Ex-CIA analyst McGovern on Petraeus and Cheney

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Ray McGovern: Was Cheney behind Iraqi army’s failed Basra offensive?
April 11, 2008

Raymond McGovern is a retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many of them. McGovern was born and raised in Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.

Transcript:

Does Sen. Kennedy know something we don’t?

MATTHEW PALEVSKY,PRESENTER: Here on Capitol Hill, both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had testified to Iraq several times over the last couple of days. To better understand their testimonies, I spoke with former CIA official Ray McGovern. McGovern worked for the federal government for over 27 years and under seven different presidents, presenting the morning intelligence briefing at the White House for several of them.

RAY MCGOVERN, RETIRED CIA OFFICER AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST: Mostly it was entirely predictable. What shocked me was how Senator Kennedy, at the very end of his remarks, apropos of nothing, asked Petraeus and Crocker, “Tell me, General, and Ambassador Crocker, when the vice president was in Baghdad, were you in any meetings where the offensive against Basra was discussed with the vice president?”

(CLIP BEGINS)

TED KENNEDY, US SENATOR (D-MA): Were you at any meetings with the vice president or Ambassador Crocker where the issue of the Basra invasion took place?

RYAN CROCKER, US AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ: It was not discussed.

KENNEDY: It was not discussed at all during the vice president’s visit to Baghdad? The possibility of Maliki going into Basra was not discussed? You were not at any meetings where the vice president was present or where this was discussed in his presence?

CROCKER: It was not discussed in any meeting I attended. No, sir.

KENNEDY: General?

DAVID PETRAEUS, COMMANDING GENERAL, MULTINATIONAL FORCE IRAQ: Same, Senator.

KENNEDY: Thank you. My time’s up.

PETRAEUS: Thank you, sir.

(CLIP ENDS)

RAY MCGOVERN: Well, I thought Petraeus was going to have a little conniptionary. He turned a little bit white and looked at Crocker, and Crocker, ashen as he was for the whole time, even paled the more, and he thought really quick, and his eyes sort of went like this, and he said, “No, sir. I was at no meetings, no meetings where Basra was discussed with the vice president.” “And you, General Petraeus?” “Same.” I think Kennedy knows more than the rest of us know. I think it’s very clear that if you’re looking for why Maliki went off half-cocked for a big offensive down against Muqtada al-Sadr in southern Iraq, it was because Cheney told him to. And I would be shocked if Cheney didn’t tell Petraeus and Crocker what he was going to tell Maliki—not only Cheney, but McCain.

They were both there just days before. Petraeus has hundreds of troops there embedded with the Iraqi forces. He had to know exactly what was going on. He just couldn’t stop it. Why? Well, he didn’t want to stop it, because Cheney is running things. The plan was to get down there into the south, to (A) show that this fellow could take the initiative and be—well, the president was instructed two days later to say this is a defining moment, a defining moment in the leadership of Prime Minister Maliki. Oh, yeah, it sure was, but not the way they meant. And so Petraeus and Crocker could come before Congress and say, “Look, you told us,” you know, “you told us last time that the Iraqis had to take more initiative so that we’re not doing the fighting.” Well, look—just what happened. You cleaned out the whole of southern Iraq.

And they still played that theme, bring several changes on that theme. Here Maliki finally took the initiative, “Iraqis are doing—you know, we supported them.” But that was only an half-truth. The other truth was he lost miserably. Muqtada al-Sadr has 70,000 people under arms with better arms than Maliki had. And if it weren’t for the US air force and US ground troops to bail them out, not only down there in Basra but out from Sadr City, you know, he would have had even a bloodier nose. Right after it became clear that, you know, it’s a great initiative, but it was going to lose, you know, they distanced themselves from it and they told all the press people, you know, “We didn’t know anything about [inaudible].” I mean, Hayden, the head of the CIA, goes on Meet the Press and says, you know, “I didn’t know anything about it, and neither did Petraeus or Crocker.”

(CLIP BEGINS)

TIM RUSSERT, HOST, MEET THE PRESS: The United States was not informed by the Iraqis that he was going to do this?

GEN. VINCENT HAYDEN, CIA DIRECTOR: I don’t know what went on on the ground in Baghdad prior to the operation. I do know that this was a decision of the Iraqi government by the prime minister, and personally by the prime minister, and that he’s relying on Iraqi forces, by and large, to take this action.

RUSSERT: Were you aware of it?

HAYDEN: I was—. In terms of being pre-briefed or having, you know, the normal planning process, in which you build up to this days or weeks ahead of time, no, no, I was not.

RUSSERT: You didn’t know it was going to happen?

HAYDEN: No more so than Dave Petraeus or Ambassador Crocker did.

(CLIP ENDS)

RAY MCGOVERN: Well, you know, that’s a crock. And in the Bronx, where I come from, we say “that’s a crock,” okay? Because [inaudible] Petraeus has got people all over that Iraqi army, and there’s no way that he could not have known. And I’m sure that Cheney told him, included him as well. Maliki can’t scratch his nose without asking Petraeus to make sure there are some bodyguards around.

So it was very much a joint operation. Ironically, they wanted to give the initiative to Maliki because they thought it might succeed, and then they wanted to give the initiative to Maliki because it failed so miserably. You know. This is a great crew, you know. Those of us who are old enough to have been through Vietnam, you know, this is an old tactic. You can construct a concept out of language: “special group” can be brought to mean whatever you want it to mean, okay?

And so in this case it’s always Iranian-influenced, nefarious influence from Iran, and all these adjectives that were used yesterday to blame what’s happening on—you know. I mean, you really need to be able to blame somebody. And as has been pointed out ad nauseam, the Iranians are indeed involved with all these groups, including Maliki, including the other part of the government, so to speak. And so to the degree things are going a-¬shambles, well, it must be the Iranians. How do we say the Iranians if they’re involved with everybody? Ah! How about “special groups”? Do you think that will work? Well, it seemed to work yesterday, because some of the congress people were using the same thing.

And so, you know, those who were more perspicacious or could see through this stuff [were] saying, “Wow, this is really quite a dog and pony show.” Petraeus talked about battlefield geometry; I’ll talk about arithmetic. Okay? Look at his own manual about insurgency. There’s no ratio that can ever cope with a country. He talked about 27 million. There aren’t 27 million Iraqis anymore, only 23 million, ’cause four [million] are outside in diaspora, four [million] refugees, okay?

But you can’t occupy a country that doesn’t want to be occupied with the ratio of troops that we have. And the reason we don’t have more troops is because there are no more troops. And so what you have is very similar to Vietnam. We have even US colonels—at the very end of Vietnam, Colonel Harry Summers, who was the army colonel who was sent to Hanoi to negotiate the final withdrawal of US and other troops—okay? So he goes there and he makes the big mistake of saying, “Colonel Tu”—that was his opposite number—”Colonel Tu, you have to admit that you never beat us at a pitched battle.” And Tu looks at him. He says, “That is correct. It is also irrelevant.”

Pitched battles don’t happen in insurgencies. And so, as somebody pointed out yesterday—I guess it was said at a Web—here we have taken the most sophisticated, maneuverable forces that have ever been created in the world, and wasted them, squandered them on an enterprise that has no chance of being won. And I have been saying that, personally, for four and a half years.

Source. / The Real News Network

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Skeletor Is Gonna Be Watching You

Posted on April 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in US
by Spencer S. Hsu

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department’s new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities — such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

“There is no basis to suggest that this process is in any way insufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans,” Chertoff wrote to Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and its intelligence subcommittee, respectively, in letters released yesterday.

“I think we’ve fully addressed anybody’s concerns,” Chertoff added in remarks last week to bloggers. “I think the way is now clear to stand it up and go warm on it.”

His statements marked a fresh determination to operate the department’s new National Applications Office as part of its counterterrorism efforts. The administration in May 2007 gave DHS authority to coordinate requests for satellite imagery, radar, electronic-signal information, chemical detection and other monitoring capabilities that have been used for decades within U.S. borders for mapping and disaster response.

But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.

Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office’s operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.

“I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration,” said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. “I won’t make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program.”

Thompson called DHS’s release Thursday of the office’s procedures and a civil liberties impact assessment “a good start.” But, he said, “We still don’t know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided.”

DHS officials said the demands are unwarranted. “The legal framework that governs the National Applications Office . . . is reflected in the Constitution, the U.S. Code and all other U.S. laws,” said DHS spokeswoman Laura Keehner. She said its operations will be subject to “robust,” structured legal scrutiny by multiple agencies.

© 2008 The Washington Post

Source / Common Dreams

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The Daily Iraq War Report

Posted on April 12, 2008 by RagBlog


And to remind you of the liars that still reside in Washington, DC, with impunity, here is a link to the White House Web site titled Disarm Saddam Hussein.

Courtesy of Free Iraq.

9th of April – The Fall of America
By Layla Anwar

Everyone says that the 9th of April was the fall of Baghdad…And this Arab Woman says the 9th of April was the Fall of America.

At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with queues for exit visas.

Not ONE IRAQI wishes your presence. Not ONE IRAQI accepts your occupation.

And don’t give me that shit about your democratic process and elections. You brought the whores from Iran to rule on your behalf and pimp for their Persian motherland.

You are small players in a game that still eludes you…the Iraqi Game is far greater and bigger than all of your strategies. You have lost in Iraq, you have been totally defeated – Politically, psychologically and economically…

Your tanks, your weapons, your artillery, your jets are nothing for us, for we are RESILIENCE and we are RESISTANCE.

You keep hiding in your camps and your Green Zone with the few Iraqi prostitutes who are willing to work for you. They don’t represent us. They represent your brothel. And their days are numbered…just like yours.

Over 600’000 armed men; soldiers, mercenaries, contractors, intelligence, security, spies add to them the sectarian death militias that you and Iran have armed (Sadr, Dawa, Badr and others), add the Mossad, the Peshermgas of the dirty Zionist Kurds, add the ghettoes you built and where you segregated us, add the millions dead and exiled and maimed…And you still CAN’T CONTROL IRAQ.

Got news for you motherfuckers, you will NEVER CONTROL IRAQ, not in 6 years, not in 10 years, not in 20 years…

Read all of it here. Arab Woman Blues / The Rag Blog

Beheaded by US gunfire

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Some Gall! Hrrmph…

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

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Un-Fuck ‘Em Or Another Sign of a Sick Society

Posted on April 12, 2008 by RagBlog

To learn the story of this picture, click here
(©1970 by Ron Mesaros & Playboy)

Ignorant History: In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture
By Bill Hatch / April 12, 2008

These thoughts are provoked by Gerald de Groot’s Reflections on The Sixties Unplugged, an arrogant volume by an ignorant historian which argues that the ’60s counterculture achieved nothing of lasting importance.

There are two kinds of hypocrisy about sexual and political matters in our generation: the left hypocrisy and the right hypocrisy. Between the two, one ought to prefer the traditional approach of the right — mis-, mal- and nonfeasance in office and in bed. The left invented the dialectics of “relationship,” and while no less promiscuous than Republicans, they have proved themselves far more self-righteous about it. The left, in general, also runs the American bureaucracy and has invented an entire alternative form of English to explain what they are doing to individuals and why. Only the well-to-do escape this aberrant form of our language.

One of the great achievements of the hippies is that they have never been a part of either faction in terms of ideology, sexual or otherwise. Although they are capable of a social cohesion at times, under certain specific circumstances (from a good party to a political action), hippies are firm believers in the individual’s right to private property and will fight any timber corporation to prevent encroachment on it. I didn’t even understand Peter Coyote’s statement, quoted reverently by De Groot, “Any structure is mutable, but once you’ve chosen it, you have to accept it — if you’re ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits.” But, I have no doubt whatsoever that Ringolevio, by Diggers founder Emmett Grogan and Coyote’s leader, was the best book ever written on the Haight Ashbury, generally considered to be the fountainhead of lamentable “anarchist excesses.” A second take always worth rereading, is the series of articles written by Nick Von Hoffman and illustrated by the great photography of Elaine Mayes, on the anarchic market in marijuana in the Haight. It could not be organized even by organized crime, which tried.

What de Groot, no doubt irrigated by the rouge corncob placed somewhere on his person where the sun never shines, fails to see is that the hippies were and remain the only genuine working-class movement that came out of the Sixties. The other thing he fails to notice is that the hippies, as opposed to their “leaders,” transcended hippydom, in fact and later fiction on the period. At Berkeley, a friend who would definitely be classed as a former hippie, told me years ago, “You watched the anti-war speakers. When they left the podium, you left the crowd because the cops were coming.” Basic working-class wisdom as old as the Haymarket Massacre.

My finest tidbit of revolutionary romanticism from the era comes not from the hippies but from the new left, a friend announcing in a frenzy of ambition that Cesar Chavez was starting a revolution. He meant one that would bring down the state. Any movement based on people not gringos was grasped fervently by the new left to be used as a club against the hippies, those messy Americans (white, black, brown, red or yellow — whatever) having fun. And for those of us who had actually done farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, oh well, how could our opinion count? It is essential to the misappropriation of the complexities of Marx’s critique that anyone with any empirical experience with any memory of actual hard farm labor should be silenced by the terribly articulate suburban pink diaper set.

Although the hippies preferred to make love, not war, when attacked by police they exhibited excellent abilities to defend themselves. My favorite scene from the chaos of late 1968 was, during yet another SWAT invasion of the neighborhood, a fellow with a molotov cocktail alight in his hand, who streaked through several cops, threw it under a squad car and escaped as the car blew up. In the context of that and other riots of that time, it was not fundamentally an attack on the federal, state or local government; it was a statement: Get the fuck out of my neighborhood, quit beating my neighbors and scaring our women and kids. One did not have to be an admirer of either Dylan or Marx to appreciate the magnificently courageous gesture of our neighbor with the flaming cocktail that night.

As for the hippies’ contribution to the election of Nixon in 1968 and the general breakdown of the Roosevelt coalition in the Democratic Party, oh well, whatever, as the hippies would say. De Groot revises the history of the Sixties anti-war movement from the standpoint of the anti-Iraq War movement? Our academic neo-Reds are on the prowl again. The latest credit crisis provides the excuse and once again we get secondary causes as reasons to do what? Man which barricade, where? These clowns haven’t learned anything since the last depression. Socialism is the answer, right? And the question is: what government produces the happiness of its people? The three anti-war demonstrations in which I marched down Market Street, San Francisco, were as far as I could tell, organized by Palestinians. Willie controlled the cops, the Palestinians controlled the peaceful crowd, and it all worked except for the inevitable bullshit provocateurs. The press called them “anarchists,” yet an Asian hippie woman I know and met in the crowd on one march handed me a broadside of a beautiful poem written by a real anarchist postman from Mendocino County. Your basic theoretical anarchist ain’t got no experience in what he preaches.

At least from the vantage point of having worked that summer of 1968 for the US Senate candidate with the most unambiguous stand against the war, while living in the Haight, I have another analysis for the Nixon election: Larry O’Brien was the only Irishman in America who did not indulge himself in a four-month wake after the assassination of Bobby. When the Kennedy faction woke up from the hangover, it was too late. If they had been able to really mourn the man instead of the power they lost that night, they might have realized more important things were at stake than their collective self pity. One need not even mention Lyndon Johnson’s incredible legislative achievements on behalf of the American working class, the huge backlash among racists, or the totalitarian excesses of the Chicago convention to indicate that it remains a bit difficult to blame Nixon on the hippies, who took the brunt of the Daley Machine beating. By that year, out on the west coast, they were already leaving San Francisco in droves to make their amusing, profitable contributions to rural life on the north coast of California.

Read all of this great rant here. CounterPunch / The Rag Blog

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Making Foreclosures into Public Events

Posted on April 12, 2008 by RagBlog

Truckers rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
(Chris Gardner / Getty Images)

Truckers Hit the Brakes
By Barbara Ehrenreich / April 12, 2008

Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I’ll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.

Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching “as far as the eye can see,” according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour.

Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests – by CB radio and Internet – have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers’ protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators’ plight – first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation’s goods – from Cheerios to Chapstick – travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers’ strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: “If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there’s going to be nothing they can do about it.”

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” JB – which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs – told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody – the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

At least one of the truckers’ tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler – only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. “Repossession is something people don’t usually see,” he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys, the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, “I don’t see why you couldn’t make the payments.” To which Hayden responded, “See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I’ve eaten too many meals in my life to give that up.”

Read all of it here. / The Nation / The Rag Blog

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Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Meet the private security firm that spied on Greenpeace and other environmental outfits for corporate clients. A tale of intrigue, infiltration, and dumpster-diving.
By James Ridgeway / April 11, 2008

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

BBI, which was headquartered in Easton, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, worked extensively, according to billing records, for public-relations companies, including Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time, these PR outfits were servicing corporate clients fighting environmental organizations opposed to their products or actions. Ketchum, for example, was working for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods; Nichols-Dezenhall, according to BBI records, was working with Condea Vista, a chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to 47 million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

Like other firms specializing in snooping, Beckett Brown turned to garbage swiping as a key tactic. BBI officials and contractors routinely conducted what the firm referred to as “D-line” operations, in which its operatives would seek access to the trash of a target, with the hope of finding useful documents. One midnight raid targeted Greenpeace. One BBI document lists the addresses of several other environmental groups as “possible sites” for operations: the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Media Services, the Environmental Working Group, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization run by Lois Gibbs, famous for exposing the toxic dangers of New York’s Love Canal. For its rubbish-rifling operations, BBI employed a police officer in the District of Columbia and a former member of the Maryland state police.

Beckett Brown’s efforts to penetrate environmental groups and other targets came to an end when the business essentially dissolved in 2001 amid infighting between the principals. But the firm’s officials went on to work in other security firms that remain active today.

Beckett Brown International began when John C. Dodd III met Richard Beckett at a bar in Easton in 1994. Dodd had recently become a millionaire after his father had sold an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship on Maryland’s eastern shore. Beckett ran a local executive recruiting and consulting business. Soon after they met, according to Dodd, Beckett introduced him to Paul Rakowski, a recently retired Secret Service agent, who had put in two decades protecting presidents and foreign heads of state and had become regional manager of the agency’s financial crimes division. Rakowski told Dodd he had an idea for a new security business.

Dodd subsequently received a fax of a business plan for the new company. The sender’s address at the top of the fax, according to Dodd, read: “11/02/94 USSS Financial Crimes Division/Forgery”—which suggested it had come from a Secret Service office. But Dodd was reluctant to put in the start-up money for the enterprise, because he didn’t know who all the partners were. To impress him, Dodd says, Rakowski and his former Secret Service colleagues began taking him and his friends on special tours of the White House. “This wasn’t a White House tour conducted by tour guides,” he says. “They would take us…to areas that said ‘Do not pass this line.'”

Cops and Former Secret Service Agents

At one point, Dodd says, a senior Secret Service agent named Joseph Masonis arranged for him to tour a Secret Service facility. “To encourage me to invest in this company,” Dodd notes, “they all said ‘why not go up to technical security headquarters [of the Secret Service] and you will get an exclusive tour.’…They showed me everything….They were worried about someone flying way up high in a plane, miles from the White House, jumping out of a plane, skydiving, popping the chute and getting on the White House grounds without anybody knowing it. They were working on the technology to pick that up.” Dodd says he was blown away by what he saw. (Masonis says, “I have never taken Mr. Dodd to any facility in D.C.”) And at a waterfront party, Dodd says, he was introduced to and deeply impressed by George Ferris, another Secret Service officer and an expert in demolitions.

Read all of it here. Includes supporting documents. / Mother Jones

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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An Emmy For O’Reilly : Please Say It Isn’t So…

Posted on April 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Protesting an O’Reilly Emmy
April 11, 2008

Bill O’Reilly is set to receive a local Emmy award in Boston next month. But he won’t, if a former fellow tabloid talker gets his way. According to the Boston Herald, Barry Nolan says O’Reilly is “a mental case,” and doesn’t deserve the award.

Having once worked in Boston, O’Reilly is being honored for taking his contributions to the national stage, first as anchor of Inside Edition and later on Fox News.

“I am appalled, just appalled,” Nolan, now with CN8, told the paper. “He inflates and constantly mangles the truth…and his frequent target is the ‘left-leaning’ media — the ones who do report the news fairly. And those are the same people who will be sitting in the room honoring him.” Oh, really?

Despite the protestations, local Emmy chief Tim Egan says O’Reilly will be honored. “You may not agree with him, but you can’t say he hasn’t increased the political conversation in this country with his style of broadcasting,” says Egan.

And it gets better. Nolan claims he will still attend the May 10 ceremony and, since his wife is out of town, he’s invited Keith Olbermann, as his date.

Chris / TVNewser

Source.
Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

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Trembling with Indignation at Every Injustice

Posted on April 12, 2008 by RagBlog

“Guerrillero Heroico” – Alberto Korda

Hope is for Suckers
by Mickey Z. / April 11, 2008

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man. – Friedrich Nietzsche

We can’t give up hope, I’m often told. Keep hope alive, the saying goes. If we lose hope, nothing will ever change… or so they believe. Well, I’m here to say: Fuck hope. We live on a planet brimming with hope yet that same planet is under perpetual assault… and the hopers are losing. The corporations raping our eco-systems don’t hope they can steal more land, exploit it, poison it, and make boatloads of cash. They make a plan and make it happen… damn the torpedoes. (You might even call it “direct action.”)

Monsanto doesn’t put its faith in candlelight vigils or humans standing in the shape of a peace sign. They get busy putting their people into positions of power, writing legislation, and bullying and smashing anyone opposed to their insane agenda.

General Motors doesn’t reserve its opinions for government sanctioned “free speech zones.” The television, Internet, magazines, movies, songs, radio, etc. are all inundated with GM’s taxpayer-subsidized propaganda… just as the planet is inundated with GM’s output.

McDonald’s doesn’t waste time hoping things will go its way when its days are chock filled with brainwashing, killing, poisoning, destroying… and counting its profits. Hope never enters into the equation.

“Hope is a bad thing,” sez Henry Miller. “It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.”

Author Derrick Jensen explains the impotency of hope as good as anyone: “I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.”

If Jensen makes it sound an awful lot like religion, well, for most folks, the verb “hope” is virtually synonymous with “pray,” while “hope” the noun is often interchangeable with “faith.”

Hope is for suckers.

How about some good old-fashioned anger, rage, and passion? (Che sez: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”) Let’s forget hope and aim for vision, clarity, strategy, courage, and finally: some goddamned results. “Creativity comes from trust,” sez Rita Mae Brown. “Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work” (as they say in South Florida: bingo).

At its worst, hope is a dangerous cop-out. At best, it’s a frivolous idea. But even so, as Henry Miller sez: “Ideas have to be wedded to action.”

Wedded, huh? Repeat after me: “I do.”

Source

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The Daily Iraq War Report

Posted on April 11, 2008 by RagBlog

More Americans Want to End Iraq War Next Year
April 10, 2008

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – Two-in-five adults in the United States believe the coalition effort should be over in 2009, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 39 per cent of respondents think the United States should bring all troops home from Iraq within a year, up two points since February.

In addition, 26 per cent of respondents would withdraw all soldiers immediately, and 31 per cent want them to remain in Iraq until the mission is complete.

Read all of it here. Global Monitor.

And here is another reason to end this war now.

Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable to Scrutinize Spending
by Jason Leopold / April 11th, 2008

Nearly all of the $516 billion allocated by Congress to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has come in the form of emergency spending requests, a method the White House has abused, depriving Congress the ability to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends money in the so-called global war on terror. The use of emergency supplemental bills to fund the wars has likely resulted in the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the investigative arm of Congress.

Dozens of emergency funding requests that Congress has approved since 2001 is unprecedented compared with past military conflicts when war funding went through the normal appropriations process. As of March, CRS said average monthly costs to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached roughly $12.3 billion, $10 billion for Iraq alone, more than double what it cost to fund the war in 2004.

“Over 90% of [the Department of Defense] funds were provided as emergency funds in supplemental or additional appropriations; the remainder were provided in regular defense bills or in transfers from regular appropriations,” the report said. “Emergency funding is exempt from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress’s annual budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight.”

Vernonique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is troubling because the money “doesn’t get counted in deficit projections, making it hard to track the real cost of the war and effectively removing any upper limits on spending for the war.”

“Even seven years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, and five years after the start of the war in Iraq, Congress and the president are still using “emergency” funding bills to cover costs, rather than going through the regular appropriations process,” said de Rugy, who just published an article on the issue, “The Trillion-Dollar War,” in the May issue of Reason magazine. “While other wars have initially been funded using emergency supplementals, they have quickly been incorporated into the regular budget. Never before has emergency supplemental spending been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years.”

Most troubling about this trend, the CRS said in a report issued in February, is that while the Pentagon’s budget requests has steadily increased annually the reasons the Defense Department has cited to explain its skyrocketing costs “do not appear to be enough to explain the size of and continuation of increases.”

“Although some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding are known — the growing intensity of operations, additional force protection gear and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment, converting units to modular configurations, and new funding to train and equip Iraqi security forces — these elements” fail to justify the increase, the CRS report stated, adding that “little of the $93 billion DOD increase between [fiscal year] 2004 and [fiscal year] 2007 appears to reflect changes in the number of deployed personnel.”

Furthermore, a $70 billion “placeholder” request included in the fiscal year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to finance operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the money will be spent “making it impossible to estimate its allocation,” according to the report.

The CRS added the Pentagon has used emergency supplemental requests to get Congress to fund equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise come out of the Pentagon’s annual budget. The Pentagon has succeeded largely due to a new way it now defines the war on terror.

“Although some of this increase may reflect additional force protection and replacement of “stressed” equipment, much may be in response to [Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England’s new guidance to fund requirements for the “longer war” rather than DOD’s traditional definition of war costs as strictly related to immediate war needs,” the GAO report says, adding that Congress must immediately begin to demand a more transparent accounting of Pentagon emergency spending in order to put an end to the agency’s accounting chicanery.

“For example, the Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G aircraft, a new electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air Force $389 million for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just entering production; such new aircraft would not be delivered for about three years and so could not be used meet immediate war needs,” the CRS report said.

Read all of it here.

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Listen to the Sabre Rattle: Iran-Attack Redux

Posted on April 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Youth in Tehran (Photo: WorldIsRound)

Attacking Iran redux

Besides the clear threats contained in Bush’s speech yesterday, Gen. Petraeus testified repeatedly this week before Congress that Iran was supplying weapons to Shiite militias what were being used to kill American soldiers and bomb Baghdad’s Green Zone. More missiles hit there this morning. McCain has also stated this week that he would not rule out a “pre-emptive” attack on Iran. Based on the renewed prominence of this theme, some pundits (Pat Buchanan in particular) have now stated their belief that such an attack will occur before Bush leaves office.

Until this week, it was widely believed that the rationale the Bush regime favored in order to justify attacking Iran was the claim that they were developing nuclear weapons. When this was refuted by the National Intelligence Estimate that was released a couple of months ago, it appeared that the ground had been cut from under the Bush warmongers. Now they’ve come up with a new rationale and they are spewing if forth every day.

Attacking Iran is back on the table and the antiwar movement needs to prepare for that possibility.

Rational arguments against attacking Iran remain. 1. To do so would incite an uprising against US troops by Iran’s allies among the Shiites in Iraq. Maybe, but Al-Sadr is principally an Iraqi nationalist and the closest allies of Iran are in the Al-Maliki government. Besides, Iraqis are Arabic-speaking Arabs and nothing unites them better than opposition to the Farsi-speaking “Persians”. 2. Oil prices would go through the roof. So what? The Bush regime’s primary constituency is Big Oil and they would make more mega-billions as a result. 3. Oil at $150 or more a barrel would sink the US economy. They don’t care if the Democrats are going to control both the White House and Congress. Let it be their problem. But if the attack could be timed just right – like in October – it might bail out a sinking McCain candidacy.

A year ago, we wrote and posted online the “Iran Pledge of Resistance Petition”. It basically stated that if the US attacked Iran, the signers would be in the streets organizing mass civil disobedience. We need to be ready to take that step and to publicize our readiness. The first step in that direction would be to unify the Austin antiwar movement. There are dozens of organizations in Austin that are antiwar – MDS, Austin Peace and Justice Coalition, Austin Against War, Third Coast Activist Alliance, CAMEO, Codepink, MoveOn, the Green Party, and Texans for Peace, just to name a few of the most obvious. Sentiment among the 7,000+ delegates to the Travis County Democratic Party convention last month was uniformly antiwar and the convention’s passed a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Austin needs a broadly based antiwar council and that coalition needs to publicly state that it will react in the most militant non-violent manner to any attack on Iran.

David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

Bush Hypes Threat from Iran in Surge “Success” Speech
By Matthew Rothschild / April 10, 2008

In his speech on Thursday, Bush wasted little time before getting to the ominous subject of Iran.

Time and time again, he lumped the alleged threat from Iran in the same breath as the one from Al Qaeda, once again fusing enemies in the minds of the American people.

“Serious and complex challenges remain in Iraq, from the presence of Al Qaeda to the destructive influence of Iran,” he said, even before declaring that the surge has “renewed and revived the prospect of success.”

A little later, he said, “Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century: Al Qaeda and Iran.” (Bush has now elevated Iran over China as the looming threat of the century!)

And in the next paragraph, he said, “If we succeed in Iraq after all that Al Qaeda and Iran have invested there, it would be a historic blow to the global terrorist movement and a severe setback for Iran.”

Al Qaeda-Iran, Al Qaeda-Iran, Al Qaeda-Iran. That is the chant emanating from the White House.

But Bush was not content to be subtle about his belligerence toward Iran.

Listen to the saber rattle:

“The regime in Tehran also has a choice to make,” Bush said. “It can live in peace with its neighbor, enjoy strong economic and cultural and religious ties. Or it can continue to arm and train and fund illegal militant groups, which are terrorizing the Iraqi people and turning them against Iran. If Iran makes the right choice, America will encourage a peaceful relationship between Iran and Iraq. Iran makes the wrong choice, America will act to protect our interests, and our troops, and our Iraqi partners.”

By “America will act,” Bush is making damn clear that he intends to go ahead and bomb Iran.

We can keep telling ourselves that Bush wouldn’t be so foolish as to widen the war to Iran when the one in Iraq is going so badly. But foolishness has never stopped him before.

Regard his words.

They put not only Tehran on notice.

They put Congress and the American people on notice.

This man is planning on waging another illegal war, and we need to do all that we can, nonviolently, to stop him.

Source / The Progressive / The Rag Blog

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Pat Buchanan on Likelihood of War with Iran

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Petraeus Points to War With Iran
By Patrick J. Buchanan

The neocons may yet get their war on Iran.

Ever since President Nouri al-Maliki ordered the attacks in Basra on the Mahdi Army, Gen. David Petraeus has been laying the predicate for U.S. air strikes on Iran and a wider war in the Middle East.

Iran, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, has “fueled the recent violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support of the special groups.”

These “special groups” are “funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran’s Quds Force with help from Lebanese Hezbollah. It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds at Iraq’s seat of government (the Green Zone) … causing loss of innocent life and fear in the capital.”

Is the Iranian government aware of this — and behind it?

“President Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders” promised to end their “support for the special groups,” said the general, but the “nefarious activities of the Quds force have continued.”

Are Iranians then murdering Americans, asked Joe Lieberman:

“Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups in Iraq are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?”

“It certainly is. … That is correct,” said Petraeus.

The following day, Petraeus told the House Armed Services Committee, “Unchecked, the ’special groups’ pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.”

Translation: The United States is now fighting the proxies of Iran for the future of Iraq.

The general’s testimony is forcing Bush’s hand, for consider the question it logically raises: If the Quds Force and Hezbollah, both designated as terrorist organizations, are arming, training and directing “special groups” to “murder” Americans, and rocket and mortar the Green Zone to kill our diplomats, and they now represent the No. 1 threat to a free Iraq, why has Bush failed to neutralize these base camps of terror and aggression?

Hence, be not surprised if President Bush appears before the TV cameras, one day soon, to declare:

“My commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, has told me that Iran, with the knowledge of President Ahmadinejad, has become a privileged sanctuary for two terrorist organizations — Hezbollah and the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — to train, arm and direct terrorist attacks on U.S. and coalition forces, despite repeated promises to halt this murderous practice.

“I have therefore directed U.S. air and naval forces to begin air strikes on these base camps of terror. Our attacks will continue until the Iranian attacks cease.”

Because of the failures of a Democratic Congress elected to end the war, Bush can now make a compelling case that he would be acting fully within his authority as commander in chief.

In early 2007, Nancy Pelosi pulled down a resolution that would have denied Bush the authority to attack Iran without congressional approval. In September, both Houses passed the Kyl-Lieberman resolution designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.

Courtesy of Congress, Bush thus has a blank check for war on Iran. And the signs are growing that he intends to fill it in and cash it.

Israel has been hurling invective at Iran and conducting security drills to prepare its population for rocket barrages worse than those Hezbollah delivered in the Lebanon War.

Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, the Central Command head who opposed war with Iran, has been removed. Hamas and Hezbollah have been stocking up on Qassam and Katyusha rockets.

Vice President Cheney has lately toured Arab capitals.

And President Ahmadinejad just made international headlines by declaring that Tehran will begin installing 6,000 advanced centrifuges to accelerate Iran’s enrichment of uranium.

This is Bush’s last chance to strike and, when Iran responds, to effect its nuclear castration. Are Bush and Cheney likely to pass up this last chance to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and effect the election of John McCain? For any attack on Iran’s “terrorist bases” would rally the GOP and drive a wedge between Obama and Hillary.

Indeed, Sen. Clinton, who voted to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, could hardly denounce Bush for ordering air strikes on the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, when Petraeus testified, in her presence, that it is behind the serial murder of U.S. soldiers.

The Iranians may sense what is afoot. For Tehran helped broker the truce in the Maliki-Sadr clash in Basra, and has called for a halt to the mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone.

With a friendly regime in Baghdad that rolled out the red carpet for Ahmadinejad, Iran has nothing to gain by war. Already, it is the big winner from the U.S. wars that took down Tehran’s Taliban enemies, decimated its al-Qaida enemies and destroyed its Sunni enemies, Saddam and his Baath Party.

No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran.

Source.
Thanks to Carl Davidson

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