Thursday, December 08, 2005
Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies...
Righties are frothing with rage over Dean’s latest comments. If you are a thinking person this should be a good indicator that he’s saying something penetratingly truthful.
He’s said the War in Iraq is not winnable. We should withdraw and support the Iraqi government as they handle the problem.
I suppose there was a significant minority of people who were saying the Vietnam War was winnable. They still say that. That we should have stayed for generations if need be. 550 billion Y2005 dollars more could have been spent. Fifty thousand more dead soldiers. Two million more dead Vietnamese civilians.
I’m distantly curious as to where the squealing point is for these warmongers. How much blood and treasure is too much to spend for a third-world country?
There is a feeling that if we leave now the country will collapse into anarchy. There will be civil war. Iran will intervene. Bad, bad things will happen.
Eighty percent of Iraqis polled say they want the U.S. out now. Forty-five percent think it’s OK to shoot American soldiers. We’ve been there two years and the battle for their hearts and minds has been lost.
Can you blame them? The only peer-reviewed study on the subject, done by the prestigious British journal of medicine The Lancet revealed that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war, mostly at the hands of U.S. bombardment. Cluster bombs bouncing in through people’s windows. The U.S. military laying bloody siege to cities like Falluja, cutting off water supplies to starve the populace and shelling hospitals that might be treating insurgents, in violation of Geneva Conventions. Commanders have admitted using napalm in a few instances, though the substance they use isn’t chemically identical to napalm, so they maintain that it isn’t illegal to use. Commanders have admitted that in Falluja they used white phosphorous rounds to soften enemy positions. White phosphorous is usually used in artillery shells to create light over a position. If it is fired into an enemy position it has other effects. White phosphorus burns on contact with air and adheres to wet or moist surfaces: any soldiers in those positions would have had their eyes and mucous membranes burned out of their skulls. The unlucky survivors would have had permanently painful and crippling burns the likes of which they could never recover from.
Most civilized nations agreed to forgo the use of chemical weapons after World War One. But our nation has a history of weaseling out of troublesome treaties when our government thinks it has a straighter and clearer vision of justice than the rest of the world. See the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty, and the Geneva Conventions for the most recent examples.
There are options on the table, as there always have been. Get UN peacekeepers into Iraq. Get NATO forces into Iraq. Withdraw bases to unpopulated areas. Withdraw bases to Kuwait. Set a timetable. Set goals and metrics for success that, once met, would lead to progressive troop pullouts.
The administration has repeatedly dismissed these options. They insist on a blank check from Congress and an unlimited time frame. They refuse to set goals, metrics for success, or other public measures of success. They refuse to communicate with the American public in concrete terms about how close the war is to ending. As Rumsfeld said, it might be five years, it might be twelve years. It might be right before November elections next year.
This arrogance is not surprising. This administration invaded on false pretenses and then proceeded to bungle the war, admitting that progress was not going as well as planned. Now they refuse to provide their constituents with a measure of how far we have come.
Unforgivable. Impeachable. And the Republican-controlled Congress has dragged its feet on investigating even the most glaringly obvious “failures” of intelligence.
First the administration said there were WMDs in Iraq. Then they claimed to have found them. Then they admitted they weren’t there and blamed the CIA. Then the President gave the outgoing CIA Director the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Curious, is it not?
There is ample evidence the administration doctored the information. The PNAC letter. The Downing Street Memo. The testimony of dozens of current and former CIA officials in the Guardian, The Progressive, the L.A. Times, and other publications. The insistence of administration officials in using information after the CIA, the State Department, and the Department of Energy told them the information was bad.
In response to damaging allegations the administration alternately accused the accusers of treason or lied their asses off. First they maintained they found the WMDs. Then they gave wildly differing accounts of the number of battle-ready Iraqi divisions. Cheney said the insurgency was in its “last throes.” Rumsfeld said it might go on for a decade. First they denied accounts of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Then the Taguba Report came out. First they said they weren’t torturing anyone. And then the news about secret CIA prisons, extraordinary renditions, and more horror stories from former prisoners backed up by witnesses and expert testimony.
The documented abuse was just “a few bad apples.” Then the story about the government using doctors to aid in interrogation techniques, a la Dr. Mengele. The Justice Department’s efforts to restrict the definition of “torture.” The allegations of the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N., all who said they encountered many instances of abuse and torture and they were restricted from accessing much of the prisons. Amnesty International calling the U.S. extrajudicial jail system across Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base the “Gulag of our times.”
Proponents of “The War on Terror” might dismiss this, saying that war is messy and torture is frequently justified. This position is immoral and illegal, but sadly common in America.
What strikes to the core of this issue, however, is the administration’s deception regarding the reasons for going to war, all of which have been debunked by me and other news outlets. Plamegate. The aluminum tubes. Yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Traveling vans as chemical weapons platforms. Al-Qaeda links.
All lies. Every single piece of evidence they produced as justification for an invasion was wrong. Not just one. Every single one. Every single one of them vociferously repeated by the administration long after their own coerced experts told them it was wrong.
Many lies the public was too ignorant of or too unconcerned with to hold the administration accountable for. The Clear Skies initiative. The Healthy Forests initiative. The $1600 tax break for the “average” family. The surplus projections. Slightly increasing veteran’s benefits, but not increasing them in proportion to the amount of new veterans using them, then claiming they had massively increased veteran’s benefits. Initiatives to cut welfare money while passing massive tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy in a time of war. Gale Norton as Interior Secretary. Ann Veneman as Secretary of Agriculture. Stuffing every department of the Executive Branch with former lobbyists who advocated for companies that were now their responsibility to “monitor.” Denying any connections with Enron. Brown in charge of FEMA. The Terry Schiavo Bill. Appointing partisans to the Federal Appellate Court, then accusing Democrats of obstructionism and complaining that a record 96% confirmation rating was not enough. Billions of dollars of no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Endless efforts to undermine and destroy the SEC and the FDA. Endless handouts to corporations. Endless slight-of-hand with budgetary numbers. Endless, concrete promises to fund a 500 million dollar program to prevent mother-to-child AIDs transmission, No Child Left Behind, the DOE’s renewable energy programs, and a hundred other programs never enacted.
Every Administration official, from the deliberately deceptive Labor Secretary (Elaine Chao, the anti-labor former board member of Clorox and Dole Foods) to the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, is criminally corrupt. But most people slept through the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Why should they pay attention now?
War, that’s why. This they cannot hide, or blame on Democrats. As the trial of Scooter Libby proceeds, as Fitzgerald and another grand jury continue to investigate, as more and more information comes out about the lies of the administration before the war, this will get worse for them.
The Abramoff/Scanlon Scandal isn’t going to help. Abramoff took 82 million dollars from Indian Tribes and used that money to line his pockets and the pockets of between twenty and sixty politicians, 98% of whom are Republican Congressmen, Senators, and aides. Bob Ney (R-OH) apparently advocated for Abramoff’s clients (the Tigua Indians) for the tidy sum of $30,000. Ralph Reed (former director of the Christian Coalition) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) is also involved. Abramoff convinced his clients to pony up 185,000 clams so he and DeLay could get their own little performance by the three tenors. From this source:
In the first ten months that President George W. Bush was in office, "GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws," the Associated Press reported (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm) May 6, 2005
'I hope you will keep my office informed on the progress of this initiative,' Bush wrote in a July 18, 1997, letter praising the islands' school plan and copying in an Abramoff deputy," the AP reported.
"At least two people who worked on Abramoff's team at Preston Gates wound up with Bush administration jobs: Patrick Pizzella, named an assistant secretary of labor by Bush; and David Safavian, chosen by Bush to oversee federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget," the AP wrote.
You might remember Safavian as the Bush Administration official who was arrested recently.
Abramoff is not alone. Since 2000 the number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled. This makes the House Banking Scandal look like a joke.
Abramoff hasn’t even started to squeal yet. His court date is four weeks away. But the damning testimony is coming very, very soon.
He’s said the War in Iraq is not winnable. We should withdraw and support the Iraqi government as they handle the problem.
I suppose there was a significant minority of people who were saying the Vietnam War was winnable. They still say that. That we should have stayed for generations if need be. 550 billion Y2005 dollars more could have been spent. Fifty thousand more dead soldiers. Two million more dead Vietnamese civilians.
I’m distantly curious as to where the squealing point is for these warmongers. How much blood and treasure is too much to spend for a third-world country?
There is a feeling that if we leave now the country will collapse into anarchy. There will be civil war. Iran will intervene. Bad, bad things will happen.
Eighty percent of Iraqis polled say they want the U.S. out now. Forty-five percent think it’s OK to shoot American soldiers. We’ve been there two years and the battle for their hearts and minds has been lost.
Can you blame them? The only peer-reviewed study on the subject, done by the prestigious British journal of medicine The Lancet revealed that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war, mostly at the hands of U.S. bombardment. Cluster bombs bouncing in through people’s windows. The U.S. military laying bloody siege to cities like Falluja, cutting off water supplies to starve the populace and shelling hospitals that might be treating insurgents, in violation of Geneva Conventions. Commanders have admitted using napalm in a few instances, though the substance they use isn’t chemically identical to napalm, so they maintain that it isn’t illegal to use. Commanders have admitted that in Falluja they used white phosphorous rounds to soften enemy positions. White phosphorous is usually used in artillery shells to create light over a position. If it is fired into an enemy position it has other effects. White phosphorus burns on contact with air and adheres to wet or moist surfaces: any soldiers in those positions would have had their eyes and mucous membranes burned out of their skulls. The unlucky survivors would have had permanently painful and crippling burns the likes of which they could never recover from.
Most civilized nations agreed to forgo the use of chemical weapons after World War One. But our nation has a history of weaseling out of troublesome treaties when our government thinks it has a straighter and clearer vision of justice than the rest of the world. See the Kyoto Protocol, the ABM Treaty, and the Geneva Conventions for the most recent examples.
There are options on the table, as there always have been. Get UN peacekeepers into Iraq. Get NATO forces into Iraq. Withdraw bases to unpopulated areas. Withdraw bases to Kuwait. Set a timetable. Set goals and metrics for success that, once met, would lead to progressive troop pullouts.
The administration has repeatedly dismissed these options. They insist on a blank check from Congress and an unlimited time frame. They refuse to set goals, metrics for success, or other public measures of success. They refuse to communicate with the American public in concrete terms about how close the war is to ending. As Rumsfeld said, it might be five years, it might be twelve years. It might be right before November elections next year.
This arrogance is not surprising. This administration invaded on false pretenses and then proceeded to bungle the war, admitting that progress was not going as well as planned. Now they refuse to provide their constituents with a measure of how far we have come.
Unforgivable. Impeachable. And the Republican-controlled Congress has dragged its feet on investigating even the most glaringly obvious “failures” of intelligence.
First the administration said there were WMDs in Iraq. Then they claimed to have found them. Then they admitted they weren’t there and blamed the CIA. Then the President gave the outgoing CIA Director the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Curious, is it not?
There is ample evidence the administration doctored the information. The PNAC letter. The Downing Street Memo. The testimony of dozens of current and former CIA officials in the Guardian, The Progressive, the L.A. Times, and other publications. The insistence of administration officials in using information after the CIA, the State Department, and the Department of Energy told them the information was bad.
In response to damaging allegations the administration alternately accused the accusers of treason or lied their asses off. First they maintained they found the WMDs. Then they gave wildly differing accounts of the number of battle-ready Iraqi divisions. Cheney said the insurgency was in its “last throes.” Rumsfeld said it might go on for a decade. First they denied accounts of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Then the Taguba Report came out. First they said they weren’t torturing anyone. And then the news about secret CIA prisons, extraordinary renditions, and more horror stories from former prisoners backed up by witnesses and expert testimony.
The documented abuse was just “a few bad apples.” Then the story about the government using doctors to aid in interrogation techniques, a la Dr. Mengele. The Justice Department’s efforts to restrict the definition of “torture.” The allegations of the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N., all who said they encountered many instances of abuse and torture and they were restricted from accessing much of the prisons. Amnesty International calling the U.S. extrajudicial jail system across Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base the “Gulag of our times.”
Proponents of “The War on Terror” might dismiss this, saying that war is messy and torture is frequently justified. This position is immoral and illegal, but sadly common in America.
What strikes to the core of this issue, however, is the administration’s deception regarding the reasons for going to war, all of which have been debunked by me and other news outlets. Plamegate. The aluminum tubes. Yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Traveling vans as chemical weapons platforms. Al-Qaeda links.
All lies. Every single piece of evidence they produced as justification for an invasion was wrong. Not just one. Every single one. Every single one of them vociferously repeated by the administration long after their own coerced experts told them it was wrong.
Many lies the public was too ignorant of or too unconcerned with to hold the administration accountable for. The Clear Skies initiative. The Healthy Forests initiative. The $1600 tax break for the “average” family. The surplus projections. Slightly increasing veteran’s benefits, but not increasing them in proportion to the amount of new veterans using them, then claiming they had massively increased veteran’s benefits. Initiatives to cut welfare money while passing massive tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy in a time of war. Gale Norton as Interior Secretary. Ann Veneman as Secretary of Agriculture. Stuffing every department of the Executive Branch with former lobbyists who advocated for companies that were now their responsibility to “monitor.” Denying any connections with Enron. Brown in charge of FEMA. The Terry Schiavo Bill. Appointing partisans to the Federal Appellate Court, then accusing Democrats of obstructionism and complaining that a record 96% confirmation rating was not enough. Billions of dollars of no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Endless efforts to undermine and destroy the SEC and the FDA. Endless handouts to corporations. Endless slight-of-hand with budgetary numbers. Endless, concrete promises to fund a 500 million dollar program to prevent mother-to-child AIDs transmission, No Child Left Behind, the DOE’s renewable energy programs, and a hundred other programs never enacted.
Every Administration official, from the deliberately deceptive Labor Secretary (Elaine Chao, the anti-labor former board member of Clorox and Dole Foods) to the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, is criminally corrupt. But most people slept through the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Why should they pay attention now?
War, that’s why. This they cannot hide, or blame on Democrats. As the trial of Scooter Libby proceeds, as Fitzgerald and another grand jury continue to investigate, as more and more information comes out about the lies of the administration before the war, this will get worse for them.
The Abramoff/Scanlon Scandal isn’t going to help. Abramoff took 82 million dollars from Indian Tribes and used that money to line his pockets and the pockets of between twenty and sixty politicians, 98% of whom are Republican Congressmen, Senators, and aides. Bob Ney (R-OH) apparently advocated for Abramoff’s clients (the Tigua Indians) for the tidy sum of $30,000. Ralph Reed (former director of the Christian Coalition) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) is also involved. Abramoff convinced his clients to pony up 185,000 clams so he and DeLay could get their own little performance by the three tenors. From this source:
In the first ten months that President George W. Bush was in office, "GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration as they pressed for friendly hires at federal agencies and sought to keep the Northern Mariana Islands exempt from the minimum wage and other laws," the Associated Press reported (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm) May 6, 2005
'I hope you will keep my office informed on the progress of this initiative,' Bush wrote in a July 18, 1997, letter praising the islands' school plan and copying in an Abramoff deputy," the AP reported.
"At least two people who worked on Abramoff's team at Preston Gates wound up with Bush administration jobs: Patrick Pizzella, named an assistant secretary of labor by Bush; and David Safavian, chosen by Bush to oversee federal procurement policy in the Office of Management and Budget," the AP wrote.
You might remember Safavian as the Bush Administration official who was arrested recently.
Abramoff is not alone. Since 2000 the number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled. This makes the House Banking Scandal look like a joke.
Abramoff hasn’t even started to squeal yet. His court date is four weeks away. But the damning testimony is coming very, very soon.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:43 PM 
