waas up?

redhedd on waas' article:

"And now we come to the crux of the problem for poor Scooter. As Fitz previously noted in his filings, he has not given notice of Rule 404(b) "other crimes, wrongs or acts" as yet. But disclosure of the NIE (with or without proper approval or declassification from the Vice President) and all of the information that Waas lays out in his article on what was behind the Administration’s desparate race to shut down any inquiry into Ambassador Wilson’s allegations — whatever its motivation from protecting the President and the Vice President on down — constitutes a big hunk of motive, opportunity, intent and all of the other goodies that allow all of that evidence to come in at trial"

* booman on waas:

"As it turns out, Rove and Hadley worked closely with Tenet to help craft his statement. But they carefully sidestepped the issue of the aluminum tubes and kept the focus on the Niger issue.

This was part of their overall strategy. And it worked.

* "Congressman John Conyers today called on president Bush to make publicly available a memo submitted to him by Stephen Hadley in October 2002. This memo clearly explained to the president that the Departments of State and Energy both rejected White House claims that Iraq was seeking materials to build a nuclear weapon. This is a very important document revealing the administration's efforts to build a case for war based on Iraq's nuclear threat to our country when overwhelming evidence disputed this claim."
the good folk at rawstory have the letter.

* chris nelson: "Sources also confirm that the President has absorbed the fact that the professional military has completely given up on Rumsfeld...admittedly a process which began for some “uniforms” even before 9/11, but which has continued to affect...or infect...virtually the whole military establishment today."
laura has more. armitage to replace rummy?

* josh: "Earlier this evening, the Associated Press ran a clarification to their story about Rep. Jim Ryun and his house purchase from the now-defunct U.S. Family Network.
"The Associated Press," they wrote, "should have credited the blog TPMmuckraker.com, which first reported the sale."
The reporting in question was by TPMmuckraker.com's Paul Kiel.
That was classy and we appreciate it."
wow. will larisa get same?

* josh:

"Here's what I can add to (waas') story.

We saw this and the cover-up it spawned first hand. While I and reporters from CBS were working on this story through 2004 it was clear that folks on the Hill would agree to talk and then suddenly un-agree when they got the call from the White House. The White House worked doggedly at almost every turn to get the story killed or delayed beyond the election, which they of course did.

That's not all.

Various arms of the US government actually have been trying or at least been interested in trying to get to the bottom of the story. But that would require the cooperation of the Italian government. And that, of course, is not likely to be forthcoming since at least some elements in the Italian government are responsible for or participated in the scam. The problem? The Bush administration has not lifted a finger to get the Italians to cooperate. That's the hang-up. Why wouldn't the White House want the Italian government to cooperate with US law enforcement and intelligence agencies on getting to the bottom of this? Go back and read Waas's description of Rove's analysis -- the Niger case was kryptonite for the president.

The cover-up on this one is deep. Really deep. And much of it has yet to be uncovered."

let's not forget that 60 mins' niger story was bumped for the rathergate story. i've often called it rove's finest hour - a brilliant double-play. here's a list of my references to that story. bastards.

so much Freedom. smell the Freedom

* re : "MCGUIRK: (Jill Carrol) strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone."
it's actually even worse than that. thinkprogress has more.

Athenae responds:

"I don't just disagree with you, sir. I am sickened by you. I am ashamed to share membership in the family of mammals with you, you miserable, selfish, sanctimonious prick."

* Holden:

"Two weeks ago Chimpy gave his little Iraq speech to an audience screened by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose board includes such luminaries as Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Louis Freeh, Joseph Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, Gary Bauer, Donna Brazile, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and Zell Miller.

This week an organization called Freedom House did the screening. And the Freedom House board? Well, it includes Steve Forbes, Kenneth L. Adelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Anthony Lake, Mara Liasson, and Diana Negroponte (wife of John Negroponte)."

everything you wanted to know about emptywheel

* desi:

"How wingnuts react to good news from Iraq
Imus Executive Producer: Carroll is “The Kind of Woman Who Would Wear One of Those Suicide Vests, Sneak Into the Green Zone”

* jane on the Plame Panel:

"We will be discussing how the actions taken by Joe Wilson to tell the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq lead to the exposing of his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. We’ll focus on the subsequent investigation by the Justice Department and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. We’ll be discussing the actions of the Bush Administration, the indictment of Scooter Libby, and the integral role played by journalists and the media. Each member of the panel brings their unique insight and experience to the discussion and I hope you will all join us for a rare opportunity to bring these perspectives together for what will no doubt be a lively and insightful conversation."

i wonder if the discussion will get beyond which journo said/heard what/when

you can see the bios of the participants here - everything you wanted to know about emptywheel but were afraid to ask...

Bush knew the intelligence was dodgy

* emptywheel dissects Waas' latest here:

"In short, this NIE Summary, the one that proves Bush knew that he was making dodgy claims, was among the material that Addington and Libby refused to turn over to the SSCI. And they refused to turn it over even while Durbin insisted that only the Summary would reveal what Bush knew and when he knew it.
They deliberately refused to turn over the evidence that Bush knew the intelligence was dodgy."

and

And don't forget that Fristie threatened to shut down the Senate if the SSCI pushed for these things. They had a confrontation not dissimilar to the one they recently had on the NSA spying program.

Ought to be a tip-off that OVP is trying to cover up crimes again.

in other news:

"Jane Hamsher just posted this at FDL: "I’m very excited to announce that on June 9, 2006 we’ll be having a panel at the Yearly Kos convention to discuss the CIA leak investigation. I’ll be moderating, and the panel members will be:

. Christy Hardin Smith, former prosecutor and blogger at Firedoglake
. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame and author of The Politics of Truth.
. Marcy Wheeler, who blogs as "emptywheel" at The Next Hurrah
. Larry Johnson, former CIA official and blogger at No Quarter
. Dan Froomkin, whose column "White House Briefing" appears at the washingtonpost.com"" (link)

anyone missing from that list?

more murray waas

* Murray Waas:

"Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.
[]
The new disclosures regarding the tubes may also shed light on why officials so vigorously attempted to discredit Wilson's allegations regarding Niger, including by leaking information to the media that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA."

read the rest


* "While the United States constitutes 5% of the world's population, this “land of the free” holds 25% of the world's prisoners – a third to a half are there for drug offenses . With all the talk of Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, many overlook that we have a Gulag Prison System here at home, fueled by our drug laws." (link)

* rimone has a related post : "“Combine these facts and stats and you see that (A) There are far more drug users than we admit out there; (B) They’re doing fine, holding jobs, raising kids, snorting on the weekends and trooping back to work like the rest of us.”"

* "John Pike is quoted as saying that the Saudis helped finance the Pakistani nuclear project in the first place" (link)

* emptywheel: "Scottie's basically saying (a) I won't address the NYT article directly (b) our public and private comments are consistent (c) you covered the public comments, which said that the use of force was the final option. Rather than just refute or admit the NYT allegations, Scottie simply says Bush's public and private comments are consistent, then he shifts all emphasis onto the public claims, the ones that assert that Bush hadn't yet committed to war. He's basically saying, "Trust Bush. He told you he hadn't decided to go to war yet. Trust him.""

* rimone has more, "that pesky memo, again", and a good bloggy wrapup.

no negotiations with Tehran

* via clemons:

"Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, said the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-03 was the result of obstruction by a "secret cabal" of neo-conservatives in the administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson wrote in an e-mail to Inter Press Service (IPS).

The Iranian negotiating offer, transmitted to the State Department in early May 2003 by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, acknowledged that Iran would have to address US concerns about its nuclear program, although it made no specific concession in advance of the talks, according to Flynt Leverett, then the National Security Council's senior director for Middle East Affairs.

[...]

Realists, led by Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were inclined to respond positively to the Iranian offer. Nevertheless, within a few days of its receipt, the State Department had rebuked the Swiss ambassador for having passed on the offer.

Exactly how the decision was made is not known. "As with many of these issues of national security decision-making, there are no fingerprints," Wilkerson told IPS. "But I would guess Dick Cheney with the blessing of George W Bush.""

keyboard commandos

arkin on rumsfeld:

"It's a battle, not between the West and the Muslim world, but rather, between a "small number" of violent extremists and the majority of the Muslim world who don't share their views or methods, Rumsfeld says.

Not a war between the West and the Muslim world, Rumsfeld says. It's just a war between the United States and its vast coalition against a "small number" of violent extremists.

A bunch of craven killers with their web sites are defeating America, and its Secretary of War blithely gives his own administration and government barely a passing grade, unable to see his own role and his own missteps?

I say he deserves an F. It's an embarrassment and a tragedy that this phony Clausewitz is still in a position to do so much damage to this country."

purpose of the 9/11 attacks

* mzm apparently worked for Homeland Security. TPMM:

"We don't yet know the full scope of who was using Wade's operations, and why. Normally, a private contractor choose a specialty: open source intelligence analysis, training security forces, translation, IT design. But MZM sounds like it would do anything for anybody. What other programs has MZM dipped into that we don't yet know about?"

* i haven't mentioned the Kaloogian scandal. here's the summary by SDUT (they gave props to bloggers):

"For weeks, Kaloogian's campaign Web site featured a photo of a peaceful city block to help make his case that things are going well in Iraq.
There was one problem with the photo. It wasn't Baghdad. It was a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey."

* sibel left a comment yesterday:

""Thank You Luke; this award belongs to all whistleblowers & those who support them.
Your Blog is the best one out there connecting the dots in my case; thank you for all your hard work."

cheers to all the whistleblowers, all those who support them, and the woman leading the Whistleblower Coalition.

* arkin:

"In the end, KSM says that the purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to "wake the American people up" to its support for Israel against the Palestinian people, and to its support for Arab governments that led to "further exploitation of Arab/Muslim peoples."

He says, according to the CIA, that he and other al Qaeda plotters "had no idea that the damage … would be as catastrophic as it was, and he did not plan on the U.S. responding to the attacks as fiercely as they did…""

nobody could have imagined...

non-nuclear mushroom cloud

* "U.S. Senator Russ Feingold announced today that Bruce Fein, former official in the Reagan Administration, and John Dean, former Counsel to President Nixon, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at Friday's hearing on Feingold's resolution to censure the president. The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday morning." (link)

* "James Barnett, chairman of the Vermont Republican Party, said presidents should not be impeached "because we disagree with them," adding that evidence for impeachment was drawn from "left-wing blogs and conspiracy theories."" (link)
true.

* TPM got plagiarized by AP, twice. (link)

* "The U.S. military plans to detonate a 700 ton explosive charge in a test called “Divine Strake” that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said" (link)
it's a non-nuclear mushroom cloud - just so ya know. (thnx rimone)

quack quack

Amid a growing national controversy about the gesture U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made Sunday at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the freelance photographer who captured the moment has come forward with the picture.

“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.

Despite Scalia’s insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper “got the story right.”

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ” (link)

the NIE intelligence had been fixed

the curiousest comment about Waas' latest is from over at EW's:

"I find it curious that any internal dissent at all remained in the presidential summary. I mean, after hacking the collected analyses of the intelligence agencies on Iraq down to 90 pages (a footnote of dissent on the tubes, right?), then further cutting that document into a single-page summary.... it just seems odd that any lingering hints of doubt remained. How does stuff that gets chucked into a footnote at one level of summary reclaim prominence at a deeper level of summary?

My cynical hunch is that this classified presidential summary was not so much a summary of (the summary of) the intelligence agencies' findings, but rather a report on how well the NIE intelligence had been fixed. Instead of actual summary wording like, "INR disputes that the tubes are for centrifuges because...," my guess is that it's more along the lines of, "There is a continued risk that the INR dissent over aluminum tubes may come back to bite us on the ass.""

Sibel's First Amendment Award

*

"PEN American Center has named Sibel Edmonds, a translator who was fired from her job at the FBI after complaining of intelligence failures and poor performance in her unit, as the recipient of this year’s prestigious PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. Ms. Edmonds will receive the $20,000 prize at PEN’s annual Gala on April 18, 2006 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. " (link)

congratulations sibel!

the political right in Israel has imploded

* clemons:

"Some observers are suggesting that the new parties and new personalities in Israeli politics have clobbered the old.

I think that the bigger story is that the political right in Israel has imploded. Ariel Sharon as former head of the Likud Party, the party now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, broke apart the vertebrae of the right and shattered the paralysis that had frozen Israel into a long-term self-destructive position regarding its all-important border dispute with Palestinians."

* froomkin was liveonline one question:

"Chicago, Ill.: can you bring us up to date on the progress or lack thereof in the Valerie Plame leak investigation? it seemed as if the latest grand jury was meeting weekly for awhile, and now ... nothing. What's that about?

Dan Froomkin: No, I can't. I don't know. There are some rumors flying around the blogosphere, but I have no reason to think they are anything but fantasy.

I do wish that investigative reporters within the traditional media were digging around this story more aggressively, rather than simply waiting for something to be announced, but I see no sign of it."

xymphora and controlled demolitions

* the 911 building collapse/demolition conversation continues in the comments here

for my part, i primarily agree with damien - the scientific evidence is pretty damning and hard to get past.

i also agree with miguel/xymphora that it'd be pretty difficuly to get the explosives in place.

net/net, i'm with damien. the numbers don't seem to lie.

meanwhile, xymphora says:

"Be careful of discussion of Osama reading building blueprints. It’s disinformation. The October 2001 Osama claimed Muslims would never do such a thing, and he had nothing to do with September 11. Later Osama’s tried to show how much hand’s-on control they had over the scheme, including inspecting the blueprints.

I need to consider how much ‘al Qaeda’ had to do with September 11. The most radical theory is that ‘al Qaeda’ had nothing to do with it!"

Those links are to me.

As far as I know - the blueprint story is true. However, we never said that the blueprints went to osama.

update: here is where xymphora thinks that the demolition folks are basically scientologists

Peter B. Collins Show

Raw's Managing News Editor, Larisa Alexandrovna
Co-Hosting Peter B. Collins Show Tonight
7-9 PM EST
http://krxa540.com/?q=Peter_B_Collins

Abramoff will continue cooperating

* The Hill, via josh : "Foreign-agent lobbyists amid uproars, duck for cover" (link)

* jeralyn: "Jack Abramoff caught a break today. The judge sentenced him to five years, ten months, the bottom of his guidelines. Adam Kidan received the same sentence. Both will remain free on bond.
The sentence will be concurrent with his Washington sentence, yet to be imposed. Abramoff will continue cooperating and a further reduction of the 70 month sentence is expected."

* emptywheel:

"Why would Libby--or anyone else in OVP--go to the trouble of altering emails if they were already handing over evidence that directly implicated Dick?

Meanwhile, there is significant reason to believe that Rove altered other evidence, at least the phone logs coming into the White House, to hide the call he had with Cooper.

So I'm not sure Rove has necessarily flipped. At least not truthfully. Rather, I suspect he has invented a story about the missing emails that implicates OVP in an attempt to hide his own (or someone else's) evidence tampering. Just keep talking, Turdblossom. Patrick Fitzgerald may well have an entire closet to store your lies in, until the time he takes them out and uses them in an indictment."

driftglass: pictures edition

jeebus - driftglass has been on a roll this past week - and i've been to effin busy to notice. i can't do justice to his words - so go read all of it - for a change of pace, rather than stealing his words, i've decided to steal his pics (i hope they aren't really his - he couldnt be that clever, or have that much time on his hands)





drifty is the master of the 'pen' - so i'd me remiss if i did'nt add some words:

Unspiraling the double-helix of GOP DNA, it seems perfectly clear that both halves of the Party of God are still getting their marching orders fresh from from the White House Rec Room.

Different codes for different nodes, of course, but like the Mendacity Extrusion and Molding factory that it is, the GOP bullshit machine can sometimes seem to make little sense when viewed in grainy snapshots -- a conveyor belt moving raw sewage from somewhere to somewhere else, next to a pic of women in smocks and crosses tearing condoms in half, chock-a-block with images of dead American soldiers.

Just…Dada.

But when viewed in its totality?

From that vantage it is a very efficient Abattoir of the American Dream staffed by smiling Christopaths working elbow-to-elbow with bigots and bankers to snuff this nation out and replace it with something dark and fearful and vicious.

So, on the one hand we find the Rubberstamping Fist of the Party – the larcenists formerly known as the United States Congress -- acting in its role as Presidential Prison Bitch and whipped-spouse-enabler of White House criminality. Beseeching us all not to notice that it has jettisoned any pretense of interest in the idea of a check and balance against an Imperial President on a rampage through the Bill of Rights, and has decided instead to go all-in with the whole crazy, faith-based worldview and just go into its new business.

so deliciously exquisitely magnificently driftglass

driftglass coming down

* i'm so busy, i didn't get round to comin down with driftglass. some highlights:

"Carl Levin on Gridlock in Iraq. The Iraqi leadership is farting around and relying on us to protect them. Every fucking day they lock their keys in the Democracymobile and then sit around waiting and shooting at each other and us for U.S. Tire and Towing to show up with the slim-jim.

We should be smacking them upside their heads with 2x4s demanding that they get their act together now. Instead, we hear the same excuses that we just heard [from Rice].

Quote from Cheney about what folly it is for the Dems to run on “competence”.

Short Levin reply: Bring it on, Bitches!"

and

"On NBC -- Meet the Press -- War, War, War, Condi, and a Special Guest appearance by...Immigration.

Couldn’t watch the GOP tickertape unspool out of Condi’s mouth.

Tried to, but what new (and, by definition, newsworthy) thing does this Administration have to say anymore? "

and for a literal lol mo

"Tim Russert; one of the few human beings I know of who would actually fail a fucking Turing Test."

similarly:

"Seriously, NBC, save yourself some Big Cake, fire Russert’s worthless carcass and go Full Ananova - Buy a Mac, get some intern to show you how to use the “speech” function, and feed it wire-copy randomly interspersed with the word “Well?”"

on tancredo:

" The Republican Party is worm-eaten from crotch to crown with pin-head and bigots like this, because that’s the way they want it. A Party that invests 4/5th of its energy warming itself in the cheery glow of the rhetorical crosses it lights to keep the Mole Rat Base happy, and spends the rest of its breath denying they every meant anything by it and calling Democrats angry and unAmerican."

on george will:

"Typical conservative; will run into a burning building to save a five dollar bill, but won’t spend that five bucks to save a burning planet."

exquisite

he manages to paraphrase katrina without going all googly about her red lips:

"And remember, this is an Administration that is at war with Science. That suppresses the truth. That rewrites scientific findings to fit political spin. That scrubs its own reports to [unintelligible, but I’ll betcha it was something like “make its Fundy Overlords happy.”]"

delicious, as always, drifty. thanks for the smack comin down. my week needed it.

atheist fathers and mothers

* josh: "There will be a lot more to say when all the dust settles. But one very happy result of the just-concluding Israeli election is the body blow it has dealt to the Likud...
With Netanyahu now at the helm of this broken party, well ... it really couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

* digby: "If they aren't plagiarising, they're lying. If they aren't lying they're cooking the record. If they can't win, they cheat." - you'll have to read his post cos i can't describe it. it's really quite outrageous.

* "Ambassador Khalilzad said that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari to be the next prime minister" (link)
doesnt accept?

* "The Badr Organization, a political party that represents the paramilitary Badr Corps, the Shiite militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded Monday that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, be expelled from that country." (link)

* sullivan:

"Eugene Volokh has just written a law article on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country - and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases."

i don't understand the complaint. how can antheists raise god-fearin' kids? sullivan then goes on to express the horror that an attack on atheists is also an attack on godfearers. ummm, nope.

wtc7

* xymphora tries to argue that WTC7 was a controlled demolition, but not wtc1 or 2. he argues that wtc7 would have been pre-wired to protect the valuable information inside in case of some calamity, but that it would be impossible to plant explosives in the other two because it'd be impossible to do it without being seen. the problem with that theory is that they shouldn't have been so secret about wtc7.

* cannon has a go at thewtc7 story too.

* paul thompson said something odd recently about sibel's blueprints & composites - something like "you'll be surprised to learn which buildings" - maybe he was talking about wtc7?

* xymph also takes a look at an interview with ellsberg where ellsberg says that he reckons judy miller actually did have a CIA security clearance - and probably Sulzberger as well.

* cannon:"We know, though, that when the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the outing of Plame, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave Andrew Card a twelve-hour "heads up," which provided plenty of time to clear damning information from the White House computers....
Recently, we learned about the 250 pages of "Now you see 'em, now you don't" emails which Rove recently "discovered" and supplied to Patrick Fitzgerald. These very same emails went missing during the original Justice Department inquiry, perhaps during those key twelve hours. (The deadline to turn over all materials was October 10.) Andrew Card could probably tell us some very interesting details about this strange matter."

smuggling drugs

* "Senate Coverup Committee update: The Phase II report on the misuse of Iraq intelligence will not examine how “political appointees at the Pentagon deliberately distorted intelligence and subverted analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency to gin up support for the invasion.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) “didn’t offer a timetable” for an investigation into “activities before the war by the office of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.”"
outrageous. twice.

* juan cole: "Iraqi officials are concerned about a big spike in drug smuggling and use in Iraq."
i bet the american officials are concerned about iraqi's smuggling drugs. that's sposed to be the americans' turf.

* froomkin: "In this morning's Oval Office announcement , Bush hugged Card and called him a close friend while keeping Bolten at arm's length and describing him as "a man with broad experience, having worked on Capitol Hill and Wall Street and the White House staff."
But in June 2003 , upon announcing Bolten's nomination to the budget post, Bush described Bolten as "one of my closest and most trusted advisers." And their relationship has only deepened since."

* froomkin: "Bush was seated in a classroom of second graders in a Florida classroom, reading a children's book, when Card came up and whispered to him: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
But quite notably, Card didn't say: Mr. President, you'd better come and do something about it. And Bush remained frozen in his seat for seven minutes."

* you won't believe this scotty said this: "MR. McCLELLAN: The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power."
but it's true, he really said it.

weinberger's obit

* remember when holden thought that Duffy and Gale Norton would probably soon be arrested given that there were going to spend more time with their families? can anyone see andy card in orange?

* there are some more updates over at Disclose, Denny - all from our readers - miguel makes three comments here, here and here. He is an expert at this stuff, so go read. and there are a bunch of new links about other Hastert shenanigans here. (or just go to Disclose Denny and you can see em all at once - scroll down past the top post)

* the beeb actually mentioned iran-contra in weinberger's obit. i dint hear that elsewhere... in fact the been said 'he'll be most remembered for iran-contra and dealing with the soviet union'

quality snark

* nyt: ""The demonstrations embody a surging constituency demanding that illegal immigrants be given a path to citizenship rather than be punished with prison terms. It is being pressed as never before by immigrants who were long thought too fearful of deportation to risk so public a display.""
perhaps the cops should throw a giant net over everyone at the next demonstration and try to arrest them all. i suspect that would be the tipping point we've all been looking for. finally.

* White House chief of staff Andrew Card resigns. OMB director Joshua Bolten to replace him.
i'm kinda surprised they didnt replace him with someone with at least *some* name recognition - although i guess that might look like they have actually called in some help.

* clemons:

"Antonin Scalia, who has already declared his full-fledged support for secret military tribunals BEFORE hearing the appeal this week, has startled Christians around the nation by "flipping off" critics moments after attenting Roman Catholic mass.
I haven't seen the photo, but UPI reports that a photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston newspaper, snapped a shot.
Scalia "ordered him" not to publish the photo. So much for separation of church and state. "

that's some quality snark

Associated Press plagiarizes RawStory

* rawstory: "The Associated Press has confirmed using a Raw Story report as the basis for a Mar. 14 article detailing a change to national security clearance policies but has refused to issue credit for the piece."

* more real-estate transaction shenanigans courtesy of tomdelay & friends

* tpmm: "We'd say political advisers are fleeing Rep. Katherine Harris's (R-FL) Senate campaign like rats flee a sinking ship, but that's not fair to sinking ships."


(pic courtesy of these good folks - credit due)

phillippe sands on 'hardball' - Cheney/Cohen

phillippe sands on 'hardball' (thnx Rimone) - via ATR

'...MATTHEWS: ...A passage in a new book, your book is called
"Lawless World." This other book by Bernard Trainor, "Cobra Two,"
describes a phone call from then Vice President Elect Cheney to then
Defense Secretary William Cohen regarding Iraq. This phone call came
soon after the debate by the Supreme Court when they gave the
election to President Bush after the Florida dispute.

Here`s what Cohen received, a call from the vice president, Cheney.
Here`s what he said. He said that he wanted to see one thing. He did
not want to see a tour of the world or all the potential threats to
our country, he wanted to get a briefing for the new president, his
partner, George W. Bush, on one topic, Iraq. That`s all he wanted."

I talked to Bill Cohen a number of times on this, and he said it was
breath taking. All the vice president wanted to know about, he didn`t
care about the world all around the globe, the only thing he cared
about was Iraq. He was already honing in on that decision in December
of 2000. What does that tell you?

SANDS: Well, I think it tells us that all of this is completely
consistent with the materials that emerged, the Downing Street Memo
of July 2002, and now this White House meeting memo of January 2003,
that an early decision was taken, and I think what it raises is
fundamental questions about competence.

It raises, in my view, fundamental questions of legality, but also
more importantly perhaps for the president`s purpose, incompetence...''parently mr cheney was in a hurry.

'parently mr cohen is getting chatty

brad has the video

Leopold: Rove and/or Hadley

* leopold:

"In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, (sources) said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation.

The sources said late Monday that it may take more than a month before Fitzgerald presents the paperwork outlining the government's case against one or both of the officials and asks the grand jury to return an indictment, because he is currently juggling quite a few high-profile criminal cases and will need to carve out time to write up the indictment and prepare the evidence.

[]

Hadley and Rove remain under intense scrutiny, but sources said Fitzgerald has not yet decided whether to seek charges against one or both of them."

war for good news

* jeralyn:

"Zacarias Moussaoui testified today that he and Richard Reid were going to fly a plane into the White House. He said it was part of the 9/11 operation but he didn't know the details (such as when it would take place.) Is it the truth or is Moussaoui trying to hand the Government a win so he can die what he believes will be a martyr's death?"

* sander hicks interviewed randy glass. Glass: "9/11 was supposed to be a nuclear attack."
sheesh. let's hope that isnt true. you'll have to read the rest. i wonder if the EPA still would have given the green light...

* " American intelligence agencies and presidential commissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein had no unconventional weapons and no substantive ties to Al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion...
Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view." (link)
omg - how much of this are we going to have to endure?

* e&p:

" After the latest round of blaming the media for distorted coverage in Iraq, which emerged this week from top Bush administraton officials, war reporters and editors strongly defended their coverage this weekend in a variety of venues, as violence in the country reached new levels.

Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru, who recently completed a 14-month stint in Iraq, commented: "Everyone wants to read their view of the war in your story. To me the only issue is whether our stories are real or not. I never got complaints from the people who were involved in the subject matter of the stories.

"The job of soldiering over there is incredibly difficult. I have tremendous respect for those guys. The criticism completely misses the point. Iraq is on the verge of civil war. Where's the good news?"

Writing in The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman traced the recent upsurge in sadistic killings, then commented: "If this all sounds depressing, it is. That's how people here feel. I've been looking hard, but in two weeks I haven't found an Iraqi optimist."

no "war for oil"

Palast:

""It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's crude.

And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with OPEC."

Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude.

Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid on Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight quota set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel.

There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get more of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing too much of it.

You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make money from pumping more oil, but from pumping less of it. The lower the supply, the higher the price.

It's Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the "insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just love it.

Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon.

Not so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy. The top oily-gopolists, the five largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 -- compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil."

here's what i've said in january:

" i've never really understood the 'war for oil' argument. i've been meaning to reiterate this forever - the 'war for oil' slogan doesn't identify the issues. as best as i can tell, this argument relies on the logic that the world is running out of oil and that america needs to have access to the vital resource to ensure that the economic engine keeps running smoothly, and there's another version of that which is that with india and china growing like crazy, there's a geo-political need to ensure some sort of competitive advantage over economic rivals.

Here's the problem with that logic. the outlaw criminals don't give a flying fuck about future generations, and they don't care about their historical legacy that they spout about. think about it - they don't care that their war has tripled the price of oil today, why would they care about the price (or availability) of oil 30 years hence? particularly when they are more likely to be demonized for focussing on oil due to environmental issues, and even more despised for going to war for it - and the historical record will show that the evidence about global warming was on all their desks, and they ignored it.

i am willing to entertain one element of the 'war for oil' narrative - in that the war has benefited, more than anyone, those who sell oil - whether from the ground such as saudi arabians, and texans, and iranians, or the oil companies. untold wealth. given that the egadministration is a bunch of outlaw criminals for sale at the highest price, the people who could afford the most are those in the oil industry in one way or other - but i want to make it very clear, i'm not talking about some nebulous concept of 'oil' or a 'strategic national resource' or any such - i'm talking about personal greed, pure and simple."

or here in 2003:

"i never really bought the 'war for oil' story - despite compelling evidence. i think its more likely to be something along the lines of 'war for my friends, who happen to have oil interests'. i think the idea of war4oil is too generous - it suggests that at least they have the (economic) interest of the 'west' at heart."

Reactions to Larisa's article about Karl

Reactions to Larisa's article about Karl et al.

* clemons "has confirmed the essential points (or Larisa's story) through a source close to Rove... Rove giving Patrick Fitzgerald a path into 250 pages of deleted and/or previously unprovided electronic communications from and within the Vice President's office must give serious heartburn to Scooter Libby's defense team, being paid for in part by this cabal of supporters."

* steve soto: "Is Karl assisting Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation by pointing out where to find the emails that previously had been missing? That’s what Raw Story is uncovering, and it appears that Rove is deflecting heat away from him and towards Scooter and Shooter."

* supreme irony: "It sounds to me the Fitzgerald has something on Rove, and Rove has turned states evidence to help with punishment. If that is the case, how much of Rove's actions are with Bush's blessing?'

* holden: "Turdblossom vs. Big Time . Oh my, this could get ugly."

* jeralyn:

"Luskin and Rove obviously would prefer Rove to come off as Mr. Truth, Justice and the American Way -- a helpful White House official who told the truth and let the chips fall where they may -- rather than as a rat who sold out his confederates in order to avoid jail -- but no matter how they try to whitewash it, it's a rollover. And Rove can't keep it a secret forever.

I think Fitz has Rove dead to rights if, as reported, he failed to disclose his conversation with Cooper in his first interview with the FBI in October 2003 or in his first appearance before the grand jury in February 2004
[]
I think Rove has been singing his heart all along, hoping to avoid an Indictment entirely. Every time it looked impossible, he remembered a little more information to tell Fitzgerald. He'll keep telling until he gets what he wants from him.
[]
If there was intentional deletion of e-mails in the Vice-President's office, someone is going to get charged as a result of it.
[]
Back to the question of the deleted e-mails. Who in Cheney's office will this reach, and how high? Does Fitz have corrorborating testimony from others who have flipped in the case? Is Cheney out of the woods? While I doubt Cheney physically deleted e-mails, I wouldn't be suprised if some of the emails deleted by people in his office contained details of conversations with Cheney about Plame or instructions he gave on how to respond to the investigation."

* clemons in the comments:

"What I confirmed through a source close to Rove is that he was cooperating enthusiastically with Fitzgerald -- and my source says that Rove did help unravel the previoiusly undisclosed email communication in the VP's office. I don't have any information, however, that those emails further indict Libby. That's speculation on my part -- and as I noted, I suggested that the provision of many more communications, partly at the hand of Rove, must be causing the Libby defense team grief.

But the key issue I was interested in was whether Rove was connected at all to these previous emails that had not been provided earlier. I don't have any evidence that Libby or anyone on the VP's team tried to destroy evidence -- but as has already been reported -- some of the recovered emails were deleted. They could have been deleted, however, as part of routine operations, though I have always been under the impression that "nothing" is deleted any longer in the EOP. But who knows."

*DSM's Michael Smith:

" There are intriguing signs of George Bush trying to distance himself from Dick Cheney as the investigation into who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame homes in on members of the vice-president’s close circle. Leaking the name of a covert CIA officer is illegal under US law and an investigation has been going on for some time under Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into who was responsible. Karl Rove, the president’s special adviser, reportedly “tipped off” Fitzgerald on the location of 250 emails that had mysteriously gone missing from the vice-president’s office.

[]
Now the US internet newspaper Raw Story is reporting that it was Rove who told Fitzgerald where to find the emails Cheney’s office didn’t want the special investigator to see."

jane hamsher: "

I've put in a number of calls to try and confirm it. Everyone I've talked to -- people who are quite well informed and have been very good sources of information on Plame in the past -- are extremely skeptical it is true.

I don't know who the sources are for the story so I can't say for sure, for all I know it is absolutely valid. But until I can get somebody to give me a bit more insight into this story, it doesn't fit with what I know and I don't think we'll be getting into it."

* atrios: "Both Raw Story and Steve Clemons say that Rove has been helping out Fitz."

* mcjoan: "Pretty interesting stuff, though, seeing the President's closest advisor potentially ratting out the Vice President's former closest advisor. Extrapolate that to their bosses, and you really do have to wonder how long Cheney is going to be around."


(i'll update this post throughout the day)

small, stupid men

* "Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House... Moussaoui told the court he knew the attacks were coming some time after August 2001 and bought a radio so he could hear them unfold." (link)

* "Texas Travis County Attorney David Escamilla has just released a statement saying that he will not pursue a formal criminal investigation into Ralph Reed's lobbying activities in Texas. Not because Reed didn't break any laws - actually he says quite the opposite - but because there is a two-year statute of limitations for prosecuting misdemeanors in Texas. So Reed gets off the hook." (link)

* digby: "So please let's can the talk once and for all about how the invasion was a good idea that was just badly executed. It was a terrible idea, as all such ideas hatched by small, stupid men with big ambitions must be. If we ever hope to regain our credibility we need to seriously contemplate plans to bring about a reckoning"

Ron: king of plagiarism

* laura logan slams howie 'good news' kurtz in this video.

* anon in the comments: "I want to know what George Bush is doing about the Epstein-Barr Virus."
sheesh. i've never even heard of that one... something else to worry about.

* with plagiarism back in the news, so is ron

deleted emails, erased hard drives and other obstruction

* larisa:

"According to several Pentagon sources close to Rove and others familiar with the inquiry, Bush's senior adviser tipped off Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to information that led to the recent "discovery" of 250 pages of missing email from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney."
[]
Rove is providing information on deleted emails, erased hard drives and other types of obstruction by staff and other officials in the Vice President's office. Pentagon sources close to Rove confirmed this account.

None would name the staffers and/or officials whom Rove is providing information about. They did, however, explain that the White House computer system has "real time backup" servers and that while emails were deleted from computers, they were still retrievable from the backup system. By providing the dates and recipient information of the deleted emails, sources say, Rove was able to chart a path for Fitzgerald directly into the office of the Vice President."

squeals like a pig. because he's a pig.

how stupid are these people?

secret sunday

postsecret

righteous state of indifference

* digby: "Whether George W. Bush can be charged with a crime, I don't know. But I have no doubt that it would be good for the country, not bad, if the Republicans were held to account for their undemocratic actions once and for all. They're impeaching, stealing eleactions and starting unnecessary wars now. What is it going to take before people realize that we are dealing with an outlaw political party?"


* wolcott on " "The Israel Lobby" by the academic duo John Mearsheimer* and Stephen Walt"

* wolcott: " One of the great paradoxes of our age is how the US can be so dimly complacent and so sharply fearful in the same breath. We're in a constant state of sluggish agitation, worked up into a righteous state of indifference."

misteps & mistakes.

*

"But after federal prosecutors finished laying out their case this week, even those who strongly supported an aggressive prosecution may wonder whether the trial has shed as much light on Mr. Moussaoui's culpability as it has on the missteps and mistakes by law enforcement agencies." (link)

misteps & mistakes.


( pic via desi)

the laura edition

* everyone is pointing to this wapo article about the USFN and ASG

* laura: "Buckham personally took a $200,000 "commission" from the NRCC?? Is there another word for that?"

* laura: "That approximately $125,000 in payments to Christine from the Buckham-controlled consulting firm answers the question of what the DeLays might have personally financially gotten out of the arrangement."
we knew that already ;-)
here's my post from last week.

* laura: "The piece demonstrates a breathtaking degree of complicity on Buckham's part to participate in a bribery and money laundering scheme engineered by Abramoff. As a friend commented to me, a good money laundering scheme would involve several layers of cut outs or front companies -- from three to twelve. These guys apparently stuck to the lower number -- a think tank here, a family values charity there, Chelsea bank accounts in the Cayman islands, a law firm in London funneling money from the Russians -- because they were too arrogant to think that anybody would look too hard."

* laura: "From August until October 2004, Georgia Kontogiannis, the wife of alleged Duke Cunningham co-conspirator Thomas Kontogiannis, gave $18,000 to eighteen vulnerable Republican US House candidates, $1,000 each to: (snip) Georgia Kontogiannis is described as a retired homemaker. These are not her local candidates, or broad nationally known candidates. Who was directing these payments to these obscure, vulnerable national Republican candidates? Who gave the Kontogiannis the Republican House play map? These payments suggest a degree of connection to someone far more central to the GOP House machine than even Cunningham."

* laura: " In some ways, perhaps the best Lincoln's funders could hope for is that its influence campaign convinces Iraqis that the US's foibles in Iraq are the result of incompetence rather than some malign intent. "
lol

I HATE THE AP.

* Rimone sent through an amazing story (thnx, rimone). Vermont Democratic U.S. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy wrote a piece saying:

"The right to know is a cornerstone of our democracy. Without it, citizens are kept in the dark about key policy decisions that directly affect their lives. Without open government, citizens cannot make informed choices at the ballot box. Without access to public documents and a vibrant free press, officials can make decisions in the shadows, often in collusion with special interests, escaping accountability for their actions. And once eroded, these rights are hard to win back. "

A Vermontian Bureau Chief for AP ran the article. AP headhonchos killed the article and sacked the editor. I don't know how many times i've said it - but I HATE THE AP.

christian afghan might be mentally ill

the highlight of the sunday talkies was watching people's heads explode trying to fit two 'facts' into their small brain:
1. christian convert afghani guy perhaps being murdered by the state
2. BUT WE LIBERATED THEM! BUT WE LIBERATED THEM! BUT WE LIBERATED THEM! BUT WE LIBERATED THEM! BUT WE LIBERATED THEM! BUT WE LIBERATED THEM!

secondary highlight is that nobody sees any irony in the fact that they are suggesting that christian guy might be mentally ill.

to quote miguel:

"What blows my mind is that if you have people calling in question the official story of 9-11, they are called "kooks" and "wingnuts". But average people believe something far more fantastic and unbelievable- that there's an Old Man In The Sky makin' miracles and movin' mountains and bringing back people from the dead. "

that, and my favourite, the flying dead guy.

hastert, CREW

my response to Hastert's response to the CREW complaint is finally up at disclose, denny. thanks to miguel, again, for his help.

Joe Wilson and the neocons

*

"Ambassador Joe Wilson spoke at Florida State University Monday night and pulled no punches, to put it lightly. Wilson pounded the shit out of the Neoconservatives, George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Khalilzad, Condoleeza Rice, and the rest of the gang and, quite frankly, surprised me with the extent he allowed his anger and frustration to play out to a live audience. Nobody was spared.....not BushCo, not Ken Mehlman, not Ann Coulter, not David Dreier.....he took the entire Bush Cult movement to the woodshed.

Wilson basically took a baseball bat to the face of the entire Neocon GOP movement and named names up and down the list"

details here. go read - but he said this:

"So since they couldn't discredit me as being a womanizer, a druggie, or partisan (since I had handwritten notes from George's dad thanking me for my brave service in saving American lives in Baghdad), they decided to go after the last thing they had, my wife Valerie. "

i still don't get this. does he really think they went after plame to get back at him? why did libby desperately continue to track wilson for another year - there is something weird going on, and i dont get it. using his logic, once they outed her, they probably didn't have much leverage against him.

Proof of a conspiracy

* you can download athenae's latest interview (with mattew rothschild) about Feith here - (30mins)

* Hadley will be on FaceTheNation. will he get asked the question? will he answer?

* "Sen. Specter has finally set a hearing date for Sen. Russ Feingold’s censure resolution. A hearing will be held on Friday, March 31st. Expect a lot of political fireworks and posturing but, at the root, you can also expect some serious questions to start coming forward. " (link)

* wapo front-pages an impeachment article.

* xymphora: "A war the size of a China war would lead to just the type of fascist military organization in the United States that neocons like Ledeen drool over. A big added advantage for the United States is that a victory over China would wipe out most of its deficit problem. That fact alone, and the fact there seems to be no other way out of the upcoming American financial crisis, makes the war seem inevitable."
oh great. that's just what we need.

* xymphora: "Proof of a conspiracy: The Kennedy School of Government removed its logo from Walt/Mearsheimer paper and made more prominent a disclaimer stating that the views expressed belong only to the authors. "

* wapo has a funny article about Lincoln and propaganda. btw - my favorite propaganda story at the mo - do you know the meme that carrots are good for your eyesight? it turns out that in ww2 the brits had some cool night-time radar which meant that they could shoot down german planes as they flew towards London - naturally they didnt want the germans to know this, so they created a story that the brit pilots were eating lots of carrots and could thusly see really, really well!

love freedom or we'll kill you

* John Laesch put up a victory post over at dkos and spent some time there in the comments (h/t steve)

* athenae: " I don't think Bush has a foreign policy so much as lists of likes and dislikes scrawled in crayon on the back of an Applebee's placemat. I think our new "love freedom or we'll kill you" policy has been pastede on yey to make Iraq look less crazy than it does now in light of, you know, all the dead people."

* re PreznitBlinky's ' future Presidents will decide when U.S. troops leave Iraq' comment, everyone assumes that means that troops will be in iraq till 2009 - but if we impeach the bastard soon, then perhaps a future president can get them outta iraq before 2009 :-)

* damien joins in the PeakOil debate. emptywheel joins in too. they are both smarter than i.
my dream for the day is that we are running out of oil and we have wise leaders who recognize this and rather than start wars for resources actually devise a plan to move our economies/lifestyles away from oil-dependence for everyone in an orderly fashion - and save the planet from global warming in the process.

* glenn:

"the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide
[]
Can that be any clearer for you - Congressmen, Senators, journalists? The President is bestowed by the Constitution with the unlimited and un-limitable power to do anything that he believes is necessary to "protect the nation.""
[]
Put another way, the Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government, particularly with regard to national security.

karen kwiatkowski , Robert Pearson

* more from that June05 interview with karen kwiatkowski that i pointed to the other day:

"(interviewer): One of the recurring themes in the latest series of leaked documents to come out of Britain is the lack of American attention to the issue of postwar planning. Did what you saw coming out of the OSP evince a similar lack of concern for the postwar phase of operations?

KK: One of my final emails to the NESA deputy director, and the one that technically got me moved back to my original OSD Directorate for Sub Saharan Africa, related to my own observations regarding the absence of realistic post war planning.

Everyone wanted to know what they (OSP) were thinking for post-war. The Turkish government had presented our ambassador in Ankara with a long list of post war planning questions. The OSP prepared the answers, and the deputy direct shared this No-Dis Secret message with the rest of us, in hopes that it would answer our general questions.

War with Iraq had been imminent since December if not earlier, so people were wondering about what the aftermath would look like for us, even if they didn't work Iraq issues. One third of the answers to the 40 plus questions were "We're working on that" or "TBD." Another one third were pat answers that showed little competence or forethought. And the rest of the answers were patently insane or unrealistic.

For example, one of the questions from the Turks had to do with human crossflow into and from Iraq after the military victory in Baghdad. Not just refugees but others. Of course, Turkey had some concerns along these lines with Kurdish separatism problems they have. The OSP-drafted answer was that the U.S. Army would secure all of Iraq's borders. I had noted in my email to the deputy director a length comparison between the U.S. border with Mexico and the Iraq border, and suggested in a clearly disrespectful and inappropriate way that the US army was probably not going to be able to secure Iraq's border in any way, shape or form.

Yes, I admit, I had failed the groupthink test and was removed from NESA within the week. But today, it is painfully and tragically obvious that the OSP planning was not just idiotic and inadequate, it was criminal. The only question is whether this was because of incompetence or by design."

there are some quite interesting bits in there.

why, for example, was the OSP crafting and providing answers for the Turkish embassy? did they create them out of air? why did they lie?

the ambassador at the time was Robert Pearson - was he part of the cabal as well? he is currently "Director General, Foreign Service and Director, Human Resources." great.

why on earth would he go to Feith/Luti/Rhodes/Franklin for answers to Turkey's concerns?

you can read the rest of the interview here

(update - apparently feith was in charge of post-war planning.)

larisa & sibel

* larisa has a post up at huffpo where she documents the AP stealing some of her work. in the process she gives a shoutout to eriposte, emptywheel, brad and yours truly:

"Luke at Wot is it Good 4, who has researched the Sibel Edmond's case so closely and tracked things so accurately (using nothing more than open source), that in my opinion and in terms of what I understand regarding the case, he is closer than anyone to the truth of it (minus some things and reorganizing other things)."

for people looking for my work on sibel - here's a reasonable place to start, and here
- or if you feel like rummaging around, here are all the posts. Here is the transcript i took of a recent interview Sibel did which has lots of interesting stuff. This post is also an OK launching pad.

Scott Horton and Christopher Deliso have done some excellent work on Sibel's story - you can find it here

update: I interviewed Larisa - see part one (plame, iran), part two (sibel, plame brewster jennings). Part 3 here(bad leaks, good leaks and buying politicians)

abramoff murder

* "But now (katherine harris') campaign says she's not spending her inheritance, only her liquidated assets, which Harris says also total $10 million.
Money quote: "I think I'm being pretty clear," her campaign spokeswoman Morgan Dobbs told the Orlando Sentinel." (link)

* everyone is pointing to the story that the russians were shovelling money to the USFamilyNetwork. I'm not sure that people have realised that the USFN was the sole source of funds for AlexanderStrategyGroup - which is where DeLay's wife 'worked' which i wrote about here

* " A judge has approved subpoenas for former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and an ex-business partner to answer questions about the mob-style slaying of the owner of a gambling fleet they bought." (link)

* "The chief prosecutor in the case, Brian Cavanagh, said his office had not intended to call Abramoff as a witness in part because he would be given immunity from prosecution for anything he says under those conditions. Cavanagh also said Kidan has not been cleared as a suspect in the Boulis slaying." (link)

peak oil and propaganda

teemu joins the peakoil debate:

I buy the idea of decreasing supply in near future. What I don't buy, however, is the way it's sometimes marketed, as a doomsday scenario: "One day, people notice on their way to work that all the gas stations are out of gas. Then they die on cold and starvation, in the middle of motorway littered with now-useless SUVs."

I've yet to see (I haven't looked for one, really) an analysis where increasing demand drives the prices up gradually, over a period of years and decades. That allows adaptation, unlike "suddendly the gas price could jump into $100 a gallon".

(FYI: Due to gas tax, the cost here in scandinavia is about $8/gallon, no doubt a nightmare for many americans, but it's nothing really once you get used to it.)

that's pretty much my argument - although teemu says it much better than i could have. clinton-era prices were below $20/barrel - so unless things have changed substantially since then, then we don't have a real problem (yes, i acknowledge that there have been some revisions re oil fields).

ftr, bowser prices here are in the order of $usd 1.2 per litre

again, this isnt an issue that i've focussed on (and thnx again to john for questioning my assumptions) - but the marketing *stinks* of propaganda - and if there's one thing i know, it's how to sniff out propaganda (given how much of it i've documented these past years)

again, i dont know anything about this issue - so i shouldnt really try to comment on it - but my *sense* is that its a load of codswallop (i think thats a real word - but maybe i'm just making stuff up at this point)

and as i've said before - i *wish* it were true - there's almost *nothing* that would make me happier than the reversal of global warming and the dependence on fossil fuels.

peekoil

* desi: "Peak oil is like a chia pet."
cute.

* meanwhile, damien thinks there's some merit in peakoil

* to clarify, of course we're 'running out' in some sense - but the marketing of peakoil stinks.

pakistan bribing Report-ers

* re the story that pakistan bribed lobbied the 911 commissioners to clean pakistan's image - i happened to stumble across this in the Butler report:

"Chapter 2
COUNTRIES OF CONCERN OTHER THAN IRAQ AND GLOBAL TRADE
2.1 Introduction 60-63 17
2.2 AQ Khan 17
2.3 Libya 20
2.4 Iran 22
2.5 North Korea 24
2.6 General Conclusions 107-109 26"

Simplyappalling notes: "Do you notice anything strange about this list? That’s right. AQ Khan is not a country... This is not a mistake. It is an effort to avoid the word "Pakistan.""

Is that a pattern yet?

feingold & Laesch

a commentor left this note
-----------------------------
Thanks for the coverage of John's race and well earned victory in the March 21st Primary Race.

Not sure you or your readers are aware, but John is making an attempt to win his 2nd victory in the same week. He was picked by Sen. Russ Feingold (just prior to the primay) to be one of eight candidates for the Progressive Patriots Fund.

This has been posted on the Kane County Democrats website (http://www.kanedems.org/)
following John's primary victory:

With your help, John is one step closer to defeating the Speaker of the House. With your support, we will prevail in November.

Your help is needed. Vote online now to help John secure the endorsement and financial support of Senator Russ Feingold's Progressive Patriots Fund.

You can vote until midnight Sunday, March 26th. After voting, pass along this request to friends and family!

I would ask, for you support and considerations to make this happen.

The financial contribution and endorsement of Sen Feingold would be a significant achievment nas go a very long way to defeating Hastert come Novemeber.

I will also state, for the record, that I am a longterm supporter for John Laesch, have contributed money, time. grassroots activism to his campaign for hte past 6-7 months. I have also lived in CD14 for nearly 40 years, John is the genuine aritcle and the best thing to happen
to us in the last 20 years as a candidate running on the national levels.

-----------------------------

how great would it be if hastert gets beaten?

niger & the OSP

this from an old interview with karen kwiatkowski:

"(interviewer): Given the coziness between Bruner/Luti and Chalabi, did any of the now-debunked intel to have come from "Curveball" make its way through the OSP? When Curveball's claims (mobile weapons lab / unmanned chem-warfare aircraft / etc.) were debunked in the national media, or perhaps even when you witnessed Colin Powell regurgitating them in front of the UN, did you recognize any of them as "talking points" which had emanated from the OSP?

KK: I don't know for sure, but it seems as if Curveball's bad info did come to the OSP, and may have been disseminated by it. I think that Curveball's info (according to the Rockefeller-Roberts report) came directly to the intelligence community at an earlier date, where it was debunked, but it then found its way back into the community through OSP and/or the Vice President's office.

The later "occurrence" of the same kinds of "reports" may have appeared to intelligence analysts as an independent confirmation of something they had previously rejected. I didn't witness this personally, but the things Curveball insisted were true are very similar to the bullets and phrases I was familiar with from OSP talking points, and these things were not found or reflected in mainstream military intelligence I saw.

Interestingly, the famous "Niger yellowcake" story, debunked by Ambassador Joe Wilson but later inexplicably included in the President's 2003 state of the union address, was never included in our OSP provided talking points. I think this speaks to the multifaceted and comprehensive nature of the administration's very effective effort to create a pretext for a war already predetermined."

i'm increasingly interested in curveball - but that for another day - kk is correct - it is interesting that the niger stuff didnt come through the osp.

biometrical spying

* glenn: "But Domenech loves George Bush and works as a Republican operative. He worked for Sen. Jon Cornyn, was a RedState regular, and edited Michelle Malkin's book. So behavioral standards don't apply to him. By definition, nothing that he does can be wrong -- certainly not that wrong -- because he's a person at his core who is incapable of doing anything truly blameworthy, and the proof of that is that he is a Bush supporter. "

* "Fallen super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his former business partner soon will be subpoenaed by defense attorneys to give sworn statements in the Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis murder case." (link)

* arkin: "And the bloggers? In the infancy of this medium, I continue to be astounded by the blogosphere's intolerance and lack of civility. The intolerance particularly seems to signal a common ailment shared by rabid Generals and Bush haters: They want only one view expressed. Our ideals in both America and Denmark mean that we tolerate all views. Our dream is that views can actually be influenced and people can learn and change."

* arkin:

"Current and former members of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, come forth.
I believe your unit is spying on anti-war, anti-military and environmental organizations under the guise of "force protection."
[]
To understand what kind of surveillance though, one has to abandon the Nixonian model of surveillance for the purpose of harassing government opponents or selecting individuals to spy on because of their political affiliations.

Modern spying, at least of this type I'm discussing here, is not so individual-centric. Dot collecting and analysis mostly involves looking for potential threats when the individual is not necessarily known."

hello 902nd (*waves*) - the thing that has me dumbstruck is the biometrical spying that Larisa mentioned on the radio. wtf is that all about?

atheists dont go to heaven

speaking of 'muslims can't go to heaven' - tristero brings us this:

"From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. "Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years," says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study's lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today's atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past-they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. "It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common 'core' of values that make them trustworthy-and in America, that 'core' has historically been religious," says Edgell. Many of the study's respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism."

mon dieu

BoxTurtle Ben

* snark of the day award goes to TPMM: "The Pentagon is conducting an internal review of how Mitchell Wade's MZM got contracts to work in its top-secret domestic counterintelligence office, CIFA. In citing parts of the MZM story we broke, the story doesn't name us, giving credit to TPMmuckraker.com only as "other Web logs." So we'll just credit this story to (other newspaper)"
btw - i effin hate the term "web logs" - FDL is calling itself a 'weblog' now too. sheesh.

* Domenech is toast! yay, internets! (link, link)

man - god knows what the blogosphere will do to the job market... i presume that i make myself more unemployable every day. the other day i agreed with falwell when he said "Jews and Muslims can't go to heaven" - i said "actually, i agree with falwell - although from a different starting point..." - i presume you all know that i meant that nobody is goin to heaven - but my traffic fell by about half at about that time... whatever. the temptation to pull punches must be enormous for lots of people. no wonder the msm is the way it is.

but back to BoxTurtle Ben- what the hell is it with plagiarism? that's some crazy stuff that i just don't understand. it's kinda dirty - its even worse than stealing physical stuff - i can't quite get my head around it. what the hell goes through your head when you steal someone's words and try to pass them off as your own - especially when you actively re-arrange the words a little to disguise it a little? it's so dodgy. btw - anyone can borrow, steal, copy, paste my work/words without attribution (although attribution is nice) - but i'm not a writer.

the other funny thing about domenech is that he called Coretta Scott King a "communist" on the day of her funeral - this also has everyone up in arms. i have no idea whether she was or wasn't - but that's beside the point. the 'communist' label is somewhere up there with 'sex-offender' or 'liberal' which is really funny

Peak oil is baloney?

from a reader (John) re this post:

Peak oil is baloney?

I think people are talking about peak oil also because of Kevin Phillips’s new book. It’s one of his major focuses.
You believe that petroleum is a renewable resource? Or I should say, renewable to the extent that its natural production occurs more quickly than our depletion of it? I suspect that you don’t. I also suspect you don’t believe that the DoDo or the Maori are a renewable resource.
All the brambles that have attached themselves to the essential peak oil theory may be baloney, but I have a very difficult time believing that you think God’s going to keep pouring it on.

i'm not familiar with the new book.

the reason that i think PeakOil is baloney is the way it is being marketed - my guess is that the oil companies have financed a few front groups to inoculate us toward accepting that high oil prices will be with us forever. it smells a whole lot like the Discovery crew and Intelligent Design (aka IDiots)

of course oil is non-renewable (absent Mother Time) - but it was also non-renewable when Clinton was president and oil was at $18/barrel.

don't get me wrong - i wish we were about to run out of oil and that we had some sensible policies to deal with it. heck, i'd even be 'happy' to have Preznit Blinky and his cronies in power if they were better than the next best alternative in dealing with global warming. (the australian govt is equally guilty).

i wish we had a new Manhattan Project to find new energy sources

i wish al gore was president

but as for Peak Oil and the imminent living-in-a-bunker earth-scorching apocalypse that Ruppert et al envisage? i dont think so.