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McCain Gets Iraq Facts Wrong AgainObama isn't expected to speak until 7:45 pm ET at a rally in Great Falls, MT. But his campaign has released excerpts of his remarks, which go right after McCain's "pre-surge levels" misstatement yesterday. They also invoke Scott McClellan's new book.
"There are honest differences about how to move forward in Iraq, just like there were honest differences about whether or not we should go to war," Obama is supposed to say. "John McCain was for the invasion of Iraq; I opposed it. John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s war in Iraq indefinitely; I want to end it. So there’s going to be a clear choice for the American people this November."
"But that’s not what John McCain’s been talking about the last few days. He’s been proposing a joint trip to Iraq that’s nothing more than a political stunt. He’s even been using it to raise a few dollars for his campaign. But it seems like Sen. McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts, because yesterday – in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy – he stood up in Wisconsin and said, 'We have drawn down to pre-surge levels' in Iraq."
"That’s not true, and anyone running for commander-in-chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq -- 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer -- that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Sen. McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to 'nitpicking.'"
"Well, I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged."
News Media ignored McCain's numerous foreign policy errors During a March 18 press conference in Amman, Jordan, McCain made the admittedly false claim, twice, that Iran is training Al Qaeda. After Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who accompanied McCain on the trip, whispered something in his ear, McCain corrected himself, saying: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda." McCain had made a similar misstatement on Hugh Hewitt's radio show the day before.
At an April 8 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, McCain asked Gen. David Petraeus, "Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?" Petraeus replied: "It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago." McCain then asked, "Certainly not an obscure sect of -- of the Shiites all -- overall --" prompting Petraeus to reply "No," as McCain went on to finish his question: "or Sunnis or anybody else?" In fact, Al Qaeda in Iraq is a Sunni Muslim, not Shiite, group.
Iraq War May Have Increased Energy Costs Worldwide by a Staggering $6 Trillion
The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.
The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.
He spoke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two weeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002, compared with the fourfold increase of the 1973 and 1974 "oil shock" that ended the world's long postwar boom.
Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities.
The New American Century Goes Missing in Action, Another Bush LegacyIt’s hard now even to recall the original vision George W. Bush and his top officials had of how the conquest of Iraq would unfold as an episode in the President’s Global War on Terror. In their minds, the invasion was sure to yield a quick victory, to be followed by the creation of a client state that would house crucial “enduring” U.S. military bases from which Washington would project power throughout what they liked to term “the Greater Middle East.”
In addition, Iraq was quickly going to become a free-market paradise, replete with privatized oil flowing at record rates onto the world market. Like falling dominos, Syria and Iran, cowed by such a demonstration of American might, would follow suit, either from additional military thrusts or because their regimes — and those of up to 60 countries worldwide — would appreciate the futility of resisting Washington’s demands. Eventually, the “unipolar moment” of U.S. global hegemony that the collapse of the Soviet Union had initiated would be extended into a “New American Century” (along with a generational Pax Republicana at home).
This vision is now, of course, long gone, largely thanks to unexpected and tenacious resistance of every sort within Iraq. This resistance consisted of far more than the initial Sunni insurgency that tied down what Donald Rumsfeld pridefully labeled “the greatest military force on the face of the earth.” It is already none too rash a statement to suggest that, at all levels of society, usually at great sacrifice, the Iraqi people frustrated the imperial designs of a superpower.
Consider, for example, the myriad ways in which the Iraqi Sunnis resisted the occupation of their country from almost the moment the Bush administration’s intention to fully dismantle Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime became clear. The largely Sunni city of Falluja, like most other communities around the country, spontaneously formed a new government based on local clerical and tribal structures. Like many of these cities, it avoided the worst of the post-invasion looting by encouraging the formation of local militias to police the community. Ironically, the orgy of looting that took place in Baghdad was, at least in part, a consequence of the U.S. military presence, which delayed the creation of such militias there. Eventually, however, sectarian militias brought a modicum of order even to Baghdad.
In Falluja and elsewhere, these same militias soon became effective instruments for reducing, and — for a time — eliminating, the presence of the U.S. military. For the better part of a year, faced with IEDs and ambushes from insurgents, the U.S. military declared Falluja a “no go” zone, withdrew to bases outside the city, and discontinued violent incursions into hostile neighborhoods. This retreat was matched in many other cities and towns. The absence of patrols by occupation forces saved tens of thousands of “suspected insurgents” from the often deadly violence of home invasions, and their relatives from wrecked homes and detained family members.
Even the most successful of U.S. military adventures in that period, the second battle of Falluja in November 2004, could also be seen, from quite a different perspective, as a successful act of resistance. Because the United States was required to mass a significant proportion of its combat brigades for the offensive (even transferring British troops from the south to perform logistical duties), most other cities were left alone. Many of these cities used this respite from the U.S. military to establish, or consolidate, autonomous governments or quasi-governments and defensive militias, making it all the more difficult for the occupation to control them.
Falluja itself was, of course, destroyed, with 70% of its buildings turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of its residents permanently displaced — an extreme sacrifice that had the unexpected effect of taking pressure off other Iraqi cities for a while. In fact, the ferocity of the resistance in the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq forced the American military to wait almost four years before renewing their initial 2004 efforts to pacify the well-organized Sadrist-led resistance in the predominantly Shia areas of the country.
Interrogation Tactics Were Challenged at White House
Five years ago, as troubling reports emerged about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a career lawyer at the Justice Department began a long and relatively lonely campaign to alert top Bush administration officials to a strategy he considered "wrongheaded."
Bruce C. Swartz, a criminal division deputy in charge of international issues, repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics at White House meetings of a special group formed to decide detainee matters, with representatives present from the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA.
Swartz warned that the abuse of Guantanamo inmates would do "grave damage" to the country's reputation and to its law enforcement record, according to an investigative audit released earlier this week by the Justice Department's inspector general. Swartz was joined by a handful of other top Justice and FBI officials who said the abuse would almost certainly taint any legal proceedings against the detainees.
Now their predictions appear to be coming true. A top Pentagon official chose this month to drop charges against a detainee who was roughly interrogated at Guantanamo, and U.S. officials believe it may be difficult to charge him at all. Defense lawyers for a group of alleged Sept. 11 conspirators in U.S. custody have said they plan to raise concerns about harsh techniques used by the CIA and will seek to keep evidence derived from such tactics out of court.
Concerns among FBI agents about the interrogations first came to light in 2004, when a series of internal memos disclosed to the American Civil Liberties Union made clear that the bureau withdrew its agents from interrogation rooms in protest. But the degree of dissent over the administration's aggressive tactics within the bureau's top ranks and within the Justice Department was unclear until the release of this week's report, which starkly describes some of these protests and the cool reception the dissenters got among some officials at the White House and elsewhere.
Besides Swartz, the others depicted as raising sustained objections are then-FBI assistant general counsel Marion "Spike" Bowman, who documented his concerns in written reports, and Pasquale D'Amuro, then the bureau's assistant director for counterterrorism. Michael Chertoff, who was then assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, raised concerns in November 2002 about the effectiveness of the military's methods, although he said later he did not recall hearing assertions that they were illegal.
Beck revived falsehood that Bill Clinton said "We've got to slow down our economy" to fight global warming
Summary: On his nationally syndicated radio show, Glenn Beck falsely claimed that former President Bill Clinton said, "We've got to slow down our economy" in order to combat global warming, and aired a portion of a speech Clinton made in January. However, as Clinton's full remarks make clear, he did not suggest "slow[ing] down our economy" to fight global warming.
As Media Matters for America noted, Clinton's full quote makes clear that he did not say "[w]e've got to slow down our economy" or "the only way to really do this is to halt the economy." Rather, he said that "rich" countries could take that approach, but it would not work. He said that the "only way" to fight global warming is to prove that doing so "is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy":
CLINTON: And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada -- the rich counties [sic] -- would say, "OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren." We could do that. But if we did that, you know as well as I do, China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren. The only way we can do this is if we get back in the world's fight against global warming and prove it is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy that saves the planet for our children and grandchildren. It is the only way it will work.
Democracy in America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes, and We May Be Running Out of Luck
Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”
Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.
The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.
The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.
Bush's Assault on the Constitution a Legacy of ShameThe 44th president will assume office with powers greatly enlarged by his or her predecessor. Drawing on recent precedents, the next president could launch preemptive wars with only minor interference from Congress, ignore the ancient right of habeas corpus and imprison political enemies, spy on American citizens without serious legal restraint, use practically any federal agency for political purposes, manipulate the press in ways inconceivable prior to 2000, corrupt the federal justice system for political gain, destroy evidence in criminal cases, use the Justice Department to prosecute members of the opposing party, offer lucrative no-bid government contracts to friends, expand the creation of private security armies, use torture, create secret prisons, assassinate inconvenient foreign leaders, circumvent laws with signing statements, and a great deal more. Such things are now possible because the system of checks and balances carefully written into the Constitution and explained in great detail in the Federalist Papers were weakened as a result of historical circumstances of the 20th century, but systematically and with great forethought by the administration of George W. Bush.
Said to be necessary in order to protect the country from terrorism, the expansion of presidential authority in truth was carried out by neo-conservatives who in the smoke and ashes of 9-11 smelled opportunity. The result is James Madison’s worst nightmare: the unification of once carefully separated powers of governance — executive, judicial, legislative — in the hands of a single faction along with substantial control over the press, radio, and television and an extensive police and surveillance apparatus he would have loathed.
The surreptitious and perhaps fraudulent manner by which presidential powers were recently expanded has greatly diminished trust and respect for the office at home and abroad. But unless explicitly repudiated by the next president and prohibited by law, the precedents of the Bush presidency will stand. The expanded powers of one president typically are carefully guarded by their successors. Republican or Democrat the next president will be advised to distance the office from the more controversial actions of George W. Bush, but only as a matter of expediency, not for reasons inherent in the Constitution or the law. If so, we will have crossed the line into executive tyranny.
Acquiescence in the unlawful enlargement of presidential power is neither right nor necessary. The next president would be well advised to support the appointment of a special prosecutor to thoroughly investigate the possible illegalities involved in the recent expansion of presidential power not to exact political revenge, but as the first step toward recalibrating the presidency to the Constitution. Second, he or she should appoint a Blue Ribbon panel of experts in Constitutional Law and the presidency to make recommendations to Congress about the restoration of the office.
Many will disagree, saying that learning the truth would be unnecessarily divisive and a waste of time in the face of more pressing business. To the contrary, we the people, Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike, will need to know the truth in order to reestablish the rule of law in the highest levels of government and restore trust, credibility, and respect for the office of the president now tarnished by the systematic abuse of power and excessive secrecy. Otherwise, we invite worse abuses of power in difficult times ahead.
Bush's appeasement malarkeyWHEN HE hinted to the Israeli Knesset this week that Barack Obama was an appeaser for being willing to talk to Iran, President Bush broke an unwritten rule against partisan politicking on foreign shores. He also displayed confusion about his own policies — and about the cause of his calamitous foreign policy failures.
Perhaps Bush forgot that his ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, has been holding talks about Iraq with an Iranian counterpart. If so, there were Knesset members who could have reminded him. Israelis are intensely aware of the strategic gifts that Bush bestowed on Iran by toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and empowering Iran’s Shi’ite proteges in Iraq. Indeed, few have done more to enable Iran than George W. Bush.
‘‘Some seem to believe,’’ Bush told the Knesset, ‘‘that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.’’ He was comparing unnamed appeasers of today to isolationists who thought they could negotiate with Nazi Germany and keep the United States out of World War II. Bush implied that Obama would be just that naive.
In reality, the likely Democratic nominee seems inclined toward a tough and prudent statecraft in the mold of Bush’s father and his secretary of state, James Baker. It also seems to have slipped the younger Bush’s mind that his own policy for keeping nuclear weapons out of Iran’s grasp is to encourage diplomacy along with mild United Nations sanctions.
Toppling the Big Myths of Republican PoliticsLong since Americans were wooed by images of Ronald Reagan astride a horse, complete with cowboy hat and rugged good looks, the Republican Party has used a John Wayne mythology to build up its candidates and win elections. Their marketing scheme of evoking brave, courageous, heroic warriors has been so persuasive and strikes such a patriotic nerve, that many citizens have voted based on this manipulative imagery even when they’ve flat out disagreed with the GOP’s positions on key issues.
Glenn Greenwald puts this bogus GOP mythology under microscopic critique and successfully argues that none of these men is, in fact, a brave, strong moral warrior—far from it. Rather, most have dodged military duty, have strings of broken marriages and affairs, and live decadent, elitist lives, which they so ruthlessly condemn Democrats for doing. Such false archetypes—that GOP leaders are exclusively ?t to command the military, represent traditional family values, and are fiscally restrained and responsible because they’re just regular folk like us—are so firmly entrenched in our culture as to allow the GOP to sit back and let their time-tested marketing ploy spin itself silly while avoiding debate on real issues. When they actually do voice opinions, it’s nothing more than a smear campaign of the supposed weakness and elitism of the Democrats.
To prevent this tired marketing scheme from succeeding again, Greenwald takes off the gloves and knocks down the hoaxes and myths, exposing the tactics the right-wing machine uses to drown out both reality and consideration of real issues. But he also calls on Democrats to shake off the defensive posture (“We love America too,” “We support the troops too,” “We also believe in God”) and start attacking the Republican candidates for the hypocrites they, in truth, are.
The ?rst book to dissect the Republican Cult of Personality and leave it openly exposed in its unabashed, shameful depravity, Great American Hypocrites is a deeply necessary call-out to Democrats to attack the GOP with their competitor’s very own weapons.
Petraeus’ Fog of WarGeneral Petraeus is being promoted. Now in charge of the war in Iraq, he will take charge of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here’s a quick summary of the media’s opinion of the man, as taken from Wikipedia:
“Time has named Petraeus one of the 100 most influential leaders and revolutionaries of 2007 as well as one of its four runners up for Time Person of the Year. He was also named the second most influential American conservative by The Daily Telegraph as well as The Daily Telegraph’s 2007 Man of the Year, and “America’s most respected soldier” by Der Spiegel in 2008. In 2005, Petraeus was selected as one of America’s top leaders by US News and World Report.”
Here are the facts.
Petraeus’ primary job in Iraq was to train Iraq’s police and army. So that they could stand up and we could stand down.
The facts speak for themselves. They can’t stand up and we haven’t stood down.
No matter how often people say he’s brilliant and how many charts he brings to Senate hearings, the bottom line is that his efforts failed completely.
He went back to the US to rewrite the army’s counter-insurgency manual.
It’s available on line, at www.npr.org/documents/2008/may/counterinsurgency_manual.pdf or at www.cfr.org/publication/12257 or you can buy it on Amazon. It’s clear, clean, well-written and makes a lot of sense.
So it is even more of a shame that neither anybody on the Senate committees that questioned him nor anybody in the media seems to have read it. The most salient idea is the force ratio that’s called for. Twenty to twenty-five soldiers for every 1000 in the population. Which is a peculiar way to say a bare minimum of 1:50. It is also the same force ratio that was called for in the old counter-insurgency manual.
Iraq’s population is 27,500,000. That means, according to both the new and the old counter-insurgency manuals, according to General Petraeus himself, that a successful operation in Iraq requires a minimum of 550,000 troops.
Over half a million pairs of boots on the ground.
Why then, would he eagerly take command of “the surge,” which brought troops levels up to merely 169,000 troops? About 381,000 short of the minimum. Half a million soldiers short of the more ideal ratio 25:1,000.
The goal of the surge was: (1) to bring stability so that, (2) Iraqi political progress could be made and (3) Iraq’s police and armed forces could stand up! So that we could stand down!
The current level of conflict shows that Petraeus and “the surge” failed to bring stability. No significant political progress has been made. The recent operation in Basra, in which Iraqi troops refused to fight, deserted, or went over to the other side, shows that once again Petraeus failed at the same task he’d failed at initially.
What was the result, for him, of his clear cut second round of failures? Another promotion.
That explains why he would take a job that his own numbers said must fail, publicly pretend that it could succeed, and tell the Senate that it was sort of, kind of like, maybe succeeding. Because it didn’t matter if it succeed or failed. He was going to move on up.
It is widely presumed that the US failed to plan for an insurgency because the people at the top, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, didn’t think there’d be one. Anyone who said there might be, like General Shinsheki, was moved out of the way, demoted, or dismissed.
But by the time Petraeus went back — promoted upwards based on his initial failure — there was no doubt that there was an insurgency. There, at hand, was the text book on how to fight one, written by the man himself. So why put in just a third of the troops needed to do the job?
Presuming that they’re rational, not just loony toons, there was, and is, no intent to “win” in Iraq.
The intent was to create a political situation in which we would stay, month by incremental month, until Bush was gone. Then someone else would have to withdraw.
Woman's rape case against Halliburton can go to trialA woman who said she was raped by co-workers while employed by a contractor in Iraq can take her claims to trial, a federal judge ruled Friday.
Jamie Leigh Jones filed a federal lawsuit last year, saying she was attacked while working for a Halliburton Co. subsidiary at Camp Hope, Baghdad, in 2005. Her lawsuit claims that after she endured harassment from some of the men where she lived in coed barracks, she was drugged and raped by Halliburton and KBR firefighters.
Jones, a former Conroe resident, said a KBR representative imprisoned her in a shipping container for a day so she wouldn't report the assault.
Attorneys for Halliburton, KBR and other subsidiaries that have been sued have disputed Jones' allegations. KBR split from Halliburton last year.
Washington-based attorney Stephanie Morris said her client is pleased that she will have the opportunity to bring attention to the case.
"We are extremely excited we can now go forward and present the case in the public arena and make the public aware of what been going on overseas in Iraq. Halliburton has ratified gross sexual conduct by their failure to act," Morris said.
RNC debuts attack against ObamaThe Republican National Committee has just rolled out a new Web site -- and a new Web ad -- devoted to attacking Barack Obama. The site and the video share the same title, "Can We Ask?" and portray Obama as "a questionable candidate."
[ ]....According to the New York Times' Caucus blog, Obama spokesman Bill Burton's response to the Web ad -- which can be viewed below -- was, "If the best they can do is a series of answered questions set to the aspirational tones of our campaign in a ham-handed Web video, I sense this is going to be a long general election for the status quo crowd in Washington supporting John McCain."
US Panel Authorizes Subpoena of Cheney Aide
WASHINGTON - A Democratic-led U.S. congressional panel voted on Tuesday to authorize its chairman to subpoena Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in its probe of possible U.S. torture of suspected terrorists.0506 11 1
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, may issue a subpoena as early as Wednesday for David Addington, who the administration maintains is immune from being required to testify.
If Addington refuses to show up, a court fight is likely, but it may not be resolved until after President George W. Bush and Cheney end their terms in January and leave office.
Despite that likelihood, Nadler, chairman of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, pushed for a possible confrontation.
“Congress has the prerogative and duty to demand the truth,” Nadler said. “Torture is un-American and yet it has been used by this government.”
Without debate, his panel approved a resolution authorizing a subpoena of Addington on a voice vote.
In the Last Gilded Age, People Stood Up to Greed -- Why Aren’t We?Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant's vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.
Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the New Rich and the New Right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a "bacchanalia of the haves." Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: "Everything is power and money and how to use them both... We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury."
That's when the division of wealth and income began polarizing so that, by every measure, the country has now exceeded the extremes of inequality achieved during the first Gilded Age; nor are our elites any more embarrassed by their Mammon-worship than were members of the "leisure class" excoriated a century ago by that take-no-prisoners social critic of American capitalism Thorstein Veblen.
Back then, it was about masquerading as European nobility at lavish balls in elegant hotels like New York's Waldorf-Astoria, locked down to forestall any unpleasantness from the street (where ordinary folk were in a surly mood trying to survive the savage depression of the 1890s). Today's "leisure class" is holed up in gated communities or houseoleums as gargantuan as the imported castles of their Gilded Age forerunners, ready to fly off -- should the natives grow restless -- to private islands aboard their private jets.
Faith-Based Missile Defense
In an oversight hearing on the US missile defense program last month, Philip Coyle III, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in the Department of Defense from 1994-2001, spoke to the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs about the almost impossible position it's in when it comes to oversight of this $150 billion – and counting – weapons program: "Congress does not have the information it needs to do oversight. If you don't have the information, and the Pentagon just says ‘trust me', you can't really do oversight."
Yesterday on Capitol Hill, Lieutenant General Henry A. "Trey" Obering III, Director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), appeared before the subcommittee for the third in this series of hearings: "Oversight of Missile Defense (Part 3): Questions for the Missile Defense Agency." It seemed the General was there to illustrate Coyle's very point, as evident when Chairman John Tierney tried to gauge how realistic the testing has been for the system which purports to defend the US and Europe from ICBMs. Has the system been tested against even the most basic countermeasures and decoys that we would anticipate from a nation capable of developing such missiles?
"What I can say is we have flown against countermeasures in the past… we will continue to expand that in our future program," Gen. Obering said. "To have this conversation in a genuine fashion I need to go closed."
"I gotta tell you, General, how the American public is supposed to decide on something with this kind of enormity of expense and speculation [about] some of the capabilities is mind-boggling," Rep. Tierney said. "We over-classify so much in this country. Back when the President made the decision that he wanted to try to deploy this inoperable system in 2004, we asked for a General Accountability Office study on this – it was done. There were 50 questions addressed in the study. It came back, and the minute it came back it was classified all of a sudden. And… they don't classify stuff when it's good news around here these days…. I don't think it does a service to the American people at all or to this Congress to keep classifying everything on that basis."
"…. I'm sure, Mr. Chairman, you would not want us to transmit in an open hearing to enemies around the world – Iran and North Korea – any kind of data that they could take advantage of in trying to overcome the system for the future," Gen. Obering replied. "I know you wouldn't want to do that."
"Of course not," Rep. Tierney fired back. "That's a tremendous red herring that we're not even talking about here. What we're talking about is the capacity of the people of this country [who are] spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this system – they ought to know against what it will work and against what it won't work. And I'm not sure that information is going to affect any other country's capacity… but it should affect our decision-making process of how we spend the taxpayers money."
What backroom conniving are Steny Hoyer and the Chris Carney Blue Dogs up to on FISA?Are House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and a small handful of "Blue Dog" Democrats working in secret to reverse one of the only worthwhile acts of Congressional Democrats since they were given control of Congress in 2006: namely, the refusal to vest the President with vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and bequeath lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty? It certainly appears that way.
Numerous reports -- both public and otherwise -- suggest that Hoyer is negotiating with Jay Rockefeller to write a new FISA bill that would be agreeable to the White House and the Senate. Their strategy is to craft a bill that they can pretend is something short of amnesty for telecoms but which, in every meaningful respect, ensures an end to the telecom lawsuits. It goes without saying that no "compromise" will be acceptable to Rockefeller or the White House unless there is a guaranteed end to those lawsuits, i.e., unless the bill grants amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.
Even Capitol Hill insiders are baffled at the impetus for this new drive to capitulate. For the first times in years, the House Democratic caucus unified to take an actual stand on an issue relating to Terrorism -- all but five Blue Dogs voted for the House bill and rejected the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill. Even the GOP accepted that their fear-mongering campaign around the issue had failed, as there was no public outcry demanding that the President be allowed to spy on Americans without warrants or that telecoms be allowed to break the law with impunity. Key Blue Dogs have been making impressive public statements insisting that they will not reverse their position.
Hoyer's motives, then, appear to be two-pronged: (1) he and the House Democratic leadership simply want to grant amnesty to telecoms -- they favor it -- because they do not want the lawsuits relating to illegal spying to proceed to resolution; and (2) they are deferring to the tiny number of Blue Dogs who favor amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping. This article from The Hill this week specifically identifies freshman Rep. Chris Carney as demanding that the House comply with the President's demands:
Vulnerable freshman Democrats and Blue Dogs say the issue demands action.
"Overall, it's very important," said Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.), a freshman member of the Blue Dog Coalition who often votes against his leadership.
Carney said that a compromise should protect national security and also respect civil liberties. "I've been in favor of the Senate bill. We'll see what happens," he said.
In early March, a new campaign was announced to begin running ads in the districts of vulnerable Democratic Congressmen like Carney whose presence in Washington is worse than worthless: it's extremely counter-productive since they essentially eliminate the entire concept of "opposition party" by continuously pressuring Democrats to enable the most radical aspects of Republican rule for their own perceived narrow political gain.
Within 24 hours, close to $50,000 was raised for that ad campaign. And the poll accompanying the fundraising campaign -- which asked which of five proposed Blue Dogs should be the first target -- resulted in a clear win (or, more accurately, a clear loss) for Chris Carney. The ad campaign aimed at Carney is in the process of being completed (and a professional ad coordinator to oversee and finalize that process is now needed -- email me if you are one or can recommend one and I'll pass it along).
For obvious reasons, this ad campaign is now more imperative than ever. The more funds that are available to fuel the ad campaign, the more potent the impact will be -- both for Carney and in terms of the message being sent generally. Those who want to donate to the ad campaign can and are encouraged to do so here.
I wrote about the reasons why it is so crucial to target Democrats who behave like Carney does back in March when the campaign was launched. These latest developments vividly highlight those reasons. Scare-mongering ads from right-wing groups have been running in numerous districts of the freshman Democrats who have stood firm against the demands of the telecoms and the President. But there have been no ads running in the districts of those members who want to vote for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty. As a result, House Democrats like Hoyer and Carney perceive that there is a cost only when they defy the President, but perceive that there is no price to be paid from capitulating. More than anything, that is what has to change.
