Former Iraq commander indicts Bush Administration and Iraq war: 'A nightmare with no end in sight'

"Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty."

"In my profession these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court martialed."

"The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat."
--Retired Lt. Gen., former Iraq commander Ricardo Sanchez

"We appreciate his service to the country. As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker said, there's more work to be done but progress is being made in Iraq. And that's what we're focused on now."
--Kate Starr, National Security Council spokeswoman

"Simply stunning," and "an extraordinary statement from the guy who was running the war," says CNN's Anderson Cooper of indictments being made by the former commander of the Iraq occupation, as reported Friday by the Associated Press.

Bush, aides 'grossly misjudged Putin'

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

The Bush administration's failure to win Russia's consent to install U.S. missile defenses in its European backyard and a growing list of other disputes suggest that President Bush and his aides have misread the man whose "soul" Bush thought he'd divined when they first met six years ago.

AT&T contract for NSA to surveill all internet traffic, foreign and domestic, started before 9/11

That’s all Internet traffic, foreign and domestic, data and voice. And the decision to do this was taken, not because of 9/11, but as soon as Bush took office. As was the decision to ignore the rule of law. So much for the idea that the extremely benevolent and trustworthy Bush administration was reacting to 9/11, and just wants “surgical” surveillance* to keep us safe from terrorists, eh? Could this program be Spencer Ackerman’s “Project X”?

Anyhow, it’s late, so I can’t do this story justice, but according to Wired:

And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.

Paul Krugman: Sliming Graeme Frost

Two weeks ago, the Democratic response to President Bush’s weekly radio address was delivered by a 12-year-old, Graeme Frost. Graeme, who along with his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Mr. Bush has vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded that program to cover millions of children who would otherwise have been uninsured.

What followed should serve as a teaching moment.

Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007; A03

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Income inequality worst since 1920s, according to IRS data

The superrich are gobbling up an ever larger piece of the economic pie, and the poor are seeing their share of earnings shrink: new IRS data shows the top 1 percent of Americans are claiming a larger share of national income than at any time since before the Great Depression.

The top percentile of wealthy Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, up from 19 percent in 2004, according to new Internal Revenue Service data published in the Wall Street Journal Friday.

EPA Joins Settlement of Lawsuit but Adds a Waiver

Action Against Polluting Utility Is Ruled Out Until 2018

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 11, 2007; Page A03

Although the Environmental Protection Agency joined in a legal settlement this week to force the largest power-plant pollution cleanup in U.S. history, the Bush administration signaled in the agreement that it has no intention of taking enforcement actions against the utility for the same kind of Clean Air Act violations in the future.

The language of the settlement indicates that the administration has not wavered in its distaste for a Clinton-era policy of using the law to force power plants to upgrade their pollution controls whenever they significantly update or expand a plant. That marks a significant victory for the power industry, which has strenuously opposed the "New Source Review," saying that it penalizes them for efficiency improvements that ultimately benefit consumers and the environment.

Supreme Disgrace

Published: October 11, 2007

The Supreme Court exerts leadership over the nation’s justice system, not just through its rulings, but also by its choice of cases — the ones it agrees to hear and the ones it declines. On Tuesday, it led in exactly the wrong direction.

Somehow, the court could not muster the four votes needed to grant review in the case of an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the Bush administration’s morally, physically and legally abusive anti-terrorism program. The victim, Khaled el-Masri, was denied justice by lower federal courts, which dismissed his civil suit in a reflexive bow to a flimsy government claim that allowing the case to go forward would put national security secrets at risk.

Marianne Means: Clarence Thomas' whiny book

By MARIANNE MEANS
Copyright 2007 Hearst Newspapers

In future histories of Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas will certainly be ranked near the bottom. He betrays the high court's high standards with nearly every mean-spirited, ideologically driven vote he has cast. But the ultimate, most revealing act of hostility is his new memoir, titled My Grandfather's Son, in which he portrays himself as Mr. Perfect, without a selfish political thought. His racial persecution complex is scary. He's risen to one of the most powerful jobs in the land and he still thinks evil white liberals are out to get him solely because of his color, not because they profoundly disagree with his opinions. He completely reflects White House Republican thinking — never admit a single mistake, no matter what. Yet he's supposed to bring a well-reasoned judicial temperament to tricky legal decisions that impact a lot of American lives, both white and black. His opposition to college affirmative action policies is particularly offensive, considering how he got into Yale law school with the help of a program to give black students a break.

Iraq's debt risk rises despite US troop surge

Mark Davis Political Correspondent
October 12, 2007

SENIOR Australian ministers from the Prime Minister down reckon the US-led troop "surge" strategy in Iraq is making headway, pointing to declining civilian fatalities and evidence of political progress in Baghdad.

But despite the debates in Washington, London and Canberra, world financial markets have already delivered a negative verdict on the decision by the US President, George Bush, to boost American troop numbers by 30,000 - from 132,000 at the start of the year to 162,000.

Paul Krugman: Why Do Right-Wingers Mock Attempts to Care for Other People?

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash
Posted on October 12, 2007, Printed on October 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64931/

"... [Y]ou can't have gross economic inequality and still have a functional democracy. You can't really have a society with broad equality without having a political democracy. So it is all about having basically a shared society. -- Paul Krugman, Economist, Columnist, Author of The Conscience of a Liberal

In a sea of media transcribers and mediocrity, Paul Krugman has held a longstanding spot as one of the most popular liberal columnists in the media.

Americans Don't Believe in the American Dream

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on October 12, 2007, Printed on October 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64831/

The American Dream is Dead, gone along with the era of good union jobs, comprehensive employer benefits and real upward mobility, and most working people are fully aware of the fact.

That's the takeaway from the latest installment of the American Dream Survey, a study of working Americans' views of the political-economy released in late September.

Abortion just as common where it's illegal

LONDON, England (AP) -- Women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal, according to research published Friday.

In a study examining abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, experts also found that abortion rates are virtually equal in rich and poor countries, and that half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe.

The study was done by Gilda Sedgh of the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and colleagues from the World Health Organization. It was published in an edition of The Lancet medical journal devoted to maternal health.

You live in a Banana Republic

by Kagro X

Thu Oct 11, 2007 at 05:00:54 PM PDT

This is a huge and wide-ranging story. Let me see if I can draw upon some of what's already been written about it to compress it into a manageable narrative.

OK, first there's this:

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest.

The documents indicate that likely would have been at the heart of former CEO Joe Nacchio's so-called "classified information" defense at his insider trading trial, had he been allowed to present it.

Surprised? Of course not. Nor should you be.

E-mail Reveals That McConnell Staffer Propagated Smear Campaign Against Graeme Frost

Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that there was mounting evidence that a staffer for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may have been involved in the right-wing campaign to smear Graeme Frost and his family.

ABC News reported earlier in the week that an e-mail sent to reporters by “a Senate Republican leadership aide” in McConnell’s office suggested that “GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about the Frosts.” A McConnell spokesman refused to deny the office’s involvement in the affair.

The $5 Billion Mulligan

Banks insist their credit problems are over. Why on earth do investors believe them?

By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007, at 2:14 PM ET

Ordinarily, investors fret when companies have to write down the value of shoddy investments. "Write-downs," "write-offs," "mark-to-market adjustments"—whatever you want to call them—are admissions that a company woefully overestimated the value of assets on its books. Write-downs should be especially worrisome when taken by banks, since they are in the business of valuing financial instruments. And yet in recent weeks, as the nation's blue-chip investment banks—Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and others—have announced multibillion-dollar write-downs because of poor lending decisions, their stocks have risen.

How Lobbying Works in the Age of the Blogosphere

By Spencer Ackerman - October 11, 2007, 4:20PM

The ACLU watched in horror and impotence this summer as the Protect America Act vastly expanded the NSA's warrantless surveillance authority. With House Democrats pushing a PAA fix that still gives civil libertarians shpilkis, the ACLU is determined not to watch history repeat itself, especially as the Senate prepares a companion bill that worries the organization even more. So the ACLU is taking an aggressive approach: passing on what it freely concedes are rumors concerning what's in the bill in order to pressure Senators against violating civil-libertarian red-lines. What follows is an example.

Humans have made the skies more moist

Study models rises in atmospheric water vapour.

Michael Hopkin

Human activity is behind the rising levels of water vapour in the lower atmosphere over the past few decades, climatologists have concluded. The rises in humidity could affect patterns of extreme storms, they warn.

Council of Europe votes against creationist teaching

Creationism is a potential threat to human rights and any attempts to incorporate it into science must be resisted, says the Council of Europe. The council is an intergovernmental body that is responsible for, among other things, the European Convention on Human Rights.

PM Carpenter: The Allure of Cryptofascism

With respect to the Fourth Amendment hatchet known as the Protect America Act, may I ask what constituency Congressional Democrats are politically nervous about other than the cryptofascist crowd?

More than enough is never enough for the Bush administration. It has sought and received legislative approval after approval that enhance its anticonstitutional aims, yet once again, enough is not enough. Yesterday the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees crafted and approved legislation that "provides authority for the government to obtain 'basket' or 'umbrella' warrants for bundles of overseas communications" -- an unwarranted offense to the Fourth Amendment -- which prompted not smiles, but rage by the administration.

Our Drinkable Water Supply Is Vanishing

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on October 11, 2007, Printed on October 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64948/

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."

We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans.

Charlie Savage: Cheney Plotted Bush’s Imperial Presidency ‘Thirty Years Ago’

The Bush administration has long held that President Bush’s expanded executive power is justified due to 9/11. “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it,” claimed Vice President Cheney in 2005.

But in his new book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage reveals that Cheney has been on a thirty-year quest to implement his views of unfettered executive power.

Verizon, AT&T broadband policies allow for censorship of unfriendly opinions

Companies insist they don't censor customers

Buried deep within the dense, legalistic agreements two of the country's largest telecommunications carriers force subscribers to accept are provisions that could allow the companies to cut access to subscribers who criticize them online.

Los Angeles Times business columnist David Lazarus uncovered the little-noticed clauses in AT&T and Verizon's service contracts.

Bill Moyers: Dispensationalism, Hagee, the Coming war With Iran and Armageddon

Bill Moyers Journal this week on PBS scared my pants off. It's a look into the organization Christians United for Israel led by Pastor John C. Hagee. In short it is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture so these Evangelicalfascists can go to Heaven in their lifetime. The wholesale thirsty enjoyable murder of 7 billion people. And of course the Jews who now support them will all go to Hell. And they call Muslims crazy murdering fascists?

Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, The Endless Summer of Distraction

Tomdispatch Jock Culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte launches a new season of sports and politics by considering the major sports scandals that distracted us from all those other scandals of the summer. At this very moment, I'm taking a break from watching the last of my hometown teams in the baseball playoffs -- the Mets, my team of choice, hit the skids before the season ended and disintegrated in a way we only wish the Bush administration would -- to knock out a quick intro. Distracted? Who me?

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools...do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer
Wed Oct 10, 12:29 AM ET

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

AP Gets Documents: U.S. Pursued 'Radiological Warfare'

By Robert Burns, The Associated Press

Published: October 08, 2007 11:25 AM ET
WASHINGTON In one of the longest-held secrets of the Cold War, the U.S. Army explored the potential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate "important individuals" such as military or civilian leaders, according to newly declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concept of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations.

It is time to speak truth to US power

Published: October 8 2007 20:24 | Last updated: October 8 2007 20:24

Since the attacks of September 11 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush has sought to cast a cloak of legality over the wrongs that it has committed in the name of fighting terrorism.

Mr Bush seems to think that legal sleight of hand can be used to justify almost any tactic to battle terrorists – including, it emerged last week, simulated drowning and other cruel interrogation techniques that Alberto Gonzales, his former attorney-general, appears to have authorised by secret legal memorandum.

Bet This Doesn't Happen to White Teachers

by Steven D
Mon Oct 8th, 2007 at 09:20:35 PM EST

A 150 pound African American high school science teacher in Brooklyn suffers a heart attack and requires open heart surgery because of police brutality after (dare I say it?) driving while black:

When the violent encounter was over, Lester Jacob, 50, suffered a heart attack and was left on his own in the street by cops, who accused him of "acting." In July he underwent open-heart surgery. [...]

Jacob, an earth science teacher at James Madison High School in Midwood, heard a siren, looked in his rear-view mirror and dutifully pulled over for the radio car behind him. He wasn't prepared for what happened next. Two officers rushed up to Jacob's vehicle and pointed their guns at his head, according to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

The Upcoming FISA Battle

by BooMan
Tue Oct 9th, 2007 at 12:49:47 PM EST

The New York Times paints a bleak picture and predicts another Democratic cave-in on the upcoming debate over the FISA bill.

Two months after vowing to roll back broad new wiretapping powers won by the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats appear ready to make concessions that could extend some of the key powers granted to the National Security Agency.

Bush administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened wiretapping authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess, and some Democratic officials admit that they may not come up with the votes to rein in the administration.

But things are not as bleak as the Times would have you believe.

Paul Krugman: Same Old Party

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

Well, I don’t know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism — and Mr. Bush hasn’t strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he’s the very model of a modern movement conservative.

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

Hackers could skew US elections

The web may not deserve its reputation as a great democratic tool, security experts say. They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.

While politicians have been quick to embrace the internet as an enabler for democracy, established security threats like spam emails and botnets – collections of "zombie" computers remotely controlled by hackers – all open new avenues for fraudulent campaigning. So said experts at an e-crime summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week.

Who's Sorry Now?

It was a pleasant weekend for those of us who have been against the Iraq War from the beginning. The Washington Post had an article on the bitterness and regrets of those in the Bush administration who concocted and ran the war and have now left. Some of them have nightmares. Nothing like the nightmares of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or the Black Sites, but hey, a few nightmares are progress. Maybe they will have more, and then they will have mental breakdowns and they can experience electroshock therapy -- that would be a nice payback for them. In the New York Times magazine, there was an article about Kanan Makiya, an exiled Iraqi scholar who was a big cheerleader for the war, and who seems to have given Bush and Cheney a rationale that they could use as a cover for their real motives. At the end of the article, there's an interesting interview with Ali Allawi, who was the Minister of Finance in the Iraqi transitional government in 2005 and into 2006. Allawi was opposed to the war, but went to Iraq to try and put Humpty back together again. He failed. And, of course, there's Blackwater. Whoops. Americans have recently gotten a good look at our very own right wing death squad (paid for by us to the tune of 445,000 per soldier, per year), and we know there are more RWDSs where that one came from. And I loved the headline of David "the Pig" Brooks' op-ed in last week's Times, "The Republican Collapse" -- is there a lovelier phrase? I used to send letters to David Brooks asking when the New York Times was going to fire him. He never responded.

The Media's Conservative Bias

by BooMan
Mon Oct 8th, 2007 at 01:50:24 PM EST

Gallup Polls discovers that a plurality (45%) of Americans still think the national media is too liberal rather than too conservative (18%). Republicans overwhelmingly (77%) feel this way, but so do a plurality (43%) of independents. Even more bizarre, a majority (58%) of Democrats think the media's partisan balance is just about right.

The right has been railing about liberal bias in the media for forty years and it has clearly had an enduring effect on public perceptions. But the l'affair Lewinsky, the Bush Era, and the rise of the Blogosphere have exposed example after example of conservative bias. This has been captured in the Gallup poll...but barely.

Paul Krugman: Wrong is right

OK, people are having some fun with the latest from Fred Barnes:

You know, I’ve thought for a long time that Obama’s not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don’t think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be.

Having been right on Iraq is a sign of weakness!

Right Wing Launches Baseless Smear Campaign Against 12 Year Old Recipient Of SCHIP

Two weeks ago, the Democratic radio address was delivered by a 12-year old Maryland boy named Graeme Frost. Graeme told his story of being involved in a severe car accident three years ago, and having received access to medical care because of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He said:

If it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today. … We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program. But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. … I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me.

The Passion of Kanan Makiya

By Todd Gitlin | bio

Dexter Filkins' piece on Kanan Makiya in the NYT Magazine is a must read in the ongoing autopsy of the Iraq catastrophe. It's also a valuable document for an anatomy of intellectual folly--make that human folly--in our time.

Makiya, the courageous, soulful, and gravely misguided Iraqi in exile, wrote two indispensable books about Iraq: one about Saddam Hussein's regime of terror (Republic of Fear), the other about the default of Arab intellectuals (Cruelty and Silence). In the 1990s, he campaigned for American intervention. He was tireless.

Regrets Only?

1. Dokan, Iraq They were well into their dinner when the talk turned to the most troubling question of all. The guests, brought here to discuss plans for the American University of Iraq, had been passing around platters of shabbout, an oily and bony fish, in the dining room of a villa owned by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, when the question came up. The six Iraqis and one Lebanese-American had gathered in this lakeside guesthouse in the mountains of Kurdistan, far from the furies of Baghdad and Basra. No one had actually posed the question; it crept up on its own. Among Iraqi exiles, particularly those who had been instrumental in persuading the Americans to invade, it was still something of a taboo.

“Leave Saddam in power?” asked Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, holding court in the middle. “So that he would be free to continue killing, free to invade his neighbors, so that he would be free to — I am sorry — develop nuclear weapons?” He shook his head. “No.”

Digby: Randy Conservatives

Submitted by Digby on October 6, 2007 - 1:54pm.

It's interesting that Naomi Klein's new book about "disaster capitalism" is taking the political world by storm, since it's such a downer. She offers a stark and scary explanation as to why in disasters and wars and crises of all kinds we so often see these even more disasterous "free-market" solutions. From shock therapy in Russia to the CPA in Iraq to the Republican post-Katrina planning committee at the Heritage Foundation, you see similar examples of market fundamentalist approaches to problems of vast scale that one would have until recently assumed would be undertaken by government, democratic or otherwise. Klein makes the case that this is essentially a product of a school of economic thought that has found it can not only benefit by disaster, but it benefits greatly if it actually creates disasters, frightening people into accepting what in the best case can be considered experimental solutions to problems and in the worst case provides the opportunity for greed and graft to operate without restraint.

Digby: The Legacy of Justice Thomas

Submitted by Digby on October 8, 2007 - 6:22am.

Seeing Clarence Thomas all over the television, once again using florid language drenched in civil rights era imagery to describe his victimization as a conservative black man really takes me back. The Thomas hearings were the first time I recall seeing the right wing directly appropriate liberal rhetoric and throw it back at them. (It may not have been the first time it was done, but it was the first time I noticed it --- and realized how powerful it could be.)

Thomas was an arch conservative who nonetheless used his experience as an oppressed minority to shut down debate about his ideology. It was quite brilliant in its way. It paved the way for the thousands of similar uses of liberal "politically correct" rhetoric to advance the most politically incorrect causes to come.

Unemployment Edges Up Despite New Jobs

By JEANNINE AVERSA – 3 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fears that the country could slide into a recession eased in September as employers created the most jobs in four months and workers' wages grew solidly. The unemployment rate crept up to 4.7 percent, the highest in over a year but still low by historical standards.

Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 91.70 points. The Standard & Poor's 500 index, the measure most closely followed by market watchers, reached a new closing high of 1,557.59.

Mobile phone cancer risk 'higher for children'

By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Last Updated: 4:07pm BST 08/10/2007

Children should not be given mobile phones because using them for more than 10 years increases the risk of brain cancer, a leading scientist has said.

People who have used their phone for a decade are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a tumour on a nerve connecting the ear to the brain, according to a group of scientists who have surveyed the results of 11 different studies.

Naomi Wolf: Blackwater: “Newly Created Thug Caste”

(Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. She has written extensively about Blackwater and joins us in the comments — jh)

Congress is finally asking questions of Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, the private mercenary organization that massacred seventeen civilians in Iraq recently. As I mentioned before, Blackwater operates in Iraq entirely outside the rule of law and has close ties to the White House. The New York Times today reported just how close — Prince’s sister-in-law is a major Bush fundraiser and ally.

Glenn Greenwald: The remaining GOP base -- the 30%'ers and the Broder/Ignatius pundit

David Broder and David Ignatius both have excellent columns in this morning's Washington Post -- excellent because of how vividly they illustrate the shallowness and dishonesty for our opinion-making elite. Impressively, even though the two columns are ostensibly about completely different topics -- Broder writes about how terrible and self-destructive Congressional Democrats are being because they are too uncooperative and partisan (seriously) while Ignatius writes about the heroic efforts the Bush administration is undertaking to avoid war with Iran (seriously) -- they are actually identical both in their tactics and their "substance."

Both columns do nothing, literally, beyond mindlessly repeating what Bush loyalists have told them -- in Broder's case, the whole column simply recites what was told to him by RCCC Chair Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, and in Igantius's case, he does nothing but uncritically repeat what unnamed "senior administration officials" whispered into his grateful, flattered ear. There is not a critical thought expressed about any of it. Like the obedient puppets that they are, they simply adopt what they are told as their own opinions and then write it all down.

Top Iraqis Pull Back From Key U.S. Goal

Reconciliation Seen Unattainable Amid Struggle for Power

By Joshua Partlow

Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 8, 2007; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- For much of this year, the U.S. military strategy in Iraq has sought to reduce violence so that politicians could bring about national reconciliation, but several top Iraqi leaders say they have lost faith in that broad goal.

Iraqi leaders argue that sectarian animosity is entrenched in the structure of their government. Instead of reconciliation, they now stress alternative and perhaps more attainable goals: streamlining the government bureaucracy, placing experienced technocrats in positions of authority and improving the dismal record of providing basic services.

Matt Taibbi: It's the End of the Road for John McCain

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on October 8, 2007, Printed on October 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64639/

I've now seen John McCain in South Carolina twice this election season. The first time came last spring at a Republican debate, where the fatigued-looking seventy-one-year-old senator all but pulled a Monty Python crack-suicide-squad act onstage, standing up during a hail of political gunfire in a televised repartee about the torture issue.

One by one, McCain's GOP opponents had lunged toward the cameras pledging, by means of innuendo both thinly veiled and not veiled at all, boundless enthusiasm for the abuse and torture of America's terror-war detainees. Rudy Giuliani, baldly seeking to overcome his rep as a two-faced Yankee liberal who kills the unborn and dresses in women's clothes, grinned into the cameras and said he would tell his people to "use every method they could think of" to get information. The other suspect Northerner, the Mormon queer-coddler Mitt Romney, took in Giuliani's response like a frat pledge who had just been issued a beer-pong challenge, preposterously promising to one-up the field and "double Guantanamo."

Climate Change: Can We Stop It?

By Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books
Posted on October 8, 2007, Printed on October 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64645/

Reviewed:

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
by Bjørn Lomborg
Knopf, 253 pp., $21.00

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Houghton Mifflin, 344 pp., $25.00

What We Know About Climate Change
by Kerry Emanuel
MIT Press, 85 pp., $14.95

Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren
edited by Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman
MIT Press, 217 pp., $19.95 (paper)

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.

Report says war on terror is fueling al Qaeda

By Kate Kelland
Mon Oct 8, 8:29 AM ET

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

FIREDOGLAKE: How Do You Repudiate A Lawless Regime?

The revelation — no, reminder — that the Bush Administration reauthorized torture after calling it “abhorrent,” lied about it, and hid behind secret legal opinions issued by Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department continues to elicit public revulsion.

And the questions everyone keeps avoiding are once again staring America in the face: What are we going to do about it, America? How long are we going to allow this regime to taunt us, to disgrace our nation, to trash every legal and moral principle upon which our country was founded?

Still Crazy After All These Years

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 9:22 am

Where to begin. Perhaps with Paul Krugman, who says right wingers have some sense of humor.

What’s happening, presumably, is that modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in.

[...]

Over the long years I’ve observed some consistent traits among righties. One is that they sincerely believe most people think the way they do, even when polls say otherwise. In fact, “most people agree with me” is a common fallback debate tactic. Some have an almost frantic need to believe they belong to a majority, possibly because it makes them feel powerful. Erich Fromm wrote that people who find autonomy isolating and bewildering often will submerge themselves in an authoritarian group. Such people often have a strong sado-masochistic streak, Fromm said. They derive pleasure both from submission to a higher authority and from aggressively dominating people who fall below them in the social/power strata. “Humor” is often a socially acceptable form of hate speech used to keep less desirable people in their place.

Paul Krugman: Europe-bashing

I was struck by something in the recent Times profile of Michael C. Jensen, who played a pivotal role in providing an intellectual rationale for gigantic executive paychecks. Now he feels some remorse – in fact, he sounds a bit like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein: “I have created a monthtah.” But he rationalizes it by saying that at least we’re doing better than those decrepit Europeans:

“As competition has intensified, corporations have flourished, but not necessarily the communities in which they are located or the workers they employ. Those are shortcomings that Mr. Jensen considers an acceptable price to pay for an American economy that he believes has outstripped Japan and Europe in growth and prosperity.”

Medicare Audits Show Problems in Private Plans

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.

The problems, described in 91 audit reports reviewed by The New York Times, include the improper termination of coverage for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, huge backlogs of claims and complaints, and a failure to answer telephone calls from consumers, doctors and drugstores.

Pete the Parrot Departs

Good riddance to the last of the Rumsfeld generals.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, at 6:21 PM ET

Somehow I missed Gen. Peter Pace's Oct. 1 farewell speech at the Fort Myer parade ground, replete with a "full honor review" and four fighter jets streaking overhead. The New York Times didn't cover it, except in a photo caption. The Pentagon's Web site didn't bother transcribing his address, though it did post the introductory remarks by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

And yet Pace's departure was a significant event because it marked the end, finally, of the Donald Rumsfeld era. Pace was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the last two years. Gates decided not to renew the general's term, despite Pace's request for another. The public rationale was that Gates wanted to avoid "very contentious" confirmation hearings. There's clearly something to this. Not only was Pace the last senior official still associated with early decisions on the war (he was the JCS vice chairman at the time of the invasion), he also recently said in public that gays shouldn't be in the military because homosexual acts were "immoral."

FBI offered me $4m: Lockerbie bomb witness

MICHAEL HOWIE HOME AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (mhowie@scotsman.com)

A WITNESS in the Lockerbie case has claimed he was offered $4 million (£2 million) by American investigators to lie to the trial judges.

Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company MEBO that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, claims he was offered the money by the FBI at its Washington HQ in exchange for making a statement that supported the main line of inquiry - that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

Frank Rich: Nobody Knows the Lynchings He’s Seen

WHAT'S the difference between a low-tech lynching and a high-tech lynching? A high-tech lynching brings a tenured job on the Supreme Court and a $1.5 million book deal. A low-tech lynching, not so much.

Pity Clarence Thomas. Done in by what he calls "left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony" — as he describes anyone who challenged his elevation to the court — he still claims to have suffered as much as African-Americans once victimized by "bigots in white robes." Since kicking off his book tour on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank, often abetted by a press claque as fawning as his No. 1 fan, Rush Limbaugh.