May 2006 Archives

« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »

May 17, 2006

Crooks and Liars has the John Stewart riff...

Link: Crooks and Liars.

Stewart: Well now it turns out that there was one specific type of domestic call the government was keeping tabs on. All of them....

Posted at 6:01 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2006

And, now a message from the President (Gore)

From last nights (good) SNL.

Al Gore makes a personal experience to open up one of the best shows in the last year...

Link: Crooks and Liars.

Announcer: And now, a message from the President of the United States.

President Al Gore:

Good evening, my fellow Americans. In 2000 when you overwhelmingly made the decision to elect me as your 43rd president, I knew the road ahead would be difficult. We have accomplished so much yet challenges lie ahead.

In the last 6 years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine, but I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Right now, in the 2nd week of May 2006, we are facing perhaps the worst gas crisis in history. We have way too much gasoline. Gas is down to $0.19 a gallon and the oil companies are hurting. I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.

I am therefore proposing a federal bailout to our oil companies because- hey if it were the other way around, you know the oil companies would help us.


Posted at 7:44 AM    Permalink    Comments (1)    TrackBack (0)

Cheney the Focus of CIA Leak Court Filing - CBS News

Link: Cheney the Focus of CIA Leak Court Filing - CBS News.

In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame _ albeit not by name _ before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame's identity.

In the latest court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intends to introduce at Libby's trial in January a copy of Wilson's op-ed article in The New York Times "bearing handwritten notations by the vice president." The article was published on July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame's identity was exposed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

The notations "support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant _ his chief of staff _ on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in the article and on responding to those assertions."

The article containing Cheney's notes "reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr. Wilson's Op Ed article," the prosecutor said. "This is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' the filing states.

The reference is to the fact that the CIA sent Wilson on a trip to Africa in 2002 to check out a report that Iraq had made attempts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful an agreement to purchase uranium had been made.

The Bush administration used the intelligence on supposed efforts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa to bolster its case for going to war.

After the invasion, with the Bush White House under pressure because no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, Wilson wrote the op ed piece for The Times. In it, he accused the Bush administration of exaggerating prewar intelligence to exaggerate an Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Defending the administration against Wilson's accusations, Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove promoted the idea that Wilson's wife, Plame, had sent him on the trip to Africa. Administration critics have said such a move was an attempt to undercut Wilson's credibility.

The prosecution's court papers also stated that Cheney told Libby around June 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, a month before her identity was outed.


Posted at 7:36 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

Friank Rich comes out blasting

Want a good reason to buy TimeSelect? Access to pieces like this:

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

     

WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.

Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

Posted at 7:23 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

May 11, 2006

Dalai Lama: First Blood

Anytime you can get a news item that says, "Seventeen lamas burst into a chapel", it's got to be put in the ABP!

Link: Dalai Lama blamed by Chinese after monks attack Tibetan rivals.

China has accused the Dalai Lama of sabotage and provoking religious conflict after a group of Tibetan monks stormed a monastery near Lhasa and attacked statues of a deity denounced by the exiled leader.

Seventeen lamas burst into a chapel in Gandan monastery in March and tore down two clay statues of protective deities, claiming they were "evil spirits". They began fighting with six worshippers, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.


Posted at 7:24 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

Bush faces an election disaster: Indpendent

6 years too late...

Link: Independent Online Edition > Americas.

Even more ominously for the White House, more than four out of five of those surveyed say the Republican-controlled Congress has "not asked enough questions" on Iraq. This suggests Democrats would enjoy broad public support if - were they to win control of either the Senate or the House - they launched the major investigation into the origins of the Iraq war that the Bush administration has so far escaped.

Posted at 7:20 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

May 09, 2006

Senators Assail Bush On Gas Mileage, Lawmakers Accuse Bush Administration Of Trailing The Marketplace - CBS News

Oh sure, now that Bush is down... some lawmakers step-up to the plate on environmental issues.

Democrats behave like pansies.

This should have happened a while ago.

Link: Senators Assail Bush On Gas Mileage, Lawmakers Accuse Bush Administration Of Trailing The Marketplace - CBS News.

Senators called for an increase in automobile fuel economy Tuesday and accused the Bush administration of trailing behind the marketplace in opposing significant increases.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., ridiculed the administration's characterization of its recent increase in small truck and SUV mileage as "bold" saying it amounts to a 1.8-mile-per-gallon boost over the next four years.


Posted at 4:52 PM    Permalink    Comments (1)    TrackBack (0)

Rumsfeld Defends CIA Choice, Defense Secretary Says Pentagon Isn't Trying To Get More Control Of Intelligence - CBS News

You know, I've asked the massive staff here at the ABP to really stop and take a look at the nominee of the CIA... oh fuck it... if Rumsfeld says he's good, he's gotta be stellar.

Link: Rumsfeld Defends CIA Choice, Defense Secretary Says Pentagon Isn't Trying To Get More Control Of Intelligence - CBS News.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday he supports the nomination of a military general as the head of the CIA, and said the Pentagon is not trying to take more control of intelligence matters.

Posted at 4:46 PM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

May 05, 2006

Cheney speech spurs new Cold War: Russian press�|�Reuters.com

How many fucking enemies does this Dick want us to have?

Link: Cheney speech spurs new Cold War: Russian press�|�Reuters.com.

A speech by Vice President Dick Cheney strongly critical of the Kremlin marks the start of a new Cold War that could drive Moscow away from its new-found Western allies, the Russian press said on Friday.

In shocked reaction to the harshest U.S. criticism of Moscow for years, commentators said Washington had created an anti-Russian cordon of Western-aligned states stretching from the Baltic almost to the Caspian Sea.


Posted at 4:49 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)

US seizes on Zarqawi out-takes

And in the "This will only piss him off more" department...

Link: BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US seizes on Zarqawi out-takes.

Later a subordinate grabs the machine gun - but drops it as the scalding barrel burns his hand.

The US has pounced on the clips in a bid to undermine the impact of Zarqawi's original video message, believed to have been his first.

"We have a warrior leader, Zarqawi, who doesn't understand how to operate his weapon system and has to rely on his subordinates to clear a weapon stoppage," said Maj Gen Rick Lynch, spokesman for the US military, who presented the clips to the media on Thursday.

"His close associates... do things like grab the hot barrel of the machine gun and burn themselves.

"Makes you wonder," said Gen Lynch.


Posted at 4:48 AM    Permalink    Comments (0)    TrackBack (0)