"When we were there, on our watch, we were always ready on 9/11, on the anniversary."
Dick Cheney, former Vice-President
Someone needs to remind Dick Cheney on who was Vice-President on the day of September 11, 2001. Perhaps the President's Daily Brief "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" that was given to President Bush on August 6, 2001. From the PDB.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
The PDB also stated that al-Qaeda operatives have been living in the United States. Condoleezza Rice flat-out lied to the 9/11 Commission about the contents of the PDB.
And I said, at one point, that this was a historical memo, that it was -- it was not based on new threat information. And I said, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile."
Dick Cheney is delusional if he thinks the Bush administration was ready on September 11, 2001.
We may finally be seeing the tougher President Obama that progressives have demanded. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John McCain made it clear that they intend to go after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice over the Benghazi attacks. Obama had these words directed at Graham and McCain.
But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me. And should I choose — if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity — the State Department, then I will nominate her. That’s not a determination that I’ve made yet.
Damn. Where has this Obama been the past four years.
Why anyone takes McCain and Graham seriously on national security is beyond me. The truth is they are clueless on national security issues. Think Progress is very friendly with the Obama administration and is going after McCain and Graham for defending Condoleezza Rice's intelligence failures on the 9-11 attacks and Iraq WMD intelligence.
Rice was pressed after stonewalling to releal the title of the August 6, 2001 CIA PDB. The title of the PDB is "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." The PDB warned of future al-Qaida was planning future attacks and hijackings. Rice's testimony to the 9-11 Commission was untruthful and embarrassing.
Rice went on CNN with the unfounded claim that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program in development. Rice made this famous comment to Wolf Blitzer.
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
As we now know, there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. Rice commits two of the biggest intelligence failures in U.S. history and is rewarded with a featured speaking role at the RNC.
Just for fun: watch the Youtube video of Sen. McCain telling Wolf Blitzer that Americans can walk freely in Baghdad during the height of the surge. CNN's Michael Ware's informs Blitzer that an American "would barely last twenty minutes out there." No one should take the man that advocated staying in Iraq 100 years seriously.
"I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud of her because she's a black woman of African origin."
Dubya's two favorite people don't want to appear on the news talk shows. With approval ratings so high, I can't imagine why.
THE HARDEST TO GET
Leading vote-getter: Vice President Dick Cheney. “He doesn’t give a s***. He’s checked out,” said one respondent. “I don’t know what he does all day,” said another.
DOESN’T MAKE THE NEWS THEY PROBABLY SHOULD
Leading vote-getter: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “never says anything.” “Everybody got really tired of the spin.”
"She’s under the rug in the living room," said an anonymous source. Too bad. I love to hear Condi's latest spin on the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" PDB.
Update:
Former Bush administration Douglas Feith foolishly appears on The Daily Show. Jon Stewarts asks Feith who was responsible for post-war Iraq. Feith didn't answer that question. Feith was in charge of post-war planning.
It was also his office that was in charge of post-war planning, and rejected the product of months of work by dozens of Iraqi exiles and Mideast experts in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency who anticipated many of the problems that have wrong-footed the occupation.
This is why current administration officials are laying low.
A young female college student told President Bush, she asked Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld what laws govern American contractors in Iraq. She informed the President that Rumsfeld did not know. Bush laughed and informed the woman he was also clueless. The video shows Bush's willful arrogance.
According to the Jamie Leigh Jones Foundation, 38 American woman have experienced sexual assault and harassment from fellow contractors. Jones told Congress, "Victims of crime perpetrated by employees of taxpayer-funded government contracts in Iraq deserve the same standard of treatment and protection governed by the same laws whether they are working in the U.S. or abroad." The State Department failed to ask the Justice Department to investigate Jones's allegations that she was gang raped. Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice missed Bill Nelson's deadline to respond to allegation of female contractors sexually assaulted. Last year, the Justice Department refused to send a representative to the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter. The Bush administration is stonewalling.
The Pentagon has refused to provide Nelson with information on how many rape examinations were performed by military doctors. The Criminal Investigation Command of the Army informed Nelson, 124 sexual assaults have been documented. Contractors fall under the State Department's jurisdiction. The Dep. of State has investigated only four sexual assaults.
Former KBR employee Mary Beth Kineston said, "I felt safer on the convoys with the Army than I ever did working for KBR." Kineston was fired after complaining about being physically groped. "At least if you got in trouble on a convoy, you could radio the Army and they would come and help you out. But when I complained to KBR, they didn’t do anything. I still have nightmares. They changed my life forever, and they got away with it."
Pamela Jones experienced similar threats.
Pamela Jones, of Texas, a KBR logistics coordinator in Kuwait in 2003 and 2004, was sexually assaulted by a supervisor. “It was known that if you started complaining that you could lose your job,” said Ms. Jones, who added that she reported it to management. “They give you an 800 number to report. But then they shoved it under the rug, and they told me I was a pest.”
Jamie Leigh Jones and Tracy Barker signed employment contracts that do not allow them to file civil suits against their former companies in court.
Jones didn't know much about arbitration when she signed the contract and was shocked to learn what she had done.
"I learned that I had signed away my right to a trial by jury," she said.
Republican Congressman Bill Poe voiced his disapproval of the employment agreements.
"Air things out in a public forum of a courtroom," said Rep. Poe in an earlier interview with ABC News. "That's why we have courts in the United States."
Bush's ignorance and arrogance is dangerous. The President literally considers laws over contractors are laughing matter. Iraq is a dangerous place to work because of the insugency. Bush makes matters worse by allowing a lawless environment for women to work in. The moral abyss America government has become because of the Bushies will take years to change. Why else would the administration make contractor immune from prosecution?
Yesterday, Jamie Leigh Jones testifying before U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions.
Conpassionate Conservatism: Bushies Say Go Pound Sand To KBR Victims
Senator Bill Nelson sent letters to Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General Michael Mukasey about new rape allegations against Kellogg Brown and Root. KBR has come under intense scrutiny after Jamie Leigh Jones went public about her rape. Nelson's website states that a Tampa, Florida woman and two Houston, Texas women have accused KBR employees of raping them. Nelson wrote letters to Rice and Mukasey asked what investigations have the State Department and the Pentagon done. He has yet to receive a response.
Nelson gave Rice a Dec. 21 deadline to respond. Rice missed the deadline and didn't even bother asking for and extention. That takes serious Chutzpah, even more shameless was a State Department spokesman's spin: "If the senator has asked questions, I’m quite sure we will provide answers. But it’s not something I could discuss with you." Or with Nelson.
The only course of action is issuing subpoenas. Nelson is better known for taking his own party to court than standing up to the Bush administration.
The Justice Department has already decided not to press charges in the Jones case. All American citizens in Iraqare exempt from prosecution. A Blackwater contractor literally got away with murdering the bodyguard of Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi. It is unlikely the State Department, DoJ and Pentagon will budge an inch for the new women whom came forward. What makes matters worse is that the story is fading from the political landscape. It is hard to force the Bush administration to move contractors under the Department of Defense (which would make contractor liable under military law) and retroactively change the State Department's Iraq contracting law if there is no outrage from the public.
Hillary Clinton calls for an investigation of Jamie Leigh Jones's raped by KBR employees.
"These claims must be taken seriously and the U.S. government must act immediately to investigate Ms. Jones's claims," Clinton said in the letter released Wednesday.
Here is the Clinton letter to Condoleezza Rice and Michael Mukasey.
The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on the matter for December 19th.
Now Congress is going to get involved in this in the public forum and find out what’s going on? What’s happening to these employees," said Congressman Ted Poe. "Is their corporation involved in securing their safety or looking the other way?"
Now there is new four women have filed lawsuits against Kellogg, Brown & Root. These woman alleged they were raped or sexual harassed. A Houston attorney will file lawsuits six new lawsuits for women against KBR.
Jason Whitely did some muckraking a found a disturbing pattern of sexist behavior from KBR employees.
Searching through a federal database, we found a second federal lawsuit in Oklahoma, another in North Carolina, and a fourth in Florida, all from women who said they were either sexually harassed or raped while working as contractors for KBR in Iraq.
In a sworn affidavit in the Jones case, SSG Kevin Rodgers, a Texas National Guard Soldier said:
“During my tour in Basra I encountered many unprofessional acts by the employees of KBR and the U.S. State Department.”
Several others concur.
“During my time as an HR (Human Resources) supervisor, I was aware that a lot of sexual harassment went on - it was our major complaint,” admitted Letty Surman, a former KBR employee.
Finally, here is what Linda Lindsey, a former KBR employee said in her affidavit: “There was a lot of promotion based upon who was sleeping with the boss.”
This story is blowing up. KBR has much to answer for.
Esquire has a must-read piece about Bush administration Middle East experts Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann efforts to engage Iran. Both were able to get Iranian leaders to talk about opening up relations with the United States. They were defeated at every turn by the administration's neocons. Stephen Hadley outlined a policy that is designed to make Iran not come to the negotiating table.
After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as Hadley's Rules:
If a state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it without strings or promises. We won't try to build on it.
It gets worse. Hadley killed Colin Powell's attempts for peace in Israel.
Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."
"This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."
"It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."
So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell to step aside.
Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. "What is it they're afraid of?" he demanded. "Who the hell are they afraid of?"
"I don't know sir," Leverett said.
The road map temporarily got back on track when Crown Prince Abdullah challenged Bush in an amazing exchange.
In the spring, Crown Prince Abdullah flew to Texas to meet Bush at his ranch. The way Leverett remembers the story, Abdullah sat down and told Bush he was going to ask a direct question and wanted a direct answer. Are you going to do anything about the Palestinian issue? If you tell me no, if it's too difficult, if you're not going to give it that kind of priority, just tell me. I will understand and I will never say anything critical of you or your leadership in public, but I'm going to need to make my own judgments and my own decisions about Saudi interests.
Bush tried to stall, saying he understood his concerns and would see what he could do.
Abdullah stood up. "That's it. This meeting is over."
One thing the Bush administration doesn't do is blow off Saudia Arabia. The White House would later scrap the road map plan because Ariel Sharon didn't want to hurt the Likud Party's election prospects.
Rice sat impassively behind her broad desk. "If we put the road map out," she said, "it will interfere with Israeli elections."
"You are interfering with Israeli elections, just in another way."
"Flynt, the decision has already been made," Rice said.
Read the whole article. It's a fascinating study on how the neoconservatives have hurt American foreign policy. The next president will spend his or her time trying to clean up the mess.
Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski comes out in favor of Barack Obama's position on foreign policy. Brzezinski states that he favors Obama's diplomatic engagement over Hillary Clinton's lack of political courage and imagination.
"The Senator from New York talks in conventional terms and I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago," Brzezinski said.
That is a subtle bitchsmack at the Clinton administration's foreign policy.
Brzezinski finds Condoleezza Rice's refusal to negotiate with Iran and Syria is foolhardy. He notes that the United States negotiated with the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war.
In an analysis of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s efforts to “reshape her legacy,” New York Times reporter Helene Cooper notes today that Rice “is trying hard to rewrite her legacy to include something more than Iraq.” As for Iraq, Rice’s “colleagues and friends say that she has accepted that Iraq is a stain that she probably cannot remove before she leaves office.”
Like Nixon, Condi will probably try to reinvent herself. Iraq is one truth she will not escape from. Nor should she.
