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2003-10-30 - 11:58 a.m.

More About Cheney and His PNAC Cabal

Here's another article about Cheney and his neocon cronies, who have "hijacked the country," by Ritt Goldstein in the Sydney Morning Herald.

A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line.

"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour... it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

"[President] George Bush isn't in control... the country's been hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed".

Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith.

She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board".

Ms Kwiatkowski said the pursuit of national security decisions often bypassed "civil service and active-duty military professionals", and was handled instead by political appointees who shared common ideological ties.

Read this article to get more insight into how the neocons from PNAC have taken over our foreign policy.

And here's another article, this one by Lt. Col Karen Kwiatowski herself, from back on July 31, 2003 in the Ohio Beacon Journal, in which she tells how her eyes were opened to the way things worked under this new administration:

However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.

Those observations changed everything.

What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of ``intelligence'' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Hussein occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I can identify three prevailing themes.

These three prevailing themes are:

"Functional isolation of the professional corps,"

"Cross-agency cliques,"

and "Groupthink."

She goes into each of these themes, as in the following discussion of Groupthink, when she says:

The result of groupthink has been extensively studied in the history of American foreign policy, and it will have a prominent role when the history of the Bush administration is written. Groupthink, in this most recent case leading to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, will be found, I believe, to have caused a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.

Read the rest of this insightful article here.

2003-10-28 - 2:01 p.m.

Dick Cheney, Commander in Chief

To understand the Bush Administration and its policies in the world, one has to understand that Dick Cheney, who put together the Bush administration, is the real power behind the throne.

Jim Lobe, who has documented the neoconservatives and PNAC, the Project for the New American Century, explains the central position of Cheney as the true architect of the Iraq War.

In his article, Dick Cheney, Commander in Chief, Jim Lobe illuminates the inner power relationships of the Bush Administration, and the real source of the current disaster in Iraq, the hyped intelligence, the deception, and the bungled aftermath.

He begins:

"Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, 'Un-uh,' and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it goes," said Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, describing the power relationship between George Bush and Dick Cheney in a recent interview with the National Journal.

It was Cheney who installed his PNAC cohorts; Libby, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, Bolton and others into positions of power in this Administration. They already had a plan for regime change in Iraq before they even came to power.

And after the invasion, they ignored the State Department's detailed "Future of Iraq" project, which might have prevented the looting and destruction which followed, and cost us so much.

Read this article, and for more background on Cheney, who views war as a part of normal foreign policy, rather than as a last resort, read this Newsweek article, "The 12-Year Itch", which came out way back in March, before the Iraq invasion, and is illustrative of Cheney's attitudes, especially about war.

Here's another current article about Cheney, from today's Washington Post, by Richard Cohen, entitled, Master of Fiction.

2003-10-27 - 11:07 a.m.

A Second Bush Term? Simply Unfathomable

Here's an article that reflects my own feelings about the Bush Administration, and the concern that he might actually be elected for a second term in 2004. To me, that would spell the end of our nation as we have known and loved it. It is simply unthinkable.

The article, A second Bush term? Simply unfathomable, appears here, followed by many comments, which are also of interest.

It is written by:

D.G. Bowman, a former longtime editor at The Seattle Times, is a writer and editor in Waikoloa, Hawaii. He detailed his gradual and empowering transformation from Republican to Democrat in the October 2001 issue of The Washington Monthly. Abraham Lincoln - "who would probably sue the current GOP for the slanderous use of his name" - remains his favorite American president. He can be reached at for.fauna@verizon.net.

He begins...

Above the empty vapor that is President Bush swirls the incredulity of those rational Americans who simply cannot fathom how anybody aside from war profiteers, religious fanatics, corporate vultures and environmental predators could possibly vote for the re-election of such a dangerously unsuitable man.

How could such a thing happen? How could this incurious fraud get another four years (unless it's behind bars)? It defies the norms of civility and reasonableness. It beggars the imagination. Yet the possibility hovers above us, terrifyingly so. Does the deadly (not to mention immoral and illegal) occupation of Iraq mean nothing? Does the looting of the Treasury send no signal? Does the breathtaking assault on our air and water and natural spaces fail to resonate? There's plenty to be alarmed about, and there's plenty of ammunition, but not enough bells are jangling.

But please read the whole article, as he gives some good reasons for this sorry state of affairs, from the media who have fallen down on the job, to the possibility of fixed exections.

The whole country needs to wake up, before it's too late.

2003-10-26 - 10:19 a.m.

White House Stonewalls on 9/11 Documents

The federal commission investigating the terrorist attacks on 9/11 may have to issue subpoenas to get some of the documents they need, which the White House continues to withhold, says Chairman Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey. The commission must complete its work by May.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.

"That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."

Other members of the commision are also becoming frustrated with the White House stonewalling.

Mr. Kean's comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said in an interview in Washington. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it's disgusting."

He said that the White House and President Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Read this whole story by Philip Shenon in the New York Times, and also reprinted here.

2003-10-22 - 10:26 a.m.

Bungled Intelligence

Here's the authoritative story of how the Bush Administration bypassed established intelligence procedures and professionals to take us to war on false assumptions.

Read the following detailed exposé in the New Yorker:

THE STOVEPIPE

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.

Here are three excerpts, but the story behind them is fascinating, frightening with regard to the incompetence and hubris of our leaders, and tragic for our country and the world:

Getting rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime had been a priority for Wolfowitz and others in and around the Administration since the end of the first Gulf War. For years, Iraq hawks had seen a coup led by Chalabi as the best means of achieving that goal. After September 11th, however, and the military’s quick victory in Afghanistan, the notion of a coup gave way to the idea of an American invasion.

...

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

...

In late summer, the White House sharply escalated the nuclear rhetoric. There were at least two immediate targets: the midterm congressional elections and the pending vote on a congressional resolution authorizing the President to take any action he deemed necessary in Iraq, to protect America’s national security.

Read the whole story, as well as additional comments about the article by the author.

2003-10-21 - 1:12 p.m.

Texas Republicans

We all know that the policies of the current Republicans are not those of the Republicans we used to know, back when there was such a thing as a "moderate Republican," who put the good of the country above the politics of power and greed.

Now we have "Texas Republicans" running the show, according to this article by Bill Gallagher:

Texas Republicans created an unnecessary war, made Americans despised around the world and our nation less secure, attacked basic civil and human rights, lost millions of jobs, made the rich richer and the poor poorer, left 40 million Americans without health insurance, defiled the environment, created record deficits and fiscal chaos, debased political discourse and twisted democratic institutions.

The Republican Party of the 19th and 20th centuries stood for good and decent things, and the party produced many able presidents and congressional leaders who changed America for the better. The Texas Republican party of George W. Bush has as much in common with the party of Abraham Lincoln as the ACLU does with the Ku Klux Klan.

George W. Bush and his "brain," top political adviser Karl Rove, took Texas Republican politics to the national and international stage. The damage they've already done will take decades to undo.

...

Texas Republicans like to call themselves conservatives, but they really are not. No true conservative would tolerate the deficits, the assault on the Bill of Rights, the protectionist tariffs on foreign steel and the shameless subsidies and corporate welfare the Bush administration fosters.

Read the rest of this insightful and thoughtful article, entitled, All Republicans Are Not Created Equal, to understand what's happened to our country.

2003-10-18 - 12:02 p.m.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Senator Robert C. Byrd made another impassioned speech in the Senate yesterday, and this 85 year old Dean of the Senate continues to be a lonely but articulate voice for sanity and reason in the world.

Here are some excerpts from this speech, based on the old story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which he retells at the beginning of his speech:

But, the bubble burst when an innocent child loudly exclaimed, for the whole kingdom to hear, that the Emperor had nothing on at all. He had no clothes.

That tale seems to me very like the way this nation was led to war.

We were told that we were threatened by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but they have not been seen.

We were told that the throngs of Iraqi's would welcome our troops with flowers, but no throngs or flowers appeared.

We were led to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but no evidence has ever been produced.

We were told in 16 words that Saddam Hussein tried to buy "yellow cake" from Africa for production of nuclear weapons, but the story has turned into empty air.

We were frightened with visions of mushroom clouds, but they turned out to be only vapors of the mind.

We were told that major combat was over but 101 [as of October 17] Americans have died in combat since that proclamation from the deck of an aircraft carrier by our very own Emperor in his new clothes.

Our emperor says that we are not occupiers, yet we show no inclination to relinquish the country of Iraq to its people.

Those who have dared to expose the nakedness of the Administration's policies in Iraq have been subjected to scorn. Those who have noticed the elephant in the room -- that is, the fact that this war was based on falsehoods – have had our patriotism questioned. Those who have spoken aloud the thought shared by hundreds of thousands of military families across this country, that our troops should return quickly and safely from the dangers half a world away, have been accused of cowardice. We have then seen the untruths, the dissembling, the fabrication, the misleading inferences surrounding this rush to war in Iraq wrapped quickly in the flag.

The right to ask questions, debate, and dissent is under attack. The drums of war are beaten ever louder in an attempt to drown out those who speak of our predicament in stark terms.

Later in the speech, he goes on to say:

But the time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end.

The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.

Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this Administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods. The President asks for billions from those same citizens who know that they were misled about the need to go to war. We misinformed and insulted our friends and allies and now this Administration is having more than a little trouble getting help from the international community. It is perilous to mislead.

The single-minded obsession of this Administration to now make sense of the chaos in Iraq, and the continuing propaganda which emanates from the White House painting Iraq as the geographical center of terrorism is distracting our attention from Afghanistan and the 60 other countries in the world where terrorists hide. It is sapping resources which could be used to make us safer from terrorists on our own shores. The body armor for our own citizens still has many, many chinks. Have we forgotten that the most horrific terror attacks in history occurred right here at home!! Yet, this Administration turns back money for homeland security, while the President pours billions into security for Iraq. I am powerless to understand or explain such a policy.

And finally, he comes to his powerful conclusion:

I began my remarks with a fairy tale. I shall close my remarks with a horror story, in the form of a quote from the book Nuremberg Diaries, written by G.M. Gilbert, in which the author interviews Hermann Goering.

"We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

". . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Go here to read the whole speech.

2003-10-17 - 3:06 p.m.

More on the Voting Machine Danger

Two more chapters of Bev Harris's book, Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century have been posted on that website for downloading.

I downloaded them and read them, and they continue to be worthwhile reading, as Bev Harris explores the situation in Georgia in 2002, when Senator Max Cleland and the govornor were upset on election day in an election that shouldn't have been certified because of many violations of election law.

In chapter 8, the author tells how difficult it has been to bring media attention to this very serious issue, the very foundation of our democracy. I recommend you read this book.

[After posting this entry, I found that the www.blackboxvoting.com link was no longer working. It had been "suspended."

On looking further, I found another link from which you can download the chapters in PDF form, along with some explanation.]

While the US media still ignores this important issue for the most part, here's an extensive article from the UK which goes into it in some depth. It's worth a read. Here are just two paragraphs from the long article:

As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do this," she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue series of commands into the code and nobody would ever know because the nature of programming is so complex. The numbers would all tally perfectly." Tampering with an election could be something as simple as a "denial-of-service" attack, in which the machines simply stop working for an extended period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of long lines. Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in the trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs". Detecting one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless the investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger it. Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at www.wheresthepaper.org.

If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate interests are being fuelled by links between the big three and broader business interests, as well as extremist organisations. Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.

Go here to read the whole article.

2003-10-16 - 10:37 a.m.

Lies Upon Lies

Here's another great article by Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Lies About Iraq Rise to Level of the Absurd.

It was his article, The President's Real Goal in Iraq, published back in September, 2002, that first shed light on the Bush Administration's push for war with Iraq, as he connected it to the plans of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-con think tank, which had proposed long before 9/11 the takeover of Iraq as the centerpiece for their plot to transform the Middle East by force. And those members of PNAC were now installed in high positions in the Bush Administration; Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and others. Just look at the list of signers of the 1997 Statement of Principles.

For more on PNAC, see PNAC.

Now, here's the current article by Jay Bookman, Lies About Iraq Rise to Level of the Absurd:

Lies beget more lies; a policy built on deception will always require further deception to sustain itself.

Case in point: The campaign by leading members of the Bush administration to rebuild faltering support for their invasion of Iraq. To hear them tell it, everything that has happened since last March has just proved how right they've been all along.

To cite just one example, consider a recent speech by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. Cheney is credited by many for having led President Bush, and by extension this country, into invading Iraq. So it's no surprise that he has been unflinching in defending that policy.

As he explained the rationale:

"We could not accept the grave danger of Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies turning weapons of mass destruction against us or our friends and allies."

Of course, no such grave danger existed. Having failed to find any WMD, we know that now. More importantly, we knew it in the fall of 2002, when this push for war began. Even back then, the CIA was using terms such as "unlikely" and "low probability" to describe the odds of Saddam handing WMD to terrorists.

Somehow, "low probability" and "unlikely" were transformed into "grave danger." Claims about Saddam's nuclear program have followed a similar trajectory.

In January 2002, the CIA reported that Iraq's nuclear weapons program consisted of no more than low-level theoretical work, an assessment that time has proved quite accurate. Yet eight months later, Cheney was somehow claiming that Iraq was close to completing The Bomb.

In his Heritage speech, Cheney also described the prewar efforts to contain Saddam -- "12 years of diplomacy, more than a dozen Security Council resolutions, hundreds of U.N. weapons inspectors, thousands of flights to enforce the no-fly zones and even strikes against military targets in Iraq" -- and dismissed them as failures.

That too denies reality. In fact, multilateral efforts to contain and disarm Saddam had succeeded to a degree that few had imagined possible.

In 1991, Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, production facilities to produce still more, and a maturing nuclear weapons program. By 1998, and certainly by 2003, he had none of those things.

Sanctions worked. Inspections worked.

Then Cheney got to the core of his argument:

"Another criticism we hear is that the United States, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent. Under this view, even in the face of a specific agreed-upon danger, the mere objection of even one foreign government would be sufficient to prevent us from acting."

With that statement, Cheney abandons deception and traipses merrily into the Land of the Completely Absurd. Nobody -- not the Democrats, not the United Nations, not even the French -- makes the argument that he describes. It would be insane to do so.

Cheney invents that argument to support his larger point: After Sept. 11, the Bush administration at least did something, while its less-than-manly critics would have done nothing.

And that is the ultimate falsehood.

The true policy choice is between actions that make things better for the United States and actions that make things worse. If we were to assess the invasion of Iraq on those grounds, the outcome would be something like this:

Saddam had no WMD, no nuclear program and no ties to al-Qaida. So invading Iraq did little or nothing to improve our security. It did, however, come at a cost that may take decades to fully tally.

The invasion has strained our alliances and international standing, making it difficult to draw support against real threats in North Korea and Iran. Our military is overextended. The financial toll is $150 billion and counting; the toll in U.S. lives continues to mount as well.

If the administration truly did expect all that, they are bigger fools than even their harshest critics have claimed.

This all goes to show how imperative it is to vote this regime out of power in 2004.

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