Third Graders Debate Iraq War

An excerpt from a presidential debate in Mr. Faustmann's third grade class, Alma Michigan.

John McCain Hires Saddam Hussein Lobbyist to Run His Transition Team

McCain Transition Team Head William Timmons on the left; his client Saddam Hussein on the right.

Really. I'm not even kidding.

Murray Waas, HuffPo: McCain Transition Chief Aided Saddam In Lobbying Effort

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government.

I can't WAIT for McCain to bring up William Ayers in the debate. What should Obama say? "Well, at least I didn't hire him to run my transition team, like you hired Saddam Hussein's lobbyist." is one way to go. Or, "I was eight years old when Williams Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground. You were 56 years old when your transition team head was lobbying for Saddam Hussein. What, did you forget about that when you selected him to your team? Or did you just not care?"

We Got Our Man

Donald Rumsfield meeting with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, 1983.
Veteran CIA asset Saddam Hussein was hung yesterday in Iraq. The murderer of hundreds of thousands was supported by the US throughout his career until the first Iraq War. Watch this excellent Flash movie by Eric Blumrich for a tour of the lowlights of US support of Hussein and the bloody results. (Link from Informed Comment.)

The trial of Saddam Hussein was a shameful kangaroo court from start to finish. His lawyers were muzzled or murdered; the result was pre-ordained, and announced to coincide with the US elections; he was convicted by an Iraqi court, but hung inside the US-controlled Green Zone in secret. As Steve Gilliard notes: "Weak governments kill their enemies."

Independent (uk): Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

Prof. Juan Cole, Informed Comment: For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein

Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: End of Another Year...

You know your country is in trouble when:

1. The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
2. Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
3. The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
4. The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
5. An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country's 'Golden Years'.
6. Your country is purportedly 'selling' 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
7. For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it's going to cut back on providing that hour.
8. Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is 'sectarian bloodshed' or 'civil war'.
9. People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that's been missing for two weeks.

A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.

James Carville Needs To STFU

James Carville, Clintonista married to a Republican strategist, is running around accusing Howard Dean of doing a terrible job as DNC Chairman. Carville charges that the DNC had $6,000,000 in the bank that they should have spent in Democratic races, and that the party should have taken an additional 15 seats as a result. (He called Dean's performance "Rumsfeldian"; them's fightin' words, Boudreaux.)

I'll put aside the fact that you can't do a straight money-to-victory analysis here. Rahm Emmanual put $3,000,000 into Tammy Duckworth's race, and she lost; he put $0, zero, into Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01), and she won, so there you go.

But why doesn't Carville look at his own Clintonista house? Hillary Clinton spent $29.5 million to win her Senate race in New York, a race that was essentially over before it started; can you even name her opponent? (HINT: he had the same name as a member of the cast of West Wing; I'll leave his name in Comments.) She won 67% to 31%. Wouldn't it have been more useful for her to donate half of her vast stores of money to candidates around the country who were actually in competitive races? Looking at it from that perspective, her actions were Cheneyesque. (Is that stretching it? Like giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton? Well, it works as well as James Carville calling Howard Dean who helped WIN BACK CONGRESS Rumsfeldian. I mean, what has Rumsfeld ever won? The handshake of Saddam Hussein? The trust of Commander Codpiece? I mean, really.)

Howard Dean Was Right

I am a proud Deaniac. Oh, I swallowed my doubts and supported John Kerry after he got the nomination, but I was on the Dean train before he got cow-catchered off the tracks by the corporate media's playing fast and loose with his speech in Iowa. Because Dean was smart and knew what was really going on. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post reminding us what Howard Dean had to say about North Korea and Iraq before Bush's ill-fated adventure began.

Unclaimed Territory: Invading Iraq and the North Korean threat -- a historical reminder

Contrary to the propaganda campaign enabled by the passive, mindless 2003 media, most anti-war advocates (such as Howard Dean) did not oppose the war in Iraq because war itself is wrong or even because preemptive war in response to a truly imminent threat is wrong. They opposed it because the evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat was so shady and unconvincing and that the case that no other options short of war existed was so unconvincing (anyone with doubts about that should just go read Dean's speech -- "Secretary Powell's recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness").

More importantly, Dean pointed out that there were far greater threats to U.S. security than Saddam Hussein -- and he particularly emphasized the threats posed by North Korea and Al Qaeda, which would be neglected -- if not outright ignored and worsened -- by the mammoth, unpredictable and highly dangerous project of invading Iraq and attempting to re-build it into a stable democracy (see e.g. the resurgent Taliban, the uncaptured Osama bin Laden, the takeover of much of Iraq by Al Qaeda and Iran, and yesterday's North Korean nuclear test). The only way to see the Bush movement as "serious, weighty, tough" foreign policy thinkers, and the only way to see Democrats like Dean as "frivolous and weak on defense," is to completely ignore (or distort) history and to operate from the premise that being terribly wrong is a sign of seriousness and wisdom and being completely right is a sign of frivolity and weakness.

Anatomy of Journamalism

One of these things is not like the other
Last Sunday, the WaPo said Bush can leak and leak and leak and it's all right with them. He's the President so he can do what he wants. So there.

A Good Leak

PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.

Editor and Publisher said, Not so fast:

'The Washington Post': At War With Itself
The newspaper's editorial page on Sunday declared Scooter Libby's notorious 2003 gift to reporters "The Good Leak." On the same paper's front page two reporters thoroughly debunked the notion.

No wonder the Post, in today’s editorial, calls Wilson’s trip to Niger “absurdly over-examined.” This is what people say when they want to change the subject instead of having to renew an indefensible position. The Post's editorial page has been wrong from the start on Iraq so we must at least applaud its consistency.

Little Debbie (Deborah Howell, laughably bad ombudsperson) defends WaPo today by saying, on the one hand, on the other hand, who needs facts when you own the paper?

Two Views of the Libby Leak Case

Editorials and news stories have different purposes. News stories are to inform; editorials are to influence.

And, finally, the Grey Lady gets it right, for once:

A Bad Leak

Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — in any accepted sense of that word — when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later.

And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program were a state secret.

[]

Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear weapons in 2002 — as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it — is laughable.)

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

The Leaker-in-Chief, exposed:

NYTimes: Bush Ordered Declassification, Official Says

WASHINGTON, April 9 — A senior administration official confirmed for the first time on Sunday that President Bush had ordered the declassification of parts of a prewar intelligence report on Iraq in an effort to rebut critics who said the administration had exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The Pentagon's top operations officer, now retired, comes out against the Iraq war.

TIME: Iraq Was a Mistake
A military insider sounds off against the war and the "zealots" who pushed it
By LIEUT. GENERAL GREG NEWBOLD (RET.)

The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood.

The BBC also has an analysis of America's blind march to war:

How predictions for Iraq came true

It was a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, three years ago. I was interviewing the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in the ballroom of a big hotel in Cairo.

Shrewd, amusing, bulky in his superb white robes, he described to me all the disasters he was certain would follow the invasion.

The US and British troops would be bogged down in Iraq for years. There would be civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The real beneficiary would be the government in Iran.

"And what do the Americans say when you tell them this," I asked? "They don't even listen," he said.

Over the last three years, from a ringside seat here in Baghdad, I have watched his predictions come true, stage by stage.

In today's global warming news, this chilling comparison of Earth and Venus:

Parting the Shroud of Earth's Mysterious Twin

Eons ago, Venus may have been the gentle, tropical paradise that Earthlings once imagined. It was closer to the sun -- but not too close. It was almost Earth-size -- but not quite. And it had plenty of water, even oceans.

But that was then. Sometime in the distant past, the oceans started to heat up and then boiled away. The water vapor hung over the planet like a glove, trapping the heat below and creating a berserk greenhouse effect.

Today, Venus's atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide, and the planet is wreathed in clouds of sulfuric acid. The planet is apparently condemned to an eternal cycle of global warming, with surface temperatures that hover around 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bush Lies Memorialized in British Document

Doug Mills/The New York Times
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Bush arriving for a White House news conference on Jan. 31, 2003, after a meeting about Iraq that would be summarized in a memorandum by an adviser to Mr. Blair.

The war plan was definite at least by January 31, 2003: three days after Bush's State of the Union speech (filled with lies like: Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production") the date for invasion was set. (The actual invasion took place nine days later than anticipated, on March 19, 2003.) And I imagine the war plan was 'set' long before this. Contrary to Bush's lies at his press conference last week, he was set to go to war all along.

NYTimes: Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

Update: Was my face red ... must have more coffee before posting ... this is just another one of the Downing Street memos, which has been out there on the web for two months. It was reported in the Guardian (uk) on February 3, 2006:

Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo
PM promised to be 'solidly behind' US invasion with or without UN backing

I even blogged about these very documents before:

Going to the UN Was a Sham; War Was Already Decided (Feb. 3, 2006)

The charge: Blogging while sleepwalking. The verdict: guilty as charged. Penalty: We report, you decide.

Incompetent Idiot Liar

Even presstitute Jim VandeHei is questioning Der Leader. However, because he is Jim VandeHei, he manages to do so without using the words incompetent, idiot or liar. ("Incompetent" from the Pew Research poll becomes "skeptical [of] administrative competency"). Of course, he does manage to throw in the old RNC talking point that Bush is a strong and trustworthy leader. Even when describing Bush's lies, he does so gently, using the passive voice. The stuff in brackets is all mine:

WaPo: Old Forecasts Come Back to Haunt Bush
Erosion in Confidence Will Be Hard To Reverse, Say Pollsters, Strategists

Three years of upbeat White House assessments about Iraq that turned out to be premature, incomplete or plain wrong.... [INCOMPETENT IDIOT LIAR]

....House optimism that skeptics contend is at odds with the facts on the ground in Iraq..... [LIAR]

.......the administration's sunny-side-up appraisals,... [LIAR, IDIOT]

.......Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) said in an interview that Cheney was wrong about the insurgency being in its last throes......."I am always cautious about always seeing things in the best light because war is not like that" and the public knows it........ [LIAR, IDIOT]

...Michael Dimock, associate director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said a recent survey by his group showed the public skeptical toward Bush, about both his administrative competency and his personal credibility. Only 40 percent of respondents said Bush was trustworthy, a 22-point drop from September of 2003, six months after the invasion of Iraq.....[INCOMPETENT, IDIOT, LIAR]

.....Bush is waging the wrong argument.....[LIAR, IDIOT]

......The erosion in the public's support for Bush at a personal level is a striking reversal for a president who for most of his first term was described by the public as a strong and trustworthy leader, especially on national security measures.....[LIAR, IDIOT, INCOMPETENT]

....In recent months, Bush has moved to talk more candidly about the problems in Iraq and yesterday said repeatedly that he understood the public's concerns.....[LIAR]

....There were the famous claims by Cheney and others that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators after the invasion.....[LIAR, IDIOT, INCOMPETENT]

Other statements were proved wrong. The weapons of mass destruction the administration said Saddam Hussein possessed before the war have never been found -- and many experts believe never existed. White House officials hammered then-chief economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey for claiming the war could cost as little as $100 billion, saying the estimate was too high. The actual tally is fast approaching four times that amount, according to the Congressional Research Service, which estimates a $360 billion price tag to date.[LIAR, IDIOT, INCOMPETENT]

Perhaps the most famous rosy statement came nearly three years ago when Bush proclaimed: "We have seen the turning of the tide" under a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." Since then, more than 2,300 Americans have died in Iraq. [LIAR, IDIOT, INCOMPETENT, WORST PRESIDENT EVER]

Using 9/11 To Pimp For War With Iraq

Started on 9/11:

The Washington Note: More Evidence that Iraq War Plan Started on 9/11

A blogger's FOIA request has yielded Steven Cambone's handwritten notes of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld's instructions to General Myers at 2:40 pm on September 11, 2001.

Some of the lines are fascinating:

"Go massive. . .Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Judge whether hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) @ same time -- Not only UBL (Osama bin Laden)

Hard to get a good case

Need to move swiftly

This is what Rumsfield thought about on 9/11. What were you thinking about? Through your tears?

The Little Red Hoax

Federal agents' visit was a hoax
Student admits he lied about Mao book

And I fell for it:

He Knows What You've Been Reading

I was thinking about this kind of thing the other day while I watched coverage of the latest day of Saddam Hussein's trial. Hussein was claiming to have been beaten while in U.S. custody. A few years ago I would have laughed at such a claim. Now, after Guantanimo, Abu Graib, dozens of prisoners dead at the hands of their U.S. captors, I had to think. Maybe we did torture him.

And that's one of the tragedies of the Bush Administration. Their conduct has been so anti-democratic that everyone now assumes the worst about them. There's no presumption of innocence once you've broken the law so many times.

I'd believe just about anything they're accused of. Sad.

Bushco Tortures In Our Name

From the Guardian.uk, excerpts from the diary of Benyam Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan and flown in a US government plane a prison in Morocco:

'One of them made cuts in my penis. I was in agony'

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.

They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.

[]

I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco, even after I'd agreed to confess to whatever they wanted to hear. It became like a routine. They'd come in, tie me up, spend maybe an hour doing it. They never spoke to me. Then they'd tip some kind of liquid on me - the burning was like grasping a hot coal. The cutting, that was one kind of pain. The burning, that was another.

In all the 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors, unless you count the pictures they showed me.

Who is Benyam Mohammed? Again, The Guardian.uk:


Suspect's tale of travel and torture

Mohammed, 26, who grew up in Notting Hill in west London, is alleged to be a key figure in terrorist plots intended to cause far greater loss of life than the suicide bombers of 7/7. One allegation, which he denies, is of planning to detonate a "dirty bomb" in a US city; another is that he and an accomplice planned to collapse a number of apartment blocks by renting ground-floor flats to seal, fill with gas from cooking appliances, and blow up with timed detonators.

[]

Mohammed was born in Ethiopia and came to the UK aged 15 when his father sought asylum. After obtaining five GCSEs and an engineering diploma at the City of Westminster College in Paddington, he decided to stay in Britain when his father returned, and was given indefinite leave to remain. In his late teens he rediscovered Islam, prayed regularly at al-Manaar mosque in Notting Hill, and was a volunteer at its cultural centre. "He is remembered here as a very nice, quiet person, who never caused any trouble," says Abdulkarim Khalil, its director.

He enjoyed football, and was thought good enough for a semi-professional career. "He was a quiet kid, he seemed deep thinking, although that might have been because his language skills weren't great," says Tyrone Forbes, his trainer.

In June 2001 Mohammed left his bedsit off Golborne Road, Notting Hill, and travelled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan. He maintains he wanted to see whether it was "a good Islamic country or not". It appears likely that he spent time in a paramilitary training camp.

He returned to Pakistan sometime after 9/11, and remained at liberty until April 2002 - during which time, US authorities believe, he became involved in the dirty bomb and gas blast plots. His alleged accomplice, a Chicago-born convert to Islam, Jose Padilla, is detained in the US. Mohammed says interrogators repeatedly demanded he give evidence against him.

You will recall despite the three years of claims about Padilla's involvement with a dirty bomb plot, that when the government finally indicted him a few days ago to avoid a Supreme Court decision about his indefinite detention, the dirty bomb plot was not charged. It was not even mentioned.

....Now that Padilla has actually been indicted, he is not accused of dirty bombs, apartment fires or any violent act whatsoever. Instead, he is accused of playing a decidedly marginal role in a group that allegedly sought to provide support for unidentified terrorist acts abroad. No one in the conspiracy is accused of engaging in any violence, and Padilla's role is so tangential that he is not even actually accused of providing material support to terrorists. Most of the case consists of fraud and perjury charges against the other defendants. The most interesting fact in the indictment is that one of Padilla's aliases was "Abu Abdullah the Puerto Rican."

So Mohammed has been tortured to reveal the existence of a plot that probably never existed. We have lowered ourselves to the level of the lowest, the vilest of the nation states of the world. We are in Saddam Hussein territory here, Duarte, Baby Doc, the torturers.

We have a special counsel looking into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in part because the release of her identification put other covert agents and cooperating persons at risk of torture.

Isn't the torture scandal worthy of its own special counsel? I'm writing to my senators and my representative today.

Not in my name. No longer.

Thanksgiving Break

Heading to Albany, New York tomorrow for Thanksgiving with my best friend, my goddaughter, my mom & my sister & her dog. Pecan pies are cooling on the stove.

I'll be off-line for most of the week so I won't post here until next Wednesday.

In the meantime, here are some sites I have been enjoying lately. Something to read while I'm gone.

Murray Waas at the National Journal has been leading the journalistic pack ferreting out the incompetence, corruption and cronyism of the Bush administration. His piece of today, revealing the existence of a heretofore unrevealed Presidential Daily Briefing from September 21, 2001 is a case in point.

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

Firedoglake is the site for monitoring the Plame case. Great writing, solid legal analysis.

I Blame the Patriarchy (wish I'd thought of that name!). Funny feminist blog by a taco-eating Texan, currently battling breast cancer.


Shakespeare's Sister Another feminist blog, lighter, more popular culture, but with the requisite liberal poliblogging. (Did I just make up that word? I like it. I'm a liberal poliblogger.)

Dependable Renegade, a political photo blog. She posts up 3-5 pics a day with wicked captions.

Can't....Reprogram....Old....Brain....

President Makes It Clear: Phrase Is 'War on Terror'

GRAPEVINE, Tex., Aug. 3 - President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

In a speech here, Mr. Bush used the phrase "war on terror" no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the "global struggle against violent extremism," the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.

In recent public appearances, Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers have avoided formulations using the word "war," and some of Mr. Bush's top advisers have suggested that the administration wanted to jettison what had been its semiofficial wording of choice, "the global war on terror."

The Times characterizes this as Commander Codpiece overrulling his underlings, but I doubt that. I think Bush gets an phrase that covers a topic in his head, and repeats it every time the topic is raised. Repeat after me: freedom, lessons of 9/11, after 9/11, we had to look at the world differently, I believe in a culture of life, Saddam Hussein was a grave threat, the world is better off without him in power, I recognize that taking Saddam Hussein out was unpopular, I made the decision because I thought it was in the right interests of our security, if you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorist, we've got a great country, I love our values, the best way to defend America is to stay on the offense, we got to be right 100 percent of the time here at home, and they got to be right once, I am not going to shortchange our troops in harm's way, I'm not going to run up taxes, which will cost this economy jobs.

The Chimp knows his lines, and he's sticking to 'em! (Most of these phrases are taken from the second Presidential Debate last October.)

Karl Rove (Surprise!) Was Matt Cooper's Source

Matt Cooper's Source
What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter

From page 2 of the online article:

NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

So Rove both (1) outed Plame AND (2) flogged the administration's lie about Saddam Hussein looking for uranium from Niger.

Let the frogmarching begin.

Chickenhawk Alert

Ship Young Pataki Straight to Iraq

[G]overnor [Pataki], who proudly announced last week that his son has been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines, also noted that Teddy Pataki hopes to defer his military service for three years until he finishes law school.

**********

At the Republican National Convention last year, Gov. Pataki praised President George W. Bush for having the courage to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. And just as Bush did in his speech Tuesday night, the governor strove mightily to link Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But with the daily war toll mounting, why wouldn't his son want to put off serving for a while?

Because George Pataki is a hypocrite. Praising the war on one hand, shielding his own family with the other. Sending poor New Yorkers in his son's place.

Hey Teddy Pataki: You signed up for the Marine Officer Training program. The Marines need you. It's time for you to perform your side of the contract.

You don't need to go law school to figure this one out.

Bush Gives the Same Ol' Speech

from thinkprogress:

Bush Iraq Speech: By The Numbers

References to “September 11″: 5

References to “weapons of mass destruction”: 0

References to “freedom”: 21

References to “exit strategy”: 0

References to “Saddam Hussein”: 2

References to “Osama Bin Laden”: 2

References to “a mistake”: 1 (setting a timetable for withdrawal)

References to “mission”: 11

References to “mission accomplished”: 0

To Win a Fight, You Have to Fight

Late Friday night I caught part of the replay of British Member of Parliament George's Galloway's appearance before the Senate subcommittee investigating the UN "Oil for Food" scandal. The subcommittee is headed by the loathesome Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. It's hard to believe that a seat that was once held by such greats as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale is now occupied by this preening, sleazy, empty-headed idiot. (gratuitous before and after pictures of his teeth from his dentist's website here. Yup, he illegally got the teeth for free while Mayor of St. Paul, then quickly paid for them when the dentist's website was discovered by blogtopia.) Oh yeah, Minnesota is the same state that elected Jesse Ventura, professional wrestler, as its governor. I wonder what kind of crap is in their water?

I digress. This post is about George Galloway. The committee had already assembled a dossier (sinister Soviet music should be playing in your head) of its evidence indicting Galloway as a collaborator with Saddam Hussein. They brought Galloway in to put his head on a pike. But he turned the tables. He made mincemeat of them. If you get a chance to view it, you should. But at least read his testimony. Listen for his Scottish accent as you read.

This is how we must fight the lies of the right. You can't be moderate in your opposition to liars. You have to fight to win. When you are right, when you are speaking the truth, you will persuade. You will win.

Since the subcommittee has removed Mr. Galloway's testimony from its website, his opening statement is reproduced below in its entirety.

Published on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 by the Times Online (UK)
Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption

* * * * *

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely @#%#*-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

Only a Bubble Boy Could Believe He Could Wage a War WIthout Casualities

'One Guy in a Bubble'

An excerpt:

"I have no outside advice" in the war on terrorism, President Bush told Bob Woodward in December of 2001. In an interview that Woodward revealed to Nicholas Lemann in last week's issue of the New Yorker, Bush insisted that, "Anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this Administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial phase of the war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble."

Indeed. By every available indication, George W. Bush's is the most inside-the-bubble presidency in modern American history. It's not just that his campaign operatives exclude all but the true believers from his rallies, or that Bush, by the evidence of his debate performances, has grown utterly unaccustomed to criticism.

With each passing day, we learn that once Bush has decided on a course of action, he will not be swayed by mere intelligence estimates, military appraisals or facts on the ground. We already knew that when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress during the run-up to the war that occupying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he sealed his ticket to an early retirement. We've recently learned that Paul Bremer had told the president we needed more troops to secure postwar Iraq and the safety of our troops already there, and that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had pleaded for more armored vehicles to better shield our soldiers.

But these and other such assessments and pleas ran counter to the idea of the war that Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had lodged in their heads. This would be our lightning war, and after Saddam Hussein was deposed, resistance would cease and U.S. forces could pack up and go home. A report in Tuesday's New York Times documents a Defense Department plan to shrink the number of U.S. forces in Iraq by 50,000 within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad. There were estimates aplenty from the State Department, the CIA and the Army suggesting that we'd need more forces for the occupation than for the war, but they were all blithely ignored.

Let's pop that bubble on November 2nd. Let America rejoin the Reality-Based Community of planet earth.

Kerry in a landslide.

Only a Fool Goes to War Without a Post War Plan

Post-war planning non-existent

Here are the first four paragraphs; you must read the entire article.

WASHINGTON - In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

A village in Texas is missing its idiot. Let's send him back to Crawford on November 2nd.