The K Street Project

The Washington Post reported last week about the purge of Democrats from lobbying positions in Washington via the "K Street Project." Picking up where the Post left off, Nicholas Confessore elaborates on how the GOP disciplined K Street in an article in this month's Washington Monthly.

Counter Propaganda

Nothing but lip service


"In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military," an editorial from the Army Times notes. "But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately."

Israel cuts off BBC

Cursor notes that the Israeli government is "cutting off ties with the BBC, following the worldwide broadcast of 'Israel's Secret Weapon,' a documentary charging Israel with secretly stockpiling nuclear and chemical weapons. An Israeli government official called the accusations in the documentary 'very reminiscent of Der Stuermer,' the anti-Semitic newspaper from Nazi-era Germany."

The “newspaper of record” and WMD lies


In an article for the WSWS, Bill Vann examines the recent revelations about NY Times reporter Judith Miller.

He concludes that the entire Miller affair "is a devastating exposure of the degeneration of the American media and its incestuous relationship with the American ruling elite. Increasingly monopolized by a handful of vast corporations and staffed in its upper echelons by a layer of nouveau riche, who depend upon government handouts and approval for their 'scoops' and book deals, the US mass media has been fashioned over the past period into a dependable propaganda arm for the state and defender of the social interests of the country’s financial elite."

And now for the really big guns...

The war is over, but a second invasion has commenced. Ed Vulliamy and Faisal Islam of the Observer detail the corporate invasion of Iraq.

The truth will come out?

Diane Carman of the Denver Post thinks the "truth will have to emerge." Likewise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. thinks the issue "will not subside and disappear, as the administration supposes."

Both, of course, are speaking about the scandal-to-come over the Iraq war, due to the Bush administration's intelligence cooking and the subsequent lack of WMD finds.

I wish I could share their optimism, but with a compliant and complicit press, a spineless opposition party, and an administration and supporting party with no qualms about spinning and lying their way out of a mess, and into victory in '04, the truth will likely remain ignored.

US unprepared for attacks

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has issued a new study indicating that the US is "dangerously unprepared" to cope with another terror attack because "government agencies across the nation are dramatically underfunding efforts to prepare police, fire and ambulance personnel."

Immigrant Roundup Backfired

According to Jim Lobe, a new report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) charges that the "measures taken by the U.S. against Arab and Muslim immigrants after 9/11 have not only failed to protect U.S. security, but may have made it more vulnerable."

Humanitarian Intervention?

Ivan Eland observes that when the heat gets turned up on the Bush administration for its strained rationales and continual deceptions on the Iraq war, they "drag out the ever-popular 'humanitarian' justification for war."

Coincidentally, this week's edition of The Nation features a forum on humanitarian intervention.

Israeli soldiers cleared in Corrie death

The IDF has exonerated all of the soldiers involved in the death of Rachel Corrie. No surprise there.

US Halts Elections Throughout Iraq

Ah, democracy...

U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.

The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.

The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."

U.S. Slow on Bin Laden Drones

Here's more evidence that the Bush administration backed off Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11. There's more on this story over at Eschaton.

Slow to respond

President Bush was at an elementary school in Florida when the attacks on 9/11 commenced. What happened when he was informed by his Chief of Staff Andrew Card that, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack"?

Nothing...for well over 5 minutes, Bush and the Secret Service did nothing.

Wingin' it

This should be pretty obvious by now: the US didn't have much of a postwar plan for Iraq.

"We've been given a job that we haven't prepared for, we haven't trained for, that we weren't ready for," says one civil affairs officer in Iraq. "For a lot of the stuff we're doing, we're making it up as we go along."

Miller's Role In MET Alpha Questioned

NY Times reporter Judith Miller is in hot water again. No, not for parroting Ahmed Chalabi's lies, but for exerting undue influence and pressure on MET Alpha, the unit she was embedded with during the Iraq war.

Dubya does God's work

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."
-- George Bush, speaking to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas during the Aqaba summit

State Department expert urged to distort work

"A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views," reports the NY Times.

Christian Westermann, an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, "told lawmakers last week that while he felt pressure, he never actually changed the wording of any of his intelligence reports.

"He did not immediately provide lawmakers with details about his complaints, and it remains uncertain the degree to which his concerns related to Iraq or other regional issues.

"Administration officials said his most specific complaints concerned issues related to intelligence on Cuba, and he has not yet provided similar specific complaints about the handling of intelligence on Iraq."

The Times also notes the proper context: that a "number of analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies have privately complained over the past few months that they felt pressure from administration officials to write reports that they believe overstated evidence that Iraq had illegal weapons programs and terrorist links" and that many "were angered that senior Bush administration officials selectively disclosed classified intelligence reports that supported the worst-case scenario concerning Iraq's weapons programs, making it seem as if there was an imminent threat to the United States. The analysts believe that in some cases, White House and Pentagon officials made public statements about Iraq's weapons based on intelligence that was far from definitive."

These last points, more than the failure to locate WMD thus far, are what should prompt impeachment hearings for Dubya and his crew.

If you haven't already, read the Ackerman and Judis article from TNR for a thorough elaboration.

Al Qaeda mutating like a virus

Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star takes a look at the way the "war on terror" has affected Al Qaeda.

The worldwide campaign [against Al Qaeda since 9/11], coupled with the Afghan war, resulted in a great leap forward in the understanding of how Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups work.

American intelligence sources say the draconian measures have delivered significant blows to Al Qaeda and its associates, shattering their bases of operations, breaking up their financial pipelines, killing some of their leaders and putting thousands of operatives on the run.

That's the good news.

But the bad news, delivered over the past month of spectacular killings, shows that, like a virus, Al Qaeda and its allies are fragmenting, mutating and spreading again.

Part of the problem, analysts say, was the war in Iraq, which unsurprisingly created a new wave of animosity toward the United States and Britain, acting as an effective recruiting tool among disaffected Muslims.

The failure to locate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the existence of which were used to justify the invasion, has reinforced the belief that America was cynically "sacrificing blood for oil" in a desperately poor and barely functioning country.

But most alarming, Middle East experts say, is the sacrifice of the long-term U.S. policy of supporting secular, rather than Islamic governments in the region, leaving the way open for extremists.

"This war has been a gift to Osama bin Laden," says Saad al-Fagih, the London-based director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.

"First of all, very few people in the region supported his argument that America wanted hegemony over the Middle East. At the same time, they believed that if there were an invasion of Iraq, the Baath party and its supporters would put up a serious fight."

However, al-Fagih says, "the fact that America actually waged war in Iraq showed that bin Laden was right. And when the Baath party supporters gave up so easily, it was a major defeat for secular Arab nationalism."

Al Qaeda, which is fighting to install an extreme form of Islam across the Muslim world, has become an even-stronger magnet for disaffected Muslims who feel the only way of stopping Washington's mammoth military machine is through terrorist action.

Americans scared stupid

From Cursor:

A new Washington Post/ABC poll finds that 56% of respondents would support military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, 63% think the Iraq war can be justified without finding WMD and 24% believe Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces during the conflict, while 14% weren't sure. Complete poll data.

ABC provides some cover for the 24% who think Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces: "That could reflect any number of factors -- erroneous information, bad guesses, an inclination to expect the worst from Iraq, and others. But probably more than anything, it underscores the limitations of opinion polls as a tool to measure knowledge."

But the director of the mid-May poll in which 22% of respondents said Iraq used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops, was less forgiving, calling the 22% "a striking finding. Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

Vote!

Don't forget to vote in the MoveOn.org Presidential Primary...

Moron or Liar?

Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar? You betcha.

Doesn't make sense, does it?

"It is sort of puzzling I think that you can have 100% certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence, and zero certainty about where they are."
-- Hans Blix

Denial, Deception, and Cowardice

"There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war," observes Paul Krugman in his NY Times column. "The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious."

He continues,

So why are so many people making excuses for Mr. Bush and his officials?

Part of the answer, of course, is raw partisanship. One important difference between our current scandal and the Watergate affair is that it's almost impossible now to imagine a Republican senator asking, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

But even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to face the implications.

After all, suppose that a politician — or a journalist — admits to himself that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war. Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust. So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability — and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a scary prospect.

Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk — to face the truth and act on it — what will happen to our democracy?

Ted Rall, in a corresponding opinion piece, doesn't see too many people stepping up to the plate and calling Bush on his lies and deceptions. He thinks that we've become "a nation of cowards."

800 Al Qaeda Members at Large

"The United Nations will issue a report next week showing Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda militant network has some 800 members ready to strike economic or tourist targets," the AP reports.

Slouching Toward Quagmire?

A new report by the International Crisis Group's Middle East team, Baghdad: A Race Against the Clock, is "must reading," according to Micah L. Sifry of the Iraq War Reader.

"The detailed briefing paper warns that what happens in the next few weeks is critical," Sifry explains. "Either the American and British forces quickly restore personal security and public services, establishing a better rapport with Iraqis before the summer heat fully sets in, or 'there is a genuine risk that serious trouble will break out.'"

UMich Cases

As you've likely heard, the Supreme Court has ruled on the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. Check out the Ann Arbor News' Special Report for continued updates on the fallout of the decision.

"...slightly more visible than Punxsutawney Phil"

What the hell does Dick Cheney do with all of his spare time?

Who dies for Bush lies?

Wake up, America

Ivan Eland thinks the American public should be blamed for Bush's Iraq shenanigans.

He writes, "The alarming thing about Iraq War II is that the American people had plenty of evidence before the war -- from the president’s own intelligence chief -- that the Bush administration was exaggerating the threat. In a republic, aren’t the people ultimately responsible for the policies their government adopts in their name?"

Cluster Bombs in Iraq

"Hundreds and possibly thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed or maimed by outdated, defective U.S. cluster weapons that lack a safety feature other countries have added," reports the AP's Thomas Frank.

The rapacious adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are going badly

"America's two 'great victories' since 11 September 2001 are unravelling," writes John Pilger.

"In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging...

"In Iraq, scene of the second 'great victory,' there are two open secrets. The first is that the 'terrorists' now besieging the American occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their enforced 'liberation' (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003). The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied."

Double Agent

Iyman Faris, the truck driver who recently pleaded guilty to planning Al Qaeda-backed terrorist acts in the US, was working for the FBI as a double agent for several months, according to the Telegraph.

More Bush distortions

This is old news: Bush overstated the Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

US plans to 'own' space

Neil Mackay of the Glasgow Sunday Herald is digging through public documents again.

He was one of the first reporters to shed light on the PNAC story, which laid out the US plan to dominate the Middle East (and rest of the world), and now he's setting his sights on the American plan to dominate space:

It sounds like the stuff of the darkest sci-fi fantasies, but it's not. The Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan is a clear statement of the US's intention to dominate the world by turning space into the crucial battlefield of the 21st century.

The document details how the US Air Force Space Command is developing exotic new weapons, nuclear warheads and spacecraft to allow the US to hit any target on earth within seconds. It also unashamedly states that the US will not allow any other power to get a foothold in space.

...The Strategic Master Plan (SMP) changes the nature of war. No longer will battles be fought by ships, aircraft and ground forces. Instead the US will use its technology to dominate any theatre of war from space.

The document also opens the door for the US to become the only global policeman. Control of space will give it uniquely instantaneous reach, capable of 'worldwide military operations.'

In a related article from a few months ago, Chris Floyd tackled the American military's preoccupation with "Full Spectrum Dominance."

Subverting the MoveOn Primary?

Benedict Spinoza points to some evidence that a few right wingers are intending to sabotage this coming Tuesday's MoveOn.org primary.

He notes, "The attempt is at least in part the brainchild of Jimmy Moore on the right wing Common Voice website. His plan is to enlist fellow Republicans to join MoveOn and then cast a vote for Al Sharpton, hoping to force that organization to then have to endorse Mr. Sharpton's candidacy."

Presumably, if MoveOn had to support Sharpton, these right wingers think that its campaign work would then be politically discredited.

Losing the peace in Afghanistan

"Just as the United States is struggling to deal with major postwar headaches in Iraq," Jim Lobe writes in the Asia Times, "its efforts to pacify Afghanistan appear to be unraveling, according to a new report by a key group of experts sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Asia Society.

"Titled 'Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?', the 24-page document, authored by, among others, three retired senior US government policymakers who specialize in South Asian affairs, answers that question very much in the affirmative and argues that Washington must do far more, and urgently, to save the situation."

American military bans BBC crew from Guantanamo for talking to inmates

Nothing to see here, folks...except, of course, egregious violations of the Geneva Convention.

Looters Stole 6,000 Artifacts

As of now, at least 6,000 artifacts from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities are confirmed to be missing. This is far less than initially thought, but it is still a substantial loss. The number could also rise as experts continue their inventory.

WMD Looted?

George Bush is now saying that the US hasn't found WMD in Iraq because, as Reuters puts it, "suspected arms sites had been looted in the waning days of Saddam Hussein's rule."

It's hard to not laugh at this, but we probably should have seen it coming, as Cyndy Roy suggests.

The Dems

Ronald Brownstein of the LA Times reports that there's some tension amongst Democrats as liberals and centrists do battle over the trajectory of their party.

In a related piece, Lawrence Magnuson talks about how and why the Democrats are tip-toeing around the WMD issue.

Reprising 'Nam

First, the language was resurrected; now, the movies:

U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.

For an occupying force that's trying to sell itself as a bunch of "liberators," they sure aren't doing a good job.

Weary of Occupation

US troops stationed in Iraq are "growing frustrated and disillusioned with their role as postwar peacekeepers," according to the Washington Post.

"'What are we getting into here?' asked a sergeant with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division who is stationed near Baqubah, a city 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. 'The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?'"

Deception and Democracy

In a rather long article for the New Republic, John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman look back at how the Iraq war was sold.

White House pushed Saddam-9/11 link without evidence

In a media advisory, FAIR notes that Former General Wesley Clark recently declared on NBC's Meet the Press that the White House had been pushing for a link between Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 without any evidence. Clark also admitted that "he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks" by someone presumably sympathetic to the Bush administration's stance on Iraq.

As FAIR also observes, "Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002," which reported that Donald Rumsfeld had explicitly and immediately tried to link 9/11 with Iraq, sans evidence.

"Despite its implications...[CBS's] report was greeted largely with silence when it aired. Now, nine months later, media are covering damaging revelations about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, yet still seem strangely reluctant to pursue stories suggesting that the flawed intelligence -- and therefore the war-- may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence. The public deserves a fuller accounting of this story."

Indeed we do.

The Bush Lies Marathon

Steve Perry of Bush Wars has been compiling a list of Bush's lies. He's been at it for six days now. Check out each day's list: one, two, three, four, five, six.

Cyndy Roy is also going back through the stacks and uncovering plenty of evidence that the slanting of intelligence data was a common theme during the runup to war. The mainstream press just failed to connect the dots...and still does.

Mass Graves, Good and Bad

"They were digging mass graves in Iraq last week," observes Chris Floyd in the Moscow Times.

No, not the mass graves that George W. Bush now reflexively invokes to justify his murder of up to 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and the needless deaths of more than 200 American soldiers in the aggressive war he launched on the basis of proven lies and outright fabrications. Those mass graves, containing victims of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, were dug years ago, back when powerful U.S. officials like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz were pursuing "closer ties" to the Saddam regime at the signed, insistent order of another president named George Bush.

...We're now told that those mass graves are bad mass graves, although they were perfectly acceptable at the time. (Then again, fashions change, don't they? Remember when presidential deceit was an impeachable offense? When military aggression was a war crime? Ah, those silly fads of yesteryear.) But the new mass graves being dug in Iraq today -- for the innocent collaterals killed during the American military sweeps last week -- are good mass graves, you see, because the aged farmers, retarded teenagers, young fathers and fleeing women now being shoveled into fetid desert pits were killed by the bombs and bullets of liberation!

MoveOn.org PAC Primary

The MoveOn.org PAC Primary is scheduled to start on Tuesday, June 24, and will last for 48 hours. If you're interested in participating, and aren't already a MoveOn member, go here to register. To find out more about the 9 Democratic candidates, go here.

Don Hazen of Alternet has also summarized what the primary's all about.

Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War

Chris Fagan writes that "the war for control of the Congo isn't mindless tribal killing. It's a war of the new world order--one in which traditional allies in Europe and the U.S. back competing sides in a slaughter for key economic resources and strategic influence."

Perhaps this is why the mainstream press generally ignores the conflict.

Galloway Docs Fake

It's official. The documents which implicated George Galloway as a Saddam dupe are forgeries.

Might as well get comfortable

USA Today reports that Paul Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have conceded that it's likely the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan will last 10 years, and cost upwards of $54 billion per year. William Nordhaus' high estimate might just come to fruition.

Meanwhile, the Guardian's Seumas Milne writes that the occupation of Iraq is "bound to get worse" until the US and British forces pull out.

The Violence of Occupation

In a series of interviews with the Evening Standard, several American soldiers stationed in Iraq have admitted to "regularly killing civilians," and that their typical response to combat uncertainty is to "shoot first and ask questions later."

Challenging the FCC

Thankfully, the FCC's June 2nd ruling is being challenged in Congress. The AP reports that a "bipartisan effort is underway in the Senate to overturn parts of a Federal Communications Commission decision that freed media companies from decades-old ownership limits and allowed them to merge and buy new outlets."

Guerrilla War

Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that the US is now waging a "guerrilla war" in Iraq, according to the Financial Times.

Editing out bad news

According to the NY Times, the EPA "is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs." The report was commissioned by Christie Whitman in 2001 and was meant "to provide the first comprehensive review of what is known about various environmental problems, where gaps in understanding exist and how to fill them."

The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

In the end, E.P.A. staff members, after discussions with administration officials, said they decided to delete the entire discussion to avoid criticism that they were selectively filtering science to suit policy.

Administration officials defended the report and said there was nothing untoward about the process that produced it. Mrs. Whitman said that she was "perfectly comfortable" with the edited version and that the differences over climate change should not hold up the broader assessment of the nation's air, land and water.

..."As it went through the review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change," Ms. Whitman said. "So rather than go out with something half-baked or not put out the whole report, we felt it was important for us to get this out because there is a lot of really good information that people can use to measure our successes."

...But private environmental groups sharply criticized the changes when they heard of them.

"Political staff are becoming increasingly bold in forcing agency officials to endorse junk science," said Jeremy Symons, a climate policy expert at the National Wildlife Federation. "This is like the White House directing the secretary of labor to alter unemployment data to paint a rosy economic picture."

The EPA's Draft Report on the Environment is available, here.

Impeachment? Not bloody likely

John Dean and Norman Solomon agree. An investigation into Bush's lies on Iraq and a subsequent impeachment hearing are reasonable ideas at this point, but with the Republicans in control of Congress, neither are likely to happen.

Iran Protests

It's ironic that the protests which have recently rocked Iran began as demonstrations against privatization. What's even more curious is that right wing cheerleaders are so supportive of protests over there, when many of these very same folks typically deride and spit at every other type of protest imaginable.

The Plan: Bloat the rich and eviscerate social programs

David Moberg looks at some of the disastrous consequences of the Republican tax cuts, and asks, "How long can this Enron style of government continue before it crashes, or before citizens replace the CEO?"

Bush lied; few seem to care

Salon's Jake Tapper looks at how the Bush administration hyped up Iraq's WMD capabilities, while Michelle Goldberg tries to figure out why Americans don't care about the lies that were used to justify the Iraq war.

(Day Pass, here)

Welcome to the New World Order

The American job market is particularly bad for white collar workers right about now. Things only look to get worse, as the white collar worker will soon be confronting the very same forces that chopped down blue collar labor in this country some 20 years ago: overseas competition and the wonders of the neoliberal order. According to Fortune,

In the next 15 years Forrester Research predicts that 3.3 million service jobs will move to countries like India, Russia, China, and the Philippines, with the IT sector leading the way. The financial services industry is expected to be another major job exporter, according to consulting firm A.T. Kearney, shifting more than 500,000 jobs, or 8% of its U.S. workforce, abroad by 2008. "The debate at major financial services companies today is no longer whether to relocate some business functions but rather which ones and where," concludes Kearney managing director Andrea Bierce. "Any function that does not require face-to-face contact is now perceived as a candidate for offshore relocation." That may be a slight exaggeration, but there's no doubt that U.S. financial services firms are making explosive moves overseas. GE Capital's International Services unit, which provides everything from risk calculation to IT services and actuarial analysis for GE worldwide, has grown from 634 employees to 17,000 during the past five years. More than half those workers are in India, and they're not being used for mindless data entry--in India every employee has a college degree, and more than 1,200 have MBAs.

Bush's 9/11 coverup?

Eric Boehlert of Salon reports that several family members of the victims of the 9/11 attacks are growing impatient and wondering why the Bush administration "has been so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures."

(you'll need a Salon Day Pass to read the story)

Which path?

"The United States is at a crossroads," declares Nat Perry, "with neither route offering an easy journey. In one direction lies a pretend land – where tax cuts increase revenue, where war is peace, where any twisted bits of intelligence justify whatever the leader wants and the people follow. In the other direction lies a painful struggle to bring accountability to political forces that have operated with impunity now for years."

He continues, "What does it mean when the most powerful nation on earth chooses fantasy over truth? What are the consequences when an American president realizes he can broadly falsify the factual record and get away with it?

"The answers to these questions could decide the future of the American democratic experiment and determine the future safety of the world."

A Wake Up Call for Americans

...from daintily dirty:

Our media is doing a great disservice to this country by continuing to play cheerleader for Bush and Co. It is an outrage that Bush lied. We should be marching by the millions to the steps of the White House and demanding answers. We, the people of this Nation, better wake up while we still can. Our arrogance and discounting the importance of the rest of the world will come back to haunt us once again. We are hated, not because of our freedom and grand lifestyle, but because we behave in the world as if everyone else can go to hell, we will get what we want, when we want it (we're starting to treat each other that way in our own country, but that is another rant for another day.) Our government, representing us, has lied and deceived, and then shrugs its shoulders when questioned. We need to stop doing the same. We need to demand accountability and responsibility by those who represent us. We need to do it now.

Another BBB

Medicine and food for the Iraqis? Nope, that's just another broken Bush promise.

Arming Al-Qaida, indirectly

"Weapons and explosives smuggled out of Iraq after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime may have ended up in the hands of al-Qaida militants in Saudi Arabia," reports Mohamad Bazzi of Newsday.

WMD Lies Could Be the New Watergate

"The war on Iraq is a Byzantine puzzle that begins and ends with a lie," writes the Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts. "The media have an obligation to expose it."

A Broken Body, a Broken Story

The Washington Post is still trying to get to the bottom of the Saving Private Lynch story. Many of the details remain vague. Perhaps Viacom will eventually help us see the light with a synergistic frenzy.

Toppling Iran still a hot item

London's Financial Times and Evening Standard are each reporting that the US is ratcheting up the pressure on Iran even further.

According to FT, there is support in Congress for some kind of "peaceful regime change in Iran." Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, is proposing an "Iran Democracy Act," which "would be similar in approach to the Iraq Liberation Act passed by Congress in 1998 which adopted regime change in Baghdad as the policy goal. The Iran bill would make it US policy to 'support an internationally monitored referendum in Iran by which the Iranian people can peacefully change the system of government in Iran.'" The bill might also include money for covert operations.

The Evening Standard, on the other hand, is reporting that "British and American intelligence and special forces have been put on alert for a conflict with Iran within the next 12 months," allegedly because of fears that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program.

Under the Sheets w/ Dubya

...High Above in the Tower of Power.

What Is Happening in America?

The Bush administration, Eliot Weinberger writes, "is, quite simply, the most frightening American administration in modern times, one that is appalling both to the left and to traditional conservatives. This junta is unabashed in its imperialist ambitions; it is enacting an Orwellian state of Perpetual War; it is dismantling, or attempting to dismantle, some of the most fundamental tenets of American democracy; it is acting without opposition within the government, and is operating so quickly on so many fronts that it has overwhelmed and exhausted any popular opposition."

Former Guantanamo prisoners tell of despair

What's going on at Guantanamo is an absolute travesty. But you knew that already, right?

Costs of Occupation

Casualties from the Iraq occupation continue to climb for US forces. Could this be the factor that erodes popular support for the war in America?

Poll suggests world hostile to US

The cliched, post 9/11 question of "Why do they hate us?" has an answer of sorts. Two words: George Bush.

Back to al-Falluja

Human Rights Watch is alleging that the US military isn't telling the truth about its role in the shootings in the Iraq town of al-Fallujah on April 28 and 30, which killed 30 demonstrators.

US media caved in to the Bush agenda

"Why," asks Eric Margolis, "are so many Americans unconcerned their government appears to have misled them and Congress over Iraq, and then waged a war with no basis in law or fact?"

Because the American media served as a propaganda outlet for the Bush administration's war claims.

Dale Steinreich details some of the ways Fox News, in particular, has been trying to legitimize the war. Even the allegedly liberal NY Times was more than willing to pave the way for invasion.

More exploitation of 9/11?

Are Republicans planning to lay the cornerstone for the new WTC site during their 2004 Convention in NYC?

The Right Wing Agenda

Steven E. Miller identifies the three major points of the right wing's agenda.

It's Not the WMD

Don't confine criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war to the issue of WMD, urges Carla Binion.

The WMD aren't the primary issue. Rather, it's "the pattern of deliberate deception, the lying to Congress and the outrageous abuse and betrayal of the American people," she argues.

Defining Hamas

Ian Fisher of the NY Times looks at why Hamas has such broad support amongst Palestinians.

Losing Control

The "war on terror" isn't working, reports Robin Wright of the LA Times. Unless drastic changes are enacted, the U.S. is on course to lose control in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine.

The American military excursions, Wright suggests, are likely driving the "direction of the Islamic world" towards "deeper extremism."

Protesters

In the US, protesters are being conflated with terrorists. Interesting that when they pop up in Iran, they're lauded as freedom fighters.

What about Palestine?

The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel has an idea for how to really save Private Lynch.

Americans stupid, ignorant, or just misinformed?

Frank Davies reports that 1/3 of Americans erroneously believe the US has found WMD in Iraq and that 22% think Iraq used chemical and bio weapons in the war, according to the results of a recent poll.

Beers Spills Beans

Rand Beers, the former top dog at the NSC who resigned a few months ago, has broken his silence and started talking to the Washington Post.

"The [Bush] administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."

...In a series of interviews, Beers, 60, critiqued Bush's war on terrorism...Much of what he knows is classified and cannot be discussed. Nevertheless, Beers will say that the administration is "underestimating the enemy." It has failed to address the root causes of terror, he said. "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged and generally underfunded."

The focus on Iraq has robbed domestic security of manpower, brainpower and money, he said. The Iraq war created fissures in the United States' counterterrorism alliances, he said, and could breed a new generation of al Qaeda recruits. Many of his government colleagues, he said, thought Iraq was an "ill-conceived and poorly executed strategy."

"I continue to be puzzled by it," said Beers, who did not oppose the war but thought it should have been fought with a broader coalition. "Why was it such a policy priority?" The official rationale was the search for weapons of mass destruction, he said, "although the evidence was pretty qualified, if you listened carefully."

He thinks the war in Afghanistan was a job begun, then abandoned. Rather than destroying al Qaeda terrorists, the fighting only dispersed them. The flow of aid has been slow and the U.S. military presence is too small, he said. "Terrorists move around the country with ease. We don't even know what's going on. Osama bin Laden could be almost anywhere in Afghanistan," he said.

Beers has apparently signed up to help John Kerry's presidential campaign. According to one observer, Paul C. Light of the Brookings Institution, this is an idication that "the way he [Beers] wants to make a difference in the world is to get his former boss out of office."

While Beers is hesitant to explicitly diss the Bush administration, his wife offered this comment about the clique that's running Washington these days: "It's a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."

Furor over looting

Conservative commentators are on a rampage regarding recent revised estimates of looting in Iraq. Many have latched on to David Aaronovitch's article in last week's Guardian to launch broadsides against political adversaries. Roger Kimball, writing in the WSJ, sees this as another example of anti-American journalism. Likewise, Charles Krauthammer reconfigures an earlier claim of a British archaeologist and argues, "You'd have to go back centuries, say, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find mendacity on this scale."

Amusingly, in their demands for journalistic accuracy, Kimball and Krauthammer each repeat the canard that only 33 artifacts are missing. That's downright false, as Tom Tomorrow has pointed out.

A much better take, in my mind, came from Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune, who concluded, "The fact that the losses were so much less than originally believed does not make the coalition's failure to protect the museum any less a dereliction."

Pax Americana

Stephen Howe examines the history and future of American Empire on openDemocracy.

Behind the scenes in Iran?

As protests ring through the streets of Tehran, the Economist is wondering if the US is pulling the strings...

Israeli retaliation boosts Hamas

The more Israel clamps down on Hamas, the more popular the group grows.

Bringing the Taliban back into the fold

The Asia Times is reporting that intelligence officials from the FBI and Pakistan's ISI are negotiating with members of the Taliban in order to bring some degree of order to Afghanistan.

AEI: Plutocrats at work

The American Enterprise Institute has recently set its sights on NGOs. This has Ralph Nader wondering if AEI has lost all contact with reality.

US Clouds Iraqi Civilian Deaths

"Americans were outraged when 3,000 people were killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," writes Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe. "Now, between Afghanistan and Iraq, our vengeance has killed way more than that. We rightly demanded that the world care about our innocent dead. Now we wrongly ignore the people we killed. We not only bombed innocent people, we bombed our own innocence."

Democrats Struggle to Make Bush's Credibility an Issue

Bush has lied, distorted, and exaggerated on a wide variety of issues. This is a given. Unfortunately, Democrats don't think it will make a hill of beans come election time.

"Like they did for Reagan, people give Bush the benefit of the doubt," says Greg Haas, a Democratic political consultant from Ohio, "because they don't think he's running the government. His advisers are. When things go wrong or he says something wrong, he gets a pass."

A map rarely seen...

Investigate Bush Administration on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

Via Act For Change:

Evidence is mounting that the Bush Administration manipulated evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the preemptive attack. According to the Washington Post, Congressional Republicans have already spurned demands for a serious probe, referring the matter to closed door hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Bush Administration repeatedly asserted that it knew with certainty that Iraq had such weapons. This argument was the only argument that resonated with the public, and was essential in paving the way for putting our soldiers and many civilians at risk.

The failure by U.S. or British troops thus far to find any weapons of mass destruction, following the earlier failure by U.N. inspection teams, calls into question the Bush Administration’s honesty. Some are arguing that the unfolding story of mass killings and torture by Iraqi forces are justification enough for the war. While we disagree with that point, it is utterly irrelevant to the importance of discovering whether the Bush Administration knowingly lied.

If it did, countless lives and hundreds of billions of dollars were put at risk under explicitly false pretences. If this Administration can successfully use the big lie to launch a war, then it and future Administrations can use the big lie for other purposes as well.

Frankly, we hope the Administration did not lie on this point. But if it did, the truth must come out. In the absence of an independent prosecutor, the Senate (and an aggressive and independent press) is our best avenue to the truth.

Call to action

Urge Senators Frist and Daschle, the Majority and Minority Leader respectively, to convene a select Senate committee immediately, with sufficient funding and investigative power, to learn the truth about what the Bush Administration really knew about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Help them look!

Mark Fiore offers a handy little tool to Tony and George: a WMD finder.

Worst Looting Outside of Baghdad

"While considerable attention has been focused on the looting and damage to antiquities in Baghdad, the scale of damage may be far greater in the rest of Iraq, home to some of the most ancient sites of human civilization," reports the Washington Post.

Where to?

It is admittedly in tatters, if not dead, right now, but Edward Said and Ali Abunimah have been wondering just where the "road map" to peace in the Mid East was supposed to lead.

Stealth ads on WWJ in Detroit

Just another incident of advertising bleeding into the news...this time on the radio.

National snoops network

Unemployed? Well then sign up with US Homeguard and protect the homeland from your very own computer!

ICC Under Pressure from US

The US is still trying to bully and undermine the ICC.

Update: The pressure worked. "The United States won another yearlong exemption Thursday for American peacekeepers from prosecution by a new U.N. war crimes tribunal," reports the AP.

Reorganizing US Military Presence

"U.S. military forces abroad will undergo their most radical reconfiguration since the beginning of the Cold War," reports Radio Free Europe.

Citing a recent report in the Washington Post, Jeffrey Donovan writes, "the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea and the recent removal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia are the first steps in an ambitious project to replace most of America's permanent bases with dozens of smaller ones for quick strikes around the world."

U.S. Can't Rule Out N. Korea Strike, Perle Says

Richard Perle thinks we shouldn't rule out risking a nuclear confrontation with North Korea. Well, almost...

US Conservatives Take Aim at NGOs

According to Jim Lobe, a recent high-powered meeting of critics of NGOs expressed concerns that, "unlike corporations and governments, they are largely unregulated, and their internal processes often lack transparency and accountability."

To the more conservative critics, however, "international NGOs raise concerns that go far beyond transparency and accountability. To them, the international NGOs are pursuing a leftist or 'liberal' agenda that favors 'global governance' and other notions that are also promoted by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies."

In response, big whigs at the American Enterprise Institute will be launching a new initiative -- www.ngowatch.org -- to track the operations, funding sources and political agendas of the more pominent NGOs.

GOP Nixes Iraq Probe

Republicans sure are smart. Not wanting their President to risk getting thrown out of of office, top GOP leaders have "rejected Democratic demands for a formal public inquiry into whether the Bush administration distorted or mishandled intelligence about Saddam Hussein's illicit arms programs and links to terrorists," reports Jonathan Landay.

All-Out War?

The Israeli army has reportedly been ordered to "completely wipe out" Hamas. In turn, Hamas has issued a statement calling "on all military cells to act immediately and act like an earthquake to blow up the Zionist entity and tear it to pieces."

Iran agrees w/ Bush Administration on Iraqi arms

"An Iranian government official with ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Tehran sides with the Americans on one big issue — Saddam Hussein's weapons," reports Stewart Stogel of the Washington Times.

"Yes, we agree with the Americans," says the anonymous official. "Our intelligence indicated that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction and was hiding them from the U.N."

A Fake Magazine

Dennis Hans examines The New Republic's fake liberal image.

Smearing Blix

Hans Blix claims he was smeared by the Pentagon in an interview conducted by the Guardian. No kidding...

Iraq Civilian Deaths

An early and "fragmentary" AP survey indicates that "at least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war." At this point, Iraqbodycount.net tallies a minimum of 5531 deaths, with a max number of 7203.

Baghdad Looting

David Aaronovitch of the Guardian looks at what's up with the Baghdad museum lootings. Tom Tomorrow is trying to sort out what's going on, too.

Cycles of Violence

Yesterday's missile attacks by the IDF were an indication that "Israel wanted to stop the peace process," writes Zvi Bar'el in Ha'aretz. If that was indeed the goal, it sure looks like they're going to get their wish.

Most Palestinians live in poverty

The Jordan Times reports that 70 percent of Palestinians are living in poverty -- some 2.5 million people -- according to a recent survey released by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Those who long to make racism 'respectable'

We all know that neoconservatives support Empire. Salim Muwakkil reminds us that they're also staunch supporters of neoracism.

More on WMD Controversy

There are two good articles on the WMD controversy on Counterpunch today. Jason Leopold tackles Colin Powell's hollow denials, while Wayne Madison examines "WeaponsGate."

ePatriot?

As of now, I won't be participating in the ePatriots initiative. I'm with Cyndy on this one...

Child sickness 'soars' in Iraq

UNICEF is claiming that the "number of children in Iraq suffering from diarrhoea and related diseases appears to have risen dramatically in the past year," according to the BBC.

Cholera, dysentery and typhoid cases are 2.5 times higher this year than the last, no doubt due to "the war and the collapse of Iraq's infrastructure," which has "worsened the health hazards, disrupting clean water supplies, damaging sewage systems and halting rubbish collections."

The Tentacles of Empire

The Asia Times examines the paradigm shift which is leading to an ever-growing US military footprint in Asia.

Accountable?

As usual, Paul Krugman is taking no prisoners.

The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier.") In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous."

...I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.

In a similar article, David Corn asks, "Where's the Outrage?"

The Ignoble Savage

Kari Lydersen details the lawsuits being pursued by Michael Savage against takebackthemedia.com, savagestupidity.com, and michaelsavagesucks.com.

In Israel...

Israel is again trying to assassinate leaders of Hamas with military gunships. To his credit, Mahmoud Abbas has pulled no punches and labelled this a "terrorist" action, as two related assaults killed 5 and injured 32 civilians earlier today.

In unrelated news, the IDF has started dismantling some settlements in the West Bank.

Mass Deportation

"More than 13,000 Arab and Muslim men in the US are facing deportation after co-operating with post-11 September anti-terror measures," reports the BBC.

Hunt for WMD at a standstill

Tony Blair is in a bad situation, while Bush's predicament continues to worsen:

U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.

"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."

Things are getting so bad that even Bill Kristol is conceding that WMD may not be found.

"No WMD" simplifies case against Bush

As various factions of the Truth Patrol^TM try to spin "no WMD" into a non-issue, Ivan Eland notes that the "press’s intense focus on finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction may have an undesirable outcome. If weapons are eventually found, the issue of the administration’s deception could evaporate. No one will focus on Bush’s larger deception of the American people in his effort to sell his military adventure."

This is a point worth highlighting. Even the spineless Democrats are starting to make waves with questions alluding to lack of discoveries. This, however, reduces the focus of the Bush administration's shenanigans to a single issue when it is documented that the Bushies have been lying, distorting, selectively editing, and slanting the evidence against Iraq in the run up to war. The issue of WMD may be the issue with the most resonance amongst the general public, but it's only one part of the deceptive campaign that was waged to scare people into accepting the need to attack Iraq.

Matthew Barganier develops this point further in a related piece.

From the Weekend

* Is lying about the reason for a war an impeachable offense? You betcha.

* Bush thinks we've found WMD in Iraq. Ya know, those trailers. Some intelligence analysts are skeptical of such claims. Additionally, the Observer reports that the trailers "were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987."

* Bush has been making a habit of asserting proof of Iraqi WMD even when he didn't have the evidence to back up his assertions.

* Bush on Sharon, in early May: "I saved his ass in Iraq. He owes me, and I intend to collect the debt."

* Another intelligence official has come out alleging that intelligence was distorted to justify the Iraq war.

* Russ Baker examines the Blair and Miller scandals at the NY Times. "If the Times is serious about reform," he writes, "it needs to stop looking just at troublesome cases like Jayson Blair and to examine its star system and its desire to break news, beat the competition and all the while stay in the good graces of top officials."

* Blowback's afoot in Iraq, claims Paul Rogers.

* Jeremy Brecher wants to "terminate the Bush Juggernaut." Check out his looong discussion paper about why this is a good idea, and how to go about accomplishing it.

* Some good news: the looting of Iraqi antiquities isn't nearly as bad as initially thought.

* The unchecked growth of the Pentagon is causing significant policy problems, according to Robert Schlesinger of the Boston Globe.

* Under Secretary of State John Bolton has announced a new "rollback" strategy for comfronting so-called rogue states which possess WMD.

Liars 'R Us

Justin Raimondo explores how the Iraq war lies are being spun.

Iran in the crosshairs

Marc Perelman of the Jewish weekly Forward details the pressure being applied at the highest echelons of the US government to go ahead and take on Iran.

"For now," Perelman writes, "President Bush's official stance is to encourage the Iranian people to push the mullah regime aside themselves, but observers believe that the policy is not yet firm, and that has created an opportunity for activists. Neoconservatives advocating regime change in Tehran through diplomatic pressure — and even covert action — appear to be winning the debate within the administration, several knowledgeable observers said."

It's also worth noting that the article echoes Jim Lobe's observation that Bill Kristol is "leading the charge" on Tehran. Michael Ledeen, of course, is not too far behind.

No recovery in sight

The American economy is still in the toilet.

Cheney leaned on intelligence workers

Intelligence workers have long been complaining about the pressure they were receiving to produce intelligence that would justify the war in Iraq.

It turns out that some of that pressure was coming straight from the top, according to the Washington Post, as Dick Cheney and "his most senior aide" made frequent trips to check on the progress being made at the CIA.

Waldorf Transcripts Retraction

In addition to yesterday's Wolfowitz-oil story, the Guardian has retracted its story about the Waldorf transcripts.

The paper's rationale for doing so isn't terribly clear.

'Shoulda left Saddam as is...

The heat has been turned up on Bush and those that supported the Iraq war in recent days.

In response, Billmon of the Whiskey Bar writes, "the war hawks have settled on a response to the WMD snipe hunt fiasco and the broken promise of democracy fiasco. This is to respond to every bit of bad news – and every new sign of the administration's bad faith – by snarling the question: 'Well, would you have left Saddam in power?'

This is the right-wing question de jour because they believe it puts opponents of the war in an impossible position. Say "yes," and it doesn't matter what else you say, the attack machine has you in its cross hairs. Say "no," and the obvious response is "so what you are bitching about?"

...since I'm not running for office and have no journalistic reputation left to protect, I'll answer the hawks' question: Yes, I would have left Saddam in power.

Because at the end of the day, having a brutal but aging dictator sitting in a box in Baghdad would have been far safer for U.S. national security – and the health and welfare of the Iraqi people – than the bloody chaos we have unleashed.

Because booting Saddam back into the criminal underground resurrected not one of his previous victims, and added another 4,000 names or so to the list of casualties – and that doesn't include the thousands or hundreds of thousands more who will die in the insanity to come...

A related piece from Mother Jones documents the intellectual backflips being done by those staunch supporters of Bush and the war.

Iraq war has always been based on lies...

Jason Leopold argues that those who claim the Iraq WMD mess represents an "intelligence failure" just aren't paying attention. The WMD have always been a red herring; they were merely the pretext used to justify the incursion.

After all, it is public knowledge that the war in Iraq was decided within hours/days of the attacks on 9/11, well before the WMD issue was raised by the Bush administration.

Looking fwd. to '04

Iraq war all about the oil

Someone in the administration better shut up Paul Wolfowitz before he lets even more cats outta the bag. According to the Guardian,

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Update: The Wolfowitz quote taken from the transcript of his remarks (linked above) isn't nearly as damning as the Guardian implies in this story. Nonetheless, the remarks still indicate that oil was a crucial factor in the administration's thinking on the runup to war.

Update II: The Guardian has retracted the story about Wolfowitz's oil comment.

Bush and the Nazis

Well lookee what we have in the Polish edition of Newsweek...

Roughly (and partially) translated, via tp.com's Take on the News blog:

Prescott Sheldon Bush, grandfather of George Walker Bush, had financial dealings during World War II with the Nazis, amassing a family fortune as a banker. Prescott Bush was a shareholder of the company United Banking Corporation, working with industrialist Fritz Thyssen from the Nazistowskiego Silesian Consolidated Steel Corporation, where Auschwitz prisoners worked.

Yup. That's the story about Prescott Bush's dealings with the Nazis. Is anything like this in the American edition of Newsweek?

Of course not, silly.

In war's wake, hostility and mistrust towards US

Meg Bortin of IHT reports that, according to the results of the Pew Center's recent "Views of a Changing World 2003" poll, the "war in Iraq has widened the rift between the United States and the rest of the world, with a steep plunge in Americans' views of their traditional allies and a further surge of anti-Americanism in Muslim countries."

The poll of more than 15,000 people in 20 countries and the Palestinian Authority, conducted in May by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center...forcefully supported the finding of an earlier survey that a U.S. war with Iraq would fuel anti-American sentiment.

As could be expected, this feeling is strongest in the Muslim world, where negative attitudes toward the United States have soared since the war on Iraq began March 20 with a wave of American air attacks over Baghdad.

One of the most extreme shifts was seen in Turkey, where the government, heeding popular sentiment, decided not to allow United States to use its soil as a base for attacks on Iraq although Washington and Ankara are partners in NATO.

The poll found that 83 percent of Turks now have an unfavorable opinion of the United States, up from 55 percent last summer.

...In fact, feelings are so intense in the Islamic world that Osama bin Laden was chosen by five Muslim publics - in Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority - as one of the three political leaders they would most trust to "do the right thing" in world affairs.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said he had been surprised by the extent to which "the bottom has fallen out" in the Muslim world.

"Anti-Americanism has deepened, but it has also widened," he said. "You now find it in the far reaches of Africa - in Nigeria, among Muslims - and in Indonesia. People see America as a real threat. They think we're going to invade them."

It goes without saying that what is indicated above is precisely what critics of the war in Iraq warned.

Update: A close look at the Pew Report indicates that the figures Bortin cites on Turkey are a bit out of whack.

Someone in a comment to the corresponding post at American Samizdat caught the misquote.

It turns out that while support for the US in Turkey has decreased over the past year, it's increased since March (from 12-15%).

A chart on page 19 of the report also indicates that 30% of respondents had a "favorable view of the US" last summer, down from 52% in 1999/2000.

I'm not quite sure where Bortin got her figures...

Iraq repercussions troubling

The Iraq situation is potentially a ticking political time bomb, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

"Some of President Bush's top advisers," John Walcott writes, "who had hoped the war in Iraq would be the turning point in the battle against terrorism and the centerpiece of the president's re-election campaign, fear it is instead becoming a political, diplomatic and military mess."

We just might have the makings of a major scandal...

Lies: Bush's Standard Operating Procedure

Paul Krugman puts the reality of the Iraq situation in very simple and frank terms in his Times column today:

The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history — worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility.

But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable. Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.

In a related piece, William Rivers Pitt reminds us that we used to impeach liars...

One-Stop 'Justice' on Gitmo

The LA Tiimes confirms the details of the alleged "death camp" being built on Guantanamo. According to reporter Richard Serrano, the Pentagon has started "renovating several old office buildings to serve as courtrooms" and officials are "informally discussing plans for building a Death Row and an execution chamber should any of the military trials result in death sentences."

Dissent is immoral

God bless the liberals at TNR. Via a story in the Guardian:

"This nation is now at war," said Peter Beinart, the editor of the liberal magazine New Republic. "And in such an environment, domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides."

Always nice seeing a member of the "Cruise Missile Left" make an appearance.

Fleecing America

The Onion has the lowdown on the Bush tax-cut plan, while Mother Jones explores the administration's general tax-cut trickery.

Media Ownership

If you want to know why today's meeting of the FCC is so important, head over to Ruminate This or Mediareform.net.

Give Congress and the FCC a piece of your mind via Consumers Union. Or dial up your Congressional representative toll free at 1-800-839-5276.

Update: The FCC voted as expected and relaxed ownership limits. We can look forward to more mega media madness.

Land of the Unfree

"With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons," Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun reports, "the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country."

Mother Jones details just how the "Land of the Free" became the world's leading jailer.

G-8

Infoshop has compiled some images from the G-8 protests going on in and around Evian, France. Indymedia, of course, has been keeping track of how things have gone this past weekend.

Powell had serious doubts over Iraqi WMD

According to reports in U.S. News & World Report and the Guardian, Colin Powell has proven, once again, a willingness to go to bat for power even when he has grave misgivings about doing so. Once the bagman, always the bagman...

The ‘Left-Wing’ Media?

There's been a flood of recent critiques condemning the media for its "liberal bias." The main goal of this campaign, Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster claim, is "to shrink still further—to the point of oblivion—the space for critical analysis in journalism."

Meanwhile, Matt Labash, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard, has unveiled the secrets of the conservative media's success. Labash and Co. sure have a good thing going; they're "working the refs" real hard.