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From Blame to Plame and Back Again

The Bush Administration is nothing if not consistent.  Husband of a librarian that he is, George W. Bush is terribly fond of literary word games -- rhymes especially. Take "Blame" and "Plame" -- both are Bushie favorites.  The two words cut to the "heart" of Bushiavellian "thought."  Failure is always someone else's fault.  Always.  Today's New York Times carries an interesting example, Douglas Jehl's, "Top Spy's No. 2 Tells of Changes to Avoid Error."  (28 July 2005)  According to the article's opening sentence,

"John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, has imposed strict safeguards intended to ensure that the government's National Intelligence Estimates are based on credible information instead of the kinds of unsubstantiated claims that were the basis for prewar intelligence on Iraq...."

-- Douglas Jehl, NYT, URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/politics/29intel.html?th&emc=th

Isn't that wonderful?  What a brilliant piece of political manipulation!  Despite the reams of evidence that clearly indicate the Bush Administration fully intended to attack Iraq right from the moment it took office, we the public are somehow expected to believe that it was "faulty" intelligence  that led our infallible Commander-in-Chief to take this awesome step.  As Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary and leader of the House of Commons, stated in his Resignation Speech on March 18, 2003,

"Our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq. That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war."

-- 18 March 2003, CNN.com/World, "Full Text: Robin Cook Speech," URL:

   http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/18/sprj.irq.cook.speech/

Faulty evidence?  Presumably, the Bush Administration's intelligence officials would not have expressed "consternation" at seeing clear evidence that Saddam's Iraq was not a fortress of terrorism... that is... if George and Co. genuinely viewed war as a "last resort."  As well, there was Paul O'Neill's -- Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury -- revelation that, at this president's very first National Security Council Meeting, back in January of 2001 (even George Bush must know that January 2001 came before September 2001),

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11."   

-- 11 January 2004, CBSNews.com, "Bush Sought 'Way' to Invade Iraq," URL:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

And furthermore,

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

-- 11 January 2004, CBSNews.com, "Bush Sought 'Way' to Invade Iraq," URL:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

Some things never change do they? George W. Bush and the Neocons have been obsessed with "taking down" Saddam Hussein since long before September 11.  The Commander-in-Chief will never admit that he was not forced into war with Iraq by the circumstances of a changed world (the only pertinent change being that he and his Cabal had come to power).  George Bush and his Crony Corps cannot tell a true story even if you give them all the oil in Saudi Arabia.  And,

The Bush White House will never stop trying to blame someone else for its failings (or is that Plame?)

- Brian Adler

(Brian Adler is a screenwriter and a writer/researcher. He also writes commentary for CounterBias.com. IseFire.com is excited to have Mr. Adler as one of its new contributors.)

Social insecurity

Amalgamated Bank's ad in The New York Times makes some important points about President Bush's anti-Social Security schemes:

*Social Security is our nation only public pension system.

*It's financially sound, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and can meet 100% of its obligations until 2052; after which it can pay 80% of its benefits even without adjustments being made. It's arguably more sound now than at any point in its 69-year history.

*Between 1959 and 2002, Social Security helped cut the poverty rate for senior citizens from 35.2% to 10.9%. The administrative costs for Social Security are less than 1%, far less than any other government program, less than any private pension plan.

*Bush's idea for "individual private accounts" will slash guaranteed Social Security benefits by as much as $9,000 per beneficiary per year. The conversion costs to this scheme proposed by Bush and the Republicans? $4.9 trillion dollars in debt for the next generation to be burdened with.

*If the Republican designs on Social Security are so obviously unsound, why would they push for them? Because Wall Street firms funding the privatization campaign would make untold millions in fees and commissions.

Visit: www.unionvoice.org/campaign/SaveSocialSecurity.

- Scott

Iran lied again

The New York Times (my emphsis):

Iran's departing president [Mohammad Khatami] said Wednesday that the country's senior officials had decided to resume activities at one nuclear site no matter what incentives were in a European proposal expected next week.

.....

Last November, Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment-related activities until the Europeans presented their proposal.

So, they intended to resume their nuclear program, at one site at least, no matter what. They've wasted a lot of money and other peoples' time.

- Scott

Stupidity at home and abroad

*PETA is calling for Fishkill, NY to change its name ("kill" derives from the Dutch word for creek). Karin Robertson of PETA: "When they think of Fishkill, they think of abusing fish, and that's not the right message."

I recommend Ms. Robertson get a real job.

*An association of British teachers is calling for the word "fail" to be banned from the classroom and replaced with the term "deferred success."

I recommend the association replace the term "association" with "jackasses."

(Both items from The Week, July 29, 2005, p. 6.)

Gee, I wonder how "liberal" got a bad name over the last few decades?

- Scott

M.U.G. learns fear and loathing in New York

I subscribe to Charlie Suisman's Manhattan User Guide (MUG). Today's MUG is particularly interesting. Yesterday, Charlie respectfully raised valid questions about the efficacy of bag searches on NYC's subway system, and some e-mail responses to his article rightly troubled him.

- Scott

A "Noble" endeavor in N. Carolina

The below is a cross-post from Religious Right Watch.
- SJI
-----

The News & Observer staffer Yonat Shimron recently profiled a rising star of the Christian Right, Steve Noble (registration required). The profile gives us occasion to examine key players in the Christian Right, and to begin to observe Noble's ernest activism. (Neither links nor emphases below are in Shimron's article online.)

(Photo of Steve Noble by Sher Stoneman)

Shimron writes that Noble organized a fall 2004 "sold-out rally for evangelist James Dobson," in Noble's home state of North Carolina," at which he "was invited to attend the secretive Council for National Policy."

The Council for National Policy (CNP) has been referred to by journalist Marc J. Ambinder as "the most powerful conservative group you've never heard of," and a "sausage factory for conservative ideas" (source).

(Photo of Paul Weyrich)

At the meeting, "Noble dined with Paul Weyrich," who co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973,"and introduced himself to former Attorney General Edwin Meese and anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly." Weyrich is often referred to as the father of the Christian Right. As Michelle Goldberg summarized for Salon.com, Weyrich, along with Howard Phillips and direct mail titan Richard Viguerie "recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority."

Shimron:

[Noble has] "made a quick ascent into the conservative elite. In little more than a year, he has built an effective grass-roots organization that can mobilize Wake County's largest evangelical churches. Now he wants to replicate his group -- Called2Action -- in cities across the nation."

.....

Noble says local organizations, are the key to changing the culture. Called2Action persuaded a newsstand owner at Cary Towne Center to take down some racy calendars. It led a two-month boycott of The News & Observer for running a photo of two gay men. More recently, it lobbied for a bill in the state Senate requiring public schools to offer the Pledge of Allegiance five days a week....

Called2Action was recently invited to join the Arlington Group, a national coalition of 26 conservative organizations working to pass a U.S. Constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual union. Last week, the coalition filed papers for a political action group, Called2Elect, that will endorse candidates for office.

(Here is Weyrich himself on the topic of the Arlington Group.)

Shimron writes that when Noble:

gets up in front of a crowd of conservatives, he tells them that until recently he was just like them. He had disengaged from society and shut out popular culture....

"I built my castle," he typically says. "I dug my moat. I pulled in my gate."

But...last year, he heard a preacher talk about a Christian's responsibility to get involved, and in the words of the prophet Nehemiah, "rebuild the wall of Jerusalem." He scribbled a commitment to himself: "To be more outspoken for God's truth in the public arena." After the sermon, he placed the note on the altar.

A week later, a friend, Raleigh City Council member Mike Regan, told him the city's Human Relations Commission was amending its policy to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Regan, Noble and Pastor Patrick Wooden of the Upper Room Church of God in Christ got to work. They packed city hall with 400 protesters and shouted down anyone who spoke in favor of the revision, saying the policy would sanction immorality.

They lost. But Called2Action was born.

According to the article, Called2Action has 49 church partners in Wake County now, and 2,200 people signed up to get electronic "ActionGrams," and "Noble is working to recreate Called2Action in other cities. Already, there's a Durham/Orange Called2Action and a Wilmington "Act Now" group. Noble is talking to people in Winston-Salem about organizing a chapter there."

Shimron spoke to critics, too, for the article. "Rev. Doug Gamble, missions pastor at Raleigh's Crossroads Fellowship...said Called2Action is too closely associated with Republican Party issues." Shimron summarizes:

But Noble, like many evangelicals, is not too worried about causes such as poverty. He thinks the problem can be addressed if the two parties, Republican and Democratic, become better stewards of national resources. Like many evangelicals, he says traditional family values take precedence over everything else.

"Society won't crumble based on tax policy or housing policy or even welfare policy," he said. "These aren't foundational issues. It's what you do with life, what you do with your family. You destroy those, and you destroy society."

Loose Lips Sink Ships - Will Karl Rove Sink After All?

What goes for a vessel on the high seas also goes for the “ship of state” – the notoriously “leak-proof” craft currently piloted by Captain George W.  Or does it? 

The United States is at war.  We have been told this countless times by virtually every high official in the Bush Administration.  George Bush even ran on this idea in 2004.  “Terror!” – say it loud enough, and you can drown out everything else.

This particular war – the electoral one – was in large part commanded by Karl Rove.  Rove is known for his political genius; his willingness to go to any extreme to get his candidate into office.  He is also known for sparing no weapon in the fight against his “enemies,” be they political or otherwise.  Former Ambassador Joe Wilson had the misfortune to become one of those enemies back in 2003 when he dared to contradict the Administration’s official line about Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear material in Niger.  The solution to the problem?  A loose lip… a sunken ship… “ Wilson’s wife,” undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson was thrown to the sharks. 

By now, we all know the story.  Karl Rove did not violate 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act when he divulged Mrs. Wilson’s name to reporter Robert Novak.  After all, Plame had not been out of the country in the past five years; had possibly been just a secretary; or had simply been staking out African vacation spots through hubby Joe – or whatever other story is current in the GOP gossip columns.  The Intelligence Identities Protection Act defines a leak narrowly – very narrowly.  Under cover of its provisions, it would be pretty easy for Karl Rove (or any other White House official for that matter) to stay dry.  But, can it really be that easy to evade a judicial walk on the plank?   

Perhaps not.  According to an article in yesterday’s Salon by Farhad Manjoo (25 July 2005, “Is Rove in Hotter Water than We Think?”), Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation may not be so narrowly defined.  As it turns out, there is another law that applies to the leaking of secret information, and it is called the Espionage Act of 1917.  Apparently, giving out secret information is easier to do than many Republican talking heads would have us believe.  In fact, a look at the Act itself on FindLaw.com (U.S. Code: Title 18: Section 793) reveals that, in time of war, it is pretty darned easy to make a “slip of the lips” – no ships necessary.

According to the Act, Karl Rove need only have possessed,
  “…Information relating to the national defense
   which information the possessor has reason to believe
   could be used to the injury of the United States or to
   the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates,
   delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated….”
- U.S.Code: Title 18: Section 793: Paragraph D (FindLaw.com).

So, was Valerie Plame Wilson working for the defense of the United States?  She was working in the weapons of mass destruction section of the CIA.  Was she a covert agent?  Her identity was marked as “s/nf” (secret/no foreign) in the State Department Memo of July 7, 2003 that was distributed just prior to her outing; the same briefing that was seen in the hands of Colin Powell and was clearly available to President Bush on that Presidential trip to Africa in 2003 (and we know George never talks to Karl while he’s away, that’s why Prosecutor Fitzgerald has subpoenaed the phone logs for Air Force One).  Was Karl Rove allowing that secret information – information that could have been detrimental to the defense of the United States – to become available to enemies of the United States?  Very possibly… if any of the terrorists know how to read a newspaper or turn on a television. 

A breach of national security?  A breach of the public trust?  A breach in the Administration’s unsinkable integrity?

Or, is it just a sinking ship?

Well... maybe… if the media would finally put one across the bow….
   
-Brian Adler

(Brian Adler is a screenwriter and a writer/researcher. He also writes commentary for CounterBias.com. IseFire.com is excited to have Mr. Adler on its new new of contributors.)

Gopnik: UK's true freedom stems from true courage

Adam Gopnik, a brilliant observer and writer, offers a compelling, must-read column in The New Yorker outlining two schools of thought about terrorism's cause, which are publicly and openly debated in the UK; something the U.S. can't manage. Contrasting London's response to their bombings with the U.S.'s to 9/11, Gopnik sees a healthy, fearless response that puts America's fearful one in stark relief.

Gopnik describes "hundreds of thousands of people" walking home from work on 7/7, "trudging in the bright sunlight...across Westminster Bridge" and, ironically, past a exhibit of "ancient ambulances from the Blitz" currently in St. James’s Park to commemorate the 60th anniversary of WWII's end.

London's 7/7 tragedy hadn't 9/11's scale, number of dead, or dramatic visibility, Gopnik concedes; yet, 7/7 was harrowing. "The sense of a city turned inside out, of a shock too large to quite analyze—that was there," he observes. "But the consuming terror [in the U.S. after 9/11] was not. No one ran, or cried, or even talked much about what had happened.... In the absence of fear, what asserted itself was" a traditional "habit of responding shaped" by the Blitz and "the I.R.A. bombings of the past three decades, which were random and deadly."

But such fearlessness births virtuous debate in the UK, too, Gopnik argues.

[W]ithout the corrosive presence of fear the argument about what had happened in London became, very quickly, starker, blunter, and more faceted than the argument has been allowed to be in America. The patriotically correct nationalism of the Murdoch media is less paralyzing in Britain than it is here. The London argument pits not left against right but the old right and the old left against the Thatcherite right and the Blairite left. And, while in America the argument that a war on terror might not be 'winnable,' or that the terrorists might not be madmen but shrewd and calculating militants with a clear cause, has often seemed almost unsayable, everyone in London was either offering it or offering a refutation of it. (My emphases)

Gopnik introduces the first of two schools of thought on terrorism's cause by noting that "the antiwar left (and right)" said that the London bombings were "because Britain was in Iraq." The argument: "The United States and Britain began the war in Iraq with the certainty...that they would cause many civilian casualties in pursuit of their political goal, and that the response, however brutal and inhumane, is part of the normal calculations of organized violence."

Then the second school: "that the new kind of terrorism is essentially nihilist and apocalyptic, and that Iraq is only a kind of inchoate excuse." Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor of the BBC's Newsnight, typifies this when saying recently, "'the African embassy bombings happened before Iraq....'" and "'What is there to negotiate with these people? An end to the American presence in Saudi Arabia? [....] The elimination of the State of Israel? [....] The restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate? [....]" Urban insists that terrorism has no "program, really. It’s a wraparound justification for a violence whose real end is the expiation of shame through massacre.”

But guess what? Surprise, surprise, the two schools of thought are not mutually exclusive, Gopnik correctly concludes. (Again and again and again and again history demonstrates this fact: the "truth," such as it is--or, at least, such as it's constructed eventually--is seldom if ever made entirely of the perspective of only the "rightwing" or "leftwing" or the "conservative" or "liberal" of the era.  Contrary to the political opinions of the unimaginative and doctrinaire, human experience culture and daily life are not "black and white" but gray. Strict dichotomies are, almost always, false ones.

Gopnik:

Of course, the worst of both readings of what is happening is surely true. The terrorists are psychopathic and shrewd, nihilist and rational, glorying in death for death’s sake while still calculating whom to kill, with what effect, when. (My emphases)

And Gopnik's utterly realistic, sensible prediction:

Will this epoch, which began on 9/11 and had a new chapter written on 7/7, end only with the apocalyptic defeat of one side or another, or will it end, as all previous terrorisms have, with unspoken concession and quiet remedy and pointed police action and the workings of time and politics? This isn’t an argument that can be ended or resolved, in London or anywhere else, anytime soon. But at least it is an argument, and at least in London they weren’t afraid to have it.

Not afraid.

How unAmerican.

Wash. Post. tells truth about estate tax

"Estate Tax Myths," the Washtington Post editorial of Sunday, July 24, 2005, Page B06, tells the truth about the tax Republicans falsely call the "death tax."

ONE OF THE chief arguments of those seeking permanent repeal of the estate tax is that it cruelly penalizes farmers and owners of small businesses whose heirs are forced to sell off their holdings to pay the tax. "In order to make sure our farms stay within our farming families, we need to get rid of the death tax once and for all," President Bush proclaimed in a speech last month to the Future Farmers of America.

This assertion, though, is more convenient myth than fact -- something that senators might consider when they're called on, perhaps as soon as this week, to vote on abolishing the tax. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office examined estate tax returns filed by farmers and owners of small businesses in 1999 and 2000. The numbers that owed estate tax, the CBO found, were paltry, and the number without enough cash on hand to pay the bill even punier: In 2000, for example, just 1,659 farm estates had taxes due, of which 138 didn't report enough liquid assets to cover their tax liability.

 
But at that time the amount of money that could be passed on to heirs free of taxes was just half what it is now. With the current exemption level of $1.5 million, the CBO analysis found, only 300 farm estates in 2000 would have owed any tax at all -- and of those, just 27 would have a tax bill in excess of their liquid assets. At the even more generous exemption scheduled to take effect in 2009, $3.5 million, the ranks of those potentially hit hard by the tax would have dwindled even further; 65 farm estates would owe taxes and 13 would not have enough cash to cover the bill.

In other words, the image of the grieving heir packing up his hoe as he trudges away from the family farm is just that -- a powerful image but not an accurate one. Over the years, the discussion of the estate tax hasn't exactly been noted for its intellectual rigor. But members of Congress debating the issue now ought to look at the facts assembled by the CBO -- not the misinformation peddled by those maneuvering to make repeal permanent.

- Scott

Olivier Roy: Terrorism's root causes are in globalization and radical religion mixing

Writing from Paris in The New York Times Olivier Roy asks, "has Britain (and Spain as well) been 'punished by Al Qaeda for participating in the American-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan?"

He answers no. He sees the roots of Islamic terrorism beyond Middle Eastern conflicts.

I feel Roy comes too close to undervaluing Afghanistan and Iraq as significant, not root, causes of terrorism. There's now general consensus among the military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have resulted in an increase in global terrorism, because the conflicts in Iraq and the (smoldering and increasingly hot) one in Afghanistan provide literal training and recruiting grounds for new terrorists to strike both in those lands and beyond.

Roy is correct that from "the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists," that for them "every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers," and that their "vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are." But, those truths are not mutually exclusive of the truths that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has, at least in the short term, made the world less safe against terrorism, and may very well prove to have been a Bad Idea.

It's not that Roy dismisses Iraq or other Middle Eastern conflicts utterly. He does state that they "have a tremendous impact on Muslim public opinion worldwide," and that terrorists' references to them provide "popularity or at least legitimacy among Muslims;" they are good opportunities for propaganda. But Roy perhaps skips too lightly over the significance of that fact.

Nonetheless, on his main theme that Iraq and Middle East conflicts are not root causes--and, to be fair, NYT op-eds don't really give the writer opportunity to follow more than one main theme--Roy has great arguments.

He points out that "Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, not before. Mohamed Atta and the other pilots were not driven by Iraq or Afghanistan," and not likely by the "plight of the Palestinians," either, whose "second intifada began in September 2000, at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," well after the 9/11 attack plans were hatched.

Critically important, I think, is Roy's observation that Bin Laden by the time of even the first invasion of Iraq was "a veteran fighter committed to global jihad," who had  left "the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980's," and that except for a smallish Egyptian faction of Al Qaeda, Lin Laden & company "were not involved in Middle Eastern politics." In fact, "Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden's mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character."

Roy presses on powerfully:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

And:

Even [the terrorists'] calls for [Western troop withdrawals] from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.

So, for Roy, the root causes of terrorism are at the nexus between globalization and radical religion. He writes that the Westernized converts so often found among the members of terrorist cells convert "because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France)." They are "looking for a cause," they are "not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations."

Olivier Roy is a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and is the author of Globalized Islam.