New York Times Editorial
Published: March 9, 2006
The wrenching debate in the 1970's over the abuse of presidential power produced two groundbreaking reforms aimed at preventing a president from using war or broader claims of national security to trample Americans' rights.
One was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership. They endured for a quarter of a century — until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.
The Senate panel has become so paralyzingly partisan that it could not even manage to do its basic job this week and look into President Bush's warrantless spying on Americans' international e-mail and phone calls. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman, said Tuesday that there would be no investigation. Instead, the committee's Republicans voted to create a subcommittee that is supposed to get reports from the White House on any future warrantless surveillance.
It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control. This new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving the spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.
The Republicans' idea of supervision involves saying the White House should get a warrant for spying whenever possible. Currently a warrant is needed, period. And that's the right law. The White House has not offered a scrap of evidence that it interferes with antiterrorist operations. Mr. Bush simply decided the law did not apply to him.
It was no surprise that Mr. Roberts led this retreat. He's been blocking an investigation into the domestic spying operation for weeks, just as he has been stonewalling a promised investigation into how the White House hyped the intelligence on Iraq. But it was disappointing to see a principled Republican like Senator Olympia Snowe go along. The Democrats are not blameless, either. Too often, their positions seem like campaign tactics, and Senator John Rockefeller IV fumbled by not consulting Ms. Snowe, who is up for re-election and under intense White House pressure.
But the Republicans deserve the lion's share of the blame. It was Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who hyped the intelligence on Iraq — and the Senate Republicans who helped them evade accountability. And it was Mr. Bush who approved the warrantless wiretapping, which is part of Mr. Cheney's crusade to expand presidential powers. (Unlike the rest of us, Mr. Cheney thought the lesson of Watergate was that the president was not strong enough.)
Ms. Snowe said she would still support an investigation if the new panel uncovered more wrongdoing. But that's hardly likely to happen because the Republicans on the panel are Mr. Roberts, Orrin Hatch, Mike DeWine and Christopher Bond, who march in lock step with the White House.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is still looking into the wiretapping. That committee should have plenty of incentive to go forward — its chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, was righteously angry when he received a letter in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales implied that there was more warrantless spying we don't know about. Mr. Gonzales won't even say that Mr. Bush understands it is blatantly illegal to spy on communications within the United States without a warrant. Nevertheless, there's not much cause for hope: Mr. Specter has a sad habit of bowing to the right wing when the chips are down.
There are moments when leaders simply have to take a stand. It seems to us that one of them is when Americans are in danger of the kind of unchecked surveillance that they thought had died with J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate and spying on Vietnam protesters and civil rights leaders.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Remember the "axis of evil"?
It's getting harder and harder to forget
by Tim Grieve
George Will said the other day that the three countries in the president's axis of evil are "more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002." Today's news sure seems to back him up.
Iran warned today that it will cause the United States "harm and pain" if the U.S. succeeds in winning sanctions against the country for its nuclear program. Not that the United States could do anything anyway. With troops bogged down elsewhere, saber-rattling from the likes of Dick Cheney lacks anything approaching credibility, and opposition from Russia makes meaningful U.N. Security Council sanctions unlikely.
North Korea offered a different sort of warning today, firing two short-range missiles in what appeared to be a test of its own nuclear program. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the tests confirm that North Korea's missile program is "a concern that poses a threat to the region and the larger international community." The administration's best-it-can-do response: Urge North Korea to return to long-stalled six-country talks aimed at stopping the country's nuclear program.
And then there's Iraq. In 2002, it was a repressive dictatorship, hemmed in by U.N. inspections and no-fly zones and run by a man who only wished he had the kind of weapons the Bush administration said he had. Today, it's a mess of a country -- a "Pandora's box," the U.S. ambassador said the other day -- where homegrown insurgents, warring faiths and al-Qaida operatives compete to see who can cause the most damage.
In a commentary up now at Nieman Watchdog, William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, says Iraq may end up looking a lot like Vietnam -- only worse. "Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having," Odom writes.
With what seem like crises coming from all three of the "axis" countries, you might think that the president and Congress would be focusing hard on solutions. But George W. Bush -- fresh off his taxpayer-financed trip home to vote in the Republican primary -- was on the Gulf Coast today, trying to put a happier face on reconstruction efforts there. And Congress -- when it's not busy scuttling an investigation into warrantless spying -- remains at full boil over the still-hypothetical harms of the Dubai Ports World deal. We feel safer already.
by Tim Grieve
George Will said the other day that the three countries in the president's axis of evil are "more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002." Today's news sure seems to back him up.
Iran warned today that it will cause the United States "harm and pain" if the U.S. succeeds in winning sanctions against the country for its nuclear program. Not that the United States could do anything anyway. With troops bogged down elsewhere, saber-rattling from the likes of Dick Cheney lacks anything approaching credibility, and opposition from Russia makes meaningful U.N. Security Council sanctions unlikely.
North Korea offered a different sort of warning today, firing two short-range missiles in what appeared to be a test of its own nuclear program. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the tests confirm that North Korea's missile program is "a concern that poses a threat to the region and the larger international community." The administration's best-it-can-do response: Urge North Korea to return to long-stalled six-country talks aimed at stopping the country's nuclear program.
And then there's Iraq. In 2002, it was a repressive dictatorship, hemmed in by U.N. inspections and no-fly zones and run by a man who only wished he had the kind of weapons the Bush administration said he had. Today, it's a mess of a country -- a "Pandora's box," the U.S. ambassador said the other day -- where homegrown insurgents, warring faiths and al-Qaida operatives compete to see who can cause the most damage.
In a commentary up now at Nieman Watchdog, William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, says Iraq may end up looking a lot like Vietnam -- only worse. "Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S. power that Iraq is already having," Odom writes.
With what seem like crises coming from all three of the "axis" countries, you might think that the president and Congress would be focusing hard on solutions. But George W. Bush -- fresh off his taxpayer-financed trip home to vote in the Republican primary -- was on the Gulf Coast today, trying to put a happier face on reconstruction efforts there. And Congress -- when it's not busy scuttling an investigation into warrantless spying -- remains at full boil over the still-hypothetical harms of the Dubai Ports World deal. We feel safer already.
At Conservative Forum on Bush, Everybody's a Critic
washingtonpost.com
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A02
If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations.
"We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that."
Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?
Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."
It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," Sullivan called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."
Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."
True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq.
Bartlett, who lost his job at the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis because of his book, said that if conservatives were honest, more would join his complaint. "They're reticent to address the issues that I've raised for fear that they might have to agree with them," he told the group. "And a lot of Washington think tanks and groups of that sort, they know that this White House is very vindictive."
Waiting for the talk to start, some in the audience expressed their ambivalence.
"It's gonna hit the [bestseller] lists, I'm sure," said Cato's legal expert, Roger Pilon.
"Typical Bruce," replied John Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Admitted Pilon: "He's got a lot of material to work with."
Bartlett certainly thought so. He began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.
Boaz assured the audience that he told the White House that "if there's a rebuttal to what Bruce has said, please come and provide it."
Instead, Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government." The notion, he said, that the "Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy."
The question period gave the two a chance to come up with new insults.
"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.
"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."
Boaz renewed his plea. "Any Bush economists hiding in the audience?"
There was, in fact, one Bush Treasury official on the attendance roster, but he did not surface. The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was "willing to overlook" the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations. Even Richard Walker, representing the think tank that fired Bartlett, declined to argue. "I agree with most of it," he said later.
Unchallenged, the Bartlett-Sullivan tag team continued. "The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."
Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing."
Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic."
Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."
"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."
"Gosh," Boaz interjected. "I wish we had a senior White House aide up here."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A02
If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations.
"We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that."
Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?
Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."
It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," Sullivan called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."
Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."
True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq.
Bartlett, who lost his job at the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis because of his book, said that if conservatives were honest, more would join his complaint. "They're reticent to address the issues that I've raised for fear that they might have to agree with them," he told the group. "And a lot of Washington think tanks and groups of that sort, they know that this White House is very vindictive."
Waiting for the talk to start, some in the audience expressed their ambivalence.
"It's gonna hit the [bestseller] lists, I'm sure," said Cato's legal expert, Roger Pilon.
"Typical Bruce," replied John Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Admitted Pilon: "He's got a lot of material to work with."
Bartlett certainly thought so. He began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.
Boaz assured the audience that he told the White House that "if there's a rebuttal to what Bruce has said, please come and provide it."
Instead, Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government." The notion, he said, that the "Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy."
The question period gave the two a chance to come up with new insults.
"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.
"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."
Boaz renewed his plea. "Any Bush economists hiding in the audience?"
There was, in fact, one Bush Treasury official on the attendance roster, but he did not surface. The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was "willing to overlook" the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations. Even Richard Walker, representing the think tank that fired Bartlett, declined to argue. "I agree with most of it," he said later.
Unchallenged, the Bartlett-Sullivan tag team continued. "The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."
Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing."
Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic."
Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."
"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."
"Gosh," Boaz interjected. "I wish we had a senior White House aide up here."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Fw: Congress Can Stop the U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Agreement - FCNL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Guthrie" <kathyguthrie@fcnl.org>
To: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 4:28 PM
Subject: Congress Can Stop the U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Agreement -
FCNL
When President Bush arrived in New Delhi last week, India had the
capacity to produce 6 to 10 nuclear weapons per year. When he departed
after reaching a tentative nuclear deal with India, that South East
Asian nation will potentially be able to produce nearly 50 nuclear
weapons per year.
Before the new U.S.-India nuclear agreement is implemented, however,
Congress will have to approve changes to existing legislation that
would weaken several nonproliferation laws. This deal would undermine
years of work by the U.S. to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), the international agreement endorsed by 188 nations that
bans the export of nuclear technology to countries that don't agree to
international inspections of their nuclear programs.
India has refused to sign the NPT and has conducted tests of a nuclear
weapon as recently as 1998. Nonetheless, the Bush administration wants
to provide India with nuclear technology and fuel. In exchange, India
has agreed to international inspections for 14 of its 22 nuclear
reactors. This proposal undermines the NPT by tacitly encouraging other
countries to make bilateral nuclear agreements with non-NPT members in
violation of a basic principle of that agreement.
The proposed U.S.-India agreement could also deteriorate relatively
stable relations between India and Pakistan if the latter perceives
this agreement to be an aggressive move. What would stop Pakistan from
reaching a similar agreement with China? Furthermore, even while the
U.S. is criticizing Iran (an NPT member) for developing its nuclear
technology, the U.S. is simultaneously creating a double standard by
offering India (a non-NPT member) similar nuclear technology. The U.S.
loses a lot from this nuclear agreement with India and gains very
little.
*Congress Can Block This Deal*
The verbal nuclear cooperation agreement that President Bush negotiated
with Indian Prime Minister Singh last week is far from a done deal.
Congress will soon begin debating legislation to implement the
U.S.-India nuclear agreement.
Please let your representative know that you care about reducing the
nuclear danger and that you oppose the U.S.-India nuclear deal. To see
reasons and talking points visit http://www.fcnl.org/redir/1506india/
Rep. Ed Markey (MA), a leading critic of the deal, recently quipped,
"You can't preach temperance from a barstool." If you have
not done so, please encourage your representative to cosponsor
H.Con.Res. 318 (http://www.fcnl.org/redir/1606hconres318/ ), a
bipartisan resolution expressing concern about the proposed nuclear
plan. See an updated list of cosponsors:
http://www.fcnl.org/redir/1706cosponsors/
Some congressional offices have not heard from their constituents on
this issue, so many may think that the public does not care about or
understand this issue. Your emails and calls to your representative are
key, especially if he or she is on the House International Relations
Committee. Find out if your representative is on this committee at
http://www.fcnl.org/redir/1806houseir/
Read FCNL's Legislative Action Message on the U.S.-India nuclear deal
from two weeks ago: http://www.fcnl.org//redir/1906indialam/. For
updated information about the U.S.-India nuclear deal, please visit:
http://www.fcnl.org/redir/2006nuclear/
_______________________________________
The Next Step for Iraq: Join FCNL's Iraq Campaign, http://www.fcnl.org/iraq/
Contact Congress and the Administration:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/dbq/officials/
Order FCNL publications and "War is Not the Answer" campaign
bumper stickers and yard signs:
http://www.fcnl.org/pubs/
http://www.fcnl.org/forms/forms.php?type=bump
Contribute to FCNL:
http://www.fcnl.org/donate/
Subscribe or update your information to this list:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/mlm/. To unsubscribe from this list, please see
the end of this message.
Subscribe to other FCNL legislative, policy, and action alert lists:
http://www.fcnl.org/forms/forms.php?type=ls.
________________________________________
Friends Committee on National Legislation
245 Second St. NE, Washington, DC 20002-5795
fcnl@fcnl.org * http://www.fcnl.org
phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330
We seek a world free of war and the threat of war
We seek a society with equity and justice for all
We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled
We seek an earth restored.
---
If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from us, please visit
http://capwiz.com/fconl/lmx/u/?jobid=66247289&queueid=643204026.
Monday, March 06, 2006
WMD Terrorism is A Nightmare of Different Sort
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Terrorist "capabilities" to use weapons of mass destruction are "more limited" than those of states like North Korea and Iran, but the threat of terrorist attack with WMD is "more likely" than an attack by any state, top U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Despite this broad assertion, U.S. officials offer only that there is the "possibility" of a future terrorist attack with WMD. They present no evidence that there is any actual terrorist capability, not a single example of terrorists receiving assistance from WMD states to develop their own capabilities nor do they offer any intelligence indicators that terrorists are making headway towards achieving any WMD capability.
I've never thought that terrorists posed much of a weapons of mass destruction threat, and I've always thought that the specter of "nuclear terrorism" was promiscuous and politically motivated, both to undermine disarmament and to bolster U.S. WMD programs.
The image of a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction is certainly a powerful one, and the threat is so catastrophic, the Bush administration has made it a priority in fighting the war against terrorism.
It shouldn't be. What is more, there is also enormous cost in continuing to let the WMD nightmare rule: It was responsible for the war with Iraq; it was at the root of the failure of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to deal with hurricane Katrina; it is central to the current debate over the security of American ports.
Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Maples testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday on the worldwide threats to the United States.
Their testimony was the usual combination of optimism about U.S. progress in the war on terrorism and happy talk about "encouraging developments in Iraq" together with dire talk about a dangerous and nightmarish world.
The "global jihadist threat," Negroponte said, is the "preeminent threat" to U. S. national security and interests abroad.
"The ongoing development of dangerous weapons and delivery systems constitutes the second major threat to the safety of our nation, our deployed troops, and our allies," Negroponte also said.
"We are most concerned about the threat and destabilizing effect of nuclear proliferation," Negroponte said, and "WMD-related proliferation and two states of particular concern, Iran and North Korea," is the central concern.
But it is the terrorist threat with weapons of mass destruction that continue to get the administration excited.
Noting a time long ago "when a few states had monopolies over the most dangerous technologies," Negroponte said "al Qaeda remains interested in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear materials or weapons to attack the United States, US troops, and US interests worldwide."
"Indeed, today," Negroponte said,
"we are more likely to see an attack from terrorists using weapons or agents of mass destruction than states, although terrorists' capabilities would be much more limited. In fact, intelligence reporting indicates that nearly 40 terrorist organizations, insurgencies, or cults have used, possessed, or expressed an interest in chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents or weapons. Many are capable of conducting simple, small-scale attacks, such as poisonings, or using improvised chemical devices."
That's quite the arsenal. I guess in order to understand why U.S. officials would focus on terrorist weapons of mass destruction while IEDs and suicide bombers and civilian airliners seem quite effective, you'd have to understand the U.S. government's definition: Everything is a weapon of mass destruction.
And then there is the issue of proportion. North Korea's existing nuclear weapons, heck Russia's thousands of precariously controlled and maintained nuclear weapons, are less threatening than poisons or "improvised chemical devices" wielded by terrorists?
Neither Negroponte nor Maples offered any current intelligence indicating trends towards terrorists acquiring any of these capabilities.
"Several terrorist groups, particularly al Qaeda, remain interested in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) weapons," Maples said. "Al Qaeda's stated intention to conduct an attack exceeding the destruction of 9/11 raises the possibility that future attacks may involve unconventional weapons."
Saying that nation-states were still "constrained by the logic of deterrence," Negroponte noted that such "constraints may be of little utility in preventing the use of mass effect weapons by rogue regimes or terrorist groups."
The truth is that the United States government has a gigantic weapons of mass destruction bureaucracy, from intelligence collectors and targeters to WMD scientists to the world's premier underground bunker physicists to "counter-proliferation" and "global strike" warriors to technology interdictors to effects analysts and disaster response cadres. There is no getting around the fact that that apparatus has both an appetite and an interest in characterizing the threat as worthy of enormous investment.
WMD are such an emotional threat that no one really asks whether the investment equals the threat or is focused on the right problem. U.S.-Russian nuclear disarmament is stalled and programs to safeguard existing WMD technologies and materials are starved in comparison with new programs to stop "proliferation" (read terrorist proliferation).
All based on bureaucratic self-justification and someone's unsubstantiated nightmare?
By William M. Arkin | March 2, 2006; 07:30 AM ET
Terrorist "capabilities" to use weapons of mass destruction are "more limited" than those of states like North Korea and Iran, but the threat of terrorist attack with WMD is "more likely" than an attack by any state, top U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Despite this broad assertion, U.S. officials offer only that there is the "possibility" of a future terrorist attack with WMD. They present no evidence that there is any actual terrorist capability, not a single example of terrorists receiving assistance from WMD states to develop their own capabilities nor do they offer any intelligence indicators that terrorists are making headway towards achieving any WMD capability.
I've never thought that terrorists posed much of a weapons of mass destruction threat, and I've always thought that the specter of "nuclear terrorism" was promiscuous and politically motivated, both to undermine disarmament and to bolster U.S. WMD programs.
The image of a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction is certainly a powerful one, and the threat is so catastrophic, the Bush administration has made it a priority in fighting the war against terrorism.
It shouldn't be. What is more, there is also enormous cost in continuing to let the WMD nightmare rule: It was responsible for the war with Iraq; it was at the root of the failure of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to deal with hurricane Katrina; it is central to the current debate over the security of American ports.
Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Maples testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday on the worldwide threats to the United States.
Their testimony was the usual combination of optimism about U.S. progress in the war on terrorism and happy talk about "encouraging developments in Iraq" together with dire talk about a dangerous and nightmarish world.
The "global jihadist threat," Negroponte said, is the "preeminent threat" to U. S. national security and interests abroad.
"The ongoing development of dangerous weapons and delivery systems constitutes the second major threat to the safety of our nation, our deployed troops, and our allies," Negroponte also said.
"We are most concerned about the threat and destabilizing effect of nuclear proliferation," Negroponte said, and "WMD-related proliferation and two states of particular concern, Iran and North Korea," is the central concern.
But it is the terrorist threat with weapons of mass destruction that continue to get the administration excited.
Noting a time long ago "when a few states had monopolies over the most dangerous technologies," Negroponte said "al Qaeda remains interested in acquiring chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear materials or weapons to attack the United States, US troops, and US interests worldwide."
"Indeed, today," Negroponte said,
"we are more likely to see an attack from terrorists using weapons or agents of mass destruction than states, although terrorists' capabilities would be much more limited. In fact, intelligence reporting indicates that nearly 40 terrorist organizations, insurgencies, or cults have used, possessed, or expressed an interest in chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents or weapons. Many are capable of conducting simple, small-scale attacks, such as poisonings, or using improvised chemical devices."
That's quite the arsenal. I guess in order to understand why U.S. officials would focus on terrorist weapons of mass destruction while IEDs and suicide bombers and civilian airliners seem quite effective, you'd have to understand the U.S. government's definition: Everything is a weapon of mass destruction.
And then there is the issue of proportion. North Korea's existing nuclear weapons, heck Russia's thousands of precariously controlled and maintained nuclear weapons, are less threatening than poisons or "improvised chemical devices" wielded by terrorists?
Neither Negroponte nor Maples offered any current intelligence indicating trends towards terrorists acquiring any of these capabilities.
"Several terrorist groups, particularly al Qaeda, remain interested in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) weapons," Maples said. "Al Qaeda's stated intention to conduct an attack exceeding the destruction of 9/11 raises the possibility that future attacks may involve unconventional weapons."
Saying that nation-states were still "constrained by the logic of deterrence," Negroponte noted that such "constraints may be of little utility in preventing the use of mass effect weapons by rogue regimes or terrorist groups."
The truth is that the United States government has a gigantic weapons of mass destruction bureaucracy, from intelligence collectors and targeters to WMD scientists to the world's premier underground bunker physicists to "counter-proliferation" and "global strike" warriors to technology interdictors to effects analysts and disaster response cadres. There is no getting around the fact that that apparatus has both an appetite and an interest in characterizing the threat as worthy of enormous investment.
WMD are such an emotional threat that no one really asks whether the investment equals the threat or is focused on the right problem. U.S.-Russian nuclear disarmament is stalled and programs to safeguard existing WMD technologies and materials are starved in comparison with new programs to stop "proliferation" (read terrorist proliferation).
All based on bureaucratic self-justification and someone's unsubstantiated nightmare?
By William M. Arkin | March 2, 2006; 07:30 AM ET
Friday, March 03, 2006
Fearmongering on Dubai
The Nation Editorial
[from the March 20, 2006 issue]
Rise by fear, fall by fear. Having deliberately nurtured a national security panic for the past four-plus years, President George W. Bush richly deserves to be trampled in its latest running: the uproar over his Administration's decision to hand management of six US ports to a state-owned Dubai firm. Bush is cornered by his own bulls--Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert warning darkly of national security threats implied by Arab ownership of American ports, other Republicans accusing him of coddling Dubai's state-socialist enterprise. Democrats, seeing a weakened President, pile gleefully on, but they, too, seem unconcerned about the corrosive implications of national security scares and economic xenophobia.
Although the Coast Guard reportedly warned the President that gaps in intelligence make the risks in the deal involving Dubai Ports World hard to evaluate, the question of mangement-company ownership has little to do with genuine security issues, since the ports are policed by the Guard, Customs and Homeland Security.
The more important public safety problem, as Senator Carl Levin points out with welcome sanity, is that the Administration has long treated the nation's ports as the poor stepchild of transportation security. Of 11 million containers shipped through US ports annually, 95 percent are never inspected or opened; and since the attacks of 9/11 just $630 million has been spent on port security, compared with $18 billion for airports. Human trafficking, drugs and smuggling all flourish thanks to the lax standards of shipping ports and the scant resources made available to police them.
And foreign management of ports is nothing new. The work crews who load and unload vessels in American harbors already draw their paychecks from companies based in Singapore, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan and Taiwan. Is DP World more likely to support terrorism than British-owned P&O? No, and thus an unmistakable whiff of anti-Arab bigotry wafts from the argument.
So what's really at stake? It's another case of Democrats and Republicans alike happily promoting corporate globalism with little regard for the public interest until the implications become too embarrassing: in this case, the control of the nation's ports being traded by transnational corporations. If Americans should revolt against the DP World contract it's not because investors come from unpopular places like China or Dubai but for the same reasons that Bolivians revolted against Bechtel Corporation's takeover of water utilities: because American harbors should not be just another commodity to be traded like cotton futures. Rather, they are the people's birthright, as crucial to the transportation infrastructure and economy as highways and airports. It's there that Congressional Democrats should be taking their stand. Yet which Democrat has the nerve to call for a public takeover of the ports?
It's hard not to cheer as the DP World fight blows a big hole in what's left of the Bush Administration agenda, but we must realize that by framing the Dubai deal as a national security threat, Democrats are paradoxically reinforcing Bush's master narrative of a permanent and all-encompassing "war on terror." They are also dangerously enhancing the equation of Islam with terrorism that Bush so deftly exploited to launch the Iraq War.
Democrats should see the panic over the DP World deal as an opportunity for a truly nervy rudder-turn--challenging the toxic premises of Bush's national security policy and confronting the obsession with secrecy that led to the consummation of the deal out of sight of Congress.
The Dubai Ports World scandal is a scandal--but mainly because it is the latest chapter in this Administration's ongoing, sweeping betrayal of the public interest. Playing to fear is a mug's game that only Bush can win.
[from the March 20, 2006 issue]
Rise by fear, fall by fear. Having deliberately nurtured a national security panic for the past four-plus years, President George W. Bush richly deserves to be trampled in its latest running: the uproar over his Administration's decision to hand management of six US ports to a state-owned Dubai firm. Bush is cornered by his own bulls--Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert warning darkly of national security threats implied by Arab ownership of American ports, other Republicans accusing him of coddling Dubai's state-socialist enterprise. Democrats, seeing a weakened President, pile gleefully on, but they, too, seem unconcerned about the corrosive implications of national security scares and economic xenophobia.
Although the Coast Guard reportedly warned the President that gaps in intelligence make the risks in the deal involving Dubai Ports World hard to evaluate, the question of mangement-company ownership has little to do with genuine security issues, since the ports are policed by the Guard, Customs and Homeland Security.
The more important public safety problem, as Senator Carl Levin points out with welcome sanity, is that the Administration has long treated the nation's ports as the poor stepchild of transportation security. Of 11 million containers shipped through US ports annually, 95 percent are never inspected or opened; and since the attacks of 9/11 just $630 million has been spent on port security, compared with $18 billion for airports. Human trafficking, drugs and smuggling all flourish thanks to the lax standards of shipping ports and the scant resources made available to police them.
And foreign management of ports is nothing new. The work crews who load and unload vessels in American harbors already draw their paychecks from companies based in Singapore, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan and Taiwan. Is DP World more likely to support terrorism than British-owned P&O? No, and thus an unmistakable whiff of anti-Arab bigotry wafts from the argument.
So what's really at stake? It's another case of Democrats and Republicans alike happily promoting corporate globalism with little regard for the public interest until the implications become too embarrassing: in this case, the control of the nation's ports being traded by transnational corporations. If Americans should revolt against the DP World contract it's not because investors come from unpopular places like China or Dubai but for the same reasons that Bolivians revolted against Bechtel Corporation's takeover of water utilities: because American harbors should not be just another commodity to be traded like cotton futures. Rather, they are the people's birthright, as crucial to the transportation infrastructure and economy as highways and airports. It's there that Congressional Democrats should be taking their stand. Yet which Democrat has the nerve to call for a public takeover of the ports?
It's hard not to cheer as the DP World fight blows a big hole in what's left of the Bush Administration agenda, but we must realize that by framing the Dubai deal as a national security threat, Democrats are paradoxically reinforcing Bush's master narrative of a permanent and all-encompassing "war on terror." They are also dangerously enhancing the equation of Islam with terrorism that Bush so deftly exploited to launch the Iraq War.
Democrats should see the panic over the DP World deal as an opportunity for a truly nervy rudder-turn--challenging the toxic premises of Bush's national security policy and confronting the obsession with secrecy that led to the consummation of the deal out of sight of Congress.
The Dubai Ports World scandal is a scandal--but mainly because it is the latest chapter in this Administration's ongoing, sweeping betrayal of the public interest. Playing to fear is a mug's game that only Bush can win.
When Americans No Longer Own America
Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
by Thom Hartmann
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.
The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our nation's largest employer has gone from being the unionized General Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 - meaning that they're going into debt or selling off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.
At the same time, federal policy has been to do the same thing at a national level. Because our so-called "free trade" policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made profits that were distributed among Americans. They used their profits to build more factories, or diversify into other businesses. The profits stayed in America.
Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are on a two-decades-long buying spree. The UK's BP bought Amoco for $48 billion - now Amoco's profits go to England. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream Wireless, so their profits go to Germany, which is where most of the profits from Random House, Allied Signal, Chrysler, Doubleday, Cyprus Amax's US Coal Mining Operations, GTE/Sylvania, and Westinghouse's Power Generation profits go as well. Ralston Purina's profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber's; TransAmerica's profits go to The Netherlands, while John Hancock Insurance's profits go to Canada. Even American Bankers Insurance Group is owned now by Fortis AG in Belgium.
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America.
As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:
· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
· Glass and glass product - 48%
· Coal mining - 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
· Advertising and related services - 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%
· Securities brokerage - 38%
· Other general purpose machinery - 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media - 36%
· Support activities for mining - 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%
· Chemical manufacturing - 30%
· Industrial machinery - 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities - 30%
· Other food - 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
· Machinery manufacturing - 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment activities - 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments - 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
· Basic chemical - 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
· Printing and related support activities - 21%
· Chemical product and preparation - 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%
· Publishing industries - 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies - 20%
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy.
The "security" implications of turning our ports over to the UAE are just the latest nail in what the cons hope will be the coffin of American democracy and the American middle class. Today's conservatives believe in rule by inherited wealth and an internationalist corporate elite, and things like a politically aroused citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky distractions.
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO.
As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in The New York Times on 24 February 2006, "the international shipping business has evolved in recent years to include many more containers with consumer goods, in addition to old-fashioned bulk commodities, and that has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent, from the single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators now manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the United States."
And those 30 percent profits from American port operations now going to Great Britain will probably soon go to the United Arab Emirates, a nation with tight interconnections to both the Bush administration and the Bush family.
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do - strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author of over a dozen books and the host of a nationally syndicated noon-3pm ET daily progressive talk show syndicated by Air America Radio. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "What Would Jefferson Do?" and Ultimate Sacrifice.
by Thom Hartmann
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
Through a combination of the "Fast Track" authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving "most favored nation status" for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.
The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.
Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they "restrain trade." Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.
These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our nation's largest employer has gone from being the unionized General Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 - meaning that they're going into debt or selling off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.
At the same time, federal policy has been to do the same thing at a national level. Because our so-called "free trade" policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other "low cost" retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.
So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations - they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they're invested to make other nations strong. The "things" they're buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made profits that were distributed among Americans. They used their profits to build more factories, or diversify into other businesses. The profits stayed in America.
Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are on a two-decades-long buying spree. The UK's BP bought Amoco for $48 billion - now Amoco's profits go to England. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream Wireless, so their profits go to Germany, which is where most of the profits from Random House, Allied Signal, Chrysler, Doubleday, Cyprus Amax's US Coal Mining Operations, GTE/Sylvania, and Westinghouse's Power Generation profits go as well. Ralston Purina's profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber's; TransAmerica's profits go to The Netherlands, while John Hancock Insurance's profits go to Canada. Even American Bankers Insurance Group is owned now by Fortis AG in Belgium.
Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because "flat world" so-called "free trade" policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America.
As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:
· Sound recording industries - 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
· Metal ore mining - 65%
· Motion picture and video industries - 64%
· Wineries and distilleries - 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
· Book publishers - 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
· Rubber product - 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
· Plastics product - 51%
· Other insurance related activities - 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
· Glass and glass product - 48%
· Coal mining - 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
· Advertising and related services - 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%
· Securities brokerage - 38%
· Other general purpose machinery - 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media - 36%
· Support activities for mining - 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%
· Chemical manufacturing - 30%
· Industrial machinery - 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities - 30%
· Other food - 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
· Machinery manufacturing - 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment activities - 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments - 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
· Basic chemical - 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
· Printing and related support activities - 21%
· Chemical product and preparation - 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%
· Publishing industries - 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies - 20%
Thus it shouldn't surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a "New World Order" with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy.
The "security" implications of turning our ports over to the UAE are just the latest nail in what the cons hope will be the coffin of American democracy and the American middle class. Today's conservatives believe in rule by inherited wealth and an internationalist corporate elite, and things like a politically aroused citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky distractions.
Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…" he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO.
As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in The New York Times on 24 February 2006, "the international shipping business has evolved in recent years to include many more containers with consumer goods, in addition to old-fashioned bulk commodities, and that has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent, from the single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators now manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the United States."
And those 30 percent profits from American port operations now going to Great Britain will probably soon go to the United Arab Emirates, a nation with tight interconnections to both the Bush administration and the Bush family.
Ultimately, it's not about security -- it's about money. In the multinational corporatocracy's "flat world," money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can - and regularly do - strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" are replaced by Antonin Scalia's "Rights of Corporate Persons."
Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: "War is good for business."
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author of over a dozen books and the host of a nationally syndicated noon-3pm ET daily progressive talk show syndicated by Air America Radio. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "What Would Jefferson Do?" and Ultimate Sacrifice.
The I-word goes public
At a forum in New York, pundits and politicians called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
By Michelle Goldberg
Mar. 03, 2006 Late last year, the idea of impeaching President Bush, once taboo even among most liberals, started gaining real currency. Following revelations of Bush's domestic spying program -- and the president's unrepentant insistence on continuing it -- former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush "the first president to admit to an impeachable offense." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate "those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment." Twenty-six House Democrats have joined him.
At the end of January, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon's impeachment, penned an appeal for Bush's removal in the Nation, citing his illegal wiretaps, his deliberate deceptions over Iraq, his incompetent prosecution of the war, and his authorizing systemic torture and abuse. "Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy," she wrote. In March, former Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham wrote a cover story in that magazine titled "The Case for Impeachment." The Center for Constitutional Rights -- the legal group representing many of the victims of Bush's torture policies -- has just published a book called "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush," and at least one other book in a similar vein is forthcoming, David Lindorff's "The Case for Impeachment."
With so much ferment on the left, last night's public forum, "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" had the buzzy feel of an important cultural event. The gathering, presented by Harper's and moderated by Air America's Sam Seder, brought together Lapham, Conyers, Holtzman, Dean and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was held in midtown's Town Hall theater, an elegant space with balcony seating, crystal chandeliers and gold detailing. Around 1,500 people -- mostly a mix of tweedy seniors and clean-cut young activists -- paid $10 for their seats. Built as a meeting place for suffragists, Town Hall has a storied radical history -- in 1921, Margaret Sanger was arrested on its stage for talking about birth control. It was a fitting setting for a discussion of what Rep. Conyers, a veteran of the civil rights movement, presented as the next great David vs. Goliath American struggle.
"I'm not doing this to fail," he said. "This goes back to a little bit of my civil rights background. We were in an impossible situation. The civil rights leaders came to Martin King and said, please, we hear you're going to start a civil rights movement in the South, you'll get all of us killed, Martin, don't do that!" But if he hadn't, said Conyers, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would never have passed.
"We've lost more rights and constitutional prerogatives in this short period of time than under any president that my studies reveal," he continued. "So now's the time. What we have to do is, we have to work on faith. We have to believe that there are enough American people who will agree with us that enough is enough. We've got to believe that, and we've got to work on that between now and November, and I think we'll win."
Conyers' invocation of the massive odds arrayed against past freedom and justice movements diminished, but did not eliminate, the air of wistful unreality hanging over the whole thing. After all, it is an exercise in extreme optimism to speak seriously about impeaching Bush as if the important question is whether impeachment is warranted. For almost everyone present, the answer to "Is there a case for impeachment?" was a passionate, insistent yes. Indeed, most insisted that the future of the republic depends on it. But the operative question is not whether Bush should be impeached, but whether Bush could be impeached, and that's something most of the panel barely grappled with.
Time and again, Lapham spoke of the responsibility of Republican congressmen to put their duty to the Constitution above their loyalty to the GOP. His seeming conviction that what matters are the facts of Bush's criminality is almost quaint. In his Harper's piece, Lapham wrote, "What else is it that voters expect the Congress to do if not to look out for their rights as citizens of the United States? So the choice presented to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee investigating the President's use of electronic surveillance comes down to a matter of deciding whether they will serve their country or their party." He echoed this theme at the Town Hall forum, opining at one point that impeachment should not be a partisan issue -- as if he seriously believes that House Republicans are small-d democrats, a delusion almost as great as Bush's conviction that God, not William Rehnquist, made him president.
Others recognized that for impeachment to even be a possibility, Democrats must retake at least one house of Congress in November. Holtzman proclaimed her faith that the people, once awakened, will save their country at the voting booth. "Too many people have been just despondent about what the president has done, and have not understood that the Constitution itself foresaw this kind of behavior and created a remedy. And once people know that, they can become empowered to act. And I believe that if enough people know, then if the Congress doesn't create [Conyers'] select committee, they may change the Congress!"
Things are not, unfortunately, quite that simple. Polls show more Americans favoring Democratic control of Congress than Republican, but that does not mean they can make it so. Redistricting along partisan lines means that most House seats are safe for one party or another; as the Center for Voting and Democracy found in a 2005 report, "The past two House elections were the least competitive in American history by most standards. In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98 percent of incumbents have won, and more than 90 percent of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10 percent."
Electoral maps that pack liberal, urban voters together have put Democrats at a structural disadvantage that is unlikely to be overcome by either exhortations about people power or disenchantment with Republican rule. As Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics," wrote in Mother Jones last year, "Even when the Democrats win more votes, they don't necessarily win more seats. That's true in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the Electoral College." In the House, he wrote, "When the two sides are tied nationally, the Republicans end up winning about 50 more House districts than the Democrats."
The Senate is even more distorted; the fact that small, sparsely populated states have the same representation as large states with big cities gives a huge advantage to rural voters, who tend to be more conservative. According to Hill, "In 2004, over 51 percent of votes cast were for Democratic senatorial candidates, yet Republicans elected 19 of the 34 contested seats."
With enough of a groundswell, of course, the Democrats' disadvantage could be surmounted. But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.
Moreover, as Ratner noted, even if the Democrats regained control of Congress, it is far from clear that they could summon the political will to mount an impeachment drive.
It's understandable, of course, that few wanted to dwell on how unlikely impeachment is under current conditions, both now and after November. The forum was a blast of civic outrage and a call to arms, not a sober exercise in political strategizing. In that way, it served its function: Just talking about impeachment in a respectable public forum legitimizes it. Still, if Bush must be impeached to save the republic, and if Bush almost certainly will not be impeached, where does that leave us?
Some of the panelists argued that if Bush is not removed, America's very foundations would rot beyond repair. "The American people are finally going to get it, I hope, about President Bush," said Holtzman. "And if they don't get it, what democracy will we have left?" Ratner spoke with similar urgency. "We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said. "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back."
Toward the end of the event, the gravity of America's dilemma led Lapham to speculate that even insurrection might be possible. It came in response to a question from an audience member who asked, "Are you willing to discuss the alternative that the American people have if they're faced with an illegal government because impeachment doesn't work? That alternative of course is for the people to overthrow the illegal government by the means that they consider necessary."
"I do think that it could easily get to the revolutionary stage, because I would expect the fight to be extremely ugly," Lapham said. "It might come to that. I don't think you're going to keep your democratic republic easily."
It was hard to tell if the applause that followed represented a flash of militant hope, or an acknowledgment of despair.
By Michelle Goldberg
Mar. 03, 2006 Late last year, the idea of impeaching President Bush, once taboo even among most liberals, started gaining real currency. Following revelations of Bush's domestic spying program -- and the president's unrepentant insistence on continuing it -- former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush "the first president to admit to an impeachable offense." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate "those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment." Twenty-six House Democrats have joined him.
At the end of January, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon's impeachment, penned an appeal for Bush's removal in the Nation, citing his illegal wiretaps, his deliberate deceptions over Iraq, his incompetent prosecution of the war, and his authorizing systemic torture and abuse. "Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy," she wrote. In March, former Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham wrote a cover story in that magazine titled "The Case for Impeachment." The Center for Constitutional Rights -- the legal group representing many of the victims of Bush's torture policies -- has just published a book called "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush," and at least one other book in a similar vein is forthcoming, David Lindorff's "The Case for Impeachment."
With so much ferment on the left, last night's public forum, "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" had the buzzy feel of an important cultural event. The gathering, presented by Harper's and moderated by Air America's Sam Seder, brought together Lapham, Conyers, Holtzman, Dean and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was held in midtown's Town Hall theater, an elegant space with balcony seating, crystal chandeliers and gold detailing. Around 1,500 people -- mostly a mix of tweedy seniors and clean-cut young activists -- paid $10 for their seats. Built as a meeting place for suffragists, Town Hall has a storied radical history -- in 1921, Margaret Sanger was arrested on its stage for talking about birth control. It was a fitting setting for a discussion of what Rep. Conyers, a veteran of the civil rights movement, presented as the next great David vs. Goliath American struggle.
"I'm not doing this to fail," he said. "This goes back to a little bit of my civil rights background. We were in an impossible situation. The civil rights leaders came to Martin King and said, please, we hear you're going to start a civil rights movement in the South, you'll get all of us killed, Martin, don't do that!" But if he hadn't, said Conyers, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would never have passed.
"We've lost more rights and constitutional prerogatives in this short period of time than under any president that my studies reveal," he continued. "So now's the time. What we have to do is, we have to work on faith. We have to believe that there are enough American people who will agree with us that enough is enough. We've got to believe that, and we've got to work on that between now and November, and I think we'll win."
Conyers' invocation of the massive odds arrayed against past freedom and justice movements diminished, but did not eliminate, the air of wistful unreality hanging over the whole thing. After all, it is an exercise in extreme optimism to speak seriously about impeaching Bush as if the important question is whether impeachment is warranted. For almost everyone present, the answer to "Is there a case for impeachment?" was a passionate, insistent yes. Indeed, most insisted that the future of the republic depends on it. But the operative question is not whether Bush should be impeached, but whether Bush could be impeached, and that's something most of the panel barely grappled with.
Time and again, Lapham spoke of the responsibility of Republican congressmen to put their duty to the Constitution above their loyalty to the GOP. His seeming conviction that what matters are the facts of Bush's criminality is almost quaint. In his Harper's piece, Lapham wrote, "What else is it that voters expect the Congress to do if not to look out for their rights as citizens of the United States? So the choice presented to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee investigating the President's use of electronic surveillance comes down to a matter of deciding whether they will serve their country or their party." He echoed this theme at the Town Hall forum, opining at one point that impeachment should not be a partisan issue -- as if he seriously believes that House Republicans are small-d democrats, a delusion almost as great as Bush's conviction that God, not William Rehnquist, made him president.
Others recognized that for impeachment to even be a possibility, Democrats must retake at least one house of Congress in November. Holtzman proclaimed her faith that the people, once awakened, will save their country at the voting booth. "Too many people have been just despondent about what the president has done, and have not understood that the Constitution itself foresaw this kind of behavior and created a remedy. And once people know that, they can become empowered to act. And I believe that if enough people know, then if the Congress doesn't create [Conyers'] select committee, they may change the Congress!"
Things are not, unfortunately, quite that simple. Polls show more Americans favoring Democratic control of Congress than Republican, but that does not mean they can make it so. Redistricting along partisan lines means that most House seats are safe for one party or another; as the Center for Voting and Democracy found in a 2005 report, "The past two House elections were the least competitive in American history by most standards. In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98 percent of incumbents have won, and more than 90 percent of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10 percent."
Electoral maps that pack liberal, urban voters together have put Democrats at a structural disadvantage that is unlikely to be overcome by either exhortations about people power or disenchantment with Republican rule. As Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics," wrote in Mother Jones last year, "Even when the Democrats win more votes, they don't necessarily win more seats. That's true in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the Electoral College." In the House, he wrote, "When the two sides are tied nationally, the Republicans end up winning about 50 more House districts than the Democrats."
The Senate is even more distorted; the fact that small, sparsely populated states have the same representation as large states with big cities gives a huge advantage to rural voters, who tend to be more conservative. According to Hill, "In 2004, over 51 percent of votes cast were for Democratic senatorial candidates, yet Republicans elected 19 of the 34 contested seats."
With enough of a groundswell, of course, the Democrats' disadvantage could be surmounted. But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.
Moreover, as Ratner noted, even if the Democrats regained control of Congress, it is far from clear that they could summon the political will to mount an impeachment drive.
It's understandable, of course, that few wanted to dwell on how unlikely impeachment is under current conditions, both now and after November. The forum was a blast of civic outrage and a call to arms, not a sober exercise in political strategizing. In that way, it served its function: Just talking about impeachment in a respectable public forum legitimizes it. Still, if Bush must be impeached to save the republic, and if Bush almost certainly will not be impeached, where does that leave us?
Some of the panelists argued that if Bush is not removed, America's very foundations would rot beyond repair. "The American people are finally going to get it, I hope, about President Bush," said Holtzman. "And if they don't get it, what democracy will we have left?" Ratner spoke with similar urgency. "We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said. "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back."
Toward the end of the event, the gravity of America's dilemma led Lapham to speculate that even insurrection might be possible. It came in response to a question from an audience member who asked, "Are you willing to discuss the alternative that the American people have if they're faced with an illegal government because impeachment doesn't work? That alternative of course is for the people to overthrow the illegal government by the means that they consider necessary."
"I do think that it could easily get to the revolutionary stage, because I would expect the fight to be extremely ugly," Lapham said. "It might come to that. I don't think you're going to keep your democratic republic easily."
It was hard to tell if the applause that followed represented a flash of militant hope, or an acknowledgment of despair.
The I-word goes public
At a forum in New York, pundits and politicians called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
By Michelle Goldberg
Mar. 03, 2006 Late last year, the idea of impeaching President Bush, once taboo even among most liberals, started gaining real currency. Following revelations of Bush's domestic spying program -- and the president's unrepentant insistence on continuing it -- former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush "the first president to admit to an impeachable offense." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate "those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment." Twenty-six House Democrats have joined him.
At the end of January, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon's impeachment, penned an appeal for Bush's removal in the Nation, citing his illegal wiretaps, his deliberate deceptions over Iraq, his incompetent prosecution of the war, and his authorizing systemic torture and abuse. "Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy," she wrote. In March, former Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham wrote a cover story in that magazine titled "The Case for Impeachment." The Center for Constitutional Rights -- the legal group representing many of the victims of Bush's torture policies -- has just published a book called "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush," and at least one other book in a similar vein is forthcoming, David Lindorff's "The Case for Impeachment."
With so much ferment on the left, last night's public forum, "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" had the buzzy feel of an important cultural event. The gathering, presented by Harper's and moderated by Air America's Sam Seder, brought together Lapham, Conyers, Holtzman, Dean and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was held in midtown's Town Hall theater, an elegant space with balcony seating, crystal chandeliers and gold detailing. Around 1,500 people -- mostly a mix of tweedy seniors and clean-cut young activists -- paid $10 for their seats. Built as a meeting place for suffragists, Town Hall has a storied radical history -- in 1921, Margaret Sanger was arrested on its stage for talking about birth control. It was a fitting setting for a discussion of what Rep. Conyers, a veteran of the civil rights movement, presented as the next great David vs. Goliath American struggle.
"I'm not doing this to fail," he said. "This goes back to a little bit of my civil rights background. We were in an impossible situation. The civil rights leaders came to Martin King and said, please, we hear you're going to start a civil rights movement in the South, you'll get all of us killed, Martin, don't do that!" But if he hadn't, said Conyers, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would never have passed.
"We've lost more rights and constitutional prerogatives in this short period of time than under any president that my studies reveal," he continued. "So now's the time. What we have to do is, we have to work on faith. We have to believe that there are enough American people who will agree with us that enough is enough. We've got to believe that, and we've got to work on that between now and November, and I think we'll win."
Conyers' invocation of the massive odds arrayed against past freedom and justice movements diminished, but did not eliminate, the air of wistful unreality hanging over the whole thing. After all, it is an exercise in extreme optimism to speak seriously about impeaching Bush as if the important question is whether impeachment is warranted. For almost everyone present, the answer to "Is there a case for impeachment?" was a passionate, insistent yes. Indeed, most insisted that the future of the republic depends on it. But the operative question is not whether Bush should be impeached, but whether Bush could be impeached, and that's something most of the panel barely grappled with.
Time and again, Lapham spoke of the responsibility of Republican congressmen to put their duty to the Constitution above their loyalty to the GOP. His seeming conviction that what matters are the facts of Bush's criminality is almost quaint. In his Harper's piece, Lapham wrote, "What else is it that voters expect the Congress to do if not to look out for their rights as citizens of the United States? So the choice presented to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee investigating the President's use of electronic surveillance comes down to a matter of deciding whether they will serve their country or their party." He echoed this theme at the Town Hall forum, opining at one point that impeachment should not be a partisan issue -- as if he seriously believes that House Republicans are small-d democrats, a delusion almost as great as Bush's conviction that God, not William Rehnquist, made him president.
Others recognized that for impeachment to even be a possibility, Democrats must retake at least one house of Congress in November. Holtzman proclaimed her faith that the people, once awakened, will save their country at the voting booth. "Too many people have been just despondent about what the president has done, and have not understood that the Constitution itself foresaw this kind of behavior and created a remedy. And once people know that, they can become empowered to act. And I believe that if enough people know, then if the Congress doesn't create [Conyers'] select committee, they may change the Congress!"
Things are not, unfortunately, quite that simple. Polls show more Americans favoring Democratic control of Congress than Republican, but that does not mean they can make it so. Redistricting along partisan lines means that most House seats are safe for one party or another; as the Center for Voting and Democracy found in a 2005 report, "The past two House elections were the least competitive in American history by most standards. In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98 percent of incumbents have won, and more than 90 percent of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10 percent."
Electoral maps that pack liberal, urban voters together have put Democrats at a structural disadvantage that is unlikely to be overcome by either exhortations about people power or disenchantment with Republican rule. As Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics," wrote in Mother Jones last year, "Even when the Democrats win more votes, they don't necessarily win more seats. That's true in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the Electoral College." In the House, he wrote, "When the two sides are tied nationally, the Republicans end up winning about 50 more House districts than the Democrats."
The Senate is even more distorted; the fact that small, sparsely populated states have the same representation as large states with big cities gives a huge advantage to rural voters, who tend to be more conservative. According to Hill, "In 2004, over 51 percent of votes cast were for Democratic senatorial candidates, yet Republicans elected 19 of the 34 contested seats."
With enough of a groundswell, of course, the Democrats' disadvantage could be surmounted. But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.
Moreover, as Ratner noted, even if the Democrats regained control of Congress, it is far from clear that they could summon the political will to mount an impeachment drive.
It's understandable, of course, that few wanted to dwell on how unlikely impeachment is under current conditions, both now and after November. The forum was a blast of civic outrage and a call to arms, not a sober exercise in political strategizing. In that way, it served its function: Just talking about impeachment in a respectable public forum legitimizes it. Still, if Bush must be impeached to save the republic, and if Bush almost certainly will not be impeached, where does that leave us?
Some of the panelists argued that if Bush is not removed, America's very foundations would rot beyond repair. "The American people are finally going to get it, I hope, about President Bush," said Holtzman. "And if they don't get it, what democracy will we have left?" Ratner spoke with similar urgency. "We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said. "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back."
Toward the end of the event, the gravity of America's dilemma led Lapham to speculate that even insurrection might be possible. It came in response to a question from an audience member who asked, "Are you willing to discuss the alternative that the American people have if they're faced with an illegal government because impeachment doesn't work? That alternative of course is for the people to overthrow the illegal government by the means that they consider necessary."
"I do think that it could easily get to the revolutionary stage, because I would expect the fight to be extremely ugly," Lapham said. "It might come to that. I don't think you're going to keep your democratic republic easily."
It was hard to tell if the applause that followed represented a flash of militant hope, or an acknowledgment of despair.
By Michelle Goldberg
Mar. 03, 2006 Late last year, the idea of impeaching President Bush, once taboo even among most liberals, started gaining real currency. Following revelations of Bush's domestic spying program -- and the president's unrepentant insistence on continuing it -- former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush "the first president to admit to an impeachable offense." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate "those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment." Twenty-six House Democrats have joined him.
At the end of January, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon's impeachment, penned an appeal for Bush's removal in the Nation, citing his illegal wiretaps, his deliberate deceptions over Iraq, his incompetent prosecution of the war, and his authorizing systemic torture and abuse. "Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy," she wrote. In March, former Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham wrote a cover story in that magazine titled "The Case for Impeachment." The Center for Constitutional Rights -- the legal group representing many of the victims of Bush's torture policies -- has just published a book called "Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush," and at least one other book in a similar vein is forthcoming, David Lindorff's "The Case for Impeachment."
With so much ferment on the left, last night's public forum, "Is There a Case for Impeachment?" had the buzzy feel of an important cultural event. The gathering, presented by Harper's and moderated by Air America's Sam Seder, brought together Lapham, Conyers, Holtzman, Dean and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was held in midtown's Town Hall theater, an elegant space with balcony seating, crystal chandeliers and gold detailing. Around 1,500 people -- mostly a mix of tweedy seniors and clean-cut young activists -- paid $10 for their seats. Built as a meeting place for suffragists, Town Hall has a storied radical history -- in 1921, Margaret Sanger was arrested on its stage for talking about birth control. It was a fitting setting for a discussion of what Rep. Conyers, a veteran of the civil rights movement, presented as the next great David vs. Goliath American struggle.
"I'm not doing this to fail," he said. "This goes back to a little bit of my civil rights background. We were in an impossible situation. The civil rights leaders came to Martin King and said, please, we hear you're going to start a civil rights movement in the South, you'll get all of us killed, Martin, don't do that!" But if he hadn't, said Conyers, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would never have passed.
"We've lost more rights and constitutional prerogatives in this short period of time than under any president that my studies reveal," he continued. "So now's the time. What we have to do is, we have to work on faith. We have to believe that there are enough American people who will agree with us that enough is enough. We've got to believe that, and we've got to work on that between now and November, and I think we'll win."
Conyers' invocation of the massive odds arrayed against past freedom and justice movements diminished, but did not eliminate, the air of wistful unreality hanging over the whole thing. After all, it is an exercise in extreme optimism to speak seriously about impeaching Bush as if the important question is whether impeachment is warranted. For almost everyone present, the answer to "Is there a case for impeachment?" was a passionate, insistent yes. Indeed, most insisted that the future of the republic depends on it. But the operative question is not whether Bush should be impeached, but whether Bush could be impeached, and that's something most of the panel barely grappled with.
Time and again, Lapham spoke of the responsibility of Republican congressmen to put their duty to the Constitution above their loyalty to the GOP. His seeming conviction that what matters are the facts of Bush's criminality is almost quaint. In his Harper's piece, Lapham wrote, "What else is it that voters expect the Congress to do if not to look out for their rights as citizens of the United States? So the choice presented to the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee investigating the President's use of electronic surveillance comes down to a matter of deciding whether they will serve their country or their party." He echoed this theme at the Town Hall forum, opining at one point that impeachment should not be a partisan issue -- as if he seriously believes that House Republicans are small-d democrats, a delusion almost as great as Bush's conviction that God, not William Rehnquist, made him president.
Others recognized that for impeachment to even be a possibility, Democrats must retake at least one house of Congress in November. Holtzman proclaimed her faith that the people, once awakened, will save their country at the voting booth. "Too many people have been just despondent about what the president has done, and have not understood that the Constitution itself foresaw this kind of behavior and created a remedy. And once people know that, they can become empowered to act. And I believe that if enough people know, then if the Congress doesn't create [Conyers'] select committee, they may change the Congress!"
Things are not, unfortunately, quite that simple. Polls show more Americans favoring Democratic control of Congress than Republican, but that does not mean they can make it so. Redistricting along partisan lines means that most House seats are safe for one party or another; as the Center for Voting and Democracy found in a 2005 report, "The past two House elections were the least competitive in American history by most standards. In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98 percent of incumbents have won, and more than 90 percent of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10 percent."
Electoral maps that pack liberal, urban voters together have put Democrats at a structural disadvantage that is unlikely to be overcome by either exhortations about people power or disenchantment with Republican rule. As Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics," wrote in Mother Jones last year, "Even when the Democrats win more votes, they don't necessarily win more seats. That's true in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the Electoral College." In the House, he wrote, "When the two sides are tied nationally, the Republicans end up winning about 50 more House districts than the Democrats."
The Senate is even more distorted; the fact that small, sparsely populated states have the same representation as large states with big cities gives a huge advantage to rural voters, who tend to be more conservative. According to Hill, "In 2004, over 51 percent of votes cast were for Democratic senatorial candidates, yet Republicans elected 19 of the 34 contested seats."
With enough of a groundswell, of course, the Democrats' disadvantage could be surmounted. But it seems almost willfully naive to talk about mustering a congressional majority for impeachment without grappling with the deformation of our democracy that must be overcome first.
Moreover, as Ratner noted, even if the Democrats regained control of Congress, it is far from clear that they could summon the political will to mount an impeachment drive.
It's understandable, of course, that few wanted to dwell on how unlikely impeachment is under current conditions, both now and after November. The forum was a blast of civic outrage and a call to arms, not a sober exercise in political strategizing. In that way, it served its function: Just talking about impeachment in a respectable public forum legitimizes it. Still, if Bush must be impeached to save the republic, and if Bush almost certainly will not be impeached, where does that leave us?
Some of the panelists argued that if Bush is not removed, America's very foundations would rot beyond repair. "The American people are finally going to get it, I hope, about President Bush," said Holtzman. "And if they don't get it, what democracy will we have left?" Ratner spoke with similar urgency. "We're talking about moving from a republic to tyranny," he said. "It's getting too late. If this doesn't happen now, if we can't hold him accountable now, we're not going to get our liberty back."
Toward the end of the event, the gravity of America's dilemma led Lapham to speculate that even insurrection might be possible. It came in response to a question from an audience member who asked, "Are you willing to discuss the alternative that the American people have if they're faced with an illegal government because impeachment doesn't work? That alternative of course is for the people to overthrow the illegal government by the means that they consider necessary."
"I do think that it could easily get to the revolutionary stage, because I would expect the fight to be extremely ugly," Lapham said. "It might come to that. I don't think you're going to keep your democratic republic easily."
It was hard to tell if the applause that followed represented a flash of militant hope, or an acknowledgment of despair.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Who Dares to Question The Dubai Port Deal?
By: Joe Conason
How fortunate that the opinion pages of our mightiest newspapers are open to diverse viewpoints. We would otherwise miss the opportunity to learn from liberal, conservative and centrist pundits alike that opponents of the Dubai ports deal—which now include about 70 percent of the American public—must be crazed, racist and xenophobic.
One original thinker after another insists that there can be no honest criticism of the Dubai deal. They tell us that every critic, no matter how measured, is a protectionist bigot; and that every argument, no matter how rational, is a calumny against Arabs and Muslims. There is a strange whiff of demagogy in these screeds.
In The New York Times, David Brooks laments America’s sudden inundation by “a xenophobic tsunami.” That newspaper’s Thomas L. Friedman warns us against “global ethnic profiling.” And Nicholas Kristof huffily declares in its pages that “this fuss about ports is really about Arabs.” Mr. Brooks proclaims that any concern about potential security problems is “completely bogus,” while Mr. Friedman describes such concerns as not only “bogus” but “borderline racist.” Mr. Kristof refers slyly to “the arguments of those who believe we should discriminate against Arabs.”
The same ugly insinuations can also be found in The Washington Post, parroted under the bylines of Richard Cohen and David Ignatius. Mr. Ignatius regards dissent from the Dubai deal as simply “racist,” while Mr. Cohen prefers to squawk “xenophobic.”
Such is the conventional mainstream wisdom, which blesses all trade as “free trade” and venerates corporate globalization as the one truth faith. To question those assumptions, even in the name of national security, is considered a sign of benighted partisanship, economic ignorance or worse.
Now all these literary worthies have suddenly acquired profound and unimpeachable knowledge about our ports. With breathtaking arrogance, they claim to know what will make us safe and what might endanger us. According to Mr. Friedman, we need not worry about the takeover of several ports by the government of Dubai, because “the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers, and U.S. longshoremen still handle the cargos.” According to Mr. Brooks, “nearly every expert who knows something about port security” agrees that there is no reason for worry.
These pundits don’t condescend to engage in serious debate. They gush over Dubai’s luxury hotels and skyscrapers, without mentioning the utter absence of democracy, transparency and human rights. They praise the United Arab Emirates for behaving like an ally against Al Qaeda, while ignoring its recent connections with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. They seem to think that if any foreign firm is allowed to operate an American port, then a company that is wholly owned by a foreign dictatorship must be treated the same way.
If none of that makes sense to you, then you’re obviously a racist, bigoted, xenophobic protectionist. Remember that for most if not all critics of the Dubai Ports World takeover, the most troubling issue is the Bush administration’s casual approach to vetting the deal. The more we learn about this process, the less confidence we have in it. To doubt the competence of this government is neither xenophobic nor racist.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency body overseen by the Treasury Department, appears to have performed poorly in examining the Dubai deal. Sadly, that is unsurprising, as the Government Accountability Office pointed out last fall. Like the conventional minds of the newspaper world, Treasury officials tend to value “free trade” above all other considerations, including national security. That is why the G.A.O. has been urging tighter and tougher methods for evaluating foreign investment in critical infrastructure and defense sectors.
As for expertise, the collected knowledge of the nation’s newspaper columnists on this subject is considerably less than that of the actual experts who have questioned the deal.
The pundits certainly know less about port security than Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, who currently directs the Homeland Security Initiative for the Aspen Institute, an impeccably moderate and nonpartisan research center. Mr. Ervin recently confessed his doubts on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times (where certain columnists might have read him while perusing their own work with the usual self-satisfaction).
The pundits also know considerably less than Joseph King, the former Customs Service special agent in charge of counterterrorism for that agency until 2003. They know less than the Coast Guard officers who turn out to have warned the Committee on Foreign Investment of the “intelligence gap” in the Dubai deal after examining classified information.
In other words, those who have exercised actual responsibility for ensuring the security of our ports believe there is ample reason for concern over Dubai. So let the columnists hiss and fulminate—and let the investigation proceed, with due caution.
How fortunate that the opinion pages of our mightiest newspapers are open to diverse viewpoints. We would otherwise miss the opportunity to learn from liberal, conservative and centrist pundits alike that opponents of the Dubai ports deal—which now include about 70 percent of the American public—must be crazed, racist and xenophobic.
One original thinker after another insists that there can be no honest criticism of the Dubai deal. They tell us that every critic, no matter how measured, is a protectionist bigot; and that every argument, no matter how rational, is a calumny against Arabs and Muslims. There is a strange whiff of demagogy in these screeds.
In The New York Times, David Brooks laments America’s sudden inundation by “a xenophobic tsunami.” That newspaper’s Thomas L. Friedman warns us against “global ethnic profiling.” And Nicholas Kristof huffily declares in its pages that “this fuss about ports is really about Arabs.” Mr. Brooks proclaims that any concern about potential security problems is “completely bogus,” while Mr. Friedman describes such concerns as not only “bogus” but “borderline racist.” Mr. Kristof refers slyly to “the arguments of those who believe we should discriminate against Arabs.”
The same ugly insinuations can also be found in The Washington Post, parroted under the bylines of Richard Cohen and David Ignatius. Mr. Ignatius regards dissent from the Dubai deal as simply “racist,” while Mr. Cohen prefers to squawk “xenophobic.”
Such is the conventional mainstream wisdom, which blesses all trade as “free trade” and venerates corporate globalization as the one truth faith. To question those assumptions, even in the name of national security, is considered a sign of benighted partisanship, economic ignorance or worse.
Now all these literary worthies have suddenly acquired profound and unimpeachable knowledge about our ports. With breathtaking arrogance, they claim to know what will make us safe and what might endanger us. According to Mr. Friedman, we need not worry about the takeover of several ports by the government of Dubai, because “the U.S. Coast Guard still controls all aspects of port security, entry and exits; the U.S. Customs Service is still in charge of inspecting the containers, and U.S. longshoremen still handle the cargos.” According to Mr. Brooks, “nearly every expert who knows something about port security” agrees that there is no reason for worry.
These pundits don’t condescend to engage in serious debate. They gush over Dubai’s luxury hotels and skyscrapers, without mentioning the utter absence of democracy, transparency and human rights. They praise the United Arab Emirates for behaving like an ally against Al Qaeda, while ignoring its recent connections with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. They seem to think that if any foreign firm is allowed to operate an American port, then a company that is wholly owned by a foreign dictatorship must be treated the same way.
If none of that makes sense to you, then you’re obviously a racist, bigoted, xenophobic protectionist. Remember that for most if not all critics of the Dubai Ports World takeover, the most troubling issue is the Bush administration’s casual approach to vetting the deal. The more we learn about this process, the less confidence we have in it. To doubt the competence of this government is neither xenophobic nor racist.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency body overseen by the Treasury Department, appears to have performed poorly in examining the Dubai deal. Sadly, that is unsurprising, as the Government Accountability Office pointed out last fall. Like the conventional minds of the newspaper world, Treasury officials tend to value “free trade” above all other considerations, including national security. That is why the G.A.O. has been urging tighter and tougher methods for evaluating foreign investment in critical infrastructure and defense sectors.
As for expertise, the collected knowledge of the nation’s newspaper columnists on this subject is considerably less than that of the actual experts who have questioned the deal.
The pundits certainly know less about port security than Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, who currently directs the Homeland Security Initiative for the Aspen Institute, an impeccably moderate and nonpartisan research center. Mr. Ervin recently confessed his doubts on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times (where certain columnists might have read him while perusing their own work with the usual self-satisfaction).
The pundits also know considerably less than Joseph King, the former Customs Service special agent in charge of counterterrorism for that agency until 2003. They know less than the Coast Guard officers who turn out to have warned the Committee on Foreign Investment of the “intelligence gap” in the Dubai deal after examining classified information.
In other words, those who have exercised actual responsibility for ensuring the security of our ports believe there is ample reason for concern over Dubai. So let the columnists hiss and fulminate—and let the investigation proceed, with due caution.
A deluded king and his court
Cut off from reality and surrounded by flatterers like Rice and Cheney, Bush clings to grandiose illusions of heroism.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Mar. 02, 2006 Republicans representative of their permanent establishment have recently and quietly sent emissaries to President Bush, like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible. These ambassadors were not connected to the elder Bush or his closest associate, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was purged last year from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and scorned by the current president. Scowcroft privately tells friends who ask whether he could somehow help that Bush would never turn to him for advice.
So, in one case, a Republican wise man, a prominent lawyer in Washington who had served in the Reagan White House, sought no appointments or favors and was thought to be unthreatening to Bush, gained an audience with him. In a gentle tone, he explained that many presidents had difficult second terms, but that by adapting their approaches they ended successfully, as President Reagan had. Bush instantly replied with a vehement blast. He would not change. He would stay the course. He would not follow the polls. The Republican wise man tried again. Oh, no, he didn't mean anything about polls. But Bush fortified his wall of self-defensiveness and let fly with another heated riposte that he would not change.
He has been true to his word. On the sale of U.S. ports to a corporate entity owned by the United Arab Emirates, for example, he has been adamant.
Congressional Republicans, observing Bush's spiraling decline in the polls, down this week to 34 percent in the New York Times/CBS News survey, and facing midterm elections in which they but not the president are on the ballot, are seized with sheer panic. In the House of Representatives, they already forced their majority leader, Tom DeLay, under indictment for illegal campaign funding, to quit his post. Then they bolted from supporting the lobbyist-larded Roy Blunt, his obvious successor, and selected John Boehner, less conspicuously tainted, to replace DeLay. At the first news of the port deal, both the House and Senate leaders hastily threw President Bush overboard. Now he has to apply presidential pressure on his own party's leaders to reel them back. While the Democrats act as a hectoring chorus, the real tension and play are between Bush and the terrified Republican Congress.
Bush's immovability was previously perceived as the determination of a man of simple but clear convictions. But as his policies have unfolded as disastrous, his image has been turned inside out. Instead of being perceived as secure, he is seen as out of touch; instead of being acknowledged as a colossus striding events, he is viewed as driftwood carried away by the flood.
Within the sanctum of the White House, his aides often handle him with flattery. They tell him that he is among the greatest presidents, that his difficulties are testimony to his greatness, that his refusal to change is also a sign of his greatness. The more is he flattered, the more he approves of the flatterer. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has risen along with her current of flattery. She is expert at the handwritten little note extolling his historical radiance. Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was a pioneer of the flatterer's method. White House legal counsel Harriet Miers is also adept.
But it is Vice President Dick Cheney who has sought and gained the most through flattery. While Bush is constantly and lavishly complimented as supreme leader, Cheney runs the show. Through his chief of staff, David Addington, he controls most of the flow of information, especially on national security, that reaches the incurious president. Bush seeks no contrary information or independent sources. He does not delve into the recesses of government himself, as Presidents Kennedy and Clinton did. He never demands worst-case scenarios. Cheney and his team oversee the writing of key decision memos before Bush finally gets to check the box indicating approval.
Addington also dominates much of the bureaucracy through a network of conservative lawyers placed in key departments and agencies. The Justice Department regularly produces memos to justify the latest wrinkle in the doctrine of the "unitary executive," whether on domestic surveillance or torture. At the Defense Department, the counsel's office takes direction from Addington and acts at his behest to suppress dissent from the senior military on matters such as detainees or the "global war on terror."
Tightly regulated by Cheney and Bush's own aides (who live in fear of Cheney), the president hears what he wishes to hear. They also know what particular flattery he wants to receive, and they ensure that he receives it.
In "The Prince," Machiavelli highlighted the danger in his chapter titled "How Flatterers Must Be Shunned." He observed that "courts are full" of "this plague," and that it can be isolated only with difficulty. His solution was that the "prudent prince" must insist that his closest advisors never withhold the unvarnished facts from him. "Because," wrote Machiavelli, "there is no other way of guarding one's self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth."
But when disturbing information manages to penetrate the carefully constructed net surrounding Bush, he instinctively rejects and condemns it. In July 2004, upon being briefed on the grim analysis of the growing Iraqi insurgency written by the CIA Baghdad station chief, Bush said, according to U.S. News & World Report, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" Bush prefers to soak up the flattery. He responds only to praise of himself as the warrior-president at the battlements, fighting the enemies at the gates and the defeatists within.
In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Bush was flattered by the analogy that he was like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, winning a world war and present at the creation of a new international order. However, since the election of 2004, a period during which the violence in Iraq has not diminished, Bush has been told he more closely resembles the beleaguered Abraham Lincoln. He is the Great Emancipator who has freed 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq but has not yet won the war. "It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people from tyranny," Bush declared on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2005. Enduring setbacks and suffering slings and arrows, he imagines himself enduring before inevitable and ultimate victory.
On May 11, 2005, Rice appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" to say, "I've often wondered, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, what people were saying to Abraham Lincoln about whether this was going to turn out all right."
Just a month earlier, on April 20, Bush had dedicated the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library in Springfield, Ill. Segueing seamlessly from the Civil War to the war on terror, from Gettysburg to Iraq, he conflated Lincoln's struggle and his own: "Our deepest values are also served when we take our part in freedom's advance -- when the chains of millions are broken and the captives are set free, because we are honored to serve the cause that gave us birth ... So we will stick to it; we will stand firmly by it."
This year, on Jan. 23, at Kansas State University, in one of a series of speeches he gave to explain once again his Iraq strategy, Bush digressed into a reverie about Lincoln's troubles. "I believe in what I'm doing," he said. "And I understand politics, and it can get rough. I read a lot of history, by the way, and Abraham Lincoln had it rough. I'm not comparing myself to Abraham Lincoln, nor should you think [so] just because I mentioned his name in the context of my presidency -- I would never do that. He was a great president. But, boy, they mistreated him. He did what he thought was right."
The greater Bush's difficulties, the more precipitously he falls in the polls, the more he is beseeched by anxious Republicans, and the harsher the realities, the tighter he clings to his self-image. Cheney and the others encourage his illusions, at least partly because the more intensely Bush embraces the heroic conception of himself, the more he resists change and the firmer their grip.
"It is an infallible rule," Machiavelli wrote in his chapter on flatterers, "that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised, unless by chance he leaves himself entirely in the hands of one man who rules him in everything, and happens to be a very prudent man. In this case he may doubtless be well governed, but it would not last long, for that governor would in a short time deprive him of the state."
By Sidney Blumenthal
Mar. 02, 2006 Republicans representative of their permanent establishment have recently and quietly sent emissaries to President Bush, like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible. These ambassadors were not connected to the elder Bush or his closest associate, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was purged last year from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and scorned by the current president. Scowcroft privately tells friends who ask whether he could somehow help that Bush would never turn to him for advice.
So, in one case, a Republican wise man, a prominent lawyer in Washington who had served in the Reagan White House, sought no appointments or favors and was thought to be unthreatening to Bush, gained an audience with him. In a gentle tone, he explained that many presidents had difficult second terms, but that by adapting their approaches they ended successfully, as President Reagan had. Bush instantly replied with a vehement blast. He would not change. He would stay the course. He would not follow the polls. The Republican wise man tried again. Oh, no, he didn't mean anything about polls. But Bush fortified his wall of self-defensiveness and let fly with another heated riposte that he would not change.
He has been true to his word. On the sale of U.S. ports to a corporate entity owned by the United Arab Emirates, for example, he has been adamant.
Congressional Republicans, observing Bush's spiraling decline in the polls, down this week to 34 percent in the New York Times/CBS News survey, and facing midterm elections in which they but not the president are on the ballot, are seized with sheer panic. In the House of Representatives, they already forced their majority leader, Tom DeLay, under indictment for illegal campaign funding, to quit his post. Then they bolted from supporting the lobbyist-larded Roy Blunt, his obvious successor, and selected John Boehner, less conspicuously tainted, to replace DeLay. At the first news of the port deal, both the House and Senate leaders hastily threw President Bush overboard. Now he has to apply presidential pressure on his own party's leaders to reel them back. While the Democrats act as a hectoring chorus, the real tension and play are between Bush and the terrified Republican Congress.
Bush's immovability was previously perceived as the determination of a man of simple but clear convictions. But as his policies have unfolded as disastrous, his image has been turned inside out. Instead of being perceived as secure, he is seen as out of touch; instead of being acknowledged as a colossus striding events, he is viewed as driftwood carried away by the flood.
Within the sanctum of the White House, his aides often handle him with flattery. They tell him that he is among the greatest presidents, that his difficulties are testimony to his greatness, that his refusal to change is also a sign of his greatness. The more is he flattered, the more he approves of the flatterer. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has risen along with her current of flattery. She is expert at the handwritten little note extolling his historical radiance. Karen Hughes, now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, was a pioneer of the flatterer's method. White House legal counsel Harriet Miers is also adept.
But it is Vice President Dick Cheney who has sought and gained the most through flattery. While Bush is constantly and lavishly complimented as supreme leader, Cheney runs the show. Through his chief of staff, David Addington, he controls most of the flow of information, especially on national security, that reaches the incurious president. Bush seeks no contrary information or independent sources. He does not delve into the recesses of government himself, as Presidents Kennedy and Clinton did. He never demands worst-case scenarios. Cheney and his team oversee the writing of key decision memos before Bush finally gets to check the box indicating approval.
Addington also dominates much of the bureaucracy through a network of conservative lawyers placed in key departments and agencies. The Justice Department regularly produces memos to justify the latest wrinkle in the doctrine of the "unitary executive," whether on domestic surveillance or torture. At the Defense Department, the counsel's office takes direction from Addington and acts at his behest to suppress dissent from the senior military on matters such as detainees or the "global war on terror."
Tightly regulated by Cheney and Bush's own aides (who live in fear of Cheney), the president hears what he wishes to hear. They also know what particular flattery he wants to receive, and they ensure that he receives it.
In "The Prince," Machiavelli highlighted the danger in his chapter titled "How Flatterers Must Be Shunned." He observed that "courts are full" of "this plague," and that it can be isolated only with difficulty. His solution was that the "prudent prince" must insist that his closest advisors never withhold the unvarnished facts from him. "Because," wrote Machiavelli, "there is no other way of guarding one's self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth."
But when disturbing information manages to penetrate the carefully constructed net surrounding Bush, he instinctively rejects and condemns it. In July 2004, upon being briefed on the grim analysis of the growing Iraqi insurgency written by the CIA Baghdad station chief, Bush said, according to U.S. News & World Report, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" Bush prefers to soak up the flattery. He responds only to praise of himself as the warrior-president at the battlements, fighting the enemies at the gates and the defeatists within.
In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Bush was flattered by the analogy that he was like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, winning a world war and present at the creation of a new international order. However, since the election of 2004, a period during which the violence in Iraq has not diminished, Bush has been told he more closely resembles the beleaguered Abraham Lincoln. He is the Great Emancipator who has freed 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq but has not yet won the war. "It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people from tyranny," Bush declared on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2005. Enduring setbacks and suffering slings and arrows, he imagines himself enduring before inevitable and ultimate victory.
On May 11, 2005, Rice appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" to say, "I've often wondered, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, what people were saying to Abraham Lincoln about whether this was going to turn out all right."
Just a month earlier, on April 20, Bush had dedicated the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library in Springfield, Ill. Segueing seamlessly from the Civil War to the war on terror, from Gettysburg to Iraq, he conflated Lincoln's struggle and his own: "Our deepest values are also served when we take our part in freedom's advance -- when the chains of millions are broken and the captives are set free, because we are honored to serve the cause that gave us birth ... So we will stick to it; we will stand firmly by it."
This year, on Jan. 23, at Kansas State University, in one of a series of speeches he gave to explain once again his Iraq strategy, Bush digressed into a reverie about Lincoln's troubles. "I believe in what I'm doing," he said. "And I understand politics, and it can get rough. I read a lot of history, by the way, and Abraham Lincoln had it rough. I'm not comparing myself to Abraham Lincoln, nor should you think [so] just because I mentioned his name in the context of my presidency -- I would never do that. He was a great president. But, boy, they mistreated him. He did what he thought was right."
The greater Bush's difficulties, the more precipitously he falls in the polls, the more he is beseeched by anxious Republicans, and the harsher the realities, the tighter he clings to his self-image. Cheney and the others encourage his illusions, at least partly because the more intensely Bush embraces the heroic conception of himself, the more he resists change and the firmer their grip.
"It is an infallible rule," Machiavelli wrote in his chapter on flatterers, "that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised, unless by chance he leaves himself entirely in the hands of one man who rules him in everything, and happens to be a very prudent man. In this case he may doubtless be well governed, but it would not last long, for that governor would in a short time deprive him of the state."
George Bush Is A Liar
He Lies He Lies He Lies. Seriously, He Lies A Lot. It's Becoming A Problem
by Stephen Elliot
The worst is that the lies never stop. We have been told that we invaded Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction and told that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. We were told that the mission was accomplished and then told of the progress being made in Iraq even as the country teeters on the brink of civil war.
We were told by President Bush on a campaign stop in Wisconsin that "thanks to America's actions Saddam's torture chambers have been closed" on the same week that every magazine and newspaper in the world printed pictorial evidence to the contrary. Now we have proof of more lies. When the President's credibility couldn't sink any lower.
Four days after the levees break in New Orleans President Bush told ABC News that nobody could have known that the levees would break but videos just released show George Bush being told exactly that, the day before the levees broke. Bush was in fact warned of just what could happen in New Orleans and told that it was very likely.
But he chose to deny that. Why? Because George Bush is a liar. To lie is the first instinct of this administration. It's the same reason Dick Cheney decided not to tell anyone when he shot a man in the face. And then they're surprised when we don't trust them to sell our ports to Dubai?
I was in New Orleans just days after Katrina hit. Watching this video footage showing Bush in another outrageous lie made me ill to my stomach. At what point are the people that voted for this man going to get to work undoing the damage they have done? Where is the congress with the guts to impeach this fraud?
These are the same people who went after Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob. George Bush let New Orleans flood, and he knew he was doing it, and he lied about it, and it's all on tape. What more do they need?
by Stephen Elliot
The worst is that the lies never stop. We have been told that we invaded Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction and told that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. We were told that the mission was accomplished and then told of the progress being made in Iraq even as the country teeters on the brink of civil war.
We were told by President Bush on a campaign stop in Wisconsin that "thanks to America's actions Saddam's torture chambers have been closed" on the same week that every magazine and newspaper in the world printed pictorial evidence to the contrary. Now we have proof of more lies. When the President's credibility couldn't sink any lower.
Four days after the levees break in New Orleans President Bush told ABC News that nobody could have known that the levees would break but videos just released show George Bush being told exactly that, the day before the levees broke. Bush was in fact warned of just what could happen in New Orleans and told that it was very likely.
But he chose to deny that. Why? Because George Bush is a liar. To lie is the first instinct of this administration. It's the same reason Dick Cheney decided not to tell anyone when he shot a man in the face. And then they're surprised when we don't trust them to sell our ports to Dubai?
I was in New Orleans just days after Katrina hit. Watching this video footage showing Bush in another outrageous lie made me ill to my stomach. At what point are the people that voted for this man going to get to work undoing the damage they have done? Where is the congress with the guts to impeach this fraud?
These are the same people who went after Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob. George Bush let New Orleans flood, and he knew he was doing it, and he lied about it, and it's all on tape. What more do they need?
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Dubious Dubai Deal
Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle
by Robert Scheer
Do you buy Dubai? That's this season's big hit, a zany farce with pompous officials in the Bush administration and their hysterical courtiers in the mass media asserting positions that are patently absurd, but hilarious to watch. Audiences are eating it up.
Great fun -- but not for everyone. Feel the pain over at Fox television. How do you go on stoking xenophobic hysteria against the Arabs when the Golden Boy in the White House has turned over management of six American ports to an emir who once backed the Taliban? OK, so now he's a good guy, responding to Daddy Bush's charity pitch by throwing $100 million to Katrina victims, and before that another million into the Bush presidential library. But how do you sell that to a Fox television audience brainwashed to believe that Saddam Hussein is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden because they both speak Arabic?
Oh, to be Lou Dobbs over at CNN, who never liked anyone connected with the Mideast, including the president, and who now sends reporters out in the dark of night to track mysterious cargo. Some guys have all the fun -- particularly those traitors who don't realize there is a war on and that it's our patriotic duty to support the president, even if he's endangering the country.
Now, maybe this port deal is not really that big a threat to U.S. security, but then neither was Hussein. That didn't stop Bush from ripping up Iraq and turning it into a showcase for religious fratricide. So he makes mistakes, but he's our president and we are in a WAR, a War on Terror. Terror, terror, TERROR, all the time.
But now, we're getting mixed messages. First, the president told us that in a war on terror you trust your own government to provide homeland security. You put your faith in the stern, electronic wand-waving Americans in white shirts and TSA epaulettes who check your shoes at the airport; those upstanding Americans who report to other upstanding Americans, such as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and people he trusts. Now they tell us it's OK to have some Arab as the guy in charge of checking our shoes -- excuse me, ports?
Yeah, I know, to be the least bit queasy about turning over our ports to guys who supported the Taliban when that bunch of religious maniacs were harboring bin Laden is, as the Bush apologists tell us, just xenophobic. Dubai was not alone; Saudi Arabia and Pakistan did the same, and they are now trusted allies.
These are crazy times, and there are some unnerving oddities in Bush's foreign policy, but don't worry: As soon as Hussein is tried and hanged, democracy will flower in the Arab world and the war on terrorism will be over. In the meantime, we have to put up with some contradictions, such as trusting Arabs to own port-management companies, even as we scapegoat them everywhere else.
Even if you are a teensy-weensy nervous about it, remember that the Bushies have made it clear that the management companies don't have anything to do with port security, because that's safely in the hands of U.S. Customs and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Ooops, well, not according to the Coast Guard.
Just when things looked like they were quieting down, Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had to go and mess it up for the president by releasing details of a very embarrassing Coast Guard warning that the White House had ignored. "There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for [Dubai Ports World] ... assets to support terrorist operations, that preclude an overall threat assessment of the potential merger," stated the Coast Guard document.
No biggie. I get it, when it comes to national security, who are you going to trust, the president of the United States, our commander in chief or those sailor boys in the Coast Guard, who are already backing off? But this is a very unpopular lame duck president, and some Republican legislators are getting nervous.
For example Collins, who broke ranks to warn, "This report suggests there were significant and troubling intelligence gaps ... That language is very troubling to me." Hey, no problem, reassures fellow Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. It could be worse -- the port managers could be Chinese communists! The Chinese are even less free than the people of Dubai, he insists, so we've dodged a bullet there. Some spoilsports might point out that Beijing never recognized the Taliban and hardly coddles religious fanatics. But that would ruin this wonderful farce, and I wish it a very long run. Do you buy Dubai? Yeah, loved every minute.
by Robert Scheer
Do you buy Dubai? That's this season's big hit, a zany farce with pompous officials in the Bush administration and their hysterical courtiers in the mass media asserting positions that are patently absurd, but hilarious to watch. Audiences are eating it up.
Great fun -- but not for everyone. Feel the pain over at Fox television. How do you go on stoking xenophobic hysteria against the Arabs when the Golden Boy in the White House has turned over management of six American ports to an emir who once backed the Taliban? OK, so now he's a good guy, responding to Daddy Bush's charity pitch by throwing $100 million to Katrina victims, and before that another million into the Bush presidential library. But how do you sell that to a Fox television audience brainwashed to believe that Saddam Hussein is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden because they both speak Arabic?
Oh, to be Lou Dobbs over at CNN, who never liked anyone connected with the Mideast, including the president, and who now sends reporters out in the dark of night to track mysterious cargo. Some guys have all the fun -- particularly those traitors who don't realize there is a war on and that it's our patriotic duty to support the president, even if he's endangering the country.
Now, maybe this port deal is not really that big a threat to U.S. security, but then neither was Hussein. That didn't stop Bush from ripping up Iraq and turning it into a showcase for religious fratricide. So he makes mistakes, but he's our president and we are in a WAR, a War on Terror. Terror, terror, TERROR, all the time.
But now, we're getting mixed messages. First, the president told us that in a war on terror you trust your own government to provide homeland security. You put your faith in the stern, electronic wand-waving Americans in white shirts and TSA epaulettes who check your shoes at the airport; those upstanding Americans who report to other upstanding Americans, such as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and people he trusts. Now they tell us it's OK to have some Arab as the guy in charge of checking our shoes -- excuse me, ports?
Yeah, I know, to be the least bit queasy about turning over our ports to guys who supported the Taliban when that bunch of religious maniacs were harboring bin Laden is, as the Bush apologists tell us, just xenophobic. Dubai was not alone; Saudi Arabia and Pakistan did the same, and they are now trusted allies.
These are crazy times, and there are some unnerving oddities in Bush's foreign policy, but don't worry: As soon as Hussein is tried and hanged, democracy will flower in the Arab world and the war on terrorism will be over. In the meantime, we have to put up with some contradictions, such as trusting Arabs to own port-management companies, even as we scapegoat them everywhere else.
Even if you are a teensy-weensy nervous about it, remember that the Bushies have made it clear that the management companies don't have anything to do with port security, because that's safely in the hands of U.S. Customs and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Ooops, well, not according to the Coast Guard.
Just when things looked like they were quieting down, Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had to go and mess it up for the president by releasing details of a very embarrassing Coast Guard warning that the White House had ignored. "There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for [Dubai Ports World] ... assets to support terrorist operations, that preclude an overall threat assessment of the potential merger," stated the Coast Guard document.
No biggie. I get it, when it comes to national security, who are you going to trust, the president of the United States, our commander in chief or those sailor boys in the Coast Guard, who are already backing off? But this is a very unpopular lame duck president, and some Republican legislators are getting nervous.
For example Collins, who broke ranks to warn, "This report suggests there were significant and troubling intelligence gaps ... That language is very troubling to me." Hey, no problem, reassures fellow Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. It could be worse -- the port managers could be Chinese communists! The Chinese are even less free than the people of Dubai, he insists, so we've dodged a bullet there. Some spoilsports might point out that Beijing never recognized the Taliban and hardly coddles religious fanatics. But that would ruin this wonderful farce, and I wish it a very long run. Do you buy Dubai? Yeah, loved every minute.
Mahatma Bush
by Norman Solomon
Evidently the president's trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world's leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi this week.
While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for the world's only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime's media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream U.S. media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn't react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.
Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi's enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by Bush's enthusiasm for violence. The commander in chief regularly proclaims his misty-eyed pride in U.S. military actions that destroy countless human lives with massive and continual techno-violence. But the Bushian isn't quite 180 degrees from the Gandhian. The president of the United States is not exactly committed to violence; what he wants is an end to resistance.
"A conqueror is always a lover of peace," the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz observed. Yearning for Uncle Sam to fulfill his increasingly farfetched promise of victory in Iraq, the U.S. president is an evangelist for peace -- on his terms.
Almost two years ago, in early April 2004, the icy cerebral pundit George Will engaged in a burst of candor when he wrote a column about the widening bloodshed inside Iraq: "In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot -- there will be many -- will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence."
The column -- headlined "A War President's Job" in the Washington Post -- diagnosed the problem and prescribed more violence. Lots more: "Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq's urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism -- violence that has slipped the leash of states." For unleashing the Pentagon's violence, the rationales are inexhaustible.
In an important sense, it's plausible to envision Bush as a lover of peace and even an apostle of nonviolence -- but, in context, those sterling invocations of virtues are plated with sadism in the service of empire. The president of the United States is urging "peace" as a synonym for getting his way in Iraq. From Washington, the most exalted vision of peace is a scenario where the occupied no longer resist the American occupiers or their allies.
The world has seen many such leaders, eager to unleash as much violence as necessary to get what they want, and glad to praise nonviolence whenever convenient. But no photo-op can change the current reality that the world's most powerful government is also, by far, the most violent and the most dangerous.
Evidently the president's trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world's leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi this week.
While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for the world's only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime's media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream U.S. media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn't react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.
Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi's enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by Bush's enthusiasm for violence. The commander in chief regularly proclaims his misty-eyed pride in U.S. military actions that destroy countless human lives with massive and continual techno-violence. But the Bushian isn't quite 180 degrees from the Gandhian. The president of the United States is not exactly committed to violence; what he wants is an end to resistance.
"A conqueror is always a lover of peace," the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz observed. Yearning for Uncle Sam to fulfill his increasingly farfetched promise of victory in Iraq, the U.S. president is an evangelist for peace -- on his terms.
Almost two years ago, in early April 2004, the icy cerebral pundit George Will engaged in a burst of candor when he wrote a column about the widening bloodshed inside Iraq: "In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot -- there will be many -- will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence."
The column -- headlined "A War President's Job" in the Washington Post -- diagnosed the problem and prescribed more violence. Lots more: "Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq's urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism -- violence that has slipped the leash of states." For unleashing the Pentagon's violence, the rationales are inexhaustible.
In an important sense, it's plausible to envision Bush as a lover of peace and even an apostle of nonviolence -- but, in context, those sterling invocations of virtues are plated with sadism in the service of empire. The president of the United States is urging "peace" as a synonym for getting his way in Iraq. From Washington, the most exalted vision of peace is a scenario where the occupied no longer resist the American occupiers or their allies.
The world has seen many such leaders, eager to unleash as much violence as necessary to get what they want, and glad to praise nonviolence whenever convenient. But no photo-op can change the current reality that the world's most powerful government is also, by far, the most violent and the most dangerous.
The Bush bubble bursts
by Mark Kleiman
Mickey Kaus gives us a good list of events Democrats fondly hoped would finally pop the Bush popularity balloon: Enron, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, Abramoff, Plame. And he argues, reasonably, that Democrats had better find a red-state-friendly candidate for 2008. (Mark Warner, anyone? On either end of a ticket with Wesley Clark?)
But, as Lieutenant Colombo would say, there's just one little thing: Bush's job-performance rating, and his popularity, are now lower than the proverbial whale-dung on the bottom of the sea. You can re-weight the numbers any way you like: 34% job approval is bad, but 29% personal favorability (v. 53% unfavorable) is catastrophic.
Yes, of course the Dubai deal is now weighing Bush down, costing him heavily with his base. That explains a big drop in job performance. But it can't, by itself, explain a loss of personal popularity, which is usually much less volatile. High personal favorability used to be Bush's ace in the hole, and it looks like that's gone, to the likely detriment of Republican candidates in 2006 and 2008. The Bush bubble has finally burst.
And it has burst in part, I submit, because Democrats (over Mickey's vociferous protests) have been relentlessly — and, I would say, accurately — attacking his character for about four years now. If we'd started earlier, hit harder, and been more unified (e.g., had some help from Joe Lieberman and Mickey Kaus), he would now probably be even less popular than he is. The first rule of advertising is repetition. The second rule of advertising is repetition. And the third rule of advertising is repetition.
George W. Bush isn't just an awful President; he's also a miserable excuse for a human being. Saying so, back when he was popular, wasn't an immediate vote-winner, but it paid long-term dividends. Saying it now — long, loud, and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again — isn't just truth-telling, it's also obviously good politics.
Fortunately for tender liberal consciences but unfortunately for the nation, there's absolutely no need to distort or exaggerate. In the words of Harry Truman, just tell the truth, and the Republicans will think it's Hell.
Mickey Kaus gives us a good list of events Democrats fondly hoped would finally pop the Bush popularity balloon: Enron, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, Abramoff, Plame. And he argues, reasonably, that Democrats had better find a red-state-friendly candidate for 2008. (Mark Warner, anyone? On either end of a ticket with Wesley Clark?)
But, as Lieutenant Colombo would say, there's just one little thing: Bush's job-performance rating, and his popularity, are now lower than the proverbial whale-dung on the bottom of the sea. You can re-weight the numbers any way you like: 34% job approval is bad, but 29% personal favorability (v. 53% unfavorable) is catastrophic.
Yes, of course the Dubai deal is now weighing Bush down, costing him heavily with his base. That explains a big drop in job performance. But it can't, by itself, explain a loss of personal popularity, which is usually much less volatile. High personal favorability used to be Bush's ace in the hole, and it looks like that's gone, to the likely detriment of Republican candidates in 2006 and 2008. The Bush bubble has finally burst.
And it has burst in part, I submit, because Democrats (over Mickey's vociferous protests) have been relentlessly — and, I would say, accurately — attacking his character for about four years now. If we'd started earlier, hit harder, and been more unified (e.g., had some help from Joe Lieberman and Mickey Kaus), he would now probably be even less popular than he is. The first rule of advertising is repetition. The second rule of advertising is repetition. And the third rule of advertising is repetition.
George W. Bush isn't just an awful President; he's also a miserable excuse for a human being. Saying so, back when he was popular, wasn't an immediate vote-winner, but it paid long-term dividends. Saying it now — long, loud, and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again — isn't just truth-telling, it's also obviously good politics.
Fortunately for tender liberal consciences but unfortunately for the nation, there's absolutely no need to distort or exaggerate. In the words of Harry Truman, just tell the truth, and the Republicans will think it's Hell.
Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's
As Americans finally begin to grasp the magnitude of the Iraq catastrophe, Bush's popularity hits a new low.
By Juan Cole
Mar. 01, 2006 The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer, and his mishandling of the Dubai port issue have sent President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to the lowest of his presidency. According to a Reuters poll, only 34 percent of Americans believe he is doing a good job overall. Only 30 percent, less than a third, think he is managing the Iraq situation well. A remarkable 72 percent of American troops polled in Iraq think the U.S. should leave Iraq within the next year. Nor is there any hope for Bush on the horizon. The bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally. The Shiite clergy of Iran and Iraq have bolstered their own authority at Bush's expense. This development has already severely limited his scope of action in Iran, and will doubtless have many other negative consequences in the months and years ahead.
Tactically, strategically and politically Bush now finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. With Americans increasingly fed up with the Iraq debacle, he needs to start drawing down troops soon, but he can't do it while the country teeters on the brink of civil war. If civil war does break out, a U.S. withdrawal will look even more like cutting and running -- under these circumstances, not even Karl Rove will be able to figure out a way to get away with simply declaring victory and going home. Yet if American troops stay, they have no good options either.
The U.S. desperately needs to keep the Sunnis in the government, but if Shiites launch reprisal attacks against Sunnis, Americans will not be able to respond for fear that the Shiites, too, will turn on them -- as indeed they have already begun to do. And as the shrine bombing shows, Iraq is a vial of nitroglycerine that can be set off with one shake. Imagine what would happen if one of the leading clerics, Sunni or Shiite, was assassinated. It is difficult to say how aware Bush is of the reality in Iraq, but some part of him must be cursing the day he decided to invade it.
Iraq has just lived through its worst week since the U.S. invasion. The blood bath in the aftermath of the destruction of a major Shiite shrine has taken more than 1,300 lives, as enraged Shiite mobs attacked Sunni mosques, burning some to the ground, and killed many Sunnis. (A proportional number of deaths in the U.S. would be 15,000 -- more than the number of U.S. troops who died in D-Day and Okinawa, the Pacific theater's bloodiest battle, combined.) After a weekend daytime curfew, the country appeared to step back from the brink on Monday, but on Tuesday guerrilla violence, including the car-bombing of a mosque, killed 60 and wounded three times that many. It seems clear that the guerrilla tactic of provoking sectarian civil war was on the verge of succeeding last week, and Tuesday's events suggest that time may well be on the side of the guerrillas.
Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, Shiite Iran's theocratic ruler, blasted the Americans over the destruction of the shrine, saying that they had blown it up in conjunction with the Israelis. The implausibility of the charge did not prevent it being taken seriously by Shiite crowds and protesters from Beirut, Lebanon, to Karachi, Pakistan. For the Shiite clerics, Islam is a form of soft power that they can deploy against the United States at will. Virtually any bad thing that happens to Muslims or their holy places is laid at the feet of the Americans.
This "paranoid style" in Middle Eastern thinking about the West has a long history, but the Iraq war has been interpreted as evidence that the conspiracy theories were correct all along, and had made this way of thinking more widespread and powerful. Khamenei said on Monday, "The Americans are trying to provoke ethnic and religious war in Iraq and the tragic incident in Samarra is one instance in this regard." He said that Iraq is symbolic of American failure in the region, and went on to call for Muslim states to support the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which won the recent elections.
More momentously, Khamenei's rival, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf in Iraq, also appears to be losing confidence in the Iraq situation. Sistani's restraint until now has been the key factor in keeping sectarian strife from boiling out of control. But he responded to the destruction of the golden-domed Askariyah Shrine at Samarra by calling for peaceful demonstrations -- a reckless move from a man known as cautious and moderate. Sistani had to know that there was little chance in the emotionally overwrought atmosphere of those days that any big demonstrations would remain peaceful. He appears to have been under enormous pressure to authorize the rallies, risking being seen as soft on Sunni terrorism if he had stuck to his previous pattern of asking believers to refrain from any reaction at all.
Worse, Sistani signaled his loss of confidence in the Iraqi government and in U.S. troops by calling for tribal levies to guard Shiite shrines and personalities. The clans of the Middle Euphrates are devoted to Sistani, and rural young men who know how to use a gun are eager to obey the grand ayatollah and to risk their lives for their faith. Iraq already suffers from a surfeit of religious militias, however, and the addition of a new one is hardly a good sign.
Another Shiite clerical leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, blamed U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for the bombing of the shrine and its sanguinary aftermath. Al-Hakim's SCIRI controls the Ministry of the Interior, which has charge of Iraq's police force. Many feel that the SCIRI militia, the Badr Corps, trained in exile by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, has infiltrated the special police commandos fielded by Interior against the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The force has been found to keep secret jails and to engage in torture. The Sunni Arabs have been demanding that the hard-line Shiite party give up control of Interior, to no avail. Khalilzad was attempting to convince the Sunni Arabs to join the government, and understandably sided with them on the undesirability of the Badr Corps paramilitary providing so much of the manpower. Now, after the explosion at the beloved shrine of Samarra, no Shiite politician could agree to give up a key cabinet post concerned with security.
Yet another Shiite clergyman, the fiery young nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, called for Sunni-Shiite unity and forbade his followers from wearing their usual provocative black costumes. His followers were thought to be responsible for many of the attacks against Sunnis and Sunni mosques, but Muqtada avoided the blame for these excesses. He had been abroad when the violence began, and immediately called for joint Sunni-Shiite marches and worship ceremonies to underline Iraqi unity. Along with the Sunni Arabs, he also called on the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq on a short timetable, and urged that this call be a key theme of the joint worship sessions.
Muqtada told a crowd in the southern port city of Basra on Sunday, "I call for a united, peaceful demonstration in the capital, Baghdad, which you will organize at a specific time, involving Shiites, Sunnis and others, in which you will demand the withdrawal of the occupying forces, and call for mutual love among you." On Monday, such a cross-sectarian Friday prayer service was held in Tikrit, to which Sunnis and Shiites flocked from all over the province.
These three Iraqi clerics all employed their influence and authority among the Shiite rank and file to make the Samarra bombing work for them politically. Sistani expanded his militia and stayed at the forefront of the movement by encouraging peaceful rallies. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim used the explosion in Samarra to bolster his own authority. He remonstrated with the American ambassador, saying it was not reasonable to expect the religious Shiites, who won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, to give up their claim on the ministry of interior, and that, indeed, Khalilzad had helped provoke the troubles with his assertions to that effect earlier. Muqtada al-Sadr used the incident to push for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, something he has wanted since the fall of Saddam. Abroad, Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei blamed Bush and his Israeli allies, a monstrous charge but nevertheless one widely believed.
For the first three years of this colossal misadventure, Bush and his political advisors were able to obscure Iraq's harsh reality beneath a smoke screen of anti-terrorist fearmongering and patriotic fervor. But the smoke is blowing away. Bush emerged from this bloody week much feebler than ever before, both with regard to the U.S. public and with regard to that of Iraq. The problem for him is that Iraq has several more shrines, and if they are destroyed, he will again face the prospect of popular turbulence, and possibly calamity. Iraq, drifting toward theocracy and something approaching civil war, looks less and less like a model for the region, and more and more like an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party.
By Juan Cole
Mar. 01, 2006 The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer, and his mishandling of the Dubai port issue have sent President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to the lowest of his presidency. According to a Reuters poll, only 34 percent of Americans believe he is doing a good job overall. Only 30 percent, less than a third, think he is managing the Iraq situation well. A remarkable 72 percent of American troops polled in Iraq think the U.S. should leave Iraq within the next year. Nor is there any hope for Bush on the horizon. The bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally. The Shiite clergy of Iran and Iraq have bolstered their own authority at Bush's expense. This development has already severely limited his scope of action in Iran, and will doubtless have many other negative consequences in the months and years ahead.
Tactically, strategically and politically Bush now finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. With Americans increasingly fed up with the Iraq debacle, he needs to start drawing down troops soon, but he can't do it while the country teeters on the brink of civil war. If civil war does break out, a U.S. withdrawal will look even more like cutting and running -- under these circumstances, not even Karl Rove will be able to figure out a way to get away with simply declaring victory and going home. Yet if American troops stay, they have no good options either.
The U.S. desperately needs to keep the Sunnis in the government, but if Shiites launch reprisal attacks against Sunnis, Americans will not be able to respond for fear that the Shiites, too, will turn on them -- as indeed they have already begun to do. And as the shrine bombing shows, Iraq is a vial of nitroglycerine that can be set off with one shake. Imagine what would happen if one of the leading clerics, Sunni or Shiite, was assassinated. It is difficult to say how aware Bush is of the reality in Iraq, but some part of him must be cursing the day he decided to invade it.
Iraq has just lived through its worst week since the U.S. invasion. The blood bath in the aftermath of the destruction of a major Shiite shrine has taken more than 1,300 lives, as enraged Shiite mobs attacked Sunni mosques, burning some to the ground, and killed many Sunnis. (A proportional number of deaths in the U.S. would be 15,000 -- more than the number of U.S. troops who died in D-Day and Okinawa, the Pacific theater's bloodiest battle, combined.) After a weekend daytime curfew, the country appeared to step back from the brink on Monday, but on Tuesday guerrilla violence, including the car-bombing of a mosque, killed 60 and wounded three times that many. It seems clear that the guerrilla tactic of provoking sectarian civil war was on the verge of succeeding last week, and Tuesday's events suggest that time may well be on the side of the guerrillas.
Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, Shiite Iran's theocratic ruler, blasted the Americans over the destruction of the shrine, saying that they had blown it up in conjunction with the Israelis. The implausibility of the charge did not prevent it being taken seriously by Shiite crowds and protesters from Beirut, Lebanon, to Karachi, Pakistan. For the Shiite clerics, Islam is a form of soft power that they can deploy against the United States at will. Virtually any bad thing that happens to Muslims or their holy places is laid at the feet of the Americans.
This "paranoid style" in Middle Eastern thinking about the West has a long history, but the Iraq war has been interpreted as evidence that the conspiracy theories were correct all along, and had made this way of thinking more widespread and powerful. Khamenei said on Monday, "The Americans are trying to provoke ethnic and religious war in Iraq and the tragic incident in Samarra is one instance in this regard." He said that Iraq is symbolic of American failure in the region, and went on to call for Muslim states to support the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which won the recent elections.
More momentously, Khamenei's rival, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf in Iraq, also appears to be losing confidence in the Iraq situation. Sistani's restraint until now has been the key factor in keeping sectarian strife from boiling out of control. But he responded to the destruction of the golden-domed Askariyah Shrine at Samarra by calling for peaceful demonstrations -- a reckless move from a man known as cautious and moderate. Sistani had to know that there was little chance in the emotionally overwrought atmosphere of those days that any big demonstrations would remain peaceful. He appears to have been under enormous pressure to authorize the rallies, risking being seen as soft on Sunni terrorism if he had stuck to his previous pattern of asking believers to refrain from any reaction at all.
Worse, Sistani signaled his loss of confidence in the Iraqi government and in U.S. troops by calling for tribal levies to guard Shiite shrines and personalities. The clans of the Middle Euphrates are devoted to Sistani, and rural young men who know how to use a gun are eager to obey the grand ayatollah and to risk their lives for their faith. Iraq already suffers from a surfeit of religious militias, however, and the addition of a new one is hardly a good sign.
Another Shiite clerical leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, blamed U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for the bombing of the shrine and its sanguinary aftermath. Al-Hakim's SCIRI controls the Ministry of the Interior, which has charge of Iraq's police force. Many feel that the SCIRI militia, the Badr Corps, trained in exile by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, has infiltrated the special police commandos fielded by Interior against the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The force has been found to keep secret jails and to engage in torture. The Sunni Arabs have been demanding that the hard-line Shiite party give up control of Interior, to no avail. Khalilzad was attempting to convince the Sunni Arabs to join the government, and understandably sided with them on the undesirability of the Badr Corps paramilitary providing so much of the manpower. Now, after the explosion at the beloved shrine of Samarra, no Shiite politician could agree to give up a key cabinet post concerned with security.
Yet another Shiite clergyman, the fiery young nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, called for Sunni-Shiite unity and forbade his followers from wearing their usual provocative black costumes. His followers were thought to be responsible for many of the attacks against Sunnis and Sunni mosques, but Muqtada avoided the blame for these excesses. He had been abroad when the violence began, and immediately called for joint Sunni-Shiite marches and worship ceremonies to underline Iraqi unity. Along with the Sunni Arabs, he also called on the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq on a short timetable, and urged that this call be a key theme of the joint worship sessions.
Muqtada told a crowd in the southern port city of Basra on Sunday, "I call for a united, peaceful demonstration in the capital, Baghdad, which you will organize at a specific time, involving Shiites, Sunnis and others, in which you will demand the withdrawal of the occupying forces, and call for mutual love among you." On Monday, such a cross-sectarian Friday prayer service was held in Tikrit, to which Sunnis and Shiites flocked from all over the province.
These three Iraqi clerics all employed their influence and authority among the Shiite rank and file to make the Samarra bombing work for them politically. Sistani expanded his militia and stayed at the forefront of the movement by encouraging peaceful rallies. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim used the explosion in Samarra to bolster his own authority. He remonstrated with the American ambassador, saying it was not reasonable to expect the religious Shiites, who won the largest bloc of seats in parliament, to give up their claim on the ministry of interior, and that, indeed, Khalilzad had helped provoke the troubles with his assertions to that effect earlier. Muqtada al-Sadr used the incident to push for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, something he has wanted since the fall of Saddam. Abroad, Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei blamed Bush and his Israeli allies, a monstrous charge but nevertheless one widely believed.
For the first three years of this colossal misadventure, Bush and his political advisors were able to obscure Iraq's harsh reality beneath a smoke screen of anti-terrorist fearmongering and patriotic fervor. But the smoke is blowing away. Bush emerged from this bloody week much feebler than ever before, both with regard to the U.S. public and with regard to that of Iraq. The problem for him is that Iraq has several more shrines, and if they are destroyed, he will again face the prospect of popular turbulence, and possibly calamity. Iraq, drifting toward theocracy and something approaching civil war, looks less and less like a model for the region, and more and more like an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party.
Impeach Bush
The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever -- and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him.
By Garrison Keillor
Mar. 01, 2006 These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt -- it's you.
But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders -- pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
By Garrison Keillor
Mar. 01, 2006 These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."
Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.
The Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.
One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?
Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt -- it's you.
But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.
According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, our country is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Our seaports are wide open, our airspace is not secure except for the nation's capital, and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world. They give the administration D's and F's in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.
Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders -- pick any big city -- is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.
The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)