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From the Creeps Who’ve Spent Billions on War
White House Official Tells Judge: Searching for Missing Emails Too Much Work
by Jason Leopold / March 24th, 2008
The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of emails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court late Friday.
Friday’s court filing by the White House came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola last week demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a “forensic copy” of emails from individual hard drives. Facciola entered the order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005.
In documents filed with Faciolla Friday, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, said the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So its unlikely that any lost emails would be retrieved anyway.
“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired… under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” states Payton’s sworn affidavit filed with Facciola late Friday.
“And even if some older computer workstations were in use, finding them and copying their hard drives with the hope that the residual data contains relevant e-mail information would create an ‘awfully expensive needle to justify searching a haystack,’” a separate court filing the White House made Friday says.
“Even if computer workstations used during the relevant time period are identifiable and locatable, making “forensic copies” (as that term is defined by the Court) of the workstations that may or may not contain residual data of emails would impose a significant burden on OA,” added Payton’s affidavit. “As I understand it, an Order requiring defendants to make a copy of all active data on workstations containing profiles from the relevant time period would require hundreds of hours of work by… staff and management personnel. Such an effort would inevitably divert significant resources from the [Office of the Chief Administration Officer] functions and projects relating to core administration operations. The precise duration of the procurement process, as well as costs associated with that process, are not presently knowable, but they must be expected to be substantial given the sensitivity and significance of such a project.”
Read all of it here.
Our Reputation in the World Is in the Toilet
Happy Anniversary, America! How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?
By David Michael Green
24/03/08 “ICH” — — Watching George W. Bush in operation these last couple of weeks is like having an out-of-body experience. On acid. During a nightmare. In a different galaxy.
As he presides over the latest disaster of his administration, (No, it’s not a terrorist attack – that was 2001! No, it’s not a catastrophic war – that was 2003! No, it’s not a drowning city – that was 2005! This one is an economic meltdown, ladies and gentlemen!) bringing to it the same blithe disengagement with which he’s attended the previous ones, you cannot but stop and gaze in stark, comedic awe, realizing that the most powerful polity that ever existed on the planet twice picked this imbecilic buffoon as its leader, from among 300 million other choices. Seeing him clown with the Washington press corps yet once again – and seeing them fawn over him, laugh in all the right places, and give him a standing ovation, also yet once again – is the equivalent of having all your logic circuits blown simultaneously. Truly, the universe has a twisted and deeply ironic sense of humor. Monty Python is about as funny – and as stiff – as Dick Nixon, by comparison.
It’s simply incomprehensible. It’s not so astonishing, of course, that a country could have a bad leader whose aims are nefarious on the occasions when they are competent enough to rise to that level of intentionality. Plenty of countries have managed that feat, especially when – as was the case with Bush – every sort of scam is employed to steal power, and then pure corruption and intimidation used to keep it. History is quite littered indeed with bimbos and petty criminals of this caliber. What is harder to explain is how a country of such remarkable achievements in other domains, and with the capacity to choose, and in the twenty-first century no less, allows this to happen. And then stands by silently watching for eight years as the tragedy unfolds before their eyes, all 600 million of them, hardly any of them even blinking.
And so, remarkably, as we mark now the fifth anniversary of the very most tragic of these debacles, the most destructive and the most shameful – because it was the most avoidable – the sad question of the hour is less what is to be done about it than will anyone even notice? Not likely. And not for very long if they do. And, most of all, definitely not enough so as to take meaningful action to bring it to an end, even at this absurdly late date.
But let’s give credit where credit is due. This is precisely by design. This is exactly the outcome intended by the greatest propaganda-promulgating regime since Hermann Göring set fire to the Reichstag. It was Göring himself who famously reminded us that, “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Sure worked in Germany. And it worked even better here, because these guys were so absolutely careful to avoid exposing the costs of their war to those who could demand its end. For example, by some counts, there are more mercenaries fighting in Iraq, at extremely high cost, than there are US military personnel. There’s only one reason for that. If the administration implemented the draft that is actually necessary to supply this war with adequate personnel, the public would end both the war and the careers of its sponsors, post haste. For the same reason, this is the first American war ever which has not only not been accompanied by a tax increase, but has in fact witnessed a tax cut. Likewise – to ‘preserve the dignity’ of the dead, of course – you are no longer permitted to see photographs of flag-draped caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base.
And the press are embedded with forces who are also responsible for their safety, which is just a fancy way of saying that they’re so censored they make Pravda look good. It is, in short, quite easy for average Americans to get through their day, every day, without the war impacting their lives in any visible respect, and that is precisely what hundreds of millions of us are doing, week in and week out. All of this is courtesy of an administration that couldn’t run a governmental program to save its own life – but, boy, they sure as hell know how to market stuff.
Read the rest of it here.
Republican Hit? Official Spitzer Story Questioned
GOP operative wrote investigators in November
In the 1970s, he was on the payroll of Richard Nixon’s now-infamous Committee to Reelect the President. In the 1980s, he helped George Bush Sr. trounce Michael Dukakis by floating a racially charged ad about the Democratic governor’s role in furloughing a black inmate. And in 2000, he organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers” riot, forcing the shutdown of a recount in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that may have turned the election to George W. Bush.
In the 1970s, he was on the payroll of Richard Nixon’s now-infamous Committee to Reelect the President. In the 1980s, he helped George Bush Sr. trounce Michael Dukakis by floating a racially charged ad about the Democratic governor’s role in furloughing a black inmate. And in 2000, he organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers” riot, forcing the shutdown of a recount in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that may have turned the election to George W. Bush.
Last November, his lawyer wrote a letter to the FBI. In it, GOP political operative Roger Stone’s attorney, Paul Rolf alleged that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer “used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida, basing his information on a “social contact.”
The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Stone gleaned the information from “a social contact in an adult themed club.”
“The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services,” Rolf wrote. “It is Mr. Stone’s understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer.”
It continued, including particular detail — Stone’s lawyer wrote that the governor hadn’t taken off his calf-length socks “during the sex act.”
It’s unclear whether Stone’s letter sparked the investigation: court papers say the investigation began “in or about October 2007.”
The New York Times reported that law enforcement officials “stumbled upon” the prostitution ring after they’d begun an investigation of Spitzer for potential corruption, after a bank flagged “suspicious transfers.”
The missive’s timing — in November — was preceded by contact from the FBI. The Miami Herald, which first reported on Stone’s lawyer’s letter, said the letter was written in response to contact from federal investigators.
“His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted,” Herald reporter Amy Driscoll wrote Friday.
Subsequent reports shed little light on why the FBI sought to speak to Stone before the letter was sent. The Times speculated that the bureau might have wanted to talk to Stone about a threatening message he allegedly left for Spitzer’s father, which resulted in his being fired by New York’s top Senate Republican.
Stone chose his words carefully when speaking to the Times: “He said that he was never interviewed by federal officials and that he was not sure his lawyers were contacted because of the reported call to Bernard Spitzer.”
He did say, however, “in a series of e-mail messages on Sunday,” that “his lawyers were contacted by federal investigators three weeks after the allegations about the call surfaced.”
The FBI has declined to comment, either on whether they received Rolf’s letter or if they contacted Stone directly.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak hinted at a possible Stone role in a column earlier this month.
“Republican political operative Roger Stone, Eliot Spitzer’s longtime antagonist, predicted his political demise more than three months in advance,” Novak wrote. “Spitzer’s entrapment by federal authorities investigating a prostitution ring raised speculation that Stone, with a 40-year record as a political hit man, somehow was behind it.”
“Eliot Spitzer will not serve out his term as governor of the state of New York,” Stone said Dec. 6 on Michael Smerconish’s radio talk show,” Novak added. “He gave no details.”
Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, avers that the Times’ explanation of Spitzer’s ‘capture’ after a bank flagged his transactions doesn’t entirely ring true to career prosecutors.
“There is no hard evidence that Eliot Spitzer was targeted for investigation, but the story of how he was caught does not ring entirely true to many experienced former prosecutors and current criminal lawyers,” Dershowitz wrote. “The New York Times reported that the revelations began with a routine tax inquiry by revenue agents ‘conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks.’ This investigation allegedly found ‘several unusual movements of cash involving the Governor of New York.’ But the movement of the amounts of cash required to pay prostitutes, even high-priced prostitutes over a long period of time, does not commonly generate a full-scale investigation.”
“We are talking about thousands, not millions, of dollars. We are also talking about a man who is a multimillionaire with numerous investments and purchases,” he added. “The idea that federal investigators would focus on a few transactions to corporations — that were not themselves under investigation — raises as many questions as answers.”
In a nod to his beginnings, Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on the back of his neck.Raw Story / The Rag Blog / March 24, 2008
4,000.
Vigil in Austin, March 24, 5 p.m.
I am sorry to report that the U.S. casualty count in Iraq has just reached the sad milestone of 4,000 deaths.
Please join us for a vigil to mourn these tragic deaths this afternoon, March 24 at 5 p.m. This has been a standing call from CodePink..
We will meet at the corner of 6th and Lamar in Austin. We will wear black and we encourage you to do the same. We will have black veils available for those who wish to wear them.
Alice Embree / March 24, 2008 / The Rag Blog
The death toll for U.S. solders in Iraq has reached 4,000:
The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.
The American deaths occurred Sunday, the same day rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide.
From MSNBC / March 23, 2008 / The Rag Blog
Source.
The Neocons Had Deliberately Gamed the System
From Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. This demonstrates the depth of criminality centred in the White House and highest levels of the BushCo administration. It is beyond me how we do nothing in the face of such contempt for the law and the people.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog
Unger: The Iraq War was a Conspiracy
Craig Unger’s email, part of an interchange on a private discussion group, is reprinted here with permission:
[A critic, let us call him X, objected] to Jim Lobe’s suggestion that Iraqi WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda had nothing to do with starting the Iraq War. But Lobe is right. X is off base when he says nothing “suggests anything other than they believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs.”
As my recent book, The Fall of the House of Bush–which owes a debt to Lobe’s fine reporting on the neocons) shows in great detail, Cheney and the neocons effectively created an alternative national security apparatus to circumvent, sabotage and subvert the $40 billion a year that the nation spends on intelligence and to disseminate false intelligence about Saddam that would create a basis for war.
To be specific, let’s take the Niger documents that falsely asserted that Saddam had agreed to buy 500 tons of yellowcake from the Republic of Niger. Many unanswered questions remain about the origin of the documents. But no one contests that they were forgeries that were based on documents stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome over New Year’s Eve in 2000.
I traveled to Rome to investigate the fabrication and dissemination of the documents, and, as I report in my book, I found that both the documents themselves and the information in them were distributed by right wing elements of Italian intelligence and the neocons in a deliberate manner to make it appear as if there were multiple independent sources corroborating one another, when in fact the only source were the original phony documents.
When the White House wanted to use the documents to build the case for war in an October 2002 speech Bush gave in Cincinnati, the CIA intervened twice to say the information was not reliable.
As I also show in my book, these documents and/or the information in them were discredited by Western authorities(including the CIA and the State Department) on at least fourteen such occasions before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address
But none of that stopped Bush from citing this information–or, rather, disinformation– as a casus belli in his famous sixteen words in his 2003 SOTU Address. [ Col. Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, told me, if he took something out of Colin Powell’s UN speech 47 times, the neocons would put in 48.]
X seems to suggest that all this could have been the result of mere ineptitude. However, I cite, on the record, no fewer than nine former officials in the military and intelligence worlds who characterize the Niger document episode as black propaganda or part of a disinformation campaign that was intentionally done to mislead the American people into supporting a war.
Likewise, one has only to talk to Tyler Drumheller, the former head of European operations for the CIA, who has recounted at great length how he vetted “Curveball,” the prized Iraqi exile who spun phony yarns about mobile weapons vans, and told his superiors again and again and again that Curveball could not be trusted. Yet George Tenet, under pressure from the White House and the neocons, ignored him. As a result, Colin Powell told the world about the phony mobile weapons vans.
One could go on at great length with many other examples(as I do in my book). But the point is, the neocons had deliberately gamed the system. As their policy papers show, they knew they wanted to start the war long before the administration took office and in order to do so they knew they had to control intelligence. That’s why Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams began making semi-secret trips to Austin as early as 1998 to convince Bush that an invasion was necessary. That’s why, in December 2000, they tried to put Wolfowitz in as head of the CIA. And that’s why, when that didn’t work, they moved him to the Pentagon where he oversaw the creation of the Office of Special Plans which was in charge of putting out phony intelligence.
Likewise, Cheney put John Bolton in at State to keep an eye on Colin Powell and to make sure that State Department analysts at INR( who had repeatedly discovered the errors in the phony neocon intelligence) were kept out of all the key meetings. As a result, Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN based on intel that came from the neocons in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon–not the professionals at Langley and at [the State Department’s intelligence analysis branch,] INR.
In other words, we went to war not because of intelligence failures, as X seems to think, but because of intelligence successes–successful black propaganda operations, successful disinformation operations–that were deliberately designed to mislead the American people.
As to why, again, I believe that Jim Lobe is on the right track. One has only to read the various neocon policy papers dating back to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers(aka the Wolfowitz Doctrine), A Clean Break in 1996, David Wurmser’s Tyranny’s Ally in 1997, the PNAC papers of 1998, and scores of other articles to see that the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began. According to these papers, the chief reasons for this grand new strategy of overhauling the Middle East were regional security(ie, Israel) and to protect America’s strategic resources(ie, oil.)
Craig Unger
Vanity Fair Magazine
Go here for information about The Fall of the House of Bush and to buy the book.
Freeze!
Stop-Action Action
By William Blum / March 23, 2008
Washington, DC – Freeze! No, it wasn’t the police or the FBI breaking into a house and yelling at a bunch of dangerous radicals. It was a hundred dangerous radicals telling the White House and the Pentagon to freeze their crimes against humanity — five years of heartless destruction of a five thousand year civilization.
The radicals were at Union Station in Washington mingling with a crowd of commuters on March 18. At a set moment they all ceased any motion and stood in place, unmoving and silent, to the surprise and confusion of the commuters. At the five-minute mark they all began chanting “Rise up! End the War!” Many commuters joined in. It was a marvelous moment.
Source.
Next Left Notes / The Rag Blog
Brian Kelly and the New SDS
To the Ramparts (Gently)
By Ben Gibberd / New York Times /March 23, 2008
One March morning two years ago, a Pace University freshman named Brian Kelly and a dozen or so friends piled into a few cars and drove to the university’s Westchester County campus in Pleasantville, to attend a speech by former President Bill Clinton.
After the speech, which was part of the university’s centennial celebration, they submitted written questions for Mr. Clinton, as they had been invited to do.
Toward the end of the session, when they did not hear their questions asked of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Kelly tried a different tack.
“A friend and I got up and interrupted as a question about peace and democracy was being put to him by the university president,” he said. “And we said: ‘You’re a war criminal! What about Iraq and Bosnia and so forth?’ ”
Mr. Kelly and his friend were swiftly plucked from the auditorium by Secret Service agents and questioned for nearly an hour in a back room, he said.
Mr. Kelly speaks out a lot about politics these days, and not surprisingly. People like him are the new face of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical group that made headlines so often at the end of the 1960s.
On April 23, 1968 — 40 years ago next month — students at Columbia University, most notably S.D.S. members, took to the streets in the first major protest over the school’s plan to build a gym in Morningside Park; later in the spring, protesting the Vietnam War, the students seized several university buildings. By the time the demonstrators were forced out by the police, more than 700 students had been arrested and 150 had been hospitalized.
In the past few years, S.D.S. has re-emerged. But despite Mr. Kelly’s affiliation with the group and his actions during Mr. Clinton’s speech, he and other members of the new generation of S.D.S. approach politics in a strikingly different way from the firebrands of 1968. Mr. Kelly, for example, who spends much of his time hunched in front of his computer, sometimes sounds more like an earnest sociologist — the subject is his major — than a campus radical intent on scaling the ramparts.
“Society is made up of institutions, and institutions are built on consent,” Mr. Kelly said one recent morning during a wide-ranging conversation at a Starbucks cafe near Union Square. “And if you get people to say, ‘We withdraw our consent, we want new institutions, we want better policies,’ that’s how movements are built.”
The Stereotype, the Reality
“The mass media, with a little help from the older liberals, have painted a tyrannizing caricature of the ‘Student Rioter,’ ” the journalist Jack Newfield wrote in The New York Times in May 1969 in his review of “The Strawberry Statement,” James Simon Kunen’s account of the unrest at Columbia. “He has long dirty hair, an insatiable libido, and a four-letter word vocabulary. He is violent, irrational, anti-democratic.”
Sitting in Starbucks, Mr. Kelly, a clean-shaven, neatly dressed and highly composed 21-year old with close-cropped hair, hardly resembled the stereotypical radicals of 1968. Only the small pin on the lapel of his light brown jacket, depicting a bomb with a red line through it, and another on his shirt, reading “sds,” hinted at his politics.
He chose his words slowly and with a politician’s care, and his lean physique and wholesome demeanor suggested a track team member or an Eagle Scout — both of which Mr. Kelly was when he was growing up in Orange County, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city. His father is a computer programmer, his mother sells real estate, and both, he says, have been accepting of his political activities.
“They were a little hesitant after the Clinton thing, but they never asked me not to do anything,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think they understand.”
In high school, he was a student activist who engaged in what he described as “general liberal politics — blood drives, food drives, stuff around Darfur, that kind of thing.”
As a freshman at Pace’s main campus in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Kelly joined the school’s chapter of the Campus Anti-War Network, a national group opposed to the Iraq war. After S.D.S. was revived in January 2006 by two high school students, one from North Carolina, the other from Connecticut, the antiwar chapter became the Pace S.D.S. chapter. Other city schools with S.D.S. chapters include Queens College, New York University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute and New School University, most with about 25 members.
When the Pace chapter was born, Mr. Kelly’s activism really took off and he became, as he put it, “basically a full-time organizer” for the revived S.D.S. But when it comes to his attitude toward the violence of the ’60s, Mr. Kelly will never be mistaken for some of his predecessors.
“I actually think violent action isn’t radical at all,” he said firmly. “Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to change society. Violence doesn’t change society, and if it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, it’s not radical.” Mr. Kelly paused. “I don’t know what it is,” he added, “but it has nothing to do with what I want to do.”
Drama, Yes. Violence, No.
Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two years ago during a protest on Pace’s Manhattan campus, and once a year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither arrest led to any charges.
No charges grew out of Mr. Kelly’s brief face-off with Mr. Clinton either, although the encounter had its unnerving moments.
“We were about 100 feet or so away from the president,” Mr. Kelly recalled. “And it all happened so fast I don’t remember being scared — more kind of nervous. These guys in generic suits just came toward us.”
Although he and his friends were not arrested, Mr. Kelly said that the Secret Service agents who grilled him and his friend called them “clowns” and said they might be held for 72 hours and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Their cars were also searched without their consent, Mr. Kelly said, and their S.D.S. colleagues were questioned.
(Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said of the episode, “We have great respect for individual freedoms, specifically freedom of speech, and do not set out to engage individuals who do not pose a threat to protectees. However, that determination in many cases cannot be made without simply speaking to people first.”)
Despite the events of that day, Mr. Kelly said he had never experienced hostility on his campus.
“Disagreement among some people,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a New York City campus, so a lot of people are progressive. Or a lot of people are just disengaged with politics. I’d say those are the typical reactions.”
His main goal, he said, “isn’t to take over a building, it isn’t to block a recruitment center. It isn’t to do any of these tactics that people kind of zero in on from the ‘60s. Our biggest goal is to get more people who are politicized, who are progressive, who want to join in a mass movement to help change the world.” Amid the chatter of the cafe and the piped-in music of Sheryl Crow and Frank Sinatra, Mr. Kelly’s phrase hung in the air, a momentary echo from another, more idealistic age.
Read all of it here.
Deeply Troubling and Almost Entirely Overlooked
One Foot in the Grave: Iran Attack Nearer, More Likely Than Most Suspect
by Chris Floyd / March 22, 2008
A very important, very disturbing — and almost entirely overlooked — piece appeared on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment site this week. It was a guest column by William R. Polk, laying out, in copious and convincing detail, the evidence indicating that the United States will indeed launch a military strike against Iran, most probably before George W. Bush leaves office.
However, even if Bush does hold off for some reason, the processes that Polk describes will almost certainly lead the next president into war with Iran, especially as the three remaining major candidates have forcefully pledged to keep “all options, and I mean, all options on the table” (Polk quotes Barack Obama’s bellicose formulation). And none of them are likely to have the political courage that Polk rightly says would be necessary to climb down from the highly aggressive posture that both parties have adopted toward Iran.
Polk is no radical firebrand; indeed, he comes toting heavy Establishment lumber: White House service (under John Kennedy), top academic and institutional posts, weighty books on history and international affairs, etc. Yet he paints as stark a picture of the situation as the most implacable dissident.
One development that has arisen after the article was posted gives added credence to Polk’s case. In recent days, both Bush and Dick Cheney have revived the scaremongering threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb that had seemed diffused by the NIE report earlier this year. Of course, that report — in which America’s myriad intelligence agencies declared their consensus view that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is moribund — was itself a more subtle piece of scaremongering. Because the report asserted — without any credible evidence — that Iran HAD been building a nuke until 2003. While the headlines focused on the overall conclusion, the Bush Administration made hay with that latter assertion: “See, we told you Iran has been building a nuclear weapon! We were right.”
They weren’t, of course, but this assertion was a propaganda weapon just waiting to be picked up: and now it has. Bush and Cheney refer to the NIE report as “proof” that Iran has been surreptitiously building nuclear weapons in the recent past — and therefore could be secretly building them again right now. Cheney was very explicit about this during his recent tour of Iraq and other stops in the Middle East — a trip that many have noted carries sinister echoes of a similar jaunt he made around the region just before the invasion of Iraq. As AP notes:
Vice President Dick Cheney retained his tough stance against Iran on Wednesday and said the U.S. is uncertain if Tehran has restarted the nuclear weaponization program that a U.S. intelligence report says it halted in 2003…Critics of the Bush administration said the report should dampen any campaign for a U.S. confrontation with Iran.
But Cheney that that while the NIE said Iran had a program to develop a nuclear warhead, it remains unclear if it has resumed that activity.
“What it (the NIE) says is that they have definitely had in the past a program to develop a nuclear warhead; that it would appear that they stopped that weaponization process in 2003. We don’t know whether or not they’ve restarted,” he said.
Bush too has been pushing this line, most recently in an interview with a government-funded Farsi-language radio station piping White House propaganda into Iran itself. As Dan Froomkin notes, Bush repeated the lie he has often told, asserting that Iran has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” Iran has always declared the opposite, of course. Bush also echoed Cheney’s provocative “mystficiation” about the current state of the alleged Iranian weapons program. As Bush put it: “They’ve hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now, who knows?”
Read all of it here.
Listen to the Winter Soldiers – Stop the Wars
Winter Soldier Marches Again
By Amy Goodman / truthdig / March 23, 2008
Last weekend, in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a remarkable gathering occurred just outside Washington, D.C., called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Hundreds of veterans of these two wars, along with active-duty soldiers, came together to offer testimony about the horrors of war, including atrocities they witnessed or committed themselves.
The name, Winter Soldier, comes from a similar event in 1971, when hundreds of Vietnam veterans gathered in Detroit, and is derived from the opening line of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, “The Crisis,” published in 1776:
“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
This Winter Soldier was organized by the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Kelly Dougherty, an Iraq veteran from the Colorado Army National Guard and IVAW’s executive director, opened the proceedings, saying: “The voices of veterans and service members, as well as civilians on the ground, need to be heard by the American people, and by the people of the world, and also by other people in the military and other veterans so they can find their voice to tell their story, because each of our individual stories is crucially important and needs to be heard if people are to understand the reality and the true human cost of war and occupation.”
What followed were four days of gripping testimony, ranging from firsthand accounts of the murder of Iraqi civilians, the dehumanization of Iraqis and Afghanis that undergirds the violence of the occupations, to the toll that violence takes on the soldiers themselves and the inadequate care they receive upon returning home.
Jon Michael Turner, who fought with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, tore his medals off his chest. He said: “On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. This man was innocent. I don’t know his name. I called him ‘the fat man.’ He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn’t kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterward he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend, who I was on post with, and I said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen.’ So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family. It took seven people to carry his body away.
“We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq.”
Hart Viges was with the 82nd Airborne, part of the invasion in March 2003. He described a house raid where they arrested the wrong men: “We never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person. Not once. I looked at my sergeant, and I was like, ‘Sergeant, these aren’t the men that we’re looking for.’ And he told me, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure they would have done something anyways.’ And this mother, all the while, is crying in my face, trying to kiss my feet. And, you know, I can’t speak Arabic. I can speak human. She was saying, ‘Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.’ And that made me feel very powerless. You know, 82nd Airborne Division, Infantry, with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles and armor and my M4—I was powerless. I was powerless to help her.”
Former Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia also spoke. After serving in Iraq, he refused to return there. He was court-martialed and spent almost a year in prison. Mejia is now the chairman of IVAW. After he finished the testimony of his experience in Iraq, he laid out the group’s demands:
“We have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over 5 million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead [Americans]. We have close to 60,000 injured. That’s not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. War is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq. In order for us to reclaim our humanity as a military and as a country, we demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, care and benefits for all veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people so they can rebuild their country on their terms.”
As we enter the sixth year of the war in Iraq, more time than the U.S. was involved in World War II, we should honor the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, by listening to them.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.
Obama’s Latin American Policy
Change? Not In America’s Backyard! Barack Obama’s Reactionary Stance Towards Latin America
By Chris Carlson / March 23, 2008
As progressives in the United States are riding a wave of excitement about Democratic hopeful Barack Obama and his promise of change, the people of Latin America have much less to be excited about. In fact, given some of his recent comments, Latin America might expect an even more aggressive policy from Barack Obama than what they saw under the Bush administration.
Latin America has long been regarded as America’s “backyard” by both US policymakers, and critics of US imperialism. Nationalist and revolutionary movements in Latin America have long expressed their desire to break away from being the “backyard” of the United States, and achieve their own independent economic development.
But US policymakers, from the Monroe Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine, have long seen Latin America as a strategic region with vast natural resources and lucrative markets which must remain inside the US sphere of influence, regardless of the desires of its people.
Barack Obama apparently feels the same. A few weeks ago he said as much, even using the infamous “backyard” label.
“We’ve been so obsessed with Iraq and so obsessed with the Middle East, we’ve been neglecting Latin America even in our own back yard,” he said at a campaign speech in Alexandria, Virginia. [1]
And he’s right. The Bush administration’s focus on the Middle East has given Latin America some breathing room from the usual US subversion and intervention so common throughout Latin America’s history. In the meantime, leftist leaders have come to power across the region like never before in a series of democratic revolutions dubbed the “Pink Tide.”
Many on the left have seen these developments as an enormous flowering of popular democracy and mass participation, and a clear break from the elitist democracies of the past. The masses have been relatively free to choose leftist and nationalist leaders in democratic elections, without them being toppled by US intervention, with some exceptions. [2]
But Barack Obama does not see it that way. In fact, he apparently views these developments as a problem that has been neglected by the Bush administration, as he warned recently:
“China has been sending diplomats and economic development specialists and building roads all throughout Latin America. They are securing trade agreements and contracts. And we ignore Latin America at our own peril.” [3]
In other words, US neglect of its “backyard” has allowed Latin America to have more freedom to trade with other countries, such as China; a certain threat to the interests of US corporations. Indeed, Latin America’s leftward sweep could prove threatening to US economic interests as the nations of the region seek to take control of their natural resources, diversify their economies, and break away from their dependence on US imports.
It is, of course, the right of any sovereign nation to do these things if it so desires, and Latin American leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa would argue that they are absolutely essential for the region’s development.
But Barack Obama views this as a problem; a result of US neglect of the region, and apparently hopes to roll back these democratic changes in Latin America. During a recent debate appearance in Austin, Texas he implied that US neglect of the region has allowed leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to have too much freedom.
“We’ve been diverted from focusing on Latin America… Is it any surprise, then, that you’ve seen people like Hugo Chavez and countries like China move into the void, because we’ve been neglectful of that,” he said. [4]
And Venezuela’s Chavez appears to be a particular problem for Obama; one that has led him to include Venezuela on a list of “rogue states,” along with Cuba, Iran and Syria, and to express his opposition to the Venezuelan president in a recent speech:
“I don’t actually agree with Chavez’s polices and how he’s dealing with his people,” he said. [5]
It apparently doesn’t matter that the Venezuelan people do agree with Chavez’s policies, and have repeatedly shown their widespread support of him in open democratic elections. And Obama evidently sees Venezuela as a “rogue state” not because it is a security threat, but because “[Chavez] has been using oil revenue to stir up trouble against the United States,” as he said recently. [6]
Indeed, many Latin American nations have recently gotten the “crazy” idea that they can use their own natural resources the way they want, and do not need to respect the interests of the United States. Venezuela’s Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales are among those who have nationalized their natural resources, and have begun to use the revenue the way they see fit.
Chavez especially has used Venezuela’s oil revenue to finance joint projects with other countries and to increase regional trade among Latin American nations. The policies have the goal of diversifying Venezuela’s economy, and severing the region’s dependence on the United States. [7]
If this is what Obama refers to as “stirring up trouble,” he is correct that these policies are not in the interests of US corporations that seek to maintain control of the markets and resources of Latin American countries. But shouldn’t the people of Latin America get to decide how the revenues from their resources are used? Or is this a decision that should come from Washington?
Read all of it (including missing references) here.
