee. He says, "There is a wall here!" The press corps laughs. Colbert has difficulty finding a door from which to exit the room, echoing Bush's experience in China. He finally finds the door and hurries through it.)

COLBERT: It reeks in there! Ridiculous! I've never been so insulted in my life! Stupid job.

(Colbert continues walking away. We hear sinister-sounding music playing. We see Helen Thomas walking behind Colbert.)

(Colbert looks behind him, sees Thomas, and starts running.)

(Colbert trips over a roller skate, and yells "Condi!" We see a close-up of Helen Thomas' face, looking determined and angry. Colbert, increasingly panicked, gets up and continues running, running into a parking garage. He reaches an emergency call box, and yells into it.)

COLBERT: Oh, thank God. Help me!

ATTENDANT: What seems to be the problem, sir?

COLBERT: She won't stop asking why we invaded Iraq! ATTENDANT: Hey, why did we invade Iraq?

COLBERT: NO!!! (runs toward his car)

(We see Helen Thomas, still walking toward him.)

(Colbert reaches his car, and fumblingly attempts to open it with his key. He is in such a desperate hurry that he fumbles with the keys and drops them. When he picks them up, he looks back and Helen is even closer. In his frantic rush, Colbert just can't get the keys into the lock.)

(Just as his anxiety is getting completely out of control he suddenly remembers that he has a keyless remote -- so he just pushes the button on the keychain and the car unlocks immediately with the usual double squeak noise. Colbert jumps in and locks the door, and continues to fumble trying to get the car started. He finally succeeds, and looks up to see Helen standing in front of the car, notepad in hand.)

COLBERT: NO!!! NO!!!

(Colbert puts the car into reverse and drives off, tires squealing. Thomas smiles.)

(Colbert is shown taking the shuttle from Washington, D.C. to New York. A car and driver are waiting for him at Penn Station. The uniformed man standing alongside the car opens the door and lets Colbert in.)

COLBERT: What a terrible trip, Danny. Take me home.

(The driver locks the doors, turns around, and says, "Buckle up, hon." IT'S HELEN THOMAS!!!)

COLBERT (horrified face pressed against car window): NO!!!

END OF "AUDITION TAPE"

STEPHEN COLBERT: Helen Thomas, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Smith, members of the White House Correspondents Association, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, it's been a true honor. Thank you very much. Good night!

Send a "Thank You" to Stephen here!
Also, check this out from The San Fancisco Chronicle
Stephen Colbert Has Brass Cojones

Warfare as It Really Is

2006-05-01T20:10:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert from The New York Times

In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.

This HBO production is reality television with a vengeance — warfare as it really is. And while it is frightening, harrowing and deeply painful to watch, it should be required viewing for all but the youngest Americans. It will premiere May 21.

For two months in 2005, the directors Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill were given unprecedented access by the Army to the 86th Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Working 12-hour shifts, they watched — and taped — the heroic struggle of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel to salvage as many lives as possible from what amounted to a nonstop conveyor belt of bloodied, broken and burned G.I.'s.

At one point in the film, a specialist who survived a roadside bomb attack murmurs from a stretcher, "It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life, sir."

"What was that?" he is asked.

Recalling his last view of a buddy who was killed in the attack, he says, "My friend didn't have a face."

The movie is neither pro-war nor anti-war. It is simply a searing record of the ferocious toll that combat takes on real human beings.

In an interview, Mr. Alpert described "the shock of seeing human beings twisted into these horrible shapes, with parts missing and parts being detached from them." In the first couple of hours after he and Mr. O'Neill had arrived at the hospital, he said, "We had already seen two amputations and they were prepping someone else for another one."

Before long, he said, the effort to document the daily activities became psychologically grueling because "you just knew that every single day that door was going to open up, that the helicopter was going to land, and they were just going to bring in something that looked like hamburger instead of a human being."

Above all else, war is about the suffering of individuals. The suffering is endured mostly by the young, and these days the government and the media are careful to keep the worst of it out of the sight of the average American. That way we can worry in peace about the cost of the gasoline we need to get us to the mall.

"Baghdad ER" is going to tell us right in the comfort of our living rooms that there is really horrible stuff going on over there in Iraq, and whether we think this is a good war or a bad war, we need to be paying closer attention to the human consequences.

"We tried to put a human face on the war," said Sheila Nevins, the head of documentary programming at HBO. "It's a part of the story that hasn't really been told."

Capt. Glenna Greene, an operating room nurse, says in the film:

"It just kills me, because these kids are, you know — I'm old enough to be their mom. And just to see them hurt, it's very difficult."

She said she tries to comfort those who are seriously wounded and about to be evacuated to Germany. "I always try to tell them before they go to sleep: 'You'll wake up in Germany. Have a beer for us.' " And then she laughed. "Some of them aren't even old enough to drink," she said.

The medical personnel do an extraordinary job. The film tells us right at the beginning that 90 percent of the troops wounded in Iraq survive, which is the highest survival rate in U.S. history. But many of the more than 17,000 who have survived their wounds will face a lifetime of physical and mental struggle.

A member of the operating room team, commenting on the amputation of a soldier's thumb and the partial amputation of his ring finger, says that the patient who immediately preceded him "lost his left arm and his right leg above the knee. And, you know, there was a couple of marines in here the other day, one lost both his arms, the other lost both his legs. And this is a bad injury, but certainly could have been worse."

The movie does not shrink from those instances in which the G.I.'s do not survive. We see doctors all but begging the patient to make it. We see buddies weeping. We see a chaplain speaking softly to a mortally wounded marine:

"We don't want you to go. We want you to fight. ... But if you can't, it's O.K. to go. It's O.K. to go. But we'll be right with you. If you get better, or if you go."

HBO. Later this month.

Lunch Period Poli Sci

2006-04-30T16:03:00.000+09:00

*Note: I normally do not post Brooks's articles, but this time, he has truly exposed himself. This is nonsense crap, it might as well be Bush standing up and saying "I'm the Decider", oh, he already did that, and David Brooks wrote this or maybe his psychiatrist was writing it all down. Anyway, get on the couch and read this sideways...

Lunch Period Poli Sci
By David Brooks from The New York Times

College is still probably a good idea, but everything you need to know about America you can learn in high school. For example, if you want to understand American class structure you'd be misled if you read Marx, but you'd understand it perfectly if you look around a high school cafeteria.

The jocks sit here; the nerds sit there; the techies, drama types, skaters, kickers and gangstas sit there, there and there. What you see is not class in the 19th-century sense, but a wide array of lifestyle cliques, some richer, some poorer, but each regarding the others as vaguely pathetic and convinced of its moral superiority.

Similarly, when it comes to politics, high school explains most everything you need to know. In 1976, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Commentary in which he noted that our political affiliations are shaped subrationally. He went on to observe that especially when we are young and forming our identities, we make sense of our lives by running little morality plays in our heads in which the main characters are Myself, the hero, and My Adolescent Opposite, the enemy.

"Forever after," Wolfe writes, "the most momentous national and international events are stuffed into the same turf. The most colossal antagonists and movements become merely stand-ins for My Adolescent Self and My Adolescent Opposite.

"If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, was the sort of person who seemed overly aggressive, brutish and in love with power, I identify him with the 'conservative' position. If My Opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, seemed overly sensitive, soft, cerebral and incapable of action, I identify him with the 'liberal' position."

And so it goes. In every high school there are students who are culturally and intellectually superior but socially aggrieved. These high school culturati have wit and sophisticated musical tastes but find that all prestige goes to jocks, cheerleaders and preps who possess the emotional depth of a cocker spaniel. The nerds continue to believe that the self-reflective life is the only life worth living (despite all evidence to the contrary) while the cool, good-looking, vapid people look down upon them with easy disdain on those rare occasions they are compelled to acknowledge their existence.

These sarcastic cultural types may grow up to be rich movie producers, but they will remember their adolescent opposites and become liberals. They may grow up to be rich lawyers but will decorate their homes with interesting fabrics from the oppressed Peruvian peasantry to differentiate themselves from their jock opposites.

In adulthood, the former high school nerds will savor the sort of scandals that befall their formerly athletic and currently corporate adolescent enemies — the Duke lacrosse scandal, the Enron scandal, the various problems that have plagued the frat boy Bush. In the lifelong struggle for moral superiority, problems that bedevil your adolescent opposites send pleasure-inducing dopamine surging through your brain.

Similarly, in every high school there are jocks, cheerleaders and regular kids who vaguely sense that their natural enemies are the brooding poets who go off to become English majors. These prom kings and queens may leave their adolescent godhood and go off to work as underpaid sales reps despite their coldly gracious spouses and effortlessly slender kids, but they will still remember their adolescent opposites and become conservatives. They will experience surges of orgiastic triumphalism when Sean Hannity eviscerates the scuffed-shoed intellectuals who have as much personal courage as a French chipmunk in retreat.

Because these personal traits are so pervasive and constant, Republican administrations tend to be staffed by people who are well-balanced but dull, while Democratic administrations tend to be staffed by people who are interesting but neurotic. Because these rivalries are so permanent, nobody has ever voted for a presidential candidate they wouldn't have had lunch with in high school.

The only real shift between school and adult politics is that the jocks realize they need conservative intellectuals, who are geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them. Meanwhile, the geeks have learned they need to find popular kids like F.D.R. to head their tickets because the American people will never send a former geek to the White House. (Bill Clinton was unique in that he was a member of every clique at once.)

The central message, though, is that we never escape our high school selves. Vote for Pedro.

Bush of a Thousand Days

2006-04-30T14:39:00.000+09:00

Here's the funniest thing I've seen in a few days. Robin Williams from The Daily Show. It's hard to laugh or even hold your head up with this disgraceful, how TGW puts it, pResident in the White House. Also, when you have time listen to the new Neil Young album. It's beautiful, anyway onto Frank Rich...The Era

Bush of a Thousand Days
By Frank Rich from The New York Times

LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie," the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand days to go and no way out.

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he comes clean.

To mark the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion last month, the White House hyped something called Operation Swarmer, "the largest air assault" since the start of the war, complete with Pentagon-produced video suitable for the evening news. (What the operation actually accomplished as either warfare or P.R. remains a mystery.) It will take nothing less than a replay of D-Day with the original cast to put a happy gloss on tomorrow's anniversary. Looking back at "Mission Accomplished" now is like playing that childhood game of "What's wrong with this picture?" It wasn't just the banner or the "Top Gun" joyride or the declaration of the end of "major combat operations" that was bogus. Everything was fake except the troops.

"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker.

These days Mr. Bush seems to be hoping that we'll just forget every falsehood in his "Mission Accomplished" oration. Trying to deflect a citizen's hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president asserted at a public forum last month that he had never said "there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." But on May 1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct connection. "With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States," he intoned then. "And war is what they got." It was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.

At the time, "Mission Accomplished" was cheered by the Beltway establishment. "This fellow's won a war," the dean of the capital's press corps, David Broder, announced on "Meet the Press" after complimenting the president on the "great sense of authority and command" he exhibited in a flight suit. By contrast, the Washington grandees mostly ignored the Downing Street memo when it was first published in Britain, much as they initially underestimated the import of the Valerie Wilson leak investigation.

The Downing Street memo — minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began — has proved as accurate as "Mission Accomplished" was fantasy. Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix "the intelligence and facts" around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to "faulty intelligence," but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

The latest evidence that Mr. Bush knew that "uranium from Africa" was no slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address was uncovered by The Washington Post: the coordinating council for the 15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday "60 Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.

"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war," Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year C.I.A. veteran and an on-camera source for "60 Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the C.I.A. in fall 2004, Mr. Drumheller has played an important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Mr. Drumheller conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent W.M.D. labs, an Iraqi émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator. "The real tragedy of this," Mr. Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the [300,000] to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi Army."

Mr. Drumheller says that until the White House "comes to grips with why it did this" and stops "propping up the original rationale" for the war, it "will never get out of Iraq." He is right. But the White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost two years.

SET against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him.

Living With War

2006-04-30T14:03:00.000+09:00

Say Uncle, Rummy

2006-04-29T15:07:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd from The New York Times

Even some State Department officials thought it was like watching a cranky, eccentric uncle with an efficient, energetic niece.

Rummy was ordered to go to Iraq by the president, but he clearly has no stomach for nation-building, or letting Condi run the show. He seemed under the weather after a rough overnight ride on a C-17 transport plane from Washington into Baghdad. And Condi's aides were rolling their eyes at the less than respectful way the DefSec treated the SecState as she tried to be enthusiastic, in her cheerful automaton way, about what she considers the latest last chance for Iraq.

A reporter in Baghdad asked Rummy about the kerfuffle when Condi talked of "thousands" of tactical errors in Iraq. Rummy later noted that "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest" and that anyone who said that had "a lack of understanding" about warfare. She's just a silly girl, after all.

He could have taken the opportunity to be diplomatic about the diplomat, but he's incapable of that, so he just added more fuel to the fire.

"She's right here, and you can ask her," he said, pointing to Condi, who said she had not meant errors "in the military sense." She must have meant mismanagement in the civilians-mucking-up-the-military sense.

The former "Matinee Idol," as W. liked to call him, is now a figure of absurdity, clinging to his job only because some retired generals turned him into a new front on the war on terror. On his rare, brief visit to Baghdad, he was afraid to go outside Fortress Green Zone, even though he yammers on conservative talk shows about how progress is being made, and how the press never reports good news out of Iraq.

If the news is so good, why wasn't Rummy gallivanting at the local mall, walking around rather than hiding out in the U.S. base known as Camp Victory? (What are they going to call it, one reporter joked, Camp Defeat?)

In further evidence of their astute connection with the Iraqi culture, the cabinet secretaries showed up there without even knowing the correct name of their latest puppet. It turned out that Jawad al-Maliki, the new prime minister-designate, considered "Jawad" his exile name and had reverted to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

On the cusp of the third anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," Rummy was still in denial despite the civil war, with armed gangs of Shiites and Sunnis going out and killing each other and Balkanizing whole communities.

When a reporter asked him what the U.S. had to do to get the militias under control and stop the sectarian dueling, he answered bluntly: "I guess the first thing I have to say is we don't, the Iraqis do. It's their country. It's a sovereign country. This is not a government that has an 'interim' in front of it or a 'transition' in front of it. It's a government that's in for a period of years and undoubtedly, unquestionably, will be addressing the question as to how they can best provide for the security of all of their people."

Yeah, let's leave it up to what's-his-name. We broke it. What's-his-name can fix it.

The assertions that Iraq is largely peaceful were belied yesterday by our own government. A State Department report on global terrorism counted 8,300 deaths of civilians in Iraq from insurgent attacks — more than half of all those killed by terrorists worldwide — and noted that violence is escalating. The elections have clearly not quelled the violence, and terrorists are said to be trying to turn Iraq's Anbar province into a base for Al Qaeda and other militants. (And since it's our State Department, you've got to figure it's soft-peddling things.)

April was the most lethal month for U.S. soldiers this year; at least 67 died.

The Bush II hawks were determined to restore a Reaganesque muscular, "moral" foreign policy, as opposed to the realpolitik of Bush I. But with no solution in sight, Congress is pressing for some realpolitik. With W.'s blessing, lawmakers are sending his father's old consigliere, James Baker, to Iraq to look for a way out.

As Iran vows to go ahead with its nuclear ambitions, the administration finds itself relying for help on the very people it steamrolled and undermined before the Iraq war: the U.N. and international arms inspectors.

"The Security Council is the primary and most important institution for the maintenance of peace and stability and security, and it cannot have its word and its will simply ignored by a member state," Condi said after a NATO meeting on Thursday.

Rummy may get prickly with his office niece, but who else but the automaton could make that threat with a straight face?

Stuck With Bush

2006-04-27T12:24:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert from The New York Times

If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he'd be behind bars.

But that's just daydreaming. The reality is that there are more than two and a half years left in the long dark night of the Bush presidency — nearly as long as the entire time John Kennedy was in office.

The nation seems, very belatedly, to be catching on to the tragic failures and monumental ineptitude of its president. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are abysmal. Republicans up for re-election are running from him as if he were the bogyman.

Callers to conservative talk radio programs who were once ecstatic about the president and his policies are now deeply disillusioned.

The libertarian Cato Institute is about to release a study titled "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush." It says, "Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power." While I disagree with parts of the study, I certainly agree with that particular comment.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished historian and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton University, takes a serious look at the possibility that Mr. Bush may be the worst president in the nation's history.

What in the world took so long? Some of us have known since the moment he hopped behind the wheel that this reckless president was driving the nation headlong toward a cliff.

The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq — a war with no end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries.

When he was a young man, Mr. Bush used the Air National Guard to hide out from the draft in a time of war. Then, as president, he's suddenly G. I. George, strutting around in a flight suit, threatening to wage war on all and sundry, and taunting the insurgents in Iraq with a cry of "bring them on."

When the nation needed leadership on the critical problem of global warming, Mr. Bush took his cues from the honchos in the oil and gasoline industry, the very people who were setting the planet on fire. Now he talks about overcoming the nation's addiction to oil! This is amazing. Here's the president of the United States scaling the very heights of chutzpah. The Bush people and the oil people are indistinguishable. Condoleezza Rice, a former Chevron director, even had an oil tanker named after her.

Among the complaints in the Cato study is that the Bush administration has taken the position that despite validly enacted laws to the contrary, the president cannot be restrained "from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror."

This view has led to activities that I believe have brought great shame to the nation: the warrantless spying on Americans, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the creation of the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition and the barbaric encampment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in which detainees are held, without regard to guilt or innocence, in a nightmarish no man's land beyond the reach of any reasonable judicial process.

The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America has morphed into outright hostility.

Remember Katrina?

The major task of Congress and the voters for the remainder of the Bush presidency is to curtail the destructive impulses of this administration, and to learn the lessons that will prevent similar horrors from ever happening again.

Return to The Era

The World is Uniting Against the Bush Imperium

2006-04-27T11:15:00.000+09:00

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Is the United States a superpower? I think not. Consider these facts:

The financial position of the US has declined dramatically. The US is heavily indebted, both government and consumers. The US trade deficit both in absolute size and as a percentage of GDP is unprecedented, reaching more than $800 billion in 2005 and accumulating to $4.5 trillion since 1990. With US job growth falling behind population growth and with no growth in consumer real incomes, the US economy is driven by expanding consumer debt. Saving rates are low or negative.

The federal budget is deep in the red, adding to America's dependency on debt. The US cannot even go to war unless foreigners are willing to finance it.

Our biggest bankers are China and Japan, both of whom could cause the US serious financial problems if they wished. A country whose financial affairs are in the hands of foreigners is not a superpower.

The US is heavily dependent on imports for manufactured goods, including advanced technology products. In 2005 US dependency (in dollar amounts) on imported manufactured goods was twice as large as US dependency on imported oil. In the 21st century the US has experienced a rapid increase in dependency on imports of advanced technology products. A country dependent on foreigners for manufactures and advanced technology products is not a superpower.

Because of jobs offshoring and illegal immigration, US consumers create jobs for foreigners, not for Americans. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs reports document the loss of manufacturing jobs and the inability of the US economy to create jobs in categories other than domestic "hands on" services. According to a March 2006 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, most of these jobs are going to immigrants: "Between March 2000 and March 2005 only 9 percent of the net increase in jobs for adults (18 to 64) went to natives. This is striking because natives accounted for 61 percent of the net increase in the overall size of the 18 to 64 year old population."

A country that cannot create jobs for its native born population is not a superpower.

In an interview in the April 17 Manufacturing & Technology News, former TCI and Global Crossing CEO Leo Hindery said that the incentives of globalization have disconnected US corporations from US interests. "No economy," Hindery said, "can survive the offshoring of both manufacturing and services concurrently. In fact, no society can even take excessive offshoring of manufacturing alone." According to Hindery, offshoring serves the short-term interests of shareholders and executive pay at the long-term expense of US economic strength.

Hindery notes that in 1981 the Business Roundtable defined its constituency as employees, shareholders, community, customers, and the nation." Today the constituency is quarterly earnings. A country whose business class has no sense of the nation is not a superpower.

By launching a war of aggression on the basis of lies and fabricated "intelligence," the Bush regime violated the Nuremberg standard established by the US and international law. Extensive civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction in Iraq, along with the torture of detainees in concentration camps and an ever-changing excuse for the war have destroyed the soft power and moral leadership that provided the diplomatic foundation for America's superpower status. A country that is no longer respected or trusted and which promises yet more war isolates itself from cooperation from the rest of the world. An isolated country is not a superpower.

A country that fears small, distant countries to such an extent that it utilizes military in place of diplomatic means is not a superpower. The entire world knows that the US is not a superpower when its entire available military force is tied down by a small lightly armed insurgency drawn from a Sunni population of a mere 5 million people.

Neoconservatives think the US is a superpower because of its military weapons and nuclear missiles. However, as the Iraqi resistance has demonstrated, America's superior military firepower is not enough to prevail in fourth generation warfare. The Bush regime has reached this conclusion itself, which is why it increasing speaks of attacking Iran with nuclear weapons.

The US is the only country to have used nuclear weapons against an opponent. If six decades after nuking Japan the US again resorts to the use of nuclear weapons, it will establish itself as a pariah, war criminal state under the control of insane people. Any sympathy that might still exist for the US would immediately disappear, and the world would unite against America.

A country against which the world is united is not a superpower.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

A Prius in Every Pot

2006-04-26T20:02:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd from The New York Times

It's taken over five years, but George W. Bush finally made a concession speech to Al Gore.

He conceded that America needs to conserve, by buying hybrid vehicles and developing new energy sources.

Trying to calm the yips in his party and the country over exploding gasoline prices, the president sounded a bit like a wild-eyed Ozone Man himself yesterday, extolling the virtues of alternative fuel derived from cooking grease, sugar, grass, wood chips, soybean oil and corn.

But then he got ahold of himself. "You just got to recognize there are limits to how much corn can be used for ethanol," he said, standing in front of a bucolic mural. "After all, we got to eat some."

You could run a fleet of S.U.V.'s on the gas that W. was spewing about fuel. Bill Clinton would have been more likely to crack down on fast food than W. and Dick Cheney would be to crack down on Big Oil.

Even the usually supportive Wall Street Journal editorial page chastised Republicans for putting on "Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi fright wigs" to shout about corporate greed and market manipulation.

W.'s big move was to ever so slightly beef up a federal investigation into oil company price manipulation that's been under way since Katrina. "It's a great idea," said the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid. "So good that we passed a law last year calling for that."

Price manipulation could explain the marginal — why gas went from, say, $2.70 to $2.90 — but not why gas went from $1.40 to $2.70. That's more about fundamental forces: Chinese and Indian demand, markets spooked by Iran's threats, Nigeria's unrest, Venezuela's talk of nationalizing its oil industry, and the Pentagon's bungling of the restoration of Iraq's infrastructure.

Gasoline prices may be hurting average folks, but the oilers who helped put the Boy King and the Duke of Halliburton in office with lavish donations are enjoying record profits and breathtaking bonuses.

The Oilmen in the Oval, incompetent in so many ways, have brilliantly achieved one of their main objectives: boosting the fortunes of the oil industry and the people who run it.

All those secret meetings the vice president had back in 2001, letting the energy and oil big shots help write our energy policy — one that urged more oil and gas drilling — worked like a charm. In all their years in government, Mr. Cheney and the Bushes have never done anything to hold the oil companies' feet to the fire, or get Americans' feet off the gas pedal.

As Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, noted, "The Republicans are the party with the keys to the executive washrooms of Halliburton, Exxon and the big oil corporations."

Consider Lee Raymond, the recently retired chairman and chief executive of Exxon. Recently, we learned about his stunning secret compensation: he got more than $686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to a Times story, which calculated: "That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon's 'God pod,' as the executive suite at the company's headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known."

The only oil baron who isn't cashing in these days is Saddam. We pulled up to the pump in Baghdad and plunked down $10 billion a month, and we're still not getting any gas out of it. Instead of easing our oil dependence and paying for Iraq's reconstruction, the bungled invasion and subsequent nuclear sparring with Iran have left even Republicans looking for Priuses.

The last time W. began wringing his hands about our addiction to oil — in the State of the Union address — the vice president was dismissive about the notion of sacrifice afterward. And the energy secretary clarified the president's words, saying they shouldn't be taken literally and that the idea of replacing Middle East oil imports with alternative fuels was "purely an example."

Even if W. shows up on TV in a gray cardigan, it's patently preposterous for the Republicans to make this argument, after selling us on the idea that it's our manifest destiny to get into giant cars and go to giant Wal-Marts and giant Targets and buy more giant bags of stuff. Now they're telling us to squeeze into tiny electric cars and compete for precious drips of oil with the Chinese and Indians who are swimming in enough of our dollars to afford cars.

The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn't helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.

By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.

Return to The Era

Fear Mongering Right Gets it Wrong, Surprised?

2006-04-26T11:15:00.000+09:00

A Polish-born youth, 16, has been taken into custody but police believe a second youth has fled to Poland.

See what happens when you assume things without the facts...You look like a gigantic ****UP!

The Boss of the World

2006-04-26T11:10:00.000+09:00

By John R. Bomar

They say life in the Green Zone is pretty cushy for the leaders and troops of the occupation army and their Iraqi minions: manicured lawns, air conditioning, good chow, and a “businesslike” atmosphere of bureaucratic and administrative duties. Inside the stockade, behind the multiple layers of blast wall protection and three-deep guard posts, aside from the isolation, it’s good duty.

I was fortunate to serve in a similar “bubble world” in Vietnam. Our half-buried, heavily fortified intelligence-gathering bunker was just behind the South Vietnamese military headquarters in Saigon. It was a cloistered world of state-of-the-art telecommunications, highly secret enterprise and complete isolation from the reality of war. The fancy Plexiglas map of the country, where we briefed the generals, was lit up with neon markers and symbols. It was the beating heart of the place and on it we tracked enemy movements and kept up with the latest developments on the ground, like a surgeon monitoring his struggling patient.

I reckon today’s mood in the “Operations Center” in Iraq is a desperate one: the patient is struggling, its organs failing at an alarming rate, its pulse pressure dropping away, its physiology at war with itself. It was the same in Vietnam when I got there. The 68’ Tet Offensive was a year behind us and most of us knew that the writing was on the wall: it was probably a terminal case and we were only the somewhat helpless caretakers, awaiting the inevitable.

Unfortunately for those involved, with increasingly desperate counter-measures, the patient held on for six more years, bleeding untold billions of dollars and more hundreds of thousands of human lives. It was a tragedy for all. Of my group, the ones who seemed to suffer the most were those who had bought the “Big Lie,” that we were there for the noblest of purpose, that our cause was just. None knew of the seeds that had planted us there: helping the French try and re-colonize Vietnam after WWII, and later, thwarting a countrywide, internationally supervised democratic election.

It is indeed a sad irony that we now find ourselves attending a similar patient in Iraq, laid low by one whom, like before, had no personal knowledge of war. In my time it was LBJ’s fear mongered rallying lie of “Gulf of Tonkin Incident!” that gave the green light. This time it was Mr. Bush’s more ominous “Weapons of Mass Destruction!” If only we had known more of the history of the patients, we may have had the wisdom to defer taking on the case.

Forgive me, but the word imperious: “marked by arrogant assurance,” comes to mind for any nation that would try and play “boss” of the world. It seems this assumed mantle has always been the first step into a dark abyss for all who would strap on such presumption. And it can with certainty and truth be said: Those who have never smelled or tasted war…rush quickest to its rotting banquet, and stay longest at the feast.

John R. Bomar
Arkadelphia, Arkansas
870-246-3052

35 Years Later

2006-04-24T15:10:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert from The New York Times

Presidents and politicians may worry about losing face, or losing votes, or losing their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent civilians who are losing their lives. — John Kerry on Iraq

Boston

Saturday was the 35th anniversary of John Kerry's appearance as a young Vietnam veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. During his testimony, Mr. Kerry called for an end to the war in Vietnam and famously inquired: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He marked the occasion Saturday with an important and moving speech before an audience crammed into historic Faneuil Hall. The speech took on even more poignancy as it became known over the weekend that at least eight more American G.I.'s had been killed in Iraq.

I've felt all along that Democratic politicians, including Senator Kerry, have hurt themselves with their muddled messages on Iraq. Most elected Democrats have been petrified almost to the point of paralysis by their fear of being seen as soft on national security. So they've acquiesced to one degree or another in a war that in their heads and in their hearts they knew was wrong.

In his speech on Saturday, Senator Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, gave the impression of a man who had found a voice he'd been seeking through trial and error for a long time, perhaps since that springtime day in Richard Nixon's Washington in 1971.

"I believed then," he said, "just as I believe now, that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice and disserves our people and our principles."

He repeated his call for a complete withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq by the end of this year, and offered an uncompromising defense of the right of all Americans — including retired generals — to engage in "untrammeled debate and open dissent" on the war.

"I come here today," he said, "to affirm that it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong and a war in Iraq that weakens the nation."

He described the war as "rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception." And in a comparison with Vietnam, he said it is time now to get past "the blindness and cynicism" of political leaders who would continue to send "brave young Americans to be killed or maimed" in a war that the country had come to realize was a mistake.

By the time he testified in 1971, he said, "it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen — disproportionately poor and minority Americans — were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men who kept sending them there."

(In a private discussion, Mr. Kerry and I talked about the many thousands of American G.I.'s who were killed in Vietnam after it had become widely known that victory would not be achieved. Barry Zorthian, the public information officer for U.S. forces in Vietnam in the mid-1960's, has noted that American losses nearly doubled between 1969 and the end of the war. He was never convinced, he said, that "those last 25,000 casualties were justified.")

Mr. Kerry also warned against allowing the war and the fear of terror to change the character of the United States. He received a standing ovation when he said, "The most dangerous defeatists, the most dispiriting pessimists, are those who invoke September 11th to argue that our traditional values are a luxury we can no longer afford."

In an interview after the speech, I asked Mr. Kerry about the secret prisons being run by the C.I.A. and the practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are abducted by the U.S. and sent off to regimes skilled in the art of torture.

He said he believed these policies were violations of the Geneva Conventions, then added: "But the more important thing is that they are violations of our values, violations of our principles. Who are we to run around the world saying protect the Falun Gong or somebody else's right to speak out, and then we're willing to take people without knowledge of [guilt or] innocence and throw them into torture situations. I think that's reprehensible."

Read John Kerry's entire speech here

Dear Mr. President

2006-04-24T15:01:00.001+09:00

Pink

CSI: Trade Deficit

2006-04-24T15:00:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman from The New York Times

Forensics are in. If you turn on the TV during prime time, you're likely to find yourself watching people sorting through clues from a crime scene, trying to figure out what really happened.

That's more or less what's going on right now among international finance experts. The crime in question is the U.S. trade deficit, which according to the broadest measure reached an amazing $805 billion last year. The mystery is how we've been able to run huge deficits, year after year, with so few visible adverse consequences. And the future of the U.S. economy depends on which of two proposed solutions to the mystery is right.

Here's the puzzle: the trade deficit means that America is living beyond its means, spending far more than it earns. (In 2005, the United States exported only 53 cents' worth of goods for every dollar it spent on imports.) To pay for the excess of imports over exports, the United States has to sell stocks, bonds and businesses to foreigners. In fact, we've borrowed more than $3 trillion just since 1999.

By rights, then, the investment income — interest payments, stock dividends and so on — that Americans pay to foreigners should be a lot larger than the investment income foreigners pay to Americans. But according to official statistics, the United States still has a slightly positive balance on investment income.

How is this possible? The answer, almost certainly, is that there's something wrong with the numbers. (Laypeople tend to treat official statistics as gospel; professional economists know that putting these numbers together involves a lot of educated guesswork — and sometimes the guesses are wrong.) But depending on exactly what's wrong, the U.S. economy either has hidden strengths, or it's in even worse shape than it seems.

In one corner are economists who think the official statistics miss invisible U.S. exports — exports not of goods and services, but of intangibles like knowledge and brand-name recognition, which allow U.S. companies to earn high rates of return on their foreign investments. Proponents of this view claim that if we counted these invisible exports, which they call "dark matter," much of the U.S. trade deficit would disappear.

The dark matter hypothesis has been eagerly taken up by some journalists, who like its upbeat message. It seems to say that the U.S. economy is, as a cover article in Business Week put it, "much stronger than you think."

But there's a problem: U.S. companies operating abroad don't, in fact, seem to earn especially high rates of return. Why, then, doesn't the United States seem to be paying a price for all its borrowing? Because according to the official data, foreign companies operating in the United States are remarkably unprofitable, earning an average return of only 2.2 percent a year.

There's something wrong with this picture. As Daniel Gros of the Center for European Policy Studies puts it, it's hard to believe that foreigners would continue investing in the United States "if they were really being constantly taken to the cleaners."

In a new paper, Mr. Gros argues — compellingly, in my view — that what's really happening is that foreign companies are understating the profits of their U.S. subsidiaries, probably to avoid taxes, and that official data are, in particular, failing to pick up foreign profits that are reinvested in U.S. operations.

If Mr. Gros is right, the true position of the U.S. economy isn't as bad as you think — it's worse. The true trade deficit, including unreported profits that accrue to foreign companies, isn't $800 billion — it's more than $900 billion. And America's foreign debt, including the value of foreign-owned businesses, is at least $1 trillion bigger than the official numbers say.

Of course, optimists have a comeback: if things are really that bad, why are so many foreign investors still buying U.S. bonds? And they point out that those predicting problems from the trade deficit have been wrong so far. But I have two words for those who place their faith in the judgment of investors, and believe that a few good years are enough to prove the skeptics wrong: Nasdaq 5,000.

Right now, forensic analysis seems to say that the U.S. trade position is worse, not better, than it looks. And the answer to the question, "Why haven't we paid a price for our trade deficit?" is, just you wait.

Scotty the Joke Was on You

2006-04-23T16:32:00.000+09:00

By Ana Marie Cox from The Washington Post

I 've always had a soft spot for departing White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Watching him give his choked-up goodbye on the White House lawn last week, I realized why. The jowls he's grown, the hair he's lost and the dark circles that have grown under his eyes in two years and nine months on the job have made him resemble Washington's other helpless diplomatic pawn: Scott McClellan is the baby panda of the press corps.

No wonder I couldn't stand to see him get beaten up.

McClellan is a metaphor magnet, actually. And they're rarely complimentary: He's been called a punching bag, a rock 'em sock 'em robot, a cog in the greater machine, Piggy from "Lord of the Flies." Even conservatives tend to use a tone in talking about him that's usually reserved for homely pets that can't seem to get adopted: the adjective "capable" turns up a lot. (McClellan and his wife have four cats and two dogs, a poignant piece of trivia for those of us who think of Scott as an abused puppy.)

In modern administrations, the press secretary is often compared to an obstacle of some sort. McClellan's prickly predecessor, Ari Fleischer, was a smirking wall -- mean, arrogant, indifferent. McClellan was no more forthcoming, but he lacked Fleischer's swaggering, eat-you-for-breakfast podium style. His verbal tussles with reporters have never seemed like a fair fight. They'd run over him with facts and quotes, and his tired, puffy face would take the impression for an instant, before popping back into place, reinflated by the expulsion of talking points. When reporters fought with Ari, it was unstoppable force meeting immovable object; when they charged at Scotty, they were running over a human traffic cone.

This is a White House that, for the most part, deals with errors, misstatements and blatant untruths by simply refusing to acknowledge their existence. What "Mission Accomplished" banner? Which Social Security reform? Harriet who?

Such unselfconscious dissembling at the top of the administration makes it difficult to believe that McClellan delivered Karl Rove's and Scooter Libby's infamous denials of their involvement in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame completely without deceit. Surely he was in on the joke.

And yet -- well, go to the video. In the contentious briefings that followed every scandalous revelation about the administration's attempts to undermine the antiwar criticisms of Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, McClellan almost physically crumbles. His eyes grow dim, his shoulders slump. He becomes twitchy and marble-mouthed, stammering through his stock phrases -- he professed inability to comment on special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation more than 200 times in the last year and a half -- and, occasionally, perspiring visibly. In the game of dodgeball between the press corps and the president's men, McClellan was always getting beaned between the eyes.

Perhaps that's why he was so easy to like, or at least pity; Rove and Libby didn't even do him the honor of having him do their dirty work. He didn't know what he was doing. In a White House full of jocks, McClellan had the air of the last kid to get picked for the team. One suspects he didn't really want to play the game anyway; he'd rather be at home, rehearsing the Darth Vader-Luke Skywalker lightsaber duel -- perhaps pantomiming with his brother Mark, head of Medicare and Medicaid, who is reportedly a science fiction geek.

At the height of his fumbling through the Fitzgerald investigation, the pathos of the press secretary drew the attention of professional flacks at PR Week, whose well-meaning advice was touchingly obvious: When reporters "come up to him after a press briefing, pat him on the back, and say, 'Hey Scott,' they do that because they still need him. He should not mistake that for respect."

You know what else McClellan probably shouldn't have mistaken for respect? Rove's lying to him. Because McClellan's awkward parrying also served a purpose: The White House could not have shown its disdain for the press corps more clearly if it hadn't bothered to hire a press secretary at all.

McClellan's increasingly hapless briefings made for good blog fodder and excellent "Daily Show" segments, and critics of the administration posted snippets of his flailing with unrestrained glee. But for me, it stopped being funny when McClellan -- in an act of clear desperation -- began to fall back on the one commodity he had: His own sweet guilelessness. Badgered over and over about his representation of Rove's and Libby's denials, McClellan beseeched the press: "I think you all in this room know me very well. And you know the type of person that I am."

Yes, Scott, we do. You're not the type to lie. You're just like us: the type who gets lied to.

Ana Marie Cox is the author of the Washington novel "Dog Days" (Riverhead) and an essayist for Time magazine.

The Great Chinese Fake-Out

2006-04-22T19:51:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

Dick and Rummy are in Karl's old office, eating Chinese leftovers.

"Serves Karl right, by golly," Rummy says. "He's so arrogant. Won't listen to anybody about anything. Goodness gracious, imagine having somebody in such an important job who doesn't take any advice or pay attention to dissenting opinions. An autocrat ruthlessly ruling over his own little kingdom. Even Laura can't stand his peacock-preening."

Dick grunts his assent, his mouth full of ginger-scented dumplings.

The Bush mandarins are feeling more sweet than sour. It's been a fun week, sidelining Rove, firing the C.I.A. officer who was a source for reporters (including for The Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning articles) on the agency's overseas gulag, plotting against Iran, messing with China's head, rolling like a Tiananmen tank over the retired generals who tried to lead a democratic uprising against Rummy.

"Here's to winning the Battle of the Potomac," Rummy said with a wolfish grin, clinking Scotch glasses with Dick. "Another tactical mistake by the military."

The Kid whizzes down the West Wing hall on his Razor scooter. "Hey, dudes, listen to my fortune cookie," he calls out. " 'Though effective, appear to be ineffective.' " Dick and Rummy exchange knowing looks.

"Hu's on first?" Rummy howls, and cracks up, as he does every time he makes the joke. "Those Commies got what was coming to them. They're still trying to figure out how we could ruin Hu's trip by letting some woman with a press pass from The Falun Gong Gazette onto the White House lawn to heckle him.

"How the Dickens do they think? We let her in! That little Commie thought he could come here and act like we're the second-rate power, like we're supposed to kowtow to him just because China can call in its marker anytime on hundreds of billions of our national debt. This is America! We love dissidents on the press platform, as long as they're dissing the president of some other country."

"Hu let her in?" Dick says out of one side of his mouth. He may be laughing, or it may be a coronary.

"You let her in!" Rummy yelps, never tiring of their Abbott and Costello routine. "Boo-hoo," Dick growls. "Poor Hu."

"If we can let a male prostitute into presidential press conferences, why not a Falun Goolagong propagandist?" Rummy says. "What a gas that was, having the White House announcer call the People's Republic of China the Republic of China, as if we didn't know the difference? We know, all right. Taiwan's our democratic ally.

"What have the Commies done for us? They're killjoys who tolerate negotiations without end. They opposed the Iraq war. They're worthless on North Korea. They don't want us to bomb Iran. They support Chavez, or any other left-wing, U.S.-hating nut with the oil they need. They think we shouldn't be throwing our military might around to run the world. They believe in all that Sun Tzu 'It is best to win without fighting' piffle.

"They flood our markets with junk, knowing that Americans will spend all their savings on SpongeBob SquarePants dolls, video games and DVD's, while the Chinese people save their money because the Commies don't allow them to buy our junk.

"If Hu wants somebody to kiss his ring, he should have stayed in that other Washington. Those computer geeks and coffee beanheads treated him like a conquering hero. They're such die-hard liberals, but they don't seem to give a good google about a little censorship or mind collaborating with the state's crackdown on human rights crackpots when it comes to their Chinese meal ticket. They saw him coming and said, 'Ya-Hu!' "

They hear an echoing "Ya-Hu to you!" yodel coming from the hall, and the scooter races into the room. "Is Hu-Man mad at me for manhandling him?" the Kid asks pleadingly. "Is Karl mad at me for unmanning him?"

Dick shakes his head reassuringly.

"I like Josh!" the Kid says. "He did a good job in the 2000 campaign heading up Bikers for Bush."

He pops a wheelie and is off.

"The Kid thinks it's a real staff shake-up," Dick scoffs.

"Yeah," Rummy chuckles. "Throwing overboard a press spokesman who we'd been throwing overboard every day for three years. How painful was that? We might have shuffled the cards — including Andy — but we're still dealing. The Kid's wheeling and we're dealing."

They spooned into their leftover dessert from the Hu lunch, "Good Fortune melon three ways," sure that it would always be their way or the highway. They knew they would be hungry for power again an hour later.

Return to The Era front page

West Point Grads Against the War

2006-04-22T19:00:00.000+09:00

WHY DIE FOR A LIE?

WHY KILL FOR A LIE?

WHY TOLERATE LIARS?

Proud to be a Dissenter

2006-04-21T22:38:00.000+09:00

I shall not conform to anything on Faux News
In response to my post on Howard Kurtz's fluff piece about Brit Hume, CJR Daily calls The Era a dissenter.

Click on image to enlarge
Hume's "first thought" on hearing of London attacks: It's "time to buy" futures
From Media Matters

The Great Revulsion

2006-04-21T15:41:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

"I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country."

I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my column collection, "The Great Unraveling." It seemed a remote prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops, and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.

Now the great revulsion has arrived. The latest Fox News poll puts Mr. Bush's approval at only 33 percent. According to the polling firm Survey USA, there are only four states in which significantly more people approve of Mr. Bush's performance than disapprove: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska. If we define red states as states where the public supports Mr. Bush, Red America now has a smaller population than New York City.

The proximate causes of Mr. Bush's plunge in the polls are familiar: the heck of a job he did responding to Katrina, the prescription drug debacle and, above all, the quagmire in Iraq.

But focusing too much on these proximate causes makes Mr. Bush's political fall from grace seem like an accident, or the result of specific missteps. That gets things backward. In fact, Mr. Bush's temporarily sky-high approval ratings were the aberration; the public never supported his real policy agenda.

Remember, in 2000 Mr. Bush got within hanging-chad and felon-purge distance of the White House only by pretending to be a moderate. In 2004 he ran on fear and smear, plus the pretense that victory in Iraq was just around the corner. (I've always thought that the turning point of the 2004 campaign was the September 2004 visit of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a figurehead appointed by the Bush administration who rewarded his sponsors by presenting a falsely optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq.)

The real test of the conservative agenda came after the 2004 election, when Mr. Bush tried to sell the partial privatization of Social Security.

Social Security was for economic conservatives what Iraq was for the neocons, a soft target that they thought would pave the way for bigger conquests. And there couldn't have been a more favorable moment for privatization than the winter of 2004-2005: Mr. Bush loved to assert that he had a "mandate" from the election; Republicans held solid, disciplined majorities in both houses of Congress; and many prominent political pundits were in favor of private accounts.

Yet Mr. Bush's drive on Social Security ran into a solid wall of public opposition, and collapsed within a few months. And if Social Security couldn't be partly privatized under those conditions, the conservative dream of dismantling the welfare state is nothing but a fantasy.

So what's left of the conservative agenda? Not much.

That's not a prediction for the midterm elections. The Democrats will almost surely make gains, but the electoral system is rigged against them. The fewer than eight million residents of what's left of Red America are represented by eight U.S. senators; the more than eight million residents of New York City have to share two senators with the rest of New York State.

Meanwhile, a combination of accident and design has left likely Democratic voters bunched together — I'm tempted to say ghettoized — in a minority of Congressional districts, while likely Republican voters are more widely spread out. As a result, Democrats would need a landslide in the popular vote — something like an advantage of 8 to 10 percentage points over Republicans — to take control of the House of Representatives. That's a real possibility, given the current polls, but by no means a certainty.

And there is also, of course, the real prospect that Mr. Bush will change the subject by bombing Iran.

Still, in the long run it may not matter that much. If the Democrats do gain control of either house of Congress, and with it the ability to issue subpoenas, a succession of scandals will be revealed in the final years of the Bush administration. But even if the Republicans hang on to their ability to stonewall, it's hard to see how they can resurrect their agenda.

In retrospect, then, the 2004 election looks like the high-water mark of a conservative tide that is now receding.

Return to The Era front page

Exxon Excess

2006-04-21T13:56:00.000+09:00

By Pat Oliphant

Our Dirty War

2006-04-20T22:35:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert

I said, "Some of these folks have never been heard from again, right?"

"Yup," said Curt Goering. "That's right."

Mr. Goering is the senior deputy executive director for policy and programs at Amnesty International USA. We were discussing a subject — government-sanctioned disappearances — that ordinarily would repel most Americans.

In past years, stories about torture and "the disappeared" have been associated with sinister regimes in South and Central America. The attitude in the United States was that we were above such dirty business, that it was immoral and uncivilized, and we were better than that.

But times change, and we've lowered our moral standards several notches since then. Now people are disappearing at the hands of the U.S. government.

"Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and 'Disappearance' " is the title of a recent Amnesty International report on the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, a highly classified American program in which individuals are seized — abducted — without any semblance of due process and sent off to be interrogated by regimes that are known to engage in torture.

Some of the individuals swept up by rendition simply vanish.

"This is a kind of netherworld that people disappear into and don't frequently emerge from," said Mr. Goering. "It's a world that's outside the reach of law. These individuals might as well be on another planet."

There is no way to know how many people have been seized, tortured or killed. Since there are no official proceedings, there is no way to know whether a particular individual who is taken into custody is a legitimate terror suspect or someone who is innocent of any wrongdoing. But we have learned, after the fact, that mistakes have been made.

You may not be familiar with the name Khaled el-Masri, but the Bush administration sure knows who he is. Mr. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was arrested while visiting Macedonia in December 2003. A few weeks later, he was handed over to a group of masked men dressed all in black — in the so-called ninja outfits frequently worn by the rendition cowboys.

Mr. Masri's clothes were cut off and he was drugged, put aboard a plane and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a squalid basement cell for five months.

It turned out, as noted by Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize this week for her reporting on the government's covert counterterrorism programs, that "the C.I.A. had imprisoned the wrong man."

Ms. Priest wrote:

"Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorist center's Al Qaeda unit 'believed he was someone else,' one former C.I.A. official said. 'She didn't really know. She just had a hunch.' "

Someone had a hunch that Maher Arar was a terrorist, too. A Canadian citizen who had been born in Syria, he was snatched by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York on Sept. 26, 2002, and shipped off to a nightmare in Syria that lasted nearly a year. He was held for most of that time in an underground, rat-infested cell about the size of a grave.

No one, not even among the Syrians who tortured him, was ever able to come up with any evidence linking Mr. Arar to terrorism. He was released and returned to his family in Ottawa. Shunned and emotionally shattered, he seems a ruined man at just 35 years of age.

The cases of Khaled el-Masri and Maher Arar are among the handful that we know about. Most cases remain concealed in the lawless netherworld that Mr. Goering spoke of.

The Amnesty International report describes various acts of torture and other forms of mistreatment that are alleged to have been inflicted on victims of rendition. According to the report, Vincent Cannistraro, a former director of the C.I.A's Counterterrorism Center, said the following about a detainee who had been rendered to Egypt:

"They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things."

The Bush administration will never do the right thing when it comes to rendition. Congress needs to step in and thoroughly investigate this program, which is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down.

Fools

2006-04-20T09:13:00.000+09:00

Click on photo to enlarge

To this day it's still on the White House website. Hat tip to The Democratic Underground....

The Decider Sticks With the Derider

2006-04-19T14:02:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

At first Rummy was reluctant to talk about the agonizing generals' belated objections to the irrational and bullying decisions that led to carnage in Iraq. The rebellious retired brass complain that the defense chief was contemptuous of advice from his military officers and sabotaged the Iraq mission with willful misjudgments before and after the invasion.

"I kind of would prefer to let a little time walk over it," Rummy told reporters at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. But seconds later, he let loose a river of ruminations, a Shakespearean, or maybe Nixonian, soliloquy that showed such a breathtaking lack of comprehension that it was touching, in a perverse way.

He flailed and floundered through anecdotes from his first and second stints at the Pentagon, arguing that he drew criticism because he was a change agent, trying to transform the lumbering military bureaucracy.

He talked about things that most people wouldn't understand — how 30 years ago he chose a M-1 battle tank with a 120-millimeter cannon and turbine engine instead of the 105-howitzer and diesel engine the Army had wanted. He babbled on about reforms in the Unified Command Plan, the Defense Logistics System, the Quadrennial Defense Reviews and the National Security Personnel System and about going from "service-centric war fighting to deconfliction war fighting, to interoperability and now towards interdependence."

When you yank the military from the 20th-century industrial age to the 21st-century information age, Rummy said, you're bound to cause "a lot of ruffles."

Asked why he twice offered to resign during the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal but has not this time, Rummy smiled and replied, "Oh, just call it idiosyncratic."

Idiosyncratic, indeed, with Iraq in chaos, the military riven and depleted, the president poleaxed, the Republican fortunes for the midterm elections dwindling, and Republican lawmakers like Chuck Hagel questioning Rummy's leadership and Democratic ones like Dick Durbin proposing a no-confidence vote in the Senate.

The secretary made it sound as if the generals want him to resign because he made reforms. But they really want him to resign because he made gigantic, horrible, arrogant mistakes that will be taught in history classes forever.

He suggested invading Iraq the day after 9/11. He didn't want to invade Iraq because it was connected to 9/11. That was the part his neocon aides at the Pentagon, Wolfie and Doug Feith, had to concoct. Rummy wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would be easy, compared with Iran or North Korea, or compared with finding Osama. He could do it cheap and show off his vaunted transformation of the military into a sleek, lean fighting force.

Cloistered in a macho monastery with "The Decider" (as W. calls himself), Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, Rummy didn't want to hear dissent, or worries about Iraq, the tribes, the sects, the likelihood of insurgency or civil war, the need for more troops and armor to quell postwar eruptions.

"He didn't worry about the culture in Iraq," said Bernard Trainor, the retired Marine general who is my former colleague and the co-author of "Cobra II." "He just wanted to show them the front end of an M-1 tank. He could have been in Antarctica fighting penguins. He didn't care, as long as he could send the message that you don't mess with Hopalong Cassidy. He wanted to do to Saddam in the Middle East what he did to Shinseki in the Pentagon, make him an example, say, 'I'm in charge, don't mess with me.' "

The stoic Gen. Eric Shinseki finally spoke to Newsweek, conceding he had seen a former classmate wearing a cap emblazoned with "RIC WAS RIGHT" at West Point last fall. He said only that the Pentagon had "a lot of turmoil" before the invasion.

Just as with Vietnam, when L.B.J. and Robert McNamara were running the war, or later, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over, we now have leaders obsessed with not seeming weak, or losing face. Their egos are feeding their delusions.

Asked by Rush Limbaugh on Monday about progress in Iraq, Rummy replied, "Well, the progress has been good." He said that if you always listened to critics about war, "we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War" or World War I or World War II, and America would have been a different country "if it existed at all."

But the conscience-stricken generals are not critics of war. They are critics of having a war run by a 73-year-old who thinks he's a force for modernity when he's really a force for fantasy. It's time to change the change agent.

The Gospel of Scooter

2006-04-19T13:50:00.000+09:00

By Kevin Siers

The Danger of Hugo Chávez's Successful Socialism

2006-04-18T19:27:00.000+09:00

By Ted Rall

When the hated despots of nations like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan loot their countries' treasuries, transfer their oil wealth to personal Swiss bank accounts and use the rest to finance (in the House of Saud's case) terrorist extremists, American politicians praise them as trusted friends and allies. But when a democratically elected populist president uses Venezuela's oil profits to lift poor people out of poverty, they accuse him of pandering.

As the United States and Europe continue their shift toward a Darwinomic model where rapacious corporations accrue bigger and bigger profits while workers become poorer and poorer, the socialist economic model espoused by President Hugo Chávez has become wildly popular among Latin Americans tired of watching corrupt right-wing leaders enrich themselves at their expense. Left-of-center governments have recently won power in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Chávez's uncompromising rhetoric matches his politics, but what's really driving the American government and its corporate masters crazy is that he has the cash to back it up.

In their desperate frenzy to destroy Chávez, state-controlled media is resorting to some of the most transparently and hilariously hypocritical talking points ever. In the April 4th New York Times Juan Forero repeated the trope that Chávez's use of oil revenues is unfair--even cheating somehow: "With Venezuela's oil revenues rising 32 percent last year," the paper exclaimed, "Mr. Chávez has been subsidizing samba parades in Brazil, eye surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor families from Maine to the Bronx to Philadelphia. By some estimates, the spending now surpasses the nearly $2 billion Washington allocates to pay for development programs and the drug war in western South America."

Chávez, the story continued, is poised to become "the next Fidel Castro, a hero to the masses who is intent on opposing every move the United States makes, but with an important advantage."

Heavens be! A rich country using its wealth to spread influence abroad! What God would permit such an abomination? Notice, by the way, that the United States funds "development programs." Oh, and it's a "drug war"--not a bombing campaign against leftist insurgents who oppose South America's few remaining pro-U.S. right-wing regimes.

Quoted by the Times--which editorialized in favor of and ran flattering profiles of the right-wing oligarchs who attempted to overthrow Chávez in a 2002 coup attempt--is "critic" John Negroponte, whose day job happens to be as Bush's Director of National Intelligence. Negroponte complained that Chávez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country."

Pot, kettle, please discuss the $1 billion a week we're wasting on Iraq while people die for lack of medical care and schools fall apart right here in America. Maybe Chávez should have found a better use for the money he spent on Rio's Carnival parade. On the other hand, at least it didn't go to bombs and torture camps.

Televangelist Pat Robertson's 2005 call to assassinate Chávez was criticized only mildly by establishment media, and primarily on the basis that murdering heads of state violates a U.S. law. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accuses Chávez of a "Latin brand of populism that has taken countries down the drain." Which ones? Certainly not Venezuela itself, where a double-digit-GDP boom leads the region and new houses, $10 billion per year is banked for future anti-poverty programs and schools are sprouting like weeds.

Loaded language unworthy of a junior high school newspaper is the norm in coverage of the Venezuelan president. "Chavez insists his government is democratic and accuses Washington of conspiring against him," the San Jose Mercury-News wrote on April 3rd. Why the "insists"? No international observer doubts that Venezuela, where the man who won the election gets to be president, is at least as democratic as the United States. The 2002 coup plotters gathered beforehand at the White House. Surely the Merc could grant Chávez's "accusation" as fact. The paper continued: "He says the United States was behind a short-lived 2002 coup, an allegation that U.S. officials reject." He also happens to be right, though it's hard to tell by reading that sentence.

Eighty-two percent of Venezuelans think Chávez is doing a good job. That's more than twice the approval rating by Americans of Bush. He roundly defeated an attempt to recall him. So why is Washington lecturing Caracas?

"The [Venezuelan] government is making billions of dollars [from its state oil company] and spending them on houses, education, medical care," notes CNN. And--gasp--people's lives are improving.

What if the rest of us noticed? No wonder Chávez has to go.

(Ted Rall is the editor of "Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists," an anthology of webcartoons which will be published in May.)

The Streets are Full of Blood

2006-04-18T19:09:00.000+09:00

"Choices (The streets are full of blood) or How I learned to love the Iraq war" Song by The Era aka Pitchfork
The song is about the George Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld/Neo-Con Death Cult machine who created this horrible war. Click the blue/title if you wanna listen...
Bonus song #1 "I have a Republican erection"

Steak Night at the Deer Camp

2006-04-18T19:00:00.000+09:00

A South Arkansas message to George

Hey George, I hate to have to tell you this son, but they’re talking bad about you out at the deer camp. That’s real bad. When you’ve lost the deer-camp-boys you’re in big trouble around here.

You see, these are the real good ol’ boys, the one’s who make up the backbone in this part of the woods. They’re the ones who build the houses, grade the roads, install the plumbing and fix your air conditioner when it goes on the blink. They’re just regular, hard working Joe’s trying to make life a little better and get ahead. And up to now they’ve done pretty good. Many of them own their own businesses and are members of the chamber and pay a lot of taxes -- a lot of taxes. And a whole lot of them read the papers and keep up with what’s going on in the world.

George, they’re a calling you a liar. And if it’s one thing they don’t cotton to, it’s a liar. They know liars; they’ve had liars for employees and dealt with liars in trying to get ahead in their businesses. “Cain’t’ trust a liar” just about sums it up around here George.

Yea, if you’re a liar we’d give you a nod in passing, but we wouldn’t stop to talk. We’d try to be sociable enough if forced to be around you, but we’d leave as soon as possible. Out at the deer camp we’d mostly try and leave you out of the conversation, but if your name came up we’d all give each other that look; “yea, we know about dealin’ with him.”

That’s bad George. Real bad…real hard to get over around here, George.

I guess it’s cause we come from pioneer stock. Most of our people moved here from Tennessee and Alabama, and before that Georgia and the Carolinas and some from Virginia. We come from a long line of survivors George. Only the survivors got this far. They survived by their wits and hard, honest work, with a little luck thrown in. Excuse’ me for saying so but they learnt’ real early how to separate the chicken salad from the chicken s**** George. They watched out for what people did rather than pay too much attention to what they said. Their Grandpas taught em’ that.

And, oh yea, they really didn’t like being played for a fool when they had kindly given you the benefit of the doubt. On a scale of one to ten George, that’s a ten.

Yep, deer-camp-boys are proud of their roots and try and hold on to the old ways, as much as they can nowdays. They know the wisdom of their Granny’s come hard learned. They’re hard scrabble folk George, and judge a man by his handshake, the honesty in his eye and the sincerity in his voice. They’re nice enough when you first meet, that’s the way their Mama’s raised them, but they don’t really take you in till you’ve proved yourself. You know that puddin’ George, its proof tells the tale.

Well, guess that’s about it friend. Just thought I’d pass this along in case you was interested. Cause when you lose the deer-camp-boys around here George, there ain’t much left.

John R. Bomar
Arkadelphia, Arkansas

The Fear Factor

2006-04-17T21:15:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert

However one feels about Zacarias Moussaoui — that he's a madman with a martyr complex who had very little to do with the Sept. 11 plot, or that he's a terrorist with the blood of thousands on his hands — his sentencing trial and contemptible public behavior have reacquainted us with the awful physical suffering and profound emotional agony unleashed by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Moussaoui has gone out of his way to make it clear that the attacks and their stunning toll delighted him. "It make my day," is a favorite phrase of his.

For most observers, the toughest part of last week's proceedings came when tape recordings were played of the voices of men and women trapped inside the World Trade Center. As I listened to the victims pleading desperately for help as the smoke and flames closed in on them, the same thought came repeatedly to mind:

We were attacked by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. What are we doing in Iraq?

On Sept. 14, 2001, in a widely hailed appearance amid the still-smoking rubble of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, President Bush told rescue workers that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." He was answered with chants of, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!"

But the administration's eye was already on Iraq. That's the war the president and his cronies wanted. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had had nothing to do with Sept. 11. Iraq is where the bulk of our combat forces and most of the money and other resources would be committed.

It seems incredible, but the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda — a wholly justified war against an enemy that had killed more than 3,000 Americans — was given short shrift. If you want a sense of this administration's priorities, and the tragic gap between the president's rhetoric and reality, think Tora Bora.

Mr. Bush got a lot of attention with his Hollywood cowboy proclamation that he wanted bin Laden dead or alive. He had his chance. In December 2001, bin Laden was trapped in his mountainous hideout in Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan.

You might have thought that Mr. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, would have used all the forces at his disposal to capture or kill the man responsible for the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. But if you thought that, you would have been wrong.

Americans bombarded Tora Bora. But the all-important effort on the ground to surround and close in on bin Laden and his forces was contracted out by the administration to a clownish, quarrelsome group of Afghan thugs and miscreants. When a Marine general all but begged to be allowed to bring his men in to do the job, he was turned down.

Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan and hundreds of his followers scattered.

The man Mr. Bush really wanted was Saddam Hussein. And he pulled out all the stops to get him.

It is time for the American people to wise up. From the very beginning, the so-called war on terror was viewed by the Bush crowd as a magical smoke screen, a political gift from the gods that could be endlessly manipulated to justify all kinds of policies and behavior — including the senseless war in Iraq — that otherwise would never have been tolerated by the American people.

The tapes of people trapped in the World Trade Center, and the cockpit recording of the panic and final struggles from United Airlines Flight 93, which was also played at Moussaoui's sentencing trial last week, are chilling reminders that the fear of terror attacks inside the U.S. is based very much on reality.

That fear, and the patriotism felt by so many millions of Americans, have been systematically exploited by the administration. The invasion of Iraq was not about terror. It was about oil and schoolboy fantasies of empire and whatever weird oedipal dynamics were at work in the Bush family.

The war has been a disaster. At the same time, the administration's unscrupulous exploitation of fear and patriotism has opened the door to such gruesome and morally indefensible activities as torture, warrantless spying on Americans and the wholesale incarceration of foreigners — perhaps for life — who have no real chance to confront their accusers or answer the charges against them.

All of this should be kept in mind as we consider the fact that the administration that once had its hostile eye on Iraq now has it trained like a laser on Iran.

Battle Hardened II

2006-04-17T21:05:00.000+09:00

By Nick Anderson

Enemy of the Planet

2006-04-17T21:00:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was paid $686 million over 13 years. But that's not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other grossly overpaid business leaders, Mr. Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders.

There's a better reason to excoriate Mr. Raymond: for the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrichment, he turned Exxon Mobil into an enemy of the planet.

To understand why Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies, you need to know a bit about how the science and politics of climate change have shifted over the years.

Global warming emerged as a major public issue in the late 1980's. But at first there was considerable scientific uncertainty.

Over time, the accumulation of evidence removed much of that uncertainty. Climate experts still aren't sure how much hotter the world will get, and how fast. But there's now an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer, and that human activity is the cause. In 2004, an article in the journal Science that surveyed 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

To dismiss this consensus, you have to believe in a vast conspiracy to misinform the public that somehow embraces thousands of scientists around the world. That sort of thing is the stuff of bad novels. Sure enough, the novelist Michael Crichton, whose past work includes warnings about the imminent Japanese takeover of the world economy and murderous talking apes inhabiting the lost city of Zinj, has become perhaps the most prominent global-warming skeptic. (Mr. Crichton was invited to the White House to brief President Bush.)

So how have corporate interests responded? In the early years, when the science was still somewhat in doubt, many companies from the oil industry, the auto industry and other sectors were members of a group called the Global Climate Coalition, whose de facto purpose was to oppose curbs on greenhouse gases. But as the scientific evidence became clearer, many members — including oil companies like BP and Shell — left the organization and conceded the need to do something about global warming.

Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science.

A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which Exxon (which hadn't yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a strategy of providing "logistical and moral support" to climate change dissenters, "thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom.' " And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics.

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.

But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.

Has Exxon Mobil's war on climate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most governments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it's not clear that policies would have been any better even if Exxon Mobil had acted more responsibly.

But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond's reign as Exxon Mobil's chief executive.

The Slaughter Spreads

2006-04-16T18:15:00.000+09:00

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Last month villagers along Chad's border with Sudan told me how brutal militias were attacking their towns, murdering their babies, raping their daughters and burning their huts, while shouting racial slurs against blacks. Now those impoverished Chadians may find themselves not only attacked by genocidal marauders but also ruled by them.

Over the past week, Sudan has sponsored a full-scale invasion of Chad, seeking to oust Chad's president and replace him with the warlord who has overseen the murder, rape and pillage in those border areas.

Sudan seems determined to extend its genocide to Chad, and the upshot is that the catastrophe of Darfur may now be multiplied manyfold.

One of the towns I stayed in during my visit to Chad last month was Adré, which by some accounts — denied by the government — has now been seized by this Sudanese proxy force known for throwing babies into bonfires. So I wonder what happened to the children I met in the Adré hospital, like Fatima Juma, a 13-year-old girl who would have been unable to flee because she had been shot in the chest and arm while fetching water.

That the fighting has spread to Chad underscores that our policy in Darfur has not only been morally bankrupt, but also catastrophic in a practical sense. Appeasing Sudan has allowed the situation to worsen, because our policy has essentially consisted, after every outrage, of making the Darfuris turn the other cheek.

Chad's president, Idriss Déby, is a corrupt dictator. But he at least had the gumption to show some discontent at the genocide next door, and Sudan is taking aim at him precisely for that reason. If we let Sudan get away with ousting him for refusing to applaud a mass slaughter, we will have compounded our own shameful record.

It's not that President Déby was even very active against the genocide. Worried about offending Sudan, his government threatened to arrest me if I again sneaked into Darfur illegally from Chad to cover the genocide. But Mr. Déby did have the guts to grant Darfur refugees a safe haven in Chad, saving their lives — although now, disgracefully, he has threatened to expel them if the Darfur conflict is not resolved by June.

The fighting in Chad, including a battle in the capital, Ndjamena, that reportedly killed 350 people on Thursday, is nominally between the government and rebels. But make no mistake: those "rebels" are simply a proxy force of Sudan, made up in part by the Sudanese janjaweed militias that orchestrated the killing of several black African tribes in Darfur.

The Chadian rebels operate from a base that journalists have visited in Sudan. The rebels' guns, vehicles and uniforms come from the Sudanese government.

Their leader, Mohamed Nour, was handpicked by Sudan to lead this invading force. Sudan's vice president, Ali Osman Taha, has visited Mr. Nour at his base. And the "rebels" often drop by the town of Geneina, where everybody sees that they include some Chadians but also many Sudanese janjaweed fighters.

"Even a kid of 5 years old in Geneina knows that the Sudanese government is organizing the militias," said Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a heroic Sudanese who leads an independent human rights group active in Darfur.

The danger now is threefold.

First, Chad may collapse into civil war, chaos and banditry, like Darfur itself but on a much larger scale.

Second, the 200,000 refugees who fled Darfur and are living in U.N.-run camps in Chad may be specifically targeted for mass slaughter.

Third, the unrest may force international aid workers to pull out of Chad. Then the refugees will starve to death more gradually.

The U.S. has called on "all parties ... to reduce those levels of violence" — which is a bit like suggesting in 1943 that Nazis and Jews alike cease hostilities. The U.S. and other major powers need to be much more forceful in shoring up Chad against the invaders.

France has a major military base in eastern Chad and should start strafing the invaders. The U.S. should back France, send a top envoy to Chad to show support, and provide intelligence to Chad and France about the invaders' whereabouts.

President Bush and millions of Americans today will celebrate Easter and the end of Holy Week. But where is the piety in reading the Bible while averting one's eyes from genocide? Mr. Bush, how about showing your faith by doing something a bit more meaningful — like standing up to the butchers?

Coming home — disillusioned

2006-04-16T17:57:00.000+09:00

By Christopher H. Sheppard

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.

I believed the Bush administration when it said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I believed its assertion that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa and refine it into weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb. I believed its claim Iraq had vast quantities of biological and chemical agents. After years of thorough inspections, all of these claims have been disproved.

I believed the administration when it claimed there was overwhelming evidence Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaida. In January 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that there was no concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

I believed the administration when it grandly proclaimed we were going to bring a stable, Western-style liberal democracy to Iraq, complete with religious tolerance and the rule of law. We never had enough troops in Iraq to restore civil order and the rule of law. The Iraqi elections have produced a ruling majority of Shiite fundamentalists and marginalized the seething Sunni minority. Iraq dangerously teeters on the brink of civil war. We have emboldened Iran and destabilized the entire Middle East.

I believed the administration when it claimed the war could be done quickly and cheaply. It said the war would cost only between $50 billion and $60 billion. It said that Iraqi oil revenue would fund the country's reconstruction. I believed President Bush when he landed on the USS Lincoln and said "major combat operations have ended."

The war has cost the American taxpayers $250 billion and counting. The vast majority — 94 percent — of the more than 2,300 United States service members killed in Iraq have occurred since Bush's "Top Gun" proclamation. The cost in men and materiel has been far beyond what we were led to believe.

I volunteered to go back to Iraq for the fall and winter of 2004-2005. I went back out of frustration and guilt; frustration from watching Iraq unravel on the news and guilt that I wasn't there trying to stop it. Many fine Marines from my reserve battalion felt the same and volunteered to go back. I buried my mounting suspicions and mustered enough trust and faith in my civilian leadership to go back.

I returned disillusioned by what I saw. I participated in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. We crushed the insurgents in the city, but we only ended up scattering them throughout the province. The dumb ones stayed and died. The smart ones left town before the battle, to garner more recruits and fight another day. We were simply the little Dutch boy with our finger in the dike. In retrospect, we never had enough troops to firmly control the region; we had just enough to maintain a tenuous equilibrium.

I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris and a lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq — painting us into a corner with no feasible exit.

I will never trust any of them again.

Christopher H. Sheppard is a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a combat engineer. He currently is finishing his master's degree in mass communication and lives in Marysville.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars for the heads up

The Rummy Mutiny

2006-04-15T20:37:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

When Donald Rumsfeld was 10, his operating principle, as described by his dad, was: "If it doesn't go easy, force it." Not much has changed in the last 63 years. Goodness, gracious! Will that dadburn Rummy ever follow any of his own rules?

Rumsfeld's Rules offer many wise axioms that Washington's most famous infighter is ignoring as he engages in the Mother of All Infighting Battles against rebellious generals.

One rule advises: "Preserve the president's options. He may need them." Others include "It is easier to get into something than to get out of it" and "Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating" the mistakes of your predecessors.

History will long dwell on how America made the same bloody errors in Vietnam and Iraq within a generation, trading the arrogant, obtuse, wire-rimmed Robert McNamara for the arrogant, obtuse, wire-rimmed Donald Rumsfeld.

First the public began bailing on supporting the conduct of the Iraq war, and now top military voices are balking. Six prominent retired generals say that Rummy discounted the dangers in Iraq and managed with an intimidating style that left commanders feeling jammed into submission. He promoted sycophants like Richard Myers and Peter Pace, while slapping down truth-tellers like Eric Shinseki. Again, Rumsfeld's rules could have helped. There's one about the "indispensable" and "gracious" art of listening.

W. should have fired Rummy long ago, after the sickening news of Abu Ghraib and torture stories out of Gitmo. He should have fired him as soon as it became clear that the defense secretary who bungled the occupation and insurgency has no idea how to get out of Iraq and stop American kids from getting blown up day after day by homemade bombs.

But W. took a break from a long holiday weekend (is there any other kind for him?) at Camp David to defend Rummy and tamp down the mutiny. The commander in chief is the one who put Rummy in charge of the botched postwar non-plan and hates admitting a mistake as much as his defense chief. He thinks that if he caves to keening generals, he will be seen by his base as weak. His whole presidency, his whole muscle-bound adventurism in Iraq, has been designed to prevent him from being labeled a wimp, as his dad was.

Mr. Bush's pretense — that he was just following the advice of the military when he endorsed Rummy's inadequate troop levels — rings hollow now that the former generals have spoken out about the defense secretary's airless policy of coercion. Convinced Iraq was all but won, Rummy prodded Tommy Franks to cancel the final Army division in the war plan, the First Cavalry Division.

"Rumsfeld just ground Franks down," Tom White, the former Army secretary, told Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor for "Cobra II," their Iraq war history. "The nature of Rumsfeld is that you just get tired of arguing with him."

Retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold writes this week in Time about the "invented war": "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions — or bury the results."

Anyone who challenged the administration was painted as traitorous, so why not respected military leaders? A few Rummy apple-polishers raced forth yesterday to accuse the candid generals of undermining the military and the country. It's fitting that the military is attempting a coup of the civilian leadership, since the Iraq war followed the civilian leadership's coup of the military.

With his Pentagon advisers Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, Rummy set up a State Department within the Defense Department in 2002, to run diplomacy, and established their own C.I.A. within the Defense Department to ferret out "evidence" of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link, when the real C.I.A. couldn't. Finally, they set up their own Defense Department within the Defense Department, snatching back power from a military establishment they felt had grown too cautious about risking troops in combat.

Rummy thought he could banish American skittishness after Vietnam with his new streamlined intervention policy. But he ended up enhancing American skittishness.

If only he had followed his rule, derived from a Mark Twain quote in "Huckleberry Finn": "You can't pray a lie."

just a little nooky device

2006-04-15T20:34:00.000+09:00

By Jeff Danziger

Sent on a Fools Mission

2006-04-15T20:26:00.000+09:00

By John R. Bomar

Imagine being on foot patrol half a world away in a land where no one understands your language and everyone is by necessity a suspicious character capable of killing you. Are they friendly Shia or hostile? Insurgent Sunni or friendly Kurd? Worst of all, are they fanatical Al Qaeda with a chest full of explosives, bolts and nails strapped on trying to get close enough to hit the button.

Imagine being sent on such a mission having been told you are there to rid the world of a powerful and evil dictator holding terrible weapons that he wants to use against your country, then finding out it was all just a foolish mistake, a terrible joke, a complete sham. Or, you learn, perhaps it was an underhanded series of lies and exaggerations told by your commander in chief because of his personal vendetta against a weak tin-pot dictator who had tried to assassinate his father.

Imagine watching your buddies blown to pieces, their body parts strewn here and there in bloody rags, like bleeding toy dolls torn to shreds by a Rotweiller, or hearing them screaming in agony at the searing hot shards that just riddled their body -- while on the radio your leaders tell you how great things are and of the progress being made. And the fighting drags on day after dreary day with no end in sight and the surrounding unfriendliness just grows. The dirt, sand and grit gets everywhere and rubs red-raw spots under your shoulder straps, inside your crotch and under your armpits and the fifty pounds of armor and equipment you wear makes you feel like a lumbering Frankenstein inside a sauna cabinet instead of the nimble Ninja warrior you want to be.

Imagine seeing your best friend in the world die horribly while crying for his girlfriend or mother, or be terribly maimed for the rest of his life so you can take a village or town, all the while knowing that when you eventually leave it will once again harbor the bad guys; the ones who feel justified in slitting your throat while praising God in the middle of the night just because you are foreign in their land. Imagine.

Imagine running on adrenaline until it is all used up, then keeping on anyway, bone tired and weary, without enough sleep or a shower, to be awakened in the middle of the night for yet another patrol. Or worse, think of being so exhausted you can’t sleep because of the closed loop tape that keeps playing in your head: gruesome pictures of spurting blood, oozing gore, blackened guts and the blank-eyed stares of the dead, while you hear the sounds of the screaming voices and sirens, the thunka-thunka-thunka of helicopter blades overhead, the moans and pleadings for help, the wailing kids caught up in the middle of it all. The high pitch sounds of incoming mortar rounds and the whoosh of an RPG followed by explosions and shock waves get all mixed up with the whizzing bee sounds of bullets seeking their target and the rat-tat-tat and flat thud of rounds driven and squashed into mud brick walls. It gets all jumbled up in the churning washtub of your mind in the middle of the night, afterwards. Where’s the “Ooh – Ra” now?

Imagine seeing all your sacrifice completely unappreciated in the dark faces you meet every day – the stern, hard glances hitting you between the eyes like a dart, and kids who once waved and smiled now throw rocks that bounce off your Humvee. Hatred and burning resentment toward you become routine and you try and ignore it as you drive by and sense the inner rage at just your presence. Another night patrol at three in the morning to break into people’s houses in mostly vain searches for the bad guys only multiplies the haters. And you know it and you can’t help but feel, “maybe I’m gonna’ die for this f****** shit?”

Most terrible of all, imagine, with seven months left on your tour -- 213 days (and nights) to mark off on your short-timers calendar, you wake up on a steaming hot, quarter-moon night bathed a cold sweat to the realization that….you’ve been sent on a fool’s mission to this God-forsaken-hell-hole because of the ego stupidity, arrogance and obsession of the idiots in charge.

John R. Bomar
Arkadelphia, AR
johnrbomar@hotsprings.net

Listen to a special audio reading of this article by The Era.

*This article was originally published on February 22nd

Weapons of Math Destruction

2006-04-14T16:09:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney's assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren't bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox."

The damned lies included Mr. Bush's declaration, in his "Mission Accomplished" speech, that "we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

The statistics included Mr. Bush's claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans."

Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But it's all of a piece. In fact, my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration's sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration's tax analysts know? The facts are there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the administration's propaganda releases.

The Treasury Department has put out an exercise in spin called the "Tax Relief Kit," which tries to create the impression that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income families. Conspicuously missing from the document are any actual numbers about how the tax cuts were distributed among different income classes. Yet Treasury analysts have calculated those numbers, and there's enough information in the "kit" to figure out what they discovered.

An explanation of how to extract the administration's estimates of the distribution of tax cuts from the "Tax Relief Kit" is here. Here's the bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people whose income this year will be at least $341,773. About 53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population. Remember, these are the administration's own numbers — numbers that it refuses to release to the public.

I'm sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I'm wrong, there's an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006." Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn't release those numbers, that's in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration's spin.

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the "Tax Relief Kit" asserts that "nearly all of the tax cut provisions" are already in effect, that's not true: one crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.

Fool Me

2006-04-14T16:01:00.000+09:00

Tony Auth

Bush Leaks

2006-04-12T13:19:00.000+09:00

By Stuart Carlson

Wag the Camel

2006-04-12T13:18:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

Talk about a fearful symmetry.

Iran was whipping up real uranium while America was whipped up by fake uranium.

Obsessed with going to war against a Middle East country that had no nuclear weapon, the Bush administration lost focus on and leverage over a Middle East country hurtling toward a nuclear weapon.

That's after the Bush crew lost focus on and leverage over an Asian country that says it has now produced a whole bunch of nuclear weapons.

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, these guys wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

While Dick Cheney was getting booed as he threw out the first pitch for the Nationals — it bounced in the dirt and Scooter wasn't even there to catch it — Iran was jubilantly welcoming itself to the nuclear club and spitting in the eye of the U.S. and U.N.

Speaking before a mural of fluttering white doves, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged that his scientists had concocted enriched uranium. They will now churn out nuclear fuel as fast as they can.

Are they making a bomb? Nah, said the Iranian president, furthest thing from their minds.

Are we going to bomb them before they can get a bomb? Nah, said the American president, furthest thing from our minds.

The nuclear doves announcement was embarrassing for Mr. Bush, who had said on Monday that he was determined to prevent Iran from getting the know-how to enrich uranium. But the Persian logic cannot be faulted. If you pretend to have W.M.D., the U.S. may come and get you. Ask Saddam. If you really have W.M.D., you're bulletproof. Ask Kim Jong Il.

I'm sure the mad-as-cheese Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot believe his luck. The down-the-rabbit-hole Bush administration is tied up in Iraq, helping to create a theocracy friendly to Iran while leaving Iran to do whatever it wants on W.M.D.

In this week's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes about the Pentagon planning for a possible strike against the nutty "apocalyptic Shiites," as the former C.I.A. agent Robert Baer calls the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad and his chorus line of clerics.

Mr. Hersh quotes a source close to the Pentagon saying that Mr. Bush believes "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy." Which makes sense, in a wag-the-camel way, since saving Iraq is not going to be his legacy.

The Bush hawks, who have already proven themselves cultural cretins in Iraq, seem to still be a long way from that humble foreign policy they promised. A former defense official told Mr. Hersh that the plan was based on an administration belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." The official's reaction: "What are they smoking?"

Just as Rummy dismissed questions back in August 2002 about a possible invasion of Iraq as a media "frenzy" — even as plans were well under way — the defense chief shrugged off The New Yorker story as "Henny Penny, the sky is falling."

Noting that the president is "on a diplomatic track," He Who Should Be Fired said that while W. was obviously concerned about Iran as a country that supports terrorists and wants W.M.D., "it is just simply not useful to get into fantasy land."

Yes, the reality-based community of journalists should stay out of fantasy land, which is already overcrowded with hallucinatory Bushies.

W. defended his authorization of a leak to rebut Joseph Wilson's contention that the administration had hyped up a story about Niger selling Saddam uranium. "I wanted people to see the truth," the president said.

Of course, sometimes in order to help people see the truth, you've got to tell them a big fat lie.

As David Sanger and David Barstow wrote in The Times on Sunday, Scooter's leak about Saddam's efforts to obtain uranium had already been debunked by the time he leaked it. Colin Powell had told The Times that intelligence agencies were "no longer carrying it as a credible item" by early 2003, when the secretary of state was preparing to make the case against Iraq at the U.N. Only Scooter and Dick Cheney were willing to use a faulty bit of intelligence to defend their war scam.

With Watergate, reporters followed the money. With Monica, Ken Starr followed the stain. With W. and his bananas second banana, Patrick Fitzgerald is following the uranium. All he needs is a Geiger counter.

How the GOP Became God's Own Party

2006-04-03T09:53:00.000+09:00

By Kevin Phillips

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics. On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.

I have a personal concern over what has become of the Republican coalition. Forty years ago, I began a book, "The Emerging Republican Majority," which I finished in 1967 and took to the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, for which I became the chief political and voting-patterns analyst. Published in 1969, while I was still in the fledgling Nixon administration, the volume was identified by Newsweek as the "political bible of the Nixon Era."

In that book I coined the term "Sun Belt" to describe the oil, military, aerospace and retirement country stretching from Florida to California, but debate concentrated on the argument -- since fulfilled and then some -- that the South was on its way into the national Republican Party. Four decades later, this framework has produced the alliance of oil, fundamentalism and debt.

Some of that evolution was always implicit. If any region of the United States had the potential to produce a high-powered, crusading fundamentalism, it was Dixie. If any new alignment had the potential to nurture a fusion of oil interests and the military-industrial complex, it was the Sun Belt, which helped draw them into commercial and political proximity and collaboration. Wall Street, of course, has long been part of the GOP coalition. But members of the Downtown Association and the Links Club were never enthusiastic about "Joe Sixpack" and middle America, to say nothing of preachers such as Oral Roberts or the Tupelo, Miss., Assemblies of God. The new cohabitation is an unnatural one.

While studying economic geography and history in Britain, I had been intrigued by the Eurasian "heartland" theory of Sir Halford Mackinder, a prominent geographer of the early 20th century. Control of that heartland, Mackinder argued, would determine control of the world. In North America, I thought, the coming together of a heartland -- across fading Civil War lines -- would determine control of Washington.

This was the prelude to today's "red states." The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilments could also boomerang economically. The United States, some $4 trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.

Four decades ago, the new GOP coalition seemed certain to enjoy a major infusion of conservative northern Catholics and southern Protestants. This troubled me not at all. I agreed with the predominating Republican argument at the time that "secular" liberals, by badly misjudging the depth and importance of religion in the United States, had given conservatives a powerful and legitimate electoral opportunity.

Since then, my appreciation of the intensity of religion in the United States has deepened. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership.

Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured.

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

Conservative true believers will scoff at such concerns. The United States is a unique and chosen nation, they say; what did or did not happen to Rome, imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He apparently was not added a further debilitating note to the late stages of each national decline.

Over the last 25 years, I have warned frequently of these political, economic and historical (but not religious) precedents. The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the bull market of 1982 to 2000 was also typical of the zeniths of previous world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion. The United States of the early 21st century is well into this debt-driven climax, with some analysts arguing -- all too plausibly -- that an unsustainable credit bubble has replaced the stock bubble that burst in 2000.

Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.

Kevin Phillips is the author of "American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" (Viking).

The Cost of Produce

2006-03-30T09:40:00.000+09:00

Thoughts from The Weed Garden
Wherein we investigate what just happens to grow

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, my step-brother was in a summer program that recruited teens to work in the fields alongside Mexican and Chinese laborers. Every day he came home smelling delightfully of strawberries and complaining mightily about how hard the work was. I considered him a whiner. What could be more pleasant than a summer day picking strawberries? Perhaps eating a few too, and making money to boot--a dollar a crate! (There was a recession on and I was trying to earn money for college.) I tagged along with him a couple of times. Two days was all my body could handle.

By the end of the first hour in the field I had discovered there was no way to pick strawberries and put them into a wooden crate that didn't hurt after 15 minutes. You could squat down and sidle along the rows until your feet went to sleep and your thighs ached miserably. You could stoop from a standing position each time you picked--the preferred choice among the experienced workers--until your back cried out in pain. You could kneel between the cramped rows until your knees froze up and refused to do your bidding.

Because the rows are picked every day, there weren't that many ripe ones on the plants. This meant more stooping or sidling per berry. You'd get docked if you turned in a crate with too many unripe or overripe berries.

In that long day in the sun I made $4. The fastest picker in the field that day made $24, a pretty good day's wages in 1964. If she could have picked strawberries year round at that rate, she could have made $6,048 in a year. Of course, strawberries are seasonal and one of the more lucrative crops to pick.

The next time I went out, we were topping onions. Cutting the tops off of onions is pretty easy--if you do it once. Doing it for hours is brutally hard on your hands, even with gloves on. It's known as one of the tougher field jobs. I made $1 that day.

At the end of the summer, my step-brother vowed he would never eat another strawberry in his life.

Wall

2006-03-30T08:57:00.000+09:00

By Tony Auth

A Change of Course

2006-03-29T19:02:00.000+09:00

By John R. Bomar

George Bush’s recent admission that our occupation of Iraq will extend beyond his presidency passed with hardly a ripple in American public opinion. Uh oh.

The greatest fear leading to the outrage that fans the flames of terrorist tactics in the Middle East and around the world is that America’s real aim in Iraq is to try and control the region through permanent military bases. Such outposts of garrisoned troops stationed at permanent airstrips now number in the hundreds, and ours is an empire based on military might and high-tech war machines.

In the complete absence of reassurances by Mr. Bush of eventual withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, what are those in the region to think? What does his silence on this issue say to Arab moderates? Other than what has been said by Islamic radicals; that the ultimate goal of the US occupation is to control Iraqi oil fields and subjugate its people to semi-colonial rule?

Hardly anything is more important in the discussion of international terrorism and the present Mideast strife than the question of permanent US bases in the region.

Think about it. Would we accept an Islamic military outpost in our territory? Of course we would not. Why do we think Muslims are any different?

The recent imbroglio over the Dubai port deal is but one example of our duplicity and hypocricy. We fully expect to be understood in our denial of their bid to control our most important seaports, while we turn a deaf ear and blind eye to their outraged perception that we are establishing military bases in their lands that will remain forever.

Besides, it won’t work. Not only do such perceptions feed the fires of nationalistic fervor and anti-Americanism, it gives succor and support to the radical elements within the Islamic populations. It also sweeps the floor from underneath the moderate progressives in the region who would try and bring reason, democratic institutions and moderation to governments; our stated goal.

So, where are the pronouncements from Mr. Bush and company that we definitely plan on leaving; that our long-term goal is other than hegemony -- control? Where are the reassurances that our plan is to leave a sovereign and autonomous Iraq and Afghanistan? Where are the words acknowledging their right to self determination, free of US imperialism? Where are the words that would quell the raging hatred and burning fears of those in the region?

Or, is it as many in the world suspect; our ultimate goal is to establish permanent bases to try and control the region through perpetual threat of violence for any who would dare to confront us, or challenge our power?

Such sinister speculation is not as ominous as it sounds given the history of the past fifty years. In fact, it would seem par for the course. Our tracks betray us. What other nation on earth has such an expansive network of military bases scattered around the globe?

Our continued and seemingly perpetual presence in Saudi Arabia supporting the “no fly” zone in Iraq was the ultimate recruiting poster for Osama Bin Laden.

Sure, Saddam Hussein was a terrible despot, but many argue that our tactics after the Gulf War only strengthened his hold on the Iraqi population. The embargo imposed at our behest killed an estimated one hundred thousand Iraqi’s, most of them children, elderly and frail. And in the end, all Iraqi’s were dependent on Baathist Party handouts to simply eat.

Such seemingly brutal, counterproductive and short-sighted tactics by the West are what has driven so much of the hatred that now confronts us, and did so on 9-11.

Until we face these realities and indeed “change course;” working on the diplomatic front while curbing our own apparent greed, we face a perpetual state of warfare between East and West. No matter how we label it, or how strongly we work to demonize others, some of the culpability for the mess we are now in lies at our own doorstep.

When things go really badly, only a neurotic places all the blame on the other side of the ledger.

Dr. John R. Bomar
Arkadelphia, Arkansas

The Statue of Liberty

2006-03-29T19:01:00.000+09:00

Ben Sargent

Facts and Folly

2006-03-29T18:57:00.000+09:00

By Thomas L. Friedman

I was leaving for a trip the other day and scooped up some reading material off my desk for the plane ride. I found myself holding three documents: one was the Bush administration's National Security Strategy for 2006; another was a new study by the Economic Strategy Institute entitled "America's Technology Future at Risk," about how America is falling behind the world in broadband. And the third was "Teaching at Risk," a new report by the Teaching Commission, headed by the former I.B.M. chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., about the urgent need to upgrade the quality and pay of America's K-12 teachers.

The contrast was striking. The Bush strategy paper presupposes that we are a rich country and always will be, and that the only issue is how we choose to exercise our power. But what the teaching and telecom studies tell us is that key pillars of U.S. power are eroding, and unless we start tending to them in a strategic way, we aren't going to be able to project power anywhere.

Because we've long been rich, there is an abiding faith that we always will be, and those who dare question that are labeled "defeatists." I wouldn't call Lou Gerstner a defeatist. He saved I.B.M. by acknowledging its weaknesses and making dramatic changes — beginning with scrapping I.B.M.'s arrogant assumption that because it was such a great company, it could do extraordinary things with average people. Mr. Gerstner understood that an extraordinary company could stay that way only if it had a critical mass of extraordinary people. This is the message of his Teaching Commission: We cannot remain an extraordinary country without a critical mass of extraordinary teachers.

"If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America's economy will be driven by second-rate skills," Mr. Gerstner says. "We can wake up today — or we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think."

The Teaching Commission notes that "our schools are only as good as their teachers," yet this "occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at its foundations." Top students are far less likely to go into teaching today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers' base pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will teach (theteachingcommission.org).

Meanwhile, the report by the Economic Strategy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, is equally harrowing. It notes that while the U.S. led the world in broadband Internet access in 2000, it has now fallen to 16th place. In 2000, 40 percent of the world's telecom equipment was produced in America. That share is now 21 percent and falling. The U.S. ranks 42nd for the percentage of people with cellphones.

In an age when connectivity means productivity, when communications infrastructure is at the heart of any innovation ecosystem, these things matter for job creation and growth. The lack of ultra-high-speed networks in the U.S. "makes it impossible for U.S.-based companies to enter key new business sectors" — one reason venture capitalists are moving their R.&D. start-ups to Asia, E.S.I. noted.

"The wealth and long-term economic growth of the United States," it added, "have long depended upon technological advancement as a means of competing with our foreign rivals. ... America's emphasis has always been on achieving such high levels of productivity that it could be the low-cost producer while still paying high wages." The study offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (econstrat.org).

It's not surprising that the Bush strategy paper is largely silent about these educational and technological deficits, as well as about the investment we need to make in alternative fuels to end our oil addiction. Because to acknowledge these deficits is to acknowledge that we have to spend money to fix them, and the radical Bush tax cuts make that impossible. It would be one thing if we were going into debt to solve these problems that affect our underlying national strength. But we are going into debt to buy low-interest houses and more stuff made in China.

We're like a family that is overdrawn at the bank just when the parents need to send their kid to college, buy a computer and a D.S.L. line, and replace a gas-guzzling furnace. Whatever "strategic plan" that family has for advancement, it won't get anywhere until it rebalances its books.

Fly Into a Building? Who Could Imagine?

2006-03-22T20:22:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

Three little words:

Still employed there.

Of all the through-the-looking-glass moments in the last few days, the strangest is this: The F.B.I officer who arrested and questioned Zacarias Moussaoui told a jury that he had alerted his superiors about 70 times that Mr. Moussaoui was a radical Islamic fundamentalist who hated America and might be plotting to hijack an airplane.

Seventy? That makes one time for every virgin waiting for Mr. Moussaoui in heaven. Judging by how disastrously the prosecution is doing, the virgins will have to wait.

We could have cracked the 9/11 plot if the F.B.I. wasn't run by dunces. Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers got a break because according to the testimony of the officer, Harry Samit, a better-run bureau could have broken the case even without the terrorist's confession — maybe F.B.I. officers should have shot him with some paintballs.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Mr. Samit confided to a colleague that he was "desperate to get into Moussaoui's computer." He never heard back from the F.B.I.'s bin Laden unit before 9/11 — what did the unit have to do that was more pressing than catching bin Laden? And he was obstructed by officials in F.B.I. headquarters here, whom he labeled "criminally negligent."

He named two of the officials who did not want to endanger their careers with any excess aggression toward radical fundamentalists: David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, then working on the Radical Fundamentalist Unit.

Even though Condi Rice told the 9/11 commission that "no one could have imagined" terrorists' slamming a plane into the World Trade Center, an F.B.I. officer did. Officer Samit testified that a colleague, Greg Jones, tried to light a fire under Mr. Maltbie by urging him to "prevent Zacarias Moussaoui from flying a plane into the World Trade Center."

Later, Mr. Jones told Mr. Samit that it had just been "a lucky guess."

Kenneth Williams, a Phoenix agent, also sent a warning memo to the phlegmatic Mr. Frasca in July 2001, after sniffing out a scheme by Osama to dispatch Middle East extremists to America to get flight training.

Neil Lewis wrote in The Times yesterday that "William Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who are still employed there, would have any comment."

Still employed there? How can Mr. Maltbie and Mr. Frasca still be employed at the F.B.I.? How can Michael Chertoff still be employed at Homeland Security? How can Donald Rumsfeld still be employed at the Pentagon?

Missing 9/11, missing Katrina, mangling Iraq, racking up a $9 trillion debt — those things don't cause officials to lose their jobs. Only saying something honest — as prescient Gen. Eric Shinseki did — can get you a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Rummy told reporters last week that the military was preparing for a civil war in Iraq, but he did not consider it a civil war yet — even though he acknowledged it was hard to tell exactly when chaos tipped into civil war.

"I don't think it'll look like the United States' Civil War," he added sanguinely. Yeah. At Fort Sumter, Lincoln let the enemy fire first. So the defense secretary believes if the body count stays below the Civil War era's 600,000, Iraq will achieve a healthy blue-state, red-state democracy?

One administration official says that Rummy does not hold the same sway in meetings anymore, that he's treated as an eccentric old uncle who pops off and is ignored. But why can't W. just quit him? Instead, the president praised him for doing "a fine job" on two wars and transforming the military, when Rummy actually bullied the military to go along with his foolish schemes in Iraq and has sapped the once-feared fighting machine.

At his impromptu press conference yesterday, the president presented himself as a nice guy doing a difficult job, relentlessly joshing with reporters. He chided the press for playing into terrorists' goals by showing bad news from Iraq — "they're capable of blowing up innocent life so it ends up on your TV show" — even as reports surfaced about insurgents outside Baghdad storming a jail, slaughtering 18 police officers and letting the prisoners out, following fast upon an insurgent raid on Iraqi Army headquarters in Kirkuk. Does the president think TV will instead report on an increase in melon sales at the market?

When the Bushies harp on training Iraqi security forces so America can hand the country over to them, it has a hollow ring. Back in 2003, the U.S. de-Baathified Iraq and put its faith in its friends, the Shiites. Now, given the suspected Shiite death squads and militias, the U.S. wants to bring the Sunnis back into the system. So whom do we trust? And for how long?

Asked if he could envision a day when there would be no more U.S. forces in Iraq, the president said, "That, of course, is an objective." But he added that it would be decided by future Iraqi governments and future American presidents.

Once W. is not still employed there.

W.'s Shadow

2006-03-22T20:05:00.000+09:00

Round the bend

2006-03-22T20:00:00.000+09:00

By John R. Bomar

When the Secretary of Defense writes an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post trying to defend the indefensible, you know things must be desperate. When the house of cards you construct begins to tumble down around your ears -- a house built on sand -- happy-talk and self-delusion no longer work. When cruel reality dispels delusion and pops every PR trial balloon before it gets off the ground, its wake-up time. With the latest developments in Iraq it must be a sobering moment for the Department of Defense and Mr. Rumsfeld.

When a national leader can no longer speak freely to a mixed assembly but is reduced to pep talks to select groups of “vetted” participants like VFW super patriots, members of the Armed Forces or ideologues of his own stripe, things must surely be going poorly. When that same leader’s foreign travel engenders hoards of hundreds-of-thousands to protest his very presence in their country things are surely amiss.

When a nation feeds upon a constant diet of fear, exaggerated by media and leaders who excel in fear mongering, things eventually go a bit balmy…crackers…around the bend. And such exaggerations have a way of becoming self-fulfilling. When leaders are caught in a lie to justify a preemptive (first strike) war, and choose to continue to lie to cover the first, they steer a nation down a dark path indeed: The world becomes George Orwell’s playground: funny sounding words creep into the lexicon and twisted contortions of rationales are used to justify “staying the course.” For a while the voices of reason seem lost. For a while the liars and fear mongers seem to hold sway. For a while the architects of such a tragic calamity hold off their just deserts.

Eventually, though, as always, truth will be out. Eventually, people catch on. Eventually, a light will shine on the darkness, and eventually the deception and the clever cunning is exposed. Thanks be to God, the Light always breaks through.

The emerging catastrophe that is Iraq today is of our own making. Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor links to Osama Bin Laden. We were played for fools and took the bait hook, line and sinker, with nary a dissenting voice to be heard.

Two evils never make goodness and two wrongs never make right. Bad seed eventually withers the vine and flowery words that drift off into the void are no substitute for wholesome fruit. It is by our actions and their effect that we are known.

What is now apparent to most of us is that the fruits of this misadventure into Iraq are poisonous indeed. We are now stuck up to our axles in a stinking mudhole of our own making. Our military forces are demoralized and retreated to isolated enclaves, islands, behind blast wall barriers and concertina wire; to once in a while make foray that creates only more hatred and resentment toward them. Politically, we are like Capt. Lawrence standing alone amidst the chaos, confusion and screaming among the tribes of Arabia, to eventually stand in an empty tent. We are the bullyboy that rampaged the China shop and there ain’t no glue in sight.

Perhaps we will be surprised. Perhaps some good can eventually come of the destruction and carnage, the slaughter. Perhaps an Iraqi government can form. But even at its best the question will always remain, at what price?

No, the lessons we will have learned from this most magnificent of blunders is that we cannot be boss of the world, and disregarding the world and its opinions is to one’s own peril. Exaggerated fear mongering does indeed make mountains of molehills and strengthens ones enemies in the process. How easy we made it for Mr. Bush and company to pull the right strings that played on our fears -- leading to this debacle. For, most assuredly, those who have never smelled or tasted war rush quickest to its rotting banquet, and stay longest at the feast.

John R. Bomar

"The Final Word Is Hooray!"

2006-03-21T10:25:00.000+09:00

Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna pundits

Weeks after thse invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media's supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.

"The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong," Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). "They didn't get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong."

Hume was perhaps correct--but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Around the same time as Hume's speech, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared (4/16/03): "All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking."

Gathered here are some of the most notable media comments from the early days of the Iraq War.

Declaring Victory

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)

"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)

"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)

Mission Accomplished?

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)

"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)

Neutralizing the Opposition

"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"What's he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it's over? I mean, don't these things sort of lose their--Isn't there a fresh date on some of these debate points?"
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean--4/9/03)

"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?"
(CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)

"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)

Nagging the "Naysayers"

"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)

"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)

"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.... I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war....

"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.

"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)

"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
(Fox News Channel's Dick Morris, 4/9/03)

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)

"Well, the hot story of the week is victory.... The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths.... There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far.... The final word on this is, hooray."
(Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)

"Some journalists, in my judgment, just can't stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, 4/14/03)

"Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn't figured out we won the war."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)

Cakewalk?

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)

"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?"
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)

"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)

"There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that."
(Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)

"He [Saddam Hussein] actually thought that he could stop us and win the debate worldwide. But he didn't--he didn't bargain on a two- or three week war. I actually thought it would be less than two weeks."
(NBC reporter Fred Francis, Chris Matthews Show, 4/13/03)

Weapons of Mass Destruction

NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it...

Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody.
(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)

"Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it."
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)

"Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of 'the green mushroom' over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time."
(Newsweek, 3/17/03)

"Chris, more than anything else, real vindication for the administration. One, credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Two, you know what? There were a lot of terrorists here, really bad guys. I saw them."
(MSNBC reporter Bob Arnot, 4/9/03)

"Even in the flush of triumph, doubts will be raised. Where are the supplies of germs and poison gas and plans for nukes to justify pre-emption? (Freed scientists will lead us to caches no inspectors could find.) What about remaining danger from Baathist torturers and war criminals forming pockets of resistance and plotting vengeance? (Their death wish is our command.)"
(New York Times' William Safire, 4/10/03)

2006-03-21T10:15:00.000+09:00

Click on image for full resolution

Bogus Bush Bashing

2006-03-20T21:43:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

"The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is 'incompetent,' and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned descriptors: 'idiot' and 'liar.' " So says the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, whose most recent poll found that only 33 percent of the public approves of the job President Bush is doing.

Mr. Bush, of course, bears primary responsibility for the state of his presidency. But there's more going on here than his personal inadequacy; we're looking at the failure of a movement as well as a man. As evidence, consider the fact that most of the conservatives now rushing to distance themselves from Mr. Bush still can't bring themselves to criticize his actual policies. Instead, they accuse him of policy sins — in particular, of being a big spender on domestic programs — that he has not, in fact, committed.

Before I get to the bogus issue of domestic spending, let's look at the policies the new wave of conservative Bush bashers refuses to criticize.

Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising. Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own complicity in that decision.

Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr. Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)

Meanwhile, the continuing allegiance of conservatives to tax cuts as the universal policy elixir prevents them from saying anything about the real sources of the federal budget deficit, in particular Mr. Bush's unprecedented decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war. (My colleague Bob Herbert points out that the Iraq hawks chose to fight a war with other people's children. They chose to fight it with other people's money, too.)

They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years. More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated the administration's dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn't truthful about his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of 'compassionate conservatism.' " As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it on his blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they thought they were in on the con.

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with this criticism: it's not true.

It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001 and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.

So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job; his report shifts artfully back and forth among various measures of spending (nominal, real, total, domestic, discretionary, domestic discretionary), managing to convey the false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

2006-03-09T10:37:00.000+09:00

Tony Auth

Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts

2006-03-08T13:44:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

There is a crash of ideologies between the country's two most self-regarding and fantasy-spinning power centers. The Bush crowd cringes away from gay cowboys spooning, gay authors flouncing, transgender babes exploring and George the Dashing Clooneying in movies about the glories of free speech and the dangers of oilmen influencing policy.

But as I looked around Vanity Fair's slinky Oscar party on Sunday night, it struck me that the bellicose Bushies do share a presentation aesthetic with Tinseltown's trompe l'oeil beauties: you see no furrowed brows, no regretful winces, no unflattering wrinkles, no admissions of imperfection, no qualms about puffing up what you really have, no visible signs of hard lessons learned, and no desire to confront reality in the mirror.

Who ever thought Dick Cheney and Mamie Van Doren would have so much in common?

The White House is constantly trying to do laser resurfacing on its Iraq policy, to sandblast away the damage from its own mistakes. But its veneer may be beyond repair.

In Hollywood terms, we've reached an Indiana Jones crisis moment in our parlous protectorate. The cave is collapsing, the snakes are encroaching, the vehicles are exploding, the crushing ball is rolling down on us. The public has stopped buying the administration's sugary spin. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans — cutting across party lines — say sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely. More than a third call it "very likely." Half also think the U.S. should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found, and two-thirds say the president has no clear plan for Iraq.

The widespread resistance to the Dubai ports deal, even among newly fractious Republicans, indicates that Americans have lost faith in the president's competence — a faith shredded by the White House's obtuseness and lies on Katrina.

As Hollywood often does, the administration scorns introspection and originality. It sticks with the same worn themes: Stay the course. Victory's around the corner. Anyone who expresses skepticism is a defeatist, a softie on terrorism.

On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraq was "going very, very well, from everything you look at." And on Tuesday at a Pentagon briefing, Rummy, who should have resigned in shame long ago, tried to blame the press, echoing Gen. George Casey in saying: "Much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation."

He added, "The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."

After all the horrible mistakes in judgment the defense secretary has made — mistakes that have left our troops without proper backup and armor, created an inept and corrupt occupation, and confused soldiers into thinking torture was O.K. — it takes humongous gall to suggest that the problem is really the reporters.

Many experts say we're close to a civil war — or already in one. Even the U.S. envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Los Angeles Times on Monday that the invasion of Iraq had opened a "Pandora's box" of tribal and religious fissures that could devour the region. His words evoked a harrowing image of the bad spirits swarming up the mountain in Disney's "Fantasia" as Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" played.

He said that if there's another incident like the Shiite shrine's being blown up, Iraq is "really vulnerable."

The Pentagon says it'll look once more at the death by friendly fire of the football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, because the first three inquiries were tainted — one more sad illustration of the administration's cynical attempt not to let anything get in the way of its heroic, and dermatologically plumped up, story line for America.

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2006-03-08T13:33:00.000+09:00

Tony Auth

2006-03-08T13:24:00.000+09:00

Global Peace Through Nuclear Weapons
Dr. Strangelove is Our President

By JOHN BLAIR

Is this a bad dream? Please wake me up! Is Dr. Strangelove really our President?

But, it is not a dream. George W. Bush has decided that the world needs another nuclear arms race and has done so by going to India and signing an agreement to undermine the five decade success of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty which India has refused to sign.

As a result, India will be able to build increasing numbers of nuclear weapons with US approval and supplies, so they can gain an upper hand on our other "ally" in the region who the Indians love to hate, Pakistan, who also has nuclear weapons.

For nearly fifty years the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has served us well. But India has always been a rogue nation to that treaty and has refused to become a part of the larger nuclear weapons club of England, France, China, Russia and the US.

India and Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have also developed nuclear weapons but have had a hard time making them in any large numbers due to a lack of weapons grade nuclear fuel.

Throughout the 1970s, the world lived in fear of an accelerated program of nuclear weapons development and use in Central Asia when India and Pakistan repeatedly use a nuclear threat toward each other. Apparently, Bush was in too much of a fog with his drinking in that period to remember all that. So now he not only went to India encouraging them to acquire more American jobs through outsourcing but also paved the way for India to initiate a nuclear arms race with Pakistan and maybe even China, by agreeing to the US sale of nuclear fuel and reactor parts to a country that has refused to allow even inspection of their nuclear program or sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Yes, India is the world's largest democracy but that does not make them immediately trustworthy on the gravest of all issues. After all, they are a country that has done testing of nuclear weapons against nearly all world opinion, dousing the world with large levels of radiation just to flex their muscles against their arch enemy neighbor, Pakistan.

Of course, Pakistan will expect us to give them similar treatment even though they are probably harboring the arch enemy we seem so frightened about, Bin Laden.

And if we are going to strike such a deal with India, just where is our moral high ground in telling Iran they cannot have nukes of their own. Don't they claim that their nuclear program is only peaceful?

It was Nixon who signed the original nonproliferation treaty and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed for dismantling of large numbers of nukes around the world but Bush seems intent to undermine that effort and create another arms race, one that may end up more dangerous than that with the Soviets and the US, since this one will between neighbors, whom we know at least one is home of large numbers of terrorists. No need for intercontinental ballistic missiles since they share a common border.

These last few weeks have revealed a situation in which anyone can see that it is not American interests that Bush has in mind, From the Ports deal to this absurdity, America will be losers while Bush's corporate friends and arms dealers around the world will reap huge benefits as the earth collapses into further disarray. Can we afford three more years of this? I do not think so.

Hopefully, Richard Lugar, as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will stop this deal in its tracks and tell Bush that he needs to serve American interests instead of those of his business enablers.

John Blair is president of the environment health advocacy group, Valley Watch and earned a Pulitzer Prize for news Photography in 1978. He can be reached at: Ecoserve1@aol.com

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If “by their fruits…..”

2006-03-07T16:35:00.000+09:00

By John R. Bomar

Can anyone doubt that the war in Iraq has proved to be Osama bin Laden’s sweetest dream come true? In his book on the run up to war, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar at the White House, immediately recognized this potential risk of an Iraq invasion.

He recounts envisioning bin Laden sitting somewhere in a cave actually “willing George Bush to invade Iraq.” Clarke knew that such a jingoist misadventure would play right into the hands of the extremists: It would allow them portray the US as an out of control Great Satan with a personal vendetta against the Islamic world and unquenchable thirst for their oil. Bush’s verbal faux paux using the word “crusade” to describe the effort only heightened the propaganda bonanza for the extremists.

Mr. Clark and other knowledgeable war critics correctly foresaw our present dilemma: the US treasury spent and bleeding red ink, our credibility and respect lost to the world, our military stretched and overextended while fighting on two fronts, near civil war in Iraq, an unfinished job in Afghanistan, deep and serious divisions in our body politic, and immense international distrust of the intentions and motives of our nation. And worst of all, a great strengthening of the forces of international terrorism.

In his recent dialogue in The Nation, former head of the Middle Eastern Division of the CIA, Paul Pillar, reveals in substantial ways the abusive and deceptive tactics used by the Bush administration in their manipulation of intelligence to sell the war on Iraq. He also describes Mr. Bush’s complete disregard of cautionary warnings about the post war conditions in Iraq, conditions now proven so sadly true. Pillar’s confessions only confirm what many had already begun to accept: we were lied to in justifying the war in Iraq, the intelligence was indeed “cherry-picked,” and the administration was ignorant of or did not care about the potential post war civil strife inside Iraq. So obsessed was Mr. Bush to make war on Saddam Hussein that he willingly played us for fools, and went in half-cocked with insufficient troops to manage the post war environment. The myth of a cakewalk followed by rose pedals in the streets and happy-ever-after demonstrates just how disconnected were the war planners from the reality of Iraq.

And the larger war on international terrorism? We are losing by leaps and bounds. Who in their right mind can argue that invading Iraq has made us safer at home? Despite Mr. Bush’s vain attempt to portray Iraq as the forefront in the struggle against international terrorism -- which only compounds the core dishonesty that characterized his preemptive invasion -- most now concede that the war has indeed strengthened the Islamofascist movement in unprecedented ways. Sure, Iraq has become a magnet for those in the Middle East who would actively make war against us, but the opportunity we handed them was of our own making. By almost universal agreement it is now accepted that we have actually strengthened international terrorism and the aura of Osama bin Laden by creating a “breeding and training ground for terrorists” in Iraq.

World opinion does matter. In many ways it provides a mirror by which we may see ourselves. Right now we hold the lowest position ever, even worse than the terrible days of Vietnam. We have been disgraced and humiliated in the eyes of the world under Mr. Bush’s blundering helmsmanship.

All military commanders are held to the high standard of outcome and effect, it is the price they pay for the power given them. By this measure Mr. Bush has been a miserable failure bordering on incompetence. We are weaker now than at any time in recent history. We have squandered the good will afforded us after the events of 9/ll and thrown away our punch on a tin pot dictator who posed absolutely no threat to us whatsoever. We are bogged down in a foreign land half a world away that is perhaps quickly approaching a state of civil war. We have handed the terrorists a propaganda bonanza on a silver platter and multiplied the hatred and resentment toward us in the Islamic world to immense proportion. Many argue that the recent success of extremists in Palestine and Iran have been a direct result of our Iraqi invasion; sweeping the floor from underneath the moderate/progressive voices in the region.

If “by their fruit ye shall know them,” then the present realities for the United States speak of leadership that has utterly failed in its duty to lead with wisdom, prudence and forethought. From the missed opportunities to identify and thwart the airborne attacks of 9/11, to the missed opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, to the lies that preceded the trumped up war in Iraq, to the unwitting strengthening of our real enemies, to the bankrupt treasury and deep divisions within the US, this administration’s legacy will be one of missed opportunities, fatal misjudgments, arrogant and short sighted priorities, reactionary jingoism, and delusional incompetence. Bitter fruits indeed.

John R. Bomar
johnrbomar@hotsprings.net

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The Soldiers Speak. Will President Bush Listen?

2006-03-01T01:08:00.000+09:00

By Nicholas D. Kristof

When President Bush held a public meeting with troops by satellite last fall, they were miraculously upbeat. And all along, unrepentant hawks (most of whom have never been to Iraq) have insisted that journalists are misreporting Iraq and that most soldiers are gung-ho about their mission.

Hogwash! A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq — and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, "How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?"

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush's position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw "immediately."

That's one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don't buy into it — and having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only 26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

So what would it take to win in Iraq? Maybe that was the single most depressing finding in this poll.

By a two-to-one ratio, the troops said that "to control the insurgency we need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions." And since there is zero chance of that happening, a majority of troops seemed to be saying that they believe this war to be unwinnable.

This first systematic look at the views of the U.S. troops on the ground suggests that our present strategy in Iraq is failing badly. The troops overwhelmingly don't want to "stay the course," and they don't seem to think the American strategy can succeed.

It's tempting, but not very helpful, to repeat that the fatal mistake was invading Iraq three years ago and leave it at that. That's easy for a columnist to say; the harder thing for a policy maker is to figure out what we do next, now that we're already there.

I still believe that while the war was a dreadful mistake, an immediate pullout would also be a misstep: anyone who says that Iraq can't get worse hasn't seen a country totally torn apart by chaos and civil war. Mr. Bush is right about the consequences of an immediate pullout — to Iraq, and also to American influence around the world.

But while we shouldn't rush for the exits immediately, we should lay out a timetable for withdrawal that would remove all troops by the end of next year. And we should state clearly that we will not keep any military bases in Iraq — that's a no-brainer, for it costs us nothing, but our hedging on bases antagonizes Iraqi nationalists and results in more dead Americans.

Such a timetable would force Iraqis to prepare — politically and militarily — to run their own country. The year or two of transition would galvanize Iraqi Shiites to find a modus vivendi with Sunnis while undermining the insurgents' arguments that they are nationalists protecting the motherland from Yankee crusaders.

True, a timetable is arbitrary and risky, for it could just encourage insurgents to hang tight for another couple of years. But we're being killed — literally — because of nationalist suspicions among Iraqis that we're just after their oil and bases and that we're going to stay forever. It's crucial that we defuse that nationalist rage.

For now, we've become the piñata of Iraqi politics, something for Iraqi demagogues to bash to boost their own legitimacy. Moktada al-Sadr, one of the scariest Iraqi leaders, has very shrewdly used his denunciations of the U.S. to boost his own political following and influence across Iraq; that's our gift to him, a consequence of our myopia. And many ordinary Iraqis are buying into this scapegoating of the U.S. Edward Wong, one of my intrepid Times colleagues in Baghdad, quoted a clothing merchant named Abdul-Qader Ali as saying: "I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America. Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."

Will a timetable work? I don't know, but it's a better bet than our present policy of whistling in the dark. And it's what the troops favor — and they're the ones who have Iraq combat experience. It's time our commander in chief stopped stage-managing his troops and listened to them.

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Ike Saw It Coming

2006-02-27T16:40:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert

Early in the documentary film "Why We Fight," Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York City police officer whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attack, describes his personal feelings in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

"Somebody had to pay for this," he says. "Somebody had to pay for 9/11. ... I wanna see their bodies stacked up for what they did. For taking my son."

Lost in the agony of his grief, Mr. Sekzer wanted revenge. He wanted the government to go after the bad guys, and when the government said the bad guys were in Iraq, he didn't argue.

For most of his life Mr. Sekzer was a patriot straight out of central casting. His view was always "If the bugle calls, you go." When he was 21 he was a gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam. He didn't question his country's motives. He was more than willing to place his trust in the leadership of the nation he loved.

"Why We Fight," a thoughtful, first-rate movie directed by Eugene Jarecki, is largely about how misplaced that trust has become. The central figure in the film is not Mr. Jarecki, but Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican president who had been the supreme Allied commander in Europe in World War II, and who famously warned us at the end of his second term about the profound danger inherent in the rise of the military-industrial complex.

Ike warned us, but we didn't listen. That's the theme the movie explores.

Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to a national television and radio audience in January 1961. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. He recognized that this development was essential to the defense of the nation. But he warned that "we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications."

"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," he said. "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." It was as if this president, who understood war as well or better than any American who ever lived, were somehow able to peer into the future and see the tail of the military-industrial complex wagging the dog of American life, with inevitably disastrous consequences.

The endless billions to be reaped from the horrors of war are a perennial incentive to invest in the war machine and to keep those wars a-coming. "His words have unfortunately come true," says Senator John McCain in the film. "He was worried that priorities are set by what benefits corporations as opposed to what benefits the country."

The way you keep the wars coming is to keep the populace in a state of perpetual fear. That allows you to continue the insane feeding of the military-industrial complex at the expense of the rest of the nation's needs. "Before long," said Mr. Jarecki in an interview, "the military ends up so overempowered that the rest of your national life has been allowed to atrophy."

In one of the great deceptive maneuvers in U.S. history, the military-industrial complex (with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as chairman and C.E.O., respectively) took its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan and launched the pointless but far more remunerative war in Iraq.

If you want to get a chill, just consider the tragic chaos in present-day Iraq (seven G.I.'s were killed on the day I went to see "Why We Fight") and then listen to Susan Eisenhower in the film recalling a quotation attributed to her grandfather: "God help this country when somebody sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do."

The military-industrial complex has become so pervasive that it is now, as one of the figures in the movie notes, all but invisible. Its missions and priorities are poorly understood by most Americans, and frequently counter to their interests.

Near the end of the movie, Mr. Sekzer, the New York cop who lost his son on Sept. 11, describes his reaction to President Bush's belated acknowledgment that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved" in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"What the hell did we go in there for?" Mr. Sekzer asks.

Unable to hide his bitterness, he says: "The government exploited my feelings of patriotism, of a deep desire for revenge for what happened to my son. But I was so insane with wanting to get even, I was willing to believe anything."

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King George

2006-02-27T16:39:00.000+09:00

By Tony Auth

American gulag

2006-02-27T16:33:00.000+09:00

Torture, force-feeding and darkness at noon -- this is Guantanamo, a lawyer for prisoners says.
By Thomas Wilner, Thomas Wilner is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.
February 26 2006

THE AMERICAN PRISON CAMP at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water supply years ago. So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners drank the yellow water.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.

Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross — who are prohibited by their own rules from disclosing what they find — and lawyers for the prisoners.

I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our American gulag.

On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log sheet and submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of the prison camp.

We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo, one of several camps where prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square and divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table where the prisoner would sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam mattress and a gray cotton blanket.

The Pentagon's files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none was captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the U.S. The prisoners claim that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and turned over to the U.S. for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 — a claim confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. forces promising rewards — "enough to feed your family for life" — for any "Arab terrorist" handed over.

The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never stand up in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two suspected Al Qaeda members on the same day — at places thousands of miles apart. The primary "evidence" against another was that he was captured wearing a particular Casio watch, "which many terrorists wear." Oddly, the same watch was being worn by the U.S. military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families for more than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become a father since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen sunlight for months — an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told me, "I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom." Other than the Koran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have been given books.

Every prisoner I've interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of U.S. captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs. "Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing," he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard U.S. congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort with great food. "If I eat, I condone these lies," Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

We asked for Fawzi's medical records so we could monitor his weight and his health. Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month, which we did. When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds to 98 pounds. Specialists in enteral feeding advised us that the continued drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was being conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital. Again, the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110 pounds. The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by medical personnel rather than by guards.

When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said, "They tortured us to make us stop." At first, he said, they punished him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto "the chair." The officer warned that recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. "We're going to break this hunger strike," the officer told him.

Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next door screaming and warning him to give up the strike. He decided that he wasn't "on strike to be tortured." He said those who continued on the hunger strike not only were strapped in "the chair" but were left there for hours; he believes that guards fed them not only nutrients but also diuretics and laxatives to force them to defecate and urinate on themselves in the chair.

After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more than 80 strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled water.

Fawzi said eating was the only aspect of life at Guantanamo he could control; forcing him to end the hunger strike stripped him of his last means of protesting his unjust imprisonment. Now, he said, he feels "hopeless."

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I know the truth.

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2006-02-27T16:32:00.000+09:00

Graduates Versus Oligarchs

2006-02-27T16:31:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.

But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that "the most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education."

That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.

The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year.

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it's true, but because it's comforting. The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.

Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.

And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who — surprisingly, given his libertarian roots — has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to "democratic society."

It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.

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Religious Extremism

2006-02-27T16:30:00.000+09:00

Tom Toles

It's the Corporation, Stupid

2006-02-27T16:25:00.000+09:00

By Molly Ivins

The government is willing to outsource American jobs for the holy grail of free trade. Why is it surprising that national security is ditto?

So, aside from the fact that it's politically idiotic and at least theoretically presents a national security risk, just what is wrong with the Dubai Ports deal?

As President George W. Bush actually said, "I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company. I'm trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to the people of the world, we'll treat you fairly."

So, what's wrong with that? There's our only president standing up against discrimination and against tarring all Arabs with the same brush and all that good stuff. (The fact that it was Mr. Racial Profiling speaking, the man who has single-handedly created more Arab enemies for this country than anyone else ever dreamed of doing is just one of those ironies we regularly get whacked over the head with.)

OK, here's for starters. We have already been warned that, should we back out of the DP deal, the United Arab Emirates may well take offense and not be so nice about helping us in the War on Terra -- maybe even cut back its money, as well as its cooperation. This is a problem specific to the fact that we are dealing with a corporation owned by a country: A corporation only wants to make money, a corporation owned by a country has lots of motives.

Second, this is a corporation, consequently its only interest is in making money. A corporation is like a shark, designed to do two things: kill and eat. Thousands of years of evolution lie behind the shark, where as the corporation has only a few hundred. But it is still perfectly evolved for its purpose. That means a corporation that makes money running port facilities does not have a stake in national security. It's not the corporation's fault any more than it's the shark's.

The president is quite correct that a "Great British" corporation has no more or less interest in helping terrorists than an Arab corporation. It is not the corporation that is supposed to have other interests -- it is government. But as Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said, "We have to balance the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to have a robust global trading system."

"Balance" is the arresting word here -- keep your eye on "balance." We have an administration that is absolutely wedded to corporate interests, both American and global. It honestly believes that "free trade" is more important than the environment and more important than the people. It has repeatedly demonstrated it is willing to let both go in order to foster free trade.

There is no "balance" in its consideration on these issues, and now it turns out not much in "balancing" national security, either. The people running this country -- and that includes most of the leaders of both parties -- have proven again and again they are perfectly willing to outsource American jobs, American wage standards, and American health and safety standards all for the sacred, holy grail of free trade. Why would it surprise us that national security is ditto?

I am amused by Chertoff's use of the word "balance." Since the administration has done zip, nada, zilch about port security, it's unclear what he's trying to "balance." In 2002, the Coast Guard estimated it would take $5.4 billion over 10 years to improve port security to the point mandated by the Maritime Transportation Security Act. Last year, Congress appropriated $175 million. The administration had requested $46 million, below 9-11 levels.

As David Sirota points out, the administration has been negotiating a free trade deal with the United Arab Emirates at the same time the port deal was being negotiated. This whole thing is about free trade and the lock big corporations have on our government to further free trade.

Sirota also points out you will see and hear almost no discussion of this fact in the corporate news media. I have no idea whether DP World represents a security threat, but U.S. News & World Report said in December that Dubai was notorious for smuggling, money laundering and drug trafficking in support of terrorists. I suppose the same could be said of New York, but it doesn't sound pleasant.

Dubai is believed to be the transfer port for the spread of nuclear technology by the Abdul Qadeer Khan network. David Sanborn, an executive who ran DP World's European and Latin American operations, was chosen last month by Bush to head the U.S. Maritime Administration, according to the New York Daily News. It'll be interesting to see just how much power the free trade lobby has over the political establishment.

Right now, both Democrats and Republicans are yelling about what appears to be a dippy idea. Let's see what hearing from their contributors brings about.

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Zen Bush

2006-02-27T13:35:00.000+09:00

Ben Sargent

2006-02-26T18:13:00.000+09:00

By Mike Luckovich

When Bush Falls in Love

2006-02-26T18:11:00.000+09:00

By Sarah Vowell from The New York Times

The charges of cronyism against the current administration have piled up higher than the rotting rubble in New Orleans: "Heck of a job, Brownie," is fast replacing "Way to go, Einstein" as the wiseacre-to-dummy put-down du jour. And what of Harriet Miers, the good friend/lame nominee for the Supreme Court the president defended as "plenty bright."

Then there's the 24-year-old political appointee who was rewarded for working on the president's re-election campaign with a job as a press aide at NASA, where he was accused of trying to silence a top climate scientist who is, go figure, concerned about global warming. That, and he demanded that the apparently too science-y NASA Web site insert the word "theory" after every use of "Big Bang."

(To be fair, he resigned after it turned out that he'd lied on his résumé about graduating from college, so he might have dropped out before his class got to the textbook chapter titled "Just Big Bang: That's What Jesus Calls It, Too.")

Plus, in a word, Abramoff.

All of which is appalling. At this point, five years after oil and gas lobbyists started scoring Interior Department appointments overseeing national parks and the Bureau of Land Management, I'm heartened that I can still scrape up a glimmer of dismay. And yet, there is a tiny, honest voice in my head that has never let me condemn the president too loudly for wanting to work only with his allies and friends. Because that's pretty much how I live my life, too.

The other day, I was on a plane where "Good Night, and Good Luck" was the in-flight movie. I'd already seen it, but watching it again afforded me the opportunity to look beyond its grand central theme and curl up with the film's lovely periphery.

Around the edges, a second, softer movie flickers, an unpretentious but sly portrait of what real camaraderie looks and feels like. By opening with a party where Edward R. Murrow and his old staff are gussied up and drinking and giggling and taking pictures with their arms around one another as a saxophone plays "When I Fall in Love," the viewer figures out right away that this is more than Murrow vs. McCarthy circa "High Noon." This guy has backup.

My favorite scene starts with George Clooney as the producer Fred Friendly and David Strathairn as Murrow a couple of minutes before Murrow goes on the air with a potentially controversial report about a Red Scare flare-up in Michigan. I don't think I've ever seen a subtler, truer image of partnership. And not just in the way the two men talk to each other, either confessing their fears or joshing around or both.

When Friendly counts down the seconds left until Murrow goes live, Friendly sits just off-camera and taps Murrow's leg with his pen when it's time. The gesture is mundane and loving all at once.

I'm lucky enough to have a Friendly of my own. Is there anything better than figuring out what you're supposed to do with your life and getting paid to do it? Yep, doing it alongside the calm and tweedy person you regard as the brother you never had.

"Good Night, and Good Luck" taps into this understandable yearning for solidarity, for affectionate toil, for a shared mission, that's also behind the allure of the founding fathers, the Boston Red Sox, the Clash. Part of me can't blame the president for his pro-crony tendencies because I also have them to an almost sickening degree.

Then I remember — wait, neither I nor any crony of mine has ever slept through the soggy downfall of an entire city, or failed to track down the genocidal maniac who still has a few American items left to check off on his mass-murder To Do list, or sent our soldiers to wage a berserk war crisscrossing the most dangerous roads in the world in flimsy vehicles with the protective capability of Vespa scooters. (But my comrades and I would like to apologize for that reading we "organized" at a noisy Chinatown restaurant in '98, when the short stories were drowned out by egg roll orders.)

Bonhomie, as our ex-cronies the French call it, should have its limits. Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he'd be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog. What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicky paranoia you'd use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals in five languages trying to figure out how to save your life.

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Osama, Saddam and the Ports

2006-02-24T20:20:00.000+09:00

By Paul Krugman

The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new — the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.

So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.

Let's go back to the beginning. At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave military commanders their marching orders. "Judge whether good enough hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time — not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]," read an aide's handwritten notes about his instructions. The notes were recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request. "Hard to get a good case," the notes acknowledge. Nonetheless, they say: "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

So it literally began on Day 1. When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals — especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn't.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what's the difference?

Now comes the ports deal. Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

The administration also tells us not to worry about having Arabs control port operations. "I want those who are questioning it," Mr. Bush said, "to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."

He was being evasive, of course. This isn't just a Middle Eastern company; it's a company controlled by the monarchy in Dubai, which is part of the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.

But more to the point, after years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn't attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can't suddenly turn around and say, "But these are good Arabs."

Finally, the ports affair plays in a subliminal way into the public's awareness — vague but widespread — that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed deliverer of democracy to the Middle East, and his family have close personal and financial ties to Middle Eastern rulers. Mr. Bush was photographed holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (now King Abdullah), not the emir of Dubai. But an administration that has spent years ridiculing people who try to make such distinctions isn't going to have an easy time explaining the difference.

Mr. Bush shouldn't really be losing his credibility as a terrorism fighter over the ports deal, which, after careful examination (which hasn't happened yet), may turn out to be O.K. Instead, Mr. Bush should have lost his credibility long ago over his diversion of U.S. resources away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda and into an unnecessary war in Iraq, his bungling of that war, and his adoption of a wrongful imprisonment and torture policy that has blackened America's reputation.

But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush's current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions — a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.

Recommended reading on the port issue:Corporate Control of Ports is the Problem By John Nichols
The Dirty Little Secret Behind the UAE Port Security Flap From David Sirota

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2006-02-24T14:38:00.000+09:00

By Nick Anderson

Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'

2006-02-24T13:26:00.000+09:00

By Nat Parry from Consortium News

Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration's domestic operations - Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy.

"The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements," Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.

"I stand by this President's ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you need a warrant to do that," Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.

"Senator," a smiling Gonzales responded, "the President already said we'd be happy to listen to your ideas."

In less paranoid times, Graham's comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways - ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.

But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.

Top US officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush's actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by "news informers" in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Detention Centers

Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with "an emergency influx of immigrants into the US, or to support the rapid development of new programs," KBR said. [Market Watch, Jan. 26, 2006]

Later, the New York Times reported that "KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space." [Feb. 4, 2006]

Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times focused on concerns about Halliburton's reputation for bilking US taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par services.

"It's hard to believe that the administration has decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer dollars," remarked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California.

Less attention centered on the phrase "rapid development of new programs" and what kind of programs would require a major expansion of detention centers, each capable of holding 5,000 people. Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to elaborate on what these "new programs" might be.

Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott and Maureen Farrell, have pursued what the Bush administration might actually be thinking.

Scott speculated that the "detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law." He recalled that during the Reagan administration, National Security Council aide Oliver North organized Rex-84 "readiness exercise," which contemplated the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and detaining 400,000 "refugees," in the event of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States.

Farrell pointed out that because "another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge" of immigrants flooding across the border.

Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Labor Camps

There also was another little-noticed item posted at the US Army Web site, about the Pentagon's Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program "provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations."

The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a "rapid action revision" on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.

On its face, the Army's labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the Attorney General to "establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him" and "make available ... the services of United States prisoners" to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.

Though the timing of the document's posting - within the past few weeks - may just be a coincidence, the reference to a "rapid action revision" and the KBR contract's contemplation of "rapid development of new programs" have raised eyebrows about why this sudden need for urgency.

These developments also are drawing more attention now because of earlier Bush administration policies to involve the Pentagon in "counter-terrorism" operations inside the United States.

Pentagon Surveillance

Despite the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibitions against US military personnel engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in domestic surveillance activities.

The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States. [Washington Post, Nov. 27, 2005]

The White House also is moving to expand the power of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate counterintelligence operations. The White House proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has authority to investigate crimes such as treason, terrorist sabotage or economic espionage.

The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about US citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. But some in the Pentagon don't seem to think that new laws are even necessary.

In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in January 2006, the US Army's top intelligence officer wrote, "Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting US person information."

Drawing a distinction between "collecting" information and "receiving" information on US citizens, the memo argued that "MI [military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime." [See CQ.com, Jan. 31, 2005]

This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of US citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.

There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn't discuss the details without breaking classification laws.

Tice added that the "special access" surveillance program may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. [UPI, Feb. 14, 2006]

With this expanded surveillance, the government's list of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the National Counterterrorism Center's central repository now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a four-fold increase since the fall of 2003.

Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA's domestic surveillance program, an NCTC official told the Post, "Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA."

Homeland Defense

As the administration scoops up more and more names, members of Congress also have questioned the elasticity of Bush's definitions for words like terrorist "affiliates," used to justify wiretapping Americans allegedly in contact with such people or entities.

During the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on the wiretap program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, complained that the House and Senate Intelligence Committees "have not been briefed on the scope and nature of the program."

Feinstein added that, therefore, the committees "have not been able to explore what is a link or an affiliate to al-Qaeda or what minimization procedures (for purging the names of innocent people) are in place."

The combination of the Bush administration's expansive reading of its own power and its insistence on extraordinary secrecy has raised the alarm of civil libertarians when contemplating how far the Pentagon might go in involving itself in domestic matters.

A Defense Department document, entitled the "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support," has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an "active, layered defense" both inside and outside US territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to "transform US military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the ... US homeland."

The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to "defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States." The plan "maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us."

But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges "threats" and who falls under the category "those who would harm us." A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity's TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.

In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500 "suspicious incidents" over a 10-month period, including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that were classified as a "threat."

The Defense Department also might be moving toward legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as part of its overall war strategy.

A secret Pentagon "Information Operations Roadmap," approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "full spectrum" information operations and notes that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa."

"PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," the document states. The Pentagon argues, however, that "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [US government] intent rather than information dissemination practices."

It calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but does not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP campaigns.

Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between "collecting" and "receiving" intelligence on US citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues that as long as the American public is not intentionally "targeted," any PSYOP propaganda consumed by the American public is acceptable.

The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the Internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the Web as a potential military adversary. The "roadmap" speaks of "fighting the net," and implies that the Internet is the equivalent of "an enemy weapons system."

In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration's perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War.

"Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place," Rumsfeld said.

The Department of Homeland Security also has demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives to deal with domestic crises.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department dispatched "heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, (and had them) openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans," reported journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept. 10, 2005.

Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as "some of the most feared professional killers in the world," Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater's presence in New Orleans "raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here."

US Battlefield

In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the United States and has been in place since shortly after the 9/11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order No. 1 which empowered him to detain any non-citizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant.

"The President decided that he was no longer running the country as a civilian President," wrote civil rights attorney Michael Ratner in the book Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. "He issued a military order giving himself the power to run the country as a general."

For any American citizen suspected of collaborating with terrorists, Bush also revealed what's in store. In May 2002, the FBI arrested US citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago on suspicion that he might be an al-Qaeda operative planning an attack.

Rather than bring criminal charges, Bush designated Padilla an "enemy combatant" and had him imprisoned indefinitely without benefit of due process. After three years, the administration finally brought charges against Padilla, in order to avoid a Supreme Court showdown the White House might have lost.

But since the Court was not able to rule on the Padilla case, the administration's arguments have not been formally repudiated. Indeed, despite filing charges against Padilla, the White House still asserts the right to detain US citizens without charges as enemy combatants.

This claimed authority is based on the assertion that the United States is at war and the American homeland is part of the battlefield.

"In the war against terrorists of global reach, as the Nation learned all too well on Sept. 11, 2001, the territory of the United States is part of the battlefield," Bush's lawyers argued in briefs to the federal courts. [Washington Post, July 19, 2005]

Given Bush's now open assertions that he is using his "plenary" - or unlimited - powers as Commander in Chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions.

As former Vice President Al Gore asked after recounting a litany of sweeping powers that Bush has asserted to fight the War on Terror, "Can it be true that any President really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is 'yes,' then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?"

In such extraordinary circumstances, the American people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush administration means by the "rapid development of new programs," which might require the construction of a new network of detention camps.

G.O.P. to W.: You're Nuts!

2006-02-22T19:20:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

It's enough to make you nostalgic for those gnarly union stevedores in "On the Waterfront," the ones who hung up rats on hooks and took away Marlon Brando's chance to be a contend-ah.

Maybe it's corporate racial profiling, but I don't want foreign companies, particularly ones with links to 9/11, running American ports.

What kind of empire are we if we have to outsource our coastline to a group of sheiks who don't recognize Israel, in a country where money was laundered for the 9/11 attacks? And that let A. Q. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, smuggle nuclear components through its port to Libya, North Korea and Iran?

It's mind-boggling that President Bush ever agreed to let an alliance of seven emirs be in charge of six of our ports. Although, as usual, Incurious George didn't even know about it until after the fact. (Neither did Rummy, even though he heads one of the agencies that green-lighted the deal.)

Same old pattern: a stupid and counterproductive national security decision is made in secret, blowing off checks and balances, and the president's out of the loop.

Was W. too busy not calling Dick Cheney to find out why he shot a guy to not be involved in a critical decision about U.S. security? What is he waiting for — a presidential daily brief warning, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S. Ports?"

Our ports are already nearly naked in terms of security. Only about 5 percent of the containers coming into the country are checked. And when the White House assures us that the Homeland Security Department will oversee security at the ports, is that supposed to make us sleep better? Not after the chuckleheaded Chertoff-and-Brownie show on Capitol Hill.

"Our borders are wide open," said Jan Gadiel of 9/11 Families for a Secure America. "We don't know who's in our country right now, not a clue. And now they're giving away our ports." The "trust us" routine of W. and Dick Cheney is threadbare.

The more W. warned that he would veto legislation stopping this deal, the more lawmakers held press conferences to oppose it — even conservatives who had loyally supported W. on Iraq, the Patriot Act, torture and warrantless snooping.

Mr. Bush is hoist on his own petard. For four years, the White House has accused anyone in Congress or the press who defended civil liberties or questioned anything about the Iraq war of being soft on terrorism. Now, as Congress and the press turn that accusation back on the White House, Mr. Bush acts mystified by the orgy of xenophobia.

Lawmakers, many up for re-election, have learned well from Karl Rove. Playing the terror card works.

A bristly Bush said yesterday that scotching the deal would send "a terrible signal" to a worthy ally. He equated the "Great British" with the U.A.E. Well, maybe Britain in the 12th century.

Besides, the American people can be forgiven if they're confused about what it means in the Arab world to be a U.S. ally. Is it a nation that helps us sometimes but also addicts us to oil and then jacks up the price, refuses to recognize Israel, denies women basic rights, tolerates radical anti-American clerics, looks the other way when its citizens burn down embassies and consulates over cartoons, and often turns a blind eye when it comes to hunting down terrorists in its midst?

In our past wars, America had specific countries to demonize. But now in the "global war on terror" — GWOT, as they call it — the enemy is a faceless commodity that the administration uses whenever it wants to win a political battle. When something like this happens, it's no wonder the public does its own face transplant.

One of the real problems here is that this administration has run up such huge trade and tax-cut-and-spend budget deficits that we're in hock to the Arabs and the Chinese to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. If they just converted their bonds into cash, they would own our ports and not have to merely rent them.

Just because the wealthy foreigners who own our debt can blackmail us with their economic leverage, does that mean we should expose our security assets to them as well?

As part of the lunatic White House defense, Dan Bartlett argued that "people are trying to drive wedges and make this to be a political issue." But as the New Republic editor Peter Beinart pointed out in a recent column, W. has made the war on terror "one vast wedge issue" to divide the country.

Now, however, the president has pulled us together. We all pretty much agree: mitts off our ports.

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Why Would Codification Be Necessary?

2006-02-22T19:15:00.000+09:00

From Demarkracy

Advise and assent

2006-02-22T19:10:00.000+09:00

An LA Times Editorial

That The UNITED STATES Senate has a body called the Intelligence Committee is an irony George Orwell would have truly appreciated. In a world without Doublespeak, the panel, chaired by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, would be known by a more appropriate name—the Senate Coverup Committee.

Although the committee is officially charged with overseeing the nation's intelligence-gathering operations, its real function in recent years has been to prevent the public from getting hold of any meaningful information about the Bush administration. Hence its never-ending delays of the probe into the bogus weapons intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. And its squelching, on Thursday, of an expected investigation into the administration's warrantless spying program.

The committee adjourned without voting on a proposal to probe the National Security Agency program, under which government agents have set up wiretaps on Americans without the warrants required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Bush has acknowledged that he greenlighted the program, essentially claiming that Congress gave him the power to break federal law and violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights when it authorized the use of force after the 9/11 attacks. Though the administration's legal defense has been laughable, its argument that the powers are essential to fight terrorism has scored political points, ratcheting up the pressure on the Senate.

Roberts justified his committee's cave by saying the White House had committed itself to working with senators to pursue legislation on the matter. Translation: Bush won't accept any curbs on his power whatsoever, but he'd be happy to see a bill legalizing his wiretaps.

There's a slim chance the House of Representatives might show more backbone. The same day the Senate committee was performing stupid pet tricks for White House table scraps, the House Intelligence Committee approved its own inquiry into the NSA program. Yet the House is still divided on whether the investigation's scope would involve an intensive look at operational details or merely examine the status of surveillance laws.

There was one piece of good news last week. In a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to respond to a request for documents on the NSA program within 20 days. Meanwhile, a Kentucky man is preparing a civil-rights suit over the wiretapping. If Congress continues to dither, the courts will be Americans' last hope for an honest appraisal of the spy program — and for at least a slight brake on the White House's relentless pursuit of excessive executive branch power.

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Bush Drunk Part II

2006-02-22T19:05:00.000+09:00

Two Sides of Dick

2006-02-22T19:00:00.000+09:00

From my buddy Demarkracy

2006-02-20T18:49:00.000+09:00

The Torturers Win
By Bob Herbert

Justice? Surely you jest.
Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.

We're in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.

The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. According to court papers, "The cell was damp and cold, contained very little light and was infested with rats, which would enter the cell through a small aperture in the ceiling. Cats would urinate on Arar through the aperture, and sanitary facilities were nonexistent."

Mr. Arar's captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.

This is a quintessential example of the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. government kidnaps individuals — presumably terror suspects — and sends them off to regimes that are skilled in the fine art of torture. In terms of vile behavior, rendition stands shoulder to shoulder with contract killing.

If the United States is going to torture people, we might as well do it ourselves. Outsourcing torture does not make it any more acceptable.

Mr. Arar's case became a world-class embarrassment when even Syria's torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism. After 10 months, he was released. No charges were ever filed against him.

Mr. Arar is a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two young children. He's never been in any kind of trouble. Commenting on the case in a local newspaper, a former Canadian official dryly observed that "accidents will happen" in the war on terror. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets.

In other words, it wouldn't matter how hideously or egregiously Mr. Arar had been treated, or how illegally or disgustingly the government had behaved. The case would have to be dropped. Inquiries into this 21st-century Inquisition cannot be tolerated. Its activities must remain secret at all costs.

In a ruling that basically gave the green light to government barbarism, U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday. Judge Trager wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."

But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.

He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted."

Under that reasoning, of course, the government could literally get away with murder. With its bad actions cloaked in court-sanctioned secrecy, no one would be the wiser.

As an example of the kind of foreign policy problems that might arise if Mr. Arar were given his day in court, Judge Trager wrote:

"One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

Oh yes, by all means, we need the federal courts to fully protect the right of public officials to lie to their constituents.

"It's a shocking decision," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It's really saying that an individual who is sent overseas for the purpose of being tortured has no claim in a U.S. court."

If kidnapping and torturing an innocent man is O.K., what's not O.K.?

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2006-02-20T18:30:00.000+09:00

The Mensch Gap
By Paul Krugman

"Be a mensch," my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.
The people now running America aren't mensches.

Dick Cheney isn't a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney's recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn't a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion's aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about "unknown unknowns" and going to war with "the army you have," ducking responsibility for the failures of leadership that have turned the war into a stunning victory — for Iran.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn't a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans? "I remember on Tuesday morning," he said on "Meet the Press," "picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.' " There were no such headlines, at least in major newspapers, and we now know that he received — and ignored — many warnings about the unfolding disaster.

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn't a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan's catastrophic start doesn't reflect poorly on his department, that "no logical person" would have expected "a transition happening that is so large without some problems." In fact, Medicare's 1966 startup went very smoothly. That didn't happen this time because his department ignored outside experts who warned, months in advance, about exactly the disaster that has taken place.

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault.

Was it always like this? I don't want to romanticize our political history, but I don't think so. Think of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a "catastrophic success," then try to lay the blame for their failure on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for failure approaches the pathological. He surrounds himself with subordinates who share his aversion to facing unpleasant realities. And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them. Last week he declared that Mr. Leavitt is doing, yes, "a heck of a job."

But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe it's the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians, like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of their achievements. Mr. Bush isn't an effective leader, but he plays one on TV, and that's all that matters.

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders' character, it has horrifying consequences. You can't learn from mistakes if you won't admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we're continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed evidence against them has been discredited. We're even holding at least eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why? Well, releasing people you've imprisoned by mistake means admitting that you made a mistake. And that's something the people now running America never do.

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Get Your War On

2006-02-20T18:25:00.000+09:00

Click on images for full resolution

Hunting for a Straight Shooter

2006-02-18T17:21:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd

Maybe I've had Dick Cheney wrong all along.

Maybe he's not maniacally secretive, manipulative with the truth and contemptuous of democratic institutions. Perhaps he's cruelly misunderstood in his heartfelt desire to disseminate information.

It was at the end of his interview with Brit Hume, when Shooter talked about Scooter, that his eagerness to share important facts with the press and public — a well-concealed trait in recent days, years and decades — burst forth. He pronounced himself a Great Declassifier.

Asked by the Fox News anchor if a vice president had the authority to declassify secrets, Mr. Cheney replied that there's an executive order giving him that power, adding: "I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions." This neatly set up a defense for Scooter, who testified that "superiors" had authorized him to leak classified information on Valerie Plame.

President Bush signed Executive Order 13292 on March 25, 2003, amending a Clinton-era order, to grant the vice president the same power as the president on top-secret material. W. must have been concerned that Vice didn't have enough power to abuse.

(With the way these guys keep giving themselves extra powers, there are probably also executive orders that allow Vice-Man to turn himself into a dragon, become invisible and leap tall buildings in a single bound.)

In return for this selfless effort to tell the world that Valerie Plame was a C.I.A. officer — and punish her husband, a critic of the phony case for war, and therefore a terrorist symp — Shooter was rewarded with an independent prosecutor and Scooter with an indictment. So when the Great Declassifier gunned down his hunting partner, he was compelled by bitter experience to override his instinct to immediately call a press conference.

The administration has been so apoplectic about leaks, I almost forget the entire Iraq war was paved by its leaks. Cheney & Co. were so busy trying to prove a mushroom cloud was emanating from Saddam's direction, they could not leak their cherry-picked stories fast enough.

Maybe I've had Rummy wrong, too. Maybe he's not an arrogant, misguided Robert McNamara clone.

In his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations yesterday, he sounded positively humble. Gone were the days when Rummy and the neocons thought a big Shock-and-Awe blaze of American might would make Islamic terrorists tremble in their Flintstones caves, never to challenge us again.

Now Rummy paints America as backward, losing the P.R. war to Al Qaeda in the first conflict in history using e-mail, blogs, BlackBerries and hand-held videocameras. "For the most part," he said, "the U.S. government still functions as a five-and-dime store in an eBay world." (Hey, didn't we invent eBay?)

Like the vice president, the defense secretary is eager to get information out. If the American press wouldn't scream, "Henny Penny, the sky is falling," every time the Pentagon tries to plant paid stories in the Iraqi press, for gosh sakes, maybe we could have some success in the P.R. battle.

After the Lincoln Group's "nontraditional means," as he delicately put it, were discovered, "the resulting explosion of critical press stories then causes everything, all activity, all initiative, to stop, just frozen."

"Even worse," he complained, "it leads to a chilling effect for those who are asked to serve in the military public affairs field." The press "seems to demand perfection from the government," he wailed. And why do the media focus on Abu Ghraib, perpetrated by "people on the night shift, one night shift in Iraq?" he asked. Why not more stories on Saddam's mass graves?

Rummy is genuinely perplexed about why it's wrong to subvert democracy while promoting democracy.

I love it when Shooter and Rummy call us unrealistic for trying to hold them to standards that they set. They are, after all, victims of their own spin on Iraq. Mr. Cheney thought we'd be greeted with flowers; Rummy said we could do more with less.

Rummy misses the point: we're supposed to be the good guys, the beacon of freedom. Our message is supposed to work because it has moral force, not because we pay some Lincoln Group sketchballs millions to plant propaganda in Iraqi newspapers and not because the press here plays down revelations of American torture. If the Bush crew hadn't distorted the truth to get to Iraq, it wouldn't need to distort the truth to succeed there.

"Ultimately, in my view," Rummy concluded, "truth wins out."

Bad news for him, and his pal Dick.

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2006-02-18T17:20:00.000+09:00

By Mike Luckovich

Thoughts On National Security

2006-02-16T15:02:00.000+09:00

From The Weed-Garden

Liberals are criticizing the president's warrantless wiretapping, most of which, they say, involves scrutinizing innocent people. But isn't it true that in order to find the real terrorists you "have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off"? Clearly, the Fourth Amendment is outdated. The founding fathers would never have required searches to be "reasonable" if they had known about Al Qaeda.

To completely prevent a terrorist attack in the U.S., we must do much more. We're only safe if every American is scrutinized. Of course, it's difficult to do this and would require an infrastructure to be developed over a period of several years.

In addition to tracing every phone call, letter and email, we'd need to get more control over people's movements as well. A system of internal passports could accomplish this--if people had to provide identification when leaving their local area as well as reasons for leaving, terrorism would be much harder to organize.

To keep foreign terrorists from acting on our shores we should also seal our borders. No one should be allowed to enter or leave without express permission from United States intelligence officials. Clearly, we have to keep people with unknown motives from coming in. But we must also prevent people with no apparent official business abroad from slipping out of the country with information that would enable terrorists to more accurately pinpoint areas of high value for attacks.

At the same time, we must expel those within our borders whose ties to certain foreign lands make them questionable. Because of the mass deportations required, we'll need a system of temporary detention centers to confine them all while their backgrounds and potential actions are being investigated.

Domestic terrorism would still be a problem. After all, the vast majority of terrorist attacks on our homeland have come from such homegrown phenomena as anti-abortionists, survivalists, polygamists, high school students, postal workers and anti-technologists.

We'll need to create a government commission to address these diverse threats and long-term approaches to preventing them. One possible solution would be a sort of two-way TV screen in every household. This would address terrorism by the lone extremist who might create an explosives belt in the privacy of his or her home. It would also allow us to keep tabs on what people are talking about. We need to have a list of those who might be interested in resisting or thwarting our national security apparatus. Finally, it would serve as a means of keeping Americans informed on the latest threats to their security.

Of course, liberals and other terrorist-excusers will inevitably argue that the occasional terrorist attack is the price of freedom. These people should be watched closely.

Senator Kerry's Office

2006-02-16T15:01:00.000+09:00

By Ark from Dem(Ark)racy

Mr. Vice President, It's Time to Go

2006-02-16T14:58:00.000+09:00

By Bob Herbert from The New York Times

It's time for Dick Cheney to step down — for the sake of the country and for the sake of the Bush administration.

Mr. Cheney's bumbling conduct at the upscale Armstrong Ranch in South Texas seemed hilarious at first. But when we learned that Harry Whittington had suffered a mild heart attack after being shot by the vice president in a hunting accident, it became clear that a more sober assessment of the fiasco at the ranch and, inevitably, Mr. Cheney's controversial and even bizarre behavior as vice president was in order.

There's a reason Dick Cheney is obsessive about shunning the spotlight. His record is not the kind you want to hold up for intense scrutiny.

More than anyone else, he was fanatical about massaging and distorting the intelligence that plunged us into the flaming quagmire of Iraq. He insisted that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was hot on the trail of nukes. He pounded away at the false suggestion that Iraq was somehow linked to Al Qaeda. And he spread the word that the war he wanted so badly would be a cakewalk.

"I really do believe," he told Tim Russert, "that we will be greeted as liberators."

Well, he got his war. And while the nation's brave young soldiers and marines were bouncing around Iraq in shamefully vulnerable Humvees and other vehicles, dodging bullets, bombs and improvised explosive devices, Mr. Cheney (a gold-medal winner in the acquisition of wartime deferments) felt perfectly comfortable packing his fancy 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun and heading off to Texas with a covey of fat cats to shoot quail.

Matters went haywire, of course, when he shot Mr. Whittington instead.

That was the moment when the legend of the tough, hawkish, take-no-prisoners vice president began morphing into the less-than-heroic image of a reckless, scowling incompetent who mistook his buddy for a bird.

This story is never going away. Harry Whittington is Dick Cheney's Monica. When Mr. Whittington dies (hopefully many years from now, and from natural causes), he will be remembered as the hunting companion who was shot by the vice president of the United States. This tale will stick to Mr. Cheney like Krazy Glue, and that's bad news for the Bush administration.

The shooting and Mr. Cheney's highhanded behavior in its immediate aftermath fit perfectly with the stereotype of him as a powerful but dangerous figure who is viewed by many as a dark force within the administration. He doesn't even give lip service to the idea of transparency in his public or private life. This is the man who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep his White House meetings with energy industry honchos as secret as the Manhattan Project. (Along the way he went duck hunting at a private camp in rural Louisiana with Justice Antonin Scalia.)

This is also the man whose closest and most trusted aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice as a result of the investigation into the outing of a C.I.A. undercover operative, Valerie Wilson.

Mr. Cheney is arrogant, defiant and at times blatantly vulgar. He once told Senator Patrick Leahy to perform a crude act upon himself.

A vice president who insists on writing his own rules, who shudders at the very idea of transparency in government, whose judgment on crucial policy issues has been as wildly off the mark (and infinitely more tragic) as his actions in Texas over the weekend, and who has now become an object of relentless ridicule, cannot by any reasonable measure be thought of as an asset to the nation or to the president he serves.

The Bush administration would benefit from new thinking and new perspectives on the war in Iraq, the potential threat from Iran, the nation's readiness to cope with another terror attack, the development of a comprehensive energy policy and other important issues.

President Bush's approval ratings have dropped below 40 percent in recent polls. Even Republicans are openly criticizing the administration's conduct of the war, its response to Hurricane Katrina and assorted other failures and debacles.

Dick Cheney is a constant reminder of those things the White House would most like to forget: the bullying, the intelligence failures, the inability to pacify Iraq, the misuse of classified information and the breathtaking incompetence that seems to be spread throughout the administration.

Mr. Cheney would do his nation and his president a service by packing his bags and heading back to Wyoming. He's become a joke. But not a funny one.

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2006-02-16T13:20:00.000+09:00

By Chip Bok

2006-02-15T17:44:00.000+09:00

By Pat Oliphant

Shooter Slips on a Silencer

2006-02-15T13:08:00.000+09:00

By Maureen Dowd from The New York Times

Who did this old guy think he was, coming between Dick Cheney and his helpless prey?

The luckless 78-year-old Texas lawyer, Harry Whittington, is in intensive care after a heart attack, with up to 200 pellets riddling his face and body — one stuck in his heart — from Dick Cheney's designer Perazzi Brescia shotgun. And still his friend, the vice president, is Swift-BB-ing him.

Private citizens have been enlisted to blame the victim. Maybe poor Mr. Whittington put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was, after all, behind Vice, not in front of him. And the hunter pulling the trigger is supposed to make sure he has a clear shot. Wouldn't it be, well, classy for Shooter to express just a bit of contrition and humility?

Instead, the usual sliming has begun, with the Cheney camp trying to protect the vice president by casting a veteran hunter as Elmer Dud.

Scott McClellan told the White House press corps that Katharine Armstrong, a lobbyist with government ties who owns the Texas ranch (and whose mother, Anne, was on the Halliburton board that hired Mr. Cheney as C.E.O.), "pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington when it came to notifying the others that he was there."

As the story of the weekend's bizarre hunting accident is wrenched out of the White House, the picture isn't pretty: With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick "I Had Other Priorities in the 60's Than Military Service" Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W. rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage. Shouldn't these guys work on weekends until we figure out how to fix Iraq, New Orleans, Medicare and gas prices?

This version of "The Most Dangerous Game" neatly follows the four-step Bush-Cheney cycle:

Step 1: Set out to pick off what you think is an easy target, like quail — in 2003, he went after stocked, pen-raised and netted pheasant — or a certain sanction-caged Iraqi dictator.

Step 2: In the corrupt company of lobbyist-contractor friends, botch things up. Ignore the peril at hand — as with, oh, Osama at Tora Bora, or Katrina, or the Iraq occupation — and with steely resolve, indulge your raging incompetence. (Oops.)

Step 3: Stonewall. Resist giving Congress information about 9/11 or Katrina; don't tell the public how you're tapping phones at home, setting up gulags abroad and making war and energy policy in secret. Why give the taxpayers, who are ponying up for these weekend hunting trips, the extraordinary news that Vice shot his hunting companion in the face and chest? Scott McClellan knew before yesterday's White House briefing at noon that Mr. Whittington was worse, but did not tell the reporters. He left that to Corpus Christi doctors, who spun the heart attack as "an inflammatory response to a metallic foreign BB."

Step 4: Admit no mistakes. Express sympathy. Blame the victim without leaving fingerprints by outsourcing the smear to the private sector.

Trent Lott joked in a meeting yesterday that Mr. Cheney was now the "shooter in chief," while other wags noted that Quayle was always a problem for Bushes.

Presidential staff members and lawmakers speculated yesterday about whether Shooter would resign and make room for Condi if Mr. Whittington did not survive. His death would trigger a more thorough police investigation and probably a grand jury.

"Are you crazy?" one Republican senator told a reporter. "He'd never quit." (Aaron Burr presided over the Senate after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.)

The shooter in chief can't quit because he is the administration. Who'd even tell him to quit? If necessary, he'd probably make W. take the fall.

Despite efforts by Mr. McClellan to joke and urge reporters to get back to "the pressing priorities of the American people," the hunting debacle once more showed Mr. Cheney running the imperial show.

He didn't talk to the sheriff for 14 hours, or even call the president to notify him after the 5:50 p.m. accident. Vice left that to Andy Card, who called Mr. Bush at 7:30 p.m. to say there had been a hunting accident, without mentioning that Vice was the gunman. Soon after that, Karl Rove called Mr. Bush back with that little detail.

A reporter, surprised, pressed Mr. McClellan: "The vice president did not call the president to tell him he was the shooter?"

Usually when there's a White House cover-up, the president's in on it.

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