Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 177         Today’s News and Views     Friday, June 23, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2510

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 310

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

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Today's News and Views

The Hitler vs. Coulter Quiz (take it here)

Crooks and Liars:

Q: Do you think that you underestimated the insurgency’s strength?

Cheney: I think so, umm I guess, the uh, if I look back on it now. I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered....

In 1992 Dick Cheney said this after the first Gulf War:

“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney said then in response to a question.

“And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq…

Link

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

September 28, 2004

Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions

By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior officials early this month.

Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were "just guessing'' about the future, though he corrected himself later, calling it an "estimate.''

The assessments, meant to address the regional implications and internal challenges that Iraq would face after Mr. Hussein's ouster, said it was unlikely that Iraq would split apart after an American invasion, the officials said. But they said there was a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent internal conflict with one another unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.

Senior White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, have contended that some of the early predictions provided to the White House by outside experts of what could go wrong in Iraq, including secular strife, have not come to pass. But President Bush has acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the virulency of the insurgency that would rise against the American occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in 2003.

The officials outlined the reports after the columnist Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The Washington Post, wrote that a senior intelligence official had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the White House had disregarded warnings from intelligence agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak identified the official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him for making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the administration.

The National Intelligence Council is an independent group, made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence community's "center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.'' Its main task is to produce National Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining the consensus of intelligence agencies. But it also produces less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it presented in January 2003.

One of the intelligence documents described the building of democracy in Iraq as a long, difficult and potentially turbulent process with potential for backsliding into authoritarianism, Iraq's traditional political model, the officials said.

The assessments were described by three government officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents. The officials spoke on condition that neither they nor their agencies be identified. None of the officials are affiliated in any way with the campaigns of Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed separately, declined to quote directly from the documents, but said they were speaking out to present an accurate picture of the prewar warnings.

The officials' descriptions portray assessments that are gloomier than the predictions by some administration officials, most notably those of Vice President Dick Cheney. But in general, the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear to have been upheld by events, and their disclosure could prove politically damaging to the White House, which has already had to contend with the disclosure that the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the council in July presented a far darker prognosis for Iraq through the end of 2005 than Mr. Bush has done in his statements.

The reports issued by the intelligence council are of two basic types: those that try to assess intelligence data, like the October 2002 document that assessed the state of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and broader predictions about foreign political developments.

The group's National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi weapons has now been widely discredited for wildly overestimating the country's capabilities. Members of the intelligence council have complained that they were pressured to write the document too quickly and that important qualifiers were buried.

The group's recent National Intelligence Estimate, prepared in July this year, with its gloomy picture of Iraq's future, was described by White House officials in the past two weeks as an academic document that contained little evidence and little that was new.

"It was finished in July, and not circulated by the intelligence community until the end of August,'' said one senior administration official. "That's not exactly what you do with an urgent document.''

Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a polarizing figure within the administration, particularly within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who were among the most vigorous champions of a war in Iraq derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not available for comment and that his comments at the West Coast session had been made on the condition that he not be identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had supervised the drafting of the document, but the official emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's bureau of Intelligence and Research.

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said Monday that "we don't comment on intelligence and classified reports," and he would not say whether Mr. Bush had read the January 2003 reports. But he said "the president was fully aware of all the challenges prior to making the decision to go to war, and we addressed these challenges in our policies."

"And we also addressed these challenges in public," he added.

A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a result of the status quo in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."

Officials who have read the July 2004 National Intelligence Estimate have said that even as a best-case situation, it predicted a period of tenuous stability for Iraq between now and the end of 2005. The worst of three cases cited in the document was that developments could lead to civil war, the officials have said. Some Democratic senators have asked that the document be declassified, but administration officials have called that prospect unlikely.

The White House has also sought to minimize the significance of the estimate, with Mr. Bush saying that intelligence agencies had laid out "several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, life could be O.K. or life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.'' Mr. Bush later corrected himself, saying that he should have used the word estimate.

Democrats have contrasted the dark tone of the intelligence report with the more upbeat descriptions of Iraq's prospects offered by the administration. The White House has defended its approach, saying that it is the job of intelligence analysts to identify challenges, and the job of policy makers to overcome them. But administration officials have also emphasized that the White House was not given a copy of the document until Aug. 31, only about two weeks before it was made public by The New York Times.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that "we have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world'' since the war began. Mr. Powell also said the insurgency in Iraq was "getting worse'' as forces opposed to the United States and the new Iraqi leadership remained "determined to disrupt the election'' set for January.

Correction: Sept. 29, 2004, Wednesday

A front-page article yesterday about prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq misidentified the television program on which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell discussed them on Sunday. It was ABC's ''This Week," not ''Fox News Sunday," on which he appeared the same day.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

The Iraq resolution is above all a manifesto of articles of faith. We face "an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values" -- not an insurgency against an occupation or a sectarian civil war. Then, "by early 2003," Saddam Hussein "supported terrorists" -- suggesting nonexistent links to al-Qaida. Now, "the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war" -- suggesting that the effect is its own cause, not that terrorism has emerged in reaction against the U.S. occupation. Finally, we "will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary." Thus we battle one enemy despite his many faces, like Satan, and our goal is nothing mundane like stability or a political solution but "freedom." Inserted into this credo is the tactical twist against a "timetable" -- though Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, submitted a plan, a timetable, in November 2005 to Rumsfeld, at his insistence, for withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops this year. None dare call it "cut and run."

The Republicans' tone of theological certainty covers their anxious expediency. In the clarifying polarization of Congress the lethal netherworld of Iraq is held at bay. The politics of the Iraq resolution are the congressional analogue of Bush's recent five-hour visit to the Green Zone intended to present an upbeat message, leaving unacknowledged, for example, a 23-point cable sent at the same time from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department chronicling the descent of Iraqi embassy employees into sectarian strife and fundamentalist Islamic strictures, putting their "objectivity, civility, and logic" under relentless siege.

For the White House, the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on June 8 became a platform for retailing old talking points, claims of eventual victory and strained appeals to history. Some perspective was provided at the beginning of this week's debate on the Senate's Iraq resolution with the publication of a new book, "The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11," by Ron Suskind. Its facts cast light on the basic operations of the Bush White House, though facts have a discounted value in the current environment.

On June 14, the Pentagon dispatched a document titled "Iraq Floor Debate Prep Book" to Republicans in the House. A Pentagon public affairs officer admitted to the Washington Post that the 74-page document originated in the White House but was repackaged as a Pentagon publication. It is a cut-and-paste rush job to refute advocates of "cut and run." It is also a representative document of the Bush administration: Evidence is cherry-picked, slogans substitute for facts, falsehoods are sold as truth, and "victory" is promised. Connections between al-Qaida and Iraq are slyly hinted at. The old accusations against Jose Padilla as the "dirty bomber," no longer being pressed against him, reappear. The Pentagon document, eagerly seized upon by congressional Republicans as a treasure trove of talking points, accurately gauges the White House's estimate of their ability to assess information on their own.

On the day the Pentagon talking points were sent to the House Republicans, Bush reformulated compassionate conservatism to demonstrate his concern for the continuing loss of life in Iraq. "I'm like most Americans, it is -- death affects my way of thinking."

On June 18, White House press secretary Tony Snow attempted to put recent events in historical perspective: "The president understands people's impatience -- not impatience, but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I daresay people would have said, 'Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?' But you cannot conduct a war based on polls." Snow's analogy was the latest effort to compare Bush and his troubles to the difficulties of previous presidents, from Lincoln to Truman. His reference to the Battle of the Bulge was an original contribution. In that battle, fought in December 1944, Hitler concentrated his remaining forces on the western front for a final desperate assault to break the inevitable Allied drive across the Rhine, and failed. In fact, there are polls available from that time. The American people were not impatient. They knew victory was coming. And their support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been reelected to his fourth term a month before, increased to 72 percent.

On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech at the National Press Club, defended his statement of May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." "I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered," he added. His comment, besides strangely echoing Bush's on Hurricane Katrina ("I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"), belied precise warnings from the CIA, the Army War College and 70 experts gathered by the National Defense University, who sent a report before the war to the administration but never received acknowledgment of receipt. But for the moment at least, Cheney's restatement of optimism or obliviousness expresses regained political confidence.

The Republican resolution on Iraq, the Pentagon's "Iraq Floor Debate Prep Book," Snow's fractured knowledge of history and Cheney's last "last throes" all fall back on a seamless but warped account of current events that is fabricated out of manipulated intelligence, filtered through ideological blinders and held to no tests by a deliberately unaccountable presidency.

Suskind, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the author of "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," provides new details in this ongoing story in his new book, published this week.

Suskind begins at the briefing of President Bush at his Crawford, Texas, homestead on Aug. 6, 2001, about a CIA memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Upon listening to the CIA briefer, Bush says, "All right, you've covered your ass, now." He asks no more questions.

The week after Sept. 11, Cheney tasked CIA director George Tenet, who was grateful he had not been fired and was eager to please, to establish the link between the terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein by putting the CIA imprimatur on a meeting of one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, Czech Republic, early in 2001. "We'll get right on it, Mr. Vice President," Tenet said. On Sept. 21, he reported: "Our Prague office is skeptical about the report. It just doesn't add up." Two weeks after that, at Cheney's instigation, Rumsfeld created a parallel intelligence operation called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, headed by neoconservative Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This operation funneled unevaluated intelligence and disinformation directly into the White House through Cheney's national security staff.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's former national security advisor and his closest associate, whom George W. Bush appointed chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, met with Cheney. Scowcroft told him that the intelligence community required reorganization and in particular that much of the Pentagon's intelligence operations should be transferred to the CIA. But that would have divested Cheney and Rumsfeld of much of their bureaucratic empire. Scowcroft's recommendation was the beginning of the end of his influence. He never met with Cheney again. Secretary of State Colin Powell was also systematically cut out and trampled. The elder Bush was not consulted.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the Saudi ambassador, with long ties to the Bush family, observed that the relationship between the 41st and 43rd presidents was, as Suskind writes, "cool and distant, not even what one would expect of a father and son; that the son didn't consult the father -- even though he was, quite possibly, the most valuable advisor presented by modern history."

Cheney took it upon himself to withhold crucial information from the president on the theory that fostering Bush's ignorance was a defensive wall of "plausible deniability." Cheney's thinking ran back to Nixon in Watergate. "He [Nixon] was accountable, and that doomed his presidency," writes Suskind. Cheney created an unaccountable executive, who subsisted on information given him on a "need to know" basis determined by the vice president and "could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements." At first, Cheney acted as a visible regent. "Bush asked Cheney not to offer him advice in crowded rooms. Do that privately. Cheney did."

Cheney decided not to give Bush the entire National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, but only a one-page summary of "key findings," which excluded caveats, including statements from the Energy Department and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes that Cheney and the neoconservatives insisted were proof of Saddam's ongoing nuclear weapons program "more likely are intended for conventional weapons." Bush read or skimmed what he was handed and asked no questions. He was the perfect "deniable" president.

Suskind's Bush is a familiar figure, a mixture of bluster and cluelessness. He loves being briefed by groups of men talking tough. "They all start talking like operators, no matter what's being reported. These are men who, on balance, never experienced the bracing effects ... of military action. The few who have, like Powell, and his deputy Rich Armitage, smooth over these disparities ... by joining in the tough talk that they know, from experience, is hollow at its core."

At one briefing in 2002, Suskind writes, Bruce Gephardt, deputy director of the FBI, told Bush that a group of men of "Middle Eastern descent" in Kansas had been discovered offering "cash for a large storage facility." "Middle Easterners in Kansas," said Bush. "We've got to get on this, immediately." Bush is reported to like barking orders, almost at a shout. The next day, he demanded a report. "Mr. President, the FBI has Kansas surrounded!" "That's what I like to hear," Bush replied. But it turned out that the men of Middle Eastern descent were operators of flea markets, not would-be terrorists. The diligent FBI had closed in on their accumulated piles of old clothing and Sinatra records.

At a Dec. 13, 2002, year-end review of the war on terror for the president in the Cabinet Room conducted by two dozen senior officials, Bush had some difficulty following the complex details and lack of a simple story line. When Kenneth Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, informed him, "Mr. President, the majority of the funders for al Qaeda are Saudis," Bush "looked at Dam, perplexed, as though he either hadn't read the handout in front of him, or was somehow surprised -- though this was all but common knowledge." "That's enough for today," said the president.

At other moments, the president who proudly relied on his "gut" for decision making, raised a pertinent question. "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" he asked at one point about the torture of detainees. But he never followed up. Meanwhile, Cheney developed the "rules." Action was liberated from evidence. Even a "1 percent chance" that some conjectured terrorist threat would materialize was good enough for a preemptive strike.

In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah, touted as a top al-Qaida commander, was captured by a CIA and FBI team in Pakistan. Bush was prompted to call him "chief of operations" for al-Qaida, naming him as "No. 3" to bin Laden. Dan Coleman, one of FBI's top agents on al-Qaida, was assigned to read Zubaydah's diary. In it, he writes in three incoherent voices, reflecting different personalities, writes Suskind. "The CIA had long suspected that the ubiquitous Zubaydah was involved in the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa. He [Coleman] looked for entries in the summer of 1998 in Zubaydah's diary. Nothing ... nothing but nonsense." Coleman reported to an FBI official: "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Bush was briefed. "I said he was important," the president complained to Tenet. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President." So Zubaydah became the first experiment in the new rules on torture in which the Geneva Conventions did not apply. Over at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a CIA official told Suskind, "Around the room a lot of people just rolled their eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was, in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO."

But the decision was made to "torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered." He was "waterboarded," simulating drowning. Zubaydah babbled about terrorist threats to shopping malls, nuclear power plants, supermarkets, and about al-Qaida plans to build a nuclear device. The administration sounded alerts on every unconfirmed threat. In May 2002, New York City was put on high alert over Zubaydah's torture-incited ravings that the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were targets. Cheney went on "Larry King Live" to defend the alerts: "We now have a large number of people in custody, detainees, and periodically as we go through this process we learn more about the possibility of future attacks."

Throughout 2002, Cheney directly pressured the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence to assert both that Saddam was connected to al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks and that Saddam was seeking yellowcake uranium for his nuclear weapons program. But the agency determined through numerous sources that these claims were false. Yet Cheney's operation and Rumsfeld's jerry-rigged intelligence shop kept insisting that the CIA put its seal of approval on the Atta-in-Prague story and the yellowcake uranium one, too.

On Jan. 10, 2003, Stephen Hadley, then deputy national advisor, called Jami Miscik, deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, from the office of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, demanding that Miscik appear in Libby's office that afternoon. According to Suskind, Miscik told Tenet, "If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report ... I'm resigning, right now." So the report was not rewritten. As a result, U.S. intelligence sources could not be cited and the disinformation had to be attributed elsewhere. Thus Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union address, delivered his infamous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush's falsehoods were an accomplishment of Cheney's "deniable" presidency. Inside the CIA, Cheney was nicknamed "Edgar," after ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

In place of regular policy deliberation there was a series of vacuums. Every morning, after reading his Bible, eating breakfast and working out, Bush received his briefing from the CIA and FBI directors, which was repackaged to him orally by Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. "What Bush knew before, or during, a key decision remained largely a mystery. Only a tiny group ... could break this seal." "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Suskind quotes Deputy Secretary of State Armitage as saying. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason. One was never started."

On Oct. 29, 2004, Osama bin Laden released his "October surprise," an 18-minute tape attacking Bush. The CIA analyzed the tape and concluded that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection." That day, at a meeting at the CIA, acting director John McLaughlin remarked, "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the president." Miscik presented analysis that bin Laden felt challenged by the rise of the thuggish Zarqawi, who called himself commander of al-Qaida in Iraq, and that bin Laden was refocusing attention through his tape on his cosmic and continuing one-on-one battle with Bush. "Certainly," she said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."

After the presidential election, in mid-November 2004, Suskind writes, Cheney directly pressured Miscik to leak a distorted part of a CIA report to "prove" that the war in Iraq was quelling, not inciting, terrorism. Cheney intended to declassify it and have the CIA make it public. But Miscik knew that the report "concluded nothing of the sort," and refused to take part in leaking false information. She was told that the new CIA director, Porter Goss, had said, "Saying no to the vice president is the wrong answer." "Actually," she replied, "sometimes saying no to the vice president is what we get paid for." Within a few weeks, she was forced out. Soon much of the CIA's top echelon was purged for adhering to its residual professional standards.

The passage of the Republican congressional resolution on Iraq stands on the wreckage of those standards. (The Pentagon talking points refer to Zubaydah as "bin Laden's field commander.") The continuing primacy of apparatchiks Cheney and Rumsfeld reflects the conquest of their conception of the executive. And Rove's exploitative strategies subordinate a potential political solution in Iraq to the paramount importance of a political solution in the midterm elections. Call it the triumph of surrealpolitik.

-- By Sidney Blumenthal

Copyright ©2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

That means Rumsfeld making asinine and outright dishonest statements like, "They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found."

That means other lying-liar Republicans like Santorum claiming, "We now have found stockpiles."

Then, of course, the truth leaked out: "But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed."

Then, there was the comment made by former weapons inspector David Kay, "It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point."

So, what does all this mean? It means Republicans are in the midst of an election cycle and, therefore, life for America will be all about terror scares, terrorists hiding in this and that city, charges of terrorism that are either eventually -- post-election -- dropped or tossed from courts. It means Iran becomes a new boogeyman and yes, it means more discoveries of WMD in Iraq, which aren't really WMD or the WMD Bush lied the nation to war over. That is what it all means. Be afraid America, be VERY afraid...it's election time Republican style.

Terror Scare Miami Update: According to CNN reporter on site in Miami, police found no bombs or bomb making materials in building they searched. Neighbors say the supposed "Islamic radicals" flew American flag on top of the building where they lived. Also, contrary to earlier reports, NO TIES to al-Qaeda. Friends of one of the men say charges are "lies". Friend claims men approached his suspected friend and offered him money. Friend says something like that was "furthest thing from his mind". Looking more and more like a Rove-Bush election-year terror scare.

Odd: As of 10:11pm, only CNN hyping terror-scare story. Nothing much on FOX News (drowning in Duke rape case), MSNBC (American Idol contestants), or CNBC (Donny Deutsch). This is FOXs bread-n-butter. Just seems bizarre, too, that CNN had "exclusives" with Dick Cheney and FBI Director Muller immediately prior to the story breaking. Make of it what you will.

Copyright © 2005 Progressive Daily Beacon

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

The True Cost of War

I don’t have much to say one way or the other on Mark Hyman’s editorial about the need for better Pentagon accounting practices. Sure, it would be nice if they could get their act together. No argument here.

The larger issue isn’t how well our tax money is being accounted for by the Pentagon, but how it’s being spent. Specifically, I’m thinking about the hundreds of billions of dollars conned out of the American people by an administration that promised us that the unilateral invasion of Iraq would make us safer, would create respect for America in the region and around the world, and would pay for itself.

Of course, it’s done none of these things. In fact, it’s done the exact opposite.

Just in terms of the money spent thus far, here are some of the things that could have been bought for the money that has been worse than wasted in Iraq:

A year’s salary for 5 million teachers.
Health care for 173 million children for a year.
A year of Headstart for 38 million children.
Four-year college scholarships for 14 million students.
2.5 million public housing units.
Fully fund 12 years of global anti-hunger efforts.
Fully fund global anti-AIDS healthcare for 28 years.
Provide immunization of every child on earth against common diseases for nearly a century.

Oh, and for you supply-siders out there, the money would provide a tax cut of over $2,600 for every household in America.

These are according to the National Priorities Project website. I’ve rounded the numbers because they are going up literally by the second.

And they’re using a conservative estimate. Two scholars (one from Harvard, the other from Columbia) have studied what the true cost of the war is to Americans, based not only on the direct costs, but on the indirect (but very real) costs of throwing so much money away. They conclude that the true cost to the nation of Bush’s Iraq invasion stands somewhere between one and two trillion dollars, as of the date of the study (January, 2006).

And who knows what’s been lost to us forever because of the deaths of 2,500 young men and women in their prime, to say nothing of the number seriously wounded, and the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died.

That’s a loss no accounting can measure.

And that’s The Counterpoint.

Republicans Gone Wild

By Dana Milbank
Thursday, June 22, 2006; A02

During a break in the proceedings at yesterday's House Homeland Security Committee hearing, George Foresman, the Bush administration official in charge of disaster preparedness, put down the "Read Ahead Book" his staff had prepared for him and began to wring his hands.

For good reason: He was the guest of honor at a ritual sacrifice, Washington-style. His Department of Homeland Security has slashed counterterrorism funding for New York City and the Washington area by 40 percent, and Foresman, though armed with many excuses, lacked an explanation that passed what Rep. Rob Simmons (Conn.) called "the common-sense test."

"It was indefensible, it was disgraceful, and to me it raises very, very real questions about the competency of this department in determining how it's going to protect America," said Chairman Peter King (N.Y.).

"How could a rational process produce such a dysfunctional conclusion?" demanded Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, calling the situation "a sad joke."

"Something's wrong with the formula," said Rep. Jim Gibbons (Nev.).

And these were all Republicans .

Maybe it's the early summer heat, but something has caused House Republicans to boil with rage this week -- and to direct much of it at President Bush and his administration. They snubbed Bush by announcing that they were putting off immigration legislation at least for the summer -- and perhaps for the year. In another show of defiance toward the administration, they decided not to take up renewal of the Voting Rights Act. And King said he will confer today with his Senate counterpart, Susan Collins (R-Maine), about forcing the administration to restore counterterrorism funding to New York and Washington.

Yesterday started off badly for the administration. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on a Democratic proposal to demand administration documents related to the National Security Agency's telephone surveillance program. And, to the delight of Democrats, Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) called for its adoption.

"I hope this committee will report this resolution favorably to send the administration and the Justice Department a message," the jowled chairman growled. "The Justice Department has once again failed to respond fully to questions," he said in an exasperated, singsong voice, and it is "imperative that this committee be provided the information it needs to provide appropriate oversight to ensure the constitutionality of this program." The committee obliged.

But that was just a warm-up for the homeland security hearing in the Cannon building, where spectators stood three deep along the walls to see the carnage.

King, with his thick New York accent and a lapel pin of the World Trade Center, did not disappoint. "I have said then, I say now: This was a stab in the back to the city of New York," he said in his leadoff statement, on a gold-draped pulpit that gave King a monarchal presence. He stacked the first panel with critics of the Bush policy -- Bloomberg and the NYPD's Raymond Kelly, and Washington's Mayor Anthony Williams (D) and Police Chief Charles Ramsey -- then joined other committee members in lobbing leading questions.

Even the laconic Williams, in his trademark technospeak, got off some zingers. "The department determined that we face less risk t