Claudia and Jammy View Bush's Unceremonial Victory

2008-08-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

Why T. Boone Pickens' 'Clean Energy' Plan Is a Ponzi Scheme

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on August 21, 2008, Printed on August 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

"If you are going out of business, you don't go down with the ship, you get another ship. For us, it's natural gas." -- T. Boone Pickens, "Becoming a Billionaire"

You can't always get what you want, the Rolling Stones counseled. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need. Factor billions of dollars, questionable loyalties and a privatization rap sheet invested more in profit than people into the equation, and you usually can get both what you want and what you need. In the case of hyper-loaded oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, that means having your cake on climate crisis, fossil fuel addiction, eminent domain, water privatization and corporate earnings -- and eating it too.

In July, the oil magnate unveiled a well-publicized campaign, the Pickens Plan, which begins with an obvious premise: "America is addicted to foreign oil." Pickens' proposal to kick the habit is straightforward and simple: "Building new wind-generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years."

Sounds fair enough, especially given that Pickens and climate-crisis herald Al Gore have melded minds on the issue. But not hard enough, which is where the cracks in the Pickens Plan begin. "(Gore) asked if we could we join together and do something," Pickens explained to Bloomberg News. "I told him no, because global warming is on page two for me. Page one is foreign oil.''

That page seems to be recently written. As previously noted on either side of the red-blue divide, Pickens has funneled millions into 527s like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, helping derail John Kerry's bid for the White House in 2004. He simultaneously committed hundreds of thousands on top of that to the election and inauguration of both Bush administrations, both spearheaded by fossil fools whose kinship with foreign oil producers not only launched an invasion into an oil-rich but nevertheless sovereign nation, but also nearly tripled the price of oil in seven years and handed campaign contributors like Exxon the most bloated earnings in corporate history.

Sure, Pickens eventually decided to stop funding political campaigns, but that deathbed conversion happened the same July that the Pickens Plan ramped up its nearly $60 million media blitz.

It gets worse. Pickens is currently the head of BP Capital Management, a secretive hedge fund (aren't they all?) that has extensive connections to the magnate's hated "foreign oil" interests. The most glaring example from its investment portfolio is Halliburton, which was once run by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, is currently headquartered not in America but Dubai, and whose main business segments and subsidiaries involve oil exploration, construction, production and refining. And that's not mentioning its resume on rampant fraud and corruption, especially in Iraq but also elsewhere, which has so far cost American taxpayers billions.

But Halliburton isn't the only BP Cap holding that stinks. Pickens is also heavily invested in Schlumberger, the world's largest oil services corporation; nuclear and conventional energy powerhouse Shaw Group; the embattled ex-Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown and Root and so on. For a very rich man who decries the influence foreign oil has on American life, Pickens sure hasn't put his money where his mouth is. He's put his money where the oil is.

"Even under the Pickens Plan," explains Treehugger's Matthew McDermott, "the U.S. will be importing a significant amount of oil. It's a step toward energy independence in that it expands renewable energy production, but I think framing this debate in terms of energy independence isn't the way to go. If you want to take a populist angle on this, pushing the very real benefits that wind power and renewables in general can have in local economies stands on much more solid ground."

If Pickens were a populist, that might be true. But he's not; he's a stone-cold capitalist whose taste for profit outweighs his desire for the common good. Pickens may have spent $3 billion on wind farms to generate enough electricity to take the load off natural gas, which is currently used to heat homes and more, but only so that it can be used for cars and trucks.

Those are the shells being moved around in this particular game. But shuffling responsibilities and resources will do nothing to forestall our dystopian environmental future, unless those resources burn clean. And what the Pickens Plan does not mention is that the oil tycoon has been deeply invested in natural gas for decades. If the entire American fleet were to switch over to natural gas, the air would possibly (but not probably) be around 30 percent cleaner in a decade, but Pickens would be richer in much higher percentages. And while the air would only stay cleaner for a short while, Pickens would stay loaded beyond the grave.

"Pickens has stated on numerous occasions that, of course, he's going to make money off the Pickens Plan," adds McDermott. "That's the nature of what he does and has done. But natural gas is probably better used to generate electricity than as a fuel source in cars. A better solution is electrically powered vehicles. While there are still technical issues, if our transportation fleet was all-electric, you could power it from whatever is the most regionally appropriate way of generating electricity cleanly and cheaply. As our ability to generate clean power improves, there would be theoretically no need to change the transportation fleet."

It's much simpler than that, argues Food and Water Watch's Wenonah Hauter. "Gas is not the solution for the future, no matter how the gas industry tries to portray it."

The biggest stain on the Pickens Plan is its architect's distasteful history of water privatization. According to Hauter, it is probably the biggest reason, more than all the aforementioned, not to trust him.

"With the water crisis looming in the future and his track record on selling water regardless of the environmental cost," she asserts, "Pickens will be viewed in the future as irresponsible. His background on promoting renewable energy can't erase his current disregard for the sustainable use of water. He recently supplemented his property holdings in Texas with 200,000 acres of land atop the Ogallala Aquifer. Under Texas law, this purchase entitles Mesa Water, Pickens' new company, to take more than 320,000 acre-feet of water, equivalent to more than 104 million gallons, from the property. The Ogallala is already severely depleted, and it's outrageous that he can stick a pipe in the ground and suck this water out without any environmental impact assessment."

Pickens has used all manner of stratagems to obtain rights to what is not a recreational, but an essential, resource for supporting life on the planet. He has spent more than $100 million to acquire water from outlying areas in Texas to sell to its metropolitan hubs, and although he hasn't yet found a buyer, it's only a matter of time. Blue gold is the new black gold, and it won't be long until the world is thirsty from one end to the other. Using his wind investment to fuel his water privatization has only made things worse.

"Pickens used the enormous wind farm erected on his property as a means to lobby for the right to pipe the Ogallala water to a major metropolitan center," Hauter adds. "He successfully passed a bill through the Texas Legislature to allow a water-supply district to transport alternative energy and water in a single corridor. Pickens also successfully loosened the legal definitions of a water district, allowing him to invoke the right of eminent domain so that he could build the pipeline through the property of several neighboring landowners. We should be concerned with these types of underhanded business dealings."

We should be concerned everywhere they occur, one might add, not just in Texas. That means putting aside the media buzz and fawning articles and seeing the Pickens Plan for what it is: a resource power grab for a post-oil oil tycoon. Natural gas will not save us from environmental catastrophe, nor will it wean us off foreign oil. Wind farms are a great start, but they deserve to be more than leadoff pitchers for natural gas, whose implementation into our fleet will do nothing to kick-start the massive emissions reductions we are going to need. Everything from oceanic dead zones and bizarre storms to desertification and societal collapse are on the burner. And we need to cool it down, rather than heat it up.

In the end, the Pickens Plan will not make that happen, no matter what kind of deathbed conversion T. Boone Pickens is experiencing.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2008-08-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

LOOK AT THE IDIOT!

What is 4 minus three

That dumb ass!
I wish there was some kind of an assurance that he will not be President for another 4 years!

Gee . . .I wish I had a larger picture than this one I got off of the web.

Claudia D. Dikinis http://starcats.com >^..^< Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com ***************************************************************** "A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow "By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2008-08-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

WOO-HOO cat lovers!
Venezuela has found the first fossils of an extinct scimitar cat

http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=nw20080812063943454C550770

Caracas - Venezuela has found the first fossils of an extinct scimitar cat - of the saber-toothed cat genus - in South America, during oil prospecting activities south-east of Caracas, paleontologists announced on Monday.

"It's South America's most important discovery in 60 years," Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigation paleontologist Ascanio Rincon said.

He said fossils of six scimitar cats, or Homotherium, were found along with those of panthers, wolves, camels, condors, ducks and horses, all from about 1,8-million years ago, by a Petroleos de Venezuela team looking for oil in Monagas state in 2006.

The most important find, he said, was the complete skull of a scimitar cat, an animal never before found in South America.

"For us it's a milestone and opens a window to the past."

The scimitar cat, a smaller version of the saber-toothed tiger with a hyena-like appearance and smaller, crenellated teeth, was believed to have only inhabited Africa, Eurasia and North America between five million and 10 000 years ago.

Rincon estimated the scimitar cat became extinct in South America about 500 000 years ago.

He said the finding proved the scimitar cat shared the same habitat with the saber-toothed tiger in South America. Saber-toothed tiger fossils have been found in both North and South America.

Rincon said the fossil find would expand his research into the lifestyle of the extinct big cats.

2008-08-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

How can we stop this monster!?! Who will advocate for us? For the animals!? Congress is NOT listening!

********************************************************************************************

Bush to relax protected species rules

08/11/2008 @ 5:44 pm

Filed by The Associated Press

by DINA CAPPIELLO

http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=11971

WASHINGTON — Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct. The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.

New regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press.

The draft rules also would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

If approved, the changes would represent the biggest overhaul of the Endangered Species Act since 1988. They would accomplish through regulations what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress: ending some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects.

The changes would apply to any project a federal agency would fund, build or authorize. Government wildlife experts currently perform tens of thousands of such reviews each year.

"If adopted, these changes would seriously weaken the safety net of habitat protections that we have relied upon to protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years," said John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming initiative.

Under current law, federal agencies must consult with experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to determine whether a project is likely to jeopardize any endangered species or to damage habitat, even if no harm seems likely. This initial review usually results in accommodations that better protect the 1,353 animals and plants in the U.S. listed as threatened or endangered and determines whether a more formal analysis is warranted.

The Interior Department said such consultations are no longer necessary because federal agencies have developed expertise to review their own construction and development projects, according to the 30-page draft obtained by the AP.

"We believe federal action agencies will err on the side of caution in making these determinations," the proposal said.

The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, H. Dale Hall, in an interview with the AP Monday, said the changes will help focus expertise on projects that have serious repercussions for species.

"We are trying to be more efficient, which means not do consultations that result in a difference for the species," Hall said.

A National Marine Fisheries Service spokeswoman declined Monday to discuss the draft proposal since it had yet to be published.

The new rules are expected to be proposed formally in coming weeks. They would be subject to a 60-day public comment period before being finalized by the Interior Department, giving the administration enough time to impose them before November's presidential election. A new administration could freeze any pending regulations or reverse them, a process that could take months. Congress could also overturn the rules through legislation, but that could take even longer.

The proposal was drafted largely by attorneys in the general counsel's offices of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department, according to an official with the National Marine Fisheries Service, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan hadn't yet been circulated publicly. The two agencies' experts were not consulted until last week, the official said.

Between 1998 and 2002, the Fish and Wildlife Service conducted 300,000 consultations. The National Marine Fisheries Service, which evaluates projects affecting marine species, conducts about 1,300 reviews each year.

The reviews have helped safeguard protected species such as bald eagles, Florida panthers and whooping cranes. A federal government handbook from 1998 described the consultations as "some of the most valuable and powerful tools to conserve listed species."

In recent years, however, some federal agencies and private developers have complained that the process results in delays and increased construction costs.

"We have always had concerns with respect to the need for streamlining and making it a more efficient process," said Joe Nelson, a lawyer for the National Endangered Species Act Reform Coalition, a trade group for home builders and the paper and farming industry.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called the proposed changes illegal.

"This proposed regulation is another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door," she said. "If this proposed regulation had been in place, it would have undermined our ability to protect the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the gray whale."

The Bush administration and Congress have attempted with mixed success to change the law.

In 2003, the administration imposed similar rules that would have allowed agencies to approve new pesticides and projects to reduce wildfire risks without asking the opinion of government scientists about whether threatened or endangered species and habitats might be affected. The pesticide rule was later overturned in court. The Interior Department, along with the Forest Service, is currently being sued over the rule governing wildfire prevention.

In 2005, the House passed a bill that would have made similar changes to the Endangered Species Act, but the bill died in the Senate.

The sponsor of that bill, then-House Resources chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., told the AP Monday that allowing agencies to judge for themselves the effects of a project will not harm species or habitat.

"There is no way they can rubber stamp everything because they will end up in court for every decision," he said.

But internal reviews by the National Marine Fisheries Service and Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that about half the unilateral evaluations by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that determined wildfire prevention projects were unlikely to harm protected species were not legally or scientifically valid.

Those had been permitted under the 2003 rule changes.

"This is the fox guarding the hen house. The interests of agencies will outweigh species protection interests," said Eric Glitzenstein, the attorney representing environmental groups in the lawsuit over the wildfire prevention regulations. "What they are talking about doing is eviscerating the Endangered Species Act."

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2008-08-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

These are incredible photos of a White Bengal Tiger named Odin.

Odin is six years old and 10 feet long from tail to nose. Odin lives at a Zoo in Vallejo, California, near San Francisco.

Odin with his British trainer Lee Munro.

Odin was hand-raised at the zoo. And after he was weaned, his British trainer Lee Munro discovered his remarkable skill.

When a lump of meat was thrown into a pool of water, Odin would happily dive in after it.

'He makes a funny face - and it's actually to close his nostrils to stop the water from going into his nose.'

Not all big cats enjoy the water but for Tigers from the hot climate of South-East Asia it's one way to cool down.

'Plus they hunt in and around water. They're an ambush predator so they wait for prey to come down to the water.'

'When you actually see him dive underwater he looks so graceful,'

'Odin loves the water and he loves food,' he said. 'Not all big cats will dive and swim underwater even for meat treats.'

Munro said tigers were the most powerful swimmers out of all land-dwelling animals.

Tragically, within our lifetimes, zoos might be the only places left to see these magnificent animals.

A century ago there were about 100,000 tigers in the wild. Now there are just 2,500 adults, with the Bengal variety almost extinct. None has been seen in the wild since the last white tiger was shot and killed in 1958.

White tigers are the most rare. They get their white color from an unusual and extremely rare genetic combination.

I hope you enjoyed these photos as much as I did.

2008-08-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

Claudia . . .I knew it, I knew it! Bush is a sissy!

Jammy

Suskind: Bush ordered fake letter linking Iraq to 9/11

08/05/2008 @ 8:46 am

Filed by David Edwards and Nick Juliano

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Suskind_Bush_ordered_fake_letter_linking_0805.html

A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq's intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind's new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

Politico's Mike Allen reports:

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [...]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

The faked letter was first reported as genuine by the conservative London Sunday Telegraph in December 2003. Right-wing commentators and Bush defenders harped on that disclosure as evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. According to Suskind's book, the CIA had been protecting Habbush in the early months of the invasion; the agency persuaded the Iraqi intelligence chief to write the letter in his own handwriting and paid him $5 million.

CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante reported Tuesday that Suskind's sources had seen a draft of the letter written on White House stationary.

The Way of the World is Suskind's third book on the inner workings of the Bush administration, joining The One Percent Doctrine, which outlined the often extreme anti-terror policies advanced by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, and The Price of Loyalty, which painted a picture of the early day's of Bush's presidency with the help of ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

Predictably, the White House is unhappy with Suskind's latest offering and the Bush administration is relying on its trademark push-back of insulting the messenger. White House spokesman Tony Fratto insulted Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Wall Street Journal, as a practitioner of "gutter journalism," and called the allegations "absurd."

Suskind appeared Tuesday on NBC's Today Show for interviews about the latest book.

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2008-02-19T23:44:00.001-08:00

Claudia sent this to me and I found it quite fitting for this month, this year and every year!

Jammy

2008-02-04T04:11:00.000-08:00

Another Election Season, Another Political Prosecution in Alabama

Scott Horton

February 1, 2008

The morning calm in the small Alabama town of Toney, located near Huntsville, was broken at 6:15 a.m. yesterday morning. A team of five FBI agents, accompanied by a prison matron, pounded on the door. When the man of the house answered, he was forced into the yard, shirtless in the early morning cold. The team had come for his wife, Sue Schmitz. She was dragged out of her bathroom, where she was taking a shower, handcuffed, breaking her flesh and scraping her wrists, and hustled off to prison.

Who was this threat to the community? Sue Schmitz is a diminutive, 63-year-old retired social studies teacher who has lived in the town for 38 years, roughly 20 of them as a civics teacher. She is loved in the community and among her students is legendary for her passion for civics and her outreach to the disadvantaged. The dream of her life was to let the fire of civic spirit catch on in communities and among families on the margin of society, where the danger of drug abuse and criminality are the highest. She dedicated her life to it. She launched a program called “We the People,” designed to build civic spirit and interest in participatory democracy among school children. And Sue Schmitz’s advocacy of civic engagement led directly to her conflict with U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, who considers it to be criminal. But one other fact figures directly in this drama. Schmitz is a Democratic member of the state legislature.

The Alabama G.O.P. is busy revving up its plans for the fall elections, and today gives us a unique opportunity to see its various limbs moving in perfect concert. The party’s objective is to take control of the state legislature. The party’s leader, Governor Bob Riley, announced that if he can raise $7 million, the party can take control of the legislature in 2010. Riley is busy mustering every tool at his disposal to accomplish that goal. That, of course, is all politics as usual–the sort of thing that goes on in states in every corner of the country. But there’s something exceedingly rotten in Alabama. And it’s revealed when we take careful stock of how Governor Riley and his party go about implementing their plans.

First, where do we read about this? On the editorial page of one of the three Newhouse newspapers that have a lock on the state’s print media market, and which operate as the press service of the Republican Party. The Mobile Press-Register, which otherwise publishes fawning pieces about Governor Riley’s cowboy boots and describes Karl Rove as a persecuted genius, now tells us that the G.O.P.’s plan to “take control of the legislature” (their words) is a wonderful idea. Indeed, it gets the official seal of approval of the paper. You can read this on line at the Press-Register’s website, but why not read it at the website of the Alabama G.O.P.? After all, they are all part of the same operation. Why bother maintaining the pretense of independence?

Here’s the core of their story:

Most Republicans are advocates of reform, perhaps because they’ve been on the outside looking in at a deeply entrenched system. The Democratic Party has controlled the Legislature for more than a century. That kind of political dominance breeds complacency, cynicism and corruption.

Got that? Republicans = reform. Democrats = corrupt. No need to deal with individuals and their record of service. No need in fact to actually explore any political issues, like education or taxation. That would just confuse your poor, tired mind. The labels are all you need to know.

Let’s keep in mind that the state government is in the hands of the G.O.P., and the legislature in theory provides oversight. What happens to the process of oversight when the executive and legislature are in the hands of the same party? I think we all know the answer to that: corruption. Voters often exercise just the kind of wisdom that the Founding Fathers envisioned by providing for opposing parties to live in an uncomfortable cohabitation. Uncomfortable for the politicians, that is. For those concerned about the hoggishness at the public trough that inevitably accompanies one-party crony rule, it can be the best solution. So when the Press-Register writes about “corruption” and “reform,” just remember that they mean those terms in the Orwellian sense.

The last several years have seen an explosion of no-bid state contracts in Alabama in which cronies of Governor Bob Riley are involved. What happens when newspaper reporters in Montgomery submit stories about these scandals to the three Newhouse newspapers? Alas, I’ve tracked that process, too. The stories don’t run and the reporters get chided. The Press-Register is absolutely right. There is a culture of “deeply entrenched” corruption in Alabama, and they’re a significant part of it. But for the Press-Register the seat of corruption lies not there, but in the Alabama Education Association, the organization that represents school teachers. Why? Because the AEA has crusaded for improvements to the state’s secondary education system, and has backed the Democrats, who generally support spending more money on education. You’d think a newspaper would favor reducing the state’s illiteracy rate, but you’d be wrong. After all, this is Alabama.

So the G.O.P.-loyal newspapers lead the charge into the campaign, calling for voter contributions to G.O.P. coffers to fund taking over the legislature. And they also crank out political propaganda for the G.O.P. in the form of stories that pass for news coverage. At the core of this is the work of the Riley Administration’s court chronicler, Brett Blackledge at the Birmingham News. Blackledge has earned his stripes with a crusade looking into Alabama’s two-year college system, where he is fearlessly rooting out corruption. Funny how everything he writes is perfectly choreographed with Governor Riley’s themes of the week and seems seamlessly joined with criminal investigations conducted by the U.S. Attorney, about which Blackledge is impeccably well informed. And strange that his investigation of the two-year college system neglects to mention that Governor Riley ran it.

Still all of this pales in comparison with the single most wondrous fact about the Blackledge reportage–only Democrats ever figure in the crosshairs. Mind you, there’s probably no shortage of corruption in this college system, feather bedding and the like. No shortage of allegations have come to me, Blackledge and the U.S. Attorney’s office concerning corruption. A great many of them involve figures connected to Governor Riley and the G.O.P. But, alas, there doesn’t seem to be enough ink or newsprint to allow Blackledge to write about those cases. Or perhaps there’s another reason. It would be what my politico friends call “off message.”

And today we see the typical pincer movement involving the Alabama G.O.P. election campaign’s third arm, the U.S. Attorney’s office. Specifically, Alice Martin, the sometime U.S. Attorney, sometime G.O.P. candidate for elective office. Martin fully understands the benefit to the party and its election efforts of criminal prosecutions being commenced that target elected Democrats, are geared carefully to the election cycle, and are hyped extensively to the party media apparatus. And yesterday, as Sue Schmitz was dramatically dragged from her home in Toney, Alice Martin went before the press with an announcement which will feature prominently in Republican campaign literature for the coming years. She announced an indictment that Blackledge signaled, with his usual perfect clairvoyance in all things prosecutorial, was in the works months back.

Sue Schmitz’s day was dramatically interrupted by her arrest. She had never before had a conflict with the law in any way. And yesterday morning, she had just been preparing to take a group of school kids from underprivileged backgrounds on a tour of the state capital, Montgomery. Here’s how the AP reports the story:

“We charge that Representative Schmitz’s only substantial ‘work’ was to work her official position in the Legislature to land a job through the postsecondary system,” U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in a statement.

Schmitz was employed from January 2006 until October 2006 by the CITY Skills Training Consortium, an arm of Alabama’s troubled two-year college system. The federally funded program operated at 10 sites statewide to help at-risk youth referred by juvenile courts develop academic, behavioral and social skills. The indictment claims Schmitz made as much as $53,403 annually as a program coordinator despite rarely showing up and doing virtually nothing for the money.

Let’s just pause and look at what’s going on here. A massive federal case has been launched, at a likely taxpayer cost in excess of $2 million, against a social studies teacher, who it is alleged (on the basis of sharply disputed evidence) was not putting in as many hours as she should have in teaching her classes. This has to count as one of the more absurd (if not malicious) cases I’ve seen in recent years. And remember, this is a Justice Department that can’t spare an FBI agent to look into, or a prosecutor to handle, a gang rape case involving Jamie Leigh Jones, or any of the dozens of other cases involving rape, assault and homicide in Iraq. They’re not “priorities.” On the other hand, bringing charges against Democratic office holders has been a very high priority from the day Bush took office, and it continues to be so today.

More than this, note how party connections flavor the U.S. Attorney’s interest in cases of feather bedding. Recall that a Missouri criminal attorney conducted a detailed investigation into the service of Mark Everett Fuller as District Attorney in Coffee and Pike Counties. His study, presented in a sworn affidavit and backed up with documentation, showed that Fuller was an absentee district attorney. He drew his salary for the job, but he spent his time out of state, largely in Colorado, attending to the business that he owns and operated and which continues to provide most of his income–Doss Aviation. The affidavit was submitted to the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department. No investigation of its allegations occurred. The allegations of “feather bedding” in the case involving this Republican official were many times greater than the one charged against Schmitz. But what happened? Nothing. The U.S. attorney was not interested. As a prosecutor told Time’s Adam Zagorin, different rules apply with respect to the “home team.” Fuller went on to be the judge designated to handle the highest profile political prosecution in the country, involving former Governor Siegelman. Now we’re seeing more evidence of the two distinct flavors of justice dispensed by Republican prosecutors in Alabama: one marked with a “D” and the other with a “R.”

U.S. Attorney Martin seems to have a problem with the truth. She’s currently under investigation for giving perjured testimony in connection with an employment litigation. I lay out the details of the accusations against her, which are quite compelling, here. However, Martin serves at the pleasure of the president, and, as comedian Jon Stewart would say, it clearly pleasures him for her to continue to serve. And it pleasures Karl Rove and the G.O.P. state organizers even more.

Former school teacher, now state legislator Sue Schmitz

“My client is a wonderful, dedicated educator. It’s been her life’s work. These charges are garbage,” said her attorney Buck Watson. He also noted that he had advised the U.S. Attorney that if they decided to indict his client, she would come in on her own, and he would handle it–an offer spurned in favor of the heavy-handed arrest squad. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s bizarre.” I spoke with several of Schmitz’s colleagues, who were shocked by the charges. And it’s spreading a message of cold fear in the community. Others with whom I communicated were afraid to have their names appear in print. “This is a political vendetta. Anyone who objects to what they’re doing will become a target,” one teacher told me.

So why would a federal prosecutor put such tremendous resources into arresting and prosecuting a retired social studies teacher? Schmitz is an irresistible target. She’s a Democratic member of the state legislature. Note how Alice Martin’s loudly trumpeted indictment works in a perfect trifecta:

• The battle plan rolled out to retake the legislature, announcing “corrupt Democrats” as the target

• The Newhouse papers run the call to arms and funds, and print a sequence of stories designed to make it all credible

• The U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham announces the indictment of a “corrupt Democrat” retired school teacher.

And today, as expected we see stories in the Newhouse papers announcing the indictment, with predictably tendentious commentary. All of this is geared at helping smooth the way for a successful prosecution, and more to the point, a successful Republican takeover of the state legislature. It is a pattern that Alabama has witnessed over and again in the last six years.

The charges against Schmitz will of course have to be proved in a court. And whether they are meritorious or not, Schmitz will be put to hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal expense and is having her reputation tarnished, all courtesy of the taxpayers. Whether the charges stand or fall, all of this activity has one clear-cut beneficiary: the Alabama G.O.P. and its plans “to take control of” the state legislature. Funny, but the ballot box doesn’t figure very prominently in that effort.

2008-01-16T08:06:00.000-08:00

~~Bush seeks to answer Arab skepticism.~~

(This should be)

Bush "attempts" to answer Arab skepticism.

"President Bush is such an inept individual. His intelligence is non-existent and his morals are definitely left skewed. He has the IQ of a 6 year old and it can clearly be seen in his economical and military decisions. Bush knows nothing of the Middle East.

Their belief system, culture, and world views totally escape him AND his advisor's! Both Egypt and Jordan are teachers pets of our current administration and are so westernized it is hard at times to believe that they are Middle Eastern and not territorial countries of the US."

Jammy

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer 2 hours, 49 minutes ago

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - Answering Arab skepticism, President Bush promised Wednesday to stay engaged in pulling Israelis and Palestinians toward a peace pact by the end of his term.

The president, on the last stop of his eight-day Mideast trip, got a boost from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. A top Arab ally to Bush, Mubarak said he would work hand-in-hand with the U.S. on a deal to create an independent Palestinian state.

"When I say I'm coming back to stay engaged, I mean it," said Bush, who has committed to returning to the region in May. "When I say I'm optimistic we can get a deal done, I mean what I'm saying."

In comments summing up his trip, Bush also expressed support for the U.S.-backed government in Lebanon, gently urged further political reforms in Egypt, and praised the Iraqi government for recent steps toward reconciliation among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Mubarak said he stressed in his talks with Bush that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is at the core of problems and turmoil in the Middle East. Bush has expressed a desire to reach an agreement before he leaves office in January 2009.

"I also said that I wish that he will reach a peace agreement before the end of his term," Mubarak said, through a translator.

"We are keen on supporting peace efforts," Mubarak said. "We are ready, hand-in-hand with the United States of America," and others to work for the "sake of a comprehensive and just peace, to put an end to this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to open new horizons for the Middle East for a more peaceful and secure future."

Bush said he is convinced that leaders in both Israel and the West Bank are committed to a two-state solution.

"I know nations in the neighborhood are willing to help, particularly yourself," Bush told Mubarak.

Standing alongside Mubarak, Bush urged greater political openness in Egypt, but did not directly criticize the Egyptian government for what the U.S. sees as a lack of political freedoms. Bush praised Egypt for taking some steps toward democratic reform, but said more was needed.

"I'm absolutely confident that people in the Middle East are working on building a society based on justice," Bush said.

Bush said Egypt can play a role in the "freedom and justice movement" and is showing more economic openness. "My hope is that the Egyptian government will build on these important steps."

The Egyptian government has waged a heavy crackdown on its strongest domestic opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting hundreds of the Islamic fundamentalist group's members, as well as some secular opponents.

And Bush did not mention prominent jailed political opponent Ayman Nour, whose case U.S. officials have pledged to raise with the Egyptians every time they meet. The State Department called Nour's 2006 trial on election-related charges a "miscarriage of justice."

Wrapping up his journey, which included a side trip to Baghdad by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush said the fragile Iraqi government was making progress on political reconciliation.

"The government isn't perfect, but nevertheless, progress is being made," he said.

"Normal life is coming back, and political life is moving," Bush said, offering an upbeat take on a war that has drained public patience back home.

"The United States will continue to help the Iraqi people secure their democracy," Bush said.

Bush, who left Egypt after his remarks to return to Washington, also expressed support for the weak U.S.-backed government in Lebanon, and called on Syria and Iran to stop interfering in Beirut.

"We agreed it's important for nations in this region to support Prime Minister (Fuad) Saniora," Bush said. "It's important to encourage the holding of immediate, unconditional presidential elections according to the Lebanese constitution, and to make it clear to Syria, Iran and their allies they must end their interference and efforts to undermine the process."

Jammy

2008-01-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

Whether or not you'd vote for Hillary -

take this seriously

Dear Friends, I'm updating you on what I find to be unacceptable sexism on the part of Chris Matthews of MSNBC. His misogyny is well-known through the years he's been host of HARDBALL, but at this point he's jumped the shark. It doesn't matter if you like HRC or not, or would vote for her or not. A core issue for me is the way Chris Matthews engages in sexism. He has to face consequences for his backward, and hateful treatment of women. I hope you will write to the people who's addresses are contained within this article. I have! Best wishes/Claudia

http://mediamatters.org/items/200801110002

Using overtly sexist language, he has referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as a "she devil" and compared her to a "strip-teaser." He has called her "witchy" and likened her voice to "fingernails on a blackboard." He has referred to men who support her as "castratos in the eunuch chorus." He has suggested Clinton is not "a convincing mom" and said "modern women" like Clinton are unacceptable to "Midwest guys." He has called her "Madame Defarge" and "Nurse Ratched."

Had enough? Contact MSNBC to tell them what you think.

Mr. Phil Griffin,
Senior Vice President, News
NBC Television Network
30 Rockefeller Plz
New York, NY 10112
phil.griffin@nbc.com

Steve Capus,
President, NBC News
steve.capus@nbc.com

MSNBC
letters@msnbc.com
MSNBC/Microsoft-NBC
30 Rockefeller Plz
3rd Fl
New York, NY 10112
(212) 664-4444

Chris Matthews
hardball@msnbc.com

After Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matthews asserted: "[T]he reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around." He described her performance at a debate last Saturday as apparently "good enough to seem good enough here for women who wanted to root for her anyway."

His sexism is hardly limited to comments about Clinton. During coverage of the New Hampshire primary, he said that Clinton is the only viable woman presidential candidate "on the horizon." He couldn't think of a single female governor eligible to run: "Where are the big-state women governors?" he asked. "Where are they? Name one." In fact, several of the states that currently have women governors are comparable in population to the states in which the male presidential candidates serve or have served as governor.

In November 2006, shortly after the Democrats took the majority in Congress, Matthews asked a guest if then-presumptive speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was "going to castrate Steny Hoyer" if Hoyer (D-MD) were elected House majority leader.

During coverage of a presidential debate last spring, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell was compelled to remind Matthews that Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) wife, Michelle, is a Harvard-educated lawyer after he focused obsessively on her physical appearance.

The good news is that people are speaking out against Matthews' flagrant, persistent sexism.

Of the New Hampshire primary results, the blog TalkLeft, observed:

"It was a revolt of women sick and tired of the likes of Chris Tweety Matthews and the Media Misogynists.

Barack Obama did not lose New Hampshire. The Media did. Their misogynist hatred of Hillary Clinton was soundly rejected by the voters. Especially the women voters of New Hampshire.

How the Media will react to this well deserved rebuke is the question. And let's be clear, Chris Matthews should be removed from covering this race. His offensive behavior is a disgrace to NBC."

It's time to play a little "hardball." Please contact MSNBC and Chris Matthews today and let them know what you think.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>cddstarcats@yahoo.com

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world: James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays (1998)]

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-12-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

Spread the word and this link to this NEWSWEEK online article about Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's son. There is a pattern of ugly and reprehensible cases of animal abuse and animal torture episodes that are linked to Republicans. We hear these stories over and over again and the letter "R" goes after their name in each and every case I've found to date.

This is the party of waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, black prison sites, "extraordinary rendition," GITMO BAY, illegal wiretapping of Americans, and more. Let me be 100% fair here and note for the record that the Democratic Party is utterly complicit in each and every case I mentioned here regarding human torture occurring under the Bush administration. If they are too cowardly to stand up for what is right, then they should be voted out of office forthwith. -- Claudia

http://www.newsweek.com/id/78241

CAMPAIGN 2008

A Son’s Past Deeds Come Back To Bite Huckabee

By Michael Kickoff and Holly Bailey | NEWSWEEK

Dec 24, 2007 Issue | Updated: 2:51 p.m. ET Dec 15, 2007

Pulaski County Sheriff-AP

Dogged: An incident involving his son David could hurt Huckabee

As gains in the polls, the former governor is finding that his record in office is getting more scrutiny. One issue likely to get attention is his handling of a sensitive family matter: allegations that one of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But , then the director of Arkansas's state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee's chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor's request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee's Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer's intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee's office and fired. "I've lost confidence in your ability to do your job," Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was "I couldn't get you to help me with my son when I had that problem," according to Bailey. "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son," says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a "courageous" and "very solid" professional.

Huckabee called Bailey's account "totally untrue" and described him as a "bitter" ex-employee. "I asked him to resign because he had so alienated the entire state police," he said. "It had nothing to do with my son." Brenda Turner, Huckabee's then chief of staff, and Kevin Crass, the Huckabee family lawyer, also disputed Bailey's account, although both acknowledged talking to him about the dog killing. "I asked him, 'Is it normal for the state police to … investigate something that happened at a Boy Scout camp?' " Turner says. "We wanted the same treatment that anybody else would get." (Animal cruelty in Arkansas is a misdemeanor, not a felony.)

The details of the incident remain murky. The Animal Legal Defense Fund got an anonymous fax that summer alleging that David Huckabee and another youth had been involved in the hanging of a stray dog at the camp on July 11. A local animal-rights activist, Joyce Hillard, later contacted the camp director. Notes of Hillard's report to the defense fund read, "Boys confessed & were fired. Dir. is making excuses, saying dog was sic & boys were putting him out of his misery." (The director told NEWSWEEK only that a stray dog was "put down" and that the counselors were fired for violating the Scout credo to be "kind.") The father of the other counselor was quoted by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in August 1998 as saying that his son found the dog "hung over a limb and choking." David Huckabee did not respond to requests for comment. (In April of this year, he was arrested—and paid a fine—when he forgot to remove a loaded gun from his carry-on luggage at Little Rock airport.) His father told NEWSWEEK that his son did not engage in "intentional torture." "There was a dog that apparently had mange and was absolutely, I guess, emaciated." A campaign official says David "regrets" the incident and notes that he later made Eagle Scout.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< title="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com" href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-12-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

From Oil Wars to Water Wars

http://www.alternet.org/environment/70448/

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this week, in Oslo, Norway. Al Gore shared the prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents more than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. The solemn ceremony took place as the United States is blocking meaningful progress at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, and the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have derailed the energy bill passed by the House of Representatives, which would have accelerated the adoption of renewable energy sources at the expense of big-oil and coal corporations.

Gore set the stage: "So, today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

"As a result, the Earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right."

He went on: "Last Sept. 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the north polar ice cap is 'falling off a cliff.' One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as seven years. Seven years from now."

How will climate-change skeptics explain that one? (Already, big business is celebrating the break up of the polar ice cap, as a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific is opening, creating a cheaper route for more needless shipping.) It is hard to imagine the north pole, the storied, frozen expanse of ice and snow, completely gone in just a few years. Lost as well will be the vast store of archeological data trapped in the ice: thousands of years of the Earth's climate history are told in the layers of ice that descend for miles there. Scientists are just now learning how to read and interpret the history. The great meltdown will surely have catastrophic effects on the ecosystem in the north, with species like the polar bear already edging toward extinction.

Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist, accepted for the IPCC. He is a careful scientist with the political finesse to chair the work of the IPCC despite the enduring antagonism of the United States. He pointed to the disproportionate effect of climate change on the world's poor:

"[T]he impacts of climate change on some of the poorest and the most vulnerable communities in the world could prove extremely unsettling ... in terms of: access to clean water, access to sufficient food, stable health conditions, ecosystem resources, security of settlements."

Pachauri predicts water wars and mass migrations. "Migration, usually temporary and often from rural to urban areas, is a common response to calamities such as floods and famines."

Gore invoked the memory of Mohandas Gandhi, saying he "awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called 'Satyagraha' -- or 'truth force.' In every land, the truth -- once known -- has the power to set us free." Satyagraha, as Gandhi practiced it, is the disciplined application of nonviolent resistance, which is exactly what Ted Glick is doing back in Washington, D.C.

Glick heads up the Climate Emergency Council. On his 99th day of a liquids-only fast, the day after the Nobel ceremony, he joined with 20 people in the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for a sit-in. The Senate Republicans are now blocking a federal energy bill that would create funding for the development of renewable energy sources in the U.S., while stripping away billions of dollars worth of tax breaks for big oil and coal.

Glick told me: "We have to be willing to go to jail. Al Gore, himself, a couple of months ago talked about how young people need to be sitting in in front of the coal plants to prevent coal plants from being built. That's true. Young people need to be doing that. Middle-age people need to be doing that. Older people need to be doing that. And Al Gore needs to be doing that. Let's get serious about this crisis."

While Glick was sitting in, news reports began to circulate about Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani's law firm's lobbying activities against the energy bill. According to Bloomberg news, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP was hired by energy giant Southern Co. to defeat the bill. At a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser last August, addressing members of the coal industry, Giuliani said, "We have to increase our reliance on coal."

As Giuliani's coffers get fat with money from big oil, gas and coal, Glick has lost more than 40 pounds, and the Earth's temperature continues to rise.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams - (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-12-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

I WANT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE.IF I HAVE TO PAY FOR CHENEY, I WANT SOMETHING FOR MYSELF OUT OF THE DEAL!! PASS THIS ON TO EVERYONE!

Nurses: Cheney 'would probably be dead' but for government health care
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Nurses_Cheney_would_probably_be_dead_1211.html

Campaigning for politicians to address universal healthcare, a nurses' group purchased provocative newspaper ads that warn Vice President Dick Cheney would "probably be dead by now" if he was not part of a single-payer government run health care system that keeps his oft-adled heart ticking.

The California Nurses Association purchased the eye-catching ads in 10 Iowa newspapers Tuesday, pointing out what the group says is another irony of the heatlhcare crisis -- that politicians receive health coverage from a government-run program, not insurance companies.

"Dick Cheney, with his heart trouble, would probably be dead now if he were an ordinary American forced to search for cardiac care in a thicket of mercenary insurers and heartless HMOs," Shum Preston wrote on the Nurses' association blog. "Cheney gets guaranteed healthcare; we get squat."

“The patient’s history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat,” the ad states, referencing Cheney’s lengthy medical chart, according to the Wall Street Journal. “For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.”

The vice president's office apparently was not amused with mentions of Cheney's mortality.

“Something this outrageous does not warrant a response,” Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, snipped.

The CNA defended its ad, and the shock-value content.

“The ad is about the substance of the debate. The ad says Democrats are bad, and Republicans are worse,” Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of CNA, told the Journal. “Dick Cheney is just the exemplar of what it means to have a double standard.”

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." -- Samuel Adams - (1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-12-08T18:37:00.001-08:00

Santa, please? This is what I want:

CHENEY MUGSHOT

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< title="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com" href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-11-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

CHENEY HAS IRREGULAR HEARTBEAT!

Nov 26 04:37 PM US/Eastern

Cheney has a heart? WHO KNEW!? Everybody, on the count of three, hold up a magnet and turn on your microwave ovens! Aim them towards Washington, DC! Let's see what happens to his pacemaker!! -- CDD

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=2007-11-26_D8T5IU802&show_article=1&cat=breaking

http://player.clipsyndicate.com/view/279/455016?cpt=8&wpid=97

WASHINGTON (AP) - Vice President Dick Cheney experienced an irregular heartbeat Monday and will be evaluated at George Washington University Hospital.

The condition was detected when Cheney was seen by doctors for a lingering cough from a cold.

"During examination he was incidentally found to have an irregular heartbeat, which on further testing was determined to be atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart," said spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-11-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

GEORGE W. BUSH

We Hate To Bring Up the Nazis, But They Fled To South America, Too

Our paranoid friends over at Bring It On have put together a story that hasn't exactly made Washington Whispers.It's real short and real simple.

The Cuban news service reports that George W. Bush has purchased 98,840 acres in Paraguay, near the Bolivian/Brazilian border.

Jenna Bush paid a secret diplomatic visit to Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and U.S. Ambassador James Cason. There were no press conferences, no public sightings and no official confirmation of her 10-day trip which apparently ended this week.

The Paraguayan Senate voted last summer to "grant U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction."

Immediately afterwards, 500 heavily armed U.S. troops arrived with various planes, choppers and land vehicles at Mariscal Estigarribia air base, which happens to be at the northern tip of Paraguay near the Bolivian/Brazilian border. More have reportedly arrived since then.

What the hell, after the jump. Plus a BREAKING UPDATE involving, of course, The Moonies!

Now, Prensa Latina is a Cuban-government operation that is not exactly friendly toward Washington, what with Washington trying to kill Castro for 50 years and all.

But Prensa Latina didn't invent the story. It's all over the South American press' and not just Venezuela and Bolivia.

Here's a version from Brazil.

Here's one from Argentina.

And here's one from Paraguay itself.

As far as we can understand, all the paperwork and deeds and such are secret. But somehow the news leaked that a new "land trust" created for Bush had purchased nearly 100,000 acres near the town of Chaco.

And Jenna's down there having secret meetings with the president and America's ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Bush posted Cason in Havana in 2002, but last year moved him to Paraguay.

Cason apparently gets around. A former "political adviser" to the U.S. Atlantic Command and ATO's Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Cason has been stationed in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama; basically everywhere the U.S. has run secret and not-so-secret wars over the past 30 years.

Here's a fun question for Tony Snow: Why might the president and his family need a 98.840-acre ranch in Paraguay protected by a semi-secret U.S. military base manned by American troops who have been exempted from war-crimes prosecution by the Paraguayan government?

Here's a little background on the base itself, which Rumsfeld secretly visited in late 2005:

U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at Paraguay's Mariscal Estigarribia air base, a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Argentinean journalists who got a peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52 bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. The air base is larger than the international airport at the capital city, Asuncion.

Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-month counterterrorism training exercise, code named Operation Commando Force 6.

Paraguayan denials that Mariscal Estigarribia is now a U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by Brazil and Argentina. There is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta , Ecuador. The United States claimed the Manta base was a "dirt strip" used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador.

BREAKING, UPDATE, LITTLE SIREN GRAPHIC:

We've been directed to yet another parapolitical theory here at Rigorous Intuition, where it is reported that Rev. Moon bought 600,000 hectares " that's 1,482,600 acres " in the same place: Chaco, Paraguay.

Another twist: The first story, from Paraguay, apparently refers to the senior George Bush as the owner of the 98.840 acres in Moon's neighborhood.

Bush 41 was the first big shot politician to go prancing around with Rev. Moon in public. Especially in South America: "In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon's anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event," wrote The Gadflyer last year. "Until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that "brings sanity to Washington." That was while on an extended trip to South America in Moon's company. A Reuters' story of Nov 25 of that year describes the former president as "full of praise" for Moon at a banquet in Buenos Aires, toasting him as "the man with the vision" (And Moon helped Bush out with his own vision thing, paying him $100,000 for the pleasure of his company.) Bush and Moon then traveled together to Uruguay, "to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital, Montevideo, to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America."

Isn't that special?

Oh, and both the Moonie and Bush land is located at what Paraguay/'s drug czar called an "enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades." And it sits atop the one of the world's largest fresh-water aquifers.

Bush Family-98,842 acres and a Mule [Bring It On]

Bush Paraguay Land Grab Incites Unease [Prensa Latina]

http://wonkette.com/politics/george-w.-bush/we-hate-to-bring-up-the-nazis-but-they-fled-to-south-america-too-208549.php

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-11-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

God help us. Claudia

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/15/i-see-your-markos-moulits_n_72839.html
Thursday, November 15, 2007

KARL ROVE TO BECOME NEWSWEEK CONTRIBUTOR

New York--Karl Rove, the former White House deputy chief of staff, will become a Newsweek contributor, offering occasional opinion pieces to the pages of the magazine and to Newsweek.com.

"Newsweek has a long tradition of asking practitioners and opinion-makers to offer our readers the benefits of their experience in occasional opinion essays," said Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham. "Whether one agrees or disagrees with Karl, there is no arguing that he has been a critical player in the political world with insights and experiences that we think will give our readers something unique. A great recent example is George Stephanopoulos, who did terrific work for us after he left the Clinton White House in the second term."

# # #

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-11-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Stiglitz warns about the Bush years' economy legacy

http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=11864&formato=HTML

Stiglitz warns about the Bush years’ economy legacy United States president George W Bush will leave his successor a country in debt up to its ears, a depressed dollar as never seen before and a nation with a class
structure closer to that of Mexico or Brazil, according to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in an article published in the December edition of Vanity Fair.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in
Economics

“When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties”, but the damage done to the US economy and its “repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page”.

Stiglitz who lectures on economy at Columbia University argues that the fact that the US economy has not been in recession in the almost seven years of the Bush administration and the respectable low unemployment can’t hide the other side: “a tax code hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70% by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-850 billion US dollars trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance”.

Stiglitz recalls that when President Bush took office the US had an anticipated 2.2
trillion US dollars budget surplus, with which the US could have afforded to ramp up domestic investment in many areas. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II.

“But the Bush administration had its own ideas”, and the first major economic initiative pursued by the president was a massive tax cut for the rich, enacted in June of 2001, compounded by a second tax cut in 2003. This meant that those with an income over a million US dollars got a tax break of 18.000 US dollars, more than thirty times larger than the cut received by the average US citizen.

Stiglitz also underlines that inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century. “A young male in his 30s today has an income, adjusted for inflation, that is 12% less than what his father was making 30 years ago. Some 5.3 million more Americans are living in poverty now than were living in poverty when Bush became president. America’s class structure may not have arrived there yet, but it’s heading in the direction of Brazil’s and Mexico’s”.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-11-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< title="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com" href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" ymailto="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-10-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

How stupid can the "masses" actually be? Well, here's our answer.--Claudia

Bomb Iran, majority of Americans says in new poll
10/30/2007 @ 11:20 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Bomb_Iran_majority_of_Americans_says_1030.html
Filed by Nick Juliano

Despite President Bush's perpetually abysmal approval ratings, it appears his increasingly hostile rhetoric against Iran has drummed up enough fear of a "nuclear holocaust" or a World War III that a majority of Americans are in favor of a US strike against the country aimed a curtailing its apparent nuclear ambitions, a new poll shows.

The Zogby International survey shows 52 percent of Americans would support a strike on Iran, while 53 percent expect President Bush to launch such an attack before the end of his second term. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is voters' No. 1 choice to deal with Iran, with 21 percent saying they would like to see her take on Tehran from the White House. Republican Rudy Giuliani was voters' second choice, with 15 percent.

Just 29 percent of Americans think the US should not attack Iran, with one in five people unsure about military action. Of those who would support a strike, 28 percent believe military action should wait until the next president is in office, while 23 percent want to see Bush let lose US missiles against Iran.

The poll results were viewed with a "Here we go again" attitude from bloggers chagrined at the apparent lack of lessons learned by Americans as the war launched against another hostile Middle Eastern regime stretches towards its fifth year.

"It is utterly stunning that, after the great difficulties we have clearly faced in Iraq (a situation far from finished, by the way), that an absolute majority would favor a strike on Iran at this time," writes Dr. Steven Taylor at PoliBlog. "Even if we assume that the die-hard 25%-30% who still approve of the way the President is doing his job also are in favor of such a strike, where do the other 27%-22% come from to get the pro-strike total to 52%?"

The support for an Iranian strike coincides with substantial fears of further terrorist attacks demonstrated in the Zogby poll. More than two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) believe another terrorist attack is likely on US soil and nearly one-in three believe such a strike will come before 2010.

Polls conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq showed larger majorities of Americans in favor of military action, and around 80 percent of Americans believed Iraq posed a threat to the United States in late 2002 and early 2003.

Don Surber, blogging for West Virginia's Charleston Daily Mail compared the speculation over a strike on Iran to another showdown over nuclear proliferation nearly half a century ago.

"I was in grade school when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened 45 Octobers ago. I was gung-ho for taking Castro out. Wiser heads prevailed — in the Soviet Union as well as the United States," he writes. "The security of the world rests on American shoulders. I’d bet against a military strike. There are enough wiser heads on both sides."

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-07-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

Mary McHugh visited the grave of her fiancé, Sgt. James J. Regan, who was killed in Iraq in February. He is buried in the new Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan....Small cities and towns are suffering a large portion of the deaths in the fighting in Iraq. (NYT comments and photo)

http://www.bushwatch.net/archives-may07.htm#fall

Bomb Iran, majority of Americans says in new poll
10/30/2007 @ 11:20 am
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Bomb_Iran_majority_of_Americans_says_1030.html
Filed by Nick Juliano

Despite President Bush's perpetually abysmal approval ratings, it appears his increasingly hostile rhetoric against Iran has drummed up enough fear of a "nuclear holocaust" or a World War III that a majority of Americans are in favor of a US strike against the country aimed a curtailing its apparent nuclear ambitions, a new poll shows.

The Zogby International survey shows 52 percent of Americans would support a strike on Iran, while 53 percent expect President Bush to launch such an attack before the end of his second term. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is voters' No. 1 choice to deal with Iran, with 21 percent saying they would like to see her take on Tehran from the White House. Republican Rudy Giuliani was voters' second choice, with 15 percent.

Just 29 percent of Americans think the US should not attack Iran, with one in five people unsure about military action. Of those who would support a strike, 28 percent believe military action should wait until the next president is in office, while 23 percent want to see Bush let lose US missiles against Iran.

The poll results were viewed with a "Here we go again" attitude from bloggers chagrined at the apparent lack of lessons learned by Americans as the war launched against another hostile Middle Eastern regime stretches towards its fifth year.

"It is utterly stunning that, after the great difficulties we have clearly faced in Iraq (a situation far from finished, by the way), that an absolute majority would favor a strike on Iran at this time," writes Dr. Steven Taylor at PoliBlog. "Even if we assume that the die-hard 25%-30% who still approve of the way the President is doing his job also are in favor of such a strike, where do the other 27%-22% come from to get the pro-strike total to 52%?"

The support for an Iranian strike coincides with substantial fears of further terrorist attacks demonstrated in the Zogby poll. More than two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) believe another terrorist attack is likely on US soil and nearly one-in three believe such a strike will come before 2010.

Polls conducted prior to the invasion of Iraq showed larger majorities of Americans in favor of military action, and around 80 percent of Americans believed Iraq posed a threat to the United States in late 2002 and early 2003.

Don Surber, blogging for West Virginia's Charleston Daily Mail compared the speculation over a strike on Iran to another showdown over nuclear proliferation nearly half a century ago.

"I was in grade school when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened 45 Octobers ago. I was gung-ho for taking Castro out. Wiser heads prevailed — in the Soviet Union as well as the United States," he writes. "The security of the world rests on American shoulders. I’d bet against a military strike. There are enough wiser heads on both sides."

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

*****************************************************************
"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen." -- Mort Sahl

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-07-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com

*****************************************************************
"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen." -- Mort Sahl

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-07-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

Spread the Word!

Dogs Against Romney blog!
Sparky the dog has started a blog against
Mitt Romney who is crapwad animal abuser!

http://www.dogsagainstromney.blogspot.com/

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

*****************************************************************
"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen." -- Mort Sahl

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2007-01-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

heh . . .the photo says it all, lol.

Jammy

2006-11-26T14:28:00.000-08:00

Heh . . .good 'ol Claudia sent this in!

2006-11-19T17:14:00.000-08:00

NUF SAID!

Contributed by:

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com

*****************************************************************
"Whatever is born, or done, in this moment of time has the qualities of this moment in time." -- C.G. Jung

"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" -- "The Day The Earth Stood Still," 1951 w/ Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal. This phrase stopped Gort, the Robot from destroying the world.

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2006-11-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

Text of editorial calling for Rumsfeld to go

Publications catering to the military will call Monday for secretary’s ouster

MSNBC

Updated: 7:12 p.m. PT Nov 3, 2006

This editorial will appear in the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times on Monday under the headline “Time for Rumsfeld to go”:

"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."

Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.

But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake.

It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15552388/

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^< href="mailto:cddstarcats@yahoo.com">cddstarcats@yahoo.com
Fax (eFax): 310 564-0417

*****************************************************************

"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" -- "The Day The Earth Stood Still," 1951 w/ Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal. This phrase stopped Gort, the Robot from destroying the world.

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

The last time we mixed religion and politics people got burned at the stake.

"If love is a drug, then I guess we're all sober..." Everybody's Gone To War, by Nerina Pallet
http://www.onlylyrics.com/song.php?id=31531

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2006-10-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

October 26, 2006

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is "martial law."

Section 1076 of the massive Authorization Act, which grants the Pentagon another $500-plus-billion for its ill-advised adventures, is entitled, "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies." Section 333, "Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law" states that "the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of ("refuse" or "fail" in) maintaining public order, "in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

For the current President, "enforcement of the laws to restore public order" means to commandeer guardsmen from any state, over the objections of local governmental, military and local police entities; ship them off to another state; conscript them in a law enforcement mode; and set them loose against "disorderly" citizenry - protesters, possibly, or those who object to forced vaccinations and quarantines in the event of a bio-terror event.

The law also facilitates militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters, so called "illegal aliens," "potential terrorists" and other "undesirables" for detention in facilities already contracted for and under construction by Halliburton. That's right. Under the cover of a trumped-up "immigration emergency" and the frenzied militarization of the southern border, detention camps are being constructed right under our noses, camps designed for anyone who resists the foreign and domestic agenda of the Bush administration.

An article on "recent contract awards" in a recent issue of the slick, insider "Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International" reported that "global engineering and technical services powerhouse KBR [Kellog, Brown & Root] announced in January 2006 that its Government and Infrastructure division was awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency." "With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five year term," the report notes, "the contract is to be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," "for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) - in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." The report points out that "KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton." (3) So, in addition to authorizing another $532.8 billion for the Pentagon, including a $70-billion "supplemental provision" which covers the cost of the ongoing, mad military maneuvers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, the new law, signed by the president in a private White House ceremony, further collapses the historic divide between the police and the military: a tell-tale sign of a rapidly consolidating police state in America, all accomplished amidst ongoing U.S. imperial pretensions of global domination, sold to an "emergency managed" and seemingly willfully gullible public as a "global war on terrorism."

Make no mistake about it: the de-facto repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) is an ominous assault on American democratic tradition and jurisprudence. The 1878 Act, which reads, "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both," is the only U.S. criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people under the cover of 'law enforcement.' As such, it has been the best protection we've had against the power-hungry intentions of an unscrupulous and reckless executive, an executive intent on using force to enforce its will.

Unfortunately, this past week, the president dealt posse comitatus, along with American democracy, a near fatal blow. Consequently, it will take an aroused citizenry to undo the damage wrought by this horrendous act, part and parcel, as we have seen, of a long train of abuses and outrages perpetrated by this authoritarian administration.

Despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19th, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007's Defense Authorization Act contained a "widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order WITHOUT the consent of the nation's governors."

Senator Leahy went on to stress that, "we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders."

A few weeks later, on the 29th of September, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had "grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report," the language of which, he said, "subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law." This had been "slipped in," Leahy said, "as a rider with little study," while "other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals."

In a telling bit of understatement, the Senator from Vermont noted that "the implications of changing the (Posse Comitatus) Act are enormous". "There is good reason," he said, "for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty."

Senator Leahy's final ruminations: "Since hearing word a couple of weeks ago that this outcome was likely, I have wondered how Congress could have gotten to this point. It seems the changes to the Insurrection Act have survived the Conference because the Pentagon and the White House want it."

The historic and ominous re-writing of the Insurrection Act, accomplished in the dead of night, which gives Bush the legal authority to declare martial law, is now an accomplished fact.

The Pentagon, as one might expect, plays an even more direct role in martial law operations. Title XIV of the new law, entitled, "Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Legislative Provisions," authorizes "the Secretary of Defense to create a Homeland Defense Technology Transfer Consortium to improve the effectiveness of the Department of Defense (DOD) processes for identifying and deploying relevant DOD technology to federal, State, and local first responders."

In other words, the law facilitates the "transfer" of the newest in so-called "crowd control" technology and other weaponry designed to suppress dissent from the Pentagon to local militarized police units. The new law builds on and further codifies earlier "technology transfer" agreements, specifically the 1995 DOD-Justice Department memorandum of agreement achieved back during the Clinton-Reno regime.(4)

It has become clear in recent months that a critical mass of the American people have seen through the lies of the Bush administration; with the president's polls at an historic low, growing resistance to the war Iraq, and the Democrats likely to take back the Congress in mid-term elections, the Bush administration is on the ropes. And so it is particularly worrying that President Bush has seen fit, at this juncture to, in effect, declare himself dictator.

Source:

(1) http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/091906a.html and http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200609/092906b.html See also, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "The Use of Federal Troops for Disaster Assistance: Legal Issues," by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney, August 14, 2006

(2) http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill+h109-5122

(3) Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, "Recent Contract Awards", Summer 2006, Vol.12, No.2, pg.8; See also, Peter Dale Scott, "Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps," New American Media, January 31, 2006.

(4) "Technology Transfer from defense: Concealed Weapons Detection", National Institute of Justice Journal, No 229, August, 1995, pp.42-43.

:: Article nr. 27769 sent on 27-oct-2006 03:18 ECT

:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=27769

:: The incoming address of this article is :
towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/911/

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Uruknet .

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^

cddstarcats@yahoo.com
Fax (eFax): 310 564-0417

*****************************************************************
"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" -- "The Day The Earth Stood Still," 1951 w/ Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal. This phrase stopped Gort, the Robot from destroying the world.
"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow
The last time we mixed religion and politics people got burned at the stake.
"If love is a drug, then I guess we're all sober..." Everybody's Gone To War, by Nerina Pallet
http://www.onlylyrics.com/song.php?id=31531
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)
"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

War, by Nerina Pallet
http://www.onlylyrics.com/song.php?id=31531
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)
"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2006-08-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

Dangerous banned liquids given to homeless
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/08/21/dangerous-banned-liquids-given-to-homeless/

By: Michael Hampton
Posted: August 21, 2006 9:53 pm
What happens to your toothpaste, shampoo, lipstick, water, and everything else you throw away at the airport because of stupid new airport security theater rules which say that water bottle might be carrying liquid explosives?

In Eugene, Ore., some of those items are making their way to the area?s homeless.

Charley Harvey, assistant executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, has been picking through the discarded potential liquid explosives at Eugene Airport since last Tuesday. He took every bottle of shampoo and shaving cream, but passed on the brandy and the Vampire Blood.

Officials at the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County spotted a salvage opportunity. They figured that the discarded items at the Eugene Airport were a way to provide homeless people with perfectly good products. Beginning Tuesday, they began collecting the banned goods for distribution at their First Place Family Center in Eugene.

?We?re always looking for shampoo, toothpaste and other toiletries to help homeless families,? Harvey said. ?It usually takes us a week or two to get this much (donated by the public). Hopefully, it?s an ongoing windfall.? ? Eugene Register-Guard

City officials, who own the airport trash bins, allowed Harvey to collect whatever he could find useful, so that the city wouldn?t have to throw it out.

Wait a minute, throw out tons of potentially dangerous materials? Isn?t the reason they?re banned from planes the fact that they could be explosives? One wonders now if that?s even a fact at all.

But that?s just the city airport trash bins. Anything seized at a federal security checkpoint goes through a different procedure: First, the TSA screener pours the seized liquid into a single large bin, mixing it with all the other liquids seized at the checkpoint that day. Then the mixed liquids and their containers are hauled away and disposed of by a contractor.

Hold on just a second. We all heard on the news that the danger was that terrorists would mix liquids together to create explosives such as the highly volatile TATP. Now, it seems, the Terrorist Support Agency is doing the terrorists? job for them.

?Yeah, that?s pretty stupid,? wrote Stephen VanDyke.

TSA screeners are so dedicated to this plot that they willingly risk their lives by handling potentially explosive liquids as roughly as if they were nothing more than harmless toiletries. Or maybe they?ve all been brainwashed by the KGB. Or aliens! It might be true, you know.

After all, what other explanation could there be? That all those things really are harmless, that the government?s just trying to put on a big show? That?s crazy talk. ? No Treason

Congratulations, you figured it out. Everyone ? including the TSA ? knows all of these liquids are perfectly harmless. This is pure security theater, meant to make people ?feel good? about flying in the face of a highly overblown one-in-a-million ?threat.?

The worst part is the American people are lapping it up like dogs.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
To make an appointment email: cddstarcats@yahoo.com
Fax (eFax): 310 564-0417

*****************************************************************

"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" -- "The Day The Earth Stood Still," 1951 w/ Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal. This phrase stopped Gort, the Robot from destroying the world.

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

The last time we mixed religion and politics people got burned at the stake.

"If love is a drug, then I guess we're all sober..." Everybody's Gone To War, by Nerina Pallet
http://www.onlylyrics.com/song.php?id=31531

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

2006-08-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/17/flying_while_muslim.php

Flying While Muslim

Aziz Huq

August 17, 2006

Aziz Huq directs the Liberty and National Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007), and recipient of a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellowship.

The partisan posturing began within hours of reports the British had arrested 20-odd suspects in connection with an alleged terrorist conspiracy to blow up passenger airplanes. Arrests were made in the U.K, not the U.S. The plot was hatched in the U.K. and Pakistan.

But it was U.S. politicians who first mounted their soapboxes. “Move to question your opponent’s commitment to the defeat of terror,” crowed National Republican Party Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds. Following this rush to judgment was a campaign to expand government powers. Both Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales floated proposals to study new British anti-terrorism laws. Now the question is: Will the Bush administration and its allies in Congress be able to introduce its borrowed “Cool Britannia” finery in time for the November 2006 polls?

Set aside for a moment the hazards of enlarging executive power when public fear is at fever pitch and partisan politics at its zenith. Are the proposed powers really new or really needed? The short answer is no.

The federal government already, in fact, exercises many of the powers the British have—and uses them deeply unwisely, in ways that don’t build the nation’s security. The government is seeking non-solutions to non-problems. The problem has never been power—it’s whether there are methods of holding government accountable for using its power in an accurate, fair and proportionate way.

From 2000 onward, the United Kingdom enacted four significant counterterrorism laws. Like the USA PATRIOT Act, each package contained a complex of interconnecting provisions. Chertoff picked out two areas for examination: the British police’s ability to detain suspects for up to 28 days under a new Terrorism Act, which came into force on April 13, 2006, and the British police’s broader surveillance powers. Reliable pro-administration hawks David Rivkin and Lee Casey added profiling to the wish-list. They contend that “British attitudes toward ethnic and religious profiling appear to be far more pragmatic.” Which is a polite way of saying “let’s treat people differently based on race or religion.”

Chertoff et al. offer no evidence that warrantless surveillance, preventative detention or improved intelligence/police coordination had any role in detecting the liquid bombing conspiracy. Like the USA PATRIOT Act, these powers are a wish-list untethered to practical needs—or practical problems.

Consider first how the British plot was intercepted, and whether the administration borrowings would help in such detection. Electronic surveillance appears not to have been decisive for the arrests—and nothing suggests such surveillance could not be carried out in accord with existing federal statutes. As Juliette Kayyem explained in The Washington Post , the real breakthrough came via an informant.

The alleged liquid-bomb conspiracy is a signal that human intelligence of this ilk will become increasingly important. Technology for planning and carrying out terrorist attacks is becoming more available. The chilling simplicity of the plot and the practical inability of security personnel to seal public spaces against such attack should warn us that high-tech surveillance of money and technology transfer will be less important in the future. Indeed, Bin Laden did not create an organization as much as he fashioned an ideology that could be disseminated and operationalized by Internet and word-of-mouth. His ideas can then be acted on independently in Bali, Istanbul, London or Casablanca. Sheer force simply doesn’t work against this strategy.

What will matter increasingly in counterterrorism strategies is human intelligence and governments’ ability to work with minority communities to identify and cultivate sources and intelligence from the ground up. None of the Chertoff et al. wish-list helps on this count. Nothing in the proposed new powers would necessarily thwart a similar liquid bomb plot in the future.

Instead, Rivkin and Casey rush to the most facile and dangerous solution of institutionalizing racial prejudice—even though it has long been clear that al-Qaida is vigorously recruiting people who do not fit ethnic stereotypes, and succeeding. Increased profiling will simply accelerate this trend. In their rush to justify the unwise and reckless policies already used by the Bush administration, they endorse measures that would alienate the communities from which not only terrorist recruits come, but also a vital resource for combating terrorists. Their proposals would dry up the most important sources of recruits for intelligence services. In the name of building executive power to discriminate, they would make us all less safe.

The British authorities know all this—and try hard not to make the mistake that Casey and Rivkin advocate, in the face of heated public pressure. The Brits cultivate human intelligence both through wise investment by the intelligence agencies and also via smart public policy. One of the most important post-9/11 initiatives begun by the British MI5—the security service responsible for protection against espionage and terrorism—is to aggressively recruit Arabic and Asian language speakers. By contrast, inquiries last year by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military revealed that the Department of Defense had fired 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers pursuant to its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Better dead than gay, appears to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s modus operandi.

Further, the British government is trying—albeit inconsistently—to reduce the number of extremists. The July 2005 bombings in London prompted a wave of new police efforts to build bridges to Muslim communities. Two weeks after the July attacks, Prime Minister Tony Blair convened a summit meeting with British Muslim leaders to find ways to strengthen communities against radicalism. Seven working groups were established to develop comprehensive economic and political strategies. British police also developed coordinated plans for responding to hate crimes against South Asian communities in the aftermath of a terror attack. To be sure, these policies were only partially successful—but that doesn’t mean they haven’t played an important role in reducing the number of plots.

The preventative detention power that Chertoff put on the table, finally, is no stranger to U.S. law. In the U.K., the 2006 Terrorism Act allows preventative detention without charge for 28 days. Since 9/11, the Department of Justice has used a 1984 law enacted to secure testimony from witnesses who might otherwise flee. This “material witness” statute is deployed to secure de facto indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. A study conducted by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU found that federal courts have not rejected a single request for a post-9/11 “material witness” warrant. Out of 70 such arrestees, 42 were released without charge. Seven were charged on counts of “material support” (an amorphous, ambiguous crime that reaches much seemingly innocuous conduct). Twenty were charged with non-terror offenses. Two were designated “enemy combatants”—never to be charged or tried (one, Jose Padilla, to be released just as the U.S. Supreme Court looked set to decide his case).

Locking up material witnesses makes good news copy for politicians. Recruiting Arabic and Urdu-speaking FBI agents doesn’t. Guess which really makes us safer. What’s needed now—and what has been needed since 9/11—are measures to ensure intelligence powers are used in a responsible, accountable fashion, that abuses are stopped, and that mistakes aren’t covered up or ignored. This is the national security agenda that would make the nation safe and keep it proud. Whether it’s the agenda touted by the Bush administration this fall is unlikely.

2006-05-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

Bush Approval Rating Hits the 20s for First Time

His father's lowest was 29%, so baby boy is even with Daddy. Nixon was at 27% at the time of his resignation. Oh, it is a thing of beauty! -- CDD

Bush Approval Rating Hits the 20s for First Time

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002501667

By E&P Staff

Published: May 11, 2006 11:10 PM ET

NEW YORK President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to 29%, its lowest mark of his presidency, and down 6% in one month, according to a new Harris poll. And this was before Thursday's revelations about NSA phone surveillance.

Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an “excellent or pretty good” job as president, down from 35% in April and 43% in January.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say “things in the country are going in the right direction,” while 69% say “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”

Some 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. Interest has faded slightly in the immigration issue.

Other recent major polls have pegged Bush's approval rating from 31% to 37%.

2006-05-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, We Know They're Illegal

What does it mean to oppose something on the grounds that it is “illegal”? Should we oppose non-heterosexual marriage based on its illegality? Shall we condemn San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom for the illicit marriages he allowed in 2004? Or are Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (the first couple to be illegally wedded in San Francisco) to blame?

A passing glance at American history confirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that, as long as this nation has existed, it has existed under laws that have been nothing short of amoral. People of color, women, blue-collar workers, queers and yes, immigrants have been oppressed in appalling, inexcusable ways, all of which were legal.

So, no, these immigrants are not legal. But instead of opposing their presence in the U.S., we should oppose the laws that make them illegal. There’s nothing shocking about seeing a legal system with a long history of fostering unjust exclusion … foster unjust exclusion. And it is unjust.

There are currently slightly less than 12 million unauthorized migrants in America and just over half of them are from Mexico. (This, incidentally, does not excuse the use of the word “Mexicans” as an umbrella term for unauthorized migrants or authorized migrants or Hispanics in general. That is racist.) Why are they here?

U.S. trade policy. As “one Mexican farmer told a researcher, 'If the U.S. sends subsidized corn into Mexico, send it in trains with benches to bring back the Mexican farmers who will need jobs.'"

NAFTA went into effect in 1994. Interestingly, although “free trade” is right there in the name, the U.S. began selling subsidized (and therefore cheap) agricultural products (mostly corn) in Mexico. Unable to compete, 1.7 million Mexican farmers found themselves destitute. What were they to do? Before NAFTA, 7 percent of migrant farm workers in the U.S. were unauthorized. By 2004, that number had risen to 50 percent.

Not all the farmers NAFTA displaced came here. Some stayed on to work for a pittance at the 2,200 U.S. factories that just happened to wander South of the border—how fortuitous! Incidentally, there certainly is a link between illegal immigration and unemployment among U.S. citizens and that link is NAFTA. Flint, Michigan, famously plummeted into indigence shortly after GM took advantage of NAFTA and moved many plants to Mexico.

To put it crudely, it’s our fault. Our nation is continuing to pursue policies (see CAFTA ) that wreck foreign economies. It is, then, not our place to complain about unauthorized migrants. They do pay taxes. They pay a whole lot of taxes, in fact. They do not deflate wages. But that’s hardly even relevant. Whether or not they benefit us, we have the moral obligation to welcome them into the U.S.; any law that does not acknowledge this is, well, wrong. History demonstrates that determining whether something is right based on whether it is legal is, mildly speaking, inaccurate. Fortunately, history also demonstrates that we tend to eventually come to our senses. So, please, let’s.

--Sandi Burtseva

2006-04-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

Bush's Paper Trail Grows
John Prados
April 03, 2006

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

On March 27, The New York Times published an article based on access to the full British record of the Iraq policy conversation that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair held on January 31, 2003, as recorded by Blair’s then-national security adviser David Manning. British legal scholar Philippe Sands had already revealed this discussion in his book Lawless World , and the British television network Channel 4 had—two months ago—printed many of the same excerpts of Manning’s memo, but the Times coverage focused new attention on the memo, previously ignored by the U.S. media.

The memo reveals that the two leaders agreed that military action against Iraq would begin on a stipulated date in March 2003—despite the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found there. The memo reveals how the two leaders mulled over ways to supply legal justification for the invasion. Indeed this record supplies additional evidence for the view that Bush planned all along to unleash this war.

Suddenly, the media descended upon the Bush White House demanding explanations. Spokesman Scott McClellan answered that “we were preparing in case it was necessary, but we were continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution.” McClellan tried to turn the question around by insisting that the press had been covering Bush at the time chronicled in the memo, implying that if the truth were different the press should have known better. He referred repeatedly to a December report from U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to back his assertion that Iraq had failed to cooperate with the inspections. Evidently that cowed the reporters, for there has been little follow-up. But White House damage control should not be allowed to cover up this evidence that the president knew his case for war was based on faulty evidence.

First, the evidence is overwhelming that Bush hosted the January 31 meeting to manage his move to war, not as an occasion to review progress toward disarming Iraq. The record of the session shows this—with talk of the war plan, the starting date, the justification and the securing of a second U.N. resolution as a legal cover, but there is more than that. Consider the context: the day the memo was taken U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell began the extensive review at the CIA of the allegations he would use to make his Security Council “briefing”—already scheduled—supposedly “bulletproof.” It was also that same day that the codebreaking National Security Agency issued a directive to spy on the friendly nations who were members of the U.N. Security Council to divine their attitudes on the move to war.

The day before, according to Bob Woodward’s account, Bush had told Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, “We will kick ass.” By his account, Berlusconi tried to dissuade Bush from war. Woodward duly notes the president resorting to his standard line that no decision had yet been made on military action. The Manning memo suggests otherwise, with Bush revealing March 10 as the projected date for beginning bombing—a campaign to hit 1,500 targets in four days, the “shock and awe” which U.S. officials bragged about at the time. Moreover, on January 24, the U.S. military commander, General Tommy Franks, had sent his final war plan up through Rumsfeld to the president. Bush’s comment to Blair on January 31, that “he was not itching to go to war,” is belied by the entire surrounding structure of events.

The other significant finding in the Manning memo concerns Tony Blair’s intentions. The press reporting at the time—regardless of what Scott McClellan says today—was that the purpose of the Blair-Bush meeting was to decide whether there needed to be a second U.N. resolution. Postwar investigations in London show that in late January Blair received official advice from his attorney general Lord Goldsmith that such a resolution was necessary to fulfill the terms of the existing resolution 1441. At the meeting with Bush, however, the record shows Blair presented the project as a convenience. “If anything goes wrong . . . a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs,” Blair said, according to Manning’s memo.

Bush went along with Blair’s talk of a resolution, but his own propositions on justifications for war revealed his true lack of interest in U.N. action. Bush speculated about deceiving Saddam into shooting at U.S. aircraft phonied up to look like U.N. planes, or getting an Iraqi scientist to assert that WMD were being concealed. The most widely reported aspect of the Bush-Blair meeting was these speculations (talk of a Saddam assassination was less justification than opportunity).

Bush told Blair he would “twist arms” to get a U.N. resolution, corresponding exactly to the NSA spy directive, which would track the success of Bush arm-twisting through U.N. members’ own communications. Regardless of the outcome, Bush told Blair, “military action would follow anyway.” Blair’s assurance at that point that Britain stood with the U.S. put him squarely in the box with Bush of seeking to initiate an aggressive war.

Finally, on the matter of U.N. inspections, David Manning appears to have engaged in some policy advocacy, as opposed to strictly confining himself to recording the proceedings of this meeting in his memorandum to Tony Blair. Manning’s paper notes the conversation among the leaders on the urgency of action if Bush’s timeline was to be met. Blair’s adviser argued that, “We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, [and] do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find.” But Manning’s view did not reflect the realities of—at least—U.S. intelligence cooperation with the inspections. Rather, the CIA had been parsimonious in its help, taking weeks to begin providing tips, and then holding back many of its target folders, while national security adviser Condi Rice had put pressure on Blix to declare Iraq in violation.

Immediately upon finishing their talk, at 4:12 p.m. Bush and Blair appeared before newsmen, where Bush declared, “Saddam Hussein is not disarming. He is a danger to the world.” Bush then added archly, “This issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months,” an almost exact repetition of Blair’s comment at their secret meeting, as recorded by Manning, that “we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months.”

President Bush asserted, inaccurately, that Resolution 1441 “gives us the authority to move without any second resolution,” a position the Attorney General of Great Britain had rejected only days before. Blair followed up, insisting that Dr. Blix had told the Security Council that Saddam was not cooperating with UN inspectors. In fact, what Blix had said when he reported to the U.N. on January 27 was that there had been difficulties with the Iraqi government but the situation was improving, and he added that his inspectors had made 300 visits to 230 different sites without finding any evidence of WMD. Nuclear inspector Mohammed ElBaradei had agreed, “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program.” Hans Blix’s own take on the Bush-Blair conversation rings true: “The U.S. government did not want to raise the hope that there was any way out but war.”

On balance the newly revealed record of President Bush’s secret meeting of January 31, 2003, confirms that by that date Bush’s Iraq war was certain. The Manning memo supplies an explicit picture of Bush not merely cherrypicking only the intelligence he wanted to use, but scheming to overcome the consequences of not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In all likelihood the debate over the Iraq war will come to center on the question of how much sooner than January 2003 was Bush’s war policy cast in stone. Was it September 2002, when Bush blurted out “I don’t know what more evidence we need” and set up the White House Iraq Group to sell the war? Was it April at a previous Bush-Blair summit in Crawford or December 2001 when General Franks presented the first war plan to the president? Was it on or immediately after 9/11 or was it the day George W. Bush took the oath of office as President of the United States?

2006-02-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

WARNING: Don't play at the office unless you have privacy. "F" word is sung in this.

CHENEY GOES AHEAD

WITH FOLSOM PRISON CONCERT

Vice President Dick "Buckshot" Cheney kept his word to the inmates at California's maximum security Folsom State Prison. He played a one hour set with his band "Dickie and The Trigger Happy Birdie Killers". The set received a luke warm reception until Cheney launched into his new, as yet unreleased, single "Go Fuck Yourself". During the guitar solo the Vice President thrilled the assembled audience by producing a rifle and opening fire. "He seems angry. Very angry" one inmate said "I mean, I always thought that the American people didn't like to vote for angry people but...Man, that dude is angry!" I managed to obtain a tape of the performance and am proud to present it here....

-- Paul Hipp

Contributed by:

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com/ >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
*****************************************************************

"If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed." -- "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire," by Morris Berman

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-02-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

Blasphemy in the Cult of BushTwo

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/02/11.html#a7117

important items today -- an article from the Times and a Dana Milbank column in the Post – highlight the growing (both in terms of numbers and importance) opposition among Republicans to the Administration's illegal eavesdropping program. And yet, as described by Milbank's column, the most blindly loyal Bush followers remain steadfastly intolerant of any criticisms of the Leader.

In that regard, it is noteworthy how true conservative believer Bob Barr -- whose conservative credentials include serving as House Manager of the Clinton Impeachment and being the primary sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act -- was treated like an evil traitor at the Conservative Political Action Conference held this weekend all because he is critical of The President's violations of FISA.

Conservatism in some circles really has morphed into The Cult of George Bush, which is why any criticism of the Leader -- even when the criticism is based on conservative principles -- is deemed to be blasphemous to the Cause. This excerpt from Milbank’s column really tells you all you need to know about what "conservativsm" has come to mean in certain circles:

Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that
believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he
posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say
yes.

"But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited
only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed
him loudly. " I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say
[Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.

For them, even to be subjected to the idea that "Bush is off course" is traumatic and wrong. Such an opinion has no place at a "conservative" event, where only praise and reverence of the Commander-in-Chief is appropriate. One sees this time and again: "conservatism" these days very rarely has anything to do with actual conservative principles of government and has come to be distorted shorthand for "George Bush follower."

The more one agrees with and praises the Commander-in-Chief, the more "conservative" one is, even when his actions aren't even remotely "conservative." That really is the definition of a creepy cult of personality, and it has consumed a large segment of the Republican Party.

--Posted by Glenn Greenwald

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^

2006-01-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

Iran’s Oil-exchange threatens the Greenback

By Mike Whitney

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11654.htm

01/23/06 "ICH" -- -- The Bush administration will never allow the Iranian government to open an oil exchange (bourse) that trades petroleum in euros. If that were to happen, hundreds of billions of dollars would come flooding back to the United States crushing the greenback and destroying the economy. This is why Bush and Co. are planning to lead the nation to war against Iran. It is straightforward defense of the current global system and the continuing dominance of the reserve currency, the dollar.

The claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a mere pretext for war. The NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) predicts that Iran will not be able to produce nukes for perhaps a decade. So too, IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei has said repeatedly that his watchdog agency has found “no evidence” of a nuclear weapons program.

There are no nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs, but Iran’s economic plans do pose an existential threat to America, and not one that can be simply brushed aside as the unavoidable workings of the free market.

America monopolizes the oil trade. Oil is denominated in dollars and sold on either the NYMEX or London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), both owned by Americans. This forces the central banks around the world to maintain huge stockpiles of dollars even though the greenback is currently underwritten by $8 trillion of debt and even though the Bush administration has said that it will perpetuate the deficit-producing tax cuts.

America’s currency monopoly is the perfect pyramid-scheme. As long as nations are forced to buy oil in dollars, the United States can continue its profligate spending with impunity. (The dollar now accounts for 68% of global currency reserves up from 51% just a decade ago) The only threat to this strategy is the prospect of competition from an independent oil exchange; forcing the faltering dollar to go nose-to-nose with a more stable (debt-free) currency such as the euro. That would compel central banks to diversify their holdings, sending billions of dollars back to America and ensuring a devastating cycle of hyper-inflation.

The effort to keep information about Iran’s oil exchange out of the headlines has been extremely successful. A simple Google search shows that NONE of the major newspapers or networks has referred to the upcoming bourse. The media’s aversion to controversial stories which serve the public interest has been evident in many other cases, too, like the fraudulent 2004 presidential elections, the Downing Street Memo, and the flattening of Falluja. Rather than inform, the media serves as a bullhorn for government policy; manipulating public opinion by reiterating the specious demagoguery of the Bush administration. As a result, few people have any idea of the gravity of the present threat facing the American economy.

This is not a “liberal vs. conservative” issue. Those who’ve analyzed the problem draw the very same conclusions; if the Iran exchange flourishes the dollar will plummet and the American economy will shatter.

This is what author Krassimir Petrov, Ph.D in economics, says in a recent article The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse:

“From a purely economic point of view, should the Iranian Oil Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar. The collapsing dollar will dramatically accelerate U.S. inflation and will pressure upward U.S. long-term interest rates. At this point, the Fed will find itself between …between deflation and hyperinflation-it will be forced fast either to take its "classical medicine" by deflating, whereby it raises interest rates, thus inducing a major economic depression, a collapse in real estate, and an implosion in bond, stock, and derivative markets, with a total financial collapse, or alternatively, to take the Weimar way out by inflating, whereby it pegs the long-bond yield, raises the Helicopters and drowns the financial system in liquidity, bailing out numerous LTCMs and hyperinflating the economy.

No doubt, Commander-in-Chief Ben Bernanke, a renowned scholar of the Great Depression…, will choose inflation. …The Maestro has taught him the panacea of every single financial problem-to inflate, come hell or high water. …To avoid deflation, he will resort to the printing presses…and, if necessary, he will monetize everything in sight. His ultimate accomplishment will be the hyperinflationary destruction of the American currency …”

So, raise interest rates and bring on “total financial collapse” or take the “Weimar way out” and cause the “hyperinflationary destruction of the American economy.”

These are not good choices, and yet, we’re hearing the same pronouncements from right-wing analysts. Alan Peter’s article, “Mullah’s Threat not Sinking In”, which appeared in FrontPage Magazine.com, offers these equally sobering thoughts about the dangers of an Iran oil-exchange:

“A glut of dollar holdings by Central Banks and among Asian lenders, plus the current low interest rate offered to investor/lenders by the USA has been putting the dollar in jeopardy for some time… A twitching finger on currency's hair-trigger can shoot down the dollar without any purposeful ill intent. Most estimates place the likely drop to "floor levels" at a rapid 50% loss in value for a presently 40% overvalued Dollar.”

The erosion of the greenback’s value was predicted by former Fed-chief Paul Volcker who said that there is a “75% chance of a dollar crash in the next 5 years”.

Such a crash would result in soaring interest rates, hyperinflation, skyrocketing energy costs, massive unemployment and, perhaps, depression. This is the troubling scenario if an Iran bourse gets established and knocks the dollar from its lofty perch. And this is what makes the prospect of war, even nuclear war, so very likely.

Peter’s continues:

“With economies so interdependent and interwoven, a global, not just American Depression would occur with a domino effect throwing the rest of world economies into poverty. Markets for acutely less expensive US exports would never materialize.

The result, some SME's estimate, might be as many as 200 million Americans out of work and starving on the streets with nobody and nothing able to rescue or aid them, contrary to the 1920/30 Great Depression through soup kitchens and charitable support efforts.”

Liberal or conservative, the analysis is the same. If America does not address the catastrophic potential of the Iran bourse, Americans can expect to face dire circumstances.

Now we can understand why the corporate-friendly media has omitted any mention of new oil exchange in their coverage. This is one secret that the boardroom kingpins would rather keep to themselves. It’s easier to convince the public of nuclear hobgoblins and Islamic fanatics than to justify fighting a war for the anemic greenback. Never the less, it is the dollar we are defending in Iraq and, presumably, in Iran as well in the very near future. (Saddam converted to the euro in 2000. The bombing began in 2001)

There are peaceful solutions to this dilemma, but not if the Bush administration insists on hiding behind the moronic deception of terrorism or imaginary nuclear weapons programs. Bush needs to come clean with the American people about the real nature of the global energy crisis and stop invoking Bin Laden and WMD to defend American aggression. We need a comprehensive energy strategy, (including government funding for conservation projects, alternative energy-sources, and the development of a new line of “American-made” hybrid vehicles) candid negotiations with Iran to regulate the amount of oil they will sell in euros per year (easing away from the dollar in an orderly way) and a collective “international” approach to energy consumption and distribution (under the auspices of the UN General Assembly)

Greater parity among currencies should be encouraged as a way of strengthening democracies and invigorating markets. It promises to breathe new life into free trade by allowing other political models to flourish without fear of being subsumed into the capitalist prototype. The current dominance of the greenback has created a global empire that is largely dependent on debt, torture, and war to maintain its supremacy.

Iran’s oil bourse poses the greatest challenge yet to the dollar-monopoly and its proponents at the Federal Reserve. If the Bush administration goes ahead with a preemptive “nuclear” strike on alleged weapons sites, allies will be further alienated and others will be forced to respond. As Dr. Petrov says, “Major dollar-holding countries may decide to quietly retaliate by dumping their own mountains of dollars, thus preventing the U.S. from further financing its militant ambitions.”

There is increasing likelihood that the foremost champions of the present system will be the very one’s to bring about its downfall.

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
*****************************************************************

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-01-29T07:28:00.000-08:00

Breaking from NewsMax & MoneyNews.com

Economist Magazine Warns 'Danger Time' for U.S.

This week's edition of The Economist magazine offers an ominous warning for the U.S economy.

"Danger Time for America" -
the respected global weekly magazine states, depicting a cover
drawing of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan passing a stick of
dynamite labeled the "The Economy."

The Economist is not given to alarmist warnings.

But the magazine believes the U.S. economy is in for a rocky road beginning
this year, and challenges economic optimists' recent sunny predictions
regarding the U.S. financial picture. The Economist report mirrors the
analysis that has been offered by the Financial Intelligence Report, a publication of NewsMax and MoneyNews. The FIR has been warning investors for some time of the potential economic chaos that Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan is about to drop on the American economy. For more info Go Here Now.

has been warning investors for some time of the potential economic
chaos that Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan is about to drop on the
American economy. For more info Go Here Now

The magazine targets Greenspan, who will soon retire from the Federal Reserve with most people bombarding him with glowing praise and congratulations for a job well done.

Not so fast, says The Economist.

The publication says: "The economy that
Alan Greenspan is about to hand over is in a much less healthy state
than is popularly assumed."

While respectfully bowing to the
retiring Fed chairman, with a sly wink to "Greenspan's 'exuberant'
send-off," The Economist's outlook soon turns dour, both on Greenspan
and on the U.S. economy.

"During much of his 181/2 years
in office America enjoyed rapid growth with low inflation, and he
successfully steered the economy around a series of financial hazards,"
says the article.

"In his final days of glory, it may
therefore seem churlish to question his record. However, Mr.
Greenspan's departure could well mark a high point for America's
economy, with a period of sluggish growth ahead. This is not so much
because he is leaving, but because of what he is leaving behind: t

While the magazine acknowledges that
Greenspan "can't control huge economic uncertainties" and "is
constrained by limits of what monetary policy can do," it points out
that one cannot exaggerate Greenspan's influence over the economy and
financial markets.

It is in the setting of monetary policy that Greenspan falls particularly short, The Economist concludes.

"The main reason why America's growth
has remained strong in recent years has been a massive monetary
stimulus," it says. "The Fed held real interest rates negative for
several years, and even today real rates remain low."

The magazine notes that Greenspan
triggered two of the greatest bubbles in history, the
dotcom bubble of the 1990s and the real estate one the magazine
warns is about to pop.

Greenspan's actions have created a
domino effect through which American consumers could borrow against the
rising, potentially artificial value of their homes to buy plush hot
tubs and $5,000 barbecue pits. In this way, Americans have been able to
literally consume more than they earn.

And that is leading to a consumer
financial environment in which Americans have negative savings rates, a
growing burden of household debt and a sizable current-account deficit.
[See: Sir John Templeton warns of housing bust - Go Here Now.]

Says The Economist: "Part of America's
current prosperity is based not on genuine gains in income, nor on high
productivity growth, but on borrowing from the future.

For the present, that means slower growth, weaker job creation and low wage growth.

Citing Morgan Stanley, The Economist
points out that over the past four years total private-sector labor
compensation has risen by only 12 percent in real terms, compared
with an average gain of 20 percent over the previous five
expansions.

The U.S. economy during the past several
years has been fueled by real estate and related spending - not from an
increase in labor compensation which has fueled previous economio

"Given that consumer spending and
residential construction have accounted for 90 percent of GDP
growth in recent years, it is hard to see how this can occur without a
sharp slowdown in the economy."

Investors who agree that the United States may be facing economic trouble ahead can prepare by reading the following reports:

Prepare for the coming Greenspan recession: Discover the 7 steps to take now to protect your wealth and survive this coming storm. Go Here Now.
Sir John Templeton first warned housing prices could crash 50%. Find out what he said and learn how to protect yourself and even profit from the coming storm - Go Here Now.
With a net worth of $43 billion, Warren Buffett is America's greatest stock investor. He is also warning of a possible economic crisis. Find out Buffett's 8 Great Investment Plays. Just Go Here Now.
Find out why gold will soar in the year ahead Go Here Now.

10 Dividend Stocks will weather a bear market -- See Them Here.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium
*****************************************************************

"If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed." -- "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire," by Morris Berman

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-01-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

Majority in U.S. Say Bush Presidency Is a Failure, Poll Finds http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_us&refer=us&sid=aKSlfaIwdI6w

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- A majority of Americans said the presidency of George W. Bush has been a failure and that they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who oppose him, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Fifty-two percent of adults said Bush's administration since 2001 has been a failure, down from 55 percent in October. Fifty- eight percent described his second term as a failure. At the same point in former President Bill Clinton's presidency, 70 percent of those surveyed by Gallup said they considered it a success and 20 percent a failure.
In a poll conducted in January of 2002, after Bush was president for one year, 83 percent of those surveyed said his presidency was a success.

In the new poll, conducted Jan. 20-22, fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for congressional candidates who do not support Bush's policies.

The percentage of Americans who called Bush ``honest and trustworthy'' fell 7 percentage points in the last year to 49 percent, the poll found.

The new poll also found that 62 percent of Americans said they are ``dissatisfied'' with ``the way things are going'' in the U.S., unchanged from a December survey. The percentage of ``dissatisfied'' Americans reached its peak in October of 2005 when 68 percent of those surveyed agreed.

The survey interviewed 1,006 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points. For the questions about whether Bush's presidency is a success, about 500 U.S. adults were surveyed and the margin for error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Nicholas Johnston in Washington at njohnston3@bloomberg.net

Contributed by Claudia

2006-01-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

Reach Out and Touch No One
by Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

http://www.topplebush.com/oped2450.shtml
January 7, 2006

Doing the math, you've got to figure that the 12 wise men and one wise woman had about 30 seconds apiece to say their piece to the president about Iraq, where vicious assaults this week have killed almost 200 and raised U.S. troop fatalities to at least 2,189.

It must have been like a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which boils down the great plays and books to their essence. Proust is "I like cookies." Othello raps that he left Desdemona "all alona, didn't telephona." "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" condense into "The Idiodity." "Henry V" is "A king's gotta do what a king's gotta do," and "Antony and Cleopatra" is "Never get involved in Middle Eastern affairs."

Beyond taking a class picture ringed around Mr. Bush's bizarrely empty desk - a mesmerizing blend of "Sunset Boulevard," "The Last Supper" and a "Sopranos" ad - the former secretaries of state and defense had to make the most of their brief colloquy with W.

The spectral Robert McNamara might have enlightened on Vietnam: "Didn't understand the culture. Misjudged the opposition. Didn't know when to get out." If he was a fast talker, he could have added: "It's the dominoes. If Iraq falls, then Syria falls, then Lebanon falls, and before you know it, all of Southeast Asia - I mean, the Middle East - will fall."

Melvin Laird only needed to add: "Ditto."

Al Haig's summation would have been a cinch: "I resign. I'm in charge here. I resign - again."

Instead of his good-soldier silence, Colin Powell could have redeemed himself with four words: "I should have resigned."

Madeleine Albright might have succinctly imparted some wisdom from Somalia and Rwanda: "Didn't understand the culture. Misjudged the threat. Didn't know when to get in."

James Baker, Svengali and Sphinx, must have been thinking: "I told your dad not to let you in here. I could tell you how to get of Iraq in 10 minutes, but you're too under the sway of that nutball Cheney to listen."

George Shultz only needed to say: "I have a tiger tattooed on my fanny," and Lawrence Eagleburger could have abridged his thoughts to "I need a smoke. Bad."

It may seem disturbing at first, that with several hundreds of years' worth of foreign policy at his elbows, and a bloody, thorny mess in Iraq, Mr. Bush would devote mere moments to letting some fresh air into his House of Pain.

Sure, he has A.D.D. But he just spent six straight days mountain-biking and brush clearing in Crawford. He couldn't devote 60 minutes to getting our kids home rather than just a few for a "Message: I Care" photo-op faking sincerity?

"We all went into the bubble and came out," one of the wise men noted.

Mr. Eagleburger explained their role as props, saying it was hard to volubly express yourself with a president. "There was some criticism, but it was basically 'You haven't talked to the American people enough.' " Lighting a cigarette on the way out - he'd thrown one in the bushes on the way in - he added the world-weary coda: "We're all has-beens anyway."

Mr. Eagleburger knows the truth. If W. had wanted to really reach out, rather than just pretend to reach out so that his poll numbers would go up, he would have sought advice outside his warped inner circle long ago - including from his own father.

Because W.'s mind is so closed to anybody except yes-men who tell him his policies and wars are slam-dunks, uneasy seasoned mandarins are forced to make a noisy stink. Brent Scowcroft, one of Bush Senior's closest friends, had to resort to the pages of The New Yorker to voice his objections. He ominously said Dick Cheney, his old colleague, was someone he no longer recognized.

You wonder whether the other contemporaries of Cheney and Rummy from Ford, Reagan and Bush I days were thinking the same thing at Thursday's meeting: Why have these guys gone so kooky?

W. is drunk on Cheney Kool-Aid. So he got testy when Ms. Albright pointed out that North Korea and Iran were going nuclear while the U.S. was bogged down in Baghdad. Then, after a quick photo in the Oval, he shooed the old-timers out, letting anyone who wanted to stay talk to the security factotum Stephen Hadley.

Still busy spreading fog over the war, W., Cheney, Rummy and Condi had no time to hear McNamara expound on the fog of war. In the picture, as Ms. Albright cringes, Mr. McNamara looks haunted, unable to escape second-guessing over Vietnam.

The only thing that would have made the photo even more utterly phony was the presence of that vintage warmonger, Henry the K.

Topplebush.com
Posted: January 8, 2006

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-01-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11485.htm

The 'fin de regime'?

An out-of-touch George Bush now presides over a lost foreign war and a morass of influence peddling

By Eric Margolis

01/08/06 "Toronto Sun" -- -- WASHINGTON -- China's Taoists philosophers warned that you become what you hate. We see this paradox in Washington, where the current administration increasingly reminds one of the old Soviet Union.

The U.S.S.R. went bankrupt after spending 40% of national income on the military. President George Bush's administration will spend a staggering $419.3 billion US on the military this fiscal year. An additional $130 billion US has been budgeted in 2006 for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That's $10.8 billion a month -- 40% above previous estimates -- and somewhat more than the monthly cost of the Vietnam War at its height. Add to this huge sum an estimated $1.5 billion in monthly secret expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan by CIA and Pentagon intelligence.

Astoundingly, U.S. military spending in 2006 will equal the rest of the world's total combined military expenditures. I just saw an ad for the new, $115-million F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, trumpeting how its radar can "intercept communications of insurgents." Using a $115-million aircraft to listen to cellphone calls by a bunch of jihadis in Waziristan staggers the imagination.

Meanwhile, Moscow on the Potomac is in an uproar over government spying on citizens, torture, and what appears to be the mother of all influence-peddling scandals. Revelations that the super-secret National Security Agency and FBI have been monitoring domestic as well as international telecommunications have roused even the deadheads in Congress and the lapdog media. FBI agents are reportely spying on such nefarious "terrorists" as vegetarians and animal rights activists.

Bush (shades of Leonid Brezhnev) claims the right to override any laws because the U.S. is at war. "Terrorists" ("enemies of the state" in Soviet talk) threaten the U.S., so anything goes. What next -- cancelling next fall's elections because of the threat of the phantom al-Qaida?

Meanwhile, a scandal bursts right out of the last days of the corrupt Soviet Union. A sinister Republican apparatchik named Jack Abramoff has admitted dishing out $4.4 million in bribes to senators, congressmen and political aides. Bigwigs like Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Republican grand poobah Tom DeLay, Bible-thumping crusader Ralph Reed, Hillary Clinton and a bevy of venal legislators have been implicated in this culture of corruption.

Abramoff got over $30 million from various Indian tribes promoting their casino businesses. He and cronies scalped their Indian clients, pocketing $11 million in kickbacks. Where, one wonders with awe, did those persecuted native Americans find so much cash?

Republicans (and also some Democrats) are scared silly by the scandal. Many legislators may be headed for the big house.

All parties that stay in power too long become deeply corrupt. Wise voters need to kick out incumbents regularly. Longevity in office ensures bad government. The Republicans, buoyed by faked-up war fever, became deeply corrupted more quickly than usual.

The Achilles heel

Money is the Achilles heel of democracy. In America, winning and keeping office demands spending huge sums on TV advertising. The Washington lobbyists and bagmen who produce millions to fund politicians have become more powerful than elected legislators. This is how parasites like Abramoff flourish.

A smell of "fin du regime" hangs over Washington, just as it did over the last days of decaying Soviet oligarchy. An out-of-touch leader presides over a lost foreign war and a morass of influence peddling and bribery, as the secret police struggle to keep a lid on growing dissent.

margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com

Copyright © 2005, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-01-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

January 8, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08court.html?pagewanted=print

Our Presidential Era: Who Can Check the President?

By NOAH FELDMAN

I. OUR PRESIDENTIAL ERA

Not since Watergate has the question of presidential power been as salient as it is today. The recent revelation that President George W. Bush ordered secret wiretaps in the United States without judicial approval has set off the latest round of arguments over what the president can and cannot do in the name of his office. Over the past few years, the war on terror has led to the use of executive orders to authorize renditions and the detention of enemy combatants without trial - for which the Bush administration has been called to account by our European allies. The treatment of detainees has also given rise to concerns in Congress about the prerogatives of the chief executive: both houses recently voted to limit the president's authority to employ C.I.A. or other executive agents to engage in cruel and inhumane interrogations. The limits of presidential power will almost surely be a major topic of discussion during Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin this week.

The stakes of the debate could hardly be higher: nothing is more basic to the operation of a constitutional government than the way it allocates power. Yet in an important sense, the debate is already long over. By historical standards, even the Bush administration's critics subscribe to the idea of a pre-eminent president. Administrative agencies at the president's command are widely understood to be responsible for everything from disaster relief to drug approval to imposing clean-air standards; and the president can unleash shock and awe on his own initiative. Such "presidentialism" seems completely normal to most Americans, since it is the only arrangement most of us have ever known.

For better or worse, though, this is not the system envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The framers meant for the legislative branch to be the most important actor in the federal government: Congress was to make the laws and the president was empowered only to execute them. The very essence of a republic was that it would be governed through a deliberative legislature, composed carefully to reflect both popular will and elite limits on that will. The framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession.

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years. Constitutional evolution, like its counterpart in the natural world, has occurred sometimes gradually and sometimes in catastrophic jolts, like those brought about by war or economic crisis. The process has not been entirely linear: presidential power grabs have often been followed by a Congressional backlash, as in the wake of Richard Nixon's presidency. But the overall winner has unquestionably been the president, who has reached heights of power that the framers would scarcely have imagined. The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers. While any constitution must evolve over time to meet new circumstances and challenges, there is reason to think that, when it comes to presidential power over national security, the latest developments have gone too far.

The rise of the presidency began with the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the landmass of the United States. History taught the framers that, just as Rome changed from republic to empire with conquest of new lands, territorial acquisition would lead to the centralization of political power. Sure enough, Thomas Jefferson's decision to buy the territory without seeking a constitutional amendment or advance Congressional approval amounted to a huge expansion of presidential authority. Jefferson entered office as a skeptic of the national government's power and even privately suggested that the purchase was unconstitutional. In overcoming his own republican instincts and arranging the purchase secretly, he demonstrated how the office of the presidency would come to serve its own interests, swaying the men holding it to strengthen not simply their own authority but also that of the institution itself.

Three decades later, Andrew Jackson's presidency marked another leap forward in presidential power. His contribution was his claim to represent the country, in its entirety, more directly and democratically than the congeries of local politicians who made up Congress. This rhetorical stance, coupled with the expansion of voting rights to white men without property, gave him the political muscle to veto the national bank and stand up to Congress in the name of the common men who had voted for him.

By the middle of the 19th century, with the admission to the Union of Florida, Texas and California, the United States became a continental empire. Such an empire called for an "imperial presidency," as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his classic 1973 book of the same name. With the onset of the Civil War, the threat to the nascent empire led Abraham Lincoln to govern without Congress and to suspend access to the courts. When in 1898 William McKinley conquered the Philippines and chose to rule it, the imperial metaphor became still more apt: the United States had become, for the first time, the proprietor of whole nations whose peoples would never vote in its elections and whose governors reported directly to the president.

In the 20th century, the Great Depression helped propel the presidency to its current level of dominance. The administrative agencies that were created during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal were a response to the tremendous complexity and growth of the national economy. An overwhelmingly Democratic Congress went along with the Roosevelt administration, giving the agencies broad discretion in regulating the economy and addressing workers' welfare. Over time, as the agencies expanded to administer health and safety regulations, Congress realized that it was more convenient to pass the buck to agencies than to deal with hard policy questions on its own. A congressman could take credit for an agency's action when it was convenient and blame the agencies when they adopted policies that his constituents disliked. It is now taken for granted that the president is in charge of the vast administrative apparatus that makes most of the important domestic-policy decisions in the country.

Today, of course, the main arena for the extension of presidential power is the realm of national security. The president's power to use force has grown enormously since the founding. The framers worried that a standing army at the president's beck and call would encourage him to subvert legislative independence by force, and so the Second Amendment gave Americans a right to bear arms in order to form well-ordered militias that would protect "a free state" - not only from the incursions of foreign powers but also from an overweening central government. Until the 20th century, a president who called the military into action did not have much to work with.

But as America emerged as a world power, Congress began to ignore the framers' concern, enhancing the size and might of the regular army until presidents could enter even major conflicts on their own. Presidents from both parties used the ongoing hostilities of the cold war to strengthen their military prerogatives during the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Despite the passage of the War Powers Act of 1973, which tried to reassert Congress's role in going to war, the presidency ended up more powerful than it had been before; no president has acknowledged the act's constitutionality. Even Bill Clinton was able to bomb Kosovo without asking Congress for permission.

The administration of George W. Bush, emboldened by the Sept. 11 attacks and the backing of a Republican Congress, has sought to further extend presidential power over national security. Most of the expansion has taken place in secret, making Congressional or judicial supervision particularly difficult. Administration lawyers have gone so far as to claim that the president as commander in chief is not bound by laws that ban torture because he is empowered by the Constitution to fight the nation's wars however he sees fit. A memo from the Department of Justice to the White House counsel dated Aug. 1, 2002, argued that any attempt to apply Congress's anti-torture law "in a manner that interferes with the president's direction of such core war matters as detention and interrogation of enemy combatants thus would be unconstitutional."

The administration has also suggested, in other memos, that the president may violate international treaties if necessary to fight the war on terror. By these lights, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the leading anti-torture treaty, could constitutionally be violated even though the United States signed and ratified it, and even though the Constitution declares treaties to be "the supreme law of the land." Meanwhile, the administration takes the view that the anti-torture treaty does not apply to its actions outside the United States as a matter of law, but only, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently stated on a trip to Europe, "as a matter of U.S. policy." When added to the newly declared presidential right to arrest American citizens wherever they might be and detain them without trial as enemy combatants, these claims add up to what is easily the most aggressive formulation of presidential power in our history.

For the last four years, a Republican Congress has done almost nothing to rein in the expansion of presidential power. This abdication of responsibility has been even more remarkable than the president's assumption of new powers. In recent months, though, Bush's relative unpopularity, as reflected in opinion polls, has emboldened Congress to take some steps toward reasserting its oversight role. In addition to the new anti-torture legislation, there is talk of requiring regular reports on secret detentions; and last month Congress nearly allowed the U.S.A. Patriot Act to lapse, granting only a five-week extension instead of the full renewal sought by the administration. Still, political logic dictates that, as long as Republicans control Congress, its oversight will be cautiously managed so as not to harm the party or the party's next presidential candidate. And even accounting for a legislative backlash, history suggests that the presidency ultimately emerges stronger after a president makes new claims of his constitutional authority.

So what, if anything, should be done? If presidential power has been taken too far, who, if anyone, can impose limits on it?

II. WHAT THE COURT HAS DONE - AND MAY DO

The Supreme Court would seem to be the natural place to look for a restoration of the constitutional balance of powers. While Congress sat on its hands for most of the last five years, the court took on some of the most contentious problems of presidential power in a set of landmark decisions concerning detainees being held as enemy combatants. These cases were not just about civil liberties. They were also about the relative powers of Congress and the president under wartime conditions, and the court treated them as such.

The court's response to these crucial issues was to propose what is in effect a compromise between presidential power and Congressional authority. The most significant case concerned the detention of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and then held without trial in the United States. In June 2004, the court rejected the administration's view that it was authorized to arrest an enemy combatant anywhere and hold him indefinitely without trial. (The administration's argument was endorsed by Justice Clarence Thomas.) But the court also did not adopt the opposing view, expressed in a stinging dissent written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that an American citizen may not be detained without trial in the United States so long as the courts are open and Congress has not exercised its power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.

Instead, the court concluded - over the disagreement of Justice David Souter - that Congress had in fact authorized the detention of enemy combatants, including American citizens. Yet at the same time, the court held that a suspected enemy combatant must be afforded the basic right to due process: to be given notice of the accusation against him and an opportunity to rebut that accusation before "a neutral decision maker." When push came to shove, however, the administration never gave Hamdi the hearing that the court promised him: he was "released" to Saudi Arabia without a hearing of any kind, on the condition that he renounce his United States citizenship.

The court's opinion in Hamdi's case seemed to exert a gravitational pull on the status and rights of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. In a parallel case, the court addressed the Guantánamo issue only to say that those detainees - who are not United States citizens - were covered by the legal right to seek habeas corpus. The administration argued that since Guantánamo was part of Cuba, the habeas corpus statute did not apply there. When the court rejected this argument, the administration seemed to draw the lesson that it had better provide some sort of hearings for the Guantánamo detainees, as the court required for Hamdi. The administration decided to give those detainees hearings before commissions made up of military officers for the limited purpose of deciding whether they were, in fact, enemies of the United States. Not surprisingly, almost all these hearings have resulted in continued detention: only 38 of the more than 500 detainees were found not to be enemy combatants

Whatever their practical shortcomings, the court's decisions regarding Hamdi and the Guantánamo detainees still registered as a limitation on the unbridled presidential power that the administration asserted. But today, the Supreme Court that decided the detention cases is no more. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has since died and been replaced by John G. Roberts Jr.; and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has offered her resignation contingent on the confirmation of her successor. If Samuel Alito takes her place, he and Roberts could change the balance significantly.

The change in the court's makeup is potentially significant, for the litigation of presidential power is just gathering steam. In addition to the likelihood that the court will hear a third prominent case concerning detention - that of Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested at O'Hare Airport in 2002 and then detained in the United States without trial - it may well consider cases concerning the tapping of private conversations between terror suspects in the United States and persons abroad.

The revelation that President Bush directed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop (and use data-mining technology) on such communications without seeking warrants has raised the question of whether the president had the power to do so. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, prohibits surveillance of this sort without a special warrant, so the administration has proffered several other justifications of its policy. It has argued that when Congress authorized the president to use force after Sept. 11, it implicitly repealed FISA's ban on warrantless surveillance. And it has also maintained that the president had the inherent constitutional authority to intercept the communications of foreign powers and their agents - regardless of whether Congress prohibited it. Reminiscent of the administration's position regarding torture, this argument relies upon the idea that the Constitution assigns certain foreign-affairs responsibilities to the president that exclude Congress from having any say in how he might exercise them.

As with the use of torture, the use of secret intelligence outside of the ordinary legal process makes it difficult even to discover the violation, much less challenge it legally. But that does not mean that the issue will not come before the Supreme Court. Although you would imagine that prosecutors are not using secret evidence in criminal trials in which defendants could invoke their Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure, defendants in terror trials are now asking courts to force the government to disclose whether such illegal surveillance occurred. Released detainees have already filed civil suits against the government charging torture, detentions and renditions to foreign countries by United States personnel. Such suits could now include claims for unlawful surveillance. Civil-liberties advocates will also bring challenges to the surveillance practices that the president has now acknowledged. And when a new administration is elected, it is not impossible that criminal prosecutions could be brought against the intelligence officials who illegally authorized the wiretaps.

If the issue does reach the court by one or more of these avenues, there is good reason to suspect that both Roberts and Alito, should he be confirmed, will be operating under the influence of an expansive conception of presidential power. Both are products of a conservative movement that has provided the legal justifications for various aspects of the Bush revolution, and both held intensely political jobs in previous Republican administrations. Two decades ago, as a deputy assistant attorney general, Alito argued in a memo that the president should issue "signing statements" when approving legislation - an effort to give the president influence over the courts' power to say what the laws mean. And Roberts, while serving as an appeals court judge, joined an opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld upholding the military commissions being used to try Guantánamo detainees. The court held that the Geneva Convention does not, on its own, create a private right that can be litigated in the courts - a position consistent with wide presidential authority but also conventional wisdom among United States courts dealing with treaty issues. (I submitted a friend-of the-court brief in that case on the right to confront witnesses and evidence.) Past experience does not, of course, necessarily determine a justice's views on the court. But given their profiles and clues from their writings, it is in any case extremely unlikely that the combination of Roberts and Alito would be less deferential to presidential power than the combination of O'Connor and Rehnquist.

III. HOW CONGRESS CAN REDEEM ITSELF

Even if the Supreme Court were inclined to resist efforts to expand presidential power, the truth is that the court cannot do much to restore Congressional authority. We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the court's own legitimacy and authority. Even when the court weighs in on the side of Congress, it often elevates its own powers at Congress's expense. By the very act of interpreting existing laws and declaring something to be within Congress's power (and not the president's), the court affirms that it, not Congress, is the entity capable of making the president listen. Likewise, when Congress allows the court to resolve a power struggle between itself and the executive branch, it effectively concedes that it lacks the will to use its own arsenal of tools to pressure the president.

Consider what happens when Congress actually tries to engage in oversight - for instance, demanding that the president turn over documents concerning prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The president refuses, citing "executive privilege" - a term, by the way, absent in the text of the Constitution. What can Congress do when the president ignores its dictates? One option would be to stop cooperating with the presidential agenda on other issues. Another would be to suspend financing for some relevant program. Holding hearings would be a way to possibly broaden public awareness (though hearings are difficult to carry off without relevant documentation). The ultimate sanction, of course, would be to initiate impeachment proceedings. All of these approaches have costs, though. They would require coordinated action by the Congress and would draw public scrutiny to the issue. By going to the court and asking it to enforce a subpoena - or better, waiting for public-interest groups to do so, as with Vice President Dick Cheney's energy advisory commission - Congress avoids most of these costs.

Once the Supreme Court hears a case involving the balance of powers, the situation actually becomes worse for Congress. The court may find for the president. And even if the court does find that Congress's powers trump those of the president, and the president complies with its ruling, the logical implication is that the president is listening to the court when he was not willing to listen to Congress. This concern was evident in Scalia's dissent in the Hamdi case, in which he asserted that an American citizen in his home country is always entitled to a judicial hearing justifying detention - unless Congress suspends the writ of habeas corpus. To Scalia, the case was about Congress and the president: the former had not authorized the latter to detain citizens without a hearing. Yet far from functioning as a vote of confidence in Congress, Scalia's dissent made Congress look like the patsies that they had been throughout the Guantánamo detentions. Scalia was clearly angry at the president for violating a basic constitutional principle, to be sure. But his anger also reflected his frustration with Congress's reluctance to stand up for its rights.

So how can Congress redeem itself? It could start by clarifying that, in authorizing the president to use force after Sept. 11, it did not mean to give him a blank check to violate existing laws without even telling Congress about the violations. Then it could pass new laws that leave no doubt that it intends to bind the president and his staff on matters relating, for example, to the conduct of war. Senator John McCain's torture bill, for instance, seeks to do just that. In the face of repeated presidential assertions that inhumane treatment does not count as torture and that the president cannot be constrained when it comes to interrogation, the law expressly prohibits cruel interrogation techniques.

But laws that bind the president are, on their own, not enough. Congress must also create meaningful oversight programs with bite to make sure the laws on the books are actually obeyed. The recent proposed bill demanding regular reports from the director of national intelligence about detentions abroad is a step in this direction, but only a step. Without specific provisions stating the content of the testimony that the executive branch must provide, Congress is just asking for the president to elicit an opinion from his lawyers permitting him to ignore the law and then to violate the law secretly. Lest that seem far-fetched, recall that such memos were in fact elicited in the war on terror, and that the violations of our anti-torture laws that took place (according to any reasonable reading of those laws) occurred in facilities whose very existence was classified as a matter of national security. Indeed, even McCain's bill, which prohibits "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," could be gutted in practice by an interpretation limiting the meaning of those terms so as to permit existing interrogation techniques.

The chief advantage of oversight hearings is that officials must appear and testify under oath as to what the administration is in fact doing. A lie to a Congressional committee constitutes perjury. Disillusioning as it may be to admit, the threat of prison is probably the only sanction that can reliably assure that executive-branch officials, protected by secrecy laws and presidential orders that may themselves be classified, will come clean about what is going on in the war on terror. Even the most conscientious officials may make ambiguous statements that disclose only part of the truth, and that misleadingly - as when Condoleezza Rice answered questions about rendition and torture at a press conference in Ukraine in December.

Beyond oversight, a newly assertive Congress would also have to create ways to sanction the president if laws were violated. Ordinary criminal prosecution will rarely do the trick, since Congress cannot expect the president to initiate proceedings against himself or his employees for violating a law that he thinks is unconstitutional. The steps for enforcement should therefore come in part, at least, from Congress itself, which could specify upfront, for instance, that if a president were to violate the law, Congress would withdraw financing from certain programs or initiate impeachment proceedings.

With midterm elections coming in the fall, and the president's popularity having fallen, Congress may already be gearing up to take some such steps, as with the request for regular reporting on detention and Iraq and McCain's torture bill. A future Congress controlled by the Democrats would doubtless do much more. But the War Powers Act of 1973 provides a cautionary tale. Without strong and credible evidence that Congress will follow through, the laws Congress passes to limit the president can enter constitutional limbo, their status unknown and their effect uncertain.

The Supreme Court can do little to help Congress along this path, but the court could make the work of restoration harder for Congress were it to rule in favor of the Bush administration's theories of executive power. The judicial approval of an inherent executive power to torture or eavesdrop, laws to the contrary notwithstanding, would be a huge blow to Congress.

The allocation of power within the government is not determined simply by reading the Constitution and figuring out what it says. To the contrary, the balance of powers is established through a game of give and take, a struggle in which each branch fends for itself. An excellent example is the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. The important fact about that decision was not that in assuring President Bush's election, it inaugurated a period of single-party government. It was, rather, that the court deliberately chose to intervene in a process laid out in the Constitution for dealing with electoral disputes - a process according to which Congress, not the court, was given the power to choose the president. Bush would likely have ended up president in either case; but once the court wrested from Congress the constitutional power to decide who won, few in Congress seriously disputed the legitimacy of its actions. The court had spoken, and its decision was treated as final.

The lesson for the balance of powers is a deep one: the prize of power goes to the bold. Right now, the presidency and its supporters have the upper hand. For Congress to regain some of its constitutional prominence, the court will have to keep a level head, and the representatives themselves will have to be willing to take some chances. Such an effort need not be restricted to national security issues - it would be nice if Congress also took more responsibility for making many of the hard domestic policy choices that it currently leaves to administrative agencies. But the national security problem is more pressing, and for the moment it offers Congress the best chance to redeem itself from its recent inaction.

It is customary, when making a plea on behalf of Congress, to give the legislature special consideration because it is the branch originally designed to represent the people. But this is not wholly justified: after all, nowadays the people directly elect the president, and the politicization of Supreme Court nominations ensures a fair amount of popular input into the composition of the court. It is also not certain that a rejuvenated Congress would be more effective in supervising the president than the Supreme Court. The real reason, then, to hope that Congress will resurrect its lost powers is that the balance of powers remains, as the framers thought, the best guarantor of liberty in a constitutional government. The basic fact of presidential power is now irreversible. No one denies that a strong executive is needed to respond to the threat of terrorism. But this just means that the presidency requires greater vigilance than ever to prevent violations of liberty.

No court alone can do the job of protecting liberty from the exercise of executive power. For that most important of tasks, the people's elected representatives need to be actively involved. When we let them abdicate this role, the violations start to multiply, and we get the secret surveillance and the classified renditions and the unnamed torture that we all recognize as un-American. Our Constitution has changed enormously over the last two centuries, and it is sure to change much more in the future. Just how it changes, though, is up to us.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine and a law professor at New York University, is the author most recently of "Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem - and What We Should Do About It."

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2006-01-02T15:38:00.000-08:00

The first annual M.F. awards'

Posted on Saturday, December 31 @ 10:10:46 EST

This article has been read 4179 times.

Ed Naha

With 2006 upon us, the voices in my head and I decided this would be the perfect time to study the behavior of politicians and pundits last year and inaugurate "The First Annual M.F. Awards." It's a contest of sorts wherein the person with the most awards gets crowned "M. F." of the year. Get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers (my own has dibs). I'm talking biggest Miserable Failure of The Year. So, let the AWARD ceremony begin.

THE "DUMB AND DUMBER" AWARD goes to George W. Bush for this gem: "The war in Iraq has been vary difficult. More difficult than expected." Two words: "General Shinsecki."

THE "BLIND MAN'S BLUFF" AWARD goes to George W. Bush (who's taking an early lead, here). When asked by NBC'S Brian Williams if BushCo. was wrong in expecting to be "welcomed as liberators" in Iraq, Bush opined. "I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome." Shock and awe has a way of putting a damper on things, don't it?

THE "NIGHT OF THE FRISKY DEAD" AWARD goes to Tom DeLay for commenting on brain-dead Terri Schiavo: "She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts." Apparently, he was watching an episode of "Veggie Tales" instead of her hospital video.

THE "BE NICE TO MOTHER NATURE" AWARD goes to Rush Limbaugh, who summed up the Republican push to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge thusly: "If you put together a video of ANWR, you would see nothing but snow and rock. It is no place anybody's ever going to go. The wildlife that lives there wishes it didn't, but it's too stupid to figure out how to move anywhere. They don't have moving vans sent to their places like people in Philadelphia do when they want to get out of someplace. This is absolutely absurd." Russ also cheered when Bambi's mother died.

THE FORK-TONGUED AWARD GOES to George W. Bush who stated: "It's up to Congress to show the American people that we have the capacity to de-fund programs which don't work, and fund programs which do work." De-fund? Wow! He's invented another word for his duh-ictionary.

THE DELUSIONAL AWARD goes to Donald Rumsfeld who declared: "We don't have an exit strategy. We have a victory strategy." He was playing with his new X-Box at the time.

THE "IT'S A MISERABLE LIFE" AWARD goes to Dennis Hastert who, while pushing a bankruptcy bill that favored credit card companies and crushed the middle class and the poor, declared: "Those who abuse the system make getting credit more expensive for everyone. Bankruptcy is for those who need help, not those who want to shift costs to other hardworking Americans." Hastert would go into bankruptcy for his dinner bills alone if he worked at a factory.

THE "IT'S GREAT TO BE AN AMERICAN" AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, at a town hall meeting in Nebraska, encountered a divorced single mother of three children, one of whom was mentally challenged, and was forced to work three jobs. Said Bush: "Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is FANTASTIC that you're doing that." Yeah, and "Roots" was a real knee-slapper of a mini-series.

THE "MR. WIZARD" SCIENCE AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, en route, to one of his gasbagging gigs, remarked: "And flying in, I saw a lot of people on tractors. It's a good sign. But it reminded me about what is possible when it comes to reasonable energy policy. See, one day I hope that those tractors are planting fuel so we become less reliant on foreign sources of energy." Yes, let's plant oil seeds, shall we?

THE ADMINISTRATION'S HINDENBURG AWARD. Three words: Social Security Overhaul.

THE RUNNER-UP TO THE ADMINISTRATION'S HINDENBURG AWARD. Two words: Harriet Miers.

THE DONNA REED DOES DALLAS AWARD goes to Laura Bush who joked about George: "He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse, it was a male horse." Not funny, Laura. He's been jerking us off since his coronation.

THE "MY FREUDIAN SLIP IS SHOWING" AWARD goes to George W. Bush who actually said: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." Incoming!

THE "WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE" AWARD goes to the Republican Party's top lobbyist Jack Abramoff whose multi-faceted investigation will do for the Republican controlled Congress what Hurricane Katrina did for New Orleans.

THE CRY-BABY AWARD goes to former Republican California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham who, when caught with his hand in a half-dozen cookie jars, yachts and mansions confessed his guilt before TV cameras and cried like a girly-man.

THE RIP VAN WINKLE AWARD goes to Senator John Kerry who, every so often, wakes up and says something relevant but in such long-winded, sonorous tones that he puts everyone else to sleep.

THE NYAH-NYAH AWARD goes to Dick Cheney who, bristling over an Amnesty International report showing that the U.S. tortures its prisoners, quipped: "Frankly, I was offended by it. For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly don't take them seriously." Fortunately, nobody takes Cheney seriously, either.

THE MOST HACKNEYED PHRASE OF THE YEAR AWARD goes to all Republicans who, in terms of the Iraq fiasco, state: "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." UH, until we invaded? There were no terrorists there, clowns.

THE DUMBEST THING KARL ROVE HAS SAID, YET, AWARD goes to Karl Rove. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war," he slimed, at a speech before conservative yahoos, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Karl? Take two aspirins and call your lawyer in the morning.

THE DUMBEST THING A MILITARY MAN HAS EVER SAID ABOUT IRAQ CASUALTIES AWARD goes to Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, in charge of National Guard forces in Iraq, who stated that the dangers faced by Guard troops have been largely exaggerated and that's why not many kids are signing up. "I lose, unfortunately, more people through private automobile accidents and motorcycle accidents over the same period of time (as the Guard has been deployed in Iraq)." Okay, maybe play Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" and you'll get more cannon fodder volunteers, idiot.

BEST CHRISTIAN QUIP OF THE YEAR AWARD goes to Colorado Republican House knuckle-dragger Tom Tancredo who said, re: foreign terrorists attacks: "If this happens in the United States and we determine that it is the result of extremist fundamentalist Muslims, ...you know, you could take out their holy sites." Sniff. And that's why the world loves us.

BEST Q AND A AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, replying to a reporter saying "But power is perception," quipped: "Power is being President." Modest little monkey, isn't he?

THE MOST HACKNEYED PHRASE ABOUT IRAQ AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, every six minutes, says: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Great. War as "Simon Says." Next year? Look for Iran and Twister!

THE WORST PARADE EVER AWARD goes to Donald Rumsfeld for this creative idea: "Every year since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have commemorated that anniversary. This year the Department of Defense will initiate an 'American Supports You Freedom Walk.'" People had to sign up to get into the parade. Their credentials were checked upon arrival. They were given patriotic T-shirts if they passed muster. Unfortunately, not too many turned out for this festive event in the land of the free.

BEST HURRICANE KATRINA HEADLINE AWARD: After New Orleans was under water, a wire-service headline proclaimed: PRESIDENT CUTS VACATION SHORT TO RETURN TO WASHINGTON. Apparently, Bush was still too engrossed by the book "My Pet Goat" to notice anything was going on.

BEST SEPARATED AT BIRTH AWARD goes to Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff and "Tales From the Crypt's" host The Crypt Keeper. That would explain why FEMA, under Homeland Security, allowed so many people to die when Katrina struck. Chertoff was talking about Avian Flu at a previously scheduled event while New Orleans was under water. He didn't declare Katrina a national disaster for 36 hours. Scary stuff.

THE "LET THEM EAT DEBRIS" AWARD goes to George W. Bush for this explanation as to why there'd been a delay in removing debris in hurricane zones, largely populated by the poor and retirees. "They didn't want to be moving federally-paid dozers on private property. Imagine cleaning up the debris and a person shows up, and says, where's my valuable china? Or, where's my valuable art?" If you're on Food Stamps? You're not gonna have many Picassos lying around, Junior.

THE BEST SUMMATION OF CONGRESS HEADLINE AWARD goes to this nifty blurb: "Congress seeks to slash food aid for poor."

THE BEST "HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE, AGAIN" HEADLINE AWARD goes to this wire service story: "Bush touts economy." Two days later, it was revealed that the U.S. poverty level has risen for five straight years.

THE BEN DOVER AWARD goes to Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman who has been kissing Bush's ass so much he now buys his Chapstick in bulk.

THE DUMBING DOWN OF DIPLOMACY AWARD goes to Condoleezza Rice, who explained, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the intricacies of Iraq: "Our strategy is to clear, hold and build. The enemy's strategy is to infect, terrorize and pull down." Guess who's winning, kid? Pull this.

THE DOUBLE O DUBYA AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, not happy with being the Bumbler-in-Chief, decided to become a spy guy, illegally getting the NSA to monitor international and domestic phone and computer chats and spy on the United Nations. Chirped our spymeister: "I just want to assure the American people that, one, I've got the authority to do this; two, it is a necessary part of my job to protect you; and, three, we're guarding your civil liberties." Translation: It's good to be the King.

THE MERRY CHRISTMAS AWARD goes to Bill O' Rielly who, enraged that people say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," railed: "I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. I am not going to let it happen. I'm gonna use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that." He, then, French kissed a loofah.

SO, THE WHO ARE WE FIGHTING, NOW? AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, in the past three months, has identified our enemies in the Iraqi war as rejectionists, Saddamists, terrorists, Bathists, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda. By February, he'll be tossing in the Amish because they're "sneaky looking."

THE DEFINITION OF "IRONY" AWARD goes to Michael Brown, the former FEMA head who transformed New Orleans into Atlantis. Shortly after leaving FEMA he announced he was opening a consulting firm, selling his expertise on emergency preparedness. Next month: Charles Manson teaches grade schoolers how to whittle.

THE DEFINITION OF "IRONY" RUNNER-UP AWARD goes to FEMA...which, on its web site, lists Hurricane Katrina as one of it's three greatest accomplishments of 2005. Way back when, Mrs. O'Leary's cow referred to the Chicago Fire as "my defining moment."

THE "AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH" AWARD goes to George W. Bush who, at a recent press conference, charmed reporters with "I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up." So, what else is new?

THE "HALLMARK CARD" AWARD goes to Senator Bill Frist who, visiting tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka, advised one of his staff photographers to "Get some devastation in the back."

THE "LAW AND ORDER" AWARD goes to "The Book of Virtues'" author Bill Bennet who stated: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Happy Kwanzaa, Bill.

THE "DOCTOR KILDARE MEETS X-RAY SPECS" AWARD goes to Senator Bill Frist who diagnosed Terri Schiavo's condition without actually visiting her. "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office. She certainly seemed to respond to visual stimuli." Shortly thereafter, he gave mouth to mouth resuscitation to a log. Amazingly, it didn't respond.

THE "WE'RE GOING TO DISNEYLAND" AWARD goes to Tom DeLay who, visiting hurricane survivors bivouacked at the Astrodome, smiled at three youngsters. "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" Yeah, and Hiroshima was a laff riot.

THE "WAR IS HECK" AWARD goes to Donald Rumsfeld who summed up many Americans' revulsion towards the Iraqi invasion thusly: "Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." Gee, ya think?

THE "CARNAC THE MAGNIFICENT" AWARD goes to Dick Cheney who, back in May, declared: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." At May's end, the American death toll in Iraq was 1667. As of this writing, it's 2178. Boy, is this guy good or what? He's even better with his tin foil hat on.

THE "YOU'RE TERMINATED" AWARD goes to California guvuhnator Arnold Schwarzenegger, who forced a special election down Californians throats and had all four of his ballot initiatives go down in flames. Kind of like "The Last Action Hero" did at the box office.

THE "MOTHER OF MERCY" AWARD goes to Barbara Bush who, visiting hurricane victims housed at the Houston Astrodome, cooed: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckles) - this is working very well for them." Yow! She probably ate the "Nun bun," too.

THE STENOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR AWARD: a tie between Judith Miller and Bob Woodward. Get me re-write! There's an actual fact in this story!

THE WORST INTERVIEWER IN THE WORLD AWARD goes to CNN's Wolf Blitzer who, while interviewing Jimmy Carter, asked Carter IF the bogus intelligence spewed by BushCo. had been true would Carter have supported the Iraqi invasion. This is closely akin to asking "If Godzilla was fighting Mothra outside your house, would you be scared?" Sheesh!

THE "ME, ME, ME" AWARD goes to Senator Joe Biden (who apparently bunks out on the set of "Meet the Press") who has the tendency to answer every question with "As I've always said," "If you remember, I've always maintained," and "When I was on the show last year, Tim, I pointed out..." Oh, stop it. No way in hell are you going to get the nomination, Sparky. Just Chill.

THE "UH-OH" AWARD goes to George W. Bush for this statement: "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." The guy knows how to work a room.

THE BIGGEST LOSER OF THE YEAR AWARD goes to America's favorite stooge Ahmed Chalabi who, after feeding bogus intelligence to BushCo. in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and after envisioning himself as a power player in the new Iraq, wound up getting diddly votes in the last election, thus assuring him a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Maybe he and Judith Miller can team up and take their ventriloquist act on the road.

THE "MAKE MONEY WORKING OUT OF YOUR OWN HOME" AWARD goes to Senator Bill Frist...whose blind trust was actually 20-20.

THE "I'D LIKE TO GIVE THE WORLD A COKE" AWARD goes to Ann Coulter for quipping: "The government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo." She then broke into the classic Disney song "It's A Small World, After All."

THE NOTSO INTELLIGENT DESIGN AWARD goes to Pat Robertson for referring to those who believe in evolution as "fanatics." "I mean, it is a religion. It's a cult. It is a cultish religion." You're the expert, Pat.

THE "FREEDOM FRIES" AWARD goes to Dennis Hastert who re-named the West Lawn's "Holiday Tree" the "Capitol Christmas Tree." He also re-named Bush's pardoned Thanksgiving turkey -"lunch."

THE "FOOT IN MOUTH DISEASE" AWARD goes to Dennis Hastert who, shortly after New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, questioned bothering to rebuild the city. "It doesn't make sense to me," he said. "But you know, we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness." Talk about your compassionate conservatism!

THE WORST RETRACTION EVER AWARD goes to Dennis Hastert who got his ass kicked for the above statement. His retraction, however, basically was the same statement, adding that rebuilding the city without doubling or tripling New Orleans' levees "probably wouldn't be very smart." At present, the government is replacing the old levees with duplicates of the old levees. Ooopsie.

THE HOUSE LEADERSHIP AWARD goes to Dennis Hastert who, after calling the House into a special session to pass a Katrina relief package, skipped out on the actual vote to attend a political fund-raiser in Indiana and an antique car auction.

THE "MY BUDDY" AWARD goes to "Hardball's" Chris Matthews who summed up Dubya by gushing: "Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs on the left. I mean, I like him personally." Stalin was, supposedly, a real charmer, too, Chris.

THE CLASSIC BUSH CARES ABOUT THE TROOPS HEADLINE AWARD goes to: "Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged." Ooops. Mission Accomplished.

THE "CAUSE AND EFFECT" AWARD goes to George W. Bush in this classic Q&A. Question: "Why do you think bin Laden has not been caught?" Bush: "Because he's hiding." Thanks, Sherlock.

Drumroll, please. Naaah. Never mind. I don't think we have to actually count the votes to give our M.F. award, gang. It's pretty obvious. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the winner of the biggest Miserable Failure of 2005 prize goes to our esteemed President of the United States, George W. Bush. Why don't we all drop him a line and tell him that we're proud of him? Simply Google "miserable failure" and hit "I'm feeling lucky." You'll be taken directly to the White House web site!

I get teary-eyed every time I do that.

Then, the anti-depressants kick in and I'm fine.

God bless America. God help us all.

Source:

http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=171

2005-12-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/dean/20051230.html

George W. Bush as the New Richard M. Nixon: Both Wiretapped Illegally, and Impeachably;
Both Claimed That a President May Violate Congress' Laws to Protect National Security

By JOHN W. DEAN
----

Friday, Dec. 30, 2005

On Friday, December 16, the New York Times published a major scoop by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau: They reported that Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

It was a long story loaded with astonishing information of lawbreaking at the White House. It reported that sometime in 2002, Bush issued an executive order authorizing NSA to track and intercept international telephone and/or email exchanges coming into, or out of, the U.S. - when one party was believed to have direct or indirect ties with al Qaeda.

Initially, Bush and the White House stonewalled, neither confirming nor denying the president had ignored the law. Bush refused to discuss it in his interview with Jim Lehrer.

Then, on Saturday, December 17, in his radio broadcast, Bush admitted that the New York Times was correct - and thus conceded he had committed an impeachable offense.

There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons.

These parallel violations underscore the continuing, disturbing parallels between this Administration and the Nixon Administration - parallels I also discussed in a prior column.

Indeed, here, Bush may have outdone Nixon: Nixon's illegal surveillance was limited; Bush's, it is developing, may be extraordinarily broad in scope. First reports indicated that NSA was only monitoring foreign calls, originating either in the USA or abroad, and that no more than 500 calls were being covered at any given time. But later reports have suggested that NSA is "data mining" literally millions of calls - and has been given access by the telecommunications companies to "switching" stations through which foreign communications traffic flows.

In sum, this is big-time, Big Brother electronic surveillance.

Given the national security implications of the story, the Times said they had been sitting on it for a year. And now that it has broken, Bush has ordered a criminal investigation into the source of the leak. He suggests that those who might have felt confidence they would not be spied on, now can have no such confidence, so they may find other methods of communicating. Other than encryption and code, it is difficult to envision how.

Such a criminal investigation is rather ironic - for the leak's effect was to reveal Bush's own offense. Having been ferreted out as a criminal, Bush now will try to ferret out the leakers who revealed him.

Nixon's Wiretapping - and the Congressional Action that Followed

Through the FBI, Nixon had wiretapped five members of his national security staff, two newsmen, and a staffer at the Department of Defense. These people were targeted because Nixon's plans for dealing with Vietnam -- we were at war at the time -- were ending up on the front page of the New York Times.

Nixon had a plausible national security justification for the wiretaps: To stop the leaks, which had meant that not only the public, but America's enemies, were privy to its plans. But the use of the information from the wiretaps went far beyond that justification: A few juicy tidbits were used for political purposes. Accordingly, Congress believed the wiretapping, combined with the misuse of the information it had gathered, to be an impeachable offense.

Following Nixon's resignation, Senator Frank Church chaired a committee that investigated the uses and abuses of the intelligence derived from the wiretaps. From his report on electronic surveillance, emerged the proposal to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Act both set limits on electronic surveillance, and created a secret court within the Department of Justice - the FISA Court -- that could, within these limits, grant law enforcement's requests to engage in electronic surveillance.

The legislative history of FISA makes it very clear that Congress sought to create laws to govern the uses of warrantless wiretaps. Thus, Bush's authorization of wiretapping without any application to the FISA Court violated the law.

Whether to Allow Such Wiretaps, Was Congress' Call to Make

No one questions the ends here. No one doubts another terror attack is coming; it is only a question of when. No one questions the preeminent importance of detecting and preventing such an attack.

What is at issue here, instead, is Bush's means of achieving his ends: his decision not only to bypass Congress, but to violate the law it had already established in this area.

Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn't the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?

The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford's chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president's power to ignore Congress' laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.

No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture -- the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under Article II of the Constitution, license any action he may take in the name of national security - although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.

Presidential Powers Regarding National Security: A Nixonian View

Nixon famously claimed, after resigning from office, that when the president undertook an action in the name of national security, even if he broke the law, it was not illegal.

Nixon's thinking (and he was learned in the law) relied on the precedent established by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Nixon, quoting Lincoln, said in an interview, "Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation."

David Frost, the interviewer, immediately countered by pointing out that the anti-war demonstrators upon whom Nixon focused illegal surveillance, were hardly the equivalent of the rebel South. Nixon responded, "This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president." It was a weak rejoinder, but the best he had.

Nixon took the same stance when he responded to interrogatories proffered by the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations To Study Intelligence Operations (best know as the "Church Committee," after its chairman Senator Frank Church). In particular, he told the committee, "In 1969, during my Administration, warrantless wiretapping, even by the government, was unlawful, but if undertaken because of a presidential determination that it was in the interest of national security was lawful. Support for the legality of such action is found, for example, in the concurring opinion of Justice White in Katz v. United States." (Katz is the opinion that established that a wiretap constitutes a "search and seizure" under the Fourth Amendment, just as surely as a search of one's living room does - and thus that the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements apply to wiretapping.)

Nixon rather presciently anticipated - and provided a rationalization for - Bush: He wrote, "there have been -- and will be in the future -- circumstances in which presidents may lawfully authorize actions in the interest of security of this country, which if undertaken by other persons, even by the president under different circumstances, would be illegal."

Even if we accept Nixon's logic for purposes of argument, were the circumstances that faced Bush the kind of "circumstances" that justify warrantless wiretapping? I believe the answer is no.

Is Bush's Unauthorized Surveillance Action Justified? Not Persuasively.

Had Bush issued his Executive Order on September 12, 2001, as a temporary measure - pending his seeking Congress approval - those circumstances might have supported his call.

Or, had a particularly serious threat of attack compelled Bush to authorize warrantless wiretapping in a particular investigation, before he had time to go to Congress, that too might have been justifiable.

But several years have passed since the broad 2002 Executive Order, and in all that time, Bush has refused to seek legal authority for his action. Yet he can hardly miss the fact that Congress has clearly set rules for presidents in the very situation in which he insists on defying the law.

Bush has given one legal explanation for his actions which borders on the laughable: He claims that implicit in Congress' authorization of his use of force against the Taliban in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attack, was an exemption from FISA.

No sane member of Congress believes that the Authorization of Military Force provided such an authorization. No first year law student would mistakenly make such a claim. It is not merely a stretch; it is ludicrous.

But the core of Bush's defense is to rely on the very argument made by Nixon: that the president is merely exercising his "commander-in-chief" power under Article II of the Constitution. This, too, is a dubious argument. Its author, John Yoo, is a bright, but inexperienced and highly partisan young professor at Boalt Law School, who has been in and out of government service.

To see the holes and fallacies in Yoo's work - embodied in a recently published book -- one need only consult the analysis of Georgetown University School of Law professor David Cole in the New York Review of Books. Cole has been plowing this field of the law for many years, and digs much deeper than Yoo.

Since I find Professor Yoo's legal thinking bordering on fantasy, I was delighted that Professor Cole closed his real-world analysis on a very realistic note: "Michael Ignatieff has written that 'it is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does.' Yoo persuaded the Bush administration to untie its hand and abandon the constraints of the rule of law. Perhaps that is why we are not prevailing."

To which I can only add, and recommend, the troubling report by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who are experts in terrorism and former members of President Clinton's National Security Council. They write in their new book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, that the Bush Administration has utterly failed to close the venerable loopholes available to terrorist to wreak havoc. The war in Iraq is not addressing terrorism; rather, it is creating terrorists, and diverting money from the protection of American interests.

Bush's unauthorized surveillance, in particular, seems very likely to be ineffective. According to experts with whom I have spoken, Bush's approach is like hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. As sophisticated as NSA's data mining equipment may be, it cannot, for example, crack codes it does not recognize. So the terrorist communicating in code may escape detection, even if data mining does reach him.

In short, Bush is hoping to get lucky. Such a gamble seems a slim pretext for acting in such blatant violation of Congress' law. In acting here without Congressional approval, Bush has underlined that his Presidency is unchecked - in his and his attorneys' view, utterly beyond the law. Now that he has turned the truly awesome powers of the NSA on Americans, what asserted powers will Bush use next? And when - if ever - will we - and Congress -- discover that he is using them?

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

Mia Grinston My Granddaughter

2005-12-25T16:57:00.000-08:00

This is my granddaughter Mia, who is 4, on Christmas morning in her new Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson outfit.

She is a doll.

2005-12-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Read whole article here: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article331083.ece

What planet are you on, Mr Bush? (and do you care, Mr Blair?)

Tens of thousands of people marched in 33 countries yesterday to express concern for the environment. But will their leaders respond? Geoffrey Lean and David Randall report

Published: 04 December 2005

GLOBAL MELTDOWN

The catalogue of disasters that are happening right now

Across the planet, rising temperatures are taking their toll

CARBON DIOXIDE

New research has found that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the main cause of global warming - are higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. HOTTEST EVER

This year is expected to be the warmest ever recorded; 1998 was the hottest so far, but the past three years currently occupy the next three places.

DESERTIFICATION

The giant Kalahari desert, already four times the size of Britain, threatens to become larger still, covering farmland in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

EXPANDING OCEANS

The level of the world's seas and oceans is rising twice as fast as in the past, as their waters expand in rising temperatures and glaciers melt.

OCEAN EXILES

The people of the Carteret Islands, a scattering of atolls off Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, have started to leave as their homes succumb to rising seas.

HURRICANES

Hurricane Epsilon - the 14th of the year - is forming in the Atlantic, even though the worst recorded hurricane season by far formally ended on Wednesday.

GLACIER MELT

Greenland glaciers have suddenly started racing towards the sea and melting. Much the same is beginning to happen to glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

WATER SHORTAGE

Areas such as the western USA, which depend on mountain snows for their water supplies, are running short as less snow falls - and what does fall melts earlier.

DISAPPEARING SPECIES

Sealife and birdlife have declined catastrophically this year along America's north-west Pacific coast, after a similar meltdown in the North Sea.

CORAL REEFS

Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are bleaching out and dying as sea temperatures rise and scientists fear that the whole reef may perish by 2050.

*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

2005-11-27T14:05:00.000-08:00

Political Cycles -- Joyce Levine

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Scooter Libby's Cycles All Tied Together (left, Scooter Libby)

Scooter Libby – Born 8/22/50 New Haven, CT. Unfortunately no time is available, so his cycles cannot be completely delineated.

What is interesting is at the time of his arrest, transiting Mars was square his natal Pluto. Mars is the planet of war and conflict. Pluto rules, among other things, subterfuge, covert operations, and the masses. In September when in all likelihood the indictment was being planned, transiting Saturn was conjunct his Venus and square his Mars. Saturn transits are typically when people get caught with any wrongdoing.

More trouble for Libby is brewing especially in February and March. Aspects from transiting Mars, Saturn, and Pluto increase the likelihood of further revelations and increased conflict.

Dick Cheney, Born January 30, 1941, 7:30 PM, Lincoln, NE. Interestingly enough, transiting Saturn was opposing Cheney's Sun in Aquarius exactly on October 28 when Libby was arrested.

There is little probability of Cheney being able to keep a low profile or operate without public scrutiny in the near future. His reputation is likely to take a dive in December, 2005. More revelations will follow in January, 2006. Cheney's involvement with the Valerie Plame debacle is likely to surface in the spring to early summer, if not before then.

George W. Bush, Born July 6, 1946, 7:26 AM, New Haven, CT

Last year I predicted that Bush's popularity would plummet in June, 2005. As of this writing, his ratings are under 40%. Even his normal base of right-wing Christian Fundamentalists are unhappy with him.

Bush had his second Saturn return in June of 2005. Saturn returns are times to grow up, face responsibility, and possibly face the music. Transiting Saturn reached his Leo Ascendant in September, 2005 and his Mercury and Pluto in October, 2005.

Bush's Pluto is in the same degree in Leo as Cheney's Sun is in Aquarius. This involves transiting Saturn with Bush's chart at the time of Libby's arrest. By December, 2005, Bush is likely to encounter more problems because of Libby and Cheney.

Irrational behavior on Bush's part at the end of January and February as transiting Uranus opposes Mars will likely make matters worse. He continues to be wounded by association in March as Chiron conjuncts his seventh house cusp.

Saturn is back on his Ascendant, Mercury, and Pluto in June and July and Chiron opposes his Ascendant once again. This brings more bad news for him, more accountability, and further problems based on his associates.

Mars is active again in September and October, as progressed Mars conjuncts the Moon and solar arc Mars squares the Ascendant. An attack on his life is possible. Further injuries to popularity with the public are likely, including possible difficulties with his political base.

It looks as if the fall elections favor the Democrats.

* * *

Joyce Levine is a full-time professional consulting astrologer with 30 years experience. She serves as a catalyst for her clients to overcome astro/psychological obstacles so that they can achieve their full potential. Joyce is available for consulting work with individuals, couples, families, and businesses. Joyce is the Clerk of NCGR, Level IV Certified in Consulting. She has been a certified professional member of the AFA since 1979.

Joyce is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Astrological Interpretation. Transformational Tapes: Self-Help Series: Meditation, Creative Visualization, Releasing Anger, and Contacting Your Guardian Angel; and Integrating Astrological Cycles Series: Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn, and Jupiter.

Contact Joyce at 617-354-7075, joycel@joycele vine.com

Contributed by Claudia!

2005-11-22T16:13:00.000-08:00

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1122nj1.htm#

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December.

The conclusions drawn in the lengthier CIA assessment-which has also been denied to the committee-were strikingly similar to those provided to President Bush in the September 21 PDB, according to records and sources. In the four years since Bush received the briefing, according to highly placed government officials, little evidence has come to light to contradict the CIA's original conclusion that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"What the President was told on September 21," said one former high-level official, "was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there."

In arguing their case for war with Iraq, the president and vice president said after the September 11 attacks that Al Qaeda and Iraq had significant ties, and they cited the possibility that Iraq might share chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons with Al Qaeda for a terrorist attack against the United States.

Democrats in Congress, as well as other critics of the Bush administration, charge that Bush and Cheney misrepresented and distorted intelligence information to bolster their case for war with Iraq. The president and vice president have insisted that they unknowingly relied on faulty and erroneous intelligence, provided mostly by the CIA.

The new information on the September 21 PDB and the subsequent CIA analysis bears on the question of what the CIA told the president and how the administration used that information as it made its case for war with Iraq.

The central rationale for going to war against Iraq, of course, was that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons, and that he was pursuing an aggressive program to build nuclear weapons. Despite those claims, no weapons were ever discovered after the war, either by United Nations inspectors or by U.S. military authorities.

Much of the blame for the incorrect information in statements made by the president and other senior administration officials regarding the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue has fallen on the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

In April 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a bipartisan report that the CIA's prewar assertion that Saddam's regime was "reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "has chemical and biological weapons" were "overstated, or were not supported by the underlying intelligence provided to the Committee."

The Bush administration has cited that report and similar findings by a presidential commission as evidence of massive CIA intelligence failures in assessing Iraq's unconventional-weapons capability.

Bush and Cheney have also recently answered their critics by ascribing partisan motivations to them and saying their criticism has the effect of undermining the war effort. In a speech on November 11, the president made his strongest comments to date on the subject: "Baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." Since then, he has adopted a different tone, and he said on his way home from Asia on November 21, "This is not an issue of who is a patriot or not."

In his own speech to the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Cheney also changed tone, saying that "disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy" and the "sign of a healthy political system." He then added: "Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Although the Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly known as the 9/11 commission, pointed to incorrect CIA assessments on the WMD issue, they both also said that, for the most part, the CIA and other agencies did indeed provide policy makers with accurate information regarding the lack of evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

But a comparison of public statements by the president, the vice president, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld show that in the days just before a congressional vote authorizing war, they professed to have been given information from U.S. intelligence assessments showing evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.

The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire … weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."

The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."

Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.

Credit card and phone records appear to demonstrate that Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., at the time of the alleged meeting, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials. Al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence official with whom Atta was said to have met in Prague, was later taken into custody by U.S. authorities. He not only denied the report of the meeting with Atta, but said that he was not in Prague at the time of the supposed meeting, according to published reports.

In June 2004, the 9/11 commission concluded: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Regarding the alleged meeting in Prague, the commission concluded: "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred."

Still, Cheney did not concede the point. "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection to 9/11," Cheney said after the commission announced it could not find significant links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the vice president again pointed out the existence of a Czech intelligence service report that Atta and the Iraqi agent had met in Prague. "That's never been proved. But it's never been disproved," Cheney said.

The following month, July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its review of the CIA's prewar intelligence: "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collected that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al-Qaeda."

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protégé of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael MaloofDavid Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview. and

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

In January 2002, Maloof and Wurmser were succeeded at the intelligence unit by two Naval Reserve officers. Intelligence analysis from the covert unit later served as the basis for many of the erroneous public statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others regarding the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, according to former and current government officials. Intense debates still rage among longtime intelligence and foreign policy professionals as to whether those who cited the information believed it, or used it as propaganda. The unit has since been disbanded.

Earlier this month, on November 14, the Pentagon's inspector general announced an investigation into whether Feith and others associated with the covert intelligence unit engaged in "unauthorized, unlawful, or inappropriate intelligence activities." In a statement, Feith said he is "confident" that investigators will conclude that his "office worked properly and in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has also been conducting its own probe of the Pentagon unit. But as was first disclosed by The American Prospect in an article by reporter Laura Rozen, that probe had been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Feith and the Pentagon.

Internal Pentagon records show not only that the small Pentagon unit had the ear of the highest officials in the government, but also that Rumsfeld and others considered the unit as a virtual alternative to intelligence analyses provided by the CIA.

On July 22, 2002, as the run-up to war with Iraq was underway, one of the Naval Reserve officers detailed to the unit sent Feith an e-mail saying that he had just heard that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz wanted "the Iraqi intelligence cell … to prepare an intel briefing on Iraq and links to al-Qaida for the SecDef" and that he was not to tell anyone about it.

After that briefing was delivered, Wolfowitz sent Feith and other officials a note saying: "This was an excellent briefing. The Secretary was very impressed. He asked us to think about possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and CIA. The goal was not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

On September 16, 2002, two days before the CIA produced a major assessment of Iraq's ties to terrorism, the Naval Reserve officers conducted a briefing for Libby and Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

In a memorandum to Wolfowitz, Feith wrote: "The briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby." Both men, the memo went on, requested follow-up material, most notably a "chronology of Atta's travels," a reference to the discredited allegation of an Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague.

In their presentation, the naval reserve briefers excluded the fact that the FBI and CIA had developed evidence that the alleged meeting had never taken place, and that even the Czechs had disavowed it.

The Pentagon unit also routinely second-guessed the CIA's highly classified assessments. Regarding one report titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," one of the Naval Reserve officers wrote: "The report provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over the course of a decade on interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only-and CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored."

This same antipathy toward the CIA led to the events that are the basis of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, according to several former and current senior officials.

Ironically, the Plame affair's origins had its roots in Cheney and Libby's interest in reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. After reading a Pentagon report on the matter in early February 2002, Cheney asked the CIA officer who provided him with a national security briefing each morning if he could find out about it.

Without Cheney's knowledge, his query led to the CIA-sanctioned trip to Niger by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, to investigate the allegations. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely not true.

Despite that conclusion, President Bush, in his State of the Union address in 2003, included the Niger allegation in making the case to go to war with Iraq. In July 2003, after the war had begun, Wilson publicly charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" the intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Libby and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove told reporters that Wilson's had been sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, Plame. In the process, the leaks led to the unmasking of Plame, the appointment of Fitzgerald, the jailing of a New York Times reporter for 85 days, and a federal grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting to conceal his role in leaking Plame's name to the press.

The Plame affair was not so much a reflection of any personal animus toward Wilson or Plame, says one former senior administration official who knows most of the principals involved, but rather the direct result of long-standing antipathy toward the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and others involved. They viewed Wilson's outspoken criticism of the Bush administration as an indirect attack by the spy agency.

Those grievances were also perhaps illustrated by comments that Vice President Cheney himself wrote on one of Feith's reports detailing purported evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In barely legible handwriting, Cheney wrote in the margin of the report:

"This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based writer and frequent contributor to National Journal. Several of his previous stories are also available online.

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*********************
Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

"A Nation of Sheep breeds a Government of Wolves." -- Edward R. Murrow

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis (1935)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." - Aldous Huxley

Claudia and Jammy View Bush's Unceremonial Victory

Why T. Boone Pickens' 'Clean Energy' Plan Is a Ponzi Scheme

By Scott Thill, AlterNetPosted on August 21, 2008, Printed on August 22, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

08/11/2008 @ 5:44 pm

Suskind: Bush ordered fake letter linking Iraq to 9/11

08/05/2008 @ 8:46 am

Another Election Season, Another Political Prosecution in Alabama

A Son’s Past Deeds Come Back To Bite Huckabee

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/17/flying_while_muslim.php

Flying While Muslim

Aziz Huq

August 17, 2006

Yes, We Know They're Illegal

CHENEY GOES AHEAD

WITH FOLSOM PRISON CONCERT

Economist Magazine Warns 'Danger Time' for U.S.

Our Presidential Era: Who Can Check the President?

Mia Grinston My Granddaughter

What planet are you on, Mr Bush? (and do you care, Mr Blair?)

Tens of thousands of people marched in 33 countries yesterday to express concern for the environment. But will their leaders respond? Geoffrey Lean and David Randall report

Published: 04 December 2005

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on August 21, 2008, Printed on August 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/95471/