Dog Blogging Open Thread

There have been plenty of cat posts on AMERICAblog lately so tonight we're doing some dog blogging. Boomer is my trusty companion. We've been together 6 1/2 years. He's around 13 or 14 -- I adopted him from the Washington Humane Society. Had a rough week with Boomer. On Tuesday, his vet thought he had an enlarged heart and congestive heart failure. On Thursday, we went to the Canine Cardiologist out in the suburbs. John came along for moral support and to ask questions. The cardiology people were great...and the good news is that Boomer's okay. No serious heart problem. Phew. I do love my dog. Read the rest of this post...

Bush's Iraq War "has made the the overall terrorism problem worse"

Not only did Bush ignore the terror threat prior to 9/11 as Bill Clinton pointed out to Fox and John's post below demonstrates, the American intelligence community is now saying that Bush has made the terror situation worse because of the war in Iraq.

Bush has been on a full-scale campaign to link Iraq to the war on terror. Looks like he's got a point, but not the way he wants people to think. Bush's Iraq War has made the terror situation much worse:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush wants to campaign on terror this year. Let him. By going to Iraq, Bush has been the biggest recruiter for terrorists. He's made the world less safe:

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled Â?Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,Â?Â? it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, Â?Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,Â? cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report Â?says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,Â? said one American intelligence official.

Anything Bush says about terror means nothing. His own government says he's made it worse. Now, we need to hold Bush and the GOP accountable for this record. Read the rest of this post...

Just another day of carnage and mayhem in Bush's Iraq quagmire

NOTE FROM JOHN: I'll be on CNN's Reliable Sources show tomorrow morning, probably around 1030AM Eastern or so. Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, will be on Blitzer's show shortly after I appear. Will be fun to see if we meet.

Today's update via Reuters:

*BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed 26 people and wounded 29 others when it exploded in Baghdad's Shi'ite slum of Sadr City, police said.

*NAJAF - Gunmen shot dead Fadhil Abu Seybi, the head of a local tribe and a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a prominent Shi'ite party. Police said Abu Seybi was killed outside his home in the holy city of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

*MAHMUDIYA - Police found five bodies bearing signs of torture and bullet wounds, in different parts of the small town of Mahmudiya just south of Baghdad, police said.

*NEAR KIRKUK - Police found the body of an Iraqi woman in a small river northwest of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, police said.

RASHAD - The body of a teenage boy was found dumped on a roadside in the small town of Rashad, 30 km (20 miles) southwest of Kirkuk. Police said the body had numerous gunshot wounds.

*BASRA - A U.S. contractor was killed on Friday as the result of a rocket attack in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra, the U.S. embassy said in a statement.

Does the White House know any of this is happening? Read the rest of this post...

Devastating Washington Post analysis of Bush administration's failure to take bin Laden seriously

UPDATE: The article is from 2002, I'd totally not realized the date. I guess this is a look back at what journalism used to be like.

Devastating.

1. Bush could have gone after bin Laden, but he held back.

The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S. government – a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But for the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept. 11, President Bush and his advisers held back.

2. Bush was more interested in SDI than going after bin Laden.

Bush and his top aides had higher priorities – above all, ballistic missile defense.

3. Bush criticized Clinton anti-terror policies, then did the same policies:

Privately, as the strategy took form in spring and summer, the Bush team expressed disdain for the counterterrorist policies it had inherited from President Bill Clinton. Speaking of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a colleague said that "what she characterized as the Clinton administration approach was 'empty rhetoric that made us look feckless.'‚"

Yet a careful review of the Bush administration's early record on terrorism finds more continuity than change from the Clinton years, measured in actions taken and decisions made. Where the new team shifted direction, it did not always choose a more aggressive path...

4. Bush concluded in February 2001 that bin Laden was behind the USS Cole attack. Then Bush did absolutely nothing to respond.

At least twice, Bush conveyed the message to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime responsible for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole – a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney – the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.

5. Rumsfeld cut extra money for counterterrorism.

In his first budget, Bush spent $13.6 billion on counterterrorist programs across 40 departments and agencies. That compares with $12 billion in the previous fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget. There were also somewhat higher gaps this year, however, between what military commanders said they needed to combat terrorists and what they got. When the Senate Armed Services Committee tried to fill those gaps with $600 million diverted from ballistic missile defense, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he would recommend a veto. That threat came Sept. 9.

6. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger warned Condi Rice about Al Qaeda

"I said to Condi, 'You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al Qaeda specifically than any other issue,' " he said. Bush administration officials gave a similar account.

7. Bush's team said Clinton was in fact TOO focused on getting bin Laden.

Bush's team had different reasons. They had already begun discussions, one adviser said, of whether bin Laden's death would be enough. And they were convinced that "this wasn't about [bin Laden], this was about al Qaeda, and that's why we had to go after the network as a whole."

Personalizing the struggle to one man, he said, was "one of the fallacies" of the Clinton team's approach.

8. Bush White House simply didn't make terrorism a priority.

"The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a certain number of issues at one time – two or three," said Michael Sheehan, the State Department's former coordinator for counterterrorism. "You can't get to the principals on any other issue. That's in any administration."

Before Sept. 11, terrorism did not make that cut.

9. Clinton staff met weekly to coordinate anti-terror battle, Bush's advisers didn't have nearly the same zeal for the issue.

He noticed a difference on terrorism. Clinton's Cabinet advisers, burning with the urgency of their losses to bin Laden in the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the Cole attack in 2000, had met "nearly weekly" to direct the fight, Kerrick said. Among Bush's first-line advisers, "candidly speaking, I didn't detect" that kind of focus, he said. "That's not being derogatory. It's just a fact. I didn't detect any activity but what Dick Clarke and the CSG were doing."

Read the rest of this post...

It's audience research time - why did FOX's Chris Wallace mention a supposedly new blame-Clinton book?

In just his second question to President Clinton, FOX's Chris Wallace asked Clinton about a book that's not out yet, called "The Looming Tower." Wallace says this book lays the blame for 9/11 at Clinton's feet. Wallace hid behind "his viewers," saying essentially that they wanted to know why Clinton hadn't gotten bin Laden.

Anyone know anything about this book or its author? And why Wallace was up on the book and/or mentioning it? Clearly the Republicans, with the help of Disney/ABC, have decided that the only way to save their pitifully corrupt and incompetent party is to, yet again, try to shift the blame to Bill Clinton.

Which is kind of funny since when Clinton was president, after the first Trade Center attack, we weren't hit for the remaining 7 years of his term. Bush can only claim 5. Read the rest of this post...

Daddy, Billy Clinton was mean to me

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....

You always know you've hit pay dirt with the Republicans when they flip out on you.

It's the same pattern every time. A Democrat says something or does something to finally stand up to some Republican outrage. The Republicans respond by doing anything and everything in their power to convince the Democrat NEVER to stand up again. Why? Because you've just made a very effective argument and they need to stop you from every doing it again. Usually the Republican counterstrike takes the form of one of the following:

1. Democrat X is MEAN.
2. Democrat X is angry.
3. Democrat X is crazed.
4. Democrat X has complaints but no solutions.

Of course, what they're describing is the very Republican attack that the Dems are forced to respond to. I.e., the GOP goes mean, crazy, vicious (e.g., Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Ken Mehlman, Rick Santorum), so when we respond forcefully they accuse us of doing exactly what they just did - the goal, to shut us up next time they go mean, crazy and vicious.

The only problem here? President Clinton, being a REAL president, doesn't put up with people's crap. When he's attacked he doesn't jump into an airplane and fly around the country, hiding in bunkers. He takes his attackers on publicly and fiercely.

Just look at the latest story of President Clinton ripping FOX News' head off for lying about September 11. Clinton eviscerated FOX host Chris Wallace for, among other things, lying to Clinton about what the show was going to be about. But then Wallace went one step further, a la Disney/ABC he started lying about September 11 and the events leading up to it. Clinton, having a backbone, called bullshit. (Clinton also made it quite clear that George Bush is the one who never tried to take out bin Laden, or respond to the Cole attack or any other attack.)

And now FOX and the GOP are all freaked out because the bad man was mean to them. Waaaaaaaaaaaa...

Which goes to a larger lesson that Joe in DC often reiterates. Bullies don't know how to handle someone who gets in their face and calls them on their bs. So in the case of the Republican bullies, they try to convince you that fighting back is BAD so that you'll never fight back again.

Sorry Charlie, this time you picked on the wrong Democrat. Read the rest of this post...

The Bin Laden rumor

Been checking the different news stories on the rumor that started in France about the alleged death of Bin Laden from typhoid or some other water-related disease.

The latest AP article maintains that French leaders and other governments cannot confirm the report:

President Jacques Chirac said Saturday that information contained in a leaked intelligence document raising the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan last month is ''in no way whatsoever confirmed.''....Officials from Afghanistan to Washington expressed doubts about the report.

Two American intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue said Saturday that U.S. agencies have no evidence to suggest a reason to believe that bin Laden is dead or dying.

However, Time Magazine claims Saudi sources saying Bin Laden is either very sick or may be dead:

Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, believed to be on the run in rugged terrain in the Afghan-Pakistani border region since the September 11 attacks five years ago, has become seriously ill and may have already died, a Saudi source tells TIME, echoing earlier reports in the French media.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Saudi officials have received multiple credible reports over the last several weeks that Bin Laden has been suffering from a water-borne illness. The source believes that there is a "high probability" that Bin Laden has already died from the disease, but stressed that Saudi officials have thus far received no concrete evidence of Bin Laden's death.

As you can imagine, the cable channels are agog over these developments. CNN's Nic Robertson has a Saudi source who claims OBL is sick, but not dead. We'll keep monitoring. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Back from a long run...what have I missed?

Also, L'shana tova to all who are celebrating the new year... Read the rest of this post...

Joanne Morrison of Reuters, please get your story right

In your article about Bill Clinton you say the following:

Earlier this month, Clinton dismissed as "indisputably wrong" a U.S. television show that suggested her (sic) was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal to confront the Islamic militant threat that culminated in the September 11 attacks.

Bill Clinton didn't "dismiss" the allegations. The September 11 Commission Report dismissed the allegations, and had you read even one single story about that entire debacle you'd have known this. The way your story is currently written presents the issue as he-said she-said, when in fact, Clinton wasn't the one rebutting the allegations, the 9/11 Commission Report states categorically that the allegations have no basis in fact. You set up a false equivalence that lessens Clinton's claim and strengthens those who defamed him. Which is more than ironic since the story itself is about FOX News trying to defame Clinton by rewriting history.

Ms. Morrison, what you wrote is not fair, it's not correct, and it misleads the reader into thinking the issue is somehow murky when it definitively is not.

Please correct your article.

PS Clinton is a "he" and not a "her." Read the rest of this post...

Another deadly explosion in Baghdad

32 reported killed, but it still remains to be seen whether they are the right kind of dead for the Pentagon to be counted. Read the rest of this post...

It's now officially autumn

Lovely weather is due later today here in Paris, for the first day of autumn. It's now officially pumpkin soup time of the year and our pumpkins in France are the best. The autumn veggies on the left are from the organic market on Raspail, which is always full of great stuff. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Run, don't walk, from the new film "All the King's Men." Horrendous is too kind a word for something that would get an F if it had been written by my 13 year old nephew. I thought I was the only one hating the film till I noticed the guy a few seats down and his girlfriend laughing hysterically when one of the lead characters died (it's not a comedy). Perhaps the woman in the hall after the film said it best - "I just wasted two hours of my life." She said she wanted to walk out. I wanted to walk out. And the only other two films in my life that I can remember wanting to walk out of - well, make that three - were AI (also with Jude Law), Something About Mary, and Backdraft.

Hideous, hideous, hideous film.

The Illusionist, on the other hand, was really nice. A great period piece, and other than the last 2 minutes, which were heavy-handed and totally unnecessary, it's a really nice movie and worth a see.

But for the love of God, stay far away from All the Kings Men. Read the rest of this post...