Kudos to Salon...

Glen Greenwald will either be remembered as the main catalyst for the criminal prosecutions of the excesses and abominations of the Bush era, or will rise to the level of prominence and respect as this generation's and this war's Sy Hersh. Either way, it will be well deserved and will go a long way towards marching us back out of the darkness into which the Republican Party and this administration has dragged the country after the last eight years.

His work on the criminal and unconsitutional abuses that Bush and Cheney brought against the the rule of law and the FISA Act, the Fourth Amendment, and the American People in their extraordinary and incredible embrace of John Yoo's absurd and banal theory of "unitary executive" powers has been well documented here and throughout the blogosphere. Kudos to Salon.com for recognizing Greenwald as a breed apart from the rest of the blogosphere, and one of the most insightful and original minds writing anywhere today. If you don't read Greenwald regularly, you should.

He's turned his eye towards the stunning expose that the NYT ran on the major networks pimping themselves out to the Pentagon's concerted effort to not only shamelessly back the neo-con agenda in Iraq, but more insidiously, to promote the interests of the defense industry, to which the "spokesmen" that the Pentagon sent out to the networks were beholden.

After I read the article, I thought: "golly, that's unseemly". After Greenwald read the article, he writes stuff like this.

I'll cut you a graph, but the entire series should be read:

Both McCaffrey and Downing were about as far from "independent" as a news analyst could possibly be. On November 15, 2002, a press release was issued announcing the formation of something called "The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," which was devoted "to advocat[ing] freedom and democracy in Iraq." Its list of 25 members was filled to the brim with the standard cast of war-hungry neocons -- including Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Leon Wieseltier, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, Eliot Cohen, and anti-Muslim "scholar" Bernard Lewis. Both Barry McCaffrey and Wayne Downing -- the two extremely independent "news sources" hailed yesterday by Brian Williams -- were two of its 25 founding members.
On the day of its formation, the group announced that they would meet later that day with then-National Security Adviser Condolleeza Rice to discuss Iraq. The group's President was quoted in the Press Release as follows: "We believe it is time to confront the clear and present danger posed by Saddam Hussein's regime by liberating the Iraqi people." Here was its stated purpose:
The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize domestic and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny. The Committee is committed to work beyond the liberation of Iraq to the reconstruction of its economy and the establishment of political pluralism, democratic institutions, and the rule of law.
So this was a group devoted to building domestic support in the U.S. for the invasion of Iraq through so-called "educational and advocacy efforts." And NBC News then hired both Barry McCaffrey and Wayne Downing as supposedly "independent analysts" to opine to NBC's viewers about the war, and did so without ever once disclosing this affiliation to their viewers, without ever disclosing that they were dedicated to propagandizing on behalf of the Bush administration's desire to invade Iraq.
Beyond their ideological affiliations that negated their "independence," both McCaffrey and Downing had substantial ties to the defense industry which gave them strong financial incentives to advocate for the war. Worse, these ties were detailed all the way back in April of 2003 by The Nation, in an article entitled "TV's Conflicted Experts:

So, NBC and Brian Williams, who clearly knew that these generals were conflicted both ideologically and financially, since at least 2003, refuse to comment on the NYT article until they are confronted by a bunch of dirty hippies on their own blogs, and at that point they basically point out that McCaffrey's a swell guy and undoubtedly wears a lapel pin.

I hate to sound elitist, but this stuff plays in Peoria, and people rely on the information that the major news outlets feed them. O'Reilly, Beck, and Limbaugh can almost be forgiven, because they are so absurd that they appeal only to their own peanut galleries. But Brian Williams (and CNN, and Fox News) needs to be called out here for his shameless and possibly criminal actions, and Greenwald is just the man for the job.

Flashback to the run-up to Iraq...Tom Friedman editon

Thomas Friedman proving once and for all that his employment at the New York Times and his status as one of our modern day pundits is one of the great farces of our time:



Was it really so hard to point out that it didn't make a bit of sense at the time these words were spoken? Did it make sense that the appropriate response to stateless terrorism was to invade and topple a middle eastern state?

Random musings....

Sy Hersh thoroughly discredited the notion that Syria was building a reactor along the Euphrates River back in February. What's stunning to me is that the press fails to cite Hersh's article when they run down the administration's latest revelation that North Korea and Syria were working towards a plutonium enrichment plant. I would think that as a data point, it would make sense to include his well sourced and damning counterargument as part of the reporting, but I suppose he's just a dirty hippie after all.

I watched the thoroughly loathsome Dick Morris on Hannity and Colmes last night (don't ask), and from what I can gather, Obama's statements denouncing Reverend Jeremiah Wright's most inflammatory remarks don't come anywhere near the level of repudiation that Morris would like to see. Apparently, Obama has to hunt down Wright, gut him like a bass and ground his innards into pudding or something in order to deal with this scandal as effectively as John Kerry did with the Swiftboaters. I'm telling you, the general election is going to be extremely uplifting.

The Democrats long-running primary campaign is clearly a disaster for the party, and points towards a McCain landslide in the fall, because all the blacks and women will hate each other if their candidate doesn't win, and will therefore vote for an arguably senile 72 year old arch conservative who has turned his back on what principled stances he has had, including those on campaign finance reform, torture, our disastrous war in Iraq, the Bush tax plan and the deficit, and lobbyist reforms. Oh, and they'll blithely look past the fact that he can't quite get his head around the differences between the Shia in Persia and the Sunni in Arabia. More importantly, those one million newly registered Democrats in Pennsylvania, who have now been galvanized by the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama? My guess is that they're all closet Bush fans....

Primary Day

Big day here in the Commonwealth. From this part of the state, it's hard to imagine Obama will get blown out, but this aint Bitterville.

There is a bit of trepidation to the whole affair, though, as it certainly brings us one step closer to the general, when we can look forward to be branded as terrorist loving, soldier hating, homo cheering, baby killing traitors no matter who prevails today.

In the meantime, while we choose between the 'salt of the earth' shot and a beer daughter of Scranton and that effeminate, elitist brown fella, let's take a look at a real man o' the people, the rugged Cowboy from Midland Texas (by way of Andover, Yale and HBS)

David,

I only caught the highlights of the debate last night, thank goodness I have the deeply "serious" David Brooks of the NYT to clue me in on the highlights:

Three quick points on the Democratic debate tonight:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.

Consider that for a moment.

As we slog through the second Bush recession, and contemplate the 4000 soldiers that we've lost in a pointless war in Mesopotamia, as we look upon the millions of displaced Iraqis, the thousands upon thousands who have died at our hands, consider that Brooks feels that questions about lapel pins are not only germane but critical to the decision that we will make about how to extricate ourselves from the hash that the Bush administration has made of our country, our reputation, and our Constitution.

As we swallow hard and accept that fact that we have become an international pariah, a nation that tortures, a nation that has accepted the doctrine of 'preemptive war', a nation that imprisons without the protection of habeas corpus, consider that Brooks feels that the most important issue we can ask our candidates to answer to has to do with the ramblings of their pastor and some inaccurate comments made on the endless campaign trail. 300,000 vets with PTSD, 320,000 vets who've suffered brain injuries, and he wants to talk about lapel pins.

I suppose he's got to say something to keep up with Bill Kristol over at the Times.


By the way, I know that I am not the only one that feels that the "bitter" comment was spot on, and that Reverend Wright made some pretty good points.

The Shame of the Country

They were all there, gathered in the White House, approving the use of torture on uncooperative suspects. These were not decisions made down the chain of command, there were no higher ups asleep at the wheel.

And if senile old McCain chooses Condi as his Veep, keep in mind that it was she, arguably the most incompetent of all of the officials in this tragic administration, who chaired the meetings.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.....

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

"These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it's legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it."

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

No, John, you pathetic bible-humping panty-sniffing theocratic pervert. History doesn't have to judge you, the present is judging you and they have rendered their verdict. Whether it's W's 28% approval rating, or the fact that 85% of the electorate feels that we are on the wrong track, you've been judged as colossal failures. The eyes of the world have been watching, and now they just wait for you and the rest of this administration to crawl off to whence you came, to live out the rest of your closeted self loathing lives.

The Rude Pundit says it better than most.

6 months at a time...

The new MoveOn.org ad is pretty jarring:

Whoa!

Watertiger gets her bitter on regarding St. John McCain:

In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c*nt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day.

Cliff's [ed, Cliff Schechter, who broke the story] point about this McCain explosion (and it's a very valid one) is that it hardly bodes well for American diplomatic relations if the guy very publicly blows his stack at something as minor as his wife teasing him about his hair, not to mention that he might be especially ill-tempered if he gets a phone call at 3:00 a.m.

But my first reaction to this verbal abuse was more visceral: This woman paid for your Senate seat, you ungrateful, lumpen prole. She has been your personal ATM. You ignominiously dumped your wheelchair-bound first wife to marry this sylphlike beer heiress; her daddy hired your sorry ass when you retired from the Navy because you were never going to receive a commission flag rank, Mr. "Keating Five Wheee I Love Flying in Lobbyists' Jets." So, my friend, you'd better be watching what you call her, especially in front of large groups of people with tape recorders.

(I'm hazarding a guess that if Cindy McCain was probably jacked up on her ill-gotten painkillers at the time and didn't even hear him; I can't imagine him walking away with all of his parts intact if she'd been remotely aware.)

Say bye bye to more women voters, John. Who else will you alienate before November?

And the real point is that. McCain gets a pass from the mainstream press, but as the campaign grinds on, we'll see more and more of this behavior. The stories of his temper are legion, and he won't stay bottled up through the long hot summer. Stay tuned, it's going to be fun.

I'm not fearing any man...

Less than 24 hours later, of course, he was gone.

By the way, here's John McCain's MLK background:

McCain has a mixed history regarding the King legacy. In 1992, he supported a referendum creating a state holiday in King’s honor in Arizona, one of the last to do so. But when McCain first came to Congress in 1983, he opposed creating a federal holiday. The House vote was 338-90 and President Reagan signed the bill into law later that year.

McCain said earlier this week that he had not understood the issue. Asked what he later learned, he said, “I learned that this individual was a transcendent figure in American history. He deserved to be honored… I had not really been involved in the issue. I just had not had a lot of experience with the issue.”

He grew testy when asked what he did not understand. He also noted that his adopted state of Arizona does not have a large African-American population, and said the U.S. military, where he had spent his entire adult life before running for Congress, is the “greatest equal opportunity employer in America. It was then and it is today.”

McCain: Senile, or just stupid?

Just keep repeating it over and over: John McCain is either senile or dangerously uninformed about Iraq.

Wrong


Wrong


Wrong

He admits he doesn't understand the economy. He proves he doesn't understand foreign policy. Those seem like fairly large handicaps.

UPDATE: He's no better on healthcare.

Mike Mukasey tows the line.

I hate to keep picking on Mike Mukasey, but he really has proven himself to be just about as loathsome as Gonzales, maybe more so, considering the fact that he was generally accepted as being somewhat competent when he was appointed AG, as opposed to Gonzo, who was clearly never more than a bootlicking toady of Bush, dating back to his Texas days. Mukasey's tearful performance in San Francisco last week, in which he decried any attempt to curtail the administration's ability to eavesdrop without legal warrant, and insisted that the telecommunication companies who broke the law by acceding to the administrations illegality should be protected at all costs was nothing more than a pack of brazen lies. But the lies were obscured by Mukasey's use of the 9/11 card, which trumps all facts and reason and launches the player of the card into the stratospheric level of sympathetic martyrdom.

The WSJ wasted no time in breathlessly praising Mukasey's speech, calling him an Attorney General "worthy of the current moment":

He also offered a perspective, partly personal as a former Mahattanite, on the necessity of warrantless antiterror surveillance. Before 9/11, Mr. Mukasey said, "We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. We've got" -- here he paused with emotion -- "we've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

The AG also addressed why immunity from lawsuits is vital for the telecom companies that cooperated with the surveillance after 9/11. "Forget the liability" the phone companies face, Mr. Mukasey said. "We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Al Qaeda would love that. The cynics will call this "fear-mongering," but most Americans will want to make sure we don't miss the next terror call.

Except, that as Glen Greenwald points out, any third grader who has been paying attention just a little bit can call bullshit on Mukasey's entire premise. The FISA laws, as they existed on the books since 1978 provide the administration the ability and the right to eavesdrop on any call coming into the states from outside the country, and further the existing emergency measures within the 1978 FISA bill grant a 72 hour grace period that allows for warrantless wiretapping until a warrant can be secured. Which brings up the more problematic issue with Mukasey's statement, to wit: if they identified a call from a safehouse in Afghanistan, why didn't they wiretap it, in accordance to the laws as they have existed since 1978?

Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.

But either way, Mukasey really wants to make the point that the telecoms must be protected at all costs, or "We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Except....not really. As Greenwald explains:

Mike Mukasey was a long-time federal judge and so I feel perfectly comfortable calling that what it is: a brazen lie. Federal courts hear classified information with great regularity and it is not heard in "open court." There are numerous options available to any federal judge to hear classified information -- closed courtrooms, in camera review (in chambers only), ex parte communications (communications between one party and the judge only). No federal judge -- and certainly not Vaughn Walker, the Bush 41 appointee presiding over the telecom cases -- is going to allow "disclosure in open court of . . . . the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence." And Mukasey knows that.

So, to recap, Mike Mukasey seems to be an Attorney General 'worthy of the current moment' because of his willingness to blatantly lie and shamelessly exploit 9/11 in defense of the Bush administration's gross incompetence and willful disdain for the laws and the principles upon which the country was founded.

UPDATE: Uh Oh....Keith Olberman picks up on this story, and Rachel Maddow agrees that if Mukasey isn't lying, his ass ought to be sworn in to explain what in the world he is talking about...stay tuned.