Dan Rather's "get along, go along" obsequiousness to CBS management led to his disgraceful exit from journalism....

IN our previous report, we highlighted Dan Rather's comments that American democracy can not endure not having an independent and aggressive press-media to provide a "watchdog" function against government and powerful private interests.
In that report, we suggested that Mr. Rather himself had been part of the problem, not noticing, or failing to aggressively investigate, the widespread reports of then Texas Governor George W. Bush's less than stellar record of duty in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s during the Vietnam war. The fact that the press and media did not RUSH to cover the "Bush AWOL during Vietnam war?" story in the summer of 2000 indicates just how lazy and complacent the media had become after almost a decade of Clinton-bashing, when all it took to start a cable 'news' show, or have your name as the by-line under a blaring front page headline, was to get the latest salacious "DID SHE OR DIDN'T SHE?" leaked Grand Jury tidbits from federal prosecutor Ken Starr (about the 'Monica scandal'), or any of five dozen other Republican leaders or partisan writers calling for the impeachment of then President Clinton based on various alleged scandals and accusations, many of which were hyped ("China satellite 'scandal'!") and many of which were false scandals created entirely out of thin air, as for example the "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!" or the "White House TRASHING 'SCANDAL'!" the later of which had NOT ONE SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH to corroborate WEEK'S worth of accusatory headlines from the incoming Bush administration press department (Ari Fleischer, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove), and the former of which ("Lincoln bedroom scandal") was ridiculous back then, much less today when the Vice President refuses to detail who even visits the VP mansion - with narry a peep of outrage and concern from the very press-media folks who were so indignant about those faux Clinton 'scandals.'

Today, investigative reporter GREGG PALAST adds another chapter of the "Dan Rather: TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE for his own good" story. Palast reports on how Rather buckled to CBS management in 2004, disavowing his own reporting. It should be noted, that Rather had previously gotten on the first President Bush's bad side, Rather trying a "gotcha" question on the senior Bush, only to have then President Bush refuse to answer the question, and instead Bush went vengeful, attacking Rather's veracity and integrity in asking the question.

It looks like, not once, but TWICE in his career Dan Rather has been STYMIED if not sidelined (and driven out of business altogether) by the Bush family. Too bad Mr. Rather didn't stick up for himself earlier: 7,000 Americans killed (in Iraq war and 9-11 attacks), and thousands more wounded, might still be alive, whole, and well today if he had.

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DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSEDPublished September 24th, 2007
by Greg Palast
Monday September 24, 2007
http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-rather-tased-and-confused/

The Still-Unreported Story of “Top Gun” George Bush



New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush’s approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.

But CBS caved. So did Dan.

That’s according to Rather’s written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was “enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration.” Viacom then set out to, “divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House….”

Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord’s voice, admits he then “refrained from defending” the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that “his contract would be extended.”

Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.

Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn’t live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that’s what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.

The Story Still Not Reported

By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of ‘Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.

No, I won’t give you his name. I don’t expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That’s another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.

And there’s more. More that Dan didn’t report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state’s Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.

This is a devastating accusation. And one that’s more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid’s vile use of daddy’s connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.

US Reporting: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn’t stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):

“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”

This is what’s so frustrating about Dan Rather. He’s two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only “narrated” the draft dodge story. For shame.

But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn’t alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, “Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?”

[For the record, BBC did ask for the President’s denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan’s CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan’s story, “ignored information that cast doubt” on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan’s story false. He never produced it.]

The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew’s impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.

Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: “Wear a grounding wire.”) But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don’t want to hear when they don’t want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.

Seeing Andrew’s arrest and Dan’s complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don’t.

******************

Greg Palast is the author of “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Penguin 2007).

Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com, check out the whole story in the documentary Bush Family Fortunes support the Palast Investigative Fund here.

Dan Rather: DEMOCRACY CAN NOT SURVIVE in America if government and corporations CONTROL the news....

DAN RATHER HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD: Democracy CAN NOT SURVIVE in America, when EVERY MAJOR "news" OUTLET is CONTROLLED by large corporations working closely with the government, in order to secure corporate goodies - tax cuts, license for consolidation, access to government sources - to broadcast's the government's choosen narrative.

The text-book example, of course, is Adolf Hitler whipping the German population into a frenzy to "DEFEND GERMANY!" even when "Defending Germany" meant attacking hapless Poland or Germany's other hapless neighbors.

Dan Rather is correct today.... but he was part of the problem. Mr. Rather and CBS ran their "George W. Bush went AWOL (absent without leave) from the Texas Air National Guard, during the Vietnam war" story in 2002 - TWO YEARS AFTER Mr. Bush had become president.

Rather and CBS _SHOULD_ have run the story in 2000.... when many (if not millions) of Americans believed the bought-and-paid-for Bush campaign narrative that then Texas Governor Bush was a "STRAIGHT SHOOTER."

IF Mr. Rather and CBS had done their job in 2000 instead of 2002, much of the totalitarian government-corporate nightmare that Mr. Rather correctly details in his comments (article below) would be greatly reduced today, as President Al Gore would be finishing the 2nd of his two terms, undoubtably under a constant barrage of vocal and coordinated, billionaire oil-baron think-tank (corporate) funded Republican criticism.

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Rather Decries Corporate Control Of News
Ex-CBS Anchor Says Government And Corporate Influence Over Newsrooms Spurred Lawsuit
By CBS, New York, Sept. 21, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/21/business/main3284810.shtml

(AP) Former network news anchor Dan Rather says the undue influence of the government and large corporations over newsrooms spurred his decision to file a $70 million lawsuit against the CBS TV network and its former parent company.

"Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live."

In the suit, filed a day earlier in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather claimed CBS and Viacom Inc. used him as a "scapegoat" and intentionally botched the aftermath of a discredited story about President George W. Bush's military service to curry favor with the White House. He was removed from his "CBS Evening News" post in March 2005.

"They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News," he told King.

Rather did not mention other instances in which he believed news organizations bowed to corporate and government pressure.

CBS spokesman Dana McClintock did not return an after-hours call seeking comment Thursday. He has called Rather's complaints "old news" and said the lawsuit was "without merit." A spokesman for Viacom declined to comment.

Journalism ethics scholar Bob Steele said Rather would have a difficult time proving that the White House or other political operatives exerted undue influence on CBS.

"It would be naive for us to believe that there was no influence from powerful institutions and individuals on journalism," said Steele, a scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism foundation in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Still, he said: "For the most part, the journalists who run news organizations and who report the news fight hard to protect the independence of the journalism, and most of the time succeed."

Rather narrated the September 2004 report that said Mr. Bush disobeyed orders and shirked some of his duties during his National Guard service. It also said a commander felt pressured to sugarcoat Mr. Bush's record.

The story relied on four documents, supposedly written by Mr. Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Critics questioned the documents' authenticity and suggested they were forged.

A panel selected by the network to investigate the story determined that it was neither fair nor accurate. CBS fired the story's producer and asked for the resignations of three executives because it could not authenticate documents used in the story. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair he had occupied for 24 years.

On CNN, Rather dismissed the panel's review, claiming it was not impartial.

"This was in many ways a fraud. It was a setup," he told King.

Louis D. Boccardi, the retired chief executive of The Associated Press who made up the two-man investigative panel with Richard Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general, defended the panel's work Thursday night.

"Our report was independent, and it speaks for itself," he said, echoing comments made by Thornburgh on Wednesday. Both declined to comment further.

Dan Rathr SUES CBS for $70 million for bowing to White House, QUASHING Rather's "Bush AWOL from Texas ANG during Vietnam war" story...

YOU GO, DAN! YOU WERE SCAPEGOATED, CBS _DID_ bow to White House pressure to fire you and kill the story, and your reputation HAS been trashed by the corporate media bosees who take it as their license to LIE to, CHEAT and STEAL from the AMERICAN public.

BUT the lesson here, Mr. Rather, is TIMING: YOU SHOULD HAVE RUN THE NVESTIGATION on George W. Bush's AWOL - ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE, bordering on DESERTION IN TIME OF WAR from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War story DURING ELECTION SUMMER 2000, NOT after Mr. Bush had the power and influence of the White House - the unholy combination of corporate billions and federal government power and billions - behind him.

Specifically, then Texas ANG Lt. George W. Bush NEVER REPORTED FOR DUTY at the Alabama ANG airbase he had been assigned to as a means of getting him out of Texas in 1971, so as to avoid a COURT MARTIAL that would have greatly embarrassed his Republican Congressman and oil business father, (future Republican National Committtee Chair, future CIA Director, future Vice President, and future President George H.W.Bush (Sr.).
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Rather Sues CBS, Saying It Made Him a ‘Scapegoat’
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: September 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/business/media/19cnd-rather.html

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

TV Decoder Blog: Rather Charges That CBS Wanted to ‘Curry Favor’ With White House
Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”

The suit, which seeks $70 million in damages, names as defendants CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

He also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush, as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.

In a statement CBS said, "These complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit." Mr. Heyward said he would not comment beyond the CBS statement. A Viacom spokesman said he had no comment.

For both Mr. Rather and CBS, the filing of the suit threatens to once again focus attention on one of the darker chapters in the history of the network and its storied news division, at a moment when it is already reeling. Mr. Rather’s permanent successor as evening news anchor, Katie Couric, has languished in third place in the network news ratings since taking over the broadcast a year ago, behind not only Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC, but also the ratings performance of the “CBS Evening News” in Mr. Rather’s final years.

The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, seemingly fearless anchor who for two decades shared the stage with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as the most watched and recognizable journalists in America.

By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS — and later the outside panel it commissioned — concluded that the report was based on documents that could not be authenticated. Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

He now leads a weekly news program on HDNet — an obscure cable channel in which he is seen by only a small fraction of the millions of viewers who once turned to him in his heyday to receive the news of the day.

In filing his suit now — three years after the now-disputed report was first broadcast, and more than a year after he reluctantly left CBS, as his last contract wound down — Mr. Rather is following, by a matter of weeks, the announcement by CBS that it had settled a similar lawsuit by Don Imus.

Mr. Imus had sued CBS over his firing in the aftermath of derogatory remarks he made about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. While some Imus associates suggested last month that his final payment was at least $20 million, CBS Radio has characterized that figure as too high.

Mr. Rather’s suit seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

Among the pivotal points of contention in Mr. Rather’s suit are the definitions of the words “full-time” and “regular.” As quoted in the filing, Mr. Rather’s contract — which he signed in 2002, and which called for him to be paid a base salary of $6 million a year as anchor — entitled him to a job as a “full-time correspondent” with “first billing” on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes,” should he leave the anchor chair before March 2006, his 25th anniversary in the job.

As it turned out, Mr. Rather would leave the anchor chair a year early, and would indeed be reassigned to the midweek edition, known as “60 Minutes II.” When that broadcast was canceled a few months later, Mr. Rather’s contract called for him to be reassigned to the main “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday evening, where he would “perform services on a regular basis as a correspondent.”

Over the next year, Mr. Rather would have eight segments broadcast on the main “60 Minutes” — including reports that took him to North Korea, China and Beirut. While that would seem to be a substantial portfolio of work, Mr. Rather notes that other correspondents had more than twice as many reports appear on the program during the same period, and that several of his reports had been effectively buried, broadcast on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day when far fewer people than usual were likely to tune in.

“He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the filing contends.

Among the most egregious indignities he suffered, Mr. Rather says, was the network’s response to his request to be sent as a correspondent to the scene of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005.

“Mr. Rather is the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes,” his lawyers write in the suit. “CBS refused to send him,” thus “furthering its desire to keep Mr. Rather off the air.”

"FREEDOM" and "DEMOCRACY" in America: UF student TASERED for ASKING TOUGH QUESTIONS the MEDIA WHORES are too cowardly to ask...

Massachusetts Senator, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate JOHN KERRY does NOTHING as campus police ARREST and HAUL AWAY a student asking Kerry tough but legitimate questions in a Monday, September 17 2007 Town Hall meeting with students at the University of Florida. Watching the video, it is clear that the student is INTERRUPTED BY THE POLICE at 35 seconds - THIRTY-FIVE SECONDS - into his questions of Senator Kerry. And.. the police officer tries to INTERRUPT that student exactly when he mentions "DISENFRANCHISED BLACK VOTERS," asking Senator Kerry why Kerry conceded election 2004 so quickly when there were widespread reports of Black voter disenfranchisement, even though Kerry had pledged all through his lackluster campaign "I won't stop fighting to count your votes, until the last vote has been counted!"
University Florida Journalism/Communications student ANDREW MEYER had waited through two hours of Kerry's speech to get an opportunity to ask Senator Kerry some REAL questions, and prefaced his questons to Kerry with a passsionate (loud) exposition that according to Gregg Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse" Kerry had WON election 2004, but for systematic, massive, and chronic disenfranchisement of legal minority votes. But merely 35 seconds in to his questioning, he is interrupted. Becoming more agitated, he continued to say that he had two more questions: Did Senator Kerry belong to the same "Skull and Bones" secretive fraternity that President Bush belonged to?" (The proper question to Kerry would have been "Did your membership in the same fraternity with the president somehow minimize your campaign's opposition function to the president's otherwise abysmal record?") The student's third question to Senator Kerry was "if you are so oppposed to the possible US invasion of Iran, why are you not now advocating the IMPEACHMENT of President Bush now, BEFORE he starts a third, wider war?"
THESE are QUESTIONS the US media corporate meda GLOSSES OVER, INGORES, and WHITEWASH.

Senator Kerry took Democratic donor's money in 2004, PROMISED TO FIGHT TO HAVE VOTES COUNTED, then treacherously and cowardly CONCEDED THE ELECTION IMMEDIATELY.

And now, America, "the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" is a nation where FIVE COWARDLY POLICE OFFICERS _TASER_ a single student, FOUR TIMES, for asking the quesions the MEDIA WHORES are TOO COWARDLY to ask.

NY Times War-pimp TOM FRIEDMAN auditions for the "Stupidest, most inane, most ghoulish Neo-Con" video....

ANOTHER post documenting ANOTHER journalistic ATROCITY of the New York Times!

In this case, their 'star' op-ed columnist and author, telling Iraq and the world to (literally, from Mr. Freidman's comments!) "SUCK ON THIS" !!

NEW YORK TIMES, Mr. Arthur Sulzberger... because of your entire decade of GROSSLY ATROCIOUS "reporting," on FAKE scandals from "Travel-office-gate" to "Lincoln bedroom" to "Hillary stole White House furniture" to "White House Trashing" to "Al Gore is a serial liar" to "IRAQ HAS WMDs!" - you are now the very embodiement of the ABJECT DISGRACE and slavish devotion to the corporatcracy military-industrial-complex imperialist-unilateral-aggression cheerleaders that American 'journalism' has degenerated to.

This video of "expert" commentator, author, and text-book Neo-Con war cheerleader THOMAS FRIEDMAN telling the people of Iraq "We (Americans) ATTACKED YOU because YOU WERE THE WEAKEST TARGET, and we needed to 'even the balance' [by attacking some country somewhere in the Mideast]" is just about the most despicable comment any neo-con has yet put to paper or video, in a field of champion ghouls, liars, and pasty-faced Chickenhawks who cheer, clap, and applaud every time an errant US bomb wipes out a wedding party.

And as one YouTube commenter posted, BOGGING DOWN THE ENTIRE US MILITARY in a war of grinding attrition, where a teenage street punk with a grenade or command-detonation mine ("IED"), paid $50 by his local guerrilla leaders, is ABLE TO TAKE OUT A TRAINED and equipped US infantryman (or entire Humvee squad), is committing that CLASSIC MILITARY MISTAKE of committing a small professional army to a large Asian land war - of making the enemies soldiers 1,000 times more potent than they were before the US invasion.

Chickenhawk Neo-con Cowards of DC press corps (Washington Post) advocate more war... and SLASHING Veteran Rehab funding!

THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! The curse of the ALWAYS WRONG neo-cons, banging the drums of the DC presses for WARS OF CONQUEST, INVASION, AGGRESSION, and CORRUPT neo-con sponsored OCCUPATIONS, are at it again. (Not that they ever stopped promoting expanding wars in the Middle East.)

The WASHINGTON POST, FOX 'news,' and DC press-corps Chickenhawk COWARDS, who always SUPPORT new American wars but never put their own bodies (or their children) on the firing line, are not only championing and supporting the escalating destruction and death toll of the Bush-Cheney (Iraq) war, but are now... working to eliminate Senator James Webb's bill to provide recovery time at home in America for troops who have spent extended time in Iraq, coupled with better rehabilitation and mental healthy services to those returning, war traumatized troops.

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American war culture in a nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald
Saturday September 15, 2007

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/15/war_culture/index.html


Jim Webb is a combat veteran and a war hero. His family has a long tradition of volunteering for military service, and his son, until several months ago, was deployed in Iraq. Sen. Webb wants to relieve a small portion of the shattering strain on our troops through legislation "requiring that active-duty troops and units have at least equal time at home as the length of their previous tour overseas." As Webb put it:

"Now in the fifth year of ground operations in Iraq, this deck of cards has come crashing down on the backs of soldiers and Marines who have been deployed again and again, while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise. . . .

Troops currently face extended deployments with insufficient "dwell time" to rest with families and friends, retrain, and re-equip before they are redeployed. The effects have been seen in rising mental health problems among service members serving multiple tours and falling retention rates for mid-grade officers and non-commissioned officers."

FRED KAGAN, along with his writing partner BILL KRISTOL, specializes in planning and advocating more wars, always from afar. His family has a tradition of doing the same. His dad, whose career he has copied, is Donald Kagan, whom The Washington Post described as "a beloved father figure of the ascendant neoconservative movement." Several years ago, Fred co-wrote a book with his dad arguing that America is too afraid to fight wars and "that it will be in the world's ultimate interest for the United States to remain militarily strong and unafraid of a fight." Neither has ever fought anything.

Donald's other son -- Fred's brother -- is ROBERT, who founded [the] PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY with Bill Kristol and is a fanatical, resolute supporter of the Iraq War (from the pages of The Washington Post).
Fred's wife, Kimberly Kagan, regularly types about how great the Iraq War is in The Weekly Standard and other places. None has any military service. They have no need for the troop relief provided by the Webb bill (which Fred opposes) because they are already all sitting at home.

Fred Kagan yesterday went to National Review -- home to countless tough guy warriors like him who fight nothing -- to argue against Senator Webb's bill. There is no need to give our troops more time away from the battlefield, Kagan types. Besides, doing that would be too administratively difficult ("this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home").

If troops want more time at home, Kagan says, there is an easy way to achieve that: "win the war we're fighting." Of course, that would not even work, because Kagan and his friends at the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute have many more wars planned beyond Iraq for other families' sons and daughters to fight. For that reason, Kagan actually had the audacity several months ago to type this:

The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.
That's the history of our country for the last six years at least. The Fred Kagans and his dad and his brother and his wife and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars -- all "as an intellectual or emotional exercise," as Webb put it.

That's all revolting enough. But to then watch Fred Kagan sit around opposing Senator Webb's attempts to relieve some of the strain on our troops -- all because it would require too much paperwork to figure out and because they haven't yet won Fred Kagan's war and thus deserve no breaks -- is almost too much to bear. But it is worth forcing oneself to observe it, as unpleasant as it might be, because within this ugly dynamic lies much of the explanation for what has happened to our country since the 9/11 attack, and the personality type that continues to drive it today.

Jewish Owned New York Times led the march to hell in Iraq.. now tries to blame conduct of war on Democrats....

The Jewish-owned New York Times, alone, which wrote this article, is one of the most strident "MORE WAR, NOW!" organizations in America. They led the 8 year media campaign (white-collar lynching) to lynch President Clinton with their entirely atrocious "Whitewater" 'reporting' and slavish devotion to Ken Starr's "Monica" leaked Grand Jury testimony. After the impeachment they then seamlessly shifted to portraying Al Gore as a serial liar while neglecting to cover the failures, lies, corruption, and budget deficits of Texas Governor George W. Bush. The NY Times then helped the Republicans SUPPRESS the story of Stolen Election 2000. They then helped the Bush Administration whitewash the gross Dereliction of Duty that allowed 9-11 to happen WITHOUT ONE SINGLE MEASURE TAKEN to prevent or deter a hijacking; and then, of course, the NEW YORK TIMES _LED_ the press-media march to the Iraq war, with Judith Miller's atrocious LIES about aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, radio control airplanes, and other BOGUS reports about Iraq's alleged WMD program which effectively instilled FEAR in the American public, and forced Congress to OVERLOOK THE BOTCHED HUNT for Osama bin Laden in favor of BOMBING, INVADING, and OCCUPYING IRAQ.

Now, in typical WHORE fashion, the NEW YORK lying TIMES is trying to portray the Democrats as managing the war - a war that would never have come about if not for an entire DECADE OF LIES and GROSSLY CORRUPT 'reporting" by the New York Times.

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Disappointed Democrats Map Withdrawal Strategy
By CARL HULSE
September 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/washington/13policy.htm

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday called the administration’s plan to keep 130,000 or more troops in Iraq through mid-2008 unacceptable and promised to challenge the approach through legislation next week.

Several proposals were being weighed, including one requiring the American military role to be shifted more to training and counterterrorism, in order to reduce the force by more than President Bush is expected to promise on Thursday. Another would guarantee troops longer respites from the battlefield, effectively cutting the numbers available for combat.

Even if those proposals draw the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster — a level that has eluded Democrats this year — any real strictures on the president would face a veto, frustrating war critics and raising the prospect that roughly as many American troops might be in Iraq a year from now as were there a year ago.

Still, the Democrats tried to get ahead of President Bush’s planned speech on Iraq on Thursday night, and to press what they see as a political advantage in opposing the war in the months before the 2008 elections.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and two party leaders on military issues accused Mr. Bush of embracing “more of the same” and of trying to pass off a routine troop reduction as a significant shift in policy.

“That is unacceptable to me, it is unacceptable to the American people,” said Mr. Reid, who was flanked by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate.

Democratic presidential contenders also assailed the administration’s plan.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois called for the withdrawal of one or two combat brigades a month, starting immediately.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said taking credit for the force reductions that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, was recommending, and that Mr. Bush appeared ready to accept, was “like taking credit for the sun coming up in the morning.”

With Democrats intensifying their attacks on the strategy outlined this week by General Petraeus, the administration is setting in motion its plans with a prime-time speech by the president on Thursday, a subsequent visit to a military base and continued appearances by General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Baghdad.

At a news conference on Wednesday, General Petraeus reiterated that he was unwilling to commit to troop cuts beyond a five-brigade reduction by mid-July, a level he described as prudent. There are 20 combat brigades in Iraq.

He also took issue with claims that such a reduction would not be significantly faster than what had already been scheduled. Combat forces in Iraq serve up to 15-month tours. Under that limit, part of the Pentagon’s broad effort to lessen the strains on the military, General Petraeus would not have had to pull out any combat units until April, instead of removing the first brigades in mid-December, he said.

“We are coming out quicker than we had to,” he said.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, in his last news briefing before leaving the job, rejected Democrats’ complaints that the administration’s plan was simply a return to the level that existed before more than 30,000 additional troops were sent into Iraq this year, a buildup that the administration pointedly referred to as a surge, suggesting its temporary nature.

“It’s a different country,” said Mr. Snow of Iraq. “You have the ability to reduce the numbers because there have been changes that reduced the necessity of American involvement.”

Senator Reid would not provide details of the legislative proposals that Democrats will pursue. But Mr. Levin and Mr. Reed have been working with some Republicans on a measure that would focus the military mission on counterterrorism, training Iraqis and protecting forces already there — a switch intended to allow large numbers of combat troops to be withdrawn by next spring.

“We have to go ahead and recognize the strain on the military forces and give them the tasks that they can do so well,” said Mr. Reed, a former Army captain, “but within the capability of their resources and the best interests of the United States.”

They have been exploring the idea of making the withdrawal more of an objective than a requirement in order to attract Republican votes, but that approach could cause defections by Democrats.

Democrats have been picking up new Republican support for a measure that requires troops to spend at least the same amount of time at their home bases as they did in Iraq before returning — a requirement that could reduce troop numbers because the Pentagon would not have as many eligible for deployment.

“I think that might be a good way to accelerate a troop reduction,” said Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, who noted that it was also popular with strained military families.

That measure attracted 56 votes this summer, and some Republicans who opposed it then, including George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, have expressed new interest. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Wednesday that he was considering the proposal, and Democrats were also trying to persuade Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska.

Mr. Reid said Democrats also planned to vote on more aggressive legislative challenges to the war, which could help appease critics who are demanding that Democrats take tougher action.

Democrats say they may also be more willing to try to attach conditions to coming Pentagon spending requests. (Democrats have been reluctant to limit money for the war unilaterally.) “I think the American people are getting tired of sending the money with no end in sight,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

The struggle to settle on a party alternative illustrates the problems Democrats are having finding a way to take on the president that unites their party and avoids criticism that they are weak on national security.

As Democrats huddled Wednesday to prepare for the floor debate, a group of leading House Republicans arrived in Iraq to demonstrate their backing for the president. The lawmakers, led by Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, had been in Iraq less than five hours, but in a conference call with reporters they said their initial briefings had already confirmed improvements.

“Clearly what’s happened over the last three months has been real success,” said Mr. Boehner, who previously visited Iraq in July 2006.

In an interview on “The Today Show” on Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said stabilizing Iraq was part of “a long process of dealing with what the president called a long time ago a generational challenge to our security brought on by extremism, coming principally out of the Middle East.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said Ms. Rice’s comment represented an acknowledgment that the United States would be engaged in Iraq for “years to come.”

“We need a new direction that redeploys our troops from Iraq, rebuilds our military and refocuses on fighting terrorism across the world,” Ms. Pelosi said.

David M. Herszenhorn and David S. Cloud contributed reporting.

Press, media, and papers TENDING CONSERVATIVE: Media Matters Study...

http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/american-papers-skewing-conservative-trib-writer-says-yup-its-good-business/

Bush brother Neil making thousands off of federal education contracts, with NO contract qualifications....

CREW to Department of Education: Investigate why "No Child Left Behind" funds are being spent on Neil Bush's company
Submitted by crew on 12 September 2007
http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/30104

Dept. of Education Ignite Neil Bush No Child Left Behind
Congress in the midst of debating legislation to re-authorize the controversial "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) program. A three-month long investigation by CREW raises serious questions about the use of NCLB funds to pay for products sold by Neil Bush, the younger brother of President George Bush.

CREW is requesting that the Department of Education’s Inspector General (IG) investigate why federal NCLB funds are being spent on educational products sold by Ignite! Learning, a company founded and headed by Neil Bush. Our letter to the IG can be found here.

Neil Bush, who has no education background, is best known for his role in the failure of Silverado Savings and Loan, which cost taxpayers $1.6 billion. CREW is asking the IG to discover why federal money is being funneled to a company with no proven track record of effectiveness, but so happens to be run by the president’s brother.

Congress has set rigorous standards for the types of educational approaches and products on which NCLB funds can be spent, but CREW’s research shows that Ignite! products do not meet those criteria. In fact, there is no scientific data, as defined by NCLB, supporting the effectiveness of Ignite!’s products.

CREW’s three-month investigation revealed that school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, including NCLB funds, on Ignite!’s Curriculum on Wheels (COW), a cart-mounted video projector and hard drive loaded with a year’s supply of Ignite!’s social studies, science, or math curricula. At a standard price of $3,800-$4,200 per unit, the COW is a very expensive device with limited use. A recent New York Times article about the use of the COW in Spotsylvania, Virginia, put the cost into perspective: each school in the district receives $1,000 "to cover all the lab supplies, equipment and other expenses connected with science for an entire year." Adding to the initial expense, schools must pay an annual $1,000 licensing, upkeep and upgrade fee in order to retain the COW for more than one year.

When we sent the letter to the Inspector General, Melanie Sloan issued this statement:

It is astonishing that taxpayer dollars are being spent on unproven educational products to the financial benefit of the president’s brother. The IG should investigate whether children’s educations are being sacrificed so that Neil Bush can rake in federal funds.

If Ignite! is to continue receiving NCLB funding, its products must be held to NCLB’s stringent standards. With the education of our nation’s students at stake, we hope that the IG spearheads an audit immediately.

Media Whores as "PONTIUS PILOT" - washing their hands of the BLOOD their LIES and TRANSCRIPTION "reporting" have wrought on America....

Cut through Arianna's prose, and the facts are: The DC press corps, except for individuals like Helen Thomas, are hired stenographers and palace courtiers, whose job is to enrich and ensure their paychecks by touting the party line: by LYING TO READERS and the public. The horrific DC press corpse couldn't ask a tough string of follow-up questions if their live depended on it.

(Lawrence Korb specifically refutes the "SURGE IS WORKING!" meme that the DC press corps is so obedienty trumpetting for the White House:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-korb/#blogger_bio
==================================
Denying the Truth: Petraeus, Iraq, and Our Pontius Pilate Press
by Arianna Huffington
September 10, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/denying-the-truth-petrae_b_63799.html

Like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility, too many in the Washington press corps want to pretend they are leaving the question of "what is truth" to their readers -- refusing to admit that there is even such a thing as truth. It is particularly troubling that so many in a profession dedicated to the idea that there is a truth to be ferreted out -- and that the public has a right to know it -- remain so resolutely committed to presenting two sides to every story -- even when the facts are solidly on one side.

Progress in Iraq is actually something that can be measured. Last week's report from the Government Accountability Office did such measuring. That's why it was immediately attacked by Republicans -- because it pointed out that Iraq was failing to meet 11 of 18 benchmarks.

Media Whores BLACK OUT Iraq news

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200709050002


The Iraq news blackout: how the press spent its summer vacation
by Eric Boehlert

News that Katie Couric would anchor the CBS Evening News from Baghdad this week created a major media splash. After earlier suggesting that type of assignment would be too treacherous for a single mother of two, Couric did an about-face. She stressed that as a journalist she wanted to get a better sense, a firsthand account, of how events were unfolding inside Iraq; to give the story more context.

It's ironic because if CBS had simply aired more reporting from Iraq this summer instead of joining so many other news outlets in walking away from the story, then perhaps Couric wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to find out the facts on the ground.

Couric's high-profile assignment helps underscore the shocking disconnect that has opened up between American news consumers and the mainstream media. The chasm revolves around the fact that public polling indicates consumers are starved for news from Iraq, yet over the summer the mainstream media, and particularly television outlets such as CBS, steadfastly refused to deliver it. The press has walked away from what most Americans claim is the day's most important ongoing news event.

The media's coverage from Iraq has naturally ebbed and flowed over the four-and-a-half years since the invasion. And escalating security concerns in Iraq have made it both more difficult and more expensive for news organization to operate there.

But the pullback we've seen this summer, the chronic dearth of on-the-ground reporting, likely marks a new low of the entire campaign. It's gotten to the point where even monstrous acts of destruction cannot wake the press from its self-induced slumber. Just recall the events of August 14.

That's when witnesses to the four synchronized suicide truck bombs that detonated in northern Iraq on that day described the collective devastation unleashed to being like an earthquake, or even the site of a nuclear bomb explosion; the destruction of one bomb site measured half a mile wide. A U.S. Army spokesman, after surveying the mass carnage from an attack that targeted Yazidis, an ancient religious community, called the event genocidal. Indeed, more than 500 Iraqis were killed, more than 1,500 were wounded, and 400 buildings were destroyed.

The bombings in the towns of Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar marked the deadliest attack of the entire Iraq war. In fact, with a death toll topping 500, the mid-August bombing ranks as the second deadliest terror strike ever recorded in modern times. Only the coordinated attacks on 9-11 have claimed more innocent lives. Yet the press failed to put the story in context.

Early news dispatches about the attacks (which pegged the early death toll at a smaller, but still remarkable, 175) were posted around 6 p.m. ET on August 14. Yet that night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the hour-long news program that airs at 10 p.m., the carnage from Iraq garnered just a brief report, and that was relegated to the "360 Bulletin," halfway through the program; a report on a playground catching on fire due to spontaneous combustion of decomposing wood chips was given slightly more airtime and, unlike the suicide bombings, prompted a reaction from host Cooper himself: "That's incredible. I never heard of that." Less surprising was the fact that a pro-Bush outlet such as The Drudge Report, as late as 10:30 p.m. that night, was ignoring the massive blast headline, or that Fox News gave the gruesome attack just three mentions all evening.

The next day, as noted by the Columbia Journalism Review, the story was placed on A6 in both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and Page 4 of USA Today. On that evening's NBC Nightly News, the historic massacre from Iraq was not even tapped as the day's most important story. (Ongoing mortgage woes led the broadcast that night.)

The media's tepid response to the cataclysmic event was telling. It simply underscored how Iraq fatigue afflicts American newsrooms -- but not American households.

That Americans are obsessed about Iraq is no surprise. Polling has consistently shown they think the war is far and away the single most important issue facing the country. And it wasn't like there was no news happening in Iraq between June and August; the months formed the deadliest summer of the war for U.S. military men and women. To say nothing of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi civilians killed this summer.

Politically, the drastic news withdrawal from Iraq carries deep implications, with the debate about America's role in Iraq due to become even more heated next week as Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies before Congress and the White House produces its report on the status in Iraq. But how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions about this country's future role in Iraq if the mainstream media won't inform the public?

Also, no news from Iraq has usually meant good news for the Bush White House; whenever Iraq has faded from view in recent years, Bush and his policies often received a bump in the polls. For instance, in July, the results from a CBS/New York Times poll raised eyebrows when it found that support for the invasion of Iraq -- which for years had been tumbling -- suddenly experienced an uptick, from 35 to 42 percent.

What's telling is that during the month of July, much of the mainstream media effectively boycotted news from Iraq. Despite sky-high interest among news consumers, stories about the situation in Iraq represented just four percent of the mainstream media's reporting for the month, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index. The index catalogs how much time and space 48 major news outlets devote to various topics each week. The index is broken down by medium: radio, newspapers, online, cable, and network television. (Click here to the see the news outlets monitored by the Coverage Index.)

To put that miniscule 4 percent into perspective: For the month of July, coverage of the fledgling 2008 presidential campaign received nearly three times as much mainstream media news attention as did the unfolding war in Iraq that claimed 79 American lives in July.

In fact, in July Iraq itself rarely ranked among the week's five most-covered stories. And if it weren't for the more robust Iraq reporting that appeared in newspapers and online, events in Iraq probably wouldn't have even ranked among the 10 most-covered stories during the month of July. That's because network and cable television, by contrast, were virtually oblivious to the story.

For instance, over the last seven weeks ABC's Nightline, the network's signature, long-form news program, did not air a single substantive report about Iraq. Not one among the 100-plus news segments the program aired during the stretch was about the situation in Iraq. (That, according to a search of Nightline's transcripts via Nexis.) For instance, on the night after the mammoth suicide bomb blasts in Iraq on August 14, Nightline aired reports about a Mexican stem cell doctor, lullaby singer Lori McKenna, and soccer star David Beckham. That week, Nightline did two separate reports about the earthquake in Peru that killed approximately 500 civilians. But nothing that week from Nightline about the suicide blasts in Iraq that also killed approximately 500 civilians.

Instead of Iraq, here are some of the news stories Nightline staffers devoted time and energy to during that seven-week summer span:

The popularity of organic pet food.
The favorite songs of Pete Wentz, bassist for the pop/rock band Fall Out Boy.
The folding of supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News.
The rise of urban McMansions.
The death of the postcard.
The commercial battle between Barbie and Bratz dolls.
The nerd stars of the movie Superbad.
News consumers remained starved for reports from Iraq

The media's dramatic news withdrawal from Iraq might be justified, on some level, if evidence showed that Americans had grown bored of the war in Iraq. Journalism is a public service but it's also a business and editors and producers are always trying to find the right mix of news that consumers need and news they want to have. If Americans were zoning out Iraq, then why should news outlets try to force-feed updates to news consumers?

But the truth is Americans are borderline obsessed with news from Iraq. And it's the mainstream media that's abdicated their news gathering responsibility.

That stunning disconnect becomes obvious when comparing the PEJ's weekly News Coverage Index with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press' weekly News Interest Index, a survey "aimed at gauging the public's interest in and reaction to major news events." Pew asks 1,000 adults which story in the news they are following "very closely" that week. The two weekly surveys simultaneously gage which stories news consumers are paying very close attention to and which stories news editors and producers are paying close attention to (i.e. which stories they're covering).

As I mentioned, the disconnect is absolutely shocking when it comes to the situation in Iraq, which as a news story consistently ranked near the top of the News Interest Index this summer, while simultaneously ranking near the bottom of the News Coverage Index.

For instance, at the outset of the summer for the work week of June 24-29, 32 percent of adults were following the situation in Iraq "very closely," but the story represented only 4 percent of that week's news hole -- a 28-point gap. That same trend played out all summer, with that gap often ballooning:

PERSISTENCE of MYTH: the "Major Media" EXPLOITS public's tendency to confuse facts and myths....

PERSISTANCE OF MYTH: the public is INHERENTLY PREDISPOSED to remember the EXACT OPPOSITE re facts posted by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) about the flu virus.
This tendency of the public to CONFUSE facts, and to even INVERT the CDC's refutation of a myth by "remembering" the CDC flier as SUPPORTING that myth; illustrates the potential for the American public to be MISINFORMED; and specifically the opportunities of the "Major Media" TO MISINFORM readers, viewers, and listeners, with malice aforethought.

The Right-Wing corporate/theological/political alliance has EMBRACED this ability to MISINFORM American citizens to such an extent, that not only do millions of Americans STILL BELIEVE that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were somehow tied to the 9-11 terror attacks that were led by Saudi fundamentalists (Saddam's Baathist regime, while Muslim, was secular/socialists, and detested religious fundamentalism of all stripes), but EVERY TIME that Osama bin Laden rolls out a new video, the American press/media SLAVISHLY anaylzes the video for meaning and context - while NEGLECTING to remind viewers that President Bush at one time promised to "GET OSAMA bin LADEN DEAD OR ALIVE!", and yet, FOUR FULL ELECTION cycles, and BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars spent on the "WAR ON TERROR" LATER, the Al Qaida leader is still sending videos to America to influence American elections and politics!

In short, the America public has a natural tendency to forget, invert, "flip," or mis-remember important facts on complex subjects; and the American corporate whore media is WALLOWING in its ability to MISINFORM or PROPAGANDIZE American citizens... from issues of public health to lies-to--war to the criminal offenses of the Bush-Cheney White House, the "major media" PREFERS MISINFORMED VIEWERS, and seldom works to dispell those mistaken assumptions.

=====================================

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 4, 2007; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

New York Whore Times INTENTIONALLY MISREPORTS the "Disband Iraqi Army" Story - to keep Cheney's name out of it.....

In YET ANOTHER case of glaring MISREPORTING by the New York Whore Times, Mr. Sulzberger's family rag discusses the DISBANDING OF THE IRAQI ARMY after the US invasion in March 2003.... WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING Dick Cheney's name!

This is almost as egregious a case of media incompetence and corruption, as the Times' (and Washington Post's) 6 year jihad against the Clinton White House, when the Times and Post managed, along with Republicans, to make the Clinton's overnight guest list into a scandal. (The so-called "Lincoln Bedroom SCANDAL!") By Comparison, Vice President Dick Cheney has REFUSED to allow the public to even know who visits his VP mansion, much less who spends the night there. And, of course, in early 2001 Mr. Cheney refused to release even the names of those who attended his "Energy Task Force," much less what was discussed at those meetings (where, according to some sources, maps of Iraqi oil fields were rolled out, as the assembled oil company execs divied up the anticipated loot from the invasion of Iraq which was the Bush-Cheney administration's real foreign policy "priority number one." That the invasion of Iraq was the Cheney-Bush administration's top priority has been confirmed, as reported by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was astounded that "taking Saddam out" was that top priority of President Bush's first national security conference after taking power, a mere two or three weeks after the January 2001 inaugueration.)

The Times' MISREPORTING - on the lead up to the Iraq war, and the DISBANDING of the Iraq military after that war switched from invasion to occupation - is not merely a case of INCOMPETENCE or even Dereliction of Duty: IT IS PREMEDITATED LYING.

================

#1. Cheney, Rumsfeld blamed by [former British Home Secretary David] Blunkett for Dissolving Iraqi Army
by Juan Cole
Sept. 7, 2007
JuanCole.com

With regard to the recent dust-up in the pages of the NYT between Bush and Bremer over the dismantling of the Iraqi Army, Ward Harkavy at the Village Voice reminds us that the mystery has already been solved by former British Home Secretary David Blunkett. He revealed in his memoirs that Cheney and Rumsfeld were the ones pushing for dismantling the Iraqi army, much to the dismay of the British. Bremer was taking orders from Rumsfeld, but being a good soldier has all along declined to blow the whistle on the Neoconservatives who ordered him to do implement several disastrous decisions. My guess? Dismantling the Baath army and the professional bureaucracy was intended as a way of ensuring there were no obstacles to putting corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi in charge of Iraq (that was the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz- Feith plan). What they didn't know was that Bremer had been charged by his old boss, the State Department, with derailing the Chalabi conspiracy and ensuring that the US ruled Iraq directly for a year or two. The combination of the Neocon plot to install Chalabi and destroy the Baath institutions, and the Powell-Blair plot to destroy Chalabi and ensure that Iraq was properly administered for a while, resulted in the worst of all possible worlds-- Bremer trying to run Iraq without an indigenous army or professional bureaucracy. Feith personally blackballed even seasoned Republican Arabists, depriving Bremer of even minimal expertise. Bush's inability to choose between Rumsfeld and Powell led to a muddle. Apparently W. now thinks he wasn't even informed of the decision to get rid of the army. This recollection is faulty, but it is proof that he did not make the decision. Blunkett says Cheney and Rumsfeld did.


==================

#2. Paper Trails in Iraq [How the NY Times got the 'Iraq Army Disbanded' Story WRONG]
by Ward Harkavy
September 5, 2000
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/2007/09/paper_trails_in.php



Times blows the Bremer-Bush dustup story. Rumsfeld, Cheney roles ignored in 2003 blunder.
The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to "dissolve Saddam's military and intelligence structures," a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been "to keep the army intact" but that it "didn't happen."

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush's comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.
The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

A member of the war cabinet, [Blunkett] reveals that Britain battled with the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, not to press ahead with dismantling "the whole of the security, policing, administrative and local government system on the basis of the de-Ba'athification of Iraq.

"The issue was: 'What the hell do you do about it?' All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world. We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognised what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognise the problem."

He admits: "We dismantled the structure of a functioning state," adding that the British view was: "Change them by all means, decapitate them even, but very quickly get the arms and legs moving."
This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

DE-BAATHIFICATION....Former British Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose diary will begin serialization in the Guardian on Monday, says that it wasn't Paul Bremer who favored dismantling the Iraqi military after the invasion. …

I don't suppose this is really surprising news or anything — did we ever really think Bremer made this decision on his own? — but it's nice to see confirmation. Yet another disastrous miscalculation from the dynamic duo of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Have these guys ever gotten anything right?
Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

Regarding the corporate tax bill, the Times's Andrews naively writes that George W. Bush "has indicated he will sign the measure despite White House concerns that it is overloaded with special-interest provisions." That's malarkey about White House "concerns." The Bush regime, which includes leaders of the GOP-controlled Congress, knew that senators of both parties would waddle over to the trough and slurp up the bill's "surplus" so they could excrete it as a steaming pile of pork-barrel projects. The structure of this session's two major tax bills is all part of the White House's shrewd strategy to reward corporations at our expense.
If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

No one has ever been able to explain the history of that crucial decision, which countless Iraqis have told me was the biggest mistake of the American occupation and a huge factor in the growth of the insurgency. When I was researching The Assassins' Gate I learned that, just before Bremer went to Iraq, in early May, 2003, he had discussed the issue at the Pentagon with Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Walt Slocombe (who became Bremer's adviser on Iraqi security forces in Baghdad), and then he cleared the decision with Donald Rumsfeld. This account was later borne out in Bremer's book. Did Condi Rice know? Dick Cheney? Bush himself? It's been impossible to be sure, and a former Administration official once told me that this fact alone shows what a dysfunctional policymaking process it was.

A history-changing decision, upending a previous policy, was made on the fly by a handful of officials at the Pentagon who consulted with no one else in Washington, let alone in Iraq. (In The Assassins' Gate, I describe the disbelief of a U.S. Army colonel, Paul Hughes, who at the time was knee-deep in the effort to organize and pay soldiers of the defeated Iraqi army; his outrage is the high point of the powerful new film No End in Sight.) Bremer's letter to Bush proves that the President was told at the last minute and gave the O.K. — but that's it. He had nothing to do with the decision either way and seemed barely aware of it.

Meanwhile, the exchange between the two of them — which took place when Iraq was already slipping away — reminds me of Lear talking to his fawning daughters at the opening of the play. "As I have moved around, there has been an almost universal expression of thanks to the US and to you in particular for freeing Iraq from Saddam's tyranny," Bremer assures his boss. "The dissolution of his chosen instrument of political domination, the Baath Party, has been very well received." The President answers in kind: "Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence."

Unless hard drives are destroyed and archives sealed, one day we'll be able to read thousands more such documents of the war. The details will be damning

HIGH CRIMES! Bush KNEW that Saddam HAD NO WMD's !! But pushed his precious PNAC invasion/occupation of Iraq regardless....

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction
Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Sept. 5, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/

Cheney directs think-tank neo-con DRUMBEAT for WAR vs Iran.. to SOFTEN UP PENTAGON for its 3rd war...

Dick Cheney, the man who got FIVE DEFERMENTS to keep himself out of the Vietnam War, now wants the US military to be bogged down in a war-occupation stretching the entire length of the "fertile crescent" - from the Mediterranean coast (Syria), through Iraq, to Iran, and then Afghanistan, and possibly Pakistan as well. (A virtual necessity if anti-American protests in that country push radical Islamists to seize control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.) That is a HUGE occupation that even the Roman empire at its height never attempted, although Alexander 'won' control over that territory briefly, but only by using fire and sword to exterminate entire tribes, and at great attrition costs to his own army.

For a text-book example of the neo-con DRUMBEAT TO BOMB IRAN that will be a full-court media press in coming weeks, see the Washington Post's neo-con in residence, Charles Krauthammer. Mr. Krauthammer fails to mention that Israel's nucler arsenal is beyond international inspection, or that, indeed, the American government (under the influence of such right-wing neo-cons as himself) has not only GUTTED the world's NPT - nuclear NON-PROLIFERATION TREATIES, but in the case of Americ's $5 billion deal to export nuclear processing technology (General Electric among other corporate beneficiaries) to India, the United States is actually ENCOURAGING NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION. In the coming weeks, Mr. Krauthammer's screed will be repeated, ad naseum, from EVERY AMERICAN MEDIA OUTLET, every Washington think tank, and from every hawk senator and congressman's speeches.
Krauthammer: "The Lust to Bomb Iran"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401413.html
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Selling War with Iran: Next Week at AEI
By Spencer Ackerman
September 4, 2007
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004064.php

Barnett Rubin is the last person to set off wild speculation about war with Iran: the longtime Afghanistan expert is wonky, moderate and thoroughly analytical. But that's exactly what happened on Wednesday, when Rubin blogged that an anonymous, plugged-in friend told him that Dick Cheney's office had issued "instructions" to conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to start a drumbeat for attacking Iran. In order to determine precisely what he's alleging, and get a sense of its credibility, I spoke with Rubin, a senior fellow at NYU's Center on International Cooperation this morning.

Cheney's likely motivation for issuing such instructions to his think-tank allies would be to win an inter-administration battle over the future of Iran policy. Cheney, an advocate of confronting the Iranians militarily, faces opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where the primary concern is preventing an open-ended Iraq commitment from decimating military preparedness for additional crises. A new war is the last thing the chiefs want, and on this, they're backed by Defense Secretary Bob Gates. "It may be that the president hasn't decided yet," says Rubin.

On this reading, the real target of any coordinated campaign between the VP and right-wing D.C. think tanks on Iran isn't the Iranians themselves, or even general public opinion, but the Pentagon. Cheney needs to soften up his opposition inside the administration if Bush is to ultimately double down on a future conflict, something that a drumbeat of warnings about the Iranian threat can help accomplish. When asked if a third war seems surreal, given the depth of investment the U.S. has given Iraq and Afghanistan, Rubin replies, "I'm out of adjectives."

How would an actual war be launched, given the expected opposition of the Democratic-controlled Congress? To that end, President Bush's decision to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group provides an opportunity. If the IRGC, Iran's alternate military, is a terrorist group, Bush could claim authority under the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan to take action against Iran without Congressional approval, citing the AUMF's broad provision that "the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States." (It's a stretch, but the administration has already made the more-tendentious argument that the AUMF authorized the warrantless surveillance program.) "The AUMF applies, according to the Cheney-Addington view of the Constitution," says Rubin.

In a post today, Rubin said the drumbeat has already started. He points to a Newsweek piece by AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht contending that designating the IRGC a terrorist group "will do little to change the current state of play" between the U.S. and Iran, but that diplomacy is an exercise in futility, as the Iranians, "determined to sow chaos beyond [their] borders," are "accomplished practitioners of hard power." Rubin said he didn't know specifically that Gerecht was part of the campaign, but he pointed to the argument as fitting neatly within the pattern.

Similarly, on Monday, AEI will host two events that Rubin considers part of the drumbeat. First, that morning, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich will give a speech contending that the war on terrorism needs to be viewed as "a world war that pits civilization against terrorists and their state sponsors who wish to impose a new dark age," according to AEI's preview. That afternoon, AEI brings together a panel featuring former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, retired General Jack Keane, who helped design the surge in Iraq, and longtime Iran hawk Michael Ledeen to discuss Ledeen's new book, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction. Rubin didn't mention it, but the Heritage Foundation recently hosted an interagency Bush administration war game attempting to anticipate Iranian responses to a U.S. bombing campaign.

None of this is to say that a military attack is imminent. But Rubin says that two conclusions are possible from the increased talk of war with Iran.

First, the administration "does not believe the war on terror is a war against al-Qaeda." Al-Qaeda would probably be the greatest beneficiary of U.S.-Iranian hostility thanks to a lack of administration focus on it. (It would also place the U.S. in the awkward position of fighting an affirmed enemy of the jihadist organization.)

Second, the administration believes "U.S. domination in the Middle East is necessary in order to defeat an ideological, transnational entity that's the equivalent of Nazism or fascism" -- only this time that entity is Iran's wheezing blend of Shiite theocracy. The likely takeaway of a U.S.-Iran war to the Muslim world, he said, is that the administration "is in fact engaging in a crusade to change the culture of the entire Muslim world." At that point, Gingrich will surely have the civilizational war he's set to describe on Monday

Media Whores ignore, suppress story of 97-0 Senate vote to authorize bombing of Iran....

Americans want mideast oil. We will kill thousands of civilians to get it. And the United Nations, which was set up specifically to prevent stronger aggressor nations from bombing and invading weaker nations, will once again be no more than a captive prostitute to American ambitions.

This excellent article by David Bromwich, one of many now cropping up on the subject, details the "VERBOTTEN!" subject of America's foreign policy alignment with that of Israel and the American-Israel (Jewish) lobby. This is a story that American corporate "MAJOR MEDIA" relentlessly SUPPRESSES.

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Iraq, Israel, Iran
by David Bromwich
September 4, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/iraq-israel-iran_b_62995.html

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's article on the Israel Lobby appeared in the London Review of Books, after having been commissioned and killed by the Atlantic Monthly, neoconservative publicists launched an all-out campaign to slander the authors as anti-Semites. Now that their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has appeared--a work of considerable scope, carefully documented, and not just an expanded version of the article--the imputation of anti-Semitism will doubtless be repeated more sparingly for readers lower down the educational ladder. Meanwhile, the literate establishment press will (a) ignore it, (b) pretend that it says nothing new or surprising, and (c) rule out the probable inferences from the data, on the ground that the very meaning of the word "lobby" is elusive.

The truth is that many new facts are in this book, and many surprising facts. By reconstructing a trail of meetings and public statements in 2001-2002, for example, the authors show that much of the leadership of Israel was puzzled at first by the boyish enthusiasm for a war on Iraq among their neoconservative allies. Why Iraq? they asked. Why now? They would appear to have obtained assurances, however, that once the "regime change" in Iraq was accomplished, the next war would be against Iran.

A notable pilgrimage followed. One by one they lined up, Netanyahu, Sharon, Peres, and Barak, writing op-eds and issuing flaming warnings to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was a menace of world-historical magnitude. Suddenly the message was that any delay of the president's plan to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq would be seized on by "the terrorists" as a sign of weakness. Regarding the correct treatment of terrorists, as also regarding the avoidance of weakness, Americans look to Israelis as mentors in a class by themselves.

So a war projected years before by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz--a war secured at last by the fixing of the facts around the policy at the Office of the Vice President--was allowed to borrow some prestige at an intermediate stage by the consent of a few well-regarded Israeli politicians. Yet their target of choice had been Iran. They accepted the change of sequence without outward signs of doubt, possibly owing to their acquaintance with the Middle East doctrine espoused by the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute--a doctrine which held that to create a viable order after the fall of Iraq, regime change in Iran and Syria would have to follow expeditiously.

To sum up this part: the evidence of Mearsheimer and Walt suggests that Israel was never the prime mover of the Iraq war. Rather, once the Cheney-Wolfowitz design was in place, the Israeli ministers who trooped through American opinion pages and news-talk shows did what they could to heat up the war fever. This war was on the cards before they threw in their lot with Cheney and Bush; by their efforts they merely helped to confer on the plan an aura of legitimacy and worldly wisdom.

But now the American war with Iran they originally wanted is coming closer. Last Tuesday, when the mass media were crammed to distraction with the behavior of a senator in an airport washroom, few could be troubled to notice an important speech by President Bush. If Iran is allowed to persist in its present state, the president told the American Legion convention in Reno, it threatens "to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He said he had no intention of allowing that; and so he has "authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." Those words come close to saying not that a war is coming but that it is already here. No lawmaker who reads them can affect the slightest shock at any action the president takes against Iran.

Admittedly, it was a showdown speech, reckless and belligerent, to a soldier audience; but then, this has been just the sort of crowd and message that Cheney and Bush favor when they are about to open a new round of killings. And in a sense, the Senate had given the president his cue when it approved, by a vote of 97-0, the July 11 Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran. It is hardly an accident that the president and his favorite tame senator concurred in their choice of the word "confront." The pretext for the Lieberman amendment, as for the president's order, was the discovery of caches of weapons alleged to belong to Iran, the capture of Iranian advisers said to be operating against American troops, and the assertion that the most deadly IEDs used against Americans are often traceable to Iranian sources--claims that have been widely treated in the press as possible, but suspect and unverified. Still, the vote was 97-0. If few Americans took notice, the government of Iran surely did.

That unanimous vote was the latest in a series of capitulations that has included the apparent end of resistance by Nancy Pelosi to the next war. After the election of 2006, the speaker of the house declared her intention to enact into law a requirement that this president seek separate authorization for a war against Iran. On the point of doing so, she addressed the AIPAC convention, and was booed for criticizing the escalation of the Iraq war. Pelosi took the hint, shelved her authorization plan, and went with AIPAC against the anti-war base of the Democratic party.

This much, one might know without the help of Mearsheimer and Walt. But without their record, how many would trace the connection between the removal of Philip Zelikow as policy counselor of the state department, at the end of 2006, and a speech Zelikow had given in September 2006 urging serious negotiation and a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? The ousting of Zelikow was a blessing to the war party, since it freed them from a skeptical confidant of Secretary of State Rice--perhaps the only person of stature anywhere near the administration whom she treated as an ally and friend. And the meaning of the change was clear when Zelikow's replacement turned out to be Eliot Cohen: a neoconservative war scholar and enthusiast, an early booster of the "surge" on the pundit shows, and incidentally a shameless slanderer of Mearsheimer-Walt ("Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," Washington Post, April 5, 2006).

From Zelikow to Cohen was only a step on the long path of humiliation that now stretched before Condoleeza Rice. When, in March 2007, amid suggestions of a renewal of diplomacy, she intimated that talks might be helpful in dealing with the Hamas-Fatah unity government (whose formation the Arab world had greeted as offering a promise of peace), she was demolished by an AIPAC-backed advisory letter bearing the signatures of 79 senators, which directed her not to speak with a government that had not yet recognized Israel. From that moment Rice was effectively neutralized.

The hottest cries for another war have been coming this summer from Joe Lieberman. He has called for attacks on Iran, and for attacks on Syria. It is as if Lieberman, with his appetite for multiple theaters of conflict, spoke from the congealed memory of all the wars he never fought. But Joe Lieberman is a stalking-horse. He would not say these things without getting permission from Vice President Cheney, a close and admired friend. Nor would Cheney permit a high-profile lawmaker whom he partly controls to set the United States and Israel on so perilous a course unless he had ascertained its acceptability to Ehud Olmert.

Yet the chief orchestrater of the second neoconservative war of aggression is Elliott Abrams. Convicted for deceptions around Iran-Contra, as Lewis Libby was convicted for deceptions stemming from Iraq--and pardoned by the elder Bush just as Libby had his sentence commuted by the younger--Abrams now presides over the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. All of the wildness of this astonishing functionary and all his reckless love of subversion will be required to pump up the "imminent danger" of Iran. For here, as with Iraq, the danger can only be made to look imminent by manipulation and forgery. On all sober estimates, Iran is several months from mastering the nuclear cycle, and several years from producing a weapon. Whereas Israel for decades has been in possession of a substantial nuclear arsenal.

How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage cited by Mearsheimer-Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population." When he wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to serve in another American administration. He certainly did not expect to occupy a position that would require him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the country with which he confessed himself uniquely at one, alongside the national interest of a country in which he felt himself to stand "apart...from the rest of the population." Now that he is calling the shots against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection.

Among many possible lines of inquiry, the senators might begin by recognizing that the United States has other allies in Asia besides Israel. One of those allies is India; and there is a further point of resemblance. In a distinct exception to our anti-proliferation policy, we have allowed India to develop nuclear weapons; just as, in an earlier such exception, we allowed Israel to do the same. But suppose we read tomorrow a statement by the director of the South Asia desk of the National Security Council which declared: "There can be no doubt that Hindus are to stand apart from any nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Hindu to be apart--except in India--from the rest of the population." Suppose, further, we knew this man still held these beliefs at a time of maximum tension between India and Pakistan; and that he had recently channeled 86 million dollars to regional gangs and militias bent on increasing the tension. Would we not conclude that something in our counsels of state had gone seriously out of joint?

The Mearsheimer-Walt study of American policy deserves to be widely read and discussed. It could not be more timely. If the speeches and saber-rattling by the president, the ambassador to Iraq, and several army officers mean anything, they mean that Cheney and Abrams are preparing to do to Iran what Cheney and Wolfowitz did to Iraq. They are gunning for an incident. They are working against some resistance from the armed forces but none from the opposition party at home. The president has ordered American troops to confront Iran. Sarkozy has fallen into line, Brown and Merkel are silent, and outside the United States only Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency stands between the war party and a prefabricated justification for a war that would extend across a vast subcontinent. Unless some opposition can rouse itself, we are poised to descend with non-partisan compliance into a moral and political disaster that will dwarf anything America has seen.

Media Whores CNN, Fox, NBC, IGNORE Mitt Romney fundraising scandal, focus exclusively on Clinton donor.....

America's DESPICABLE media whores at it again: giving one-sided and negative coverage to minor Democrat scandals, while IGNORING even worse scandals in the Republican camp. In this case, ONE FUNDRAISER to the Hillary Clinton campaign is under suspicion for money fraud... while Mitt Romney's national finance committee CO-CHAIRMAN, Alan B. Fabian, has been charged with a 23 count indictment, including money laundering, mail fraud, and perjury!

MEDIA WHORES, they name is LIES and TREACHERY!

MediaMatters.org has the story by the numbers...
http://mediamatters.org/items/200709010002

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Romney Fundraising Scandal Ignored By Liberal Media - Clinton Gets Hammered Over Hsu
By: Logan Murphy
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/03/romney-fundraising-scandal-ignored-by-liberal-media-clinton-gets-hammered-over-hsu/

August was a disastrous month for Republicans and the Romney campaign took a huge hit when it’s national finance committee co-chairman, Alan B. Fabian was charged in a 23 count indictment, including charges of money laundering, mail fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice. It’s reported Fabian, a former Bush Pioneer, allegedly ran a scheme that netted him millions of dollars which were used to purchase beach front property and travel. The Romney campaign said they would return Fabian’s $2,300 campaign donation, but not funds donated by others through him. Fabian stepped down from Romney’s campaign shortly after his August 9th indictment — but you may not have heard much about this scandal.

However, you may have heard of a scandal involving Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a less-than savory character named Norman Hsu. According to reports from the LA Times, Hsu skipped out on a 1991 plea agreement in San Mateo Co. CA, in which he was to serve three years for grand theft. Hsu, who turned himself in to authorities in CA on Friday and awaits a September 5th bail hearing, became a top Democratic fundraiser and contributor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as other Democratic candidates, including Senator Barack Obama, much of which was laundered through others. The Clinton campaign has agreed to return $23,000 in campaign donations from Hsu, and Obama has agreed to donate his $2,300 donation to charity.

While both scandals hold equal potential for damage to the respective candidates involved, the media, for unknown reasons, gave Mitt Romney a pass, while devoting ample time to Hsu and the Clinton campaign. According to Media Matters, NBC, CNN and FOXNews all covered the Hsu scandal, but none of the aforementioned networks dedicated any time to the Romney/Fabian scandal that can be found in the Nexis database. More from Media Matters:

Summary: In recent days, NBC, CNN, and Fox News have all aired reports or discussed the case of Norman Hsu, who The Wall Street Journal suggested may have funneled illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Hillary Clinton. However, when Mitt Romney’s national finance committee co-chairman Alan Fabian was charged with mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice, the three networks did not report or discuss it during programs available in the Nexis database.

GENOCIDE the first priority, the Alpha & Omega of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz invasion and corrupt occupation of Iraq....

In 2003, the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush2 admininstration reprised their roles from the late 1980's, when the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush1 administration (Cheney as Secretary of Defense, Bush Senior as both Vice President and foreign-policy expert in the Reagan administration, and president in his own right after 1988, and Don Rumsfeld as personal envoy from the Reagan White House to Saddam Hussein) was THE WORLD'S PREMIER SPONSOR of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Not only did the United States FUND SADDAM during the entire length of the Iran-Iraq war with money ("agricultural credits" that were as fungible as cash) and equipment, but Bush Sr., Rumsfeld, and Cheney were also sponsors of Saddam's WMD program, the late 1980's rife with talk about Iraq's "WMD PRECURSOR TECHNOLOGIES" developed with the blessings of the United States, including the chemicals and equipment required to produce poison gas for the infamous attacks on Kurdish civilians and Iranian military units. Effectively, GENOCIDE WAS A BYPRODUCT, if not intended consequence, of US assistance to Saddam's regime then, and starting with the stolen election of 2000, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush (Jr.) started reprising the role of SPONSORS OF GENOCIDE in Iraq, this time with American troops and aircraft doing the dirty work.
See "Spider's Web: The Secret History of How The White House Illegally Armed Iraq"
http://www.amazon.com/Spiders-Web-Secret-History-Illegally/dp/0553096508

#1. How the Bush-Cheney administration may have ENCOURAGED LOOTING in Baghdad and Iraq after the successful invasion in 2003, hoping to DESTROY IRAQI INFRASTRUCTURE more than US bombings had already done, in an effort to make Iraqis jobless, homeless, stateless, economically disenfranchised war refugees who, in turning to the insurgency, could be killed en masse.
http://www.thebluestate.com/2007/09/the-darkest-of-.html

#2. Contrary to US 'news' reports, Iraq civilian DEATH RATE SOARS in Summer of 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003634166

#3. Family of US Marine killed by insurgents in Haditah calls Marine's massacre of 24 Iraqis in Haditha a "HEROIC ACTION"!!
Family Of Marine Killed In Haditha Slaying 'Outraged'
POSTED: 1:10 pm PST December 30, 2006
UPDATED: 1:41 pm PST December 30, 2007
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/10636883/detail.html

#4. http://noendinsightmovie.com/ video clip, Movie preview "NO END IN SIGHT" - how careful planning for the post-invasion rebuilding of Iraq was DISCARDED... IN FAVOR OF CHAOS !!


The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz led INVASION and OCCUPATION of Iraq hoped to achieve its first objective - complete control of Iraqi oil and Iraq strategic territory - by KILLING AS MANY IRAQIS AS POSSIBLE. That goal was accomplished by CREATING A SITUATION OF CHAOS, disbanding the military, disbanding the police, and ENCOURAGING LOOTING. All of which led to an INVIGORATED INSURGENCY, which gave the administration the cover to CONTINUE TO DESTROY IRAQI INFRASTRUCTURE.

The huge Iraq RECONSTRUCTION programs by American companies WERE INTENDED TO BE A SHAM - like New Orleans, their first priority was to REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH UPWARDS, from taxpayers to Bush-Cheney cronies such as Halliburton corporation, a company which is STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY in "deferred stock options" which go up in value with every billion-dollar government contract that Halliburton receives but doesn't complete.
Like Vietnam, today entire swaths of Iraq are considered "FREE FIRE ZONES" where the US military has unlimited authority to kill anyone, with very little oversight, and what little oversight there is is provided only by the military itself... as for example NOT ONE OFFICER convicted of Abu Ghraib "abuse" although FEMALE PRIVATES WERE CONVICTED by US military KANGAROO COURT.


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The darkest of all suspicions about Rumsfeld's postwar strategy
Why the Administration may have purposely encouraged looting after the fall of Baghdad.
http://www.thebluestate.com/2007/09/the-darkest-of-.html


Over the last four years, I have been personally conflicted over which was more outrageously horrible: the decision to go to war in the first place, or the manner in which postwar planning was executed? Both were bad, no doubt there. But there was something said about the latter last night on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher that jolted my emotions. Let me say that as someone that follows politics on a daily basis, I am rarely shocked. But what I heard last night personally disturbed me, and will get all of you grinding your teeth.

Remember all the looting throughout Iraq after the US invaded? Many Pentagon-types concede that the US should have done a better job protecting the Iraqi infrastructure. Well, according to former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, one of the three panel guests on the show, the Administration actually wanted there to be mass looting in Baghdad because it would help downsize government. In other words, Rumsfeld wanted to implement Ronald Reagan's limited government model in Iraq.

So I did some digging on the issue. I found a 2003 story in The Nation magazine that confirmed this strategy. It's quite disturbing that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would want there to be looting. But it all makes perfect sense:

As the Bush Administration becomes increasingly open about its plans to privatize Iraq's state industries and parts of the government, Bremer's de-Baathification takes on new meaning. Is he working only to get rid of Baath Party members, or is he also working to shrink the public sector as a whole so that hospitals, schools and even the army are primed for privatization by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for privatization, de-Baathification looks a lot like disguised downsizing.

We need to ask ourselves what the purpose was behind Reagan's ideology? Why do conservative Washington insiders want limited government? Is it because their brand of government would be more efficient, or because the phrase "limited government" is code for selling democracy to the highest bidder?

Republican leaders want you to think that less government means less spending and more rights for you. But actually, there will be spending no matter what. It's just a question of who will be in charge. Do you want government, which is bound by disclosure laws, to do the work? Or do you want corporations, whose motives are less about spreading democracy than making a profit on Wall Street? Oh boy have we been used!

But the main idea is that Rumsfeld wanted this "limited government" model to be implemented. He tried. He failed. Now there is no end in sight.

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#2. DEATH TOLL in Iraq SOARING
AP's Count: Contrary to Claims -- Civilian Deaths Soaring in Iraq
Published: September 01, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003634166

BAGHDAD Civilian deaths rose in August to their second-highest monthly level this year, according to figures compiled Saturday by The Associated Press. That raises questions about whether U.S. strategy is working days before Congress receives landmark reports that will decide the course of the war.

At least 81 American service members also died in Iraq during August — an increase of two over the previous month but well below the year's monthly high of 126 in May. American deaths surpassed the 80 mark during only two months of 2006.