Wednesday, May 19, 2004
"the level of incompetence here is so staggering here, and yet there's this gap between how astonishingly incompetent...and we can go over particulars in the last year if you want to... how astonishingly incompetent they've been and the perception is still of them as solid citizens...
The only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say no. They don't know what they're doing. They're clowns." – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, on The O’Franken Factor, Air America assessing the Administration
Media Wake-Up CallA good sign: Numerous reports as to newspapers finally realizing that they’ve long given the Administration a free pass and had generally given up their investigative function. The prototypical quote from one such media person who admires the Seymour Hersh series in The New Yorker, "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!". So, it wasn’t surprising that a front-page story in today’s NY Times notes:
White House Trumpets Programs It Tried To Cut
Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.
For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: We’re out of troops, now moving 10% of those deployed in Korea a training battalion from Louisiana and are calling u 30,000 inactive reservists. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worums183807608may18,0,3658673.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines Iraqi journalists have complained about their being abused. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/international/middleeast/19REUT.html
Iraq Invasion and Occupation: The Upshot
Robin Wright is a thoughtful columnist for the Washington Post.
Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.
The stakes in Iraq -- for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor -- are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.
The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.
That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world -- ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change…
The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad -- or struggle, as the word is accurately translated -- has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.
Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region's democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era's final phase.
The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28339-2004May14?language=printer
Fred Kaplan in Slate summarizes the culpability of those at the top:
Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.
That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial. http://slate.msn.com/id/2100683/
Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
The UPI’s Martin Sieff notes that those who matter are increasingly distancing themselves from the Administration and moving closer to wanting truth.
Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040518-064124-9605r
The LA Times’ Tracy Wilkinson and Alissa J. Rubin look at the myth that ‘only a few’ perpetrated the abuse. They note that hundreds, if not thousands followed orders and beat and brutalized more than 40,000 Iraqis who were held for months, though, as the Red Cross noted, up to 90% were there by mistake.
As much of the world focuses on Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, dozens of detainees and their families, along with scathing reports from international human rights groups, describe mistreatment at detention centers under U.S. control from Basra and Umm al Qasr in the south to Tikrit and Mosul in northern Iraq.
Even as the White House continues to argue that photographed abuse at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case, interviews with detainees and human rights reports demonstrate that abuse in various forms was system-wide. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-abuse18may18,1,4789041.story?coll=la-home-headlines
June 30 B.S.
The much-cited June 30 deadline for the “hand-over of power” (to whom?) has always been absurd, and a hoax. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper explain.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108439973419309908,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Bushies: No Matter What, It’s Our Oil
If anyone still thinks we weren’t interested in their oil…
As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology for a "sovereign" Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June 30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he "has to do" whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.
We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top $16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is Iraqi.
In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry. Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/17/oil/index_np.html
WMD:
The desperate Administration might try to make something of the sarin shell discovered in Iraq on Tuesday. But, lo, even David Kay has noted its antiquity (it’s probably from the Iraq-Iran war) and adds, “It’s doesn’t strike me as a big deal.” http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040517/D82KIMH00.html
Low-Keying it at the Olympics.
It’s no time to flaunt your americanismo.
American athletes have been warned not to wave the U.S. flag during their medal celebrations at this summer's Olympic Games in Athens, for fear of provoking crowd hostility and harming the country's already-battered public image.
The spectacle of victorious athletes grabbing a national flag and parading it around the stadium is a familiar part of international sporting competition, but U.S. Olympic officials have ordered their 550-strong team to exercise restraint and avoid any jingoistic behavior. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040516-121028-9603r.htm
Palestinians-Israelis
Tamer Ziara for The Independent reports on the latest:
Israeli helicopters pounded the refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza strip with missiles and machine gun fire today, killing at least 12 Palestinians as troops searched houses in the largest Israeli offensive in Gaza in years.
The death toll was expected to rise, with doctors saying they knew of two more bodies they were unable to collect because of heavy shooting.
Trapped residents said they huddled in the innermost rooms of their homes as bullets rained outside. Others tried to flee to safer ground. At least 34 Palestinians were wounded, including eight who were in critical condition.
Israel says it is targeting the Rafah refugee camp, on the border with Egypt, to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels and hunt Palestinian militants. Security officials said earlier this week the army also plans to widen an Israeli patrol road between the camp and Egypt, which would entail demolishing rows of nearby houses.
Last week, Israel destroyed about 100 houses near the patrol road, making more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless and drawing worldwide condemnation, including rare criticism from the United States. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522411
Move-On: Bold John Kerry (sic)
Move-On has been terrific, though this overstatement should be retracted.
Throughout his life, John Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and guarantee truth-telling in government. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more from us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope and progress. http://by16fd.bay16.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg?msg=MSG1084829799.3&start=1928166&len=10672&imgsafe=n&curmbox=F000000001&a=703fc391345f33adb7fc5c53384502fc
Wither Bill Moyers’ NOW:
Latest from Current, the Public TV trade paper reports: “…
PBS announced…its plans to retool Now with Bill Moyers as a half-hour series, during the Public Television Programmers' Association Conference in Atlanta last month. PBS has said Now, which will lose Moyers as host when he retires after the elections, will be followed by Tucker Carlson's new half-hour series, Unfiltered, developed with CPB and PBS support to counterbalance Moyers politically….
Another program with a right-ward edge may also join PBS’s expanded public affairs lineup. CPB is discussing a new series from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which is edited by Paul Gigot, a former pundit on PBS's NewsHour. “ http://www.current.org/
-R
The only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say no. They don't know what they're doing. They're clowns." – Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, on The O’Franken Factor, Air America assessing the Administration
Media Wake-Up CallA good sign: Numerous reports as to newspapers finally realizing that they’ve long given the Administration a free pass and had generally given up their investigative function. The prototypical quote from one such media person who admires the Seymour Hersh series in The New Yorker, "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!". So, it wasn’t surprising that a front-page story in today’s NY Times notes:
White House Trumpets Programs It Tried To Cut
Like many of its predecessors, the Bush White House has used the machinery of government to promote the re-election of the president by awarding federal grants to strategically important states. But in a twist this election season, many administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.
For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html?hp
What’s Happening, Iraq: We’re out of troops, now moving 10% of those deployed in Korea a training battalion from Louisiana and are calling u 30,000 inactive reservists. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-worums183807608may18,0,3658673.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines Iraqi journalists have complained about their being abused. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/international/middleeast/19REUT.html
Iraq Invasion and Occupation: The Upshot
Robin Wright is a thoughtful columnist for the Washington Post.
Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.
The stakes in Iraq -- for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor -- are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.
The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.
That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world -- ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change…
The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad -- or struggle, as the word is accurately translated -- has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.
Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region's democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era's final phase.
The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28339-2004May14?language=printer
Fred Kaplan in Slate summarizes the culpability of those at the top:
Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.
That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial. http://slate.msn.com/id/2100683/
Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
The UPI’s Martin Sieff notes that those who matter are increasingly distancing themselves from the Administration and moving closer to wanting truth.
Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040518-064124-9605r
The LA Times’ Tracy Wilkinson and Alissa J. Rubin look at the myth that ‘only a few’ perpetrated the abuse. They note that hundreds, if not thousands followed orders and beat and brutalized more than 40,000 Iraqis who were held for months, though, as the Red Cross noted, up to 90% were there by mistake.
As much of the world focuses on Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, dozens of detainees and their families, along with scathing reports from international human rights groups, describe mistreatment at detention centers under U.S. control from Basra and Umm al Qasr in the south to Tikrit and Mosul in northern Iraq.
Even as the White House continues to argue that photographed abuse at Abu Ghraib was an isolated case, interviews with detainees and human rights reports demonstrate that abuse in various forms was system-wide. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-abuse18may18,1,4789041.story?coll=la-home-headlines
June 30 B.S.
The much-cited June 30 deadline for the “hand-over of power” (to whom?) has always been absurd, and a hoax. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper explain.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108439973419309908,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Bushies: No Matter What, It’s Our Oil
If anyone still thinks we weren’t interested in their oil…
As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology for a "sovereign" Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June 30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he "has to do" whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.
We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top $16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is Iraqi.
In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry. Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/17/oil/index_np.html
WMD:
The desperate Administration might try to make something of the sarin shell discovered in Iraq on Tuesday. But, lo, even David Kay has noted its antiquity (it’s probably from the Iraq-Iran war) and adds, “It’s doesn’t strike me as a big deal.” http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040517/D82KIMH00.html
Low-Keying it at the Olympics.
It’s no time to flaunt your americanismo.
American athletes have been warned not to wave the U.S. flag during their medal celebrations at this summer's Olympic Games in Athens, for fear of provoking crowd hostility and harming the country's already-battered public image.
The spectacle of victorious athletes grabbing a national flag and parading it around the stadium is a familiar part of international sporting competition, but U.S. Olympic officials have ordered their 550-strong team to exercise restraint and avoid any jingoistic behavior. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040516-121028-9603r.htm
Palestinians-Israelis
Tamer Ziara for The Independent reports on the latest:
Israeli helicopters pounded the refugee camp of Rafah in the Gaza strip with missiles and machine gun fire today, killing at least 12 Palestinians as troops searched houses in the largest Israeli offensive in Gaza in years.
The death toll was expected to rise, with doctors saying they knew of two more bodies they were unable to collect because of heavy shooting.
Trapped residents said they huddled in the innermost rooms of their homes as bullets rained outside. Others tried to flee to safer ground. At least 34 Palestinians were wounded, including eight who were in critical condition.
Israel says it is targeting the Rafah refugee camp, on the border with Egypt, to destroy arms-smuggling tunnels and hunt Palestinian militants. Security officials said earlier this week the army also plans to widen an Israeli patrol road between the camp and Egypt, which would entail demolishing rows of nearby houses.
Last week, Israel destroyed about 100 houses near the patrol road, making more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless and drawing worldwide condemnation, including rare criticism from the United States. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=522411
Move-On: Bold John Kerry (sic)
Move-On has been terrific, though this overstatement should be retracted.
Throughout his life, John Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and guarantee truth-telling in government. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more from us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope and progress. http://by16fd.bay16.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg?msg=MSG1084829799.3&start=1928166&len=10672&imgsafe=n&curmbox=F000000001&a=703fc391345f33adb7fc5c53384502fc
Wither Bill Moyers’ NOW:
Latest from Current, the Public TV trade paper reports: “…
PBS announced…its plans to retool Now with Bill Moyers as a half-hour series, during the Public Television Programmers' Association Conference in Atlanta last month. PBS has said Now, which will lose Moyers as host when he retires after the elections, will be followed by Tucker Carlson's new half-hour series, Unfiltered, developed with CPB and PBS support to counterbalance Moyers politically….
Another program with a right-ward edge may also join PBS’s expanded public affairs lineup. CPB is discussing a new series from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which is edited by Paul Gigot, a former pundit on PBS's NewsHour. “ http://www.current.org/
-R
