Outside the Spectrum

      Yet another story in the New York Times about the massive shortfalls in reconstruction and the continuosly bad security situation. Maybe the reason no good news is being reported out of Iraq is that there is none.

   I won’t evaluate the incessant wiretap spin coming out of the White House. I’ve already gone over the arguments.

   The Bushies have repeatedly said they will continue the wiretapping, which amuses me. What else can they say? Stopping it now would not make the scandal any better for them, and it would look like they were guilty. They have to go on. This is the defense of a rabbit caught in the view of a fox: freeze, don’t move, and pray you aren’t ripped to shreds. Running will only guarantee your dismemberment.

   Or maybe they actually think what they’re doing is legal, though I’m not particularly concerned with what the Torture Administration thinks is legal. They can count on Victoria Toensing to shamble out of her legal grave and mount a defense, but they will find little support elsewhere.

   I don’t like to speculate about a highly uncertain future, but what justice will there be with republicans like Roberts chairing the committees that will evaluate these activities? This is the guy who voted against the McCain anti-torture amendment, for God’s sake. This is the guy who doubted Valeria Plame was undercover.

   We’ll see if the Republicans get their electoral teeth kicked in come November, but in any case justice will be long in coming. Where is Phase II of the intelligence investigation, again?

   A small bright spot will be the upcoming State of the Union Address. Tom Oliphant yesterday mentioned that this has been the worst fifth year for a president in modern history. From Katrina to Plamegate to Iraq to wiretapping to failed social security reform, this is as bad as it gets. While I am used to Preznit Twitchy filling valuable minutes of my life with lies and whitewashings, this SOTU is going to be a truly epic exercise in evasiveness and forward-looking programs, because if he takes one second to look back at the feculent ocean of his political legacy it will swallow him whole.

   While one half of congress sits sullenly through his address, I expect the other half to applaud loud and long. While Bush’s Job Approval Rating has been hovering at or below 50% for nearly two years now, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll conducted last week his approval rating is at 83% among Republicans, compared to 14% for democrats and 34% for independents.

   Can you say “disconnect?” What planet are you living on, Repubs? While democrats register an approval rating 20 points below the independents, Repubs register an approval rating nearly 50 points higher.

   Never before have conservatives been so partisan, to the detriment of our nation and the world. Only when they are voted out of office will responsible government be restored to Washington.

   So forget about the moderate reprobaticans doing anything. Arlen Specter, the “pro-choice” conservative, forgot about the “pro-choice” part and voted for Alito. Voinivich, though he called John Bolton “the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be...” swallowed his conscience and abstained from voting against Bolton. John McCain, sunk in South Carolina by Rovian dirty tricks, turned right around and campaigned with Dubya in the following years. In the words of Driftglass: “Man! Bush-dick must taste like Belgian Chocolate! So yummy, that you just can’t get it out of your mouth!”

   You can always count on spineless conservatives to heel when their party machine jerks the leash. These invertebrates have less integrity and self-esteem than beat-down crack whores. They have the same chance of reforming as Tom DeLay has of suddenly waking up tomorrow morning with a conscience. They have failed at every single opportunity over the past four years to take a stand against the ugliest junta that has ever controlled their party. Bush dallied for days to address the Katrina disaster. But when James Dobson pulls the strings you can bet your ass Bush jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and flew to Washington in his underwear to sign the Terri Schiavo Bill within 24 hours.

   I remember, with the hazy uncertainty of the dim past, the days when an approval rating below 50% was considered very bad territory. This administration is happily making a career out of living in this wasteland. The bad news for them is, like massive overspending financed by Chinese loans, it can’t last forever. The halcyon days of unlimited cash and blatant lies have consequences, and with the Plame/wiretapping/Abramoff scandals still unfolding, this administration is barreling towards the edge of a cliff they will never be able to come back from.

  

   So Hamas just won 76 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Parliamentary elections, a landslide victory for the most radical Palestinian power bloc in the Middle East.

   The right is going to go berserk over this. They focus inordinately on terrorists in the Middle East as it is. Israel is horrified.

   Bwahahahahaha!

   The entire world is dismayed: “Leaders around the world were shocked by Hamas' victory, with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi reportedly calling it a "very, very, very bad result,’” according to AOL News.

   Sounds like the world reaction when W got reelected, don’t it? Funny how fucked up democracies can get when the electorate are a mob of gap-toothed inbreds.
     
   But just parse the reactions from the “good guys” here. “Labor Party politician Ami Ayalon said Israel might have to change the route of its West Bank security barrier to take Hamas' victory into account.” In other words, their illegal barrier might have to be altered to gobble up more Palestinian land to punish the peasants for electing a radical government. Yet another quid-pro-quo response from Israel. The Jews, if they could, would seize more West Bank territory as retribution for negative press coverage in Palestinian towns. This follows from the Israeli logic that if your citizens are massacred by a suicide bomber its OK to penalize the relatives of the bomber by bulldozing their home or detaining them as terror suspects indefinitely. The Israelis have made a science out of making a profit from being a “victim”: they have a unique way of taking more and more as restitution for their losses even when they have to seize property and arrest people that only happen to be tangentially related their abusers, who are long dead.

   I am endlessly amused at the Israelis, who, after forty years of sitting on Palestinian land after they started and then won the 1967 War, are in violation of more U.N. Resolutions than any other nation in the world, after having assassinated, pillaged, policed, beaten, and humiliated the Palestinians for generations, are suddenly shocked, shocked, that Hamas won a majority.

   I tire of their act. Je suis no longer amused. I have already written about my low opinion of this posturing, and my opinion hasn’t changed in the last week.

   World leaders called on Hamas to repudiate violence, something Hamas is not rushing to do, which endlessly amuses me also. Not that I endorse terror or violence: I just like Israel thinking it might happen.

   For God’s sake let’s drop the act. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO PALESTINE ELECTS. Israel is in control of the situation, as they have been for sixty years. If Palestine elects a militant leadership, Israel will simply take more of their land and use collective punishment to make Palestinians’ lives Hell. If Palestine elects a moderate government Israel will simply sit on their West Bank settlements that are most defensible and continue to construct a wall through Palestinian territory for their own “defense” (read: new border), brutally policing Palestinian towns and stalling the peace process until the Palestinian authority has somehow stopped all anti-Israeli violence in their feces-smeared reservation.

   Which will never happen. Palestine has a population comparable to Sweet Home Chicago, which has six hundred homicides a year. If you turned Chicago into an execrable Indian reservation and put a bunch of brutal, foreign police in charge of maintaining law and order, say, some imaginary nationality that had been at war with Chicagoans for a century, what’s the chance that anti- imaginary nationality violence would ever approach zero homicides a year?

   I FEEL LIKE I AM LIVING IN A DREAMWORLD. Hey! HEY! NEOCONS! You want to put “teeth” into U.N. sanctions? How about invading Israel? They have thumbed their nose at the Security Council for sixty years.

   Where is your concern for justice and international law now? WHERE IS YOUR CONCERN FOR JUSTICE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW NOW?

   Nowhere. Our lawless governors wouldn’t know Justice if it was introduced to them by Jack Abramoff at a GOP fundraiser. They are an insult to justice. And every one of the verminous, raunchy hookers that service them at the National Review or Wall Street Journal are an insult to justice as well. Enjoying those tax cuts, conservatives? How’s everything going in THE HOOK SHOP OF MAMMON?

   I tire of arguing with these drooling, twitching lobotomy subjects. They’re like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter: every time you debunk them and point out their gross, factual lies on national TV they just come back a week later with a different lie. HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU HAVE TO BE HUMILIATED BEFORE YOU REALIZE YOU ARE AN ABOMINABLE INTELLECTUAL WHORE?

   Let me make this more clear, so there isn’t any, say, ambiguity.

YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION.

   Yes, you, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh fans. That goes for you Michael “Savage” Weiner fans, and movement conservatives, and brainless, dickless moderate conservatives too. I hope you get drafted to fight and die in the war you dream of and jerk off to at night, you chickenshit porcine wannabes. Maybe you won’t be so flippant about the necessity and costs of war when your ass cashes the checks your mouth writes.

   Where is the courage of your convictions? If you want the war, then go fight it, Yellow Elephants. How about starting by paying for it without the use of a Chinese loan? Your hallowed tax cuts might have to wait.

   I listened to the Illinois Republican Gubernatorial Debate last night. Talk about tax cuts. Jebus Mary Joseph! That’s the only thing they talked about last night.

   Tell me, Reprobaticans, how do you form a coherent political philosophy around one fucking idea. How do tax cuts solve anything, much less everything? Do you have any fucking idea about how to run a country besides “don’t take my money” and “fuck the poor”? What is the use to a healthy society of moral parasites like yourself?

   YOU HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER. YOU ARE A DISEASE ON THE FACE OF AMERICA THAT MUST BE EXCISED.

I smell blood in the water.
  
   I actually consider myself to be living in pretty special times. I’m living in the tenure of the worst president in history. I can tell my grandkids about this someday.

   Yesterday The New York Times ran a story about the disaster Iraqi reconstruction has become. The Chicago Tribune ran two.

   The Bush Administration is stonewalling investigations in the Katrina disaster and spinning like a dog on crack chasing its own tail regarding the wiretapping scandal.

   And this just in: George H.W. Bush has spent a full year below the 50% approval mark, even with a good economy.

   Although I hated this president from the moment I found out that he lied about Iraq, it never ceases to amaze me how everything he touches comes to ruin. I always knew he was a dry-drunk son of privilege with poor reasoning skills and bottomless greed, but I usually figured his administration could clean up the messes he made.

   I was wrong.

   Drinky is like Jimmy Carter without the goodwill, or Nixon without the intelligence, or Reagan without the charisma. He is an ongoing disaster of a president with an administration that shares his faults, sent back to the White House by a ravening horde of hate-filled gun fetishists, inbred secessionists, and fuck-everybody-but-me fiscal conservatives. The truly sad thing to me is not what a bad presidency this is, but who in God’s name ever voted for this stuttering dimwit in the first place.

   Drinky’s legacy is going to hang like an albatross around the neck of modern conservativism for years, and the smarter ones in Washington are beginning to figure this out. To the rest, I can only say this: enjoy the ride down, you gluttonous jackasses. I hope your tax cut was worth it.

Some abortion commentary here from the righty blogs:
“Abortion rights have been slowly whittled away while we haven’t even been looking,” said Kitty Striker, 22, who decorated her hair with small coat hanger replicas for the protest. “That’s what’s so shocking and so scary to me.”
Here’s a hint for you, slut: Keep your fucking knees together or use a reliable means of contraception. You won’t die from not fucking that sleazy piece of shit you picked up at the bar last night, you know.

And some more, an annotation of the Koran:

[1.1] All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
Whose prophet is a kiddy-diddling pedophile (having a fetish for shaven genitals is one thing. Boinking 9-year-olds to save a few dinars on shaving supplies is another thing altogether) buggerer of goats that even his own family didn’t want to associate with.
[1.2] The Beneficent, the Merciful.
Just ask Daniel Pearl.
[1.3] Master of the Day of Judgment.
He’ll be there, alright, but since we’ve read the book, we hardly think that “master” is the appropriate title here.
[1.4] Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech for help.
And thou shalt keep beseeching, but of help thou shalt have none. Of Hellfire missiles, on the other hand, thou shalt have plenty.
[1.5] Keep us on the right path.
We seem to have a clear case of “dereliction of duty” here.
[1.6] The path of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed favors. Not (the path) of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor of those who go astray.
“Fuck all those apostate infidels whose heads we shall saw off amidst much merriment. In thy mercy and beneficence.”

   This is from the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, which just goes to show you that only “idiotarians” are against bigotry and misogyny.

   I could have quoted from Cold Fury or another “conservative” blog, as the language is similar. Corporate plutocrats may be able to mine blind hatred for votes from these Neanderthals but that doesn’t make them right, even when they win elections. Take a good, long look, people: this is Karl Rove’s audience.

   But while their base flies the confederate flag over its state capitals and spouts warmongering jingoism and islamophobia, the leaders of modern conservatism are aghast at Hillary Clinton saying the House is run like a plantation, or Dick Durbin saying that Guantanamo Bay conditions are sometimes comparable to Soviet gulags. They are simply shocked at the questioning Judge Alito had to endure at the hands of “partisan” democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

   This faux outrage is typical posturing from cynical politicians but real outrage in their delusional base. It never ceases to amaze me how these people’s thinking process is a sad appendage to their feeling values: America is always right, democrats are deceitful flip-floppers and cowards, etc. They slander John Kerry’s service record but give Bush’s flight to the National Guard and subsequent mysterious departure a complete pass. They dig up small inconsistencies in Kerry’s position but ignore far greater one’s in Bush’s record. They lampoon democratic senators and ignore the corruption in their own party.

   This is not a tu quoque argument to defend John Kerry’s record, but when election time comes and you are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils who in their right mind could say that person was George Bush in 2000 and 2004?

   When it comes to people living in backwoods Georgia I can simply write them off as people who get too much of their news from FOX News. But bloggers have access to the Information Superhighway. How could they willfully ignore the truth when it is literally at their fingertips?

   My only answer is that these people’s curiosity is carefully bounded by their desire to only find information that confirms their already-existing beliefs. They exist, as one famous philosopher said, “in the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”

   I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the votes of people who exist in a hermetically-sealed bubble with stacks of canned food and ammunition to rule our democracy. If they want to play in their faerie land, fine, but we shouldn’t be getting their advice on how to run the world outside of a room-sized plastic container or a militia bunker.

   To aid the republic I have compiled a DSM-IV-like list of signs that people with this disorder share. If you evince one or more of these signs please do not vote or speak publicly about politics.

Top Ten Signs You Might Be A Conservative

10. You subscribe to The Weekly Standard and consider it a good source of information.
9. Because you read Richard Miniter’s Disinformation you consider the Lancet’s estimate of Iraqi civilians casualties in the recent war to be “debunked.”
8. You listen to Hannity/Limbaugh/FOX News as an alternative to mainstream media’s “Liberal bias.”
7. You hate Michael Moore but have never fact-checked his arguments.
6. You fly a confederate flag but consider yourself a patriot.
5. You think it’s clever to dig up crazy passages from the Koran as proof that Islam is an evil religion but consider the Bible to be free of factual errors, contradictions, and divinely-blessed violence.
4. You hold a reverence for the military beyond the bounds of ordinary respect and well into the realm of fetishism.
3. You think that capitalism is the answer to all things.
2. You hate liberalism as socialism but enjoy a 40-hour workweek, paid vacations, and the protections of the FDA.
1. You have an inherent belief that this is the Greatest Nation on God’s Green Earth but have no knowledge of its history or the history of any other nation that happens to share God’s Green Earth with you.

   According to nervous-sounding pundits in the media, Osama bin Laden’s latest transmission is a sign of weakness.

   Not that they would know. No one knows where he is, if he’s injured, or what Al Qaeda is planning. But they’re just positive that he’s desperate.

   This latest communiqué was also a golden opportunity for the brilliant commentators on the right to smear lefties with guilt-by-association tactics. Scarborough and guest said that Osama’s words look at lot like those of the critics of the administration. Chris Matthews compared Osama’s message to Michael Moore.

   Nice, guys.

   John Kerry hit back, saying essentially what I said yesterday: maybe if we had concentrated on Afghanistan instead of Iraq we wouldn’t need to be wildly guessing what Osama’s latest communications meant. Maybe we wouldn’t have let him slip through our fingers.

   That’s the real message to be gained from this communication. Bin Laden is still alive, and still planning attacks on American soil. Sadly enough, bin Laden has never before failed to keep his word on these matters.

   Michael Medved asked a caller on his radio show what concrete affect Bush’s failures have on the lives of everyday Americans. Besides inflating the debt that will eat up our tax dollars for years to come, besides mercury in the environment that threatens the livelihood of millions, besides cutting funding to countless programs for the poor and shifting the tax burden more squarely on the middle and lower class.

   How about this one: Bush’s failed war on terror has actually increased the numbers of terrorist attacks on Earth and it has failed to capture our #1 enemy, meaning that we all still must live in fear of the next attack.

   Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is still stonewalling releasing information regarding its ties to Jack Abramoff. Is anyone surprised? Honestly. Is anyone out there just shocked at this revelation?

   We already know Abramoff met scores of times with administration officials. Abramoff was a pioneer for the Bush election campaign. According to the Washington Post, “After the 2000 election, Abramoff was named to the Bush transition team for the Interior Department, which regulates the Indian casinos that paid Abramoff his inflated fees.”

   This scandal stinks like week-old garbage and Bush is in it up to his neck.

  
  

  

   Bad news for GOP apologists all around, today.

   Bob Herbert writes a short but scathing op-ed in the NYT today grilling the administration over warrantless wiretapping. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, in another op-ed, write “The two of us have been immersed in Washington politics for more than 36 years. We have never seen the culture so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional.” A recently released report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush Administration’s limited briefings for Congress on the NSA wiretapping program are “inconsistent with the law.” This adds to their earlier report saying that the program itself was probably illegal. Last week the official Vatican newspaper published an article saying that intelligent design is not science and should not be taught as such. Human Rights Watch, a valued source for earlier administrations in castigating the human rights abuses of other countries, asserted yesterday that the Bush administration had undertaken a concerted policy of abusing detainees, “a deliberate policy choice.”

   Wow. If the news gets any worse for Dubya and the republican-controlled congress they’ll have to flee Washington to the hills of West Virginia to wage a guerilla resistance against leftist rebels.

   None of these facts, however, slow the march of the partisan suicide brigades in the rightist media into the guns of reality. I still have access to only one progressive news source on my radio dial, compared with three conservative ones. You can bet that the conservatives are still waging an all-out war against the rising tide of anger in this country and around the world against the policies of the Bush Administration and the republican congress. As I wrote yesterday, their ideological inflexibility will only worsen the hammer blow when it falls. I hope Laura Ingraham is prepared to be satisfied with a discredited career in broadcast media, with the heckling that will come five years from now (“Remember Laura Ingraham, the talk show host that defended warrantless wiretapping? I hear she’s still syndicated in Montana…”).

   Osama bin Laden released a tape today threatening further terrorist attacks if the U.S. continues its present course but offering a truce is the U.S. pulls out of the Middle East (and probably, also, stops funding Israel). In other words, more of the same.

   Over four years after the Preznit said he wanted Osama “dead or alive” this guy is still rattling his scimitar. By all accounts he is nowhere in or around Iraq, the sinkhole into which the bulk of our mobile forces has been thrown. Has it ever occurred to anyone in the Pentagon that if we had 120,000 troops in Afghanistan instead of Iraq we might have caught this guy by now?

   Oh, but I forgot. In March of 2002, the Preznit underwent a change of heart. “I truly am not that concerned about him,” he said. Osama is on the run, he’s hiding under a rock somewhere, whatever. On to Iraq.

   In the words of Noam Chomsky, “there is no war on terror.” Osama is wandering around loose somewhere and the president is “not that concerned.” Worldwide terrorist attacks have increased dramatically since Bush took office. U.S. casualties have skyrocketed. “Mission Accomplished,” Mr. President!

   Bravely charging the dragon in his lair, one caller said to Michael Medved that maybe we should pull out of the Middle East to solve this problem. Medved was not pleased. He rampaged (“your argument is idiotic, sir”) all over history, claiming that Jimmy Carter did nothing when Iranians seized U.S. hostages, apparently unaware of the rescue attempt by special forces that Carter initiated. “We could have destroyed one of their cities,” Medved argued, revealing a subtle touch to foreign policy analysis he is never given credit for. Killing tens of thousands of Iranian civilians as retaliation for 300 angry students taking 66 American hostages is the kind of incisive policy solutions Medved offers on a daily basis.

   Reality is slowly catching up to the conservatives in this country, like a tiger stalking a dazed tourist with a bleeding head wound in the Bangladeshi jungle. Stumbling and thrashing about will only hasten their inevitable end.

   The world hates him. His popularity is hovering around 40%. But still the conservatives thrash and wail that he has done nothing wrong, that the rest of the world is wrong, that everything’s OK.

   There are voices of unrest all across the country. A majority of people want to impeach Bush if he wiretapped people without a judge’s oversight, not to mention the people who want him impeached over the lies that led to the war in Iraq.

   Despite this, the Republican Party still struggles to silence dissent and brand critics as “defeatists,” despite the fact that a majority of people in this country disapprove of Bush’s handling of the war. The sad truth is that the Republican Party is the one that is out of the mainstream.

   Not that this is proof that the Republican Party is wrong. That is covered by my other blogs, and by the countless websites, media outlets, and democratic politicians who have adduced evidence to this time and time again.

   What this is proof of is that FOX News and Blogs for Bush and all the other sycophantic media mercenaries are in denial. They should be talking about reform and moderating their positions, not standing fast to a party line that will lead to them being hammered that much harder when election day comes.

   I doubt they will moderate. These are people who have enjoyed lavish success by lying their asses off and defending the indefensible for decades. They won’t stop because of a change in job approval ratings. That’s too subtle.

   Their leaders are not so stupid. Scrambling now to shield themselves from electoral retribution, GOP leaders like Rick Santorum and Bill Frist have suddenly found that John McCain’s funding reforms look mighty good right now. By all accounts they are going to be pushing these bills in late January and early February.

   Please. You mobsters are the ones that created the “K Street Project,” for God’s sake. Suddenly found a conscience, have you?

   The good news is that Tom DeLay is rapidly heading towards a disastrous election. Grover Norquist has been revealed to be what he has always been: a sickening cancer on the face of democracy. The Bush administration, caught red-handed doing things with the NSA that were specifically prohibited by FISA, is holding fast to a defense that has little hope of holding up in a court of law.

   The question is, after five long years of this junta controlling all the levers of power, what have we learned? Are the leaders of this cabal going to go down only to have their Roy Blunts and Condi Rices rise to take their place, inexplicably absolved of guilt for having eagerly aided and worked with these criminals committing the very same crimes that their leaders were convicted of?

  

   In its defense of the indefensible, no publication equals The Weekly Standard, as I have written before. I read this publication often, however, to hear the arguments of my opponents: Stephen Hayes’ allegations of perpetually-classified intelligence that really exonerates the administration are published in regular installments in The Standard. David Tell cements his roll as a far-right hatchet man with every article he writes, defending torture and warrantless wiretapping while attacking publications that dispute this such James Risen’s State of War. Adam Wolfson argues in his piece “Survival of the Evolution Debate” about how evolution doesn’t explain everything and ID might be a good idea. William Kristol supplements Hayes’ work by also arguing for the release of the alleged intelligence that vindicates the administration. Peter Berkowitz whitewashes Sharon’s legacy in his tendentious historical piece “Ariel Sharon’ s Legacy.” Vance Serchuk shits all over NATO and Europe in general in his work “Dutch Retreat?” It is always stunning to me how the collected writers in The Weekly Standard seemingly invariably come down on the worst side of every political issue.

   Harvey Mansfield writes an amazing defense of the warrantless wiretapping in the current issue. He argues that the president has “extra-legal” powers that are “not confined to executing the laws.” To further lay the bricks on the road to Hell, Mansfield of course quotes Machiavelli, arguing that “ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince.”

   If fascism gets plainer than this I would like to know where. The Weekly Standard has been, for too long, a putrid den of liars, Christian extremists, Israeli apologists, arrogant imperialists, and monarchists with only the thinnest veneer of journalistic integrity and manners. In any decent democracy this publication’s circulation would be limited to the militia members and corporate plutocrats who comprise its true audience. Instead, this propaganda is piped into the American mainstream of political thought like a broken New Orleans drainage duct spouting raw sewage into the streets of our city, forcing otherwise distinguished commentators to actually have to refute its ridiculous arguments with detailed analysis. Even then the delusional political cannon fodder of the right gulp this saucy shit like mother’s milk, regurgitating it without hesitation or skepticism onto the comments sections of Little Green Footballs or in the Letters to the Editor section of newspapers around the country.

   Meanwhile, the reality-based community in this country and around the world look on in horror as this diseased band of marauders hijack the government of the most powerful nation on earth and use its military and political clout to lay waste to the world.

   While, in a sane world, I and others would not even bother to repudiate the laughable assertions of these propagandists, The Weekly Standard is relevant. It’s relevant because its brazen arguments are, point for point, the arguments of the Bush Administration. Dick Cheney still asserts Al Qaeda-Iraq links, citing Hayes like some demented muse as the journalist who encapsulates the intelligence on those links publicly. The Bush Administration argues, like Kristol and Hayes, that torture is necessary to gather intelligence. Bush has publicly endorsed the teaching of ID in schools. The Administration lauds Sharon and his legacy as deceptively as Peter Berkowitz. The administration takes every opportunity to make plain its contempt for the international community as feverishly as Vance Serchuk. The Administration and its attorneys have cleaved to the concept of an imperial presidency as eagerly as Harvey Mansfield.

   Not even Reagan and his favorite publication, The American Spectator, would go this far down the path of imperialism and hubris, though they come close. In the words of one historian, “This administration is unique in its failures.”

   The uniqueness of this administration is not what bothers me the most. The nail that sticks out will be hammered down, as Confucious said. What bothers me the most is how this administration is an organic outgrowth of the rabid, nationalist junta that seized control of the Republican Party with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. This cancer in our democracy has actually spread in the intervening years, as Rush Limbaugh and an army of rightist propagandists took over the airwaves in the late eighties and early nineties, FOX News opened shop a few years later, and far-right think tanks continued to grow and spread. Republicans seized the House in the mid-nineties. George W. Bush, the most unqualified man ever to capture the republican nomination for president (as I said in 2000), actually got elected that same year. A year later, republicans also seized the senate.

   Although the incessant scandals of this presidency and this congress are beginning to destroy the hegemony they have enjoyed for four years, it will take a similar amount of time to pry their hands from the controls of government, if that ever even happens. Even if the House falls to democrats the senate and, thus, the presidency look secure for three more years. FOX News is profitable and is not going away anytime soon. The network of conservative corporate backers and think tanks shows no sign of weakening.

   The only thing that will threaten the structure of this oligarchic machine is comprehensive campaign reform that results in private donations being eliminated completely from presidential and congressional races. I strongly doubt this will happen. The inertia of vested interests and beaurocracy in Washington is incredibly powerful. Even after the Electoral College delivered an improbable victory to Bush in 2000 and many called for its abolition, this 17th century anachronism remains in place to this day.

   Of course, the similarities are not complete: campaign finance will not require a constitutional amendment, and the Abramoff scandal looks like the ugliest congressional scandal in a generation. Nevertheless, little was done to amend campaign finance before, even when it was plain that campaign financers were writing legislation. No congressperson even made an attempt to amend the Electoral College after 2000, or before, for that matter, when other candidates lost the popular vote but won the college vote.

   I expect some legislation to amend campaign finance, judging from the truckloads of angry letters from across the political spectrum pouring into newspapers nowadays. This reform will fail for two reasons: one, it will not be a complete abolishment of private funding for politicians; two, any campaign finance reform will leave untouched the vast web of corporate think tanks and news outlets, like FOX, who support and nurture violently reactionary politicians who seek to crush truth and liberal enemies underneath the jackboot of conservativism.

   There are many conservative or libertarian types out there who don’t usually merit that much attention from me due to my very limited time. The Stossels of the world, if you will. But today I make an exception.

   I was driving home from work and I tuned into WIND, the local station out here that carries the foul message of Michael Medved. To my horror, I discovered him rhetorically doing what some recently have done literally.

   Medved converted to conservativism in time to help Ronald Reagan get elected in 1980. Apparently his stigmatization of “celebrity bastard parents” didn’t stop him from backing one when it suited his purposes. Since then he has been a loud conservative voice in “the greatest nation on God’s green earth,” reaching out to 140 markets with his syndicated radio show.

   Medved devoted a bit of time today to echo the conservative talking point that the homeless deserve what they get. Homelessness isn’t stigmatized enough in our society, he says. There are enough jobs out there to support these people, he maintains. They’re lazy. Screw ‘em.

   This is conservatism, ladies and gentlemen. Screw the poor. Kick the people who are homeless when they’re down. Evil does not get any more unambiguous than this.

   Forget that nearly fifty percent of all homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence. Forget that massive, uncounted numbers of children are homeless. Forget about the homeless who were unable to pay rent because they didn’t make enough money. Forget about the fact that many homeless are evicted from their homes because of poverty. Check out this link if you want honest statistics, not conservative vitriol and anecdotes.

   I don’t know what Bible “observant” Jews like Medved read, but it’s not any Torah I’ve ever heard of. I know this much: if there is a benevolent God, no Medved will ever enter Heaven. His rhetorical baseballbatting of people who are homeless is among the most degenerate diatribes I have ever been exposed to. Even Rush Limbaugh rarely sinks this low.

   This is the thug so shitfaced on conservative ideological moonshine that he denied Bush wanted to privatize social programs and then suffered a psychotic break when he was refuted with a simple quote, claimed that the “American Left” took “comfort and joy” in the mess that Iraq has become, and suggested “a major, multicharacter generational saga about the utterly amazing Bush family,” barely pausing to wipe the drool from his chin.

  Medved is a morally inbred thug, a proud warrior of a tribal political cult who takes pride in beating the teeth out of homeless people and victimizing the helpless. Since the days of Goldwater and Nixon his clan has bred and proliferated in the dark and noisome corners of this country, feeding on ignorance and bigotry like kudzu grown in fresh shit. His filthy and illiterate cousins have grown numerous and powerful enough to dare to storm the walls of civilization like universities and media outlets in order to rape and pillage the inhabitants and strip the gold from the temples, carrying off the remainder to waste on whores and alcoholic binges.

   To add insult to injury, Medved’s scurvy barbarians claim to have supplanted the old order with a new one, some kind of retarded New Rome for the drooling, twitching masses who have inherited their father’s bigotry like a congenital birth defect. You may pillage Rome, Medved, but your plunderers have as much claim to the Civilization as maggots do to the soul of the corpse they feed upon. Stealing the statue doesn’t make you the high priest, and raping the woman doesn’t make you her husband, you loathsome invertebrate.

 
   In his speech today at the Veterans of Foreign Wars President Bush railed against “irresponsible debate.”
 
   This on the heels of a Congressional Research Service report maintaining that the president’s wiretapping was probably illegal.
 
   Fascism doesn’t get much more plain than this. Illegal spying. The discouragement of dissent. This president is so far beyond the pale that he is almost a caricature of a republican dictator.
 
   Unfortunately, he is not a caricature. He has real support. Sen. Coburn of Oklahoma on Bill Bennett’s show this morning flat-out denied that there were provisions in FISA that allow the president to receive warrant approval after the fact. He said (paraphrasing) “sometimes these wiretapping requests take 48 hours or more for approval. What is the president supposed to do when he needs a warrant within minutes?”
 
   As anyone who has been paying any attention to the news knows, FISA allows the Executive to receive wiretapping warrants up to 72 hours after the tap has already been placed. Coburn’s assertion is a flat-out lie.
 
   But what do you expect from a senator who was one of only nine to vote against the anti-torture McCain Amendment?

Alito

   Let me first say I have a great deal of respect for Judge Alito’s career and opinions. Despite this, he has issues in his past.

   Alito, in the seventies, joined the Concerned Alumni if Princeton. He later, in 1985, placed this on his resume, ostensibly as a point of pride. He had a reason to, at least in the era of Ronald Reagan: CAP was a conservative organization. The problem with the CAP is that a large portion of its agenda was restoring Princeton’s old standards of admission and cultural and racial identity. CAP writings evince undisguised hostility to the admission of minorities and women.

   Alito, under questioning yesterday, had “no specific recollection” of the CAP. I find this answer disingenuous. He had enough of a memory of it in his twenties and thirties to consider it a point of pride.

   The CAP, granted, is an old issue. Some of his rulings are not. In the U.S. v. Rybar, Alito dissented from the majority in stating that Congress had no right to ban fully automatic weapons under their constitutional power to regulate interstate trade. This is a curious dissent: the broad authority of congress to regulate this trade is the only thing that underpins federal drug and gun control legislation. Courts across this nation for generations have upheld this standard. While I’m not a legal expert, I’m not the only one perplexed by this judgment.

   Alito again dissented in Doe. V. Groody, when he ruled that police, who had strip-searched a ten-year-old girl, had the right to do so in their warrant to search a drug den (pardon the colloquial language). Alito was concerned that if his court set a precedent than drug dealers around the country would use ten year olds as mules. While he expressed distaste for the situation, he nevertheless sided with the police. Alito, along with many conservative Americans, believes that the quest for drugs trumps the privacy rights of children.

   This is but a sampling. Alito has a long history of conservative rulings. He was promoted to the Circuit Court by George H.W. Bush and nominated for the Supreme Court by George W. Bush. No one denies that Alito is a staunch conservative.

   I wouldn’t want Alito to become the fifth conservative on the court. His artful refusal to give opinions regarding such things as the president’s wiretapping don’t make me any more confident in his judgment. Many say that the committee’s hearings are a show as the senators have already made up their minds. That may be not such a bad thing. Alito’s record speaks louder than words.

   His defenders point out instances of Alito siding with “the little guy,” minorities, and others. I don’t doubt that he has. But do we want the dissenter in Rybar to be a Supreme Court Justice?

   Iran is restarting its nuclear program, and by most accounts North Korea and Pakistan already have nukes. The world is getting more dangerous, is it not?

   Or is it? After all, Americans no longer live under the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the U.S.S.R. China is much more open than it was twenty years ago. The issue nowadays seems more to be the security of nuclear secrets with dangerous regimes.

   Despite the rantings of Charles Krauthammer, I doubt the leaders of Iran are eager to suffer total nuclear erasure as a response to their use of a nuclear weapon against Israel, Europe, or the United States. The professions of divine inspiration from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don’t sound any less creepy coming from the mouth of our own president. That doesn’t mean either of them is insane. We have lived with nuclear weapons in the hands of oppressive regimes like China and the Soviet Union for decades. This is not much different.

   I am similarly skeptical of claims these regimes might slip a weapon to a terrorist organization: the U.S.S.R. supported Palestinian terrorists for decades in the middle of the twentieth century and they didn’t. They realized what all nations realize: who’s to say the sale of a nuclear weapon couldn’t be traced before or after the weapon was detonated? Who’s to say that the terrorists, once acquiring the weapon, wouldn’t sell it to another organization? Who’s to say that terrorist buying the weapon isn’t a CIA agent or being watched by the CIA?

   Those are a lot of questions to answer, and no government would be willing to stake its existence, and the existence of its nation, on the answers.

   By all credible accounts, Hussein wanted to acquire weapons for the same reason the U.S.S.R., China, India, France, Great Britain, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran want them: as a deterrent. As a weapon of last resort should their nation be invaded.

   That’s not to say that there aren’t risks that a nuclear weapon might be stolen or compromised by a low-level official that has been bribed. It’s just that these questions are ones of security, not government decisions.

   The United States has a lot to offer to nations in the way of security assistance. The United States might offer aid to nuclear-armed nations with security concerns the same way it has offered that aid the former Soviet Republics.

   In a New York Times story today, concealed on page 11, Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, acknowledged that, “As a matter of law, Iran has the right to do all the nuclear activities, including enriching uranium.”

   Despite that, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are not eager to see Iran do that. Sanctions are possible, though Russia or China might veto them, and how moral are sanctions for a country that is doing what it has a right to do?

   A more constructive approach seems expedient. How about working on an agreement to help safeguard their nuclear sites? Iran may be unwilling to reveal their locations or operations, but surely the United States or the European Union can offer assistance in the way of vetting personnel or security systems.

  

   Leading the fools’ charge into the guns of reality, “conservative” cannon fodder mount a last-ditch effort to retake the high ground before the November elections.

   As I predicted, minimization is the preferred tool. Chris Matthews says that the Abramoff scandal won’t even be the biggest event of the year, even as other MSM figures and progressive sources call it the biggest scandal in generations. The dedicated righties like those at Powerline Blog, who have a vested interest in this like Faust had an interest in the Devil, predict that this will all blow over soon. Noooothing to look at here. Move along, just move along. No similarity whatsoever to the scandals that plagued democrats in the early nineties.

   They’re right on that count, but not how they think. The Banking Scandal was just a bunch of congresspeople using the House Bank to let them overdraft checks for up to the amount of their next paycheck. We’re talking about 23 people convicted of issuing themselves illegal two-week loans, for God’s sake. The Post Office Scandal was over democrats shielding Rostenkowski from investigation into his money laundering. Abramoff’s 82 million dwarfs these scandals.

   If there’s one thing people in this country don’t have patience for it’s graft. I have no idea why raping the environment just doesn’t show up on their radar; I don’t know why blowing up deficits or lying people into war is so defensible. But with the Abramoff scandal even dyed-in-the-wool repugs are scrambling for cover like rats off a sinking ship.

   Even David Brooks and Newt Gingrich are getting twitchy. Real Clear Politic’s Blog is crying out for a change in republican leadership. The Chicago Tribune and other conservative editorial boards are suggesting that if republicans don’t clean up their act they will be rightly swept from office in 2006.

   Advocating torture didn’t faze these thugs one bit. A war based on lies? Who cares. We just need to keep looking forward and win. Ballooning deficit? We’ll reign in spending soon enough.

   But good old-fashioned graft? The kind of stuff that happens legally every day in Washington and throughout the private sector? Noooo!!!

   I guess I’m just not that smart. Graft has saturated our republic for generations, and it’s been getting worse gradually. Every five years or so the number of lobbyists in Washington doubles. Congress has egregiously failed to get money out of politics for years, even when it was becoming apparent that cash for politics was being discretely traded with every handshake and wink.

   All of a sudden the inevitable scandal breaks. You can’t keep a $16 billion a year business under wraps forever. And now they’re scared.

   DeLay is out. When democrats wanted him out, to quote DeLay, Southern Partisan, Sean Hannity, and a million other fascist toadies, the democrats were politicizing normal government fundraising. Now that Abramoff is squealing, however, even many conservative blogs are saying Tom has got to go.

   Adios, Mr. DeLay. Not that it matters much. He’ll still be in congress.

   What amuses me is that conservatives think, rightly or not, that they can salvage the Titanic with a couple of arc welders. That they can convince the American people that Blunt, somehow, is a whole different kind of guy. If they fail they’re idiots. If they succeed the American people are idiots.

   The Republican Party has been the cat’s paw of big business for longer than I’ve been alive. Changing one republican for another is a joke. Expecting republicans to clean their own house is a joke.

   This is the party that brought you Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist. Who are the democratic corollaries to these guys? Dan Rostenkowski? Anybody else?

   There isn’t anyone else. For every Jim Traficant there’s a Duke Cunningham. The difference is that Jim Traficant didn’t run his party. Tom DeLay did. Trent Lott did. Newt Gingrich did. Bill Frist does.

   What do you expect from the party of Richard Nixon and George Wallace? What reforms are you expecting from the home of Strom Thurmond, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Jesse Helms?

  



  

  
   Richard Miniter’s work, Disiniformation, is in itself, ironically, a work of disinformation. Though I could go chapter by chapter and refute Miniter, I have no desire to write a book to refute his. I will concentrate on one chapter, his allegations of Hussein-al-Qaeda cooperation. His major source is a series of articles written by Stephen Hayes for The Weekly Standard, with support from Deroy Murdock and Colin Powell’s speech to the UN.

   Douglas Feith, head of the controversial Office of Special Plans, sent a classified memo to congress that contained a list and description of intelligence reports, a memo that was leaked to the media and became the foundation of Stephen Hayes’ reports in the Weekly Standard. Though Hayes described it as “detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources,” Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of Defense Intelligence Agency, called the Feith memo "a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" in a Washington Post article critical of Hayes’ work. Daniel A. Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, said of the memo "[I]n any serious intelligence review, much of the material presented would quickly be discarded." A November 2003 Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball analyzes the work and considers it “shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst Christopher Carney) whom [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J.] Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda "connection" in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.” In The Washington Post, former FBI counterterrorism analyst Matthew Levitt said of Hayes’ work: “A constellation of suggestions, however, still is not a convincing argument.”
  
   Despite being panned by the Main Stream Media, not surprisingly, the right-wing media published positive reviews of Hayes’ work, most notably the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.
  
   The assertions of Hayes, Murdock, and Colin Powell never proved true regarding al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein, al-Zarqawi’s links to Saddam Hussein, and similar allegations.
  
   These allegations run contrary to all official reports. According to the U.S. Intelligence Agency’s Kerr Group Report of July 29, 2004, “[the U.S.] Intelligence Community remained firm in its assessment that no operational or collaborative relationship existed” between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The 9/11 Commission reported the same finding. The Senate Intelligence Investigation Report reported the same finding. While all investigations turned up evidence of meetings between al Qaeda and Iraqi officials, none of them saw evidence of a “collaborative relationship.” As terrorism analyst Evan Kohlman points out:

While there have been a number of promising intelligence leads hinting at possible meetings between al-Qaeda members and elements of the former Baghdad regime, nothing has been yet shown demonstrating that these potential contacts were historically any more significant than the same level of communication maintained between Osama bin Laden and ruling elements in a number of Iraq's Persian Gulf neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Kuwait.

   So we begin the long, tiring journey into examining Richard Miniter’s sources regarding al-Qaeda and Iraq connections. Stephen Hayes is his primary source. The sources are covered in their order in Miniter’s Notes section.

Stephen Hayes, “The Connection” June 7, 2004

Hayes’ assertions about Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Hikmat Shakirv were discounted by intelligence experts, according to the Washington Post’s account. Even Hayes admits, at the end of this tale, “The Shakir story is perhaps the government's strongest indication that Saddam and al Qaeda may have worked together on September 11. It is far from conclusive; conceivably there were two Ahmed Hikmat Shakirs.”
  
   He quotes a Newsweek article from 1999 that alleges that “Saddam Hussein…is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden” (emphasis added).
  
   He quotes an ABC News story where unnamed sources alleged a meeting between Iraqi intelligence, a vague and unsubstantiated report. The fact that there were meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda is not in dispute.
  
   Hayes then quotes an AP article than ran in the Washington Post without citation that also can be found here.
  
   Very interesting. But bin Laden didn’t accept the offer, apparently.
  
   So Hayes convincingly cites sources, including former CIA administrator Vincent Cannistraro, who prove that Iraq offered al-Qaeda asylum.
  
   Hayes cites Clinton-era assertions of Iraq-al-Qaeda links regarding the Sudanese chemical plant that Clinton’s Administration attacked. His evidence of what was being produced at these plants is contradictory, as Hayes writes “For journalists and many at the CIA, the case was hardly clear-cut.” The Clinton Administration, without proof or citation, alleged an Iraq connection to the plant that was never proved by anyone.
  
   The most damning evidence Hayes cites comes from documents captured by the Iraq Survey Group alleging bin Laden’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence in Syria (in the spring of 1992), a document alleging bin Laden was an “asset” of the intelligence, and another detailing a meeting with bin Laden and the Taliban about attacking American targets. He neither cites these documents nor proves that these meetings constitute a working relationship.

Stephen Hayes, “Nothing: What Michael Scheuer has to say about bin Laden and Saddam—and what that says about the CIA’s performance.” November 21, 2004

   Hayes begins by criticizing MICHAEL SCHEUER, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit and until recently a senior analyst. He points out that in 2002 Sheuer’s book mentioned several instances of Iraq-al-Qaeda connections, again, connections that all inquiries into the matter have concluded didn’t amount to a working relationship.

   Hayes again mentions the Clinton-era strike on the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan on August 20, 1998.

   Hayes says that he considers it unlikely that Scheuer would have written a book alleging extensive al-Qaeda contacts based solely on open-source material, as he says.

    Hayes rehashes his old arguments from “Connection” thusly:

We know that Iraqi Intelligence officials reported in 1992 that Osama bin Laden was an Iraqi intelligence an "asset" that had "good relations" with the Iraqi intelligence station in Syria. We know that Sudanese government officials met with Uday Hussein at bin Laden's behest in 1994 to discuss cooperation on bin Laden's behalf. We know that deputy Iraqi intelligence director Faruq Hijazi met with bin laden, at least twice. We know that Saddam agreed to air anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi national television. We know that the Iraqis considered the numerous "contacts" with bin laden a "relationship"--as revealed in their internal documents. We know that in the mid-1990s an internal Iraqi intelligence memo revealed that Saddam sought "further cooperation" with al Qaeda. And we know that meetings between high-level al Qaeda terrorists and senior Iraqi intelligence officials took place throughout 1998.
   Again, all material that U.S. government investigations have concluded is circumstantial. Material that is “unsubstantiated.” On this basis Hayes maintains that Scheuer’s investigation into classified materials that didn’t substantiate a significant relationship between the two must mean that the CIA hasn’t been doing its job, that “Porter Goss has a big job to do.” And, apparently, Hayes knows how to do it.

Colin Powell’s Address to the UN Security Council February 6, 2003

   The address can be found here. I find it amusing that Miniter cites Colin Powell as a good source for info on Iraq as Powell “was certainly not a cheerleader for war in Iraq.” Wow. That’s known as begging the question, Mr. Miniter. He also cites George “Slam Dunk” Tenet as his other reputable administration source (both page 108). And so, the long, hard slog into right-wing fucknuttery continues…

   Miniter cites the Address as proof that “bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization, a secret police agency” and “bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat, Iraq’s external intelligence service, in Khartoum in 1996,” and “an al Qaeda operative now held by the United States confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam’s men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.”

   This is the address later intelligence analysis done by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee would conclude was based bad CIA intelligence, intelligence largely based on the lies of the defector Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda agent captured by the U.S. and rendered to Egypt where he was tortured into giving a false confession. He later recanted his story, and the DIA and the CIA repudiated his story.

Stephen Hayes, “Body of evidence: A CNN anchor gets Iraq and al-Qaeda wrong. But will the network issue a correction?”June 30, 2005

   Hayes criticizes CNN Anchors Carol Costello and Daryn Kagan for asserting there was “no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” He maintains “The CNN claims are wrong. Not a matter of nuance. Not a matter of interpretation. Just plain incorrect.”

   Hayes goes on to correctly point out that the 9/11 commission did conclude there were links, but then he amusingly mischaracterizes their conclusion himself. He says they “concluded only that there was no proof of Iraqi involvement in al Qaeda terrorist attacks against American interests.”

    As Hayes himself has said:“Wrong. Not a matter of nuance. Not a matter of interpretation. Just plain incorrect.” The 9/11 commission went further than that and concluded there was no “collaborative relationship.”

   Undaunted, Hayes continues, relating how  “Jordan's King Abdullah explained to the Arabic-language newspaper al Hayat that his government had tried before the Iraq war to extradite Abu Musab al Zarqawi from Iraq. ‘We had information that he entered Iraq from a neighboring country, where he lived and what he was doing. We informed the Iraqi authorities about all this detailed information we had, but they didn't respond.’"

   This of course, is to be expected, as U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that while Zarqawi was in central Iraq he used an alias. Following that he moved to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, beyond the Iraqi government’s reach. This is according to the CIA’s report in late 2004.

   Hayes goes on to rehash his old intelligence, the intelligence about bin Laden in Syria in 1992 being listed as an Iraqi intelligence “asset,” the account of the non-aggression pact between al-Qaeda and Iraq in 1993, and the accounts of meetings in 1994 and 1995. Hayes goes on to characteristically quote the Senate Intelligence Committee out of context:

In 1997, al Qaeda sent an emissary with the nom de guerre Abdullah al Iraqi to Iraq for training on weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell cited this evidence in his presentation at the UN on February 5, 2003. The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Powell's presentation on Iraq and terrorism was "reasonable."

   “Reasonable” in that it was reasonably based on bad intelligence, that is.
  
   Hayes details another meeting between Iraq and al-Qaeda in 1998, and he reiterates the asylum offer allegation. Again, none of this was considered to constitute a “collaborative relationship” by the intelligence reviews that heard testimony and examined the documents.

   Hayes proceeds to reiterate bad intelligence from 2002, citing the October 2002 National Agency report that alleged Hussein was funding al-Qaeda camps in Northern Iraq.

Stephen Hayes, The Connection

   See my notes on The Weekly Standard article of the same name.

Iraq: Former PM Reveals Secret Service Data on Birth… May 23, 2005

   This account records the assertions of Iyad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a terrorist organizer whose killed about 100 civilians in terrorist attacks aimed to destabilize Hussein’s regime. Funny how some terrorists are “good” and others are “bad.”

   He fed bad intelligence to the British and the U.S. in the run up to war. His “discovery” of documents now that he is in an influential position in Iraq led him to relate this story to this Arabic news outlet. Apparently, Hayes is taking Allawi’s word for it.

Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, “Another Link in the Chain: The role of Saddam and al Qaeda in the creation of Ansar al-Islam” July 22, 2005

   I question how many lies and mischaracterizations I have to catch Hayes in before he is effectively refuted in the eyes of his rabid, militia-member fan base.

   Ansar al-Islam is the focus of this article. His central assertion is this: “The terrorists in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are all connected--in one way or another--to the same Iraqi-based network which spawned the Kurdish-based group just 10 days prior to September 11, 2001.”

   He quotes Le Monde, which published an unatributed assertion that Ansar al-Islam"was founded in 2001 with the joint help of Saddam Hussein--who intended to use it against moderate Kurds--and al Qaeda, which hoped to find in Kurdistan a new location that would receive its members."

   This is surprising, considered that Mullah Krekar, the alleged leader of Ansar al Islam, rejects these claims.

   He cites intelligence reporting of the same kind of contacts between Ansar al-Islam, and Saddam Hussein that were discounted by subsequent intelligence reviews. Hayes uses as his source material intelligence primarily gathered from CIA sources, information that also made its way into Colin Powell’s address to the UN.

Why Can't the CIA Keep Up with the New Yorker? Stephen Hayes, September 13, 2002

   Hayes highlights Jeffrey Goldberg’s work in The New Yorker, which alleges Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam…” The links between al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam still seem accurate, but the intelligence linking this group to Hussein was discounted.

   As usual, Hayes cherry-picks intelligence from the massive store that the CIA, NSA, and DIA released to the public, frequently in a highly-redacted form, and draws conclusions that his own sources eventually dispute.
“Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror,” Deroy Murdock, September 2004
   Murdock, a fellow of the right-wing Hoover Institution, begins his story by citing unattributed and slightly exaggerated figures of Hussein’s reign of terror, alleging 400,000 victims.

   He follows with a chart reproduced in Disinformation, detailing Hussein’s sponsorship of terror. His sources for Ansar al-Islam are Jonathan Landay “Islamic Militants kill senior Kurdish general” and Catherine Taylor’s “Saddam and bin Laden help fanatics, say Kurds,” from the Times of London, which largely cite the same Kurdish sources, discounted by U.S. intelligence reviews, who lied about such connections to encourage intervention from the U.S. to help them in their war against Saddam Hussein. He rightly cites some figures that are nevertheless misleading: Hamas, for example, is an umbrella organization that has legitimate political operations and health clinics. Hamas had an office in Baghdad. Thrown into this deceptive potpourri are mostly Palestinian groups whose ties to Saddam were no more extensive than their ties to every government in the Middle East.

    Murdock documents the checks Hussein’s regime cut to the families of suicide bombers, done, according to Hussein, to help alleviate their pain and suffering and compensate for the loss of their homes, which were frequently bulldozed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

   Murdock cites other instances of Iraqis who helped terrorists, including, strangely enough, Abu Nidal, whose organization figures prominently in the “Iraq sponsored” terror groups table. It is curious because, after Abu Nidal entered Iraq Saddam Hussein had him killed, though the Iraqi government maintained Nidal killed himself. Eventually, Murdock points this out, but alleges that because the Iraqi government couldn’t or wouldn’t capture Nidal for three years they were complicit in his activities (?).

   This is the quality of Murdock’s report. He also cites other accounts of terrorists who operated in Iraq, including al-Zarqawi, whose case we have already covered.

   Slogging further into this steaming mound of shitty writing…

   Murdock goes on to cite the case of Salman Pak, yet another bit of intelligence that was discounted by the intelligence community. Salman Pak was allegedly a terrorist training site, according to some Iraqi defectors: Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami (former Iraqi army captain), Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy (former brigadier general in the Mukhabarat), Khidir Hamza (scientist who was director of the Iraqi nuclear program), Abdul Rahman al-Shamari (a Mukhabarat agent in US custody), and "Abu Mohammed" (a former colonel in the Fedayeen). Their credibility was questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, the organization of Iraqi defectors from Iraq who hated Saddam Hussein and fed U.S. sources bad intelligence in the run-up to war. Inconsistencies in their stories led U.S. investigators to conclude they were untrue. No evidence has been disclosed about any intelligence finds at the camp after its capture, leading to doubt that anything was found.

   Murdock goes on to reference Hayes in his account of Shakir, which has already been discounted by intelligence services per Hayes’ own caveat: it was a mix-up of names.

   A judge by the name of Baer is covered next. I won’t dwell on a judge’s ruling.

Stephen Hayes “The Rice Stuff: Susan Rice talks about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” October 20, 2004

   This tendentious article covers the case of al-Zarqawi. Again, we have covered this. Hussein never gave Zarqawi anything or harbored him.

   See this wikipedia article for a well-cited rundown of refuted evidence linking Iraq to al- Qaeda and other terrorists.

   Not to belabor the point, but the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Investigation, and the Kerr Report all found the same thing: there was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Defectors and witnesses who allege that there were had agendas and were lying. Intelligence reports seeming to confirm cooperation turned out to be false. These investigations were all more thorough, more exhaustive, and had more access to intelligence than Richard Miniter, Stephen Hayes, et al. But more importantly, they didn’t have a right-wing agenda.

   This right-wing campaign to refute its own intelligence sources and prove Hussein was a terrorist mastermind are simply the desperate delusions of people seeking to justify the war in Iraq in their own minds. Hayes and Miniter get play on every FOX News channel and right-wing radio station. Regnery Press, the infamous imprint of the conservative movement, printed Miniter’s work. The Weekly Standard, the most right-wing of right-wing magaizines, printed Hayes’ work. This willingness to print and distribute misinformation is the defining characteristic of this right-wing media machine.

   To quote Miniter’s dustjacket: You’ve been fooled.