Bulletin N 208
Subject : ON THE ACTUALLY
EXISTING CRISES WITHIN THE U.S. RULING CLASS: FROM THE CENTER FOR THE
ADVANCED
STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.
4 November 2005
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The center of political power, Washington, D.C., is abuzz with rumors
and
gossip about the imminent fall of the "Bush-II Regime". The mental
health of the President is being questioned now by his fellow
Republicans, and
Democrats are attempting to varnish their image in preparation for an
illustrious return to center stage.
For the tens of millions of ordinary American citizens who are excluded
systematically from this kind of "democracy," the activities in the
nation's capital today offer lessons. Just as the fall of Joseph
McCarthy in
1954 occurred in a matter of months, after his fatal error of accusing
the
Our research center has received several articles reflecting this
moment of a
changing political landscape in the
Item A. is an
article from the Washington Post, which describes the
unorthodox
behavior on the
Item B. is an
article by Professor Stephen Zunes,
professor of Politics
at the
Item C. includes
four articles from former U.S. Senator James Abourezk.
Our research associate, Elisabeth Chamorand,
forwarded to us, by attachment, these four articles selected by Abourezk (see attachment icons at the
bottom of this
page), and which in his opinion represent the beginning of the end of
the Bush
administration.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Universit頓tendhal-Grenoble
III
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
______________
A.
from Charles Babington and Dafna Linzer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01
washingtonpost.com
GOP Angered by
Closed Senate Session
Meeting Reopened After Two Hours
Democrats forced the
Senate into
a rare closed-door session yesterday, infuriating Republicans but
extracting
from them a promise to speed up an inquiry into the Bush
administration's
handling of intelligence about
With no warning in the mid-afternoon, the Senate's top Democrat invoked
the
little-used Rule 21, which forced aides to turn off the chamber's
cameras and
close its massive doors after evicting all visitors, reporters and most
staffers. Plans to bring in electronic-bug-sniffing dogs were dropped
when it
became clear that senators would trade barbs but discuss no classified
information.
Republicans condemned the Democrats' maneuver, which marked the first
time in
more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a closed session
without
consulting the other party. But within two hours, Republicans appointed
a
bipartisan panel to report on the progress of a Senate intelligence
committee
report on prewar intelligence, which Democrats say has been delayed for
nearly
a year.
"Finally, after months and months and months of begging, cajoling,
writing
letters, we're finally going to be able to have phase two of the
investigation
regarding how the intelligence was used to lead us into the intractable
war in
Iraq," Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.)
told reporters, claiming a rare victory for Democrats in the
GOP-controlled
Congress.
Beneath the political pyrotechnics was an issue that has infuriated
liberals
but flummoxed many of the Democratic lawmakers who voted three years
ago to
approve the war: allegations that administration officials exaggerated
Democrats were dismayed that President Bush made no apologies after the
indictment and that his naming of a new Supreme Court nominee Monday
knocked
the Libby story off many front pages. As he stood on the Senate floor
to demand
the closed session -- a motion not subject to a vote under the rule --
Reid
said Libby's grand jury indictment "asserts this administration engaged
in
actions that both harmed our national security and are morally
repugnant."
The usually unflappable majority leader, Bill Frist
(R-Tenn.), was searching for words to
express his
outrage to reporters a few minutes later. The Senate "has been hijacked
by
the Democratic leadership," he said. "They have no convictions, they
have no principles, they have no ideas."
Never
before had he been "slapped in the face with such an affront," he
said, adding: "For the next year and a half, I can't trust Senator
Reid."
Frist seemed much calmer when the closed
session
ended. He agreed to a six-senator bipartisan task force that will
report by
Nov. 14 on "the intelligence committee's progress of the phase two
review
of the prewar intelligence and its schedule for completion."
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said the report was nearing
completion
anyway, but Democrats disputed that. Committee Vice Chairman John D.
Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) began inquiring
about the
evidence against
Roberts resisted a full investigation for three months. But in June
2003, when
it became increasingly apparent that no weapons of mass destruction
were being
found in Iraq, the committee agreed to look into the intelligence cited
in the
administration's case for war. In February 2004, senators agreed to a
second
phase that would investigate the Bush administration's use of
intelligence and
examine public statements made by key policymakers about the threat
posed by
In July 2004, the committee issued the first phase of its bipartisan
report,
which found the
The Defense Department's Office of Special Plans stopped cooperating
with the
Senate panel in July of this year. Roberts said key officials hired
lawyers and
stopped talking when Rockefeller suggested laws may have been broken.
But
Democrats dismissed that as an excuse.
Authority to hold secret Senate sessions is provided in Article 1,
Section 5 of
the Constitution, and the Continental Congress met behind closed doors.
But the
practice has ebbed in recent years. The most recent closed Senate
session was
in February 1999 to deliberate President Bill Clinton's impeachment
trial,
according to the Congressional Research Service, and that was done
through a
bipartisan agreement.
Reid said he was forced to seek the closed session to spur action on
the
investigation. "The only way we've been able to get their attention is
to
spend 3 1/2 hours in a closed session," he said. "It's a slap in the
face to the American people that this investigation has been stymied."
Rockefeller said Democratic requests for information related to the
investigation are routinely denied or ignored, and he suggested that
the Senate
Republican leadership was under orders from the Bush administration not
to
cooperate.
"Any time the intelligence committee pursued a line of inquiry that
brought us close to the role of the White House in all of this in the
use of
intelligence prior to the war, our efforts have been thwarted time and
time
again," Rockefeller said. "The very independence of the United States
Congress as a separate and coequal branch of the government has been
called
into question."
Staff writer Shailagh
Murray contributed to this report.
2005 The Washington Post Company
_______________
B.
from Stephen Zunes :
November 01, 2005
ZNet
by Stephen Zunes(*)
President George W. Bush's
October 6
address at the National Endowment for Democracy illustrated his
administration's increasingly desperate effort to justify the
increasingly
unpopular
The speech focused almost entirely the
On a positive note, Bush reiterated the fact that terrorism in the name
of
Islam is contrary to the Islamic faith. He acknowledged to a degree he
had not
yet done so publicly that many of these movements are part of a loose
network
of local cells rather than a centrally controlled armed force.
Yet much of his speech contained the same misleading rhetoric regarding
Some Samples of President Bush's Misleading Statements "These
extremists
want to end American and Western influence in the broader
While these extremist groups indeed want to limit American and other
Western
influence in the region and their ideology certainly does not support
democratic institutions or peaceful means to advance their goals, the
problems
that radical Islamists have with the American role in the Middle East
is not
related to America's stand in support for democracy and peace. As made
clear by
their manifestoes and by interviews with individual leaders, the
radical
Islamist opposition to the United States stems primarily from U.S.
support for
autocratic Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq, the ongoing U.S.
military
presence in the region, U.S. backing for the Israeli occupation, and
related
concerns which have nothing to do with democracy and peace.
"Al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate,
quote, their 'resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of
their
lands.' Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a
quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to
repeat the
sad history of
Al-Qaeda has existed for barely a dozen years. The network didn't exist
a
quarter century ago. Nor is there any indication that they "expect us
to
run" when hit. If anything, their hope and expectation is that the
The "sad history of
"The militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American
retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch
attacks and
conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past
few
decades, radicals have specifically targeted
While small groups of radical Islamists have engaged in a series of
terrorist
bombings and assassinations in
They succeeded in
The "vacuum" that would allow radical Islamists to pose a challenge
to the Iraqi government has already taken place as a direct result of
the
removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power by
"The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the
Muslim
masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the
region, and
establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from
It is quite possible that these Salafi
Sunni
revivalists indeed harbor such fantasies, but they are just
that--fantasies.
The United States has more than a dozen allied governments in the
region that
have the motivation and ability to resist these fanatics, who have
relatively
few adherents within these or any other county in the Islamic world
outside
Iraq.
There are dozens of armed groups in
Even in the unlikely event of the overthrow of the Iraqi government, it
is
extremely doubtful that these more extreme elements would end up in
control.
"Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi
has
vowed, 'We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will
pass to
the eternal life.' And the civilized world knows very well that other
fanatics
in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol
Pot,
consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of
history."
The idea that Al-Zarqawi could somehow
obtain the
power of Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin is
utterly
ludicrous. He lacks the resources, the state apparatus, the popular
support,
the propaganda machinery, the disciplined political party, the armed
force, the
industrial base, or any other attribute that could conceivably give him
that
kind of power. Bush is cynically playing on the fears of American
people and
shows a callous disrespect to the millions who died under these
totalitarian
rulers.
"Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like
a
parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others . . ."
What Bush fails to note is that much of the suffering and frustration
felt by
the Iraqi people is a direct result of U.S. policy. Not only did the
Iraqi
people suffer under decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship (which was
backed
by the
"The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and
enablers. They have been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of
convenience like
The Bush administration has failed to present any credible evidence
that either
On the contrary,
Similarly, the Syrian government is a secular nationalist regime
dominated by members
of the Alawite branch of Islam, which is
far closer
to the Shiites than the Sunnis.
"Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the
actions
of our coalition in
No one has claimed that the Islamist radicals responsible for the
massacre in Beslan were in any way
motivated by the
"Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for
violence--the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the
No major opponent of the
The U.S. should cease its unconditional military, diplomatic and
economic
support for autocratic Middle Eastern regimes and Israeli occupation
forces,
not for the sake of appeasing terrorists, but because no country that
espouses
freedom and the rule of law should support governments that engage in
gross and
systematic human rights violations.
"The
If Bush really believes this, it would behoove him to start with the
government
over which he has the most control: that of the
"Some observers also claim that
This is totally spurious argument. By virtually all accounts of
scholars and
journalists familiar with the various constituent elements of the Iraqi
insurgency, the vast majority of the insurgents are not dedicated to
the
destruction of the
"If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own
destiny,
and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men
and
women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of
violent
radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By
standing
for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more
secure."
In reality, the United States is doing very little to advance the cause
of
self-determination, the rule of law, religious freedom and equal rights
for
women in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. For example,
the
Similarly, the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni
Mubarak remains the second largest
recipient of
The
It is also utterly false to claim that the United States supports the
right of
self-determination in the Middle East, since the Bush administration
continues
to support the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and the
Golan
Heights of Syria, as well as Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara.
These
occupations are maintained in violation through ongoing violations of
international
humanitarian law, the UN Charter, and a series of UN Security Council
resolutions.
In
Conclusion
Given the large number of misleading
statements in
this key foreign policy address, it is profoundly disappointing that
the
mainstream media appears to have taken it so seriously. There has been
little
critical analysis of the president's remarks and headlines have instead
focused
upon the unsubstantiated claim in the speech that the
It is similarly disappointing that leading Democrats in Congress have
not
attempted to expose the fallacious arguments in this address either.
Doing so
could advance their party's chances to win back the House of
Representatives,
the Senate, and the White House. Since the Democratic Congressional
leadership
and the vast majority of Democratic Senators and Representatives have
chosen to
continue their support of the
As a result, it is up to American people to not only challenge the Bush
administration's falsehoods and misleading statements, but to challenge
those
in the media and in Congress who allow them to get away with such
dangerous and
illegitimate policies.
----------------
(*)Stephen Zunes,
Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org), is a professor of
Politics at the
_________________
C.
from Elisabeth Chamorand :
Date : Wed, 2 Nov 2005
Objet :
ICH
Francis,
Four excellent articles sent by Jim Abourezk
are
attached with this short message.
Elisabeth
----------------------------------------------------------
And last,
Jim Abourezk
1208
1)
The
Lie Factory
Mother Jones
January 26, 2004
BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & JASON VEST
Mother Jones, January/February 2004
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon
unit to
create the case for invading
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from
Washington,
D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the
Shenandoah hills.
On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse,
at the
end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is
perched
on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy
sneakers.
Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne
air is filled with swarms
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the
Central
Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into
intelligence on
Kwiatkowski,
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly
exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE END of major combat in Iraq, the United States had
spent
$300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush
was
seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's
Scuds and
other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and
botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents,
mustard
gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing
biological
weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms
program, all
of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also
missing
was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons
and
terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost
as soon
as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting
of the
Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath
of
office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised,
according to one
of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the
line
started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at
the
Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz,
the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith,
undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would
become
the vanguard for regime change in
Both Wolfowitz and Feith
have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most
influential
Called in to help organize the
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically,
"Those
who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith
to
purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic
about the
muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz
and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be
"pulling people out
of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other
places to
replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do
with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith
and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think
tank whose
12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of
neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter,
an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician.
Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege,
the
godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who
was
chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode,
along with
Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon,
was a
ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years,
and the
two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers
for the
AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage
whispers to
panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith
and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the
director of
Wurmser would be the founding participant
of the
unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of
the Defense
Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within
weeks of
the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other
intelligence
agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's
Al Qaeda
as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz
and Feith obsessively focused on
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith
and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
IN AN ADMINISTRATION devoted to the notion of "Feith-based
intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For
years,
he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the
1990s
that was beating the drums for war against
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the
Wall Street
Journal called "
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a
Pentagon
"cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find
nuggets of
information linking
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global
exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence
agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy
notions, many
other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and
the
Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version
of
events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA
headquarters by
Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons
seethed with
contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle,
"isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded
hallway during an AEI event, Perle added,
"The
CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit
meant that it
was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for
a
pre-emptive invasion of
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz
and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit
and created
an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia
Affairs
section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti,
under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's
director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser
to
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon,
who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation,
and WMD
office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's
OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control,
banishing
veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who,
despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other
positions
or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but
would act
aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White
House.
Both Luti and Shulsky
were
neoconservatives who were ideological soulmates
of Wolfowitz and Feith.
But Luti was more than that. He'd come to
the Pentagon directly
from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti,
a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat
aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along
with his
colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had
done a
stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle
and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's.
"He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti
and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of
Special Plans with
brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the
party
line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people
working on the neocon agenda had a narrow,
well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking,"
or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti,
before formally
taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky
turned
cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into
talking
points, on issues like
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti,
pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over
to
'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was
none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief
of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly
unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work
directly
on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue
that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did
not seek to
gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree.
Staff
working for Luti and Shulsky
in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an
example,
she cited the work of a
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence
specialist
at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed
lower-ranking
staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside
[and
being told], 'We saw your last piece and
it's not what
we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State
Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann
and
Christian Westermann, have both charged
that pressure
was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in
particular from
BESIDES CHENEY, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board,
including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, all
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in
Colonel Bruner, a
former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti
and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to
the
Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's
Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi
founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy
CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon
Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top
aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an
aristocratic Iraqi
family, Chalabi fled
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's
Iraqi
National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked
intelligence reports into
"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department
what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say
what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating]
cooked information
that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's
former
staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says
Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi
and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding
that the
INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for
debriefings. Chalabi claims to have
introduced only three actual
defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann
considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by
the
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency-which is not
beholden
to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon-leaked a report it
prepared,
concluding that few, if any, of the INC's
informants
provided worthwhile intelligence.
SO FAR, DESPITE ALL of the investigations underway, there is little
sign that
any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky
Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it
operates
in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the
intelligence
community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how
wrong
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The
thousands of
aluminum tubes supposedly imported by
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who
was sent by the CIA to visit
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar
and author,
says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it
had
because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war
was
simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak,
the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United
Nations'
criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying
about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The
ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
is
pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to
look
into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but
there is
strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)
has
introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the
intelligence
mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats-but no
Republicans-in
support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully,"
Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans.
"I'd
like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence
people to
slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
2)
Bushs
Increasing Mental
Lapses and Temper Tantrums Worry White House Aides
By DOUG THOMPSON
Nov 2, 2005, 05:26
An uncivil war rages inside the walls of the West Wing of the White
House, a
bitter, acrimonious war driven by a failed agenda, destroyed
credibility,
dwindling public support and a President who lapses into Alzheimer-like
periods
of incoherent babbling.
On one side are the dwindling numbers of die-hard loyalists to
President George
W. Bush, those who support his actions and decisions without question
and
remain committed to both Bush and scandal-scarred political advisor
Karl Rove.
On the other side are the increasing numbers of those who say Rove must
go and
who worry about the President's declining mental state and his ability
to
restore credibility with Congress, our foreign allies and the American
people.
The war erupted into full-blown shout fests at
White House staff members say the White House is like a wartime bunker
where
shell-shocked aides hide from those who disagree with their actions and
office
pools speculate on how long certain senior aides will last.
Bush, whose obscenity-laced temper tantrums increase with each new
setback and
scandal, abruptly ended one
Senior aides describe Bush as increasingly edgy or nervous or
unfocused. They
say the President goes from apparent coherent thought one moment to
aimless
rambles about political enemies and those who are out to get me.
Its worse than the days when Ronald Reagans Alzheimers
began setting
in, one longtime GOP operative told me privately this week. You dont know if hes
going to be
coherent from one moment to the next. What scares me is if he lapses
into one
of those fogs during a public appearance.
Aides say Bush, who has always had trouble focusing during times of
stress, is
increasingly distant during meetings, often staring off into space
during
discussions on the nations security and
other issues.
Card has responded to the crisis by cutting back on the number of staff
members
with direct access to the President and jumping in to answer questions
when Bushs mind wanders.
Some people say Karl Rove is Bushs brain,
says one
increasingly-concerned West Winger. Well Andy has become the Presidents
voice. Hes there to speak when the
President seems unable to find
form an answer.
Bushs mental state is a hot topic on
Internet blogs and has increased since
this web site disclosed last
year that the White House physician had placed the President on
anti-depressant
medication a story the administration never denied. Others, including
prominent
psychiatrists like Dr. Justin Frank of
An increasing number of mainstream media outlets, including Newsweek, The
Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he
knows
they can take it, the Daily News reported. Lately, however, some junior
staffers also have faced the bosss wrath.
This is not some manager at McDonalds chewing out the help," a source
with
close ties to the White House told the paper. This is the president of
the
Bush loyalists claim the President can survive his current spate of
political
troubles and emerge stronger than ever but an increasing number of
White House
aides express increasing doubt. Some even go so far as to speculate if
the
Presidents deteriorating mental condition can survive another three
years in
office.
The President has lost his focus, his ability to govern and the trust
of the
American people, says one longtime GOP operative. Those are things that
are
difficult to recapture when youre on top
of your game
and this President has taken one too many blows to the head.
3)
Bigger
than
Watergate
By Ted Rall
Yahoo News
Tuesday 01 November 2005
Bush-Cheney traitors
deserve prison,
impeachment.
Urbana, Illinois - To weigh the outing of CIA
agent
Valerie Plame against historical
standards, consider
that no leader of the Soviet Union-including that master of
ruthlessness, Josef
Stalin-ever arranged for the name of a KGB operative to appear in a
newspaper. Adolf Hitler had countless
millions murdered, yet getting
at a political enemy by endangering agents of the Sicherheitsdienst,
the Nazi intelligence service, didn't cross his mind. In this respect,
not even
the worst tyrants have stooped to the level of George W. Bush.
Don't let the Republicans distract you. Treasongate
isn't just about deposed vice presidential chief of staff Scooter
Libby, who
has been charged with five felony counts and faces 30 years in prison,
or even
deputy presidential chief of staff Karl Rove, who may soon be charged
as well.
The Libby charges clearly point to the real culprit: Dick Cheney, who
told
Libby about Plame's covert status in the
first place.
Cheney abused his security clearance to find out. "Libby understood
that
the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," reads
page five of the indictment.
"Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a
political problem," a White House official told the New York Times. For now.
The stink on Karl Rove rubbed off on his boss. When Treasongate first broke in 2003, Bush promised
to get to
the bottom of the Plame leak and fire
everyone
involved. Now we know that he is the bottom of the cover-up. "An angry
President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for
his
role in the Valerie Plame affair,"
reported the
New York Daily News, which owns the story of this scandal, in an
account the
White House tacitly confirmed with a meaningful inside-the-Beltway
no-comment:
silence = truth. "A second well-placed source said some recently
published
reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the
Wilson
counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides
trying to
protect the President," says the News.
An earlier News report revealed a secret White House
Iraq
Group (WHIG) that "morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at
critics who questioned its claims [that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and
biochemical weapons]" from late 2002 to mid-2003. WHIG's
members included Rove, Libby, and disgraced Times reporter/Bush
stenographer
Judith Miller.
"In our system," Bush reminded, "each
individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair
trial." Unlike the thousands of people Bush tossed into prison after
9/11-without charges or access to a lawyer-Libby is a rich guy with
pale skin.
He gets to confront his accusers.
Democrats, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
as
usual, say they'll settle for an apology. The media is equally
accommodating.
"The
Much, much worse.
Watergate became the umbrella term for several
scandals:
"dirty tricks," including money laundering and the burglary of
Democratic headquarters, to steal the 1972 election in favor of Richard
Nixon;
illegal wiretaps and break-ins used to silence and smear anti-Nixon
critics
like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers; and the cover-up
symbolized by the erasure of 18 crucial minutes from a subpoenaed tape.
Together these crimes painted a portrait of a
lawless
president with advisers indistinguishable from gangsters. Nixon was a
cheat, a
thief, a liar and an all-around scuzball,
and
Congress was right to initiate impeachment
against
him. But, bad as he was, Nixon didn't jeopardize national security for
political revenge.
Treasongate includes
many of the
essential components of Watergate: smearing opponents of the Iraq war
and their
loved ones, financial shenanigans and a cover-up. Actually it was a
cover-up of
a cover-up; they lied about trashing Plame,
who they
targeted because her husband revealed their lies about Iraqi WMDs. Outing a CIA agent is the rancid cherry on
top of a
triple-dip blob of corruption. You can bet there's more to come.
Trust us, they ask. We're incompetent, not evil.
That's
their defense.
"One can believe that the neocons
are utterly wrong without also assuming that they are evil," Nicholas Kristof argues in a Times op-ed. But people
willing to lie their country into war and
stab the people who protect
it in the back-if we're to believe them, by not bothering to check Plame's status-are evil.
It's like a case of vehicular homicide: Did Bush and
his
goons hit Plame on purpose or was it an
accident?
Either way, I want them off the road.
4)
By Scott Shane
The
Monday 31 October 2005
Washington - The
National Security Agency has kept secret since
The historian's conclusion is the first serious
accusation
that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive
eavesdropping and
code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if
North
Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days
after a
previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack
to
persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in
The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok,
found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered
intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded
him that midlevel agency officers had
deliberately skewed the
evidence.
Mr. Hanyok concluded
that they had
done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors,
and
that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about
nor
condoned the deception.
Mr. Hanyok's findings
were
published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and
starting
in 2002 he and other government historians
argued that
it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level
agency
policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt
uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify
the war
in
Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has
discussed
Mr. Hanyok's Tonkin Gulf research with
current and
former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it, said he had
decided to
speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have
been
released long ago.
"This material is relevant to debates we as
Americans
are having about the war in
Mr. Aid's description of Mr. Hanyok's
findings was confirmed by the intelligence official, who spoke on
condition of
anonymity because the research has not been made public.
Both men said Mr. Hanyok
believed
the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was
probably an
honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.'s
archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the
error
almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that
they
appeared to provide evidence of an attack.
"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they
helped launch the
Asked about Mr. Hanyok's
research,
an N.S.A. spokesman said the agency intended to release his 2001
article in
late November. The spokesman, Don Weber, said the release had been
"delayed in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of
providing the public a more contextual perspective."
Mr. Weber said the agency was working to declassify
not only
Mr. Hanyok's article, but also the
original
intercepts and other raw material for his work, so the public could
better
assess his conclusions.
The intelligence official gave a different account.
He said
N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a
400-page,
in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called "Spartans in
Darkness." Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing
it,
the idea lost momentum as
Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence
officials
the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though
neither he
nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue
was
discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency's. director
until last
summer and is now the principal deputy director of national
intelligence,
referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had
no
further information.
Many historians believe that even without the
But Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary
played a
central role in the
"I think it's wrong to believe that Johnson wanted
war," Mr. McNamara said. "But we thought we had evidence that
Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that
the
intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of
a North
Vietnamese attack.
"That really is surprising to me," said Mr.
McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had
unknowingly used
the altered intercepts in 1964 and
The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the
American
destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history.
Johnson
responded by ordering retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese
targets and
used the event to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution on
Aug. 7, 1964.
It authorized the president "to take all necessary
steps, including the use of armed force," to defend
Not all the details of Mr. Hanyok's
analysis, published in N.S.A.'s Cryptologic
Quarterly in early 2001, could be learned. But they involved
discrepancies
between the official N.S.A. version of the events of Aug. 4, 1964, and
intercepts from N.S.A. listening posts at Phu
Bai in South Vietnam and San Miguel in the
Philippines that
are in the agency archives.
One issue, for example, was the translation of a
phrase in
an Aug. 4 North Vietnamese transmission. In some documents the phrase,
"we
sacrificed two comrades" - an apparent reference to casualties during
the
clash with American ships on Aug. 2 - was incorrectly translated as "we
sacrificed two ships." That phrase was used to suggest that the North
Vietnamese were reporting the loss of ships in a new battle Aug. 4, the
intelligence official said.
The original Vietnamese version of that intercept,
unlike
many other intercepts from the same period, is missing from the
agency's
archives, the official said.
The intelligence official said the evidence for
deliberate
falsification is "about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun -
you can come to no other conclusion."
Despite its well-deserved reputation for secrecy,
the N.S.A.
in recent years has made public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A study by Mr. Hanyok
on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, titled "Eavesdropping on
Hell," was published last year.
Two historians who have written extensively on the
Tonkin
Gulf episode, Edwin E. Moise of Clemson
University
and John Prados of the National Security
Archive in
Washington, said they were unaware of Mr. Hanyok's
work but found his reported findings intriguing.
"I'm surprised at the notion of deliberate deception
at
N.S.A.," Dr. Moise said. "But I get
surprised a lot."
Dr. Prados said, "If
Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it
adds to the tragic
aspect of the Vietnam War." In addition, he said, "it's
new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail,
turns out
to be not that at all, just as in
*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble
III
http://www.ceimsa.org/