Bush: Iraq like Korea

Josh Marshall:

The president says so many stupid things about Iraq that it's sort of hard to know which ones to focus on. But in purely political terms if no others I would think the president's critics would want to focus in on what the White House said about how long the president thinks US troops should stay in Iraq.

By saying that Korea is the model for the US military presence in Iraq, the president is saying that he envisions the US military presence in Iraq continuing for many decades into the future.

Or let's put that in more stark terms, for most of you reading this post, the president envisions US troops remaining in Iraq long after you're dead.

Talking about drawdowns in late 2007 or by the end of 2008 is basically a joke, in other words. Countries can really only think on forty or fifty year horizons. So what this means is that the US military presence in Iraq is permanent.

As TPM Reader DS made clear in the email we posted earlier [see below -- bill], there's only one goal that makes sense of that strategy. And that is to permanently dominate the cluster of oil fields in southern Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Nothing to do with democracy, as though that needed saying. But also nothing to do with terrorism. We're permanently occupying Iraq to lock down the world oil supply.

But all that is commentary. The headline is clear enough to get the message out: the president wants US troops in Iraq for decades to come.

TPM Reader DS follows up on the White House's new Korea/Iraq analogy ...

I have believed, from the beginning – though I have always hoped to be proven wrong – that the Bush White House (i.e. Cheney) has had as its principal goal in Iraq the establishment of a permanent military presence in that country. The neocon dream of transforming the region (from the PNAC manifesto and elsewhere) has always envisaged such a military presence. These people see America’s long-term national interest in terms of (overwhelmingly, though not exclusively) energy security and therefore the control of energy supplies. This means control of the flow of oil from the Middle East. [Relying on a mutual-interest-between-sovereign-states approach, à la western Europe, is considered naïve when it comes to Arab countries.] Everything else – from the initial justifications for the war to the current rhetoric-of-the-day (we have to ensure stability, we have to fight them there or they’ll follow us here, etc.…) – is aimed at making such control, by means of long-term military presence, possible. When 9/11 took Saudi Arabia off the table as a viable base, some other country had to be found – but of significant size. Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, et al. are simply not big enough.

Cheney, in particular, is vicious enough to contemplate a long-term presence at the cost of a daily toll in the dozens or hundreds as well as ongoing domestic opposition. He’s convinced that the US needs to be there to keep an eye on – and always to be in a position to intervene in the affairs of the region, with particular attention to the the Arabian Sea oil fields, but also the Caspian Sea oil and gas fields. Bin Laden was the publicly accepted casus belli for the invasion of Afghanistan; but finding Bin Laden is irrelevant to the true purpose: to be on the ground, to have bases, to be able to project force in the region. [Remember that, within a month or two of 9/11, Bush and his people are known to have talked about going into Iraq in order to control the southern oil fields. This was explicit, and it has been widely reported, through seldom dwelt upon as explanatory of the whole enterprise.] Similarly with Iraq: WMD, democracy, removing a tyrant, fighting Al Qaeda,… all offered for public consumption, but none of any real importance to the White House and all irrelevant to the actual goal. When the public rationales evaporate, or when events make the achievement of any of the rationales still being offered in fact impossible of achievement, the White House will still keep troops on the ground – even when their presence makes the stated goals even harder to achieve (e.g. reconciliation between Iraq’s factions), the White House will find some other justification for staying, no matter how weak. Because staying is itself the objective.

Occam’s Razor supports me in this; the creation and maintenance of a long-term military presence is the only policy objective that unifies, aligns and makes sense of everything Bush has done. If any other goal is posited, his policies and actions are incoherent; but if this goal is posited, they all make sense.

An unfortunate confluence

The always readable Barbara O'Brien has this to say about the disgraceful (and now disgraced) Paul Wolfowitz:

As for Wolfie’s part, do read Sidney Blumenthal’s recent article, “Wolfowitz’s tomb.”

With the end of the Cold War the cold warrior without a mission fastened onto a new id´e fixe. As the undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Gulf War, serving under Secretary Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz had concurred in the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein to Baghdad after expelling him from Kuwait. He had been present at the Feb. 21, 1991, meeting where that policy was approved and uttered not a skeptical or contrary word. But when the elder Bush was defeated, Wolfowitz in exile became the champion of regime change. He developed an elaborate utopian scheme based on the overthrow of Saddam — instant democracy in Iraq, inciting democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East, accompanied by the equally sudden quiescence of the Palestinians, creating peace for Israel while doing away with any negotiations involved in a peace process. And he imagined Saddam, a brutal enough tyrant, as an octopus, his tentacles manipulating nearly every horror. Even after every available piece of evidence and trials proved otherwise, he continued to insist that Saddam was behind the Oklahoma City and 1993 World Trade Center bombings. …

… [After becoming a deputy to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld] Wolfowitz set to work at once to implement his master plan. He brought up overthrowing Saddam in the first National Security Council meeting with the president, eight months before 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Wolfowitz hammered on the idea of striking at Iraq.

Less than a month before the invasion, for which his intelligence operation had provided the justifications (later all disproved as sheer disinformation), Wolfowitz was approaching an ecstatic state of being. He could see the shape of things to come through the fog of war. On Feb. 19, 2003, in an interview with National Public Radio, he held forth on the new dawn: “But we’re not talking about the occupation of Iraq. We’re talking about the liberation of Iraq … Therefore, when that regime is removed we will find one of the most talented populations in the Arab world, perhaps complaining that it took us so long to get there. Perhaps a little unfriendly to the French for making it take so long. But basically welcoming us as liberators … There’s not going to be the hostility … There simply won’t be.”

Five months later, on July 23, 2003, after his trip to Iraq, Wolfowitz was still in an elevated state. “There is no humanitarian crisis,” he said. “There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to infrastructure — minimal war damage … So, fortunately, much of what … we planned for and budgeted for has not proved necessary.”

Historians often write about the founding of our country with a reverent wonder — isn’t it remarkable that so many giants among men could have been alive at the same place and the same time? We still defer to the Founders respectfully — Washington. Jefferson. Hamilton. Madison. Franklin. A fortunate confluence. But on 9/11 we had the unfortunate confluence of the worst pack of losers and idiots that ever ran a government — Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Rice. Names which will in infamy.

Shameful betrayal

What Keith says:

Pathetic

House passes Iraq funding bill without timelines. Truly pathetic!

Dem Leadership: If We'd Confronted Bush On Iraq, White House Would Have Criticized Us

By Greg Sargent

With the House set to vote on the no-timelines Iraq War funding bill later today, The New York Times provides a glimpse into the thinking among top Dems that led to the current proposal:

...in recounting the leadership’s thinking, senior Democrats and other officials said that by early this week they had concluded there was no alternative but to give ground to President Bush despite their view that he had mishandled the war and needed to be put under tighter Congressional rein.

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Oooooooooooooo, scary! If we didn't give Bush his way, the White House would have criticized us!

Sen. Russ Feingold says: This Is No Time To Back Off

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) responded today to congressional war critics who dropped the Iraq timeline because they feared that “White House attacks” would be “politically threatening“: “Tell that to the families who lose their loved ones in the next few months while we’re dillying and dallying.”

Speaking on MSNBC, Feingold took aim at the “toothless supplemental” currently working its way through Congress. Calling the bill “weak” and “a step backward,” Feingold said, “This is no time to back off. We have ratcheted-up the pressure successfully in the last few months.”

He warned lawmakers seeking to delay action on Bush’s Iraq strategy until September that the White House will use the opportunity to prolong the war even further:

You know what’s going to happen in September? They’ll bring General Petraeus back and he’ll say, Just give me until the end of year. I think things are turning around. And then we’ll be out of session, come back in late January, February, and the fact is a thousand more troops will lose their lives in a situation that doesn’t make any sense and it is hurting our military, hurting our country. This should not wait till September.

The 27% Problem

The incomparable Driftglass writes:

Left in complete darkness we will infer patterns and causalities. Left there a little longer, we will invent Gods and angels and a retinue of ritual that must be performed to keep our deities happy.

Left longer still and we’ll start killing each other over the imaginary differences among our make-believe Olympians.

[...]

Ms. Tucker has just laid her finger directly on one of the two most important stories of our time; that a mass of the American public (27% of the population? 75% of the GOP? A horde perhaps the size of modern Germany?) aren’t simply mistaken or misunderstood or misled by villainous men.

They are unfit citizens. They are Bad Americans.

They are the evil gift that keeps on giving. The residue of centuries of impacted racism, Dominionism, homophobia and assorted other spices, set ablaze by to warm the electoral ambition of everyone from George Wallace to George Bush.

They are pandered to and flattered by Fox teevee and Hate Radio, and they are all gathered conspicuously together under the same political banner.

There is finally no other explanation that will bear the weight of the fact of the short, catastrophic arc of the Bush Administration and the longer, brutal malevolence of the 30 Year Long March of the Wingnut GOP.

The good men have long since fled the Party. The barely adequate men have fled the Party.

Hell, anyone who can swirl a shotglass-full of synapses and not come up with “Commie fem’nazi queers” as the punchline to every joke and the answer to every question has fled the Party.

The honest answer to the question raised by Frank Luntz – “Why do Republicans keep winning if their candidates are so shitty?” – is that the GOP base is morally subhuman at a deep and probably incurable level.

That selling fascism to brownshirts and racism to intractable bigots is like any other kind of narcotics trafficking. Like selling hillbilly heroin to Limbaugh. Users are not necessarily going to score out loud and in public, but they don't exactly need a whole lotta persuasion to get them to buy and mainline the lethal shit the Right is slinging.

Luntz’s “solution” is the most recent GOP Talking Point being handed around the Conservative Pundit glory holes as eagerly as Hillary snuff porn anime: That Liberals need to stop being so “angry”.

When your party is led by outright lunatics and liars, traitors and thieves…

When after thirty years your base can only take nourishment suckling on the poison that oozes from Cheney’s bile sacs, Coulter’s fangs, Hannity’s tongue, O’Reilly’s wheezing pores, Falwell’s ingrown soul…

When your official cult house organs have been spewing raw hatred it the noosphere for thiry years…

...and your advice is that the other side who have finally had it with playing nice with these moral locusts are” too angry”?

It boggles the mind.

But then again, Luntz isn’t stupid; he knows perfectly well that he serves evil. He simply doesn’t care. Selling out his country is a good buck, and as an obedient whore he will form his mouth to say whatever it is his paymasters wish him to say.

However this is the problem:

What do you do when 1/4 of the people in your country are the enemy of your country?

We cannot be a United State when 1/4 of the nation does not believe in Uniting. When they believe only in capitulation and conquest?

When their point-of-view – their superstitious, eliminationist, Hate Radio-barbered point-of-view – is impervious to reason, compassion or mercy,

Because while they may not possess the basic cognitive and empathic functions the Good Lord saw fit to endow flatworms with, they do stomp and scream and vote, and it is high time – long past time – to start speaking of the 27% that props up the GOP as The Problem.

A Problem every bit as destructive as global warming, and that requires every bit as much of a sea-change in attitude and a generational perspective.

[...]

While the lies and half-truths provide some kind of parasitic sustenance for the half-wits that prop up this President, his War and his Party, this firehose of unabashed McCarthyesque propaganda has also flattened most of “legitimate journalism”

No wonder they have always been so baffling, smugly at ease supporting a President who lied the nation into war and disaster: This is a Party that always, always, always fixes the facts around its bigotries.

Because no one with a Big Voice will challenge them. No one with Big Ink will push back on them even slightly.

These droolers are allowed to decide deep in the reptilian pylons of its Unitary brain who it will hate, who it will fear, who it will scapegoat and to which Dear Leader it will swear its eternal fucktard fealty unchallanged by the press. And then cherry-pick history, philosophy and the Bible for snips and sentence fragments that support its deranged ideology. Romp across the headlines for seven years, screeching for Bill Clinton’s blood like macaques going through heroin withdrawal, because no one in the MSM will make it their business to report on this as a story.

This Party of God who fall alternately and obediently into cheering ranks and leaden, smirking silence as their Dear Leader runs through everything of value in this nation like a junkie going through a fistful of stolen credit cards, and not a single soul in all of Punditville has balls hairy enough to stand up and say: “These people are what is wrong with America”.

It is as if a nuclear reactor were melting down in the apse of the National Cathedral and the press corps had decided to take a collective pass on it and focus on the pretty cherry blossoms.

For, y’know, “balance”.

And in doing so, willfully abandon the work of reporting on the most important story of our generation to latter day pamphleteers. To bloggers, who bang away at the perimeter of this vast and tragic darkness with little more than a handful of thoughtful readers, a second cuppa coffee and some occasionally pungent language.

Instead of journalism, we get Captain Obvious …

What Digby said...

Abortion is a difficult subject and Digby tackles it after reading, yet another, argument that goes: if you can't be sure when life begins, then you should err on the side of enforced pregnancy.

This is not the first time I've heard this argument and it's always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.

The "great moral issue" of when life begins is fascinating I'm sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will. But I guess that's an argument for another day. Today, we are talking about the meaning of "life" and that has no bearing on the vessel that contributes its DNA and lifeblood, incubates it for nine months inside itself and potentially bears its siblings. Certainly that vessel's personhood and agency is irrelevant to the much greater issue of blastocyst rights. Why even bring it up?

After abortion, why not address Iraq. Digby has this to say:

The Bush administration and its neocon muses have long said that the most dangerous thing the US could do would be to give the terrorists a victory by "proving" that we don't have the ballocks to stand and fight. They firmly believe that a failure to kick ass and take names, going all the way back to Reagan and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, is what caused the Islamofascists to think they could attack us. They know this because bin Laden has trash talked this line on various tapes and missives over the years so it must be true. (He wouldn't lie, would he?)

And when they hear him saying "bring it" like big dumb bulls they see red and immediately start snorting and stomping the ground and rush headlong into some half baked scheme designed to prove that we can't be intimidated. But what if the Islamoboogeymen are actually waving their capes in front of the big, dumb United States in order to get them to do exactly that?

[...]

Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy's threats and taunts and holding fast so they can't yell "psych!" is not a foreign policy --- it's a WWF advertising campaign. It isn't real and it doesn't address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavellis know.

This isn't some scripted TV "throw-down." It's a serious and complicated challenge and we desperately need to get some people in power who don't depend on "Jack Baur" for their policy prescriptions. Every single day these jokers continue with their little playground game, they make things worse.

Presidential criminality

It's pretty clear now why A.G. the A-G wanted to keep former Deputy A-G, James Comey, from testifying before Congress. The after shocks of Comey's bombshell are still being felt, yet there is surprisingly little uproar in the media. As Glenn Greenwald wrote Thursday:

There is just no excuse left for allowing the administration to keep this behavior concealed from the country. What James Comey described on Tuesday is the behavior of a government completely unmoored from any constraints of law, operating only by the rules of thuggery, intimidation, and pure lawlessness. Even for the most establishment-defending organs, there are now indisputably clear facts suggesting that the scope and breadth and brazenness of the lawbreaking here is far beyond even what was known previously, and it occurred at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

We are so plainly beyond the point of no return with this criminality. It is now inescapably evident even for those who struggled for so long to avoid acknowledging it. Here is one of the most establishment-friendly voices of the Bush administration proclaiming the Attorney General of the United States to be a chronic liar and accusing the Bush administration -- as part of events in which the President was deeply and personally involved -- of engaging in deliberate cover-up of blatant lawbreaking.

The enormity of the wrong-doing is made clear by Glenn here.

Comey then made clear that he and Ashcroft met, determined that the NSA program lacked legal authority, and agreed "on a course of action," one whereby the DOJ would refuse to certify the legality of the NSA program. Yet even once Ashcroft and Comey made clear that the program had no legal basis (i.e., was against the law), the President ordered it to continue anyway. As Comey said: "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality."

Amazingly, the President's own political appointees -- the two top Justice Department officials, including one (Ashcroft) who was known for his "aggressive" use of law enforcement powers in the name of fighting terrorism and at the expense of civil liberties -- were so convinced of its illegality that they refused to certify it and were preparing, along with numerous other top DOJ officials, to resign en masse once they learned that the program would continue notwithstanding the President's knowledge that it was illegal.

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution, and although that decision is being appealed by the Bush administration, they are relying largely on technical arguments to have it reversed (i.e., standing and "state secrets" arguments) and -- as has been true for the entire case -- are devoting very little efforts to arguing that the program was actually legal or constitutional.

Yet even once Bush knew that both Aschcroft and Comey believed the eavesdropping was illegal, he ordered it to continue anyway.

[...]

Even The Washington Post Editorial Board -- long tepid, at best, concerning the NSA scandal -- recognizes that Comey has offered "an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source." And as I documented yesterday, these "shocking" revelations were long concealed due to Alberto Gonzales' patently false assurances that the testimony of Comey and Ashcroft -- which Democrats on the Senate Judiicary Committee sought last year -- would not "add to the discussion." What more glaring and clear evidence do we need that the President of the United States deliberately committed felonies, knowing that his conduct lacked any legal authority? And what justifies simply walking away from these serial acts of deliberate criminality? At this point, how can anyone justify the lack of criminal investigations or the appointment of a Special Counsel? The President engaged in extremely serious conduct that the law expressly criminalizes and which his own DOJ made clear was illegal.

[...]

The NSA scandal has always presented two equally critical but completely distinct issues: (1) the eavesdropping was against the law; and (2) precisely because it was conducted in secret, we do not know whether the administration engaged in the eavesdropping abuses which the law (by requiring judicial oversight) was designed to prevent.

Proposition (1) has long been established, and ought to result in serious consequences by itself. But we still do not know the answer to (2) -- were these eavesdropping powers used for improper purposes? -- and whether anyone in Congress yet knows is still a mystery. But Comey's testimony yesterday adds some obviously significant information that ought to heighten the concern about whether there was such abuse.

There is one other aspect of Comey's testimony worth highlighting. This is part of what he said when describing the scene in Ashcroft's hospital room:

I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn't clear that I had succeeded. I went out in the hallway.

Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances.

Comey repeatedly stated that it appeared that Ashcroft was not even oriented to his surroundings. Compare that to Tony Snow's disgustingly dismissive defense yesterday of the behavior of Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales: "Trying to take advantage of a sick man -- because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?"

But more revealingly, just consider what it says about this administration. Not only did Comey think that he had to rush to the hospital room to protect Ashcroft from having a conniving Card and Gonzales manipulate his severe illness and confusion by coercing his signature on a document -- behavior that is seen only in the worst cases of deceitful, conniving relatives coercing a sick and confused person to sign a new will -- but the administration's own FBI Director thought it was necessary to instruct his FBI agents not to allow Comey to be removed from the room.

Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs. Indeed, Comey said that when Card ordred him to the White House, Comey refused to meet with Card without a witness being present, and that Card refused to allow Comey's summoned witness (Solicitor General Ted Olson) even to enter Card's office. These are the most trusted intimates of the White House -- the ones who are politically sympathetic to them and know them best -- and they prepared for, defended themselves against, the most extreme acts of corruption and thuggery from the President's Chief of Staff and his then-legal counsel (and current Attorney General of the United States).

Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law? How can we possibly permit our government to engage in this behavior, to spy on us in deliberate violation of the laws which we enacted democratically precisely in order to limit how they can spy on us, and to literally commit felonies at will, knowing that they are breaking the law?

How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history? Why is this only a one-day story that will focus on the hospital drama but not on what it reveals about the bulging and unparalleled corruption of this administration and the complete erosion of the rule of law in our country? And, as I've asked many times before, if we passively allow the President to simply break the law with impunity in how the government spies on our conversations, what don't we allow?

If we had a functioning political press, these are the questions that would be dominating our political discourse and which would have been resolved long ago.

The President's Secret Program: A Timeline

A TPM Reader provides us with the timeline.

We’re starting to see a timeline emerge on the confrontation between the White House and Justice on domestic spying.

The first date to mark on your calendar, I think, is October 3, 2003. That’s when the Senate confirms Jack L. Goldsmith as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. In June, with Goldsmith’s nomination before the senate, John Yoo had left his job as the deputy at OLC to return to his teaching gig at Boalt.

Fast forward to December 11, 2003, when Comey is confirmed as Deputy Attorney General. He immediately assumes a more aggessive posture than his predecessor, Larry Thompson. The Times reports this morning that “with Mr. Comey’s backing, Mr. Goldsmith questioned what he considered shaky legal reasoning in several crucial opinions, including some drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.”

But that was just the beginning. Thompson had not been authorized access to the details of the NSA program. But, reports the NYTimes, “Comey was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence
material that grew out of it” (1/1/06). He set Goldsmith to the task of sorting through the program’s dubious legality. Goldsmith’s “review of legal memoranda on the N.S.A. program and interrogation practices became a source of friction between Mr. Comey and the White House,” the Times reports today. And we know from Comey’s testimony that by “the White House,” we mean, principally, Dick Cheney and David Addington.

Up until this moment, Ashcroft had been signing off on the program every 45 days. That means his signature was last required in late January, shortly after Comey assumed his post, and perhaps even before he’d been authorized access to the program. Suddenly, the March 11 date comes into clearer focus. For the first time, trained and qualified attorneys within the Justice Department had conducted a careful review of the program. Comey took the evidence he had gathered to Ashcroft, as he testified on Tuesday: “A week before that March 11th deadline, I had a private meeting with the attorney general for an hour, just the two of us, and I laid out for him what we had learned and what our analysis was in this particular matter.” By the end of that meeting, Ashcroft and Comey had “agreed on a course of action,” to wit, that they “would not certify the program as to its legality.”

Thereupon follows the late-night drama that’s already been exhaustively chronicled. I’d simply note that one of the people in that hospital room was Goldsmith. On March 11, the President made the determination that the program was appropriate and lawful, and reauthorized it without Justice signing off.

On the morning of March 12, the president, faced with open revolt, backed down. The Times reported on what happened next last year: “The White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses. The concerns within the Justice Department appear to have led, at least in part, to the decision to suspend and revamp the program, officials said. The Justice Department then oversaw a secret audit of the surveillance program” (01/01/06). Comey’s testimony refines that a little. He claims that it was a matter of weeks before the program was brought into compliance.

There’s a sad coda to this story. On June 17, 2004, Goldsmith announced his resignation after scarcely a year on the job.

What to make of this long narrative?

Simply this. The warantless wiretap surveillance program stank. For two and a half years, Ashcroft signed off on the program every forty-five days without any real knowledge of what it entailed. In his defense, the advisors who were supposed to review such things on his behalf were denied access; to his everlasting shame, he did not press hard enough to have that corrected.

When Comey came on board, he insisted on being granted access, and had Goldsmith review the program. What they found was so repugnant to any notion of constitutional liberties that even Ashcroft, once briefed, was willing to resign rather than sign off again.

So what were they fighting over? Who knows. But there’s certainly evidence to suggest that the underlying issue was was whether constitutional or statutory protections of civil liberties ought to be binding on the president in a time of war. The entire fight, in other words, was driven by the expansive notion of executive power embraced by Cheney and Addington. And here's the kicker - it certainly sounds as if the program was fairly easily adjusted to comply with the law. It wasn't illegal because it had to be; it was illegal because the White House believed itself above the law.

PS: There’s hope we’ll find out what was really going on. I’d highlight this portion of Specter’s remarks from the hearing: “Mr. Comey, it's my hope that we will have a closed session with you to pursue the substance of this matter further. Because your standing up to them is very important, but it's also very important what you found on the legal issue on this unnamed subject, which I infer was the terrorist surveillance program. And you're not going to comment about it. I think you could. I think you could even tell us what the legalisms were. Doesn't involve a matter of your advice or what the president told you, et cetera. But I'm going to discuss it with Senator Leahy later and see about pursuing that question to try to find out about it.”

And then Leahy, in response: “We will have a closed-door hearing on this. Senator Specter and I are about to have a briefing on aspects of this.” Can’t wait to hear what leaks out of that.

Alter-nate Reality

Glenn Greenwald shares a classic contre-temps wherein one person claims that his speculation is more valid than another's facts. It would seem that Jonathan Alter's slap at Jebediah Reed gets him smacked down in return.

Glenn:

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, at The Huffington Post, in a post last night:

There's one dimension of the blogosphere that never ceases to amaze me: Some people disbelieve nearly everything they read in the "mainstream media" -- and believe nearly everything they read online. Never mind that the ground-breaking reporting on which they base their opinions often comes from the MSM publications like Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

That's because until now, few online publications have invested enough money to undertake original reporting, which is much more expensive than mouthing off at home. I'm happy to see that the Huffington Post is moving to change that disparity by hiring top-flight and highly experienced reporters like Tom Edsall.

I'm also glad to see the magazine Radar sending young reporters like Jebediah Reed out to cover politics. The more the merrier. Unfortunately, Reed is a bad reporter, and his bad reporting of a 30-second sidewalk conversation involving me, Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel is now rocketing around the web. . . .

Why do I bore you with this? Only to reinforce the point to be careful of believing everything you read. Just because it's in Radar or online somewhere doesn't make it true. The same goes for reading me or Tom Edsall or others who happen to have worked at first-rate news organizations.

But our batting averages--and David Broder's--are a helluva lot higher than the Jebidiah Reeds of the world, which is only one of the reasons why the readers of Huffington Post are lucky to have Edsall aboard.

When I first saw that Alter had written about this Radar article and called Reed a "bad reporter," I assumed he was going to claim that Reed conveyed the Gravel/Edsall/Broder exchange inaccurately. But he didn't. Instead, he offered this, one of my absolute most favorite statements in a long time:

I don't remember [Edsall] calling Broder "the voice of the people," but if he did, it was said with a pleasantly arch tone, neither serious nor sarcastic.

And while there's exactly no one on the face of the earth that grizzled reporters like us would "matter of factly" call "the voice of the people" (No, not even Mike Gravel), Edsall and I both know that whatever disagreements we may have with recent Broder columns, he is an honest reporter and no ivy tower thumb-sucker.

Alter, Edsall and Broder all work for "first-rate news organizations," while Reed works for some crappy low-level thing on the Internet that Tim Russert never even heard of. Therefore, the way that Alter fantasizes that the conversation would have occurred had he remembered it (which he doesn't) is more reliable than Reed's first-hand account of it.

Here is Reed's response: An Open Letter to Jonathan Alter

Radar is perfectly happy to ignore the occasional ribbing, but cite us for bad journalism and we might just break form to respond. In this edition of "Minding the Store," Jebediah Reed addresses criticisms of his recent piece on Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel by Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter ...

Dear Jonathan,

The last thing I had in mind when I wrote that profile of Mike Gravel at the Columbia rally was getting into a Web tiff with you. I've read and enjoyed many of your columns. So when you called me out as a "bad reporter" in your HuffPo screed, it would have been traumatic if I wasn't sure my reporting from that day was bulletproof. Fortunately, it is.

It's kind of funny, isn't it, all this hubbub over one little remark? But reporter Tom Edsall did say that David Broder is the "voice of the people," and he did say it as I reported. In the conversation I documented, in fact, Gravel was accusing Broder of not believing in popular democracy. He referred to the Iraq war and mentioned Broder's book, Democracy Derailed, which, as I understand it, argues that ballot initiatives often yield undemocratic results. Gravel, of course, is a huge believer in ballot initiatives. Edsall, without changing the tone of the conversation, said: "He [Broder] is democracy. He's the voice of the people."

It sounds like you might not have heard Edsall, but—scout's honor—it was not said archly. I suppose you can criticize me for replacing a he with a David Broder and not bracketing it. I'll plead guilty to that. But if you doubt my account, you're welcome to pop by Radar HQ and listen to the exchange on tape.

Accusing me of being a bad judge of tone is one thing—accusing me of being unethical is quite another. (Writing defamatory falsehoods—even about online journalists—doesn't seem like a good habit to get into, either.) You say the lunch was off the record and that I accepted those terms and then broke the agreement. Here's what really happened: I made arrangements with Mike Gravel's press agent, Alex Colvin, to meet up with the candidate at the Columbia rally as part of a feature story for Radar. When the rally was finished, Alex invited me to join the senator for lunch. That invitation was extended to me as a reporter, not as a friendly guest at an off-the-record sit-down with Jonathan Alter. Throughout the lunch, you might remember, I had my tape recorder running and sitting on the table as I was taking notes. The question of what was on and off the record came up precisely once: You were talking about a segment you'd done about John Edwards for Today. You noticed that I had written something down and asked me not to use what you had just said, noting that the Edwards piece hadn't aired yet. I said no problem, made a somewhat exaggerated gesture of putting down my notebook, and, of course, abided by that agreement. I picked up my pad and started taking notes after the conversation turned back to Gravel.

Perhaps it didn't occur to you that there was any news value in what was said at the lunch. It was, by and large, an amicable and low-key affair. But I can't feel guilty for not abiding by retroactive efforts to move it all off the record. And here's the truth: My piece was not remotely unfair to anyone involved, including Edsall.

Sideswiped indeed.

Sincerely,

Jebediah Reed

PS—Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)

The roots of the netroots

Atrios again...

Some of the discussion has been about when and why blogs and the netroots emerged. I'd say, roughly, online liberal activism began with Move On, the online liberal web generally grew in response to the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 recount/selection*, and the liberal blogosphere as a semi-definable distinct movement emerged in 2002 in response to the glorious summer of war.

Political blogging generally was a post-9/11 phenomenon, headed by the ole perfesser under the name "warbloggers." It was a subculture which consisted mostly of people who were conservative and self-described liberals who knew that the 2nd most serious the country faced was the all powerful The Left, which was generally represented by some anonymous poster on Indymedia, Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere, or occasionally Cythia McKinney. Subsequently a few actual liberals such as myself joined in, and for awhile it was a kind of semi-civil amateur debate club with the ole perfesser, the only person with significant traffic, acting as a one-hand-on-the-scales moderator of the conversation. That brief moment of relative comity faded quickly as the Iraq war debate began and people like me were regularly accused of treason, of supporting dictators, of "being on the other side," by our very civil non-swearing friends on the right side of the blogosphere.

The uniting feature of all of the catalyzing events - whitewater and impeachment, selection, the Iraq war - was that they were moments when it became clear that there was something tremendously flawed with our various elite institutions and of "the liberals" which supposedly represented people like me in them, especially in the mainstream media. They represented tremendous failures of our elite classes.

There were almost no anti-war voices in the media, and the few who were present were basically ridiculed. There were some "war skeptics," but they didn't really question the basic premises of the war - the existence of WMD, the concept of preventive war, the flowers which would follow - but instead nitpicked around the edges. You know, we need more allies, we need the UN's blessing, maybe we need more troops. There were no mainstream media voices who actively opposed the war. Joe Klein did in his heart, he claims, but in public he supported it.

Opposing the war seemed to many of us to be a perfectly non-crazy thing, yet that viewpoint was either completely ignored or actively ridiculed. Even many of our so-called liberals didn't simply support the war or fail to oppose it, but actively "opposed the opposers" by joining in with conservatives to attack and marginalize any one who dared suggest that their Great and Glorious Crusade might be a bad idea. There were only us dirty fucking hippie bloggers.

Radicalizing Moment

Atrios tells us about his

In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn't find elsewhere, it wasn't actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media - CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news - while imperfect wasn't completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.

You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson's The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush's father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn't until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media's reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.

Peace of Paris 2

Driftglass reflects on America's roots and sees therein the seed of an idea for Iraq.

File under: Shut up, sign it and get off the stage you horrible little man.

In honor of the Queen Mum’s visit to our troubled land, it seemed a good time to reflect on the fact that, once upon a time, we were the oppressed.

We were the ones who didn’t like it one bit that the mightiest power on Earth was shoving us around and telling us how to live from the safety of thousands of miles away.

We were the ones with oppressors who fought to bend us in directions of their choosing against our will year after year because the though of losing us was too militarily, culturally and economically abhorrent to contemplate.

And even though we shared a common language, a common faith, a common history and heritage with our oppressors – and even though our oppressors thought they had perfectly valid and rational reasons for everything they did -- the desire to get their boot off our throat was strong enough that we took up arms against them.

We were the ones who shot from the weeds; who chivvied and harassed our occupiers. We were the ones who lost almost every battle but won the war because we finally made it clear to the English that defeating the American Insurgency from the other side of the world was either impossible, or would come at such a cost that it could not be borne.

We were the ones who were so indelibly affected by the experience that we encoded protections against it into our Constitutional DNA:

The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution"

"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

We were the ones who made it clear to our invaders that we were home and they were not and that, in the end, settled it.

And so, because intelligent, practical men concluded there was no hope of a Military Solution to the problem of the American Rebels, a Political Solution was found.

We all gathered around a table and signed a treaty. The Treaty of Paris. And – Surprise! -- the British Empire did not fall.

It is a remarkably sturdy document; so much so that with a minimum of tweaking and fiddling (and trading the original Article that dealt with where and how Americans could catch and dry fish for a newer one that deals with how the problem of foreign fighters might be adjudicated) I think we could repurpose the 1783 agreement into something we and the Iraqis could sign virtually intact.

A Black Matter for the King

Deanie Mills writes:

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all "We died at such a place"--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.--Shakespeare, King Henry V, Act IV, Scene I.

For all the patriotic flag-waving and yellow-ribbon magneting, there is nothing particularly patriotic or romantic about death in combat.

Even if you are lucky enough to survive the IED or the sniper or the rocket propelled grenade that killed your buddies or blew off their legs and hands and arms and burned them, you have to be there for them. You have to pull them from burning vehicles when their skin slips off in your hands like a glove. You have to tie a tourniquet around spurting stumps to save their lives.

You have to watch them die.

It's not pretty, when a buddy dies in combat. Sometimes they fight to live, and you can see them fighting, and you can see the young medic working valiently to save them, and you can see the life leave their eyes.

And then you have to go back to where you lived together, and help gather up their photographs of wife and children or mom and dad and girlfriend, and the letters from home they have saved, and other things.

And then you have to live.

You have to go home and hug your family and know that they won't be able to, and you have to go on with your life as best you can. You have to live the life they would have lived if only they could have. You have to honor them--as best you can--with your life.

And that's a pretty heavy burden for a kid barely out of his or her teens.

According to the March/April 2007 issue of Mother Jones magazine (sorry, I had this copied over in Word and did not save the link):

94% of soldiers & Marines in Iraq have been shot at

86% know someone who was seriously injured or killed

77% have shot at or directed fire at the enemy

68% have seen dead or seriously injured Americans

51% have handled or uncovered human remains

48% said they were responsible for the death of an enemy combatant

28% said they were responsible for the death of a noncombatant

It's not enough that they are exposed to intense combat conditions 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, but this is the first war in our history where they have not been permitted to rotate in and out of a rear area where some measure of rest and recreation was possible.

This is the first war I know of in our history where you don't just serve your deployment. You serve it knowing you will have to go back, and the whole time you are "home" you are training for more combat for your next deployment, and then you have to go back.

And then you have to go back.

There is no time, I told my son, for you guys to recuperate from the traumas you have witnessed, before you have to go back.

According to Benedict Carey, writing for the New York Times:

The Iraq war, experts say, is a new kind of war--a 360-degree battle space with no front or rear, no safe zone outside the large fortified bases, and the compounded physical uncertainty of roadside bombs and mortar attacks. The lack of any control over these factors, and the generally limited sense of progress, only intensifies the stress for troops.

"You can endure a lot of physical and mental exhaustion as long as you feel you're having an impact, you're accomplishing something and that you have some control over your situation," said Dr. Andy Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University who has worked extensively with regular and Special Operations troops. "If you don't feel you have any of that, you quickly get to a point where the only thing that's important is keeping yourself and your buddies alive. Nothing else much matters."

As pointed out by one of the finest war correspondents I know, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, the stress of multiple deployments increases with each new tour of duty.

Marriages are cracking up, kids are suffering, and the odds of a soldier or Marine showing more symptoms of post traumatic stress are increasing exponentially--not to mention the danger of suffering a traumatic brain injury from getting "blown up" and then sent back to duty the next day.

And yet, at the same time, unbelievably, the Bush administration has slashed benefits for mental health care of active duty troops and combat veterans.

That's not even the beginning of the outrages.

According to Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe, the fancy new task force created by the DoD to study the best and most effective way of protecting troops from vicious IED's, has been--like everything else--outsourced to so many contracing firms for so many millions of dollars with virtually no progress being made while, at the same time, operating in virtual secrecy--that the Democrats in Congress are getting ready to crack that nut and find out what the hell is going on.

Meanwhile, yet another defense contractor gets rich on the blood of American troops. God bless America, eh?

This whole bullshit Bushspeak about "supporting the troops" is OVER.

The troops themselves want out--ask them. "We can't stay in Iraq for the next thousand years." said one soldier on CBS news.

Over on Morgan Pardee's incomparable blog entry, she wrote about the personal cost of the recent news flash that six more soldiers died in a fiery IED explosion in the Diyala province. Those men were friends of her son's. His wife was shopping in a mall with the fiancee of one of the men who died. The poor girl got a cellphone call telling her about the death, and she collapsed in the middle of the mall.

One can only wonder what others were thinking as they moved around her on their way to the latest sale at Sears.

Like Shakespeare, I am afeared there are few who die well that die in battle.

My only hope in life these days is that it will be a black matter, indeed, for the king--and all his enablers--that led them to it.

World Wide War

The incomparable driftglass watches Newt on teevee and explains it all as only driftglass can...

Newt: We are caught up in a World Wide war. Against an enemy that is evil evil evil. There was a 12 year old kid who beheaded someone! And this couple who wanted to use their baby to smuggle a bomb.

driftglass: And there were White high schoolers at Columbine who committed mass murder. A White Christian milk-truck driver who walked into an Amish schoolhouse and started shooting children.

A loyal Militia Conservative Christian and embodiment of Newt’s own “The Government is Evil” ideology named McVeigh who blew up an entire building.

There is Eric Rudolph.

There is Fred Phelps.

By Newt’s reasoning, each of these incidents involving White, Christian lunatics who either volubly advocate violence or commit actual violence demands to be stitched together to “prove” that we are really in a World Wide War against violent White American Christian extremism.

So if I understand correctly, by Newt’s reasoning, we need to nuke Alabama.

Like, immediately.

Newt: Whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran…

Because the racist Republican doctrine that dare not quite speak its name is as simple as this: The Great Swarthy Hordes are all in it together!

Like the army of bigoted wingnuts for whom he speaks, to Newt they’re all ragheads. They’re all the same. They all believe the same thing. They’re all savages. They all need to be “defeated”. And steered by this White Power, imperialist doctrine, we lashed wildly out at a non-radical people who never, ever threatened us.

Who happened to be sitting on an ocean of oil.

And then proceeded to fuck up their country, turning it into a gaping, bloody wound.

And now, four years later, for reasons which are unfathomable to me, charlatans and fascists like Newt still have an open invitation to sit in front of the nation’s cameras and opine as if they were not insane.

To calmly cite the chaos that their own perverse ideology nourished and metastasized as “evidence” that we should continue doing exactly what got us into this quagmire in the first place.

Because without the Viagra of an Endless Cold War to engorge the wee dabs of shriveled gristle between their legs, the Conservatives have nothing left in the sock drawer to stuff down their Grand Old Party Pants but corporate feudalism, gay dread and Negrophobia.

Under-briefed, lazy, arrogant, stubborn

Brad Delong reminisces about the pass that the media gave Incurious George who was "under-briefed ... "lazy"... "arrogant" ... "stubborn".

It was the summer of 2000 when I began asking Republicans I know – generally people who might be natural candidates for various sub-cabinet policy positions in a Republican administration – how worried they were that the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, was clearly not up to the job. They were not worried, they told me, that Bush was inadequately briefed and strangely incurious for a man who sought the most powerful office in the world. One of President Clinton’s problems, they said, was that the ceremonial portions of the job bored him – and thus he got himself into big trouble.

Look at how Bush had operated as president of the Texas Rangers baseball club, they said. Bush let the managers manage the team and the financial guys run the business. He spent his time making sure the political coalition to support the Texas Rangers in the style to which it wanted to be accustomed remained stable. Bush knows his strengths and weaknesses, they told me. He will focus on being America’s Queen Elizabeth II, and will let people like Colin Powell and Paul O’Neill be America’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

By the summer of 2001, it had become clear that something had gone very wrong. By that point, Bush had rejected O’Neill’s and Christine Todd Whitman’s advice on environmental policy, just as he had rejected Alan Greenspan’s and O’Neill’s advice on fiscal policy, Powell’s and Condoleezza Rice’s advice on the importance of pushing forward on negotiations between Israel and Palestine, and – as we learned later – George Tenet’s and Richard Clarke’s advice about the importance of counterterrorism.

A strange picture of Bush emerged from conversations with sub-cabinet administration appointees, their friends, and their friends of friends. He was not just under-briefed, but also lazy: he insisted on remaining under-briefed. He was not just incurious, but also arrogant: he insisted on making uninformed decisions, and hence made decisions that were essentially random. And he was stubborn: once he had made a decision – even, or rather especially, if it was glaringly wrong and stupid – he would never revisit it.

So, by the summer of 2001, a pattern was set that would lead British observer Daniel Davies to ask if there was a Bush administration policy on anything of even moderate importance that had not been completely bollixed up. But if you relied on either the Washington Post or the New York Times, you would have had a very hard time seeing it. Today, it is an accepted fact that the kindest thing you can say about the Bush administration is that it is completely incompetent, which is the line now taken by hard-line Bush supporters like the National Review and the commentator Robert Novak.

Why didn’t the American press corps cover the Bush administration properly for its first five years? I really do not know. I do know that the world cannot afford to rely again on America’s press for its information: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So I appeal to all of you working for newspapers, radio, and television stations outside the United States: it is to you that we – including those of us in America – must look to discover what our own government is doing.

---

There are honorable exceptions. Ron Suskind. Paul Krugman. McClatchy--the news service and organization formerly known as Knight-Ridder. David Wessel and the crew at the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau got medieval on economic policy missteps early. The Financial Times was measured but accurate, and didn't follow the strategy of keeping its good reporters off the front page.

Doesn't anybody notice the battleship in the room?

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch notes:

But something was missing -- as it is regularly from American reporting on the U.S./Iranian face-off. The Bush administration is, at this very moment, sending a third aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to the Persian Gulf. Although the three carriers and their strike forces will add up to a staggering display of American military power off the Iranian coast, American journalists aren't much impressed. Evidently, it's not considered off the diplomatic page or particularly provocative to mass your carrier battle groups this way, despite the implicit threat to pulverize Iranian nuclear and other facilities. Journalistically speaking, this is both blindingly strange and the norm on our one-way planet. If Iranians send the materials to make some roadside bombs into Iraq (as the Bush administration, at least, continually claims is the case), it's a huge deal, if not an act of war; but put the most powerful fleet in history off the Iranian coast. No sweat.

Tom quotes Michael Klare:

President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these "diplomatic" endeavors -- as he describes them -- succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.

And so, knowing that his "diplomatic" efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has "tried everything"; that "his patience has run out"; and that he can "no longer risk the security of the American people" by "indulging in further fruitless negotiations," thereby allowing the Iranians "to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making," and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz -- and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well -- will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

The Tip of the Iceberg

Booman tells us what the U.S. Attorney scandal is all about in case you are confronted with a right-winger who, feigning ignorance, says: I don't understand what all the fuss is about. This is what it's about... and it's only the tip of the iceberg.

If you are Jerry Lewis, the chairman of the House Appropriations committee, and you have a federal prosecutor sniffing up your ass, what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is hire a staunchly Republican law firm to represent you. And then you can get that law firm to hire the prosecutor. Suddenly, you have not only disrupted the investigation, but you have all the dope on the case that is being developed against you.

But it isn't that simple. Jerry Lewis needed to give the prosecutor a little nudge, just so she knew her choice was between unemployment and enrichment.

Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. [Debra Wong] Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé.

Harriet Miers, you might remember, was George W. Bush's choice for the Supreme Court. Of course, Bernie Kerik was Bush's choice for Director of Homeland Security even though he was a mob-connected, incompetent crook. Go figure.

What's emerging in the Attorney scandal is a clear pattern. All the prosecutors appear to have been either pursuing corruption scandals or failing to pursue baseless voter fraud cases. And no one in the Department of Justice will take responsibility for making up the list. There is only one suspect left in the Justice Department that has not denied responsibility (Monica Goodling), and she has taken the fifth amendment. The problem is that Ms. Goodling was the liaison to the White House. If she made up the list we can be sure that it was dictated to her by someone in the White House.

Back on August 13, 2005, after Jack Abramoff was indicted, the Washington Post reported:

In Washington, a task force that includes the Justice Department, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Interior Department's inspector general has been picking through thousands of Abramoff's e-mails and lobbying records for more than a year to determine if any favors or gifts to lawmakers amounted to bribes for official actions. The two Senate committees -- Indian Affairs and Finance -- are investigating Abramoff's representation of tribes and the alleged abuse of charities for political purposes.

Legal analysts agree that this first indictment is typical of government prosecutions of people who are under investigation in more than one case. The first indictment sends a signal that prosecutors are serious, and then they typically wait to see if lawyers want to begin discussions about possible cooperation. If not, prosecutors often bring another set of indictments.

"What they're looking for is how many names can they give -- and by names I mean members of Congress or other prominent people -- and what kind of message do they want to send," said Mike Missal, a former government lawyer now practicing white-collar-crime defense in Washington. "If just Abramoff goes down, it is not that big a deal for prosecutors. If he brings down members of Congress, it is a much more noteworthy case. That would be the ultimate target here."

It was on December 14, 2005 that the House filed the conference negotiated Patriot Act renewal that contained the language allowing Bush and Gonzales to bypass Senate confirmation for filling prosecutor vacancies. It's no accident that this all got started in the fall of 2005. Washington was swirling with rumors that the Abramoff scandal was going to take out as many as a dozen Republican congresspeople. Look at this article from the Washington Post's Susan Schmitt that appeared on December 21, 2005.

Former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, facing trial on fraud charges Jan. 9 in Florida, is negotiating a possible deal with the Justice Department, in which he would agree to plead guilty and cooperate in the wide-ranging political corruption investigation focused on his dealings with members of Congress and executive branch officials, people familiar with the talks said last night.

Abramoff would provide testimony about numerous members of Congress and their staffs if he and the Justice Department reach an agreement, the sources said. Negotiations have been ongoing for several months, people knowledgeable about the discussions said, but pressure is mounting because of the pending trial.

Abramoff's co-defendant in that case, Adam Kidan, agreed last week to plead guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud, and to testify against his former business partner. Abramoff would face significant jail time in any plea deal, the sources said.

You think the timing of this was all an accident?

What we have here is a massive conspiracy that was hatched to cover up rampant corruption that was raging all throughout the Republican Party. They did their best to limit the fallout by interfering in the investigations of Congressmen Doolittle, Renzi, Jerry Lewis, fallout from Duke Cunningham, etc.

Meanwhile, they transformed the civil rights division at DOJ from an outfit that defends voting rights to an outfit that pursues baseless voting fraud cases.

It was a criminal process from beginning to end, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Slam Dunk

Bob Somerby debunks the "slam-dunk" myth with a little time-line analysis.

We pre-discussed this recent history on Wednesday, so we’ll keep it short and sweet today. But we think the following point is worth noting: George Tenet was surely right when he said, on Sixty Minutes, that his “slam dunk” comment in December 02 didn’t drive the nation to war. That said, it’s important to recall the major role this silly narrative played in Bush’s re-election.

How silly was the “slam dunk” anecdote in Bob Woodward’s ballyhooed Plan of Attack? The book appeared in April 2004. The weekend before the book was released, the Washington Post ran a 2800-word front-page report; it summarized what Woodward’s book said. Written by reporter William Hamilton, it was the nation’s first real glimpse of the book’s contents. Hamilton started like this:

HAMILTON (4/17/04): Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Right away, Hamilton said that Bush’s war planning had been “fueled in part” by Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark. A few grafs later, he went into more detail. But this passage, which referenced the “slam-dunk” meeting, made no earthly sense:

HAMILTON: [Colin] Powell agreed to make the U.S. case against Hussein at the United Nations in February 2003, a presentation described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett as "the Powell buy-in." Bush wanted someone with Powell's credibility to present the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.

That’s the meeting where Woodward says Tenet saved the day by telling Bush it was all “a slam-dunk.”

In his front-page Post report, Hamilton highlighted this 12/02 meeting—but his narrative made no apparent sense. By December 21, 2002, Bush and Cheney had been already touring the country for four months, warning voters about Saddam’s WMD, saying there was “no doubt” he had them and wanted to use them against the U.S. and its friends. But according to Hamilton’s report (see above), Bush had “initially” found the case for WMD unconvincing—at that December meeting, which took place four months after this push began! So no, this didn’t make much sense. The real question was the following: Why did Bush and Cheney start making their claims back in August 2002? What sort of briefing did they receive before that? Why did they start telling the world, without qualification, that Saddam had those weapons—and was planning to use them? It was then, back in August, when they started making these claims. What had led Bush to think, all the way back then, that the case was as strong as he said?

But that obvious question wasn’t asked, because Hamilton’s account of this matter took hold. Pundits cited the ”slam dunk” anecdote more than any other part of Woodward’s book. The anecdote painted Tenet as the loudmouth bad guy—the guy who oversold the weapons. And not only that—in his account of the “slam dunk” meeting, Woodward included this pleasing passage, in which a conscientious Wise Leader urged caution on Tenet—several times:

WOODWARD: The president told Tenet several times, “Make sure no one stretches to make our case.”

Gag me! It was right out of a Boy’s Life bio—so Woodward typed it on up. Several times, Bush warned Tenet against stretching the intel—four months after he himself began stretching it! Other silly, Bush-friendly anecdotes littered Woodward’s book—perhaps the price one pays now for big access.

If you read Woodward’s book very carefully, you could possibly torture the real rationale for that 12/21/02 meeting. Most likely, this was the meeting at which the Admin began planning Bush’s State of the Union and Powell’s UN presentation. But pundits (including Hamilton) read the anecdote differently, and the image they portrayed became a big help to Bush on the trail. Had the Bush Admin stretched the intelligence? The question was already being asked as Campaign 04 unfolded. But Woodward’s book seemed to show something different—a good, wise leader being misled by a wild and crazy CIA head. Chronologically, the passage made no earthly sense. But Bush’s job approval was still at 50 percent, and the press corps agreed not to notice.

In the past few weeks, Tenet has complained about the way the public got played by that silly “slam dunk” anecdote. (Cheney was still pimping this pleasing nonsense on Meet the Press last September.) Whatever else Tenet may have done, he has surely been right in this critique. Woodward put a silly anecdote right at the heart of his blockbuster book. Hamilton built the Post’s news report around it, and the bullsh*t ran downhill from there.

Wise Leader Bush had wisely urged that no one—but no one—should stretch the intelligence! For the full text of Woodward’s “slam dunk” anecdote, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/25/05.

Go for it!

Greg Sargent thinks that the MSM (this time the WaPo) is misrepresenting public opinion. Who could have believed it?

In a front page Washington Post article today by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton about how the Democratic Congress is faltering, the reporters quote Leon Panetta making the case that Dems had better watch out and not be too confrontational with the White House:

[...]

But let's put that aside and ask a larger question: Is it really true that the public is fed up with partisanship and "sick and tired of the fighting," as Panetta says, and as David Broder and Joe Lieberman keep lecturing?

No doubt one could dig up polls showing that people don't like generically defined "fighting" or "gridlock." But here's another way to look at this: The polls show clearly that the public strongly supports efforts by Dems to confront Bush both on Iraq and on corruption. Check out the numbers in this recent Pew poll:

Do you think Democratic leaders in Congress are going too far or not far enough in challenging George W. Bush's policies in Iraq, or are they handling this about right?

Too far 23%
Not far enough 40%
About right 30%
Don't know/Refused 7%

So 70% say that Dems are being appropriately or even insufficiently aggressive in challenging Bush. Multiple polls show that solid majorities back Dem efforts to end the war -- efforts which by nature are confrontational and basically partisan, since the GOP more or less (with a few exceptions) continues to back Bush's Iraq policies. What's more, multiple polls have also found that solid majorities support Dem efforts to probe GOP malfeasance -- also efforts which by nature are confrontational and partisan.

Bottom line: Asking whether the public opposes generic "partisanship" in the current environment is utterly meaningless. Here's the deal: Bush and the GOP are doing a bunch of things. The American people don't like those things, and want them changed. But Bush and the GOP just keep on doing them, anyway. So Dems are the ones now trying to force Bush and the GOP to change. In other words, the choice the public faces isn't between "fighting" and "gridlock" on the one hand, and "bipartisan cooperation" on the other. Rather, it's between (a) accepting the disastrous Bush/GOP status quo; and (b) backing Democratic efforts to change it. And the public supports the latter. Even though those efforts are partisan and confrontational. Is that really so hard to fathom?

A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away.

I have written before about the problem that the right wing faces wherein they could not get elected if the voters knew what they would be voting for. For this reason, it is vital for the wingers to confuse the voting public about its true agenda. But every once in a while a true believer makes the mistake of telling the unvarnished truth. Glenn Greenwald, points out one such candid piece and it is appalling.

A Harvard professor of government actually writes in that bastion of right-wingedness, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, that:

Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply [...] In some circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law," but "the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule."

These people are such cowards! They are so willing to throw away freedom when faced with the slightest threat to their security. Wasn't it Franklin who said something like: those who would give up their freedom for security, do not deserve, nor will they have, either.

Glenn writes in conclusion:

That is why -- as jarring as it is -- it is actually necessary to ask presidential candidates whether they intend to exercise the power to imprison American citizens with no charges of any kind. The dominant political movement in this country believes in that power and has defended and exercised it. Mansfield's beliefs may be twisted and tyrannical and radical and profoundly un-American. But they are also the beliefs that have propelled our government for the last six years and -- absent some serious change -- very well may continue to propel it into the future.

[...]

Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments -- the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard -- receive almost no attention.

While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President's will, our media still barely discusses those issues.

They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

Bush vetoes Iraq funding bill

"Mr. President, you can veto a bill. But you can't veto the truth."

Mission Accomplished

Four years ago today, GWB gave his "Mission Accomplished" speech. Do you think anyone is celebrating this anniversary today... except, maybe, Osama Bin Laden & friends?


- tell us the mission

No Prodigal Son, He

Tristero has this to say about the book-touring George Tenet:

This fine open letter protesting Tenet's recent book implicitly makes an important point about redemption and forgiveness. You earn it, you don't cash in on it. And you do so not merely by writing a self-serving book that cashes in on the present (well-deserved) disgust with the Bush administration's bloody and totally immoral war, but you take the symbolic action of returning the medal you received from your fellow scoundrels and you also take the very real action of refusing to profit from your cowardice and culpability. In short, Tenet needs to behave like a truly honorable human being instead of a Bush-league hustler.

Whether or not this moral dwarf ever redeems himself isn't that important, however. More to the point is that we shouldn't waste any more time listening to him. That has been one of the major problems of the US in the 21st Century. Both the national government and the public political discourse have been dominated by people who are so utterly worthless they make one appreciate Paris Hilton all the more for the qualities of her incisive mind.

It's high time that those who were right all along about Iraq have a significant national voice. The country should be listening to - ie, the networks should be running numerous interviews with - Brady Kiesling, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, and many, many others. And no one should be bothering to pay attention any further to the likes of Peter Beinart, Kenneth Pollack, George Tenet, Francis Fukuyama, Willaim Kristol, Rich Lowry, George Will, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ledeen. Whether or not they now recognize they were wrong, the fact is that they were when it counted most. Time to listen to those who got it right from the start.

Fat chance. But I thought I should mention it.