The Top 10 Rightblogger Stories of 2008

The Top 10 Rightblogger Stories of 2008

#8: The Hoover Boom. "This election year does look quite a bit like Hoover vs. Roosevelt (and given that choice, I'll take Hoover)," said National Review's Jonah Goldberg, setting off a little avalanche of rightblogger warnings that "electing Obama and the congressional Democrats will be like electing FDR in 1932." Amazingly, U.S. voters failed to take the bait. Maybe rightbloggers should have promoted Hoovervilles as holiday camps for families on a budget.

#7: And Robin is Tony Blair. "A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds... Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a 'W.'" In the Wall Street Journal Andrew Klavan explained why The Dark Knight is "a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war... Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency." Maybe that explains why the Joker was more popular. (The Journal unfortunately didn't run Klavan's other essay about the Hollywood film that celebrated an earlier phase of Bush's career, Pineapple Express.)

CHENEY: I don’t have any idea. I don’t follow the polls

CHENEY: I don’t have any idea. I don’t follow the polls
Only 29 percent of Americans approve of the job Dick Cheney is doing as Vice President. In an interview with his hometown Wyoming newspaper, The Caspar Star-Tribune, Cheney expressed his bewilderment over his low approval numbers:

QUESTION: How do you explain your low approval rating?

CHENEY: I don’t have any idea. I don’t follow the polls.

My experience has been over the years that if you govern based upon poll numbers, upon trying to improve your overall poll ratings, people I’ve encountered who do that are people who won’t make tough decisions. And the job the president has and those who advise him is to make those basic fundamental decisions for the nation that nobody else is authorized or able to make.

In addition to his well-documented abuse of power and disregard for the rule of law, Cheney’s public disapproval ratings might be explained in part by his own personal disregard for the public. When told that two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Iraq war, Cheney responded “so?,” adding that he didn’t care what the American people thought.

While he says he doesn’t follow the polls, Cheney was all too proud to state shortly after the 2004 elections: “President George W. Bush won the greatest number of popular votes of any presidential candidate in history.” (That’s no longer true.)

Cheney is still holding out hope, however, that the polls will turn his way. He said recently, “I’m personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Bush Defeats Truman

Bush Defeats Truman
At 39 months in the doghouse, George W. Bush has surpassed Harry Truman's record as the postwar president to linger longest without majority public approval.

Bush hasn't received majority approval for his work in office in ABC News/Washington Post polls since Jan. 16, 2005  three years and three months ago. The previous record was Truman's during his last 38 months in office.

Click here for PDF with charts and full questionnaire.

Truman's problems included both economic recession and the war in Korea, which, in October 1952, 56 percent of Americans said was not worth fighting. Bush's approval, likewise, has suffered overwhelmingly because of the unpopular war in Iraq; his job rating correlates almost perfectly with views of the war.

In the latest ABC/Post poll, just 33 percent of Americans approve of Bush's work, a point from his career-low 32 percent earlier this year. Sixty-four percent disapprove, with those who "strongly" disapprove outnumbering strong approvers by a 3-1 margin.

The president's rating has been remarkably stable  32 or 33 percent approval in the last nine national ABC/Post polls, comprising nearly 10,000 interviews since July. Indeed, Bush hasn't exceeded 36 percent approval since November 2006.

Study Criticizes Bush Approach to War Funding, Calls for Changes

Study Criticizes Bush Approach to War Funding, Calls for Changes
President-elect Barack Obama's administration needs to monitor war spending much more closely than the current White House has, according to a new study that criticizes President Bush's approach to funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- a bill that is projected to approach nearly $1 trillion next year.

Even with declining troop numbers in Iraq, the direct price tag of the two wars could grow as high as $1.7 trillion by 2018, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments reported last week. The defense think tank's figure does not include potentially hundreds of billions more in indirect economic and social costs, such as higher oil prices and lost wages.

The war in Iraq alone has already cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars than every other U.S. war except World War II, the CSBA found.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, named by Obama to continue in that job, has made it clear that the incoming administration will scrutinize defense spending, which has mushroomed since 2001 as a result of the wars and related costs.

"There clearly is going to be very close scrutiny of the budget," Gates said this month, adding: "We need to take a very hard look at the way we go about acquisition and procurement."

The CSBA agreed and blamed the ballooning budgets on the Bush administration's unprecedented decision to fund the wars through giant emergency spending measures rather than through appropriations requests.

"The process has reduced the ability of Congress to exercise effective oversight. It has also tended to obscure the long-term costs and budgetary consequences of ongoing military operations," the report says. It also warns that such emergency bills have included "substantial amounts of funding for programs unrelated to the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Steven M. Kosiak, a defense budget expert and author of the study, said the Obama administration should "budget in a more straightforward way, to provide better justification for war-related costs" by having a budget for military operations and long-term force modernization, and limiting supplemental spending to "a real emergency."

The Office of Management and Budget declined to comment on the CSBA report. It said that Congress had appropriated $819.6 billion for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan through fiscal 2008. Fiscal 2009 ends Sept. 30.

The report noted that the Iraq war has cost far more than the Bush administration estimated before the March 2003 invasion, and it cited an interview that Mitch Daniels, then the OMB director, gave to the New York Times, in which he indicated the Iraq war could cost $50 billion to $60 billion. "These estimates have already proven to be wildly optimistic," the report says.

Direct costs of the wars have increased from about $17 billion in 2001, when the United States overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan, to $93 billion in 2003, when the U.S. military invaded Iraq, and $182 billion for 2008. Those costs cover military operations, the building of Iraqi and Afghan forces, foreign assistance, and veterans benefits. The study was based on a broad survey of official and unofficial war-cost assessments.

The report also rapped the Bush administration's paying for the wars through borrowing, rather than tax increases and spending cuts. That approach, it concluded, will lead to interest costs through 2018 that range from about $70 billion to as high as about $700 billion, depending on how much of the war funding came through bond sales.

"If you want to go to war . . . we should probably pay for more of that war upfront rather than borrowing for it," Kosiak said, because the public feels more of the war's real burden through tax increases and spending cuts.

Rove Mocks Infrastructure Spending As ‘Goofy Pie-In-The-Sky Spending Ideas’

Rove Mocks Infrastructure Spending As ‘Goofy Pie-In-The-Sky Spending Ideas’
Yesterday, a water main break in Maryland trapped a dozen commuters in their cars and sent rescuers scrambling to pull motorists from frigid floodwaters. Despite the fact that officials had been warning for years of the dangers of the crumbling pipe system, Maryland did not have the money to make the necessary repairs. As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, the water main break is a wake-up call for the need for massive infrastructure spending by the federal government.

Just hours after the water main break, however, Karl Rove belittled the idea of infrastructure spending on Fox News, calling it “goofy, pie-in-the-sky spending ideas,” and agreed with host Rich Lowry that infrastructure spending doesn’t “make any economic sense”

Cheney’s admissions to the CIA leak prosecutor and FBI

Cheney’s admissions to the CIA leak prosecutor and FBI
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.

Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter.

Still, for those in search of the proverbial “smoking gun”, the question as to whether Cheney directed Libby to leak Plaime’s identity to the media at Cheney’s direction or Libby did so on his own by acting over zealously in carrying out a broader mandate from Cheney to discredit Wilson and his allegations about manipulation of intelligence information, will almost certainly remain an unresolved one.

Libby was convicted on March 6, 2007 of four felony counts of lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice, in attempting to conceal from authorities his own role, and that of other Bush administration officials, in leaking information to the media about Plame.

One of the jurors in the case, Dennis Collins, told the press shortly after the verdict that he and many other jurors believed that Libby was serving as a “fall guy” for Cheney, and had lied to conceal the role of his boss in directing information about Plame to be leaked to the press.

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald, said in both opening and closing arguments that because Libby did not testify truthfully during the course of his investigation, federal authorities were stymied from determining what role Vice President Cheney possibly played in directing the leaking of information regarding Plame that led to the end of her career as a covert CIA officer, and jeopardized other sensitive intelligence information.

Speaking of the consequences of Libby’s deceit to the FBI and a federal grand jury, Fitzgerald, who is also the U.S. attorney for Chicago, said in his Feb. 20, 2007 closing argument: “There is talk about a cloud over the Vice President. There is a cloud over the White House as to what happened. Do you think the FBI, the Grand Jury, the American people are entitled to a straight answer?”

The implication from that and other comments made by Fitzgerald while trying the case was that Libby had lied and placed himself in criminal jeopardy to protect Cheney and to perhaps conceal the fact that Cheney had directed him to leak information to the media about Plame.

Despite Time's report that photos had been in prof's safety deposit box Fox asks if media sat on photos until after election

Despite Time's report that photos had been in prof's safety deposit box Fox asks if media sat on photos until after election
Referring to Time magazine's photo essay, "Obama: The College Years," a 1980 photo shoot of President-elect Barack Obama by then-fellow student Lisa Jack, Sean Hannity stated on the December 18 broadcast of his radio show: "Just take a look at this. Barack Obama has a hat, you know, pulling a drag on a cigarette." He then asked: "I wonder if they had a picture of John McCain, you know -- I wonder why -- why didn't we see these pictures beforehand?" Hannity continued: "You think the media maybe thought, well, it might not hurt -- it might not help Barack Obama?" In fact, according to Time, Jack "put the negatives in a safety-deposit box, so that they could not be used until after the election." Jack is now an assistant professor of psychology at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, not a media photographer.

Similarly, on the December 19 edition of Fox & Friends First, teasing a segment on the Time photo essay, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked: "Was Time magazine sitting on these photos until after the election?" During the ensuing segment on Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked: "Would it have -- I don't know. Would it have served any purpose to release these photos before the election?" Co-host Steve Doocy responded: "Yeah, well, you know, so here you've got these pictures of the president and some of the headlines that said something about, look he was cool even back then. What if somebody else like [Sen. John] McCain had pictures like that. ... [Y]ou've got to figure that they probably would have come out before the election." Fox & Friends then aired a series of altered photos with McCain's face replacing Obama's in the pictures.

Bush Could Have Stopped Mortgage Meltdown

Government warned of mortgage meltdown
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying -- along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK -- regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed-rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted the value of government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims

Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims
n his January 2003 State of the Union address, as part of his effort to make the case for invading Iraq, President Bush infamously declared that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The White House was later forced to repudiate the statement after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson blew the whistle on the claim.

As part of an investigation into pre-war intelligence claims, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked the White House to provide examples of times that the CIA had cleared such uranium references for use in speeches. On January 6, 2004, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) on behalf of Condoleezza Rice that claimed the CIA had “orally cleared” the uranium claim for two of Bush’s speeches.

But in a new memo, House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that he has found evidence contradicting Gonzales’ assertions:

The information the Oversight Committee has received casts serious doubt on the veracity of the representations that Mr. Gonzales made on behalf of Dr. Rice. Contrary to Mr. Gonzales’s assertions, the Committee has received evidence that the CIA objected to the uranium claim in both speeches, resulting in its deletion from the President’s remarks.

When White House speechwriters tried to put the uranium claim into Bush’s Sept. 12, 2002 speech to UN, the CIA rejected it because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech”:

During an interview with the Committee, John Gibson, who served as Director of Speechwriting for Foreign Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), stated that he tried to insert the uranium claim into this speech at the request of Michael Gerson, chief White House speechwriter, and Robert Joseph, the Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense at the NSC. According to Mr. Gibson, the CIA rejected the uranium claim because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech.” Mr. Gibson stated that the CIA “didn’t give that blessing,” the “CIA was not willing to clear that language,” and “[a]t the end of the day, they did not clear it.”

When National Security Council staff refused to take the uranium claim out of Bush’s Sept. 26, 2002 speech, Jami Miscik, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA, called Rice personally to request it be removed:

According to Ms. Miscik, the CIA’s reasons for rejecting the uranium claim “had been conveyed to the NSC counterparts” before the call, and Dr. Rice was “getting on the phone call with that information.” Ms. Miscik told Dr. Rice personally that the CIA was “recommending that it be taken out.” She also said “[i]t turned out to be a relatively short phone call” because “we both knew what the issues were and therefore were able to get to a very easy resolution of it.”

According to Waxman, Rice refused to testify to the Committee about the pre-war claims, so he is unable to say “how she would explain the seeming contradictions between her statements and those of Mr. Gonzales on her behalf and the statements made to the Committee bv senior CIA and NSC officials.”

Stand Up Against Bush's Giveaway of America's Redrock Wilderness

Stand Up Against Bush's Giveaway of America's Redrock Wilderness
You can't put a price on silence or solitude. You can't quantify the beauty of wilderness. And yet that's not going to stop the Bush administration from trying to sell off what should be the birthright of future generations.

In three days, this Friday, 110,000 acres of majestic Utah wild lands go on the auction block, to be sold to the highest bidders in the oil and gas industry. It's a last-ditch effort by a corrupt administration to further enrich its friends in the dirty fuels business. If they succeed, they'll leave a wasteland behind them.

Never mind that we the People of the United States just rejected the failed energy policy of "drill, baby, drill!" Never mind that once industrialized, these precious lands will be marred for centuries. Ravaging these places will put cash in the pockets of greedy speculators, even if it won't solve our energy problems.

The miraculous thing about America though, is that we the People have options. And one of those options is to take a corrupt and foolish administration to court.

This morning I stood with my friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA) to announce an emergency lawsuit aimed at stopping this wanton destruction of Utah wilderness. Sharon Buccino, the head of NRDC's lands program, has been fighting the Bush administration for eight years, holding the line against an industrial juggernaut. She says it's illegal under federal law for the Bureau of Land Management to just snap its fingers and sell off national treasures. In its rush, BLM just ignored the rules.

Sharon's case will be among the last lawsuits NRDC ever files against the Bush administration. Most of those lawsuits have been successful. I don't know the odds on this one, but my fingers are crossed. It could be our last chance to protect these irreplaceable lands.

Bush may be a lame duck president, but he can still quack

12 Things to Throw at Bush

12 Things to Throw at Bush
A shoe is an honest choice. Civilized. Convenient. Sends a simple "you're an artless jackass, and everyone knows it" kind of message. What's more, a hurled shoe is a timeless bit of wisecrackery, sort of like a pie in the face or standing up and hurling your drink at your two-faced lover in a restaurant. Classic.

But this is Dubya we're talking about. Worst. President. Ever. Surely he deserves better. Surely he deserves something a bit more ... thoughtful? Profound? Ironic? After all, while a shoe is nice, it's also terribly cliched. Boring, even.

Of course, I officially endorse none of the following far more appropriate, delightfully hurl-able options. Do not ever throw anything at President Bush, because you could get shot or perhaps go to jail for a very long time, which, despite how you'd be hailed a hero worldwide forevermore, would just be no fun at all. Don't do it. Throwing is wrong. OK?

1) Rainbow flag

Obvious, but effective. What better way to say, "Thanks for keeping the last fundamental civil right in hateful lockdown for another 20 years by kowtowing to the sexually ignorant and the religiously malformed, you sad lump of homophobic lint."

Bonus suggestion: Attach small photo of Bush's new son-in-law and Rove sycophant, Henry Hager, to the flag. Implied rumor: Henry's secretly gay! Just like half the GOP and all televangelists and John Travolta! The AP photogs will eat it up.

Note: Be sure to fold flag tightly for ideal trajectory, lest it unravel mid-flight and accidentally land on the head of the Saudi Arabian reporter, inducing horrified screams and spontaneous combustion. No one wants a scene.

2) Book about science

Clever! Something this president has actually never seen before: A real book full of complex ideas written by people who actually understand that humans didn't ride on the backs of dinosaurs, the Earth is not a giant litter box made of Cheez-Whiz and Jesus spittle, and that the Bible is basically a violent little children's fable. Amazing. Make it a soft paperback, because those hardbacks are a bitch and you don't want to hurt anyone. Remember, science is your friend.

3) Birth control pills

Turns out those little pink plastic saucer things actually soar quite well when hurled like little Frisbees o' Female Empowerment. It's a nice way to thank Bush for sucking the sour teat of the sexist religious right and Catholic church, front-loading the nation's courts with misogynist judges and stabbing at the heart of women's rights for nearly a decade.

Alternative: Load individual RU-486 pills into a large straw and blast them at Bush's head like Divine Spitwads of Cervical Righteousness. It's more sustained fun, and might get you in less trouble overall. Don't forget to aim a few at Jenna, in the honest hope she will never, ever breed. Hey, it's for her own good. Didn't you know her husband is secretly gay? I swear I just read that somewhere.

4) Crayons

Back in the early days of the Worst Presidency Ever, Bush used mostly Burnt Sienna with the occasional Purple Pizzazz. But lately Dubya's been turning to Mango Tango and Beaver, with a bit of Neon Carrot -- saying that one aloud always makes him giggle -- to sign all those laws, last-minute enviro rollbacks, sweetheart deals to Big Oil, final bitch-slaps and FUs to the conscious and the hopeful.

Did you know the Crayola company officially replaced Teal Blue with a color called "Wild Blue Yonder"? That makes George feel proud to be an American. He says to himself, "You think that damn Al Qaeda would ever use a color like that? You're gul-dang right they wouldn't! They're use some stupid America-hating color like Terrorism Turquoise or Suicide Bomber Sepia. Jerks!"

5) Dick Cheney

Cheney, thought to be made up entirely of black tar, razor blades and cold, glowering evil, certainly looks like he weighs as much as a tumescent water buffalo, and therefore would be just impossibly difficult to raise over your head and heave at Bush with any sort of accuracy or distance.

Turns out, however, that Dick is merely a phantasm, a collective nightmare, a little smear of something slimy and gray and unidentifiable, like you find on a dark road after it rains. Deeply unpleasant, but also nearly weightless. Easy to fling, after all! Warning: Do not to get any on your fingers or anywhere near your eyes or other mucus membranes. He may be an ephemeral hellbeast, but he's still one enormously toxic Dick.

6) Hunk of glacial ice

Not much left, so you'd better hurry. Here, George, shove this last snowball from what's left of Greenland into your lemonade this summer at the ranch. Thanks for all the brutal enviro rollbacks and rejecting Kyoto and making America the pathetic laughingstock of the entire scientific community. May you reincarnate as a starving, scabrous polar bear, adrift on a melting ice floe, wondering what happened to your home.

Alternate: hunk of ozone. For nearly identical reasons.

7) Prosthetic limb

Imagine this perfect scene: You raise your right hand to ask Bush a question. Bush points at you, "Yes?" You calmly raise your left hand, reach over to your right and give a little tug and pop! Off comes your entire right arm from the socket! Before anyone can register what's happening, said arm is winging through the air, straight at Bush's head. Bonk! See? Not only have you conked him, you've slapped him as well. Now that's poetry.

Terrific reminder of the tens of thousands of young U.S. soldiers who've been maimed, mutilated and permanently scarred in Bush's lost, futile, disgusting war. Imagine the hilarious photos! It's tragicomic, really.

8) Hanging chads

Because we will never forget.

9) WMD

Good luck finding any. Maybe over in Pakistan? North Korea? Toronto? Still, imagine the shock on Bush's tired face. Finally, some WMD! Right here in my lap! He'd stroke it like a feral kitten and cry.

Alternate choice: Glowering Taliban fighter. There's been a big resurgence, after all. Plenty to go around. Plus, Islamic terrorist jackals don't eat much. Makes them light as pillows. Fun to throw!

10) National sense of pride/hope/dignity

We used to have quite a lot. Now the only place to really find any is over at Obama transition headquarters, where they're giving it out to desperate citizens for free, by the truckload, as much as you can carry, like medicine from the Red Cross after a major disaster. Problem: People have been throwing this stuff at Bush for years, with zero effect. He just thinks it's some sort of bizarre foreign food and feeds it to the dog. Or Saudi Arabia.

11) Entire remainder of gutted, ruined Republican party

This quivering mass of ignoble sadness and blighted phlegm will now fit comfortably into the palm of your hand, ready to hurl. Be sure to wear gloves. One drawback: Most Republicans are already chucking huge, angry hunks of blame at Bush for destroying the Cult of the Great God Reagan. You might have to get in line.

12) Reality

Throw some if you can, but if possible, better to just run up and dump enormous buckets of it over Bush's head. Of course, he will not notice. He will merely blink a few times and get that look on his face like he almost had a thought, then it passed, like a bit of gas. Reality has evaded this president for eight solid years and possibly over two million lifetimes. He will never, ever see it. No matter. At least it's real. And it still beats a shoe.

Bush and Dick Lied About Torture

Pack of Liars
Yesterday's bipartisan Senate report on the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere doesn't just lay out a clear line of responsibility starting with President Bush, it also exposes the administration's repeated explanation for what happened as a pack of lies.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report finds. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

The report notes that in early 2002, not long after the Defense Department legal counsel's office started exploring the application of the sorts of abhorrent practices later documented at Abu Ghraib, Bush signed a memo exempting war-on-terror detainees from the Geneva Conventions. "[T]he decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody," the report states.

And the report concludes: "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantanamo]. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."

In a statement, Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin voiced his contempt for what was essentially an administration cover-up: "Attempts by senior officials to portray [the bad apples scenario] to be the case while shrugging off any responsibility for abuses are both unconscionable and false. Our investigation is an effort to set the record straight on this chapter in our history that has so damaged both America's standing and our security. America needs to own up to its mistakes so that we can rebuild some of the good will that we have lost."

As examples of false statements, Levin offered: "In May 2004, just after the pictures from Abu Ghraib became public, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that the abuses depicted were simply the result of a few 'bad apples' and that those responsible for abuse would be held accountable. More than seven months later, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Asked about accountability for detainee abuses, Gonzales said 'we care very much about finding out what happened and holding people accountable.' Neither of those two statements was true."

But Levin could have gone much higher. Bush himself repeatedly and sanctimoniously blamed Abu Ghraib on a small number of low-level perpetrators, even while trying to get credit for what he insisted was a transparent system that held those who were responsible accountable.

Bush, on May 24, 2004, described what happened at Abu Ghraib as "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values."

On June 1, 2004, he told a reporter: "Obviously, it was a shameful moment when we saw on our TV screens that soldiers took it upon themselves to humiliate Iraqi prisoners -- because it doesn't reflect the nature of the American people, or the nature of the men and women in our uniform. And what the world will see is that we will handle this matter in a very transparent way, that there will be rule of law -- which is an important part of any democracy. And there will be transparency, which is a second important part of a democracy. And people who have done wrong will be held to account for the world to see.

"That will stand -- this process will stand in stark contrast to what would happen under a tyrant. You would never know about the abuses in the first place. And if you did know about the abuses, you certainly wouldn't see any process to correct them."

In a May 18, 2004, interview, Bush told an Iraqi journalist: "I want to know the truth, too. . . . [Y]ou've just got to know that I'm interested in the truth, as well, just like you're interested in the truth."

And by April 6, 2006, after seven soldiers had been convicted, Bush made it clear that his quest was over: "I'm proud to report that the people who made that decision are being brought to justice, and there was a full investigation over why something like that could have happened."

By contrast, yesterday's Senate report suggests that those responsible for the abuse have emphatically not been brought to justice, and that there's more investigating to be done. Among the issues still to be addressed: the CIA interrogation program, which even more overtly included techniques commonly considered to be torture, such as waterboarding. There's also the obvious question that comes to mind after considering the sequence of events: How are these not war crimes?
The Coverage

Pamela Hess writes for the Associated Press: "The physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.

"The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning."

Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung write in The Washington Post: "A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

"In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military. . . .

"The report is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics -- that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true.

"The administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, 'damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.' . . .

Racial Extremists Are Infiltrating the Military for the Chance to 'Kill a Brown'

Racial Extremists Are Infiltrating the Military for the Chance to 'Kill a Brown'
The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He'd just enlisted in the United States Army.



"Sieg Heil, I will do us proud," he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which "Sobibor's SS," who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).



About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor's SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he'd specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D.



MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That's because they're specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how one is made.



"I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can't share them here," Sobibor's SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: "Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself." Timothy McVeigh

Many analysts believe that Timothy McVeigh, mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, was radicalized during his experience as a soldier in the first Gulf War.

Sobibor's SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he's a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble determining whether the Army may actually be teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind about tactical bomb-making.



But there's little reason to expect that will happen.



Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives.



Forty members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military. "Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public," U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. "We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today's racist extremist may become tomorrow's domestic terrorist."

Media advance GOP talking point that UAW killed the auto bailout bill

Media advance GOP talking point that UAW killed the auto bailout bill
On December 12, both an Associated Press headline and MSNBC's Tamron Hall echoed the Republican accusation that the United Auto Workers (UAW) union prevented the passage of a $14 billion bailout for General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. The AP headlined an article "Union balks and $14B auto bailout dies in Senate," while Hall asserted on MSNBC Live: "The deal fell apart because the autoworkers union refused to give in to Republican demands to reduce workers' wages." In fact, a compromise bailout bill supported by the UAW and the White House passed the House by a 237-170 vote. Then, in the words of Edmund L. Andrews and David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times: "After Senate Republicans balked at supporting a $14 billion auto rescue plan approved by the House on Wednesday, negotiators worked late into Thursday evening to broker a deal, but deadlocked over Republican demands for steep cuts in pay and benefits by the United Automobile Workers union in 2009."

Note to Detroit Consider the Refrigerator

Note to Detroit Consider the Refrigerator
Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. “I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is,” he said.

Chu is an inspired choice to lead the Energy Department, but he’s clearly going to have his work cut out for him. Among the many groups that have failed to absorb the lessons of the refrigerator are Congress and its new ward, the American auto industry.

The same day that word of Chu’s appointment began to leak out, Congress backed away from a provision of the auto-bailout package that would have forced the automakers to abide by new efficiency standards that California—once again—is trying to set. California’s Clean Car rules would require vehicles sold in the state to become roughly twenty per cent more efficient by 2020. The U.S. automakers have been fighting the standards in court for years. Some drafts of the bailout bill would have forced them to drop these lawsuits in return for federal assistance; the Bush Administration, however, said that it would not agree to any package with that provision.

Former U.S. Contractor Alleges 9-Month Detention in Iraq

Former U.S. Contractor Alleges 9-Month Detention in Iraq
For months, he worked closely with American soldiers, ferreting out threats to the troops and forging a relationship with a key sheikh who went on to lead the Sunni awakening. But when this 52-year-old translator and veteran of the U.S. Army headed for his annual leave as a contractor in Iraq, he claims he was wrongfully imprisoned for nine months by American forces, with no access to a lawyer and no contact with his family for months.

The allegations are laid out in a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, recently filed in federal court in Washington where the former contractor for Titan, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, alleges that his due process rights were violated when he was detained and held in "torturous conditions." "There was no justice in what happened to me," the translator said in an exclusive hour-long phone interview with ABCNews.com. "There was no justice involved in it."

The translator's suit is filed under an alias, John Doe, because he fears for his safety and his family. But through his lawyer, Michael Kanovitz, the translator agreed to an interview about the details of his imprisonment. His case is the fourth known example of a U.S. citizen held in Iraq without a formal trial. Two other former contractors, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, have filed a similar suit in Chicago over their three month long detention at Camp Cropper. Another U.S. citizen, filmmaker Cyrus Kar, also filed suit over his arrest and several-week long detention, but a judge recently dismissed his suit on the grounds that the military officials had immunity.

Spokespeople for the defense and justice departments declined comment, as did a company spokesperson for Titan, now called L-3 Communications.

The translator's story begins in December 2004 when he arrived at the al-Asad airbase about 180 kilometers west of Baghdad. There he met with the site manager for Titan, the American-owned defense contracting firm he worked with, and first learned his job: translating for the Marine Corp Human Exploitation Team near the Western border of Iraq and Syria, according to the complaint.

He was based in Camp Korea Village and worked alongside three other men, two sergeants and a lieutenant. His job was straightforward: to interrogate prisoners, develop sources among Iraqi civilians and "ferret out threats to the unit," according to the complaint.

He stayed with them until July 2005, when he was transferred to al Walid, another military base on the closer border. There he joined another HET with the same mission, according to the complaint.

A Whitewash for Blackwater

A Whitewash for Blackwater? by Eugene Robinson
The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards in the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it's probably the exact opposite -- a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility.

If what Justice Department prosecutors allege is true, the five guards -- Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough -- should have to answer for what happened on Sept. 16, 2007. The men, working under Blackwater's contract to protect State Department personnel in Iraq, are charged with spraying a busy intersection with machine-gun fire and grenades, killing at least 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 20 others. One man, prosecutors said yesterday, was shot in the chest with his hands raised in submission.

The indictment, charging voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations, demonstrates that those who engage "in unprovoked attacks will be held accountable," Assistant Attorney General Patrick Rowan claimed.

But it demonstrates nothing of the sort. As with the torture and humiliation of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, our government is deflecting all scrutiny from the corporate higher-ups who employed the guards -- to say nothing of the policymakers whose decisions made the shootings possible, if not inevitable.

Prosecutors did not file charges against the North Carolina-based Blackwater firm -- the biggest U.S. security contractor in Iraq -- or any of the company's executives. The whole tragic incident is being blamed on the guards who, prosecutors say, made Baghdad's Nisoor Square a virtual free-fire zone.

The Blackwater guards were nervous because of a car bombing elsewhere in the city that day. The company says the Blackwater convoy came under attack by insurgents, prompting the guards to fire in self-defense. "Tragically, people did die," defense attorney Paul Cassell told reporters.

There is a huge difference between self-defense and the kind of indiscriminate fusillade that the Blackwater team allegedly unleashed. Proper training and supervision -- which was the Blackwater firm's responsibility -- would have made it more likely for the guards to make the right split-second decisions amid the chaos of Nisoor Square. Rather than give Blackwater a free pass, the Justice Department ought to investigate the preparation these men were given before being sent onto Baghdad's dangerous streets.

Blackwater no doubt has rules and regulations about when and where its people can discharge their weapons. But were those rules enforced? Did the guards who were indicted yesterday have any reason to believe they would be punished for the rampage? Or were the shootings considered acceptable inside the Blackwater bunker? Company executives should have to answer these and other questions -- under oath.

But a real attempt to establish blame for this massacre should go beyond Blackwater. It was the Bush administration that decided to police the occupation of Iraq largely with private rather than regular troops.

There are an estimated 30,000 security "contractors" in Iraq, many of them there to protect U.S. State Department personnel. The presence of these heavily armed private soldiers has become a sore point between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Until now, the mercenaries -- they object to that label, but it fits -- have been immune from prosecution by the Iraqi courts for any alleged crimes. This will change on Jan. 1, when the new U.S.-Iraqi security pact places them under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law.

What Obama Has to Look Forward To

What Obama Has to Look Forward To
A new GAO report says he inherits a federal government rife with waste, fraud, and mismanagement.

The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Agriculture have no plan to work together in the event of a food-borne disease outbreak or terrorist attack. The Department of Defense's security clearance process takes so long it jeopardizes classified information. The EPA's chemical risk assessment program is improperly influenced by private industry.

When Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) requested a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) listing questions his fellow senators might ask President-elect Barack Obama's political nominees at their upcoming confirmation hearings, he probably didn't expect a 150-page list of Bush administration screwups. But that's what he got.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress that frequently exposes waste, incompetence, and corruption in the federal government, supplemented its proposed questions with summaries of problems in the executive branch. The result is a catalogue of hundreds of unresolved issues that the Bush administration is leaving behind for Obama and his administration.

Smart Defense

Smart Defense
The report offers $56 billion in cuts to spending on offensive weapons, and $50 billion in new expenditures on defense and prevention. It transforms the Bush administration's 9:1 ratio of spending on offense as compared to defense and prevention, to 5:1. According to the report, "This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it."

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and its Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) network of progressive experts also released a report last year-- Just Security--which details how $213 billion could be cut from US military spending. Even with this cut the US would retain the largest military in the world and spend over eight times more than any of the next largest militaries.

President Nixon's Treason

Richard Nixon: The traitor
I want to congratulate Charles Taylor for his brilliant, properly scathing denunciation of Richard Nixon in his review of Anthony Summers' new biography of our late, demented president.

Taylor is absolutely right -- forget the story that Nixon may have beaten poor Pat (as if she did not have enough to bear, simply being married to that paranoid, cold-hearted son of a bitch), or even the shocker that he was likely self-medicating with drugs provided by one of America's leading businessmen. (Ah, the genius of the private sector!)

The really significant story is that Nixon's own defense secretary thought the president was so far gone during his last months in office that he ordered the military to ignore orders from the White House. Now there's a genuinely terrifying thought that should engage our nation in soul-searching discussion.

And as Taylor emphasizes, the most important revelation of the book -- the one that all U.S. history texts should henceforth include -- is the near certainty that Nixon, as a private citizen during the 1968 presidential race, sought to delay and disrupt the Paris peace talks, thereby prolonging the war in Vietnam and leading to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese.

Again, as Taylor writes -- and it bears repeating -- Nixon committed treason. I might add that Summers' story of Nixon's treachery builds on previous accounts, including veteran reporter Jules Witcover's book "1968: The Year the Dream Died."

From his earliest days in politics, Nixon embodied America's darkest impulses. It's important to remember just how deplorable and dangerous a man he was.

Applying the Rule of Law to All Heads of State

Applying the Rule of Law to All Heads of State
During the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, legal developments not directly related to the historic McCain-Palin/Obama-Biden contest got little attention. Now that the election is over, several recent but little-reported criminal prosecutions, with potentially great significance for members of the outgoing and incoming administrations, deserve a second look, even though impeachment is a practical impossibility before Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009.

The recent “torture” conviction the son of Liberia’s notorious former President Charles Taylor in Miami federal court has the potential to advance the Rule of Law, and to strengthen the concept that even vast power does not create impunity for the commission of great crimes, even by governmental figures claiming sovereign perogative. And the arrest warrants sought by International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo for President Bashir of Sudan demonstrate that even the presidents of countries that have not ratified the ICC-Treaty of Rome can be called to account in international tribunals.

Presidential Legal Liability In Office, and Out

One important measure of any legal system, grounded in equality and due process before the law, is “equivalency before the law” for the privileged and powerful….as well as those less-favored by vagaries of birth and status. The recent conviction of Alaska Senator Stevens is only the most recent example of this principle in practice.

And, the various Clinton-era legal battles established that even a sitting president is not immune from civil liability arising before the presidential term and though even “high crimes and misdemeanors” may not be domestically-prosecuted during a presidential term, there is no established doctrine of immunity from domestic criminal liability following the end of a presidential term, or from international legal standards, either during or after a presidency.

The anticipatory pardon of Richard Nixon by the recently-elevated President Ford would not have been necessary if ex-presidents are not culpable under domestic criminal law for crimes committed during their presidency. It is not clear that even a blanket presidential pardon, ala “Scooter” Libby, can insulate executive branch members from potential international criminal culpability. Also, there is no obvious precedent for presidential power to grant an anticipatory pardon president’s own crimes.

Overseas Violation of the Convention Against Torture as a Domestic Crime

Earlier this month, “Chuckie Taylor”, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now facing trial at The Hague, became the first US citizen in history to be convicted under 18 USC §2340-2340A, a 1994 federal statute that criminalizes violations of the Convention Against Torture by any US citizen, anywhere in the world.[1] The Bush Justice Department was successful in arguing the constitutionality of §2340A and its applicability to a US citizen for crimes committed in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.

Ironically, this overlaps with the period during which the Bush executive branch itself was engaging in what the CIA’s George Tenet euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in secret CIA overseas prisons and in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantamo. The CIA apparently adopted “waterboarding” and other “torture” tactics when their first high-level captive refused to cooperate in late 2001 or early 2002 [2], and the “torture stain” began to spread to other executive-branch services.

"Top Cover"

Tenet did not get written approval for “enhanced interrogations” from the White House until after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted in June 2004. By then, CIA officials, apparently including the Office of General Counsel, demanded explicit proof of White House support for the CIA torture program.

But, according to Condoleezza Rice’s written Senate testimony last month, long before 2004 other executive branch agencies were so “uncomfortable” with CIA interrogation methods that she specifically asked then-Attorney General Ashcroft to “…advise the NSC principles whether the CIA program was lawful….under U.S. laws or international treaties.”[3] Apparently the result was the famous 2002 “torture memo” prepared for the Justice Department Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) by John Yoo, John Delahunty and other deputies.[4]

According to a Washington Post article, despite these misgivings in other executive-branch agencies “....[f]ormer and current CIA officials say no...reservations [regarding the legality of the CIA “torture” program] were voiced in their presence...”.[5] The major concern within the CIA was that the agency had political “top cover” in the event the torture program was ever discovered.

“I]n the agency’s view.... ‘[w]e don’t want to continue unless you tell us in writing that it is not only legal, but is the policy of the administration’…[t]he CIA understood that [the interrogation program] was controversial and would be widely criticized if it became public.”[6] According to the Post, no one in the CIA General Counsel’s Office expressed objections to the legality of the secret “enhanced interrogation” program.[7]

OLA’s Goldsmith: Crimes of the “Terror Presidency”

By 2004, after the exposure of torture at CIA “black sites” and “extraordinary renditions,” the CIA euphemism for kidnapping and outsourcing torture to foreign experts, as well as abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, a new lawyer was brought in to head the OLA. Former University of Chicago law professor Jack Goldsmith was shocked to find the shoddy legal analysis that Yoo and his staff had used to justify violations of long-standing statutory, constitutional and treaty prohibitions against the use of torture by the United States government. As described in Goldsmith’s insider account, The Terror Presidency,[8] Bush’s Presidential Chief Counsel Addington, Yoo and his OLA deputies were responsible for the pre-2004 assurances that the CIA program was “lawful,” which were not challenged by the CIA General Counsel’s Office.

According to Goldsmith, the legal reasoning was so transparently inadequate that a complete re-writing of the OLA Opinion defining the “torture options” available to executive branch was undertaken. In was not until 2004 that Goldsmith was able to force through the new standards that were much, much closer to the requirements of the Convention Against Torture and the terms of 18 USC §2430A, by threatening to resign if the Bush Justice Department did not replace the John Yoo 2002 OLA opinion [9], an extraordinary event according to OLA protocols.[10]