Internet muse.
Daring, bold, never sold.
My daily weblog of politics, humor, philosophy...and a constant and nagging reminder of the existence of universal love....
Today’s liberals want to be happy but dumb — just as dumb as pseudo-conservatives have been for the past several decades. He [he?! - my emphasis] wants to be fed stupid tales, in which his side is always right, and the other side is wickedly wrong. And no, he doesn’t want ambiguity!Insulting, indeed...especially when he uses Orin as his reason.
Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Nigerwhich he never mentions was later corrected by the Post, and changed to IRAN.
"Judy's view is that any purported waiver she got from anyone was not on the face of it sufficiently broad, clear and uncoerced."- [Source- WaPo]Four other reporters have answered some of the prosecutors' questions after receiving specific waivers from their sources, including Libby....yet Judy Miller won't do it. Why?
"Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S. government and military?"...and what might this have to do with Judy Miller's part in this Plame investigation?
"In The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen cites Wurmser in charging that, just before 9-11, "Saudi intelligence had become difficult to distinguish from Al Qaeda." Countless other, similar accusations have been flung at the Saudis by neocons. Max Singer, co-founder of the Hudson Institute, has repeatedly suggested that the United States seek to dismantle the Saudi kingdom by encouraging breakaway republics in the oil-rich eastern province (which is heavily Shia) and in the western Hijaz. "After [Hussein] is removed, there will be an earthquake throughout the region," says Singer. "If this means the fall of the [Saudi] regime, so be it." And when Hussein goes, Ledeen says, it could lead to the collapse of the Saudi regime, perhaps to pro-al-Qaeda radicals. "In that event, we would have to extend the war to the Arabian peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing regions."
Libby's network was in competition with the CIA and many members wanted to permanently weaken the agency in favor of the Pentagon, since they had much more influence there.The neocons of the Bush administration included members of our own Vice President's offices (if not the Vice President himself). The facts surrounding the creation of (false) justifications for the Iraq invasion has threatened to literally pour out of multiple leak sources, like a decayed old hose that's ready to burst. Judith Miller is an inextricable cog in the wheel of the tangled web of lies. How could she possibly separate herself when her involvement was incestuous?
"Did he hear that from a reporter after he had already informed the reporter of it? Or did he hear it from a reporter after Scooter Libby, Rove's colleague, had already told the reporter about it?"Here is a beauty of an analogy by Mr. Cole to show you how unnecessary the destruction of Joseph Wilson was - as unnecessary as the Iraq war itself -- but for sheer political furtherance, defensiveness, and aggression:
There was no Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It had been dismantled shortly after 1991. There was no program, ipso facto there is no plausibility to reports of significant uranium purchases, purchases which did not occur. The Rove approach is to insist that there is evidence that some creature ate grass on a farm in Maryland, and that it has not been disproved that it was African elephants that did the eating. That there are no free-ranging African elephants in Maryland does not matter if you keep pointing to the grass and say, well, something ate it and it could have been elephants.
There was no Iraqi nuclear program, and Rove knew this in summer of 2003 when he outed Valerie Plame.
Within government, a representative figure for the pre-rollback era is David Gergen, the consummate insider who served as White House advisor to Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. He preached to both parties, the press, and to television audiences a cautious realism in media relations. It's long gone now but (in my paraphrase) it went something like this:I deeply appreciated Mr. Rosen's use of a Ron Suskind "parable" and contrasting the strange White House attitude toward delivering their created version of "the truth" to the reality of the needs of the real-world press, who are now asking some tough questions while reporting the developments in the story of the outing of Valerie Plame:
"The White House has a right to get its message out. The press has a right to question and probe. There are going to be conflicts (and during scandals much worse) but they ought to remain within bounds. The press needs the Administration, it's number one source. The Administration can be hurt by bad press, and helped by good relations with reporters. So calm down and let's get on with producing White House news together."
Or as Larry Speakes, fomer press secretary to Ronald Reagan, once put it: "You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to report it." It's no surprise that Gergen moved easily from one Administration to the next, and from government into journalism and back. He had the insider's consensus narrative in his pocket. But what if one party unilaterally withdraws from Gergen-style managerialism? There's nothing in the press playbook about that.
The Parable (Ron Suskind):
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Today the prosecutor is studying what they do, and there's no way to roll that back. In a Salon interview after the Times article came out, Suskind (whose sources were mostly Republicans) was asked whether the Bush forces were indeed trying to "eliminate a national point of reference on facts."Absolutely! That's the whole idea, to somehow sweep away the community of honest brokers in America -- both Republicans and Democrats and members of the mainstream press -- sweep them away so we'll be left with a culture and public dialogue based on assertion rather than authenticity, on claim rather than fact.No more honest brokers; and claims take the place of facts. Disguised by the culture war's ranting about media bias, this is happening all around us today. Limits on what liberties could be taken with the factual record without triggering a political penalty are being overcome. Joseph Wilson interfered, forcing the White House to pay a penalty (my emphasis in bold print): the so-called sixteen words in the State of the Union speech that had to be withdrawn after his op-ed. So he had to pay. And that's how roll back, freedom over fact, culture war, and the naming of Valerie Plame connect to one another.....
- Jay Rosen
Excerpt from your July 17 column:
"....Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- "
The report repeatedly condemns the departing CIA director, George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA's view, and casting aside dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the state or defence departments.** NOTE: The Senate Intel Committee used Tenet as scapegoat and told America they'd investigate the White House role "later"...and they never did.
It blames Mr Tenet for not personally reviewing Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. Mr Tenet has resigned, and leaves his post on Sunday.
Chapter 6.4
Section 503-
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. British government intelligence from several different sources indicated that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased uranium, as opposed to having sought uranium. The British government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
"George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, declared that the Niger claim was "not tenable". And in last week's damning senate report on pre-war intelligence, a memo by a senior CIA official was revealed which said: "We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue."
Karl Rove may be able to claim that he did not know he was leaking "classified information" about a "covert agent," but there can be no question he understood that what he was leaking was "sensitive information." The very fact that Matt Cooper called it "double super secret background" information suggests Rove knew of its sensitivity, if he did not know it was classified information (which by definition is sensitive).
United States District Court Judge Richard Story's statement to Jonathan Randel, at the time of sentencing, might have an unpleasant ring for Karl Rove. Judge Story told Randel that he surely must have appreciated the risks in leaking DEA information. "Anything that would affect the security of officers and of the operations of the agency would be of tremendous concern, I think, to any law-abiding citizen in this country," the judge observed. Judge Story concluded this leak of sensitive information was "a very serious crime."
"In my view," he explained, "it is a very serious offense because of the risk that comes with it, and part of that risk is because of the position" that Randel held in the DEA. But the risk posed by the information Rove leaked is multiplied many times over; it occurred at a time when the nation was considering going to war over weapons of mass destruction. And Rove was risking the identity of, in attempting to discredit, a WMD proliferation expert, Valerie Plame Wilson.
This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. In 1992, Mr. Rove was fired from the Texas campaign to re-elect the first President Bush because of suspicions that he had leaked information to Mr. Novak about shortfalls in the Texas organization's fund-raising. Both Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove had been the source.Novak is such a scumbag.
Novak's own statement contradicts story that HE told Rove about Plame, and not vice versa
by John in DC - 7/15/2005 01:09:00 PM
Astute reader Ted just alerted to what appears to be a lie from either Novak or Rove.
Today's big story is that Rove supposedly never gave Valerie Plame's name to Novak - but rather that Novak mentioned Plame was CIA and Rove said "yeah I heard that too," or something to that effect.
In fact, here's what Novak said in his first interview that we know of just after he leaked Plame's name in print:
Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."
Read that again. I didn't dig it out, it was given to me - they gave me the name. That does not jibe with Rove's anonymous buddy telling the NYT that it was Novak who first brought up Plame as CIA and NOT Rove.
"Time for this site to illustrate the main contrast between liberals who answer the call of duty and Karl Rove, who smears them and participates in endangering them in order to play politics. Karl Rove is running scared and Bush is protecting him. This is your moment to go on the offensive...Link this site."This is becoming an incredibly popular website: 82,498 visitors since June 24, 2005. It is a site set up for the purpose of receiving email from men and women serving currently in the United States military or veterans who are angry at Karl Rove's recent comments. The proprietor does not serve in the military himself. His aim is to let Karl Rove know that when it comes to defending the USA, there are no Democrats or Republicans, just Americans.
"Every rule has an exception. My mama always told me to "compliment the chef" at dinner. But that doesn't apply when the chef pees in your soup. Likewise, there's an exception to the rule of source protection. When officialdom uses "you-can't-use-my- name" to cover a lie, the official is not a source, but a disinformation propagandist -- and Miller and The Times have been all too willing to play Izvestia to the Bush's Kremlinesque prevarications.The whole thing makes me want to take a shower to scrub away the filth of power-abuse and propaganda; the stinking lovechild borne of the intercourse between journalists with 'access-ego' and lying White House goons, off my brain. If only it could be that easy.
And that is what Miller is protecting: the evil called "access."
The great poison in the corpus of American journalism is the lust for tidbits of supposedly "inside" information which is more often than not inside misinformation parading as hot news." - [LINK-CommonDreams.com]
But there's one GOP talking point that I hope they'll go on repeating, and that is that this is just a partisan attack. Lots of Republicans are saying this; as an example, here's Ken Mehlman again:"It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."
Republicans: please keep saying this. Keep telling the American people that it's only Democrats who think it's wrong to out an undercover CIA agent. Keep saying that the only reason anyone would think it's any sort of a problem to put vindictiveness and a desire to discredit one's political opponents above national security is "partisanship"....Because most people know better. Most people know that you just do not out undercover agents at all, and you surely do not out them to score political points. And if the Republicans keep telling them that it's only Democrats who care about this, maybe they'll listen.
- Hilzoy, Obsidian Wings
By dividing the press corps into Red versus Blue—and talking only to the Red—administration strategists are inviting attacks from one side.I'm glad MSM is beginning to see what these bastards have done to damage MSM's integrity, along with this nation's reputation, credibility, and inner-peace.
But that might be precisely what they want. After all, they won two national elections that way.
EXCERPT:
My understanding is that shortly thereafter, a meeting was held - sometime in March of 2003 - in the offices of the Vice President at which it was decided to do a “work up” on me. A work up means to run an intel op to glean all the information you can about “me.” My understanding is that at a minimum, [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby was at this meeting.
But in retrospect looking at this, the natural group [of people] who would meet to discuss something like this would be the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).
Raw Story: Right, and the group includes Karl Rove as part of that main group of six.
Wilson: Yes, that would include Rove. I believe it is Rove, Karen Hughes, Libby, and others.
Raw Story: Also: Andrew Card, Mary Matlin and James Wilkinson as well as others who advised then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley.
Wilson: That would be the natural group because they were constituted to spin the war, so they would be naturally the ones to try to deflect criticism. Now, some of those people would have very high security clearances.
"The Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn't know about it until this year when it became public in the last month or so." Other senior Administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have also claimed that they had not heard of Wilson's report until recently.
"A source close to the matter says that Wilson was dispatched to Niger because Vice President Dick Cheney had questions about an intelligence report about Iraq seeking uranium and that he asked that the CIA get back to him with answers."Could that source be JUDY MILLER?
"The State Department opposed releasing the rest of the money [more than ninety million dollars in federal funds], arguing that Chalabi had failed to account properly for the funds he had already received. “The Vice-President came into a meeting furious that we hadn’t given the money to Chalabi,” the former official recalled. Cheney said, “Here we are, denying him money, when they”—the Iraqi National Congress—“are providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.s.”"Unique"..indeed. It's all so clear that our nation was pushed into war by a stack of deliberate lies. Let's go back in time:
Tony Blair's sensational pre-war claim that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "could be activated within 45 minutes" was based on information from a single Iraqi defector of dubious reliability, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. British intelligence sources said the defector, recruited by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, told his story to American officials.
"The planners on the OSD [office of the secretary of defense] side were largely unqualified as military planners, and further, they were blinded by ideology, prejudice against Arabs in terms of their military or organizational capability, and confused on reality, because they appeared to only listen to Chalabi and others like him, and held the official intelligence as suspect because it didn't conform to their agenda. In the case of postwar planning, it suffered from the same flaws—incompetence, believing lies, false assumptions about Iraqis and their political culture.....I think Cheney should be impeached, Bush as well, for lying and attempting to deceive in order to go to war. Rumsfeld may be protected, as he worked for them, the Nuremberg defense, as with Perle. Perle, however, should probably be in jail for profiteering, but so far he hasn't been charged—this would be in a criminal or civil court. Because we have a Republican Congress, Bush is safe, as Clinton would have been given a Democrat Congress. More recently, we have reports of information-leaking and possible espionage in the Pentagon, and some of these same policymakers are said to be under FBI investigation. In a fair and objective world, some people will go to jail for their role in creating and implementing the Bush foreign policy."I realize that these words are strong and that they have been very diffiicult for everyday Americans, who do not pay close attention, to hear (if they have heard them yet at all - the media being "the silencer" that it is.)
Chalabi the embezzler and Bush the American-democracy snuffer team up for fun and profit Chalabi, cousin of Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon's choice to head the country, said he would be prepared to serve the Iraqi oil industry if a democratically elected government was in place. He said selling off Iraq's oil assets was the only way to secure investment in his country. 'Iraq is going to need a lot of money in the next five years, up to $300bn. 'Privatisation or partial privatisation is the way to secure this investment.
"A dustup between two NY Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein. An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter [sic] on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is paid by top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding WMD?... "
".... Information from Iraqi defectors made available by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress before the US invasion was of little or no use...The Pentagon and those pushing for war against Iraq were quick to cite the information it provided and to promote the cause of Mr Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department were much more cautious about the organization's reliability."
"More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi.......The April trip to Chalabi's headquarters took place "at Judy's {Judith Miller's} direction," one officer said...."This was totally out of their {MET Alpha's} lane, getting involved with human intelligence," said one military officer who, like several others interviewed, declined to be named because he is not an authorized spokesman. But, the officer said of Miller, "this woman came in with a plan. She was leading them. . . . She ended up almost hijacking the mission."
Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. --According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls. [Richard Sale, UPI, February 5, 2004]
**Per Kos at Daily Kos: "Hannah, by the way, is a "senior national security aide" for Cheney, and was, in fact, the administration's main point of contact with Chalabi's INC."**
Israel's most dangerous enemy -- have also alarmed both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties were highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that "U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq." According to one government source, some of the information he gave Iran "could get people killed." A Chalabi aide denied the allegation. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA -- Chalabi's longtime enemies -- were behind the leak: "the State Department and the CIA are using the intelligence about his Iran ties to persuade the president to cut him loose once and for all."
"The White House had a perfect "deal" when it came to Miller. Chalabi would provide the Bushites with the information they needed to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he would supply the same material to Miller. Chalabi would tip her on something and then she'd go to the White House, which had already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she'd get it corroborated by an insider she'd always described as a 'senior administration official.'
I'm not certain if it was arrogant ignorance or some greed or delusional heroic motive or downright intent to deceive the American public. All I know is that George W. Bush should have known better and his administration should have known what they were doing when they gave such enormous credence to Chalabi, whose own self-interest (and past indication of poor character) was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq.
The fact that the N.Y. Times failed to point out that much of its reporting was dependent on Chalabi and Iraqi defectors (while the Bushites apparently sucked up Chalabi's lies and distortions) is inexcusable."
"Would their vociferous defense of con-man Chalabi make the NeoCons anti-American? Have NeoCons become inconvenient friends of the White House? Wait! Some of the NeoCons are members of the White House administration !
"I highly recommend you read a Stratfor.com analysis before it's removed from the site."
The history of the other party is a different one. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and Democratic filibusters blocked progress for decades.
Despite this history, the Democratic Party by the 1960s had something real and tangible to overcome this legacy. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic President, signed what in my opinion were the most important laws of the 20th century: the civil rights act, voting rights act, open housing law.
By the 70s and into the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out.