A Plague on the Nation

NYT: Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain

2010-07-23T10:47:00.001-04:00

Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain

By SARAH LYALL

Published: July 20, 2010

LONDON — The former director general of Britain's domestic intelligence agency said Tuesday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had greatly increased the terrorist threat to Britain and that intelligence available before the Iraq war had not been sufficient to justify the invasion of that country.

Carl Court/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"Our involvement in Iraq, for want of a better word, radicalized a whole generation of young people — not a whole generation, a few among a generation — who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam," said the former official, Baroness Manningham-Buller.

Lady Manningham-Buller, who led MI5, roughly the British equivalent of the F.B.I., from 2002 to 2007, made her remarks in testimony to a panel investigating the events leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The panel, led by Sir John Chilcot, has heard from a variety of witnesses, including Sir Richard Dearlove, the former leader of MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, and former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The panel is expected to issue a report later this year examining some of the mistakes that were made and making recommendations for future military operations.

Lady Manningham-Buller has said on a number of occasions that Mr. Blair's government failed to heed MI5's warning that attacking Saddam Hussein would make Britain more vulnerable to terrorism. But her remarks to the panel on Tuesday were particularly pointed and critical of the decisions leading to the American-led, British-supported invasion.

Answering questions from the panel, she also said that Iraq had presented little threat to Britain before the invasion, and that there had been no reliable evidence linking the government of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection, and that was the judgment, I might say, of the C.I.A.," she said.

"Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11," she added, "and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind."

But, she said, "it was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine" — namely Donald H. Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense at the time.

That "is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment," she said.

Lady Manningham-Buller also said that Britain relied on "fragmentary" intelligence before invading Iraq, and that MI5 had not believed that Mr. Hussein was amassing unconventional weapons in Iraq, as the government contended.

The belief that Iraq might use such weapons "wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to my colleagues and myself," she said.

Not only was the invasion unnecessary based on what was known about Iraq, Lady Manningham-Buller said, but it diverted attention from the real threat, Al Qaeda.

"By focusing on Iraq, we ceased to focus on the Al Qaeda threat or we reduced the focus on the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan," she said. "I think that was a long-term, major and strategic problem."

The invasion led to an "almost overwhelming" increase in homegrown terrorism, she said, so much so that MI5 had to have its budget doubled in the following months. And after the invasion, about 70 to 80 Britons traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency, she said, thus creating a threat where there had been none.

"Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad," she said.

Fw: UPDATE: Open Letter to Iraq

2010-04-19T18:46:00.001-04:00

A newly released Wikileaks "Collateral Murder" video has made international headlines showing a July 2007 shooting incident outside of Baghdad in which U.S. forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees. Two soldiers from Bravo Company 2-16, the company depicted in the video, have written an open letter of apology to the Iraqis who were injured or lost loved ones during the attack that, these former soldiers say, is a regular occurrence in this war. You can view the Wikileaks video here: http://wikileaks.org/

Sign your name to their letter here http://www.lettertoiraq.com

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: IVAW <webmaster@ivaw.org>
To: jnash67@yahoo.com
Sent: Mon, April 19, 2010 3:56:52 PM
Subject: UPDATE: Open Letter to Iraq

Dear Jonathan,

Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord from Bravo Company 2-16, the company depicted in the Wikieleaks "Collateral Murder" video, have created an open letter to the Iraqi people. Please help spread Josh and Ethan's message of reconciliation and responsibility.

http://www.lettertoiraq.com

Sincerely,
Iraq Veterans Against the War

Click here to unsubscribe

The Public Record: Wilkerson Demolishes Bush, Cheney, And Rumsfeld’s Lies About Guantanamo

2010-04-19T09:52:00.001-04:00

Commentary

Wilkerson Demolishes Bush, Cheney, And Rumsfeld's Lies About Guantanamo

By Andy Worthington
The Public Record
Apr 14th, 2010

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell

Those of us who have been studying the recent career of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson were not surprised when, last week, he submitted a declaration (PDF) in a lawsuit seeking compensation from the US government that was filed by former Guantánamo prisoner Adel Hassan Hamad. A Sudanese hospital worker, Hamad was sold to US forces by their unscrupulous Pakistani allies in the summer of 2002, but was only released from Guantánamo in December 2007.

In the declaration, Col. Wilkerson, who served in the US military for 31 years and was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from August 2002 until January 2005, stated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all knew — and didn't care — that "the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent."

Last March, Col. Wilkerson wrote a guest column for The Washington Note, "Some Truths About Guantánamo Bay," in which he first laid out some of his major complaints about the failures of the Bush administration's detention policies in the "War on Terror." In his column, Col. Wilkerson decried "the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US operations there," and explained, "Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."

Col. Wilkerson also wrote that:

[S]everal in the US leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released. But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers.

Furthermore, Col. Wilkerson wrote:

[I]t has never come to my attention in any persuasive way — from classified information or otherwise — that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement. This is perhaps the most astounding truth of all, carefully masked by men such as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney in their loud rhetoric — continuing even now in the case of Cheney — about future attacks thwarted, resurgent terrorists, the indisputable need for torture and harsh interrogation and for secret prisons and places such as GITMO.

Col. Wilkerson's attacks on the Bush administration's incompetence reflected what I and other researchers had discovered, and as a result, I felt emboldened to approach him, to ask if he would agree to an interview. I was delighted when he accepted, and the resulting two-part interview was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation last August and September.

In it, Col. Wilkerson expanded on the chaotic detention policies following the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and explained how the State Department had been left trying to deal with countries who wanted their citizens back. He conceded that they were largely kept out of the loop by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and added how, in Colin Powell's opinion, President Bush had "no idea" of the "magnitude" of what Cheney was up to behind the scenes. He also reiterated that there was no reason for the majority of the prisoners to have been held, citing an unnamed colleague, who told him, after 742 prisoners had been transported to Guantánamo, "I'll tell you right now that 700 of them haven't done a damn thing except get in the way of somebody capturing them."

Col. Wilkerson also dropped a bombshell about intelligence gathering, explaining how, "from talking to hundreds of people, literally," he had recently become convinced that, although he had previously thought that the administration's fear of another terrorist attack persisted throughout 2002 (in other words, when the entire torture program was being developed), "their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November [2001] as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan."

Despite these previous attacks on the Bush administration, Col. Wilkerson's declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad's claim for compensation is welcome for a number of reasons. The first is because memories are chronically short in this world of endless rolling news, and many people (both journalists and the general public) may have forgotten — if they ever noticed — that Col. Wilkerson has been waging a one-man assault on the Bush administration for the last year.

The second is because he finally implicates George W. Bush in the policies largely implemented by Cheney and Rumsfeld; and the third is because the Obama administration has reached something akin to paralysis in its attempts to close Guantánamo, and the innocent men still detained there — as well as the handful of genuine terrorist suspects — deserve either freedom or a fair trial, so that the abomination that is Guantánamo can finally be closed.

A fourth reason, perhaps most damning of all, concerns the entire basis of the detention policies — to facilitate interrogations — and here Col. Wilkerson expands on his revelation, last summer, that the gathering of intelligence was subverted to justify the invasion of Iraq rather than to protect the American people from another terrorist attack.

The first point is self-evident, as is apparent from mainstream media reporters who appear not to have noticed before that, as Col. Wilkerson explained in his declaration, "many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all," and that many were "victims of incompetent battlefield vetting."

Col. Wilkerson also pointed out that "predominantly US forces were not the ones who were taking prisoners in the first place," explaining that "Instead, we relied on Afghans, such as General Dostum's forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 a head." As he also explained, "I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives."

Col. Wilkerson also explained that, "by late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review."

Clearly troubled by this, he added that it also became "more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military," and that, during his morning briefings, Colin Powell "often expressed that he was particularly troubled by the lack of a plan regarding final disposition for the detainees, especially if the idea was to keep them in indefinite detention, without trial, forever."

Spelling out the Bush administration's incompetence more clearly than before, Col. Wilkerson added that "At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them," and that one particular concern was that, through releasing prisoners, "the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were."

As in his previous articles and interviews, he also made it clear that a major stumbling block to the release of prisoners was Donald Rumsfeld, who "just refused to let detainees go," and that another was Dick Cheney, who "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President's Office."

However, whereas, last summer, Col. Wilkerson had indicated to me that President Bush had little idea of the extent to which Cheney was running the government's post-9/11 policies, in his declaration he fully implicated the President, noting that, although "it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so," and that he "could more often than not gain the President's acquiescence" by "exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President's 'cowboy instincts,'" Powell also told him that, in his opinion, "it was not just Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making."

The third point — President Obama's inability to close Guantánamo — is particularly relevant right now. This was largely outside the scope of Col. Wilkerson's remit for the declaration, but it was depressing to realize, while reviewing his earlier pronouncements, that a year ago he had pointed out "the now prevalent supposition, recently reinforced by the new team in the White House, that closing down our prison facilities at Guantánamo Bay would take some time and development of a highly complex plan. Because of the unfortunate political realities now involved — Cheney's recent strident and almost unparalleled remarks about the dangers of pampering terrorists, and the vulnerability of the Democrats in general on any national security issue — this may have some truth to it. But in terms of the physical and safe shutdown of the prison facilities it is nonsense."

In light of Col. Wilkerson's explanations about the insignificance of the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners, it is depressing indeed to realize that, one year after he wrote these comments, 183 men are still held at Guantánamo, and the government's own Task Force has reinforced Col. Wilkerson's fears regarding the vulnerability of the Democrats on national security issues by recommending that, although 35 men should be tried, 47 others should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Col. Wilkerson has done a great service to those of us (like myself and staff and students at the Seton Hall Law School) who have studied the prisoners' stories in depth, and have persistently pointed out that there are no valid reasons for holding the majority of the prisoners who are still in Guantánamo. However, the fact that so little progress has been achieved in the last year — and that, in fact, the Obama administration is more clearly wracked by caution, cowardice and inertia than ever before — really should give added weight and urgency to his analysis.

Sadly, the media's main focus — as part of the relentless spin-cycle of news I mentioned above — has been more on Col. Wilkerson's revelations about President Bush's knowledge of the failure of his experiment in detention and interrogation, and rather less on the lack of any rationale for holding the majority of the 183 men who still languish at Guantánamo.

Also overlooked, with implications that are no less grave, are Col. Wilkerson's ongoing revelations about how the entire process of interrogation, which led to the widespread use of torture, was not to protect America from another terrorist attack, but was, instead, designed to extract information that would justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. This was a bombshell when Col. Wilkerson revealed it to me last summer, and it remains no less shocking now. As he explained in his declaration:

For the Vice President, Secretary Rumsfeld and others, the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on al-Qaeda and its current and future plans but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's intelligence and secret police in Iraq. Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years … was deemed acceptable if led to a more complete and satisfactory intelligence picture with regard to Iraq, thus justifying the Administration's plans for war with that country.

In his closing comments, Col. Wilkerson noted, "I have made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served in an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred."

In doing so, I hope that Col. Wilkerson's statements not only lead to pressure for the release of the majority of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo, but also contribute to calls for those who authorized the torture and abuse to be held accountable for their actions. These are calls which, in law-abiding circles, have increased since the recent whitewash of a report recommending disciplinary action for John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the authors of the "torture memos," which purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA — and which then migrated to the military.

For Col. Wilkerson, who remains "extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes," the need for accountability has a particularly personal meaning, but for the rest of us, it should be no less important that torture was used to justify an illegal war, that it infected the US military, that those who authorized it remain free to continue spreading their poisonous lies (in Dick Cheney's case, at least), and that men continue to languish in Guantánamo as a result of it — and also as a result of the Obama administration's unwillingness, or refusal to confront the very facts that Col. Wilkerson has disclosed.

This column was first published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Bush Official: We Knew Gitmo Inmates Were Innocent

2010-04-09T11:18:00.001-04:00

Bush Official: We Knew Gitmo Inmates Were Innocent

New document claims releasing them was seen as 'politically impossible'

By Caroline Miller| Posted 2 hours, 15 minutes ago| Share

Updated 1 hour, 34 minutes ago

(Newser) – The Bush White House knew that hundreds of early Gitmo detainees were innocent, but refused to release them because the admission would weaken support for the war in Iraq, according to a new document obtained by the Times of London. The charge, by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was made in a declaration in support of a lawsuit for a Gitmo detainee. Wilkerson claims that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees had been picked up, not by the US military, but by Afghans and Pakistanis for a bounty, and there was no evidence against them. But they saw it as "politically impossible to release them."

If innocent detainees were released, he writes, "the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were." Of Cheney, he writes: "He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it." Wilkerson also says he discussed the issue with Powell, who told him it was not just Cheney and Rumsfeld, "but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making."

-----

From The Times

April 9, 2010

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'

(Andres Leighton/AP)

Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by US military guards at Guantánamo Bay

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell's chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was "politically impossible to release them".

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson's declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration's approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because "the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were". This was "not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]".

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: "He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it."

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld "innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks".

He added: "I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making."

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, "thus justifying the Administration's plans for war with that country".

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson's allegations: "We are not going to have any comment on that." A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney's office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.

Fw: overwhelming agreement

2010-02-22T12:13:00.001-05:00

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: "Robert Weissman, Public Citizen" <publiccitizen@mail.democracyinaction.org>
To: jnash67@yahoo.com
Sent: Mon, February 22, 2010 11:20:32 AM
Subject: overwhelming agreement

Jonathan,

Quick - name something that 85% of Democrats, 81% of Independents and even 76% of Republicans agree on.

Give up? A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed that people across the political spectrum overwhelmingly oppose last month's Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend as much of their unparalleled wealth as they want attacking or promoting political candidates.

I need your help to reach out to all those people who think it's a bad idea to let more corporate money into our elections. Please forward this email to 10 friends, family members, colleagues and neighbors right now.

Ask them to sign our petition at www.DontGetRolled.org for a constitutional amendment to fight the corporate takeover. And, of course, sign the petition yourself if you haven't already!

Public Citizen is fighting the Supreme Court ruling with everything we've got.

We can win if hundreds of thousands join the campaign. But I don't know that many people.

Take this simple step to help build the massive movement we need to defend democracy. Forward this email to 10 people in your personal network and send them to www.DontGetRolled.org today!

Thank you for all you do,

Robert Weissman, President

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Informed Comment - Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs

2009-12-25T18:31:00.001-05:00

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade;
Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade. If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless 'Oligarchs' in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq. Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '"very low food security," meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger.

8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.

7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin's Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people's mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights under vague and unconstitutional rubrics such as 'providing material aid to terrorists,'(rights which seem unlikely ever to be restored).

6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America's great cities. The administration's unconcern about the unsound dam infrastructure, about climate change, and about the fate of the victims are all a wake-up call for what all of us have in store from the small social class that Bush served.

5. The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration's attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow. It should have been nipped in the bud, but was not. Once an insurgency becomes well established, it is defeated militarily only about 20 percent of the time. Eight years later, the Neoconservative thrust into Central Asia (in search of hydrocarbon leverage, or in a geopolitical pissing match with Russia and China?) of the early years of this decade has bequeathed us yet another war, this time one that could destabilize neighboring Pakistan-- the world's sole Muslim nuclear power.

4. The Iraq War, which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over as million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion.

3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the
Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda's largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslimm country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty). Al-Qaeda was a small fringe crackpot group of murderous conspiracy theorists, since most of what they considered an American 'occupation' of Muslims was no such thing. The leasing of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? They intended to make themselves look like a world-historical force, and the US new Oligarchs, who no longer had the international Communist conspiracy with which to scare the American public into letting them have their way, were happy to buy in to the hyping of al-Qaeda, as well. But the catastrophe was not only the attacks, deadly and horrific though they were, but the alacrity with which Americans rsurrendered their birthright of yeoman liberties to a Bonapartist regime that ran roughshod over law, the constitution, the Congress, and anyone, such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared oppose it.

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.

End/ (Not Continued)

posted by Juan Cole @ 12/22/2009 12:59:00 AM

http://www.juancole.com/2009/12/top-ten-worst-things-about-bush-decade.html

Globe: Condi Comforts Suicidal Bush

2009-04-03T19:27:00.001-04:00

let's hope she fails

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Condi Last Hope for 'Suicidal' Bush: Tabloid

Posted Apr 1, 09 10:32 AM CDT in Politics, Gossip

(Newser) – On the brink of suicide and estranged from his wife, George Bush is leaning on his former secretary of state to ease his pain, the Globe tabloid reports. The "broken and desperate" Dubya has been dialing Condoleezza Rice, who, of course, "many believe was his secret lover," at midnight for comfort. The details—including Laura's "agony"—are all in the latest "blockbuster world exclusive."

SOURCE: Globe

----

http://www.globemagazine.com/story/325

Condi Comforts Suicidal Bush

Broken and desperate, George Bush has turned to the woman who many believe was his secret lover, insiders say. In a blockbuster world exclusive, sources reveal what the ex-President said in frantic midnight phone calls to Condoleezza Rice - and his estranged wife Laura's agony. Don't miss a single word.

The Daily Beast: The Woman Who Could Nail Bush

2009-03-28T20:14:00.001-04:00

The Woman Who Could Nail Bush

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national security affairs for Harper's Magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Ruth Fremson, The New York Times / Redux

Forget nanny issues and unpaid taxes. The GOP is threatening an ugly fight over an Obama Justice Department appointee who wants to disclose more Bush-era torture memos.

Until recently, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, often considered the "brains" of the department, has been known mostly to legal experts. But for the past eight years, it was the epicenter of allegations of political manipulation and, worse, the source of infamous memoranda on torture. In tapping Eric Holder as attorney general, President Obama has promised to restore standards of professionalism to the department. For Republicans, this is tantamount to a declaration of partisan war.

The real reason for their vehement opposition is that Johnsen is committed to overturning the Bush administration's policies on torture and warrantless surveillance that would clip the wings of the imperial presidency.

On March 19, the nomination of Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC was endorsed by the Judiciary Committee with every Republican voting against her and Sen. Arlen Spector (R-PA) abstaining. The nomination was to have been brought to the Senate floor for a vote on Monday and then again on Wednesday, but it has been held back. Republican leaders, it appears, are playing with the notion of making Johnsen the target of their first filibuster.

The highly credentialed Johnsen is an improbable target, and OLC was long viewed as an obscure post. But Johnsen served as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League. Antiabortion groups have targeted Johnsen over the last three weeks with a massive telephone, email, and letter-writing campaign, demanding that senators oppose her nomination. Johnsen is labeled a "radical, pro-abortion activist," although her views on the abortion issue line up very closely with the mainstream. While the noise surrounding the Johnsen nomination appears on the surface to be about the abortion issue—over which her position at OLC would have very little influence—discussions with Republican stalwarts reveal that their main concerns lie elsewhere.

The real reason for their vehement opposition is that Johnsen is committed to overturning the Bush administration's policies on torture and warrantless surveillance, which would clip the wings of the imperial presidency. Even more menacingly (from their perspective), she is committed to shining a light on some of the darkest skeletons of the Bush years. Already, publication of OLC memoranda authorizing torture, approving warrantless surveillance, and pronouncing the First and Fourth Amendments a dead letter in connection with domestic military operations has rocked the public. More memos, potentially even more disturbing, I have learned, are about to be made public soon. Yet these are difficult issues on which to attack Johnsen, other than through vague suggestions that she is "weak on national security." Hence the steady stream of accusations linked to her largely irrelevant views about abortion rights.

Will the Republicans attempt to filibuster the Johnsen nomination? The threat is sufficiently serious to have provoked the editors of the New York Times to editorialize in support of Johnsen on Thursday. Calling the operation of OLC in the Bush era "lawless," the editors wrote, "Ms. Johnsen is superbly qualified and has fought for just the sort of change the office needs."

The controversy surrounding Johnsen provides a flashpoint for President Obama's nominees for administration legal posts. Unsurprisingly, they look an awful lot like Barack Obama—strong legal credentials, an academic bent, and liberal attitudes balanced by a strong commitment to political pragmatism.

Obama's top picks start with a couple of well-known Washington names. Eric Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, was a career Justice Department attorney who spent his formative years as a prosecutor in the department's Public Integrity Section (much-criticized for abuse under Bush). He spent time as a U.S. attorney, a judge, and ran the Justice Department for a while as deputy attorney general in the Clinton years. Obama's White House counsel, Greg Craig, is a Washington fixture at the powerhouse Williams & Connolly law firm. The former foreign-policy aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy and State Department official has handled high-profile cases from Clinton's impeachment defense to representing the father of Elian Gonzales. In the way of Washington, he is also has ties to powerful Republicans, including Karl Rove and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, whom he successfully represented in a sensitive FBI investigation into the leaking of classified data.

But delving deeper into the list, the names are less known for pragmatic politics and inside-the-Beltway experience than for pure intellectual firepower. Nearly a quarter of all Obama nominees have a Harvard degree. No fewer than 11 Harvard Law School faculty members drew appointments in the Obama team, including the dean, Elena Kagan, who was also deputy domestic-policy adviser to President Clinton. He also tapped Yale's law-school dean, Harold Koh, widely thought to be a possible Supreme Court appointment, to serve as the principal lawyer at the State Department. Obama has mined the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Georgetown. All these schools are being forced to scramble as professors announce the cancellation of classes and prepare to depart for Washington.

A scan of the names involved makes clear that Obama is not looking for any particular ideological line—the candidates tapped range from centrist conservatives to traditional liberals. But he clearly is seeking individuals highly regarded by their peers who are on top of the issues for which they will have responsibility.

The trio of appointments Obama announced for the OLC underscores this point. In addition to Johnsen, Obama chose Harvard law professor David Barron and Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman as her two deputies. The three nominees have similar histories. Each served in the OLC in prior administrations before departing for academia. And over the last eight years, each spent a good deal of time and energy studying and criticizing the conduct of the OLC in the Bush years. Barron and Lederman co-authored a highly regarded two-part historical study of presidential powers, which demolished the underpinnings of the most significant OLC memoranda authored by John Yoo, including the famous torture memorandum. The three may well have been the Bush OLC's most vocal critics, highlighting its departure from traditions and practices of earlier administrations. All three were also sharply critical of the Bush team's devotion to secrecy in the formation of legal policy. It is therefore unsurprising that the Obama team has moved very quickly to publish the previously secret opinions that their Bush predecessors issued and to overturn those decisions. It would be hard to identify three lawyers more knowledgeable about the subject than Johnsen, Barron, and Lederman.

In the coming two weeks, their push for transparency will result in the publication of more Bush-era OLC memos, including the specific approvals granted for waterboarding, extended isolation, and other torture techniques—memos that the Bush administration has sought to keep secret. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden and Obama adviser John Brennan are said to have "gone to the mat" to keep the opinions secret, but Obama sided with his designated OLC team and upheld the decision to declassify and publish them.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars and Supreme Court advocates, and Obama's former teacher, is often mentioned as an adviser in the background, a gray eminence, counseling Obama on appointments and policy choices. He is widely believed to covet an appointment to the Supreme Court, though, at 67 years old, he might be passed over for a younger person. While Tribe is a regular target of the right and closely connected to an array of liberal causes, those familiar with his role in the recent appointments process say that he has steadily advised Obama to avoid ideological confrontations and stressed pragmatism as an important quality for appointees.

Another legal academic said to figure in Obama's inner circle is Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who until recently was a colleague of Obama's at the University of Chicago Law School. Sunstein has been appointed to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, while his wife Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, serves as chief on the National Security Council as head of international organizations. Sunstein is associated with the notion of judicial minimalism, arguing that decisions should be taken on the narrowest possible case-specific grounds so as to preserve a broader range of options in future cases. The executive orders that Obama issued in his first two days in office were widely seen as following Sunstein's minimalist approach in confronting a range of national-security issues on which Obama has pledged changes.

Unlike Obama, a professor of law, George W. Bush was noted for a sharp disdain for lawyers. He liked to make disparaging jokes about attorneys in pinstripes and tasseled loafers. "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass," he barked as the war on terror got under way, according to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Through the Bush administration, appointment to high-level legal positions was usually a reward for faithful service—as personified by Alberto Gonzales, who as counsel to the president and attorney general arguably held the two most powerful legal posts. Gonzales' entire career, as a partner at the prestigious Houston firm of Vinson & Elkins, in Texas state government, and finally in Washington, was marked by service to a single client: George W. Bush.

The Bush administration's overriding concern was for political loyalty. It demanded individuals who would unquestioningly implement the White House's directives. The notion of independent professional judgment was derided as counterproductive at best and a cloak for liberal activism at worst. To that end, selecting the best and the brightest was not advisable. Where prior administrations looked for the top graduates from the nation's elite law schools, the Bush team scoured schools not found in a list of the top-100 law schools (and sometimes not even ABA-accredited), but with strong ties to the religious right and the Republican Party. Justice Department officials openly asked job candidates whether they had worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign and contributed money and quickly rejected those whose offense was support for John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries. Membership in the movement's conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, was also a plus if not essential—in recently disclosed emails, former Bush-era U.S. attorney and Civil Rights Division Director Bradley Schlozman (whose case is now under review for the possible filing of criminal charges) called them "ideological comrades." The result was a Justice Department filled with political hacks in appointed positions and a historically unprecedented level of politicization in its decision-making process.

The Obama nominees, presenting the sharpest possible contrast, have drawn sputtering fire from Republicans in Congress and have come under broad attack from religious-right leaders who previously had strong influence in Justice Department picks. Dawn Johnsen is an interesting test case. If the Republicans opt for a filibuster or move to line up a unanimous GOP vote in opposition, it will be a shot across the bow of the Obama Justice Department.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and the American Lawyer, among other publications.

The Hill: Go back into hiding, GOP begs Dick Cheney

2009-03-25T19:46:00.001-04:00

Go back into hiding, GOP begs Dick Cheney

By Molly K. Hooper

Posted: 03/23/09 08:10 PM [ET]

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.

Displeased with the former vice-president's recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he's hurting GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings.

The veep, who showed a penchant for secrecy during eight years in the White House,has popped up in media interviews to defend the Bush-Cheney record while suggesting that the country is not as safe under President Obama.

Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, "He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn't be so public...But he has the right to speak out since he's a private citizen."

Another House Republican lawmaker who requested anonymity said he wasn't surprised that Cheney has strongly criticized Obama early in his term, but argued that it's not helping the GOP cause.

The legislator said Cheney, whose approval ratings were lower than President Bush's during the last Congress, didn't think through the political implications of going after Obama.

Cheney did "House Republicans no favors," the lawmaker said, adding, "I could never understand him anyway."

Cheney's office declined to comment for this article.

Potential Illinois Senate hopeful Rep. Mark Kirk (R) told The Hill that Cheney would better shape his legacy by writing a book.

"Tending a legacy is best done in a memoir," Kirk said. "I would just encourage everybody who has left office to follow the tradition of the Founding Fathers — to write your memoirs, but to refrain from [criticizing]."

Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who is running for governor, suggested that past leaders should not be seeking the spotlight at a time when the party is rebuilding and redefining itself, after "hitting bottom" in the devastating losses last November.

"Interpret it however you want to, but what I'm saying is: We should focus on the people that will lead us tomorrow, not the people who led us yesterday," Wamp said. "With all due respect to former Vice President Cheney, he represents what's behind us, not what's ahead of us."

To the delight of some Democrats, Cheney, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele have attracted headlines in recent weeks.

Asked about Cheney's criticisms of Obama, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs last week said, "I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal."

Bush, who has announced he has already started to work on his memoirs, has not taken shots at Obama.

The 43rd president said last week that Obama "deserves my silence," adding "it is essential that he be helped in office."

Not all Republicans are calling for Cheney to keep mum.

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.), the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee who is eyeing a 2010 Senate bid, said Cheney's remarks are not out of bounds because Obama made some "pretty severe criticisms of what President Bush did in the war against terrorism."

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) said, "Politically, it's irrelevant, because whether I like it or not, a private citizen has the right to free speech and they can do what they want. What gets a majority back is deeds, not words."

During an interview on "60 Minutes" that aired on Sunday, Obama fired back at Cheney.

Obama said, "I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney … I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national-security interests. I think he's drawing the wrong lesson from history. The facts don't bear him out."

In 2007, it was revealed that Obama and Cheney are distant relatives.

(BN) Recession-Proof Jobs Shelter Bush’s Bum Lawyers: Ann Woolner

2009-03-22T18:00:00.001-04:00

Recession-Proof Jobs Shelter Bush's Bum Lawyers: Ann Woolner

Commentary by Ann Woolner

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- As hundreds of thousands of laid-off workers sign up for unemployment each month and major employers head for bankruptcy court, many Americans would find it oh-so- nice to land a job guaranteed for life.

The U.S. has no kings or queens. But it does have federal judges and tenured professors.

There are good reasons for making those jobs safe. Judges should follow the law, not the whims of voter opinion. Professors should be allowed to speak without fear of dismissal should they offend their school's major donors.

I get that. But the release this week of certain government memoranda written by lawyers now guaranteed a lifetime of paychecks makes me wonder whether exceptions should be made.

These are legally sloppy, single-minded memos from high- level Bush administration lawyers who rationalized widespread abandonment of bedrock constitutional principles. They said the president essentially had no restraints on him in time of war.

So wrong were these opinions that in its final days the Bush Justice Department felt compelled to disown the ones it hadn't previously discredited.

It now turns out that the same lawyers who condoned torture also claimed that the president could legally suspend free speech, the free press and freedom from unreasonable searches.

They wrote that the president could lift international treaties without consulting Congress.

And they said he could dispatch detainees to foreign countries that use torture to make them talk and needn't worry about congressional interference in treating terrorism suspects any way he wants.

Warrantless Wiretaps

And as for warrantless wiretaps on Americans, no need to bother with the law that restrained the president from doing that, either, they said.

Most of the memos, released this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, were written by John C. Yoo and Jay Bybee when they worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel beginning in 2001.

Fortunately for these men, they found other jobs before their work saw the light of day.

Yoo is a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, of all places. I'm all for academic diversity and robust debate on campus, and surely Berkeley could use some conservative balance.

But I worry what a man with so little regard for the Constitution teaches lawyers-to-be. For now, he is teaching it at Chapman University in Orange County, California, as a visiting professor while on leave from Berkeley.

Judicial Appointment

Bybee sits on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to which his patron, George W. Bush, appointed him. It's hard to imagine a Democratic Senate confirming him if the memos had come out earlier. The courts of appeal are one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court, each setting precedent for vast regions of the country.

Like Berkeley, the 9th Circuit needed more right-leaning weight for ideological balance. But if Bybee's memos are any indication, the court got a radical, not a conservative.

Their jobs don't offer the big bucks that, say, running an investment bank into the ground used to pay. But they carry high prestige and they promise lifetime work, barring ill-health or some sort of horrific misconduct.

It's true that these lawyers wrote the memos as the Bush administration was working around the clock to figure out every legal means available to prevent another terrorist attack.

Out of Mainstream

Nonetheless, these opinions are so far out of the mainstream that more level-headed attorneys in the Bush administration spent years correcting them.

You don't have to take my judgment. Rely on Bush's last deputy assistant attorney general, Steven Bradbury.

Five days before leaving office, he wrote to make it clear that those memos were just plain wrong.

To use his words, this one is "not sustainable" and that one contains "doubtful" legal reasoning. Some are "not persuasive" and at least one is flat out "incorrect."

Bradbury said so in a memo on Jan. 15 to make sure that no one would still take these writings seriously. He pointed out that some had long ago been "withdrawn," meaning discredited.

In some cases, they were defanged by Supreme Court rulings or congressional act.

Yoo and Bybee are smart, articulate men, richly credentialed professionally.

To be sure, the fear unleashed by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the awesome responsibility to help prevent another one weighed heavily on them.

But those who wrote the Constitution and its Bill of Rights knew something of war, too. They had fought one against great odds to win the very freedoms that these men would have diminished.

And yet these two will never have to worry about where their next paycheck is coming from. They're now ensconced where they can pass along their extreme views through court rulings and law classes for years to come, long after their memos are buried in history's trashbin.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg news columnist. The opinions are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: March 6, 2009 00:01 EST

Ex-Bush official to AP: Many at Gitmo are innocent

2009-03-21T16:21:00.001-04:00

Ex-Bush official to AP: Many at Gitmo are innocent

2 days ago

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A former Bush administration official says many Guantanamo detainees are innocent, and have been held only because U.S. officials hoped they would know something important.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He says only two dozen or so of the roughly 800 men held at Guantanamo are terrorists. About 240 prisoners remain at the US military prison.

"There are still innocent people there," Wilkerson told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Wilkerson says he learned of their innocence through State Department briefings and military commanders. He first made the allegations in an Internet posting this week.

The Pentagon has said the detainees are dangerous enemy combatants.

Seattle Times: Patriot or crackpot? Seattle man's mission to prosecute Bush

2009-03-19T22:15:00.001-04:00

most certainly a patriot

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COURTNEY BLETHEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Bob Alexander rounded up volunteers and money, but he knows others might not see things his way.

Patriot or crackpot? Seattle man's mission to prosecute Bush

By Mark Rahner

Seattle Times staff reporter

Ask Bob Alexander how often he's heard the word "quixotic" recently. The approximate answer: all the time.

Of all the people who read Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's best-selling "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," this 57-year-old Seattle coffee merchant is the only one jolted to act on it in a substantial way. The SuperBeans proprietor has become a super-activist.

With the help of a handful of volunteers and donations, Alexander has sent 2,200 copies of Bugliosi's hardcover to prosecutors around the country.

Now he and his volunteers are following up with each one of them by phone and e-mail, as well as gathering signatures for petitions urging the prosecutors to indict the former president.

Two other things Alexander hears: that he's courageous and principle-driven, and that he's an obsessed crackpot.

"Absolutely," he said with a kind of rueful joviality. He hears he's "a Bush-hater, an America-hater." He wouldn't disagree with the former, but Alexander argues that it's only hatred for what's been done in America's name that spurred him to act.

He had already achieved a degree of recognition for his anti-Bush essays that incendiary liberal talk-radio host Mike Malloy regularly reads on his syndicated show as a "Moment with Bob."

But Alexander was inspired by Bugliosi's premise: Bush lied to make a case for invading Iraq, so he's responsible for each of the more than 4,000 American lives lost there, and prosecutors in counties that had Iraq war casualties have the jurisdiction to file murder charges against Bush.

Not every lawyer and legal scholar agrees with the premise, and it's the possibility of war-crimes investigations — for torture — that's gained the most mainstream traction so far. But Alexander locked in.

"After I read the book, it was the first time in eight years I had seen anyone lay out a clear blueprint of what we could do because of what Bush has done," Alexander said.

Calling all prosecutors

Reached at his Pasadena, Calif., home, Bugliosi recalled, "[Alexander] sent me a letter and said he was telling people, 'Instead of buying my coffee, spend the money on Vincent Bugliosi's book.' I wrote back to him and said, 'I'm very honored you feel so strongly about this, but I feel extremely uncomfortable that you're losing business. Can't you just recommend that people buy the book?' "

Nope. A thought percolated after Alexander attended a Seattle appearance by Bugliosi in September and he listened to the author's argument about the jurisdiction of district attorneys (DA).

"The next day I was walking to school to pick up my little boy and I just thought, Why don't we send a book to all of them? It didn't seem at that second a very patriotic thought, or a very courageous thought."

In fact, he said, "One of the grimmest things you can do is look up the names of all the soldiers who died, in each county, and then match them up with a DA."

But in September, Alexander and his wife, Arminda, set up a Web site for the project (prosecutegeorgebush.com) and began raising donations chiefly through Malloy's radio listeners. With a substantial cost break from publisher Vanguard Press and nearly $18,000 raised, Alexander had enough books by January.

"I didn't quite completely grasp what it was like having 4,000 pounds of books in your house," he said.

With 10 volunteers, some pizza and no doubt plenty of his coffee, Alexander packed the books with a cover letter from Bugliosi, and sent them off Jan. 31. Now they're following up.

"He really took the bull by the horns," Bugliosi said. "Bob's the only one that really took it to the next level."

Question of resources

No takers so far, though, particularly in King County.

Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff in the King County Prosecutor's Office, said he's answered about 500 e-mails from people who want charges filed against Bush.

"Mr. Bugliosi has some legal theories that he suggests, but none of which have any legal merit," he said.

Goodhew explained, "The statutes of Washington state only give us jurisdiction for crimes that occur in Washington state. We can't prosecute someone for a murder that occurs in California under Washington state law, so how can we prosecute for someone that was killed in Iraq?"

Also, Goodhew said, "Even if there was jurisdiction, we don't have the resources."

Other prosecutors in nearby counties asked for reaction to receiving the book didn't return calls from The Times.

University of Washington professor Peter Arenella, a nationally recognized expert in criminal law, agrees with Goodhew.

Further, Arenella said, "Regardless of whether Bugliosi offers a tenable legal theory for criminal prosecution of Bush for some of his decisions and policies in conducting the Iraq war, one thing is clear: There is a complete absence of any political will to pursue a criminal prosecution against Mr. Bush."

For the latter reason, Bugliosi says, no federal prosecutor who answers to the U.S. attorney general will touch the matter.

Beyond that, he claims those who disagree with him about jurisdiction simply don't understand the law he cites: the Effects Doctrine, which allows prosecution for effects suffered within a jurisdiction for acts committed outside it.

Meanwhile, even though Alexander has his supporters, some others don't quite see things his way.

An Army vet e-mailed him, "Alas my wish that you would be dragged out in the street and shot in public then put on display for 3 days like they used to do to people like you in Iraq will never come true. And to think I actually went through hell to defend this crap."

Another wrote him, "It's liberal facists [sic] like yourself who will destroy this country ... not George Bush."

Yet another wrote, "One day you will be arrested and killed by the government and when that day comes I will celebrate."

Again, quixotic, to say the least.

Realistically, Alexander said, "I think there's a very good chance of getting an indictment" if not a murder conviction against a former president.

"I think there's some DA out there who believes in the law more than he believes in partisan politics. At least with an indictment we can show the rest of the world that we know what happened and we're trying to clean it up."

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com

The Raw Story: Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney

2009-03-17T20:44:00.001-04:00

Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney

03/11/2009 @ 2:28 pm

Filed by Muriel Kane

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

Hersh replied, "After 9/11, I haven't written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet."

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. "It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on," Hersh stated. "Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

Hersh told MinnPost.com blogger Eric Black in an email exchange after the event that the subject was "not something I wanted to dwell about in public." He is looking into it for a book, but he believes it may be a year or two before he has enough evidence "for even the most skeptical."

Stories have been coming out about covert Pentagon assassination squads for the last several years. In 2003, Hersh himself reported on Task Force 121, which operated chiefly out of the Joint Special Operations Command. Others stories spoke of a proposed Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group.

As Hersh noted in Minnesota, the New York Times on Monday described the Joint Special Operations Command as overseeing the secret commando units in Afghanistan whose missions were temporarily ordered halted last month because of growing concerns over excessive civilian deaths.

However, it appears that Hersh is now on the trail of some fresh revelation about these squads and their connection to Vice-President Cheney that goes well beyond anything that has previously been reported.

Eric Black's blog posting, which includes an hour-long audio recording of the full University of Minnesota colloquy, is available here.

The Raw Story: Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court

2009-03-14T18:07:00.001-04:00

Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court

Stephen C. Webster
Published: Saturday March 7, 2009

An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, former US President George W. Bush could -- and should -- be next on the International Criminal Court's list.

The former prosecutor's assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America's military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations.

"David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects," reported the New Zealand Herald.

The indictment of Bashir was a landmark, said Crane, because it paved a route for the court at The Hague to pursue heads of states engaged in criminality.

"Crane also said that the [Bashir] indictment may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture," said Turkish Weekly.

"All pretended justifications notwithstanding, the aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupations constitute atrocities that must be condemned and repudiated by all who believe in the rule of law in international relations,"Brockmann told the Human Rights Council. "The illegality of the use of force against Iraq cannot be doubted as it runs contrary to the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. It sets a number of precedents that we cannot allow to stand."

The Bush administration boycotted the Human Rights Council. The day Brockmann made his accusations happened to be the first in which the United States had observers at the council, on orders from President Obama.

According to Iranian news network PressTV, the Iranian government called the Bashir indictment "a blow to International justice" and an "insult directed at Muslims."

Iran's plainly stated sentiment toward the court's legitimacy is similar in spirit to that of the United States. Because the US Government has refused to recognize the court by becoming a signatory in its statute, "the only other way Bush could be investigated is if the [UN] Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member," said the Herald.

Due to the International Criminal Court's lack of any real police force, it has traditionally relied upon signatory states for enforcement of its rulings. But when the leader of one such state is indicted, the court's authority and enforcement capability is called into question. Even the arrest of Bashir is a far cry, for now. And without a UN Security Council order, former US President Bush would not go on "trial" before the court any time soon.

However, on January 26, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak insisted that the pursuit of Bush and members of his administration for the torture of terror war prisoners is crucial if justice is to be served.

Nowak added that he believes enough evidence exists currently to proceed with the prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who was credited as being highly influential in the crafting and push for America's invasion of Iraq and the prior administration's abusive interrogation tactics.

The following video was published to YouTube on March 6 by the non-profit, Web-based news service LinkTV.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/ExUN_prosecutor_Bush_may_be_next_0307.html

Reuters: Suicide attack kills 28 at police academy in Iraq

2009-03-09T21:10:00.001-04:00

Suicide attack kills 28 at police academy in Iraq

Sun Mar 8, 2009 10:45am EDT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed 28 people and wounded 57 on Sunday at the main police academy in Baghdad, the first major attack in almost a month in the Iraqi capital.

Many police and police recruits were among those killed when the bomber, wearing an explosive vest and riding a motorbike also packed with explosives, blew himself up at the back entrance of the police academy in central Baghdad, police said.

Body parts were scattered at the scene and police struggled to determine the identities of the victims.

Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq from the height of sectarian and insurgent bloodshed unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the country remains a dangerous place, and areas such as the northern city of Mosul are still in the grip of a stubborn insurgency. A car bomb in a livestock market in southern Iraq killed 12 people on Thursday.

On February 11, 16 people were killed 25 wounded when twin car bombs exploded at a bus terminal and market area in Baghdad.

Police recruits have been a major target for militant attacks in the past. On December 1 last year, an attack killed 15 policemen and recruits and wounded 45 other people outside the same Baghdad police academy.

"We know recruits are a favorite target for suicide bombers. We tell them to come in small groups instead of big groups, but they don't pay attention," an academy official said.

"This is the result -- a suicide bomber managed to infiltrate and explode himself," he said, requesting anonymity.

Iraq has expanded the ranks of its police and military forces by hundreds of thousands of men in recent years as the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki seeks to ensure local forces can provide security, with U.S. forces preparing to end combat operations by September 2010.

Under U.S. President Barack Obama's new plan, up to 50,000 U.S. soldiers would stay in Iraq to train and equip local forces, protect civilian reconstruction projects and conduct limited counter-terrorism operations until all U.S. forces are required to leave by the end of 2011.

U.S. and Iraqi forces acknowledge that Iraqi forces are in urgent need of equipment and specialized training before they can take over sole responsibility.

Air support and logistics are two areas in which Iraqi forces are seen as especially weak.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed)

WP: Bush's Secret Dictatorship

2009-03-08T11:35:00.001-04:00

Posted at 12:52 PM ET, 03/ 3/2009

Bush's Secret Dictatorship

The memo issued by the acting director of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel just five days before Barack Obama took office comes across almost as, among other things, a bit whiny.

Steven Bradbury wrote to officially retract a series of memos in which his former colleagues secretly rewrote the Constitution.

He acknowledged that their reasoning was at various points "unconvincing" and "not sustainable."

But Bradbury was also making excuses for them. They were afraid, he wrote: "The opinions addressed herein were issued in the wake of the atrocities of 9/11, when policymakers, fearing that additional catastrophic terrorist attacks were imminent, strived to employ all lawful means to protect the nation." They were rushed, confronting "novel and complex legal questions in a time of great danger and under extraordinary time pressure."

No excuse. Not even close.

The memo was one of nine previously undisclosed Office of Legal Counsel documents released by Obama's Justice Department yesterday, most of them making baldly spurious legal arguments to support any number of unprecedented tactics that were either contemplated or employed by the White House.

At about the same time the documents were being released, Attorney General Eric Holder was making a speech putting them in context: "Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties," Holder said. "Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good. I have often said that the test of a great nation is whether it will adhere to its core values not only when it is easy, but also when it is hard....

"There is no reason we cannot wage an effective fight against those who have sworn to harm us while we respect our most honored constitutional traditions. We can never put the welfare of the American people at risk but we can also never choose actions that we know will weaken the legal and moral fiber of our nation."

R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen write in The Washington Post: "The number of major legal errors committed by Bush administration lawyers during the formulation of its early counterterrorism policies was far greater than previously known, according to internal Bush administration documents released for the first time by the Justice Department yesterday....

"In one of the newly disclosed opinions, Justice Department appointee John Yoo argued that constitutional provisions ensuring free speech and barring warrantless searches could be disregarded by the president in wartime, allowing troops to storm a building if they suspected terrorists might be inside. In another, the department asserted that detainees could be transferred to countries known to commit human rights abuses so long as U.S. officials did not intentionally seek their torture."

Neil A. Lewis writes in the New York Times: "The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

"Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks."

Josh Meyer and Julian E. Barnes write in the Los Angeles Times that one Bush administration lawyer told them the memos are "just the tip of the iceberg" in terms of what was authorized.

Law professor Jack Balkin blogs about "reasoning which sought, in secret, to justify a theory of Presidential dictatorship...

"This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary. This is a theory of presidential dictatorship.

"These views are outrageous and inconsistent with basic principles of the Constitution as well as with two centuries of legal precedents. Yet they were the basic assumptions of key players in the Bush Administration in the days following 9/11."

Scott Horton blogs for Harper's: "We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it."

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our 'laws' were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them."

Greenwald also writes, with some vindication: "Yet those who have spent the last several years pointing out how unprecedentedly extremist and radical was our political leadership (and how meek and complicit were our other key institutions) were invariably dismissed as shrill hysterics."

By Dan Froomkin | March 3, 2009; 12:52 PM ET | Category: Bush Rollback

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/2009/03/bushs_secret_dictatorship.html

Politico: Bush a four-letter word at CPAC

2009-02-28T18:26:00.001-05:00

a highlight of the CPAC conference is Ron Paul explaining how we need to get rid of the Department of Education, pull out of the UN, go back to the gold standard etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_aZn6wqAdQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGeR-ocMwfU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9s937F9IWY&feature=related

-----

Bush a four-letter word at CPAC
By: Andy Barr
February 28, 2009 07:01 AM EST

Conservatives aren't sure who's the Republican presidential frontrunner in
2012. They disagree over how sharply to attack President Barack Obama and on
the question of whether a back-to-basics approach is the path back to
majority.

But if there's one thing those attending the annual Conservative Political
Action Conference this week agree on, it is this: They don't want another
George W. Bush.

Few come out right out and say it, but they don't have to. There's no
nostalgia for the past eight years, no tributes to Bush and no sessions
dedicated to exploring his presidency.

Indeed, for a president who publicly embraced conservative principles, there
is little evidence that the movement returns the sentiment.

When the subject of the 43rd president has come up at CPAC — where he spoke
each year of his presidency — it's usually been in an unflattering context.

Conservative icon Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, railed against
the "Bush-Obama continuity in economic policy" and the "Bush-Obama big
spending program" in a speech Friday.

"We had big spending under Bush and now we have big spending under Obama,"
Gingrich said. "And so now we have two failures."

He wasn't the only high-profile conservative taking shots at the former
president.

"I wish the president would have laid [a stimulus package] out before he
left office, so that in September, October, November, December, there would
have been a stimulus plan," former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney
said Friday in an interview with POLITICO, adding that the GOP has yet to
come up with unified policy proposals or a clear, positive voice.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, like Romney an unsuccessful candidate
for president in 2008, pointed to the Bush administration's failed response
to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

"You know what kind of conservatives we need most? Competent conservatives,"
Huckabee said in a speech Thursday. "It's when we lose our competence, that
Americans lose their confidence."

"We're no longer Reagan's shining city on a hill; we are the ruined city by
the sea," he added.

While the 9,000 registered attendants represented the top turnout in the
conference's history, the series of speeches, panels, meeting, dinners and
parties was dominated by questions about the direction of the conservative
movement and the Republican Party in the post-Bush era.

The absence of two of the party's most recognizable conservatives, Gov.
Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), only added to the
uncertainty since CPAC has traditionally served as an early proving ground
for GOP presidential contenders and their ideas.

"We are fast becoming a regional party, not a national party," Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned the conference. "There is
another name for a regional party, it's a minority party."

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) added that "the American people walked away from
us, so now we're in the wilderness."

While it was obvious that Bush failed to leave a model of governance for
conservatives to follow, it was equally clear that there are competing
visions for how Republicans can recover.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) said the House Republicans "have found out the way
to regain the majority is to go back to our old ways."

Pence said that while the GOP does need to adopt new technology and ideas,
it really needs to "get back to basics."

"We need to be willing to fight for freedom, free markets and traditional
family values," he said.

Other speakers warned audiences that they needed to rethink their priorities
in order to come back to power.

Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and current host of MSNBC's
"Morning Joe," warned the GOP against becoming the party of resistance and
urged conservatives to tone down their rhetoric against Obama.

"We have to present alternatives, we can't just say no," he said. "There is
an alternative to everything we hear from the White House every single day,
but we can't just say no."

He added: "We're not going to win votes and we're not going to win elections
by calling Barack Obama a communist."

But various scenes from the conference suggested that won't be so simple.
When House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the president's $787
billion stimulus a "down payment on a new American socialist experiment,"
the audience exploded in enthusiastic response, just as it did when Cliff
Kincaid, the editor of Accuracy in Media, suggested that Obama is not an
American citizen.

Obama, of course, wasn't the only pin cushion at the conference — other
frequent targets included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep.
Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Gingrich singled out Geithner as "part of the Bush group."

Despite the disappointments of the Bush era, CPAC's leader, American
Conservative Union President David A. Keene, urged conservatives to remain
hopeful and to continue to elect conservative pols.

"Sometimes they don't live up to be everything we want them to," he said,
"but sometimes they do."

Politico: Bush back in saddle for speaking tour + The Times: George Bush embarks on lucrative international speaking tour

2009-02-25T20:59:00.001-05:00

The former president will embark on a series of speeches in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Photo: AP

Bush back in saddle for speaking tour

By MIKE ALLEN | 2/23/09 7:34 PM EST

Former President George W. Bush will embark next month on a series of speeches that will take him to Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia, advisers said.

The former president already has plans for about 10 speeches over the next year, and will do more.

During his final news conference, Bush had predicted that he would be back in the saddle quickly. He has stuck to that: An offering for speeches went up on the Washington Speakers Bureau website on Jan. 29, the week after he left the White House.

The president, who moved to Dallas last week after spending the first month of his ex-presidency at his ranch, is also working on a book about major decisions he made as the 43rd president.

The first speech will be March 17 in Calgary, Alberta. The Canadian event, to be held in a convention center before a largely business audience, is being promoted as "A conversation with George W. Bush," and is scheduled to last from noon to 2 p.m. It is closed to the press.

"President during a period of great consequence, George W. Bush shares thoughts on his eight momentous years in the Oval Office and discusses the challenges facing the world in the 21st century," the brochure says.

Washington Speakers Bureau also represents the former first lady, Laura Bush, and the younger brother of the former president, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

The suggested topic is "Remarks by George W. Bush." The offering notes that he travels from Texas. "Fees based on event location," the bureau says

Here is how the former president is described in the Washington Speakers Bureau's online catalog:

"President George W. Bush served in the Oval Office for eight of the most consequential years in American history. Faced with challenges from a terrorist attack to a global financial crisis, he made difficult decisions that will shape the nation's course and world affairs for decades to come. His leadership after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was an inspiration to millions of Americans. His policies, while controversial at times, kept the country safe for more than seven years and liberated more than 50 million people from tyranny.

"Working with leaders in Congress and elsewhere, President Bush also raised standards and accountability in public education, added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare that helped more than 40 million beneficiaries, improved air quality and made America's energy supply more secure, designated more ocean area habitats for environmental protection than any predecessor, launched historic efforts to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria in Africa, and strengthened America's relationships with strategically important nations like India, China and Japan. He shares with audiences candid insights on his eight years in the White House, his experiences with other world leaders, the nature of public leadership and decision making, and a wide variety of domestic and international issues."

-----

(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Mr Bush is swapping the White House lectern for the after dinner circuit

From The Times

February 25, 2009

George Bush embarks on lucrative international speaking tour

Tim Reid in Washington

George W Bush will embark next month on an international speaking tour aimed at making him hundreds of thousands of dollars and reshaping his battered image abroad.

The former president plans to make about ten speeches over the next year — the first of what he hopes will be many more — at various venues in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Mr Bush promised at his final news conference that he would keep busy as soon as he left office. He is also working on a book about his eight tumultuous years in the White House and his presidential institute. Its central theme will be liberty.

He will deliver his first speech on March 17 in Calgary, Canada. It will be held in a convention centre before a mostly business audience, and the press will not be allowed to attend. The brochure promoting it reads: "President during a period of great consequence, George W Bush shares thoughts on his eight momentous years in the Oval Office and discusses the challenges facing the world in the 21st century."

Post-presidential speaking can be lucrative, although Mr Bush will struggle to match the colossal sums amassed by Bill Clinton. By the end of 2007 he had made roughly $40 million, including $10 million in 2006 alone. For one speech — to Citigroup in France in 2004 — he was paid $250,000. Mr Clinton has now been forced to curb his engagements drastically because of conflict of interest concerns over his wife Hillary's role as US Secretary of State.

Mr Bush has been taken on by the Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents an array of prominent public figures, including Tony Blair, John Major and Mr Bush's wife, Laura.

Promoting its new client on its website , it says of the former president: "Faced with challenges from a terrorist attack to a global financial crisis, he made difficult decisions that will shape the nation's course and world affairs for years to come."

Mr Bush spent the first month as an ex-president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Last week he moved to his new home in Dallas.

Huffington Post: Walter Jones, GOP Congressman, Signs On To Investigating Bush

2009-02-20T18:10:00.001-05:00

Sam Stein

stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting From DC

Walter Jones, GOP Congressman, Signs On To Investigating Bush

February 13, 2009 12:56 PM

There is, in fact, an element of bipartisan support for creating of a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate illegalities from the Bush years. And it comes from within Congress.

Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, has signed on as a co-sponsor of legislation introduced by House Judiciary Chair John Conyers to establish "a national commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties."

A self-described conservative who brought "Freedom Fries" to Congress, Jones developed into one of the most vocal Republican critics of the Bush administration. He took particular umbrage at the handling of the Iraq War and the decision to prohibit photographs of returning coffins of American soldiers. Late in the past administration's time in office he was reported to have been reading Vincent Bugliosi's book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."

So while it is surprising to see an elected Republican official endorse the establishment of an investigatory committee to probe the Bush years, it is slightly less surprising that that official is Jones.

Nevertheless, Democrats on the Hill who are committed to the idea are ecstatic to have the congressman on board. Jones' office did not return repeated requests for comment.

As for what the Obama administration thinks of the matter, that remains shrouded in a bit of mystery. I asked the president about Sen. Patrick Leahy's proposal for a truth and reconciliation committee at his Monday night press conference. He responded that he had would not comment on a proposal he had not seen. Asked on Friday whether the White House was in a better position to offer an opinion and if not, when, a spokesman replied: "I don't have a timetable to share... I will keep you updated if there is movement."

In the meantime, polling firms are beginning to take the issue seriously enough to gauge public opinion. The results are somewhat mixed, but they certainly demonstrate that the notion of investigating the Bush administration for possible illegal activities is not a revenge fantasy of the fringe "left."

A USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 38 percent of Americans support launching criminal investigations into the use of torture and warrantless wiretapping, while 41 percent support criminal investigations of Justice Department politicization. Thirty percent support setting up an "independent panel" to investigate what happened at DOJ, while roughly 25 percent support an independent investigation into warrantless wiretapping and the authorization of torture.

WP: Bush Faithful Rewarded With Jobs

2009-02-19T19:59:00.001-05:00

Bush Faithful Rewarded With Jobs
On the Way Out, He Placed Aides and Big-Money GOP Donors

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 10, 2009; A02

Fred F. Fielding, Emmet T. Flood, William A. Burck and Daniel M. Price worked together at the White House under George W. Bush. Less than two weeks before leaving office, Bush made sure the senior aides shared a new assignment, naming them to an obscure World Bank agency called the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

The appointments are for six years and are potentially lucrative, paying up to $3,000 a day plus travel and other expenses if an appointee is chosen to hear a case. Bush also named two other prominent Republican lawyers to the agency, which attempts to broker international finance disagreements.

Bush made more than 100 such end-of-term appointments to a constellation of presidential boards and panels, such as the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the U.S.-Russia Polar Bear Commission. Like other presidents, he often turned to close aides and top political supporters to fill the last-minute postings, many of which will outlast President Obama's current term.

Nearly half of Bush's appointments after Election Day were filled by donors who gave a total of nearly $1.9 million to Republicans since 2003, according to an analysis of the postings. At least 20 of the positions were filled by former Bush aides, plus others filled by old hands from the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Most of the positions are unpaid and are valued more for their status than for monetary compensation. Yet the appointments show how political connections matter even for the most obscure Washington jobs, and they illustrate the extent to which presidents have an impact well after they leave the White House.

"It's a way for an outgoing president to have some ongoing influence, however modest, after he's gone," said Thomas E. Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar. "It also shows you that a lot of people just like positions, names, titles and affiliations, especially if it came from a presidential appointment."

Carlos M. Gutierrez, Bush's last commerce secretary, now sits on the board of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. James W. Holsinger Jr., whom Bush had nominated at one point to be surgeon general, snagged a seat on the fitness council, along with quarterback Eli Manning, figure skater Michelle Kwan and other athletic stars. Condoleezza Rice, in a customary move for former secretaries of state, was named to the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Some boards were particularly popular. Bush named a dozen appointees to the council that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including former chief of staff Joshua B. Bolten, former homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff, former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Elliott Abrams, who was an aide to Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Two major GOP donors -- real estate billionaire Alan I. Casden and former public broadcasting chairman Cheryl F. Halpern -- were also on the list.

The nation's top military colleges were also sought-after destinations. For the U.S. Air Force Academy board of visitors, Bush named former congressman Robin Hayes (R-N.C.), former U.S. trade representative Susan C. Schwab and former White House physician Richard J. Tubb. Fred Malek, who was an aide to Nixon and the elder Bush, was appointed to the board overseeing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., while former congresswoman Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.) was named to the U.S. Naval Academy board in Annapolis.

The wide array of presidential appointments "perpetrates a merry-go-round of personalities," said Marthena Cowart, spokeswoman for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. "Once you get on the merry-go-round, you never get off, whether you belong there or not."

Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that while many of the appointments owe to vanity or good causes, some are also useful for maintaining political influence. "The real question is not only whether they are paid, but what benefits can they pay out from these boards," she said.

Consider the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, the U.S. government's senior trade advisory panel, which favored several of the free-trade agreements that Bush was unable to push through Congress.

Bush named three members to the panel on Christmas Eve: Carol Ann Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo, who donated about $35,000 to Bush and other Republicans over the past six years; Maria Cino, who organized the 2008 Republican National Convention; and Israel Hernandez, who worked in the Commerce Department and the Bush White House. Their terms last through 2012, allowing them to play a role in influencing trade policy throughout Obama's term.

Many of the appointees had no clear political connections, particularly on some of the more obscure or scientific panels, such as the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science.

The World Bank's settlement center, based in Washington, bills itself as the "leading international arbitration institution" for disputes between nation-states and private corporations. Four White House aides were appointed to the agency on Jan. 6 as conciliators or arbitrators: Fielding, who was chief White House counsel; Flood, a special counsel; Burck, an associate counsel; and Price, a deputy national security adviser. J.C. Boggs, president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and Ronald A. Cass, who served under Reagan and the elder Bush, were also named.

Conciliators and arbitrators earn "$3,000 per day of meetings or other work performed in connection with the proceedings, as well as subsistence allowances and reimbursement of travel expenses," according to the center's published fee schedule.

But David Theis, a World Bank spokesman, said the agency is set up like a pool, with up to eight appointees from each of the agency's 143 member countries. As a result, he said, about 80 percent of them never participate in a case, and therefore receive no pay.

American Freedom Campaign: We can't handle the truth

2009-02-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

for those who think a truth commission should only be a small first step, please consider signing the below:

-----

Dear Jonathan,

The subject line of this email isn't an admission of weakness. Rather, it is a cry of frustration. We have grown sick and tired of the Bush administration getting away with murder - figuratively, if not literally. And we are done watching Congress spin its wheels merely talking about it.

The latest outrage? Earlier this week, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called for the establishment of a "Truth Commission" to look into various unconstitutional actions by the Bush administration. As Leahy described the commission, "such a process could involve subpoena powers and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions for anything accept perjury in order to get to the full truth."

We don't want the "truth." We want a full criminal investigation led by the Department of Justice, with prosecutions where it is found that the laws of the United States have been violated. If you agree, click on the following link to send an E-mail to the Department of Justice:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2165/t/1027/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26685

Why should we waste our time looking for "the truth" when the man who produced the legal memo setting the stage for torture under President Bush, John Yoo, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Bush -- on three separate occasions! -- authorized waterboarding, an interrogation technique universally recognized as torture? That is the truth. Now let's start the prosecution process.

Why should we waste our time looking for "the truth" when we have known for years that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program was conducted outside of the legal boundaries established by the FISA laws? That is the truth. Now let's start the prosecution process.

We know Bush administration officials defied congressional subpoenas. Attorney General Michael Mukasey may have even violated the law by directing the U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia to ignore a statute providing that he "shall" bring a contempt citation issued by Congress to a grand jury. We don't need to go through the charade of watching Karl Rove defy congressional subpoenas again.

We don't need the truth. We need the Justice Department to do its job and launch a criminal investigation. Please use the following link to ask Attorney General Eric Holder when he will start this process:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2165/t/1027/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26685

Once you have sent your message, please forward this email widely to friends and family. In the alternative, you can use the "Tell-A-Friend" option on the AFC Web site that will appear after you have sent your message.

Thank you so much for taking action.

Steve Fox
Campaign Director
American Freedom Campaign Action Fund

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Senator Leahy: A Truth Commission

2009-02-13T08:53:00.001-05:00

please consider signing the petition

A Truth Commission

Dear Jonathan,

Urge Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses --
Sign my petition at BushTruthCommission.com today.

We have just emerged from a time when White House officials often acted as if they were above the law. That was wrong and must be fully exposed so it never happens again.

That is why I proposed the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws.

During the past several years, this country has been divided as deeply as it has been at any time in our history since the Civil War. It has made our government less productive and our society less civil. In this week when we begin commemorating the Lincoln bicentennial, there is need, again, "to bind up the nation's wounds." President Lincoln urged that course in his second inaugural address some seven score and four years ago.

Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened. The best way to move forward is getting to the truth, finding out what happened, so we can make sure it does not happen again.

Please sign my online petition at BushTruthCommission.com -- and urge Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

The Obama Administration has already made huge strides to restore the Constitution and renew our commitment to international law after eight corrosive years. But we must read the full page on this dark chapter in American history before we can turn it for good, which is why I feel so strongly about investigating what really happened.

I hope you agree.

Please sign my online petition at BushTruthCommission.com -- and urge Congress to consider forming a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

On Monday, I delivered a speech at Georgetown University where I outlined my ideas about why we need a truth and reconciliation commission and how it could work. You can click here to watch some of my remarks.

A truth and reconciliation commission would be tasked with seeking answers. It would provide Congress and the American people with a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past, so we do not repeat them in the future.

Please sign my online petition at BushTruthCommission.com -- and urge Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

Thank you for taking action to prevent history from repeating itself by supporting the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the misdeeds of the past eight years.

Sincerely,

Patrick Leahy
U.S. Senator

P.S. If you think establishing a truth and reconciliation commission is important, I hope you'll take just a second to sign my online petition -- and then forward this email to everyone you know. It's critically important that we build grassroots support to make sure we get the truth.

Visit LeahyForVermont.com | Sign the Petition

Paid for by Leahy for U.S. Senator Committee, Inc.
PO Box 1042
Montpelier, VT 05601

Invite your friends & family to join Leahy for Vermont today!
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Reuters: Senator seeks Bush-era "truth commission"

2009-02-11T18:51:00.001-05:00

Senator seeks Bush-era "truth commission"

Mon Feb 9, 2009 6:29pm EST

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. "truth commission" should investigate Bush administration policies including the promotion of war in Iraq, detainee treatment and wiretapping without a warrant, an influential senator proposed on Monday.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, urged a commission as a way to heal what he called sharp political divides under former President George W. Bush and to prevent future abuses.

He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era.

"We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past," Leahy said in a speech at Georgetown University.

"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," the Vermont senator said. "And we do that to make sure it never happens again."

Some Republicans and intelligence officials have resisted any suggestion of broad inquiries into accusations against the Bush administration, saying it would be a distraction or weaken morale in the fight against terrorism.

"If every administration started to reexamine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it. This is not Latin America," the Judiciary committee's top-ranking Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, told reporters last month.

President Barack Obama suggested shortly before he took office in January that he did not favor prosecuting Bush administration officials over their counterterrorism policies, but said he would look into "past practices."

"What we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past," he said.

Bush spokesman Rob Saliterman said only, "We're not going to respond to every call for investigation."

Leahy said he had not begun to promote the truth commission idea with the Obama administration or with the Democratically controlled Congress. But he suggested it could be formed by both Congress and the White House, and said the panel must have credibility across the political spectrum.

Issues to investigate would include the Justice Department's firings of several U.S. attorneys, which Leahy said may have been motivated by a White House aim to influence elections, policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and other areas "where (congressional) committees were lied to."

This included the war in Iraq, he said. "There were lies told to the American people all the way through."

Bush has acknowledged that intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was wrong, but said he never lied to the public about the war.

Leahy said he wanted the Defense Department investigated for filming Iraq-war protesters, which he said came "shockingly close" to the FBI's Vietnam War-era Cointelpro operation to investigate domestic war protesters. "We fought a revolution in this country so we could protest the actions of our government," he said.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Reason Magazine: Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster

2009-02-09T20:44:00.001-05:00

Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster

He expanded the state, and the idea that the state is incompetent

Nick Gillespie | January 26, 2009

Now that George W. Bush has finally left office, here's a challenge to a nation famous for its proud tradition of invention: Can somebody invent a machine capable of fully measuring the disaster that was the Bush presidency?

Yes, yes, I know that attitudes towards presidencies are volatile. Harry Truman was hated when he left office and look at him now; he's so highly regarded that President Bush thought of him as a role model. There are, I'm sure, still a few William Henry Harrison dead-enders around, convinced that the 31 days the broken-down old general spent as president will someday receive the full glory they deserve.

In a way that was inconceivable when he took office, Bush—the advance man for the "ownership society," smaller and more trustworthy government, and a humble foreign policy—increased the size and scope of the federal government to unprecedented levels. At the same time, he constantly flashed signs of secrecy, duplicity, ineffectiveness and outright incompetence.

Think for a moment about the thousands of Transportation Security Administration screeners—newly minted government employees all—who continue to confiscate contact-lens solution and nail clippers while, according to nearly every field test, somehow failing to notice simulated bombs in passenger luggage.

Or schoolchildren struggling under No Child Left Behind, which federalized K-12 education to an unprecedented degree with nothing to show for it other than greater spending tabs. Or the bizarrely structured Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the largest entitlement program created since LBJ. Or the simple reality that taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.

Such programs were not in any way foisted on Bush, the way that welfare reform had been on Bill Clinton; they were signature projects, designed to create a legacy every bit as monumental and inspiring as Laura Bush's global literacy campaign.

The most basic Bush numbers are damning. If increases in government spending matter, then Bush is worse than any president in recent history. During his first four years in office—a period during which his party controlled Congress—he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the federal budget. The only other presidential term that comes close? Bush's second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223 billion in total additional outlays in his one full term.

If spending under Bush was a disaster, regulation was even worse. The number of pages in the Federal Registry is a rough proxy for the swollen expanse of the regulatory state. In 2001, some 64,438 pages of regulations were added to it. In 2007, more than 78,000 new pages were added. Worse still, argues the Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Bush is the unparalleled master of "economically significant regulations" that cost the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, he jacked that number by more than 70 percent. Since June 2008 alone, he introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations.

At this late date, it may be pointless to argue about the grounds for the invasion of Iraq, which even Bush has (finally) acknowledged were built on sand rather than bedrock. The Iraq war has lasted longer than any American conflict except for Vietnam and has cost more than any shooting match except for World War II. Leave aside for a moment the more than 4,200 U.S. deaths and 30,000 casualties, and ask a very basic question: Did President Bush's prosecution of the war—he declared an end to major hostilities in May 2003—and his direction of the ongoing occupation make you feel better about the government's ability to execute core functions?

Or, like the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina (later made good by shoveling billions of pork-laden tax dollars to the Gulf area) and the rushed, secretive, and ever-changing bailout of the financial sector, did it make you want to simply despair?

Bush's legacy is thus a bizarro version of Ronald Reagan's. Reagan entered office declaring that government was not the solution to our problems, it was the problem. Ironically, he demonstrated that government could do some important things right—he helped tame inflation and masterfully drew the Cold War to a nonviolent triumph for the Free World. By contrast, Bush has massively expanded the government along with the sense that government is incompetent.

That is no small accomplishment—and its pernicious effects will last long after Bush has moved back to Texas, and President Obama has announced that his stimulus package, originally tagged at $750 billion and already up to $825 billion, will cost $1 trillion or more. Bush has cleared the way for President Obama to intervene more and more in the economy and every other aspect of American life.

Last July, the political scientists Philippe Aghion, Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer wrote a paper titled "Regulation and Distrust" (PDF). Using data from the World Values Survey, the authors convincingly argue that "distrust influences not just regulation itself, but the demand for regulation." They found that "distrust fuels support for government control over the economy. What is perhaps most interesting about this finding...is that distrust generates demand for regulation even when people realize that the government is corrupt and ineffective."

George W. Bush has certainly taught us that government really can't be trusted to be very effective, or open, or smart. He has also taught us that government can always get bigger on every level and every way. It's a sad lesson that we'll be learning for many years to come.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com. A version of this ran in the Saturday, January 24, 2008 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Reuters: Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

2009-02-08T13:31:00.001-05:00

"It's hard to find a historian who won't say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known,"

President Bush walks away after saying goodbye to staff and friends after his primetime address from the White House, January 15, 2009.

REUTERS/Jason Reed

Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

Mon Jan 19, 2009 3:42pm EST

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - Editorial writers around the world have been taking their final printed whacks at George W. Bush, accusing the president of tarnishing America's standing with what many saw as arrogant and incompetent leadership.

Some newspaper editorials, for all their criticism, suggested historians might just be kinder later on than those now writing first drafts of history. A success often cited by those seeking a silver lining was the United States' freedom from further homeland attacks following September 11.

Bush's successor, Barack Obama, will be sworn in as the 44th U.S. president on Tuesday.

"A weak leader, Bush was just overwhelmed in the job," said Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline: "The Failure." "He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage."

Editorials hit out at Bush for two unfinished wars, for plunging the economy into recession, turning a budget surplus into a pile of debt, for his environment policies and tarnishing America's reputation with the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Bush was given credit in some editorials for defending the United States against terror attacks after September 11, 2001.

Israel was most complimentary, of his intentions if not necessarily of his achievements.

"Of all the U.S. presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush," the Jerusalem Post daily wrote during Bush's final visit.

Last week columnist Caroline Glick wrote Bush "recognizes Israel and the U.S. share the same enemies and they seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom. But Bush never learned how to translate personal views into policy."

Canada's Toronto Star was categorical in its condemnation.

"Goodbye to the worst president ever," it declared. "Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

"Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters," wrote the Sunday Times in London. It said America's national debt and unemployment nearly doubled on his watch.

Britain's Daily Mail said he entered office with a budget surplus of $128 billion but exits with a $482 billion deficit.

"He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low.

"How will history judge George W.? Have we, perhaps, to quote his own mangled malapropisms, 'misunderestimated' him? On the plus side, after 9/11 he achieved what became his number one priority: to prevent his country suffering further attack on its own soil. Al Qaeda has been hugely weakened."

LEGACY OF WARS

The Scottish Daily Record observed: "America is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a man who made the world a more dangerous place while sending it to the brink of economic collapse."

The Economist found room to praise Bush on free trade, immigration reform and China. But its overall view was negative:

"He leaves as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America's reputation since World War Two."

The Sydney Morning Herald complained about Bush's "singular lack of curiosity in international matters" in an editorial titled "Farewell to a flawed and unpopular commander-in-chief."

But it also praised Bush for improving U.S. relations with China and India, his efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. It predicted historians might one day rank Bush in the mid range.

Le Monde disagreed.

"It's hard to find a historian who won't say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known," the French daily wrote. "One success: since September 11, 2001, there was no attack on U.S. soil. But this sits alongside an interminable list of failures, starting with the war in Iraq."

Germany, ridiculed as "old Europe" by Bush's former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for opposing the Iraq invasion, took aim at Bush.

"Bush brought great misery to the world with his 'friend-or-foe' mentality," wrote Die Zeit.

Stern magazine said: "Bush led the world's most powerful nation to ruin. He lied to the world, tortured in the name of freedom and caused lasting damage to America's standing."

The Pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper resorted to bitter black humor under the headline: "We cried a lot and the joke was on us." It recalled his controversial election win in Florida and how he once nearly choked on a pretzel, watching television.

"Perhaps we could say that fate, which let the American people down first in Florida and then with the issue of the pretzel in the president's throat, ultimately helped them by making sure the president would spend half his time on vacation.

"Indeed, he would have caused twice the damage if he had been more active and focused."

Austria's Wiener Zeitung wrote Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even ranked higher in one international opinion poll than Bush:

"The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush. A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers -- along with at least 500,000 Iraqis."

In Poland, the Warsaw daily Dziennik lamented the worst part about Bush's presidency: "It was empty rhetoric."

(Additional reporting by Jakub Jaworoski in Warsaw, Peter Griffiths in London, Alastair Macdonald in Jerusalem, and Francois Murphy in Paris; editing by Ralph Boulton).

Democrats.com: Eric Holder: Please Appoint a Special Prosecutor

2009-02-04T20:08:00.001-05:00

please consider signing this petition

-----

Attorney General Eric Holder: Please Appoint a Special Prosecutor

President Obama's choice for Attorney General, Eric Holder, was confirmed by the Senate yesterday and sworn in today. In another proud historic first, Mr. Holder will be our first African American Attorney General.

During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Holder declared unequivocally, "Waterboarding is torture." This terrified Republicans because it means Holder must prosecute George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and other top officials who authorized waterboarding and the rest of the "Bush System of Torture," as Keith Olbermann calls it.

Republicans pressured Mr. Holder to promise not to prosecute the torturers, but Mr. Holder refused. He said, "No one is above the law." That's exactly what President Obama said when ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked him our question on January 11.

Of course Mr. Holder must also end eight years of absolute corruption under John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey. He must reverse George Bush's criminal policies on torture, habeas corpus, secret government, and warrantless wiretapping. How can Mr. Holder do it all?

The best solution would be for Mr. Holder to quickly appoint a Special Prosecutor to focus exclusively on Bush's crimes. That would take these crimes off Mr. Holder's desk entirely, and ensure a thorough and nonpartisan investigation.

In December, we launched a petition drive with our friends at Docudharma.com. Over 20,000 activists have already urged Mr. Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor. Please join them:

http://www.democrats.com/special-prosecutor-for-bush-war-crimes

If you already signed, please user our petition form to encourage friends to sign.

You can also call Mr. Holder's office at 202-514-2001 and leave a simple message: "Appoint a Special Prosecutor for George Bush's crimes."

Thanks for all you do!

Bob Fertik

#####

Forward this message to everyone you know!

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The Guardian: The worst of times: Bush's environmental legacy examined

2009-01-27T22:04:00.001-05:00

The worst of times: Bush's environmental legacy examined

With four days to go until president-elect Barack Obama takes is inaugurated, history is documenting George Bush's environmental record at home and abroad. Read more on the Bush legacy in The Bush Years supplement in Saturday's paper

Suzanne Goldenberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 January 2009 15.45 GMT
Article history

The document released by the White House to commemorate George Bush's exit from the most powerful job on the planet describes a president who spent much of the last eight years as a careful steward of the planet. "Throughout his administration, President Bush made protecting the environment for future generations a top priority," says the booklet, Highlights of Accomplishments and Results.

"If only" – went the near-universal response from green organisations. They see the Bush years as a concerted assault, from the administration's undermining of the science on climate change to its dismantling of environmental safeguards to its support for mining and oil interests.

"He has undone decades if not a century of progress on the environment," said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, one of America's largest environmental groups.

"The Bush administration has introduced this pervasive rot into the federal government which has undermined the rule of law, undermined science, undermined basic competence and rendered government agencies unable to do their most basic function even if they wanted to. We're excited just to push the reset button."

The tone was set in the first 100 days when Bush reneged on a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants, the biggest contributors to global warming. Days later, the White House announced that America would not implement the Kyoto global climate change treaty.

The two moves at the time were seen as a sign of surrender from Bush, a former oil man, to America's coal and oil industries.

Christine Todd Whitman, who was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency at the time, later described the exit of Kyoto as "the equivalent to 'flipping the bird,' frankly, to the rest of the world".

But it was the manner of Bush's exit from Kyoto that provided the most sustained damage, say environmentalists, with the administration injecting doubt on the science that demonstrated an urgent need to deal with climate change.

"The idea of a head of state putting the science question on the table in the way that he did was horrifying to most of the rest of the world," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.

The disinformation campaign became a defining element of the Bush era – and was perhaps the most damaging.

"Certainly the most destructive part of the Bush environmental legacy is not only his failure to act on global climate change, but his administration's covert attempt to silence the science alerting us to the urgency of the problem," said Jonathan Dorn of the Earth Policy Institute (EPA) in Washington.

The campaign to keep the public unaware of the evidence on climate change came to light in October 2004 when the Nasa scientist, James Hansen, accused the Bush administration of trying to block data showing an acceleration in global warming.

The full extent of the White House efforts to downplay, distort and outright censor the science on climate change remains unclear – but such efforts continued even after Hansen accused the Bush administration of censorship.

In July 2008, Jason Burnett, a former official at the EPA, wrote a letter to the Senate describing efforts by the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality to censor discussion of the consequences of climate change.

Burnett said the White House tried to circumvent a 2007 Supreme Court decision compelling the EPA to regulate car emissions by doctoring scientific findings on the costs of fuel-efficiency standards. The White House objected to a study showing the benefits of raising fuel standards outweighed the costs.

In 2008, officials from Cheney's office sought to doctor testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on California's efforts to impose stricter fuel efficiency requirements than the national standard.

Meanwhile, Bush officials began a concerted effort to strip away a regulatory regime that had been decades in the making.

"Every effort has been made to weaken existing law and there has been no effort to advance regulatory solutions to the most important issue we face, which is climate change," said Frances Beinecke, president of the National Resources Defence Council.

A particular target of the Bush administration's project of deregulation was the Endangered Species Act. The campaign was driven in part by the administration's concern that the act – with its protections for polar bears – could be used to force limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

As with the science on climate change, the Bush Administration has been accused of interfering with scientific findings on wildlife protection for political reasons.

An official report last month found widespread political interference in the management of endangered species. The inspector general's report said that the deputy secretary of the interior, Julie MacDonald, intervened repeatedly to prevent new additions to the endangered species list.

The report said MacDonald, who headed the endangered species protection programme at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, intervened improperly in 13 of the 20 cases under investigation, overruling the recommendations of field biologists that species be protected.

It described MacDonald's dealings with the field biologists as "abrupt and abrasive if not abusive".

MacDonald resigned in 2007. Dale Hall, a biologist who headed the service, called MacDonald's conduct "a blemish on the scientific integrity of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior".

Other controversial actions included:

• Gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts

• Dismantling the protections of the Endangered Species Act

• Opening millions of acres of wilderness to mining, oil and gas drilling, and logging

• Defunding programmes charged with the clean-up of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead and mercury

• Reducing the enforcement effort in the Environmental Protection Agency

• Removing grizzly bears and wolves from the endangered species list

• Endorsing commercial whaling

• Approving mountain-top removal for coal mining

Bush pursued the grand plan of deregulation to his last days in the White House, with a series of last-minute rule changes. Under the new rules, oil companies will be able to drill within sight of the Arches national park in Utah. Federal agencies will no longer be compelled to consult with government wildlife experts when they open up new areas for logging or road construction, and he also barred the EPA from looking at the effects of global warming on protected species.

Some positive changes in the past eight years were inadvertent. The Bush administration's refusal to cap carbon dioxide emissions acted as a catalyst, with 24 states acting on their own to put in place regional cap and trade networks. Some 27 states enacted renewable portfolios, mandating local power companies to produce more of their electricity from sun, wind and solar power. "A lot of things happened because the Bush Administration was so negative about a lot of things," said Claussen.

Bush expanded on a programme launched by Bill Clinton to reduce diesel exhaust, extending the rules to tractors, trains and small ships.

The administration did have one last-minute surprise in store for the green lobby though, by demonstrating a late commitment to ocean conservation. Just two weeks before leaving office, Bush designated nearly 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as national monuments.

"We and others in the environmental community have been at odds with this administration on lots of things, but if one looks at this one event it is a significant conservation event," said Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group.

The New Republic: Worse Than Hoover by Alan Brinkley

2009-01-24T17:04:00.001-05:00

The New Republic
Worse Than Hoover by Alan Brinkley
The personality flaw that's made Bush one of the worst presidents ever.
Post Date Tuesday, January 13, 2009

We are less than two weeks away from the end of the Bush era, but it is not too early to assess how this important presidency went so disastrously wrong. There are already shelves full of books criticizing Bush and his administration, and there will undoubtedly be more as records become available to reveal what will almost certainly be a generation's worth of damage that we have not yet even recognized. But the whole of Bush's failure is not simply the sum of his administration's parts. The key to his behavior is less ideology than a critical aspect of his character.

Most Americans, I suspect, if asked whether they would prefer a president with strong principles or one who prefers pragmatic politics, would choose an idealist over a realist in a flash. But almost all successful politicians combine principle with pragmatism constantly. They speak of great goals and deep convictions, but they govern in a world that almost always requires compromises, half-measures, and concessions. Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, is remembered best for his lofty rhetoric, his great public convictions, and his aura of humanity. But Lincoln was also one of the craftiest and most skillful politicians ever to inhabit the White House, a leader who changed course constantly on almost everything except his commitment to the Union and who repeatedly outfoxed even the most powerful and experienced political figures with whom he worked. Franklin Roosevelt was revered by his admirers in the 1930s as a great father figure, committed to reforming American life and embracing the needs of the neediest Americans. But those who worked with him were constantly struck by his political nature, which often led to compromise, inconsistency, and dramatic changes of course. Roosevelt himself, in frank moments, admitted that the only things that interested him were things that worked.

On the other hand, Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's immediate predecessor, exemplifies the dangers of sticking to one's principles. One of the ablest and most widely admired men in America when he was elected president in 1928, Hoover left office four years later discredited and reviled--a victim of a Depression that he had not created, to be sure, but also a victim of his choice of conviction over pragmatism. Unwilling to challenge the pillars of free-market capitalism, strongly committed to balanced budgets and fiscal prudence, convinced that the natural laws of economics would bring the Depression to a close, he responded to the Depression with such restraint and timidity that had his administration not ended when it did, the entire financial system of the United States might have collapsed.

Bush, like Hoover, has blanketed himself with principles and commitments. But, unlike Hoover, he has built an administration that seems almost purposely designed to ward off any challenges to the President's goals and to protect him from the need to compromise with other areas of government. To a remarkable degree, the Bush White House has created defenses from other areas of government--Congress, the states, leaders of other nations, even other parts of his own administration--in a way that seem designed to create something like an autocracy. This was not because power itself has been Bush's principal goal. He was, apparently, a happy man serving in one of the weakest governorships in the country. But the accumulation of power in the White House has protected him from the need to negotiate and make compromises with others.

For whatever reasons--his difficult family history, his problems with addiction, his failed careers before entering politics, his strong religious convictions--Bush has seemed to be comfortable only when he could make quick and firm decisions, however complicated the issue, and then move on. Admitting mistakes or changing course seems almost contrary to his nature. The "unitary executive," which Dick Cheney has so energetically implemented and defended, was the perfect vehicle for Bush's tendency to prefer conviction over practicality. When Congress passed laws that challenged his convictions, the White House changed them through signing statements. When the Supreme Court struck down policies Bush believed in, the White House largely ignored the decisions. When military leaders pointed out the futility of wartime strategies, Bush ignored the generals and waited for Rumsfeld to replace them. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Bush was not only slow to act, but also never took any significant steps to repair the damage that his administration had done to the agency that was supposed to have helped rebuild the city. FEMA today is little better prepared for another Katrina than it was in 2005.

On the surface at least, Bush--and much of his coterie--are leaving the White House serene and unruffled by their extraordinary unpopularity. That may be a good thing for them as they relinquish their power and look back on their dismal legacy. But the American people would do well, in the aftermath of this disastrous presidency, to consider the value of what may be an uninspiring, but certainly essential, quality of leadership: the ability to experiment, to make changes, to reconsider ideas and principles that fail to work, and to embrace, at least in part, the philosophy of pragmatism that is, not surprisingly, one of the few truly American contributions to the history of ideas.

Alan Brinkley is provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia.

Time: The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

2009-01-19T09:29:00.001-05:00

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

By Joe Klein

"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.

The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. (Read "Shell-Shocked at Abu Ghraib?")

It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable information. But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured — first at Guantánamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner: "Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks."

Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush Administration proudly produced it. Memos authorizing the use of "enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide, David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved by Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"

It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position — standing stock still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two hours' sleep. But that's not going to happen. Indeed, it seems probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there's some theoretical exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I don't think there's much public appetite for that sort of action." There is, I'm told, absolutely no interest on the part of the incoming Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors. "We're focused on the future," said one of the President-elect's legal advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas — one imagines the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway — just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain and arrested in London for his crimes.

If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then they'd have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure — through his excellent team of legal appointees — that no such behavior happens again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration's policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business. If Obama doesn't want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position — the real Bush legacy.

See pictures of the abuse revelations that rocked the U.S. and Iraq.

See pictures from inside Guantánamo Bay.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1870319,00.html

The Raw Story: White House: Increase in terror attacks since 9/11 a success

2009-01-18T11:34:00.001-05:00

White House: Increase in terror attacks since 9/11 a success

Eric Brewer
Published: Saturday January 10, 2009

One of the many sad ironies of the Bush era that is rapidly and mercifully drawing to a close is that after the president created a "central front in the war on terror" by invading Iraq, the amount of "terrorism" in the world skyrocketed. I call it the Bush Bubble:

At first, the administration seemed a little embarrassed by this result, and it engaged in various attempts, which I've documented over the years and summarized here, at disguising the increase. Interestingly, the public face for many of those shenanigans was John Brennan, formerly head of the National Counterterrorism Center and currently Obama's transition intelligence adviser and pick for the newly created position of deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism.

In July 2005, announcing a new web-accessible database of terrorism incidents compiled by the RAND corporation and available at tkb.org, Brennan said, "We're trying to be as open and transparent to the public as possible."

That lasted a little over two years. Funding was withdrawn from the project on March 31, 2008, probably because people like me were using the analytical tools on the site to produce embarrassing graphs like the one above. Note that the data used in that graph was accessed a couple of months before the site's demise, and the decrease shown for 2007 may reflect incomplete data. The government's own figures, put out by the National Counterterrorism Center but going back only to 2004, show an increase in 2007:

Those increases were largely driven, of course, by the carnage let loose in Iraq subsequent to our invasion. The last time Bush's attention was called to the havoc he wreaked there, his response was a blithe, "So what?"

I didn't want that to be the last word, so on Friday I went back to the White House to throw one more metaphorical shoe at the president. Luckily, Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel was sitting in for Dana Perino and Tony Fratto, both of whom have ignored me these last couple of months. Here's the transcript of my exchange with Scott:

ME: The administration has been boasting about the success of the President's war on terror, yet data compiled by the RAND Corporation show that the global rate of terrorism, as measured by the number of people killed per year, increased by almost fivefold during the Bush presidency. And according to the government's own terrorism statistics, 2007 was the worst year ever, with over 22,000 people killed worldwide. Does the President consider that record a success?

MR. STANZEL: The President considers it very much a success that we have kept this nation safe since the devastating attacks of 9/11. The magnitude of the attacks on 9/11 were unprecedented, unseen, when 19 individuals armed with box cutters flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and were fought and died in a field in Pennsylvania.

We have taken the fight to the terrorists. It has been this President's sole mission throughout his presidency to confront those threats where they are. He has a much talked-about Bush Doctrine. The President has made it very clear that if you aid, abet, house, feed, fund a terrorist, you are just as guilty as the terrorist, and that we will also confront the challenges where they emerge so we don't have to face them here at home. And we will work to spread an ideology of hope and freedom, which will be the ultimate tool in combating terrorism around the world.

So I'll move on. Yes, go ahead --

ME: But shouldn't the anti-terrorism efforts reduce terrorism rather than increase it?

MR. STANZEL: Well, I guess you should ask the question, have terrorists -- do terrorists continue to try to kill innocent civilians around the world? Yes, they do. Should we then just take a step back and decide, no, we shouldn't confront those challenges?

ME: But you can try a --

MR. STANZEL: I'm done, I'm going to move on.

ME: -- you can try a different tactic.

MR. STANZEL: Which is -- we have a full tactic, full panoply of tactics that we use, on the diplomatic side, on the defense side, on the homeland security side, and terrorist financing side. So the President is very proud of his record in defending this country and taking the fight to terrorists for the past two terms.

This is probably the last time I'll set foot in the Bush White House. So that's my farewell kiss in honor of the widows, the orphans, and all those killed in Iraq.

Eric Brewer attends White House briefings on behalf of Raw Story and BTC News.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/White_House_Increase_in_terror_attacks_0110.html

WP: The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.

2009-01-11T12:02:00.001-05:00

The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.
The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.

By Thomas A. Schweich
Sunday, December 21, 2008; B01

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.

President-elect Barack Obama's selections of James L. Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, to be his national security adviser and, it appears, retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair to be his director of national intelligence present the incoming administration with an important opportunity -- and a major risk. These appointments could pave the way for these respected military officers to reverse the current trend of Pentagon encroachment upon civilian government functions, or they could complete the silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media.

While serving the State Department in several senior capacities over the past four years, I witnessed firsthand the quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government. The first assault on civilian government occurred in faraway places -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and was, in theory, justified by the exigencies of war.

The White House, which basically let the Defense Department call the budgetary shots, vastly underfunded efforts by the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to train civilian police forces, build functioning judicial systems and provide basic development services to those war-torn countries. For example, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Justice Department and the State Department said that they needed at least 6,000 police trainers in the country. Pentagon officials told some of my former staffers that they doubted so many would be needed. The civilians' recommendation "was quickly reduced to 1,500 [trainers] by powers-that-be above our pay grade," Gerald F. Burke, a retired major in the Massachusetts State Police who trained Iraqi cops from 2003 to 2006, told Congress last April. Just a few hundred trainers ultimately wound up being fielded, according to Burke's testimony.

Until this year, the State Department received an average of about $40 million a year for rule-of-law programs in Afghanistan, according to the department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs -- in stark contrast to the billions that the Pentagon got to train the Afghan army. Under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Defense Department failed to provide even basic security for the meager force of civilian police mentors, rule-of-law advisers and aid workers from other U.S. agencies operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, driving policymakers to turn to such contracting firms as Blackwater Worldwide. After having set the rest of the U.S. government up for failure, military authorities then declared that the other agencies' unsuccessful police-training efforts required military leadership and took them over -- after brutal interagency battles at the White House.

The result of letting the Pentagon take such thorough charge of the programs to create local police forces is that these units, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been unnecessarily militarized -- producing police officers who look more like militia members than ordinary beat cops. These forces now risk becoming paramilitary groups, well armed with U.S. equipment, that could run roughshod over Iraq and Afghanistan's nascent democracies once we leave.

Or consider another problem with the rising influence of the Pentagon: the failure to address the ongoing plague of poppy farming and heroin production in Afghanistan. This fiasco was in large part the result of the work of non-expert military personnel, who discounted the corrosive effects of the Afghan heroin trade on our efforts to rebuild the country and failed to support civilian-run counter-narcotics programs. During my tenure as the Bush administration's anti-drug envoy to Afghanistan, I also witnessed JAG officers hiring their own manifestly unqualified Afghan legal "experts," some of whom even lacked law degrees, to operate outside the internationally agreed-upon, Afghan-led program to bring impartial justice to the people of Afghanistan. This resulted in confusion and contradiction.

One can also see the Pentagon's growing muscle in the recent creation of the U.S. military command for Africa, known as Africom. This new command supposedly has a joint civilian-military purpose: to coordinate soft power and traditional hard power to stop al-Qaeda and its allies from gaining a foothold on the continent. But Africom has gotten a chilly reception in post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile, U.S. competitors such as China are pursuing large African development projects that are being welcomed with open arms. Since the Bush administration has had real successes with its anti-AIDS and other health programs in Africa, why exactly do we need a military command there running civilian reconstruction, if not to usurp the efforts led by well-respected U.S. embassies and aid officials?

And, of course, I need not even elaborate on the most notorious effect of the military's growing reach: the damage that the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and such military prisons as Abu Ghraib have done to U.S. credibility around the world.

But these initial military takeovers of civilian functions all took place a long distance from home. "We are in a war, after all," Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me by way of explaining the military's huge role in that country -- just before the Pentagon seemingly had him removed in 2007 because of his admirable efforts to balance military and civilian needs. (I heard angry accounts of the Pentagon's role in Neumann's "retirement" at the time from knowledgeable diplomats, one of them very senior.) But our military forces, in a bureaucratic sense, soon marched on Washington itself.

As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. Vice President Cheney, himself a former secretary of defense, and his good friend Rumsfeld ensured the success of this seeding effort by some fairly forceful means. At least twice, I saw Cheney staffers show up unannounced at State Department meetings, and I heard other State Department officials grumble about this habit. The Rumsfeld officials could play hardball, sometimes even leaking to the press the results of classified meetings that did not go their way in order to get the decisions reversed. After I got wind of the Pentagon's dislike for the approved interagency anti-drug strategy for Afghanistan, details of the plan quickly wound up in the hands of foreign countries sympathetic to the Pentagon view. I've heard other, similarly troubling stories about leaks of classified information to the press.

Many of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's cronies still work at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert M. Gates, has spoken of increasing America's "soft power," its ability to attract others by our example, culture and values, but thus far, this push to reestablish civilian leadership has been largely talk and little action. Gates is clearly sincere about chipping away at the military's expanding role, but many of his subordinates are not.

The encroachment within America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in domestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over its extensive intelligence operations to the first director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte -- a State Department official who eventually gave up his post to Mike McConnell, a former Navy admiral. The Bush administration also appointed Michael V. Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, to be the director of the CIA. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley saw much of the responsibility for developing and implementing policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- surely the national security adviser's job -- given to Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Bush's new "war czar." By 2008, the military was running much of the national security apparatus.

The Pentagon opened a southern front earlier this year when it attempted to dominate the new Merida Initiative, a promising $400 million program to help Mexico battle drug cartels. Despite the admirable efforts of the federal drug czar, John P. Walters, to keep the White House focused on the civilian law-enforcement purpose of the Merida Initiative, the military runs a big chunk of that program as well.

Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations -- which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act, the long-standing law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.

If President-elect Obama wants to reverse this trend, he must take four steps -- and very quickly:

1. Direct -- or, better yet, order -- Gates, Jones, Blair and the other military leaders in his Cabinet to rid the Pentagon's lower ranks of Rumsfeld holdovers whose only mission is to increase the power of the Pentagon.

2. Turn Gates's speeches on the need to promote soft power into reality with a massive transfer of funds from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Justice Department and USAID.

3. Put senior, respected civilians -- not retired or active military personnel -- into key subsidiary positions in the intelligence community and the National Security Council.

4. Above all, he should let his appointees with military backgrounds know swiftly and firmly that, under the Constitution, he is their commander, and that he will not tolerate the well-rehearsed lip service that the military gave to civilian agencies and even President Bush over the past four years.

In short, he should retake the government before it devours him and us -- and return civilian-led government to the people of the United States.

Thomas A. Schweich served the Bush administration as ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs.

Salon: Another brutal year for liberty

2009-01-10T11:08:00.001-05:00

Another brutal year for liberty

The good news is that it's clear what the Obama administration must do to end the decade-long war on the Constitution.

By Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 1, 2009 | Befitting an administration that has spent eight years obliterating America's core political values, its final year in power -- 2008 -- was yet another grim one for civil liberties and constitutional protections. Unlike the early years of the administration, when liberty-abridging policies were conceived of in secret and unilaterally implemented by the executive branch, many of the erosions of 2008 were the dirty work of the U.S. Congress, fueled by the passive fear or active complicity of the Democratic Party that controlled it. The one silver lining is that the last 12 months have been brightly clarifying: It is clearer than ever what the Obama administration can and must do in order to arrest and reverse the decade-long war on the Constitution waged by our own government.

The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 -- the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity -- ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn't get its way.

Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush's most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure -- what we once charmingly called "oversight" -- regarding what Bush's domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime -- pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.

Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush's spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.

With passage of the Act, Democrats delivered to the Bush administration everything it wanted -- and more. GOP Sen. Kit Bond actually taunted the Democrats in the Times for giving away the store: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get." Making matters much worse, by delivering this massive gift to the White House, the House undid one of its very few good deeds since taking over in 2006: its galvanizing February 2008 refusal to succumb to Bush's rank fear-mongering by allowing "The Protect America Act" to expire instead of following the Senate's lead in making it permanent.

Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party's leadership in voting for cloture on the bill -- the opposite of a filibuster -- and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House -- where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer -- was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America's basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.

The FISA fight was the destructive template that drove virtually every other civil liberties battle of the last year. Time and again, Democrats failed to deliver on a single promise. They failed to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate to restore habeas corpus, which had been partially abolished in 2006 as a result of the Military Commissions Act that passed with substantial Democratic support and wholesale Democratic passivity. Notably, while Senate Democrats, when in the minority, never even considered a filibuster to block the Military Commissions Act, it was simply assumed that the GOP, when it was in the minority, would filibuster in order to prevent passage of the Habeas Restoration Act. And filibuster they did.

A similar scenario played out with the attempt in February to redress America's torture crisis by enacting an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act compelling all government agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual when interrogating detainees. The most immediate effect of such a law would have been to impose an absolute ban on the use of waterboarding, along with any other coercive tactics -- torture techniques -- which the Manual does not explicitly authorize.

Knowing that the president would veto the bill, the GOP allowed a floor vote on the Army Field Manual amendment. Signaling what would be his year-long, soul-selling captivity to the far right of his party, John McCain -- despite years of parading around as a righteous opponent of torture -- voted against the torture ban. The bill passed both houses largely along party lines, President Bush vetoed it as promised, and the House then failed to override the veto. The path taken was slightly different, but the outcome was the same: total failure in reining in Bush's abuses. Indeed, by the end of 2008, civil libertarians could point to many defeats suffered in the Democratic-controlled Congress, but not a single victory.

The fate of civil liberties in the judiciary was much more mixed, punctuated with several significant victories. Undoubtedly the most important win was the Supreme Court's June decision in the Boumediene case, which struck down as unconstitutional one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Bush era: Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act, which had purported to abolish habeas corpus for Guantánamo detainees and prohibited them from challenging their detention in a federal court.

The Court ruled, by a precarious 5-4 margin, that Guantánamo detainees could not constitutionally be denied the right to have their detentions reviewed by an American federal court. That seminal ruling paid quick dividends for some of the detainees. Last month, a Bush 43 federal judge -- the same jurist who had originally upheld the Act's abolition of habeas review for Guantánamo detainees and was ultimately reversed by the Boumediene court -- conducted a habeas hearing for six Algerian-Bosnian detainees imprisoned without charges at Guantánamo for the last six years.

The judge concluded that the Bush administration had no credible evidence to justify the detention of five out of the six detainees and thus ordered them released immediately. Four of the five are now back in Bosnia, while the fifth awaits release. Without the Boumediene ruling, the truly heinous provisions of the Military Commissions Act would still be operative and would continue to empower the government to hold those detainees -- along with dozens if not hundreds of others -- indefinitely and without charges. Boumediene is one of the few civil liberties bright spots of this decade.

The Bush administration, also earlier this year, suffered another judicial defeat at the hands of a very conservative, Bush 43-appointed federal judge, when that judge emphatically rejected the administration's claim that Bush aides Harriet Miers (former White House counsel) and Josh Bolten (former White House chief of staff) are entitled to absolute immunity from Congressional subpoenas. That dispute, which arose from the House Judiciary Committee's efforts to investigate the notorious firing of nine U.S. attorneys, dispensed with one of the administration's most radical tools -- a claim of absolute, unconstitutional executive privilege -- for shielding itself from accountability.

One of the most potentially damaging judicial developments of the year was a horrendous ruling issued in July by the conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. The al-Marri court actually upheld the president's claimed authority to detain legal residents and even U.S. citizens in a military prison as "enemy combatants," rather than charge them in a civilian court with a crime. But the damage done by that ruling was mitigated substantially when the U.S. Supreme Court announced just two weeks ago that it has agreed to review the al-Marri ruling, and civil libertarians are cautiously optimistic that the Court will likely reverse it.

For the last seven years, Democrats have repeatedly cited GOP political dominance to excuse their wholesale failures to limit, let alone reverse, the devastating war waged by the Bush administration on America's core liberties and form of government. With a new Democratic president and large majorities in both Congressional houses, those excuses will no longer be so expedient. As dark and depressing as these last seven years have been for civil libertarians, culminating in an almost entirely grim 2008, there is no question that the Obama administration and the Democrats generally now possess the power to reverse these abuses and restore our national political values. But as the events of the last 12 months conclusively demonstrate, there are substantial questions as to whether they have the will to do so.

NYT: Car Bomb Near Baghdad Shrine Kills 24, as Iraqi Shiites’ Holiest Month Approaches

2009-01-07T19:54:00.001-05:00

Hadi Mizban/Associated Press

Iman Kadim, one of those wounded Saturday in a Baghdad car bombing that the authorities said killed at least 24, was hospitalized. Many victims were pilgrims visiting a nearby Shiite shrine.

December 28, 2008

Car Bomb Near Baghdad Shrine Kills 24, as Iraqi Shiites' Holiest Month Approaches

By SAM DAGHER

BAGHDAD — A car bomb killed at least 24 people, many of them Shiite pilgrims, and wounded 46 others when it exploded Saturday on a busy road in Baghdad that leads to the revered shrine of Kadhimiya, according to the Ministry of Interior.

That bombing, along with several others in recent weeks, was a stark reminder that even as violence has sharply fallen, insurgents still have the power to carry out deadly strikes in the heart of the capital. The attack's timing and location appeared to be intended to reignite sectarian passions.

Millions of Shiites are preparing to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The observance falls during Muharram, the holiest month of the Shiite religious calendar, which begins Monday. Shiite families from across Iraq traditionally visit the shrine, with its shimmering twin golden domes, on Saturdays.

The explosion occurred at midday about 100 yards from Bab al-Dirwaza, one of the main gates to the shrine and the Kadhimiya district's bustling market, which has been a pedestrian-only area for several years because of a spate of deadly attacks in the area. According to several witnesses, the car that exploded was parked outside the fence of one of the nearby parking lots.

Jalal Hussein, 56, had just parked his car, after dropping off his wife and daughter at the gate, when the bomb exploded a few yards away, creating a huge ball of fire that consumed several vehicles and many pedestrians. He said the bodies and limbs of victims, including many children and women, were scattered everywhere.

"It was an unexpected massacre of simple people going to visit the shrine," said Mr. Hussein, who was wounded in the shoulder.

On the street in front of the lot, which was cordoned off by American and Iraqi forces, the chassis of a car lay amid the wreckage of a minibus and five other vehicles in one lane. A woman's shoe and shreds of the black head-to-toe cloak commonly worn by Iraqi women mixed with blood, broken glass and metal. A smashed bus was in the other lane.

"My son," screamed a distraught mother who had rushed there with her husband.

Rescuers tried to force open the doors of vehicles to remove the dead and wounded, witnesses said. Many badly burned bodies were simply piled up on wooden market pushcarts.

Muhammad Hamdan, 58, who narrowly escaped the blast, had come to the shrine with his wife and six children to pray to be cured of a heart ailment. "Those who perished are martyrs, God willing," he said.

Residents and visitors expressed shock and anger that the bombing occurred in what is considered one of the city's most secure enclaves. The neighborhood is ringed with Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, where each entering vehicle is scanned with a hand-held bomb detection device.

The area receives special attention because it is home to the shrine and the base of Ayatollah Hussein Ismail al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric close to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The tight security led several residents to lash out at what they assumed to be incompetence or corruption that had allowed the bombing to happen. "This area is highly protected," Mr. Hussein said. "Not even a rat could come in. The terror is from within."

A Kadhimiya resident, Fawzia Qazzaz, standing on her porch overlooking the scene, screamed at security personnel as tears rolled down her cheeks. "Either their bomb detection equipment is faulty or they are implicated in the terror," she said.

In another bombing on Saturday, in Jurf al-Sakher, south of Baghdad in Babil Province, an Iraqi Army officer and two members of a local Awakening Council were killed when a bomb attached to their vehicle exploded, according to a police official in Hilla, the provincial capital.

While the sectarian bloodshed that had ripped Iraq apart as recently as last year has eased, devastating attacks continue to crop up. The last major attack in the capital, a suicide bombing at a police training academy on Dec. 1 , killed at least 15 people.

A new report released Saturday by the nongovernmental group Iraq Body Count placed at 8,955 the number of civilians killed by acts of violence in Iraq so far in 2008. The figures, while far below those of 2006 and 2007, when a total of 51,894 civilians were killed, were only slightly below those for 2003 and 2004, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the police in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killed an escaped prisoner who was believed to be an insurgent leader. The prisoner, Emad Ahmed Ferhan, was among three who escaped Friday from a police station after a shootout that killed six policemen and seven prisoners.

The police received a tip on Saturday that he was hiding at a house in central Ramadi and sent a force to arrest him, said the police chief, Maj. Gen. Tareq al-Youssef. He said the force had surrounded the house and a gun battle had ensued with Mr. Ferhan, who was described as a leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners.

He was killed as he fled. A machine gun, passport and fake beard were in his possession, General Youssef said.

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Ramadi and Hilla.

NYT: Blast Kills 16 Afghans, Including 13 Schoolchildren, Near Pakistan

2009-01-04T14:37:00.001-05:00


	Nashanuddin Khan/Associated Press Men inspected the wreckage of a suicide car bomb on Sunday in Khost Province, Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bomb, which was detonated next to a school.

December 29, 2008

Blast Kills 16 Afghans Near Pakistan Border

By ADAM B. ELLICK

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber detonated a bomb in a black sport utility vehicle outside a local government compound in Khost Province on Sunday, killing at least 16 people, including 13 schoolchildren, and wounding 53, local government officials and coalition forces said. The bombing, near the border with Pakistan, occurred next to a school, and many children were among the wounded.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

Haji Dawlatkhan Quyomi, the chief of Ismail Khil, the district in which the bombing occurred, said the death toll could rise.

Coalition forces provided a video showing about 15 children walking on the street as they were engulfed by a ball of fire. Mark Larter, a spokesman for the coalition forces, said the death toll also was based on reports of troops at the scene. Two police officers were among the dead.

The number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan has fallen sharply since 2006, mainly because of better intelligence and a proliferation of security checkpoints. But in Khost Province, which borders the tribal area of Pakistan's North Waziristan, a wave of violence continues to overwhelm security officials.

Despite the drop in the number of bombings, suicide attacks around the country have become more technically sophisticated and grown in scale, including Sunday's attack, in which a huge fireball towered over the compound's security blockade.

In November 2007 in Baghlan Province, north of Kabul, a mammoth suicide bomb laced with ball bearings killed more than 70 people, including six members of Parliament, and wounded more than 100, mostly children.

Sunday's blast occurred west of the city of Khost as local leaders and tribal elders gathered inside the government building to discuss security and elections, said Tahir Kahn Sabari, the deputy governor of Khost Province. At the nearby school, the bomb rattled students, ages 6 to 12, who were receiving certificates on the last day of the school year.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack, saying those responsible "are not aware of the Islamic teachings which outlaw the killing of innocent people."

A day earlier the police acted on intelligence to locate a suicide car bomber as he tried to enter the city of Kandahar, said Matiullah Qait, provincial chief of Kandahar. Police vehicles chased the driver, and when he reached a security checkpoint west of the city, he detonated his explosives, killing three policemen and one civilian.

Also on Saturday, a roadside bomb killed two Canadian soldiers and two Afghans working alongside them in a dangerous region of southern Afghanistan, Canada's military said on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. Four other Canadian soldiers and one Afghan interpreter were wounded in the blast.

On Saturday night, a rare missile attack fell on Kabul, killing three teenage sisters, their family and the police said. The rocket likely was fired from west of the capital, near Wardak Province, where militants have developed a stronghold since last year. No one claimed responsibly for the attack.

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

NYT: Suicide Attack Kills 24 at Iraqi Tribal Gathering

2009-01-03T14:44:00.001-05:00

The New York Times

Insurgents still have influence in some districts in Yusufiya.

January 3, 2009

Suicide Attack Kills 24 at Iraqi Tribal Gathering

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and RIYADH MOHAMMED

BAGHDAD — At least 24 tribal leaders who were meeting at the house of an influential Sunni sheik to discuss national reconciliation efforts were killed and as many as 42 others were wounded Friday after a member of the tribe detonated an explosive vest among the guests, government officials said.

Reports of fatalities among the approximately 1,000 members of the Qaraghul tribe gathered for the meeting have ranged as high as 30 killed and 110 wounded, but those numbers could not be confirmed by Friday evening.

The bombing occurred in the town of Yusufiya, about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad in an area once referred to as the Triangle of Death because it had been one of the centers of the insurgency against American forces in Iraq. It is a region where Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners, has been active.

During the past year and a half, however, violence in Yusufiya had been tempered after local tribal leaders turned against the insurgents and began to support the American military and the Iraqi government.

Yet, some of the town's neighborhoods have never won complete freedom from Qaeda operatives, who have sought to lure tribal members back to the insurgency with gifts of money and cars, a local sheik said.

Friday's bombing occurred during a lunch meeting at the Yusufiya home of the tribal leader, Mohammed Abdullah Salih al-Qaraghuli, for nearly 1,000 members of the Qaraghul tribe, who had traveled from around Iraq to be there, guests said. The tribe includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Some of those in attendance were former Sunni insurgents who had become leaders of Awakening Councils, groups allied with the government against Al Qaeda.

After Friday Prayer, the tribe ate a communal lunch in a large yard adjacent to the sheik's house to discuss which 20 members would represent them at a meeting with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Relations have been tense between many of the predominately Sunni Awakening Councils and the Shiite government of Mr. Maliki, most notably with regard to the number of Awakening Council members who will be hired for the national police and army, and whether former insurgents will be prosecuted for previous crimes.

Around 1:30 p.m., after lunch, some of the tribal leaders lingered, drinking tea, while others began to leave, said several guests, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation.

It was about then that one of the tribe's members, Amin Ahmed Edan Hasoon, who is well known in the neighborhood, entered the yard without being searched by guards, guests said. Moments later, he detonated an explosive vest he was wearing.

"I heard a horrible and shocking explosion, and there were people who had been standing in the yard and suddenly, no one was standing — they were on the ground," said Abu Khalid, 33, a teacher and tribal leader who had gone to wash his hands when the bomb went off.

At Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, where many of the wounded were taken, the sound of sobbing men and women filled the corridors.

Khalid Abdullah Salih al-Qaraghuli, a brother of the sheik who hosted the gathering, was lying in a hospital bed awaiting care. Shrapnel had pierced his left side, his left arm and his left leg. "I was standing, saying goodbye when the blast happened," he said. "I was blown 15 meters away."

The sheik suffered only minor injuries, his brother said.

Another guest, Mohammed Dawood Hussein, said he remembered almost nothing. "I heard an explosion and I immediately lost consciousness and found myself in the hospital," he said.

Also Friday, armed men fatally shot three members of an Awakening Council at a security checkpoint in Jurf al-Sakher, a town near Hilla, about 60 miles south of Baghdad. Six other Awakening members were wounded.

Reporting was contributed by Suadad al-Salhy, Campbell Robertson, Mohammed Hussein and Sam Dagher in Baghdad, and by Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Baghdad and Hilla.

Newsweek: Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina

2008-12-31T18:46:00.001-05:00

Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina

Former Bush advisers say Katrina severely damaged Bush's ability to talk to nation

Dec 30, 2008

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

Their comments are a part of an oral history of the Bush White House that Vanity Fair magazine compiled for its February issue, which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and nationally on Jan. 6. Vanity Fair published comments by current and former government officials, foreign ministers, campaign strategists and numerous others on topics that included Iraq, the anthrax attacks, the economy and immigration.

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let's face it, that's what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the "most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur" he'd ever met.

"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him," Wilkerson said of Cheney. "And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

On other topics, David Kuo, who served as deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, disputed the idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of a religious right voting bloc.

"The reality in the White House is — if you look at the most senior staff — you're seeing people who aren't personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders," Kuo said.

"In the political affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at ... basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated."

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/177151

Vanity Fair: Tortured Reasoning

2008-12-30T19:48:00.001-05:00

Reckoning

President George W. Bush on his way to announce the transfer of 14 terrorism suspects from previously secret C.I.A. prisons abroad to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, September 6, 2006. By Gerald Herbert/A.P. Photo.

Tortured Reasoning

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn't work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.

by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE December 16, 2008

By the last days of March 2002, more than six months after 9/11, President George W. Bush's promise "to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act" was starting to sound a little hollow. True, Afghanistan had been invaded and the Taliban toppled from power. But Osama bin Laden had vanished from the caves of Tora Bora, and none of his key al-Qaeda lieutenants were in U.S. captivity. Intelligence about what the terrorists might be planning next was almost nonexistent. "The panic in the executive branch was palpable," recalls Mike Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official who set up and ran the agency's Alec Station, the unit devoted to tracking bin Laden.

Clockwise from top left: al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah; al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shortly after his capture, in 2003; terror suspect Jose Padilla; former British resident and current Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Early in the morning of March 28, in the moonlit police-barracks yard in Faisalabad, Pakistan, hopes were high that this worrisome intelligence deficit was about to be corrected. Some 300 armed personnel waited in silence: 10 three-man teams of Americans, drawn equally from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., together with much greater numbers from Pakistan's police force and Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). In order to maximize their chances of surprise, they planned to hit 10 addresses simultaneously. One of them, they believed, was a safe house containing a man whose name had been familiar to U.S. analysts for years: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian better known as Abu Zubaydah. "I'd followed him for a decade," Scheuer says. "If there was one guy you could call a 'hub,' he was it."

The plan called for the police to go in first, followed by the Americans and ISI men, whose job would be to gather laptops, documents, and other physical evidence. A few moments before three a.m., the crackle of gunfire erupted. Abu Zubaydah had been shot and wounded, but was alive and in custody. As those who had planned it had hoped, his capture was to prove an epochal event—but in ways they had not envisaged.

Four months after Abu Zubaydah's capture, two lawyers from the Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, delivered their notorious memo on torture, which stated that coercive treatment that fell short of causing suffering equivalent to the pain of organ failure or death was not legally torture, an analysis that—as far as the U.S. government was concerned—sanctioned the abusive treatment of detainees at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay. But, as Jane Mayer writes in her recent book, The Dark Side (Doubleday), Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to coercive interrogation techniques well before that, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in the Global War on Terror to undergo waterboarding.

Katherine Eban on the C.I.A.'s coercive interrogation techniques (July 2007).

David Rose on Guantánamo Bay (January 2004).

From U.S. Central Command/A.P. Photo (Zubaydah); from A.P. Photo (Sheikh Mohammed); from Reuters/Landov (Padilla); from Press Association/A.P. Images (Mohamed).

NYT: The World According to Cheney

2008-12-28T10:33:00.001-05:00

December 23, 2008

Editorial

The World According to Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.

So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt's decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln's declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That's not exactly a lofty standard of behavior.

Then again, it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews where he has made those comments. It seems as if everything went just great in the Bush years.

The invasion of Iraq was exactly the right thing to do, not an unnecessary war that required misleading Americans. The postinvasion period was not bungled to the point where Americans got shot up by an insurgency that the Bush team failed to see building.

The horrors at Abu Ghraib were not the result of the Pentagon's decision to authorize abusive and illegal interrogation techniques, which Mr. Cheney endorsed. And only three men were subjected to waterboarding. (Future truth commissions take note.)

In Mr. Cheney's reality, the crippling budget deficit was caused mainly by fighting two wars and by essential programs like "enhancing the security of our shipping container business."

Well, no. The Bush team's program to scan cargo for nuclear materials at air, land and sea ports has been mired in delays, cost overruns and questions about effectiveness. As for the deficit, the Congressional Budget Office has said the Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy were the biggest reason that the budget went into the red.

Some of Mr. Cheney's comments were self-serving spin (as when The Washington Times helpfully prodded him to reveal that even though the world might have seen Mr. Bush as insensitive to the casualties of war, Mr. Cheney himself made a "secret" mission to comfort the families of the dead.)

Mr. Cheney was simply dishonest about Mr. Bush's decision to authorize spying on Americans' international calls without a warrant. He claimed the White House kept the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership fully briefed on the program starting in late 2001. He said he personally ran a meeting at which "they were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike" that the program was essential and did not require further Congressional involvement.

But in a July 17, 2003, letter to Mr. Cheney, Senator John Rockefeller IV, then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wanted to "reiterate" the concerns he expressed in "the meeting today." He said "the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues" and created "concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology and surveillance."

Mr. Cheney mocked Vice President-elect Joseph Biden for saying that he does not intend to have his own "shadow government" in the White House. Mr. Cheney said it was up to Mr. Biden to decide if he wants "to diminish the office of vice president."

Based on Mr. Cheney's record and his standards for measuring these things, we're certain a little diminishing of that office would be good for the country.

AP: Iraqi Army: At Least 22 Die in Baghdad Car Bomb

2008-12-27T12:21:00.001-05:00

Iraqi Army: At Least 22 Die in Baghdad Car Bomb

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 27, 2008

Filed at 8:13 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A bomb tore through a busy square in Baghdad at midday Saturday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 54, the Iraqi army said.

An Iraqi soldier and two other people were killed in a separate bombing south of the capital, police said.

Police also said a suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fugitive was killed in a gunbattle with police in the western city of Ramadi. He was one of four suspected al-Qaida in Iraq members who escaped during a jailbreak and ensuing riot at a Ramadi police station on Friday that left six policemen and seven insurgents dead.

The U.S. military and Iraqi officials said the blast occurred at al-Zahra square, in the northern Baghdad Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah. Associated Press Television News footage of the scene showed scorched vehicles peppered with shrapnel and an engine block that was all that remained of the car bomb.

The office of Iraqi army spokesman Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said the blast killed at least 22 people, while a U.S. military spokesman, Capt. Charles Calio, said 20 were killed and 25 wounded. Conflicting casualty tolls are common in the chaotic aftermath of bombings in Iraq.

Also Saturday, an Iraqi soldier and two other people were killed when a car bomb exploded as they were trying to defuse it in Musayyib, about 60 miles (40 kilometers) south of Baghdad, according to local police.

The two nonmilitary victims were members of the local awakening council, also known as Sons of Iraq, one of several names used to refer to the Sunni insurgents and tribesmen who have turned against al-Qaida in Iraq and joined the U.S. military in the fight against the terror group, a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

He said 10 other people were wounded in the blast.

In Ramadi, police said they killed the escaped prisoner, Emad Farhan, in a gunbattle inside the home of a family he had taken hostage. Three police were wounded but the family was not harmed, said the officer who could not be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Another man who escaped was arrested Friday, and police are still searching for two others.

Police in the northern city of Kirkuk also arrested six suspected insurgents, including the former driver of Hassan al-Majid -- Saddam Hussein's cousin who is also known as ''Chemical Ali,'' for ordering poison gas attacks against Iraq's Kurdish minority in the 1980s. Police Col. Bastoun Qafari said they were arrested in a pre-dawn raid. Earlier this month al-Majid received his second death sentence from an Iraqi court for his role in crushing a Shiite uprising in the wake of Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.

Although violence has dropped by more than 80 percent around Iraq and particularly Baghdad, devastating attacks still occur. The U.S. military has said attacks are down from 180 a day last year to about 10 a day this year.

The last major bombing was on Dec. 17. On that day, 18 people were killed and 52 others wounded when a car bomb exploded in eastern Baghdad followed by a roadside bomb minutes later as police rushed to the scene, according to police and hospital officials. The U.S. military reported nine killed and 43 wounded.

On Dec. 11, a suicide bomber killed 55 people in a packed restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk where Kurdish officials and Arab tribal leaders were trying to reconcile their differences over control of the oil-rich region.

NYT: Cheney Defends Bush on President’s Role

2008-12-26T08:46:00.001-05:00

he said the president "doesn't have to check with anybody" — not Congress, not the courts — before launching a nuclear attack to defend the nation


	Doug Mills/The New York Times Vice President Dick Cheney at a meeting about the auto industry on Capitol Hill this month.

December 22, 2008

Cheney Defends Bush on President's Role

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday vigorously defended the White House's use of broad executive powers during the last eight years, saying he believed that historians would ultimately look favorably on the Bush administration's efforts to keep the nation safe.

Mr. Cheney said the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority across a broad range of policy, including the war in Iraq, treatment of terrorism suspects and the domestic wiretapping program. And he said the president "doesn't have to check with anybody" — not Congress, not the courts — before launching a nuclear attack to defend the nation "because of the nature of the world we live in" since the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001.

The vice president also sharply criticized Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., offering a pointed response when asked about Mr. Biden's plans to operate differently from him as vice president and about Mr. Biden's remark during the Oct. 2 vice-presidential debate with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska that Mr. Cheney had been "the most dangerous vice president we've had in American history."

"If he wants to diminish the office of vice president, that's obviously his call," Mr. Cheney said of Mr. Biden in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." He added that President-elect Barack Obama "will decide what he wants in a vice president."

"And apparently, from the way they're talking about it," he went on, "he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time."

It was the second interview that the usually media-averse vice president granted in a week, just short of a month before he and Mr. Bush are to leave office. Mr. Cheney's unapologetic tone was in marked contrast to that in several recent interviews in which the president has been reflective, expressing regrets about his failure to win passage of immigration legislation and to change the tone of the debate in Washington.

Mr. Cheney challenged Mr. Biden's knowledge of the Constitution, saying he could not "keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature, which provides for the executive." At the vice presidential debate, Mr. Biden said of Mr. Cheney, "The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch," then referred to the article's provision for the vice president's limited role in the Senate.

There is ample precedent, Mr. Cheney said, for the Bush administration's policies.

"If you think about what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, what F.D.R. did during World War II. They went far beyond anything we've done in a global war on terror," he said. "But we have exercised, I think, the legitimate authority of the president under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief in order to put in place policies and programs that have successfully defended the nation."

Mr. Cheney also said that the Supreme Court was "wrong" to override the Bush administration's initial policy of detaining terrorism suspects without granting them access to the protections of the Geneva Convention or granting them the right to challenge their detention. And he said he strongly disagreed with Mr. Bush's acceptance of Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation as defense secretary in 2006, saying, "he did a good job for us."

"I did disagree with that decision," Mr. Cheney said. "The president doesn't always take my advice."

On "This Week" on ABC on Sunday, Mr. Biden said his primary role would be to offer Mr. Obama what he described as "the best, sagest, most accurate, most insightful advice."

The vice president-elect said he would "restore the balance" to the office, and he offered his own critical assessment of Mr. Cheney, saying the vice president's recommendations to Mr. Bush on the war and counterterrorism issues were "not healthy for our foreign policy, not healthy for our national security."

"His notion of a unitary executive," Mr. Biden said, "meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power, you know, goes to the executive, I think is dead wrong."

Mr. Biden said that he was still committed to closing the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that he remained critical of the Bush administration's surveillance and detention programs, saying, "we have created, not dissuaded, more terrorists as a consequence of this policy."

The Guardian: Stampede for 'Bush shoe' creates 100 new jobs

2008-12-25T21:00:00.001-05:00

finally some positive economic news from the Bush administration

Stampede for 'Bush shoe' creates 100 new jobs

Robert Tait in Istanbul
The Guardian, Monday 22 December 2008

Their deployment as a makeshift missile robbed President George Bush of his dignity and landed their owner in jail. But the world's most notorious pair of shoes have yielded an unexpected bonanza for a Turkish shoemaker.

Ramazan Baydan, owner of the Istanbul-based Baydan Shoe Company, has been swamped with orders from across the world, after insisting that his company produced the black leather shoes which the Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi threw at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last Sunday.

Baydan has recruited an extra 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of Model 271 - more than four times the shoe's normal annual sale - following an outpouring of support for Zaidi's act, which was intended as a protest, but led to his arrest by Iraqi security forces.

Orders have come mainly from the US and Britain, and from neighbouring Muslim countries, he said.

Around 120,000 pairs have been ordered from Iraq, while a US company has placed a request for 18,000. A British firm is understood to have offered to serve as European distributor for the shoes, which have been on the market since 1999 and sell at around £28 in Turkey. A sharp rise in orders has been recorded in Syria, Egypt and Iran, where the main shoemaker's federation has offered to provide Zaidi and his family with a lifetime's supply of shoes.

To meet the mood of the marketplace, Baydan is planning to rename the model "the Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush".

"We've been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy. We've even hired an agency to look at television advertising," he said.

Zaidi has been in custody since the shoe-throwing incident, amid claims that he has been badly beaten. He faces a possible jail sentence for insulting a foreign leader, but has reportedly apologised and requested a pardon from Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

NYT: ‘Headed Out of Town,’ Bush Turns Reflective

2008-12-20T12:34:00.001-05:00

"I came with the idea of changing the tone in Washington"!!!!

Jim Young/Reuters

President Bush said Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute that he regretted his failure to pass immigration legislation.

December 19, 2008

'Headed Out of Town,' Bush Turns Reflective

By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — President Bush shared some bittersweet reflections on Thursday as he looked back fondly on his White House days but regretted his inability to win passage of immigration legislation and to change the tone of debate in the capital.

"Reflections by a guy who's headed out of town," Mr. Bush called his musings in a question-and-answer session at the American Enterprise Institute. "An old sage at 62 ... headed to retirement."

The president, who has described himself as uncomfortable with introspection, loosened up considerably before a friendly audience of conservatives. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all was a theme he embraced several times.

"One such problem was immigration reform," the president said. "And in this case, I chose to put the spotlight directly on the issue by giving an Oval Office address. Obviously, we weren't successful about getting comprehensive immigration reform. Nevertheless, I feel good about having tried."

And while he will miss many things about Washington, he won't miss "the petty name-calling," Mr. Bush said.

"I came with the idea of changing the tone in Washington, and frankly didn't do a very good job of it," he said. "You know, war brings out a lot of heated rhetoric and a lot of emotion. I fully understand that."

The president reiterated his faith in freedom and in free markets, the current financial crisis notwithstanding. And while he voiced his continued optimism about the American people, he said one of his "great fears" was that troubles overseas might tempt the country to revert to isolationism.

"The world needs America's involvement," he said. "We're a compassionate, decent, strong nation."

The president spoke about big issues (Iraq and tax policy, for instance) and not so big ones, like his relationship with the White House press corps. "I don't like some of the things they say," Mr. Bush said. "Of course, they don't like some of the things I say. But we've had a good relationship."

A lot of spirited intramural debate preceded the 2007 increase of American troops in Iraq, Mr. Bush said in observing that "creating tension is good for decision-making, so long as it doesn't become destructive."

When asked about President-elect Barack Obama's assertions that "Bush deregulation" had led to a culture of recklessness and greed on Wall Street, Mr. Bush said he was looking forward "to the true history of this financial crisis being written."

"Just some thoughts on this," he said. "The markets sometimes create excesses. We're living through the consequences of the excess. I quipped in Texas that Wall Street got drunk, and we got a hangover."

But this, too, shall pass, he said of the current storm. And when it does, he said, elected officials should remember that "markets and free enterprise is what made the country great," and that government's proper role is promoting entrepreneurship and prosperity, not getting deeply involved in the mortgage business or managing car companies. And, yes, he retains his faith in low taxes as the best economic stimulus of all.

The president said the country "needs to overcome its fear about nuclear power" if Americans want to have all the electricity they will need and still protect the environment.

"In terms of safety, the engineering has changed dramatically from the past," he said. (Coincidentally, Mr. Bush spoke 51 years to the day after the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, near Pittsburgh, became the first civilian nuclear plant to generate electricity in the United States.)

Mr. Bush implied that the harsh words of the presidential campaign were all but forgotten when he and Mr. Obama met in the Oval Office recently. The retiring president refused to say what advice he had given his successor but said they had chatted about something in common: "He's a dad who will have two daughters in the White House."

Mr. Bush, one of the least popular presidents in recent history, if public opinion polls are accurate, said the individual in the Oval Office is not that important: "Presidents will come and go with their strengths and weaknesses, but the ship of state sails on because of the institution being greater than the person."

And political conservatives who fear that the November elections banished them to the wilderness should take heart, Mr. Bush said. Remember the Democratic landslide led by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, he said, and recall that just two years later Republican conservatives triumphed across the country.

"My point is that things go in cycles in politics," he said.

NYT: When Laws and Liberties Test Each Other’s Limits

2008-12-19T17:22:00.001-05:00

MOVIE REVIEW

The End of America (2008)

IndiePix Films

Naomi Wolf in the documentary "The End of America."

When Laws and Liberties Test Each Other's Limits

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: December 3, 2008

"The End of America," an unsettling documentary polemic about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, brings up matters many of us would rather not contemplate in the middle of a financial crisis and on the eve of a new administration. Federal laws enacted during the last seven years that threaten our constitutional rights, it reminds us, remain in effect.

The pointedly inflammatory film, adapted from Naomi Wolf's book "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," compares the Bush administration's attempts to discourage dissent and to wield increasingly unchecked power to the events preceding the establishment of 20th-century dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Chile and elsewhere. Without explicitly invoking the word, it implies that since 2001 the United States has drifted toward fascism in the name of fighting terror.

Tightly constructed and fiercely one-sided, "The End of America," directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern ("The Devil Came on Horseback"), interweaves excerpts from a lecture in New York given by Ms. Wolf with film clips and interviews illustrating her contention that the rise of those dictatorships created a "blueprint" that the Bush administration, consciously or not, has followed.

According to Ms. Wolf, the first and fundamental tool for acquiring power is the manipulation of fear. In the shell-shocked post-

9/11 climate, the overwhelming public reaction to the Patriot Act of 2001, which gave law enforcement agencies expanded powers of surveillance, was mute acceptance of whatever was deemed necessary to keep us safe. Since then, she says, a color-coded system of terror alerts has been effectively wielded to keep us on edge.

From here, Ms. Wolf describes a 10-step program toward authoritarian rule that includes the creation of secret prisons where torture takes place; the deployment of a paramilitary force (Blackwater, which the film calls a contemporary American variation on Mussolini's private army of "black shirts"); the development of an internal surveillance system; the harassment of citizens' groups; and the arbitrary detention and release of ordinary civilians.

The film's most disturbing moments are its accounts of James Yee, a United States Armychaplain at Guantánamo, who was accused of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days before being released, and Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian telecommunications engineer, who was detained at Kennedy International Airport, then later deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. He was eventually cleared of charges of terrorism.

The seventh step, selecting key individuals for harassment, cites the Dixie Chicks and Dan Rather as prominent cases. The eighth step, the restriction of the press, focuses on the case of Josh Wolf, a journalist jailed for 226 days for refusing to turn over videotapes he made of police brutality at a July 2005 demonstration in San Francisco.

The ninth step, the equating of political dissidents with traitors, fleetingly examines the Bush administration's floating of the word "treason" to describe The New York Times's publication of classified information about the government's monitoring of overseas telephone calls. All these middle steps might be described as examples of selective intimidation intended to inhibit dissent. The case histories are glossed over.

The final step in Ms. Wolf's Top 10 is the suspension of the rule of law. She cites the refusal of Bush administration insiders subpoenaed to appear before Congress to testify in the United States attorneys scandal. The film ends on a note of stern warning: the 11th step might be the imposing of martial law.

If the film's vision of the steps leading toward a homegrown fascist state qualifies as paranoid, there is still enough here to make you shiver. Could it happen here? Maybe. A little fear — not the collective panic that followed 9/11 — can be a useful thing.

The Raw Story: Senate report: Rumsfeld to blame for detainee abuse

2008-12-16T22:24:00.001-05:00

Senate report: Rumsfeld to blame for detainee abuse

12/11/2008 @ 9:40 pm

Filed by RAW STORY

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees," claims a Senate Armed Services Committee report issued Thursday.

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate's findings.

The report determined that placing the blame on "a few bad apples," as Bush administration officials attempted to do in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, is inappropriate.

The policies were adopted after government assessments determined waterboarding and other torture techniques were "100 percent effective" at breaking the wills of US officers who underwent the military's Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program.

The report finally claims that Rumsfeld's torture policies "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority."

A Plague on the Nation

NYT: Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain

Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain

By SARAH LYALL

Published: July 20, 2010

Carl Court/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Fw: UPDATE: Open Letter to Iraq

http://www.lettertoiraq.com

The Public Record: Wilkerson Demolishes Bush, Cheney, And Rumsfeld’s Lies About Guantanamo

Commentary

Wilkerson Demolishes Bush, Cheney, And Rumsfeld's Lies About Guantanamo

Bush Official: We Knew Gitmo Inmates Were Innocent

Bush Official: We Knew Gitmo Inmates Were Innocent

New document claims releasing them was seen as 'politically impossible'

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'

Fw: overwhelming agreement

Informed Comment - Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade; Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs

Globe: Condi Comforts Suicidal Bush

Condi Last Hope for 'Suicidal' Bush: Tabloid

The Daily Beast: The Woman Who Could Nail Bush

Blogs and Stories

The Woman Who Could Nail Bush

The Hill: Go back into hiding, GOP begs Dick Cheney

(BN) Recession-Proof Jobs Shelter Bush’s Bum Lawyers: Ann Woolner

Ex-Bush official to AP: Many at Gitmo are innocent

Seattle Times: Patriot or crackpot? Seattle man's mission to prosecute Bush

Patriot or crackpot? Seattle man's mission to prosecute Bush

The Raw Story: Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney

Hersh: 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney

03/11/2009 @ 2:28 pm

The Raw Story: Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court

Reuters: Suicide attack kills 28 at police academy in Iraq

Suicide attack kills 28 at police academy in Iraq

WP: Bush's Secret Dictatorship

Posted at 12:52 PM ET, 03/ 3/2009

Bush's Secret Dictatorship

Politico: Bush a four-letter word at CPAC

Politico: Bush back in saddle for speaking tour + The Times: George Bush embarks on lucrative international speaking tour

Bush back in saddle for speaking tour

George Bush embarks on lucrative international speaking tour

Huffington Post: Walter Jones, GOP Congressman, Signs On To Investigating Bush

Walter Jones, GOP Congressman, Signs On To Investigating Bush

WP: Bush Faithful Rewarded With Jobs

American Freedom Campaign: We can't handle the truth

Senator Leahy: A Truth Commission

Reuters: Senator seeks Bush-era "truth commission"

Senator seeks Bush-era "truth commission"

Reason Magazine: Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster

Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster

He expanded the state, and the idea that the state is incompetent

Reuters: Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

Editorials worldwide pillory Bush one final time

Democrats.com: Eric Holder: Please Appoint a Special Prosecutor

The Guardian: The worst of times: Bush's environmental legacy examined

The worst of times: Bush's environmental legacy examined

With four days to go until president-elect Barack Obama takes is inaugurated, history is documenting George Bush's environmental record at home and abroad. Read more on the Bush legacy in The Bush Years supplement in Saturday's paper

The New Republic: Worse Than Hoover by Alan Brinkley

Time: The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act

The Raw Story: White House: Increase in terror attacks since 9/11 a success

WP: The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep.

Salon: Another brutal year for liberty

Another brutal year for liberty

NYT: Car Bomb Near Baghdad Shrine Kills 24, as Iraqi Shiites’ Holiest Month Approaches

Car Bomb Near Baghdad Shrine Kills 24, as Iraqi Shiites' Holiest Month Approaches

NYT: Blast Kills 16 Afghans, Including 13 Schoolchildren, Near Pakistan

Blast Kills 16 Afghans Near Pakistan Border

NYT: Suicide Attack Kills 24 at Iraqi Tribal Gathering

Suicide Attack Kills 24 at Iraqi Tribal Gathering

Newsweek: Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina

Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina

Vanity Fair: Tortured Reasoning

Reckoning

Tortured Reasoning

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn't work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.

by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE December 16, 2008

From U.S. Central Command/A.P. Photo (Zubaydah); from A.P. Photo (Sheikh Mohammed); from Reuters/Landov (Padilla); from Press Association/A.P. Images (Mohamed).

NYT: The World According to Cheney

Top Ten Worst Things about the Bush Decade;
Or, the Rise of the New Oligarchs