Another Coverup Appears to Thicken

We're getting an even clearer picture of the efforts by mid-level U.S. Government bureaucrats to warn the Bush administration about the Al-Qaeda threat in the summer of 2001. The story that Rice failed to mention an impromptu briefing by CIA director George Tenet of Al-Qaeda plans to attack U.S. targets has been subsumed by the Foley pagegate scandal. But Jonathan Landay, formerly of the Christian Science Monitor is still on the case.

It appears that the CIA officials on the Al-Qaeda hunt kept beating the Bushes after the unsuccessful Rice briefing. Landay reports that the officials then went on to brief Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then Attorney General John Ashcroft. It also appears that Ashcroft publicly "lamented" never receiving such a heads up about the Al-Qaeda threat. None of these briefings were listed in the September 11 Commission Report detailing Bush and Clinton administration efforts to combat terrorism.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again...

FromRumsfeld, Ashcroft received warning of al Qaida attack before 9/11
By JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL and JOHN WALCOTT
McClatchy Newspapers

NBA Star says Republicans Lost Their Minds

Thank god Paul Krugman is back from vacation...

In any case, just as the religious right was feeling betrayed by Mr. Bush's focus on the goals of the economic right, the economic right suddenly seemed to become aware of the nature of its political allies. "Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?" asked Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, in an interview with Ryan Sager, the author of "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party." The answer, he said, was "blatant pandering to James Dobson." He went on, "Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies."

Some Republicans are switching parties. James Webb, who may pull off a macaca-fueled upset against Senator George Allen of Virginia, was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Charles Barkley, a former N.B.A. star who used to be mentioned as a possible future Republican candidate, recently declared, "I was a Republican until they lost their minds."

So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn't seem to be in Kansas anymore. Kathleen Sebelius, the state's Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.

And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he "got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right."

from"Things Fall Apart"
The New York Times
October 2, 2006

How we Handled Torture in the Past

ABC News dug up two past instances in which U.S. servicemen engaged in the technique known as waterboarding. In both cases, the soldiers were disciplined.

Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago. A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier's severe punishment.

"The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army," recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.

Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.

Elsewhere, Tom Malinowski describes the effect that a seemingly more benign technique, sleep deprivation, has on a prisoner.

Finally, the president might review the memoirs of former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, who describes experiencing sleep deprivation in a Soviet prison in the 1940s: "In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. . . . Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it. . . . I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them -- if they signed -- uninterrupted sleep!"

The Soviets understood that these methods were cruel. They were also honest with themselves about the purpose of such cruelty -- to brutalize their enemies and to extract false confessions, rather than truthful intelligence. By denying this, President Bush is not just misleading us. He appears to be deceiving himself.

from "Call Cruelty What It Is"
The Washington Post

Al Gore and the link between jobs, environment and security

Gore notes that jobs remain the great nexus between environmental and national security issues. Nothing new here. It's just always nice to see it articulated.

From a September 18th speech at NYU.

After all, many Americans are tired of borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf to make huge amounts of pollution that destroys the planet’s climate. Increasingly, Americans believe that we have to change every part of that pattern.

When I visit port cities like Seattle, New Orleans, or Baltimore, I find massive ships, running low in the water, heavily burdened with foreign cargo or foreign oil arriving by the thousands. These same cargo ships and tankers depart riding high with only ballast water to keep them from rolling over.

One-way trade is destructive to our economic future. We send money, electronically, in the opposite direction. But, we can change this by inventing and manufacturing new solutions to stop global warming right here in America. I still believe in good old-fashioned American ingenuity. We need to fill those ships with new products and technologies that we create to turn down the global thermostat. Working together, we can create jobs and stop global warming...

Shifting to a greater reliance on ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, butanol, and green diesel fuels will not only reduce global warming pollution and enhance our national and economic security, it will also reverse the steady loss of jobs and income in rural America. Several important building blocks for America’s role in solving the climate crisis can be found in new approaches to agriculture. As pointed out by the “25 by 25″ movement (aimed at securing 25% of America’s power and transportation fuels from agricultural sources by the year 2025) we can revitalize the farm economy by shifting its mission from a focus on food, feed and fiber to a focus on food, feed, fiber, fuel, and ecosystem services. We can restore the health of depleted soils by encouraging and rewarding the growing of fuel source crops like switchgrass and saw-grass, using no till cultivation, and scientific crop rotation. We should also reward farmers for planting more trees and sequestering more carbon, and recognize the economic value of their stewardship of resources that are important to the health of our ecosystems.

Remembering Ann Richards

Thanks to Molly Ivins for this story from her days with the former Texas gov. who pass away earlier this month.

At a long-ago political do at Scholz Garten in Austin, everybody who was anybody was there meetin' and greetin' at a furious pace. A group of us got the tired feet and went to lean our butts against a table at the back wall of the bar. Perched like birds in a row were Bob Bullock, then state comptroller, moi, Charles Miles, the head of Bullock's personnel department, and Ms. Ann Richards. Bullock, 20 years in Texas politics, knew every sorry, no good sumbitch in the entire state. Some old racist judge from East Texas came up to him, "Bob, my boy, how are you?"

Bullock said, "Judge, I'd like you to meet my friends: This is Molly Ivins with the Texas Observer."

The judge peered up at me and said, "How yew, little lady?"

Bullock, "And this is Charles Miles, the head of my personnel department." Miles, who is black, stuck out his hand, and the judge got an expression on his face as though he had just stepped into a fresh cowpie. He reached out and touched Charlie's palm with one finger, while turning eagerly to the pretty, blonde, blue-eyed Ann Richards. "And who is this lovely lady?"

Ann beamed and replied, "I am Mrs. Miles."

The Disinformation Society

Check out Robert F. Kennedy Junior's excellent article in the May issue of Vanity Fair. While the pundits are scrambling around trying to find a Democratic candidate who can out-god the Republicans and win an election, Kennedy makes a point echoed by some of the less jittery observers of recent events. The majority of voters actually agreed with Kerry on the important issues of the day. They just didn't realize that President Bush's policies were so out of line with their views.

Here's the crux:

To explain the president's victory, political pundits posited a vast "values gap" between red states and blue states. They attributed the president's success in the polls, despite his tragic job failures, to the rise of religious fundamentalism. Heartland Americans, they suggested, are the soldiers in a new American Taliban, willing to vote against their own economic interests to promote "morality" issues that they see as the critical high ground in a life-or-death culture war.

I believe, however, that the Democrats lost the presidential contest not because of a philosophical chasm between red and blue states but due to an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media. Traditional broadcast networks have abandoned their former obligation to advance democracy and promote the public interest by informing the public about both sides of issues relevant to those goals. To attract viewers and advertising revenues, they entertain rather than inform. This threat to the flow of information, vital to democracry's survival, has been compounded in recent years by the growing power of the right wing media that twist the news and deliberately decieve the public to advance their radical agenda.

According to an October 2004 survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA):

• 72% of Bush supporters believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or a major program for developing them), versus 26 percent of Kerry voters. A seven-month search by 1,500 investigators led by David Kay, working for the C.I.A., found no such weapons.
  
• 75% of Bush supporters believed that Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda, a view held by 30 percent of Kerry supporters. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that there was no terrorist alliance between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
  
• 82% of Bush supporters erroneously believed either that the rest of the world felt better about the U.S. thanks to its invasion of Iraq or that views were evenly divided. Eighty-six percent of Kerry supporters accurately understood that a majority of the world felt worse about our country.
  
• Most Bush supporters believed that Iraq war had strong support in the Islamic world. Kerry's supporters accurately estimated the low level of support in Islamic countries. Even Turkey, the most Westernized Islamic country, was 87 percent against the invasion.
  
• Most significant, the majority of Bush voters agreed with Kerry supporters that if Iraq did not have WMD and was not providing assistance to al-Qaeda the U.S. should not have gone to war. Furthermore, most Bush supporters, according to PIPA, favored the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming, the treaty to ban land mines, and strong labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, and wrongly believed that their candidate favored these things. In other words, the values and principals were the same. Bush voters made their choice based on bad information.

It's no mystery where the false beliefs are coming from. Both Bush and Kerry supporters overwhelmingly believe that the Bush administration at the time of the 2004 election was telling the American people that Iraq had W.M.D. and that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaeda. The White House's false message was carried by right-wing media in bed with the administration.

...

Alas, while the righ-wing media are deliberately misleading the American people, the traditional corporately owned media - CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN - are doing little to remedy those wrong impressions.

Kennedy goes on to track the development of the right wing media, their success in coining the term "liberal bias", and their efforts to pepper the airwaves and the mainstream media with a coordinated message

More on the Kennedy article to come.

God isn't partisan

I'm not religious but I do believe that understanding the role of religion in our society and knowning the underlying doctrine fueling much of the values debate currently raging in this country is essential. Thanks to the Swing State Project for these excellent remarks by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

From Senator Reid:

I am disappointed that in an attempt to hide what the debate is really about, Senator Frist would exploit religion like this. Religion to me is a very personal thing. I have been a religious man all my adult life. My wife and I have lived our lives and raised our children according to the morals and values taught by the faith to which we prescribe. No one has the right to judge mine or anyone else’s personal commitment to faith and religion.

God isn’t partisan.

As His children, he does ask us to do our very best and treat each other with kindness. Republicans have crossed a line today. America is better than this and Republicans need to remember that. This is a democracy, not a theocracy. We are people of faith, and in many ways are doing God’s work. But we represent all Americans, regardless of religion. Our founding fathers had the superior vision to separate Church and State in our democracy. It is a fundamental principle that has allowed our great, diverse nation to grow and flourish peacefully. Blurring the line between Church and State erodes our Constitution, and our democracy. It is a blatant abuse of power. Participating in something designed to incite divisiveness and encourage contention is unacceptable. I would hope that Sen. Frist will rise above something so beyond the pale.