"He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things," one White House ally said, referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
From the AP, I saw it in a local paper
BAGHDAD, Iraq — (AP) With the grim milestone of the 2,000th U.S. military death looming in Iraq, many wonder about the direction of the insurgency that killed most of them. Experts think the country’s increasingly regional-oriented politics will fuel the insurgency and even spread it further inside Iraq.
Others put forward a simple, disquieting scenario: So long as U.S. and other foreign troops remain in Iraq, the insurgency will continue. “It will become more chaotic,” predicted Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm, Sweden. “It is obvious that the United States is in Iraq to stay. If this is the case, the Shiites will likely join the Sunnis in the fight.”
You can find more of the article at the link above, but I said before that we weren't leaving.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NATO intelligence sources.
This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.
Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.
Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.
The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.
Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.
This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.
And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.
The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.
It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.
But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.
Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.
The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.
There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.
Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.
If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.
If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.
Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.
And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."
The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush, citing confidentiality, said on Monday he would refuse to release documents showing what U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers recommended to him as a White House lawyer.
"That would breach very important confidentiality, and it's a red line I'm not willing to cross," Bush told reporters.
And remember, being a fine person is the most important qualification to sit on the highest court of the land for the rest of one's life. That's why Mr. Rogers was such an exceptional Supreme Court Justice.
Senate Democrats and Republicans have sought White House documents related to Miers' work for Bush as they prepare for her confirmation hearing, set to begin on November 7.
At the start of a Cabinet meeting, Bush again praised his embattled nominee. Miers has come under fire from Democrats for once backing a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and has been challenged by conservatives who see the appointment as cronyism and fear she may fail to move the Supreme Court to the right.
"Harriet Miers is a fine person, and I expect her to have a good, fair hearing," Bush said.
Bush has refused to turn over the internal documents before, including many requested in the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
In this case, both Democrats and Republicans had asked for the additional information, arguing little is known about Miers, who was Bush's personal attorney in Texas and who has never served as a judge.
"Requests ... have been made by Democrats and Republicans about paperwork out of this White House that would make it impossible for me and other presidents to be able to make sound decisions," Bush said.
'Mr. President, we need another couple billion dollars over at Halliburton. When are we going to invade Syria?'
"People can learn about Harriet Miers through hearings, but we are not going to destroy this business about people being able to walk into the Oval Office and say, 'Mr. President, here's my advice to you. Here's what I think is important,"' he added.
Bush did not answer a question about a weekend report that the administration was preparing possible contingency plans to withdraw the Miers nomination.
A White House spokesman said earlier on Monday that Bush remained committed to the Miers' nomination. "Absolutely," said press secretary Scott McClellan.
Miller attempts to excuse her shoddy reporting on Iraq's imaginary weapons of mass destruction by saying that "everyone" got that story wrong. But the State Department Intelligence and Research Division did not get it wrong. The Department of Energy analysts were correct that the aluminum tubes couldn't be used to construct centrifuges. Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission was not wrong. Imad Khadduri, former Iraqi nuclear scientist, was not wrong. "Everybody" got it wrong only in the sense that "everybody" had been brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch.
As Rightweb notes:
His Fox News was singled out for criticism because of its blatantly one-sided coverage of the war in Iraq and for printing unsubstantiated stories about the conflict. When CNN reporter Christian Amanpour blamed Fox for creating "a climate of fear and self-censorship" regarding coverage of Iraq, a Fox spokeswoman shot back, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda." Said Murdoch of the war, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."
Gee, we got $60 a barrel oil instead. You wonder how someone so stupid got to be so rich (hint: stabbing people in the back is more lucrative than canny market research).
So here is how Murdoch and Fox and the Right in general tie into the NYT scandal. They stalked the Times. If you lexis Fox "News" transcripts and the NYT in the period between September 11 and the Iraq War, you find a constant stream of attacks. Brit Hume even waxed wrathful that the Times urged Tiger Woods not to play golf on a course at a club that excluded women.
Here's Bill O'Reilly on September 10, 2002:
Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Contributor: It's a question here also of timing. I'm not sure the administration really wanted to have the debate heat up in August. This is not the administration directing the pace of this debate. It was the opposition who, after eight months, after all the president launched all this in his State of the Union address when he talked about the axis of evil and emphasized Iraq, it's the opposition that has now seized the day and made its case, starting with the Scowcroft piece and the assist from the New York Times.
I spoke last year about the attack Andrew Sullivan launched in Murdoch's London Times on NYT editor Howell Raines for not cheerleading Bush's building Iraq War. Sullivan had been especially incensed that the NYT gave no credence to the Iraqi expatriates on the nuclear issue.
So in this polluted information environment, in which Howell Raines's view of reality, which was perfectly correct, was constantly pilloried by powerful rightwing media as nothing short of treason, there was every incentive to give Judith Miller her head. Remember that the NYT is a commercial publication. All major newspapers were seeing their subscription base shrink. After September 11, the country had moved substantially to the right on national security issues. The Times could easily go bankrupt if it loses touch with the sentiments of the American reading public. There is a lot at stake in the Murdoch et al. assault on the NYT.
In its absence, the information environment in the US would be even more rightwing. I've even rethought my own rash response to its editorial on the Columbia Middle East studies issue last spring.
The NYT had no sources to speak of inside the Bush administration, a real drawback in covering Washington, because it was a left of center newspaper in a political environment dominated by the Right. Miller had sources among the Neoconservatives, with whom she shared some key concerns (biological weapons, the threat of Muslim radicalism, etc.) So she could get the Washington "scoops." And her perspective skewed Right in ways that could protect the NYT from charges that it was consistently biased against Bush. Of course, in retrospect, Bush's world was a dangerous fantasy, and giving it space on the front page of the NYT just sullied the Grey Lady with malicious prevarications.
I have been told that Miller was also important in hiring decisions, and she probably created her own base of clientelage among new hires over time. It has been alleged to me that senior neo-conservative-leaning reporters at the Times at one point blocked the hiring of an Arab-American reporter. I have this from a single source and cannot be sure it is true, and cannot be sure that Miller was part of it if it was. But that she could affect the careers of her colleagues at the paper does seem clear and helps explain why even those critical of her had to tread lightly.
Raines began the strategy of letting Miller's stories act as responses to the constant attacks from the Right. But then he had to resign when he was caught up in the Jayson Blair scandal (like Miller, Blair made things up, and like Miller, Blair was unsupervised; unlike Miller, he was caught fairly early on).
The Blair scandal was red meat to NYT critics and the whole rightwing Sound Machine. I suspect that for the paper to face the Miller problem at that moment in 2003 might have seemed fatal to its credibility on the parts of Keller and owner Sulzberger. And, there are rumors that Miller had Sulzberger wrapped around her pinky.
So Bill Keller comes on board. And there are these complaints about Miller. So this is the larger context of Keller's recent remarks:
"First, I wish I had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD first thing upon becoming executive editor. At the time, I thought I had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jason Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin my tenure by attacking the previous regime. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction. So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point we published that long editor's note acknowledging the pre-war journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind at least as important -- launched a body of aggressive reporting aimed at exposing how bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war.
I'm thinking of our excellent investigation of how those infamous aluminum tubes became a supposed smoking gun, the report on how the Iraqi National Congress recruited exiles to promote the notion of Saddam's WMD threat, our close look at the military's war-planning intelligence, and several other pieces. Critics sometimes overlook the fact that lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco transpired appeared in the NYT.
By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the WMD boil earlier, I suspect our critics -- at least the honest ones -- might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers."
Second, I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling to case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells.
Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (After the initial leak to Robert Novak in 2003, we asked the Washington Bureau to ask our correspondents whether any of them had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.
In essence, Murdoch, Scaife and other far rightwing super-rich propagandists succeeded in maligning the NYT and in pushing it off its liberal perch even further to the Right. In trying to defend themselves from the charge of treason, Raines and Keller fell into the trap of using Miller's shoddy reporting as a rampart. In the end, it was revealed to be not a rampart but a Trojan Horse for the Right.
The Greatest Book Ever Written!, October 20, 2005
Reviewer: Richard Einhorn "richardein" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This one is up there with Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Dante's Inferno, and The Left Behind Series.
Cogently argued, thoughtful, bold, outside the box thinking from America's finest living reporter. Comparable in American letters only to Paine's "Common Sense," in which this book abounds. Every single fact was checked, and re-checked against reality.
And if the liberals can succeed with Christmas, wait till they get their greasy little hands on Good Friday. The mind reels.
Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.
They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.
Known as "Prussian Blue" — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.
"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."
Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. "They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening," said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins' father. "I'm going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would."
April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April's father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he's even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.
Victory Day
(by Hawthorne/Latvis)
Well sit down and listen, to what I have to say. Soon will come a great war, a bloody but holy day. And after that purging our people will be free, and sing up in the bright skies, a sun for all to see…….
Times are very tough now for a proud White man to live. And although it may appear that this world has no life to give. Times are soon changing, this cant go on or long. And on that joyful summer’s day we’ll sing our Victory song…..
The women, they’ll smile, on Victory Day. And the children, they’ll laugh and they’ll sing and they’ll play. And the forests will echo our grace, for the brand new dawn of our Race…
You are my brother and in war we proudly sing. Our Cause shall never tire. Our gift to you we bring: A holy creed of Racial purpose, A mighty Race to defend. And when we fly our holy flag Their oppressive reign shall end….
And when we finally conquer, our people will be free. And all across this great land, the bold Truth we shall see. So as we march together, to avoid catastrophe, let’s remember always our sacred Destiny….
“What’s that on your uniform, solider?”
“It’s a pledge pin, sir…”
“What kind of fraternity would pledge a man like you?”
From http://www.whitehouse.gov/:
One of President Bush's top priorities is to select men and women of the greatest ability and highest ethical and professional integrity to serve in policymaking and key administrative positions in his administration.
President George W. Bush |
Presidential appointments are an ongoing effort. Some of President Bush's appointments will require Senate confirmation. These appointments are for positions throughout the federal government, for the Cabinet and subcabinet, for members of regulatory commissions, for ambassadorships, for judgeships and for members of numerous advisory boards.
Factors to Consider
To serve our country as a member of the Bush-Cheney administration will be both an honor and a privilege. However, government service is not for everyone. Anyone thinking about applying should be aware that:
I received a wonderful solicitation from the former "newspaper of record" (I think they changed the legend on the masthead to "All the news that Judy makes up, we print!") to get a free trial to "Times Select" and then PAY to hear the wit and wisdom of the newspaper that gave us Whitewater and a whole lot of war support. Where do I sign up?
Now I like reading Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert and yes, on occasion, even Maureen Dowd (if you want to pay to read Tom Friedman or David Brooks, I can't help you). Why ANYONE now would want to jump into New York Times payola with their recent performance is beyond me, though. All we have to do is look at Executive Editor Bill Keller (who got the job after the Jayson Blair fiasco, another feather in, or goose dropping on, the Times' cap), who said that in the late summer of 2003 he took Judy off of Iraq matters but "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."
Nice editorial control there, Bill. Drifting? Reporters shouldn't be drifting, should they, Bill? And even if they are drifting down the lazy river, in this case the
Thanks, but no thanks, former gray lady, I'll keep my $50. I think we all know what kind of lady you have become.
washingtonpost.com
'Rule of Law'? That's So '90s
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
We are on the verge of an extraordinary moment in American politics. The people running our government are about to face their day -- or days -- in court.
Those who thought investigations were a wonderful thing when Bill Clinton was president are suddenly facing prosecutors, and they don't like it. It seems like a hundred years ago when Clinton's defenders were accusing his opponents of using special prosecutors, lawsuits, criminal charges and, ultimately, impeachment to overturn the will of the voters.
Clinton's conservative enemies would have none of this. No, they said over and over, the Clinton mess was not about sex but about "perjury and the obstruction of justice" and "the rule of law."
The old conservative talking points are now inoperative.
It's especially amusing to see former House majority leader Tom DeLay complain about the politicization of justice. The man who spoke of the Clinton impeachment as "a debate about relativism versus absolute truth" now insists that the Democratic prosecutor in Texas who indicted him on charges of violating campaign finance law is engaged in a partisan war. That's precisely what Clinton's defenders accused DeLay of championing in the impeachment battle seven years ago.
DeLay's supporters say charges that he transferred corporate money illegally to local Texas campaigns should be discounted because "everybody does it" when it comes to playing fast and loose with political cash. That's another defense the champions of impeachment derided in the Clinton imbroglio.
The most explosive legal case -- if special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brings charges, and lawyers I've spoken with will be surprised if he doesn't -- involves Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove. A lot of evidence has emerged that they leaked information about Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had the nerve to question aspects of the administration's case for waging war on Saddam Hussein. Even if these administration heavies are not charged with improperly unmasking Plame, they could be in legal jeopardy if they are found to have made false statements to investigators about their role in the Plame affair.
This case goes to the heart of how Republicans recaptured power after the Clinton presidency and how they have held on to it since. The strategy involved attacking their adversaries without pity. In the Clinton years, the attacks married a legal strategy to a political strategy.
Since Bush took office, many of those who raised their voices in opposition to the president or his policies have found themselves under assault, although the president himself has maintained a careful distance from the bloodletting.
In Wilson's case, the administration suggested that his hiring by the CIA to investigate claims that Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material was an act of nepotism, courtesy of his wife. But administration figures wanted to wipe their fingerprints off any smoking gun that would link them to the anti-Wilson campaign. Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who went to jail to protect Libby until she got what she took to be a release from a confidentiality agreement, offered a revealing fact in an account of her saga in Sunday's Times.
Before he trashed Wilson to Miller in a July 8, 2003, meeting, Libby asked that his comments not be attributed to a "senior administration official," the standard anonymous reference to, well, senior administration officials. Instead, he wanted his statements attributed to a "former Hill staffer," a reference to Libby's earlier work in Congress. Why would Libby want his comments ascribed to such a vague source? Miller says she told the special prosecutor that she "assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson."
These cases portray an administration and a movement that can dish it out, but want to evade responsibility for doing so and can't take it when they are subjected to the same rule book that inconvenienced an earlier president. An editorial in the latest issue of the conservative Weekly Standard is a sign of arguments to come. The editorial complains about the various accusations being leveled against DeLay, Libby, Rove and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and it says that "a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives."
I have great respect for my friends at the Weekly Standard, so I think they'll understand my surprise and wonder over this new conservative concern for the criminalization of politics. A process that was about "the rule of law" when Democrats were in power is suddenly an outrage now that it's Republicans who are being held accountable.
Peace in Iraq Still Elusive after Constitutional Referendum
Dr. Frankenstein: You know, I'm a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump. 
