The Neocon Lust for Terror

FLASHBACK: It’s About A Lot More Than A "Goddamned Piece of Paper"Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration of the USA. Indeed, some of the main neocon players were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years. Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli.
Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that:

"A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured".

(quote is by one of Strauss' main biographers).

Indeed, Strauss used the analogy of Gulliver's Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

"When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."

Moreover, Strauss said:

"Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic... Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns."

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one's own soil to one's own people -- of "pissing" on one's own people, to use his Gulliver's travel analogy. And he advocates that government's should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally "not know" that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one's own people in order to save them from some "catastrophe" (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from an increasingly-powerful China?).

Fast Forward a Couple of Decades to the 1990's...
Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor seemed to hint at this approach when he wrote in 1997:

"as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

Similarly, the Project For A New American Century, a think tank lobbying group with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and the other leading Neocons in its ranks, lamented that its rapacious military agenda would not be realized

"absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

Don't believe that these quotes represent anything nefarious yet?

Fast forward to today...
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Newt Gingrich recently said:
"the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say, 'Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.' And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."
The head of the Arkansas Republican party said:
"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]" so people appreciate Bush.
Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky openly called for "another 9/11" that "would help America" restore a "community of outrage and national resolve".
Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, told the Toronto Star that "The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago."
And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.
It's All Hot Air, Isn't It?
But isn't this all talk? They wouldn't really allow terror to happen . . . or aid and abet such attacks. Would they?
Well, President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.
A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.
Former Senator Gary Hart warned Americans that the White House might create a "Gulf of Tonkin" or "remember the Maine" type incident to justify war against Iran (starting at 7:15 minutes)

Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government "is determined to have martial law", and that the government is hoping to get the people "fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse"
Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said "if there is another terror attack, "I believe the president will get what he wants", which will include a dictatorship.
A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:
"We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want."
The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to "play fast and loose" with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag

The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said:
"Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?"
He goes on to say:
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
A member of the British Parliament stated that "there is a very real danger" that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically
And the former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.
Does that sound like the Neocons' expressions of yearning for terror are just so much talk? Or does it sound like the disciples of Leo Strauss are willing to "manufacture threats" and "fiddle while Rome burns"?
And if the it is the latter, and the same people made the expressions of yearning before 9/11, the anthrax attacks and the London bombings, what does that imply about the cause of those events?

Discussions, Discussions, Discussions

CORAL GABLES, Florida. — A day after Senator Barack Obama gathered a majority of pledged delegates in the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defiantly sent out new signals Wednesday that she might take her fight for the nomination all the way to the party’s convention in August.
Indeed, she will never stop.
Mrs. Clinton stumped across South Florida, scene of the 2000 election debacle, pressing her case for including delegates from Florida and Michigan in the final delegate tally. On the trail and in interviews, she raised a new battle cry of determination, likening her struggle for these delegates to the nation’s historic struggles to free the slaves and grant women the right to vote.
But behind the scenes, the campaigns were working with the Democratic National Committee to resolve the dispute over the delegates before May 31, when the party’s rules committee is to decide the matter. Mrs. Clinton has said she wants all delegates counted and apportioned based on the popular vote of the two candidates in both states, although Mr. Obama did not appear on the ballot in Michigan.
Mr. Obama has said he wants the delegates seated but has not said how or in what proportion. David Axelrod, his chief strategist, said in an interview Wednesday that the campaign was willing to go beyond halfway in the apportionment.
That’s changing the rules during the competition. If it has been known before, Barack Obama could have campaigned in the two states and his name – by then unknown – should have been on the ballot in Michigan. The well-known name of Mrs. Clinton was an advantage, but Mr. Obama has proven to campaign very effectively.
“If that means we have to make some sacrifices,” Mr. Axelrod said, “we are open to do so, within reason. Our sense is the folks in Florida and Michigan want to resolve this. They’re not looking to prolong this.”
Mrs. Clinton called this offensive… how, why?
The outcome on the Florida and Michigan delegates may be only symbolic anyway. Winning extra delegates, even under her rosiest scenario, would not help Mrs. Clinton catch Mr. Obama’s lead on that score.
The point is that she does not want the delegates to be counted, but only the popular votes and also not the caucuses. In that way she can win, only counting the states she wins and the winner takes all, because she is the best nominee the worlds has ever seen. It’s a good plan and in November she wants only the Democrats votes counted, because she is the best president the world has ever seen. Only her campaign was acting poor and the fundraising and the organisation and the strategic plan and the judgement and the Democratic members were not loyal enough, but look, she was already eight years in the White House and she is the best, right?
Both need superdelegates to get over the finish line. But winning additional delegates from Florida and Michigan might be Mrs. Clinton’s last glimmer of hope in bolstering her case to superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in November. In her victory speech Tuesday in Kentucky, she noted that the primary race was one of the closest in history.
Of course that’s true, one of the 50 closest.
Florida and Michigan have emerged as central to Mrs. Clinton’s effort to keep her candidacy alive. Both states jumped ahead in the primary calendar in January in violation of party rules. As punishment, the party stripped them of their delegates, leaving them excluded from a primary process that has galvanized the rest of the country.
Mrs. Clinton agreed by then with that punishment, else Mr. Obama should have run in those states and perhaps won them, because he is much better campaigning.
Mrs. Clinton told The Associated Press on Wednesday that she would support those states if they had to carry their fight to the convention.
Then she has a pseudo-legal motive to attack Obama still saying that Senator McCain should be a better president than Senator Obama… And then there comes the bullet what will make Senator Clinton the nominee.
“Yes, I will,” she said. “I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”
God has chosen her…right? You have to believe it and it will be. What kind of president will that make? Who’s giving her God’s messages?
And Geoff Garin, her pollster, told MSNBC that she could campaign beyond the primaries because “there are enough uncommitted delegates left for either candidate to earn a majority.”
And also those committed delegates are not committed. They all can change their votes, according to Clinton’s statement: “there are no rules for delegates!”
Mr. Obama crossed the threshold of amassing a majority of pledged delegates on Tuesday with his victory in Oregon.
Come on! Do we count votes for a black man because he is black? Are we racists? Do we count votes for a man because he is a man? Are we sexists? What is wrong with a poor hard working non-elitist beer drinking white woman, who carries a gun, spits on the ground, shooting dugs after church in the weekends?
Mr. Garin added that at some point, one of the candidates would have enough total delegates to win the nomination, “but we have not reached that point yet; we probably won’t reach that point on June 3.” Mrs. Clinton has signalled that she intends to stay in the race at least through the final primaries on June 3.
At least, but you have never enough delegates because, according to Senator Clinton, the delegates can change their votes anytime at random. Remember, there are no rules for delegates, right?
Mr. Obama ignored Mrs. Clinton’s arguments about the delegates in an effort, his aides said, not to legitimize her point of view.
Nah…
“I know there are some people worried about the Democratic Party being divided,” Mr. Obama said. “We will be united.”
But than has Senator Clinton te be the nominee. Otherwise: forget it! The Billary-crowd will vote for their appointed better president McCain.
That strategists are working behind the scenes on the matter raised the possibility that Mrs. Clinton’s newfound fervour was an effort to make sure her apportioning method prevails.
You see, out ruling the caucus-states counting Florida and Michigan, changing pledged delegates voices commanding superdelegates to vote for unity and Hillary Clinton for president.
It also raised the possibility that her campaign was split over how to handle the end game of what some have admitted privately is a lost cause. Some Clinton aides said that she was well aware of her uphill climb and that she was making a symbolic point. They said she was hesitant about declaring that she could overcome Mr. Obama’s lead, but at the same time did not want to be seen as surrendering.
Just like Senator McCain, you only leave the theatre with victory, never surrender. There is a war and the enemy has to be eliminated at 2.30 a.m. Phone me when it is done.
Her swing across South Florida on Wednesday seemed essentially to be a campaign-within-a-campaign, one that is about process and is directed chiefly at the party’s rules committee.
If there are no rules, why the heck there is a party rules committee?
“I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country.”
But not counting caucus-states acting within the rules and did nothing wrong?
She also sought to whip up populist sentiment, telling voters in Boca Raton, where the 2000 election played out vividly, “You didn’t break a single rule, and you should not be punished for matters beyond your control.”
Lies, they broke the rules.
She argued with fervour that the nomination should be determined by popular vote. She has claimed to have the lead in the popular vote by including Florida and Michigan in her tally.
O, no single vote for Senator Obama from Florida and Michigan?
“The outcome of our elections should be determined by the will of the people, nothing more, nothing less,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will.”
Yes, next chance for the people to vote is in November. Don't try to do it in July or August because that does not count.
“The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear,” she said. “If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people isn’t realized and our democracy is diminished.”
She should have made that statement before the rules and the punishment were established and she admitted the case.
She generally avoided mentioning Mr. Obama all day, but concluded a rally in Coral Gables on Wednesday by declaring: “Look at the states I’ve won. Look at the states I’m leading in. Look at the electoral map. It is clear I’m the stronger candidate.”
And she can’t even manage her campaign?
As her voice was drowned out with cheers, she added: “Stay with me. Let’s make history together.”
No, thanks. Let all the delegates of Florida and Michigan sit at the convention with a half vote each and free to vote for who they want, furthermore stick by the rules, removing the Clintons from the party. Out! The Democratic Party is no anarchistic community.
Pointer:
She makes herself a pariah in the party.

Arianna Huffington: Scotty Come Lately

Pointer wrote: this book is not a must read, but this article of Arianne Huffington about it has its own quality.
Scotty Come Lately
By Arianna Huffington
Seven takes on Scott McClellan's new book:

Take One: What Took You So Long?
In What Happened, Scott McClellan offers withering portraits of George Bush, Karl Rove, Condi Rice, and Scooter Libby, confirms that we went to war in Iraq under false pretenses, and that we were serially lied to about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Interesting stuff, Scott. But about five years too late.
It's George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands -- and add a chunk of change to his bank account -- by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?
McClellan told the Washington Post that he wrote the book to "provide an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it." And he told Cox News Service, "My job was to advocate and defend [Bush's] policies and speak on his behalf. This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things."
Great. We need all the openness and honesty we can get. But it would have been a lot more helpful if he had taken the "opportunity" when it really mattered -- say before the 2004 election, when it could have potentially saved thousands of lives.
What Happened is page-turning reading. What Didn't Happen -- namely McClellan telling the truth in service to his country rather than in service to his book sales -- is a stomach-turning disappointment.

Take Two: The Rationale for Iraq is Even Worse Than We Thought
McClellan really lets it rip on Iraq. He says that Bush led a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" to sell the war, was not "open and forthright on Iraq," managed the runup to war "in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," "largely ignored or simply disregarded" contradictory intelligence on the war, and as the war went poorly responded by "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising."
McClellan's scathing conclusion: "History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."
Perhaps the most damning revelation regarding Iraq is McClellan's assertion that the real reason Bush wanted to invade Iraq was the "opportunity to create a legacy of greatness" by transforming the Middle East into a land of peace and brotherhood. Over 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers sacrificed for a neo-con wet dream of democratic dominoes across the region. How chilling is that?
McClellan also tosses in a pinch of Oedipal subtext: "The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office. And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating."
Such is the stuff foreign policy nightmares are made of.

Take Three: The Press Secretary Presses the Press
McClellan points an accusatory finger at the mainstream media -- he calls them "enablers" and says they were too easy on the administration during the selling of the war:
"The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."
Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.
It's such a great point, it caused Karl Rove to act like something nefarious has happened to McClellan, transforming him from the lie-spouting sock puppet he has "known for a long time" into somebody who "sounds like a left-wing blogger." Have anyone specific in mind, Karl?

Take Four: Rove More Turd Blossom Than Boy Genius
Speaking of Rove, McClellan's tome continues the obliteration of the Rove mystique, reminding us what an out-and-out liar Rove was and is -- more than willing to assure McClellan that he wasn't involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity when, in fact, he was up to his Turd Blossom in the sordid affair, having discussed Plame with Matt Cooper and Bob Novak in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson.
McClellan also makes it clear that the indelible, says-all-you-need-to-know-about-this-administration photo of Bush looking out the window of Air Force One during his too-busy-to-stop flyover of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina was a Rove special: "Karl was convinced we needed to do it -- and the president agreed."

Take Five: Truthiness in Government
Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of "truthiness": the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush's "leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate." Citing Bush's assertion that he honestly couldn't remember if he'd ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he "was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true."
But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.

Take Six: Truth in Government
According to McClellan, the Secret Service code name for the White House press secretary was "Matrix."
As any Keanu Reaves fan will tell you, the Matrix is a simulated reality used to pacify and subdue the human population in a dystopian future.
Who knew Secret Service agents have such an arch sense of humor?
Take Seven: Heckuva Job, Scotty!
On the day McClellan resigned as press secretary, Bush pictured a time down the road when he and his former aide would "be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, 'Job well done.'"
Maybe not. Although, since, according to McClellan, Bush "has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment," who knows?
I can already see the blurb on the back of the paperback edition of What Happened: "Heckuva job, Scotty!" - George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States

Who Said What And When?

In January during an appearance in Dover, New Hampshire, Clinton was introduced by a woman named Francine Torge who said the following, according to the New York Times' "Caucus" blog: "Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually" passed landmark civil rights legislation. The Clinton campaign called those comments "totally inappropriate."
OK, totally inappropriate, but very useful for later when things go wrong in the Billarygang.
This was Francine Torge, a Clinton-backer from New Hampshire, right?
More recently, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) -- after his speech to the National Rifle Association was interrupted by a noise from off stage -- joked: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he -- he dove for the floor."
Also the Suckebee from Arkansas can not be called a Obamaniac.
The Republican version is somewhat thoughtless but the Hillary statement was not new and she used it in interviews with the writing press on March 6, totally incorrect because the primaries of 1968 just started in March and she used it on May 2 again, feeling good te repeat it the same day. You get used to it, but on television live it makes a difference:
"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?," Clinton said in explaining why she remained in the race to the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader editorial board. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."
That's not out of the context, because the question was why she stays in the race as she can't win by the regular voting in the primaries. The votings can not bring her ahead of Obama, so, there must be somwhat else. What is it?
That long stay in the primaries is unprecedented. Also Bill Clinton started in February, a month later than this year, and he was in May as the frontrunner in the same position as Obama now. That's far different than Clinton is by now. There is no simularity on behalf of the length of time and her position not te be able to win.
In 1992 she thought end of May: only a bullet can prevent Bill to become President. Of course, she did not say that and nobody had said that.
But your days and nights are filled with fear and she had that experience, right?
There is no sign that the billarygang will step out the race before the general election. They want to prove that Barack Obama can't win over McCain. She said already so "McCain is should be a better president than Obama, but I'ám the best qualified for the job." She can say something to win votes, but change, no, that's not where she goes for and not what the Billary Democrats want. They want a past century back. That there's a war going on? O yeah, but that's far away, right? Let's vote for McCain, he is old, so he knows how it was in the past. Even Vietnam was not that bad as they say, right? We killed far more of them than they killed us. McCain knows how to win a war. Never surrender, that's the spirit of Hillary Clinton.

John McCain is Out Of Touch

Every time John McCain aims low in his increasingly belligerent campaign rhetoric, I think about an item Time’s Joe Klein wrote about a month ago. Klein, a McCain admirer, predicted that McCain would avoid the cheap and pathetic style of campaigning we’re seeing now. McCain, Klein said, “sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — as unworthy.” If he doesn’t, “McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose expediency over honor. That’s probably not the way he wants to be remembered.”
Klein’s optimism is looking shaky. Consider how John McCain chose to honor Memorial Day.

“Barack Obama really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,” the Arizona senator added. “If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn’t had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly.” […]
The Iraq war, which polls have shown that most of the country opposes, is shaping up to be a defining issue in the November presidential election. McCain, who wrapped up the GOP nomination in March, supports continued military involvement in Iraq; Obama, who has all but clinched the Democratic nomination, has called for withdrawing U.S. troops.
“For him to talk about dates for withdrawal, which basically is surrender in Iraq after we’re succeeding so well is, I think, really inexcusable,” said McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times, most recently in March.

Now, I’ve come to expect cheap rhetoric from John McCain, but “surrender” talk is generally more the province of right-wing blogs, not respected presidential candidates. Most Americans believe withdrawal from Iraq best serves American interests. Is McCain prepared to smear a majority of the country?
But that’s hardly the most nonsensical aspect of McCain’s attack. First, McCain decided to lash out at Obama for taking a sensible approach to Iraq on Memorial Day. This is a holiday for a reason — it’s about paying respect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Can McCain — you know, the one who vowed to make this an “honorable” campaign — not see how wildly inappropriate this is?

Second, in what universe does McCain feel justified arguing that Obama’s “knowledge” and “judgment” on Iraq are lacking? Obama’s the one who’s been right about the war from the start, while McCain was the one who a) said the war would be short and easy; b) said Sunnis and Shi’ia would get along fine; c) insisted that the war was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from giving WMD to al Qaeda; d) said we had to “stay the course” with the Rumsfeld strategy; e) is still confused about Sunni, Shi’ia, al Qaeda, and Iran; and f) continues to believe the “surge” policy has brought about the non-existent political progress it was intended to create.
McCain may be too foolish to recognize his mistake, and too blinded by crass partisanship to approach his humiliating record with humility, but to lash out at Obama for being right is demonstrably ridiculous.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, who, exactly, does McCain think we would “surrender” to in Iraq were we to leave? I realize McCain isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, but he does realize the nature of the conflict in Iraq, doesn’t he?
My hunch, reading over McCain’s obtuse and inarticulate assessments of the war, is that he’s deluded himself into thinking that the war in Iraq is with al Qaeda. That the Republican presidential candidate is confused about the source of violence in Iraq with the war in its sixth year doesn’t speak well of his competence, but with some regularity, McCain has said that “al Qaeda will then have won” if we withdraw U.S. troops.
Regrettably, McCain doesn’t have the foggiest idea what he’s talking about.

Some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.
The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.”

Before McCain starts irresponsibly throwing around painfully stupid rhetoric about “surrender,” maybe he could take a moment to learn something about the war he helped create more than five years ago. While he’s at it, if could also pause to consider why it’s crass and disrespectful to make these kinds of attacks on Memorial Day, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it.

A Dismal Record

Amnesty International Report 2008:
As the world’s most powerful state, the USA sets the standard for government behaviour globally. With breathtaking legal obfuscation, the US administration has continued its efforts to weaken the absolute prohibition against torture and other ill-treatment. Senior officials refused to denounce the notorious practice of “water-boarding”. The US President authorized the CIA to continue secret detention and interrogation, although they amount to the international crime of enforced disappearance. Hundreds of prisoners in Guantánamo and Bagram, and thousands in Iraq, continued to be detained without charge or trial, many for more than six years. The US government has failed to ensure full accountability for abuses by its forces in Iraq. An Order issued by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) in June 2004 granting immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts to foreign private military and security firms operating in Iraq, presents further obstacles to accountability. There was wide concern about the killings of at least 17 Iraqi civilians by guards employed by the private security company, Blackwater, in September 2007. These actions have done nothing to further the fight against terrorism and a great deal to damage the USA’s prestige and influence abroad.
[…]
The world needs a USA genuinely engaged and committed to the cause of human rights, at home and abroad. In November 2008, the US people will elect a new President. For the USA to have moral authority as a human rights champion, the next administration must close Guantánamo and either try the detainees in ordinary federal courts or release them. It must repeal the Military Commissions Act and ensure respect for international humanitarian law and human rights in all military and security operations. It must ban evidence obtained through coercion and denounce all forms of torture and other ill-treatment no matter to what end. The new administration must establish a viable strategy for international peace and security.
It must ditch support for authoritarian leaders and invest instead in the institutions of democracy, rule of law and human rights that will provide long-term stability. And it must be ready to end US isolation in the international human rights system and engage constructively with the UN Human Rights Council.

If the US administration has distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law, European governments have shown a proclivity for double standards. The European Union (EU) professes to be “a union of values, united by respect for the rule of law, shaped by common standards and consensus, committed to tolerance, democracy, and human rights”. Yet, in 2007 fresh evidence came to light that a number of EU member states had looked the other way or colluded with the CIA to abduct, secretly detain and illegally transfer prisoners to countries where
they were tortured and otherwise ill-treated. Despite repeated calls by the Council of Europe, no government has fully investigated the wrongdoings, come clean and/or put in place adequate measures to prevent future use of European territory for rendition and secret detention.
On the contrary, some European governments sought to water down the 1996 ruling from the European Court of Human Rights prohibiting the return of suspects to countries where they could face torture. The Court pronounced itself in one of two cases pending before it in 2007, reaffirming the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.
While many grumble about the regulatory excesses of the EU, there is little outrage at the lack of EU regulation of human rights at home. The truth of the matter is that the EU is unable to hold its member states accountable on human rights matters which fall outside EU law. The Fundamental Rights Agency, created in 2007, has been given such a limited mandate that it cannot demand any real accountability. While the EU sets a high bar on human rights for candidate countries seeking accession (and rightly so), once they are allowed in, they are able to breach the standards with little or no accountability to the EU.
Can the EU or its member states call for respect for human rights by China or by Russia when they themselves are complicit in torture? Can the EU ask other – much poorer – countries to keep their borders open, when its own member states are restricting the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers? Can it preach tolerance abroad when it has failed to tackle discrimination against Roma, Muslim and other minorities living within its borders?
As for the USA, so too for the EU, the year ahead will bring important political transitions. The Lisbon treaty signed by EU governments in December 2007 demands new institutional commitments to be forged among the member states. In some key member states elections and other developments have brought about or will lead to new political leadership. They provide opportunities for action on human rights within the EU and globally.

downloads
If the link does not work: paste: http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/download-report

McClellan whacks Bush, White House

McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. "I remember thinking to myself, 'How can that be?' " he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

"The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office," he writes. "And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on "propaganda" to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be "badly misguided."

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them -- and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped.
But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClellan, who turned 40 in February, was press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006. An Austin native from a political family, he began working as a gubernatorial spokesman for then-Gov. Bush in early 1999, was traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and was chief deputy to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer at the beginning of Bush’s first term.

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

Is his book a must read?
No, all his confessions and yesterday's talk is a diversionary tactic of a reborn liar. The real issue is 9/11, a false flag to start the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now you have to believe: some Republicans are good guys. We know better, alas.

Jofn McCain Against Women

In Clinton vs. Obama, the policy differences were minor (hence the overriding focus on minutiae like flag pins, Bosnian sniper fire, and the real meaning of "bitter"). In McCain vs. Obama, the differences are enormous. Staying the course in Iraq vs. ending an unnecessary and immoral war. Universal health care vs. less regulation for insurance companies. Rolling back the Bush tax cuts vs. making them permanent.

And nowhere is the difference more profound than with reproductive rights.

For anyone -- male or female -- who cares about reproductive rights, family planning, and women's health issues, the choice this fall is not even close.

And yet many voters have no idea how extreme McCain's position on these issues is.

Over half of all women in these states have no idea what McCain's positions are on reproductive health. Forty-nine percent of women in battleground states who currently favor McCain are pro-choice. Twenty-three percent of them believe McCain agrees with them on choice.
A poll that Planned Parenthood had commissioned of women in 16 battleground states [pdf].
The good news is, 36 percent of pro-choice McCain supporters are less likely to vote for him after learning that McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and favors making most abortions illegal. That number hits 38 percent when those voters learn that McCain has also consistently voted against expanding access to programs that reduce pregnancy and the need for abortion, consistently voted in favor of abstinence-only programs, and against legislation requiring insurance companies to cover birth control.
The poll's encouraging conclusion:

The simple arithmetic of these findings suggests that just filling in McCain's actual voting record and his publicly stated positions on a handful of key issues has the potential to diminish his total vote share among battleground women voters by about 17 to 20 percentage points.

His Own Words
• “I do not support Roe v. Wade. It should be overturned.”
• Sen. McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign website states that he “believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned.”
• Discussing his pro‐life voting record, McCain said, “I have many, many votes and it’s been consistent. And I’ve got a consistent zero from NARAL throughout all those years…. My record is clear. And I think the important thing is you look at people’s voting record because sometimes rhetoric can be a little misleading. As you know I don’t support Roe v. Wade. I thought it was a bad decision, and I think that the decision should be made in the states.”
• “I’m proud that we have Justice Alito and Roberts on the United States Supreme Court. I’m very proud to have played a very small role in making that happen.” McCain explained further that he “will try to find clones of Alito and Roberts” to fill future court vacancies.
• “If I am fortunate enough to be elected as the next President of the United States, I pledge to you to be a loyal and unswerving friend of the right to life movement.”
• When asked about whether he supported supplying condoms to Africa to assist in the fight against HIV/AIDS, McCain had the following exchange with the reporter:
• Reporter: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”
• Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”
• Reporter: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”
• Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Praise the Convict - Blame the Victim

No such thing as an accident
I think we know exactly what Hillary meant:
Nice nominee you got there... sure would be a shame if anything happened to him. Awfully big-hearted of her to be willing to stick around through August, just in case... It has happened before in 1968, it can happen again.

The Obama camp has offered the following response to Sen. Clinton's comments:
"Senator Clinton's statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
The Clinton camp is denying any implications beyond historical comparison in her reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination:
"She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as historic examples of the nominating process going well into the summer. Any reading into beyond that would be inaccurate and outrageous."
Yes, but she made a clear and well-thought-out reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, also ealier on March 6 and May 7 and the timeline has no relevance because in 1968 the primaries started in March and this year in Januari and Bill Clinton was already the frontrunner in May 1992 like Obama now. Frontrunners don't stop, you know. Losers do.
Sen. Clinton has issued the following apology for her statements, a quick departure from her campaign's initial response:
"Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968 and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact.
The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that, whatsoever. My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to, and I'm honored to hold Senator Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family."

The New York Times summed up what they are calling one of the worst days of Hillary Clinton's political career.

Clinton Camp Stokes RFK Flap by Blaming Obama
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign accused Sen. Barack Obama's campaign of fanning a controversy over her describing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy late in the 1968 Democratic primary as one reason she is continuing to run for the presidency.
"The Obama campaign ... tried to take these words out of context," Clinton campaign chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said on "Fox News Sunday." "She was making a point merely about the time line."
The issue is particularly sensitive given longstanding concerns about Obama's safety as a presidential candidate. (He first received Secret Service protection last May.) The Obama campaign called Clinton's words unfortunate and circulated a TV commentary criticizing them, although Obama himself said Saturday that he took Clinton at her word that she meant no harm.
Hours after mentioning Kennedy's assassination, Clinton said, "I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive."
Obama senior strategist David Axelrod dodged questions about why the campaign was still circulating commentaries criticizing Clinton even after suggesting it wants to move beyond the controversy.
"We're beyond that issue now, so certainly we're not trying to stir the issue up," Axelrod said.
Asked if Clinton has personally called Obama to apologize for the reference, McAuliffe said she has not, "nor should she." He added, "Let's be clear. This had nothing to do with Senator Obama or his campaign."
McAuliffe noted that Robert F. Kennedy's son -- who endorsed Clinton last November -- has said that Clinton's reference to his father's death did not cross the line.
"If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't find offence to it, why is it that everybody else should?" McAuliffe said. "They shouldn't. They ought to take Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- he did not misinterpret it or misjudge it."
Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation", Clinton senior strategist Howard Wolfson said McAuliffe is "absolutely right" that Clinton didn't want to apologize to Obama for the remark and said: "I think it was unfortunate to attack Senator Clinton's remarks without knowing fully what she had said."
McAuliffe said Clinton is staying in the race to give hope to the millions of women who have voted for her and "she is winning races." And the campaign chairman made clear that his boss would strongly consider pressing on if the Democratic National Committee does not allow Florida and Michigan delegates to vote at the party's convention this summer -- a decision that would boost Clinton's delegate total. The DNC's rules and bylaws committee is scheduled to meet Saturday to discuss the issue.
"We are prepared to fight this so that all 50 states are included, that the delegates be seated. Let's have no questions about that. This race is still very close," McAuliffe said.
Wolfson said the campaign believes the DNC will reinstate Florida and Michigan "100 percent. That's what they should do. That will obviously help us, but it's the right thing to do."
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, delivered a strong signal that it expects the nomination contest to wrap up in the next 10 days, after the final primaries.
"We expect on June 3rd that this process will come to an end," Obama senior strategist David Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week."
"People in this country want change. They've identified Senator Obama as the candidate who can bring that change," he said. "And we're going to be united as a party after June 3rd."
Axelrod acknowledged, "There's an enormous amount of pride and investment in Senator Clinton among millions of women across this country," and that unifying the party after a tense nomination contest will produce "some tumult in the short run."
However, he said, Clinton's "strongest supporters understand how desperately we need change in this country, and I think that they understand that this is a critical election."
One prominent Clinton supporter acknowledged that virtually all hope for her winning the nomination is gone now.
"Obama clearly has the momentum. I am a proud Hillary delegate. But I predict the race will be over soon," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.). "The loser will concede graciously. "And I hope that we build what I call a unity ticket, either with both of them on the ticket or with the people on the ticket strongly representing the two bases which we will need to combine if we're to win in November over a very strong Republican challenge."
House Members Looking Ahead to November
The leaders of the Republican and Democratic House campaign committees clashed over their parties' chances in November.
Republicans have been particularly nervous recently after losing three consecutive special elections to Democrats in recent months.
"We've got a challenging landscape, no doubt about it," said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chairman of the Republican National Congressional Committee. "But I think the fall elections are fundamentally different than a series of specials."
"We actually, if you'll recall, won all the special elections in 2006 and then got our clock cleaned pretty good at the end of the year," Cole said. "So I think once we're in a presidential year, the dynamic changes and we'll be in a lot stronger position."
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Cole's counterpart at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, wouldn't predict a number of wins for Democrats.
"It is a rough environment for the Republicans, and it's a rough environment because of the mistakes that they've made and the fact that we, on the Democratic side, have been pushing an agenda for change and they've been trying to stand in the way of change," he said. "They have really become the party of no, veto and the status quo."

The comments of the Billarygang need a harsh answer:
Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Clinton-Obama Assassination

THE BIN LADENS

An Arabian Family in the American Century.
By Steve Coll.
Illustrated. 671 pp. The Penguin Press. $35.

Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song:

You could have pierced her with swords
When she discovered
Her youngest liked Lenin
And sold the Daily Worker near the House of Lords.

But Saudi Arabia, Coll shows, is a place where the interests of rulers and revolutionaries are less easy to distinguish.
Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, emigrated from the canyons of the Hadhramawt, in present-day Yemen, in the 1920s. He arrived in Jidda, one-eyed and semiliterate, at a time when Saudi Arabia had hardly any paved roads and the king kept his treasury in a tin trunk. Muhammad was charismatic. His workers, with whom he prayed and sang at job sites, revered him. He was scrupulously honest, as Arabian lore holds Hadhramis to be, and his company keeps this reputation still. Most important, Muhammad would serve the greedy and capricious Saudi princes in ways that Bechtel and other foreign contractors balked at — doing humiliating jobs from digging gardens to fixing air conditioners. The grateful royals made him their main palace- and highway-builder in the boom years after the war. By the time Muhammad died in a plane crash in September 1967, his company was worth an estimated $150 million, and he had fathered 54 children by about 22 wives.
Those children, Osama included, grew up in the shadow of a court society. Royal favor was all. Since the Saud family sent its sons to Princeton and Georgetown, Muhammad educated many of his own sons in the West, too, starting with Salem, his impious and ribald successor. Coll’s account of Salem is doting. When the austere King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, the sybaritic King Fahd took power. Hedonism and consumerism became for Salem what piety had been for his father: common ground with the royal family. Knowledgeable about private planes, luxury cars and new gadgetry, Salem became, as Coll puts it, a “royal concierge.”
Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics — the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens’ lawyer called the family’s “favorite politician.” Since Salem’s own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family’s present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter’s causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own “an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war.”

Osama was timid. Coll suggests that he was haunted by the low status of his Syrian mother. An afternoon Islamic study group he joined during junior high school filled him with purpose, and eventually with anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of photography. These stances got little attention. They were just a more ardent version of what Saudi kids were taught anyway.
Politicized piety did not make Osama a black sheep. It made him an asset. In the mid-1980s, Fahd granted the bin Ladens a contract to redevelop — critics would say Americanize — the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. These projects replaced highway-building as the mainstay of the family income. They depended on the good graces of Saudi clerics and powerful princes like Prince Nayef, who later claimed the 9/11 attacks were a Zionist plot. Osama’s commitment to Muslim holy war impressed such people more than Salem’s bathroom humor. Far from hating the Saud family, Osama would fly into a fury if he heard someone question Fahd’s legitimacy. Even in 1990, Coll writes, he saw himself as “an international Islamic guerrilla leader who worked in service of his king.”
Coll shows that Osama’s efforts supporting the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan could never have been done on his own nickel. He inherited just 2.27 percent of his father’s fortune. What he had, though, was a court network — conservative princes, the company’s associates and the charitable funds of various elite families, including his own. He also had equipment. The bin Laden group was the largest owner of Caterpillar earthmovers in the world. Osama used them to fortify the caves that would shelter Arab and Afghan mujahedeen and, after 9/11, himself. Salem arranged shipments of anti-aircraft missiles. Khalid, a brother who worked in the company’s Cairo office, obtained Afghan visas for Egyptian radicals. The jihad was a family affair.
The question is whether it remained a family affair after Osama turned his sights on the United States. Coll did not crack the family’s inner circle, so his conclusions on the matter are provisional. But through government papers and interviews with various bin Laden associates, he gives us a judicious, painstaking and vivid picture of an exotic family pulled in two directions by world events. Occasionally, the picture is too vivid — there is more detail than most readers will need about Khaled bin Laden’s stud farm in Egypt, Khalil bin Laden’s Brazilian wife’s sister’s drug addiction and Yeslam bin Laden’s unsuccessful stock transactions.
Osama’s siblings repudiated his acts as early as 1994, but they left a door open to reconciliation. After 9/11, they seemed more interested in retaining legal counsel than in sharing information. Coll found allegations in a California custody case that there were scenes of celebration at the bin Laden compound in Saudi Arabia after the attacks. Coll does not believe any of the bin Ladens permitted to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after 9/11 had connections to radical Islam. He notes, though, that one who had possible connections — Omar Awadh — may not have been interrogated by the F.B.I.

Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. “To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama,” Coll writes. “To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.”
Seven years’ distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden’s attacks turned a profit.
Christopher Caldwell’s book on immigration, Islam and Europe will be published next spring.

How the Government Is Passing Secret Laws, part I

source control

Once upon a time, a team of federal attorneys went before the Supreme Court only to discover that their entire case was based on a revoked executive order and therefore moot.
True story. Look it up. Panama Refining Company v. Ryan. The revoked presidential order was understandably missed by the attorneys. The revocation had never been made public -- an example of what legal scholars refer to as "secret law."
Cases like that caused Congress, in the '30s and '40s, to pen legislation aimed at bringing order to the dissemination of vital government information, amid the chaotic complexity of state administrative laws and downright shoddy record-keeping. Congress also established statutes to keep a growing body of secret law in check.
That's how we got the Federal Register Act of 1935, the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 and the golden key to open government (and investigative reporting) -- the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Those legislative acts exemplify one of the defining features of American government -- the publicizing of laws and regulations. The political philosophy isn't hard to understand. Secret laws are the antithesis of a free and open society, which explains why the first U.S. Congress mandated that every "law, order, resolution, and vote (shall) be published in at least three of the public newspapers printing within the United States."
But, never mind -- for the moment -- the decline of newspapers, and the harmful implications it has for democratic governance. Even more alarming is the underreported increase of unpublicized "secret laws," clandestinely cultivated in recent years.
We're talking everything from secret interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to secret Presidential directives and transportation security orders.
And don't let the word "opinion" throw you off. If, for example, they're "opinions" issued by the OLC -- like the now infamous Yoo torture memos -- those kind of "opinions" are binding on the executive branch.
So, while the Washington press heavy-hitters were analyzing flag pins and pastors, a Judiciary subcommittee hearing was held on "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government".
Among the half-dozen or so witnesses to testify was the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood -- one of the nation's preeminent authorities on secret law. What should have been a top-story across the country was rendered invisible by a tsunami of triviality.
Here's some testimony you probably missed:
"There has been a discernible increase in secret law and regulation in recent years" to the point where "legislative intervention" is required to "reverse the growth."
Unsurprisingly, secret law really became entwined with the government during the Cold War. But today, "secrecy not only persists, it is growing. Worse, it is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture, and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans."
The law that governs espionage activity has been re-interpreted by the FISA Court, the specific nature of which has not been disclosed to the public?
In August 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned the court on First Amendment grounds to make public those legal rulings, after redacting classified information. The court denied the ACLU petition, claiming it didn't have the expertise to decide what information should be redacted.
The denial was issued despite it being evident "that there is a body of common law derived from the decisions of the (FISA court) that potentially implicates the privacy interests of all Americans. Yet knowledge of that law is deliberately withheld from the public. In this way, secret law has been normalized to a previously unknown extent and to the detriment, I believe, of American democracy," Aftergood testified.
Other areas of concern: "there appears to be a precipitous decline in publication of OLC opinions in recent years ... In 1995, there were 30 published opinions, but in 2005 there were 13. In 1996, there were 48 published opinions, but in 2006 only 1. And in 1997 there were 29 published opinions, but only 9 in 2007."
"One secret OLC opinion of particular significance, identified last year by Sen. Whitehouse, holds that executive orders, which are binding on executive branch agencies and are published in the Federal Register, can be unilaterally abrogated by the President without public notice."
Such orders mean "Congress is left with no opportunity to respond to the change and to exercise its own authority as it sees fit. Worse, the OLC policy... implies a right to actively mislead Congress and the public."
Here's something else that's been […] underreported. As of January 2008, the Bush administration has issued 56 National Security Presidential Directives on a range of national security issues. Most of those directives have not been disclosed. "Texts of the directives or descriptive fact sheets have been obtained for about a third of them (19)," Aftergood testified. Only the titles have been obtained on 8 of the directives and absolutely no information is available for 10.
Congress has also gotten in on the action, having "participated in the propagation of secret law through the adoption of classified annexes to intelligence authorization of bills, for example."
Aftergood concluded his testimony, rightly observing that "it should be possible to identify a consensual middle ground that preserves the security of genuinely sensitive national security information while reversing the growth of secret laws."
That's why he's pushing for the passage of the State Secrets Protection Act -- S. 2533 -- which aims to balance conflicting interests of secrecy and public disclosure.
"The rule of law, after all, is one of the fundamental principles that unites us all, and one of the things we are committed to protect. Secret law is inconsistent with that commitment."
Of course, whenever someone points out how civil liberties have taken a back-seat in the name of "national security" under Bush, what's the typical response of true believers?
They call talk radio, blog and write letters-to-the-editor about how "liberals" and "leftists" aid and abet terrorists with a naive insistence that America's political leaders adhere to quaint luxuries like long-established Constitutional freedoms.
The old saw -- "loose lips sinks ships" -- has been replaced by another now familiar brain-dead mantra: "if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about." But the metastasizing growth of secret law pulls the rug out from underneath that flimsy argument. And for obvious reason: you can't know what you don't know.

Pointer will give you his comments on this stuff in a following article withe the same title.

George Bush as a Real McCainiac

How the president has almost become the man he trounced in the primaries.
March 28th 2002
From The Economist print edition

IF THE battle in 2000 to choose the Republican Party's presidential candidate now seems a world away, it is not just because September 11th changed the world. It is also because George Bush trounced John McCain so thoroughly that he seemed to bury everything the Arizona senator stood for.
Back then, the two men appeared to have nothing in common. While Mr Bush campaigned as the choice of the Republican establishment, Mr McCain rampaged against “special interests” and made campaign-finance reform the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. In economic policy, Mr Bush argued for big tax cuts regardless of circumstances; Mr McCain said tax cuts should be proportionate to the size of the budget surplus. Mr McCain wanted an ambitious national-service program; Mr Bush proposed small-scale “compassionate conservatism”.

If you didn’t note the date, this is 6 years ago.
It was a shocking article. “Despite his defeat McCain laid much of the groundwork for Mr. Bush’ post-9/11 presidency… Mr Bush has proved a better spokesman for McCainiac ideas than Mr McCain could ever had been.”

IF THE battle in 2000 to choose the Republican Party's presidential candidate now seems a world away, it is not just because September 11th changed the world. It is also because George Bush trounced John McCain so thoroughly that he seemed to bury everything the Arizona senator stood for.
Back then, the two men appeared to have nothing in common...
But the biggest differences were in foreign policy. The Arizona senator campaigned for a policy of “rogue-state rollback”— by which he meant preventing disruptive small-country dictators getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, if necessary by arming the local opposition. Mr McCain was the only candidate on either side to promote this theme, and hardly anyone took him seriously. Mr Bush, in contrast, talked about managing great-power relationships and repairing the damage done to America's ties with China, Russia and Europe after, as he saw it, eight years of Clintonian inconsistency. Mr McCain spoke stirringly or scarily, according to how you see these things, about “national greatness”. Mr Bush called soothingly for greater humility in projecting American power abroad...
Yet, if you look at the ideas that currently animate Mr Bush's presidency, they are about as McCainiac as you can get without having spent five years as a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war... In his state-of-the-union speech in January, Mr Bush... delivered his famous warning on the “axis of evil”, rhetorically reformulating Mr McCain's “rogue-state rollback”.
Suddenly, “national greatness conservatism”—Mr McCain's amour fou—has become the passion of the White House too. Confronting threats from small dictatorships, not managing relations with big powers, has become the focus of the presidency. Mr Bush has defined his presidency in terms of success in the war against rogue states and terrorists. To make the comparison complete, Mr Bush has been telling anyone who will listen that he has been reading Edmund Morris's new book on Teddy Roosevelt, one of Mr McCain's often-quoted heroes.
It is almost as if the Arizona senator had won the election. How on earth did this happen? But he still does not see the broader horizon the way that Mr McCain sees it... Abroad, it meant changing corrupt regimes which threaten the West, and encouraging the spread of democracy.
...Whether by prescience or luck, he [MCCAIN] was the first to reach out for the policies that fit the new world wrought by September 11th. Despite his defeat, he laid much of the groundwork for Mr Bush's post-September presidency. But the credit to Mr Bush is probably greater. He has proved quicker to adapt his views than anyone expected, switching seamlessly from great-power maintenance to rooting out terrorists and showing his independence from the Republican establishment by pinching ideas from his rival.
This transformation contains an irony and a question. The irony is that, because the president dominates his party in a way the maverick Mr McCain could never have done, Mr Bush has proved a better spokesman for McCainiac ideas than Mr McCain could ever have been...

By now there’s a lot of critical remarks upcoming from McCain and his
campaign and most important those regarding the size of the troops, initial too small in his eyes to any kind of success.
But in 2002 he said:
“I think we could go in with much smaller numbers than we had to do in the past... I don't believe it's going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991.” [Face the Nation, 9/15/02]
“And I believe that the success will be fairly easy” and “There's no doubt in my mind that... we will be welcomed as liberators.” [CNN, Larry King Live, 9/24/02]
“There's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along.” [MSNBC Hardball, 4/23/03]
McCain was asked, “at what point will America be able to say the war was won?” He responded, “...it’s clear that the end is, is, is very much in sight.” [ABC, “Good Morning America,” 4/9/03]
Exactly one year before violence in Iraq peaked: “Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course.” [The Hill, 12/8/05]
Now John McCain is outlining his vision for America.
John McCain, looking through a crystal ball to 2013 and the end of a prospective first term, sees "spasmodic" but reduced violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden dead or captured and government spending curbed by his ready veto pen.
In particular, he sees a world in which:
- "The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced."
- The Taliban threat in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced.
- "The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants," McCain said. "There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."
- A "League of Democracies" has supplanted a failed United Nations to apply sanctions to the Sudanese government and halt genocide in Darfur.
- The United States has had "several years of robust growth," appropriations bills free of lawmakers' pet projects known as "earmarks," public education improved by charter schools, health care improved by expansion of the private market and an energy crisis stemmed through the start of construction on 20 new nuclear reactors.
- Democrats are asked to serve in his administration, he holds weekly news conferences and, like the British prime minister, answers questions publicly from lawmakers.

Also this is a jolly good one: "Campaigns and the media collaborated as architects of the modern presidential campaign, and we deserve equal blame for the regret we feel from time to time over its less-than-inspirational features," he said.
Well, as boring and inconspicuous as Barack Obama acts will McCain not perform yet, isn’t it? “We belong to different parties, not different countries," McCain says in remarks prepared for delivery in the capital city of Ohio, a general election battleground. "There is a time to campaign, and a time to govern. If I'm elected president,..” God forbid that should be, because it seems to be McCain is an alien and certainly he belongs to the undereducated creatures from another planet.

Too Late

You don't believe it, but after Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton "yes we can" and hence eventually "yes we will", creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code.
Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).
Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role says: "We don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric."
Mere numbers? Heaven forfend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained -- too late in recognizing that the electorate does not acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.

Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates. If Democrats, who genuflect at the altar of "diversity," allowed more of it in their delegate selection process, things might look very different. If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would have been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.

Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the still-unattached cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.

McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.

Exit Polls: Limbaugh Effect Seems To Rear Its Head

Photo: Lost in North Carolina and defeated with doubble diggits the Billarygang is celebrating their 2% victory over Barack Obama, but they don't look very happy.
Did Rush Limbaugh actually impact the Democratic primary?
The loud-mouthed radio talk show host has been encouraging Republicans to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton to continue the "chaos" in the Democratic race. And a sampling of some key exit poll information suggests he may, to a certain extent, be having an effect.
Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said "neither candidate" shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.
These are not small numbers. By comparison, of the 33 percent of voters who said Sen. Barack Obama does not share their values, only seven percent cast their ballots in his favor. Basically, more people who don't relate to Clinton are, for one reason or another, still voting for her. These are not likely to be loyal supporters.
On a broader level, among the 17 percent of primary goers who said they would choose Sen. John McCain over Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election match-up, 41 percent of that group came from Clinton's own camp. In essence, roughly seven percent of Clinton support in Indiana (40 percent of 17 percent) said they would defect to the Republican should she end up the nominee. That would be a difficult punch to stomach in November. In 2004, nearly 1 million Indianans voted for John Kerry. A seven percent defection rate would have meant 70,000 less votes.
By contrast, if the general election is between Obama and McCain, 19 percent of the Indiana Democratic primary goers said they would support the Republican. But only 12 percent of that group (2.28 percent) would come from Obama's camp.
The numbers suggest one of three things: A) Clinton's support in Indiana, while clearly there, is not entirely solid; B) a large swath of Indiana primary goers simply didn't like the nominees and thought of Clinton as the lesser of two evils; or C) Limbaugh's hatchet plan could be having political ripples.
Perhaps it's a mix of all three.