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By Weldon Berger, on May 23rd, 2007
The newest new US plan for Iraq involves political negotiations, selectively assassinating uncooperative Iraqi government and security officials and strengthening the Iraqi army, which is described in the Washington Post story on the plan as “one of the more reliable institutions in the country.”
This would be the same army that U.S officials said only a month ago was no longer a factor in their strategy for securing the country.
But of course the army isn’t the big news in the plan: that’s the U.S. endorsement of assassination as a tool for political reconciliation. Ann Tyson’s sources were quick to add that it wouldn’t be the U.S. doing the assassinating — “we are not running our own death squads or vigilante activity … for us to do it would be horrible” — but say that making examples of particularly recalcitrant government officials and army or other security officers is essential. So it will be the Iraqi government’s responsibility to assassinate its own officials, presumably through the good offices of non-sectarian death squads and vigilantes loyal to the Iraqi factions controlling the government. And thus will sectarian conflict be ameliorated.
Continue reading New US Iraq plan relies on imaginary army and real assassinations
By Weldon Berger, on May 21st, 2007
More than 100 Washington Post readers have responded to a Washington Post op-ed piece by new U.S. intelligence director Mike McConnell calling for changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At last count, only five comments could be interpreted as favorable, and only one of those was genuinely coherent. A number of readers point out that McConnell, the nation’s top intelligence official, is a liar.
McConnell says that FISA, the law regulating electronic eavesdropping on non-U.S. espionage and terrorism suspects, hasn’t been updated to keep pace with changes in technology since its enactment nearly 30 years ago. He’s lying. Major amendments to the law were included in the PATRIOT Act, the massive omnibus “anti-terrorist” legislation that was hurried through Congress in the wake of 911.
McConnell knows that. So did the Post’s editorial page editors; the paper published dozens of stories about the revisions. But the Post chose, and not for the first time, to turn its paper over to a Bush administration official to use as a promotional vehicle for a blatant lie.
Continue reading The U.S. Director of National Intelligence is lying about FISA
By Weldon Berger, on May 19th, 2007
Let no one say that the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, such as it is, has been an unqualified failure. Sure, Iran and Osama bin Laden may be the primary beneficiaries of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Yes, the unqualified US support for Israel’s disastrous assault on Lebanon helped precipitate yet another political crisis in the region’s only multi-ethnic and pan-religious democracy, simultaneously sending Hezbullah stock skyrocketing in certain key quarters. And it’s true that Saudi Arabian leaders, including the once reliable Bandar Bush, have taken to flipping off high-ranking US officials with boring regularity.
But Condoleezza Rice and company have achieved at least one of their goals: they set out last year to encourage a civil war between Hamas and Fatah in Palestine, and in relatively short order, with relatively little effort and at relatively little expense, they’ve succeeded. Of course they couldn’t have done it absent cooperation from the Israelis, the Egyptians and factions within both Palestinian parties, and the outcome likely won’t meet the administration’s ideal, but for now the situation can be counted an unqualified success if for no other reason than that it takes diplomacy, at which the administration really, really sucks, off the table.
Curiously, the U.S. press coverage and analysis of the conflict goes light on the U.S. decision to arm and train the losers of last year’s Palestinian elections in the hope of forcibly overturning the results. This Washington Post story does offer a bit of insight into the complexities of the situation, adding the (presumably) unintentionally comic notation that even as Israel and the U.S. are overtly supporting Fatah in a variety of ways, both countries, “each deeply unpopular among Arabs in the region, have been trying to avoid the perception of taking sides in a conflict that this week in Gaza has resembled a nascent civil war.”
Continue reading Finally, a Bush administration success in Palestine: civil war
By Weldon Berger, on May 18th, 2007
The website of Alhurra, the Virginia-based Arabic language satellite broadcaster, acknowledges that the channel is funded by the U.S. government but says that the channel’s parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Inc., “receives this funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent and autonomous federal agency. The BBG serves as a firewall to protect the professional independence and integrity of the broadcasters.” So why, then, were the broadcaster’s management team defending their station’s programming during a contentious and often unintentionally comedic congressional committee hearing yesterday?
It’s a rhetorical question. Alhurra was established in 2003 by Congress on direction of the Bush administration, and their funding is contingent on satisfying Congress that they’re behaving properly. Proper behavior includes not giving a platform to anyone on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, which includes Hamas, the governing political party in Palestine, and Hezbullah, one of the most powerful political parties in Lebanon and a key player in the continuing boycott of the Lebanese government, which means that the channel is legally proscribed from interviewing members of those organizations, which means that by design, there’s a bloody, gaping, glaring hole in the channel’s regional news coverage. Which is a problem because regional news coverage, albeit coverage favorable to the U.S., is the raison d’être of the operation, and persuading viewers to take seriously a news channel that won’t cover half the news is a real challenge in most parts of the world (the success of Fox News in the U.S. notwithstanding).
But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that the channel’s management have no actual idea what they’re broadcasting because none of them speak Arabic. Funny-sad, as is the failure of presumably sentient members of Congress to grasp the notion that the US can’t showcase the virtues of free speech by censoring it.
Continue reading No Arabic-speaking execs for US-backed Middle East broadcast
By Weldon Berger, on May 16th, 2007
It’s perfect: the man nominated by George Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission received a $150,000 payoff from the organization representing the businesses he would be in charge of regulating.
But Michael Baroody is probably telling the truth when he says that the money won’t have any impact on the way he does his new job, assuming he ever gets confirmed; he was never what his patrons would consider a risky proposition, with a resume including 10 years in the not especially consumer-friendly Reagan and Bush I administrations and a stint at the Republican National Committee, where he helped write the 1980 Republican party platform that includes a plank explicitly rejecting the need for consumer advocates within the federal government.
An informed consumer making economic choices and decisions in the marketplace is the best regulator of the free enterprise system. Consumers are also taxpayers, workers, investors, shoppers, farmers, and producers. The Republican Party recognizes the need for consumer protection but feels that such protection will not be enhanced by the creation of a new consumer protection bureaucracy. Just as there can be no single monolithic consumer viewpoint, so the Republican Party opposes the funding of special self-proclaimed advocates to represent consumer interests in federal agency proceedings.
Continue reading New consumer protection honcho gets payoff from manufacturers
By Weldon Berger, on May 16th, 2007
Arizona senator John McCain disappointed the audience at Tuesday’s GOP presidential candidates debate when he refused to support the use of torture against terrorism suspects, but he may have repaired some of the damage when he promised to personally take the fight to terrorists in Iraq.
McCain became the first of the GOP presidential . . . → Read More: McCain volunteers for Iraq combat duty “if necessary”
By Weldon Berger, on May 16th, 2007
Among the less subtle hints about US long-term plans for Iraq are the massive, permanent military bases there and the Brobdignagian new US embassy in the Green Zone. No one, including congressional Democrats, ever talks about the bases, but Al Kamen has some details about the embassy in today’s Washington Post.
For all those who keep whining about how the government can’t do anything right, we’re happy to report that the massive New Embassy Compound in Baghdad, the biggest U.S. embassy on earth, is going to be completed pretty much as scheduled in August.
The bad news is that it appears it’s not going to have enough housing for all the employees who’ll be moving to the 27-building complex on a 104-acre tract of land — about the size of the Vatican, two-thirds the size of the Mall — within the Green Zone.
The housing shortage is a problem because outside the embassy there are quite literally no safe places to live, even in the Green Zone.
Continue reading America’s Vatican City-sized Baghdad embassy is too small
By Weldon Berger, on May 16th, 2007
The Washington Post reported Sunday on a Pentagon official in Iraq who has drawn the ire of other government officials by unilaterally reconstituting some of that country’s state-owned industries.
Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better bombs. The State Department has even taken the unusual step of enlisting the CIA to dispute the validity of Brinkley’s work.
Brinkley’s attempt to ease unemployment among the ranks of young men with guns — estimated to be running at 60% or higher — drew this response from one irate US embassy official: “Here was this guy who parachuted in from Washington who thought he had all of the answers and that we were just a bunch of idiots sitting around in the Green Zone.”
What could possibly lead him to think that?
Continue reading From the department of questions better left unasked
By Weldon Berger, on May 15th, 2007
It’s the most brilliant political stratagem since Pat Buchanan kidnapped and murdered the Reform party in 2000: “Gridlock in a Can.”
Unity ’08 wants to run a bipartisan ticket in the next presidential election, mix-and-matching candidates from the two major parties with candidates from the other party or with independents. Among the names bandied about have been Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Hagel because he has a presidentially craggy face and doesn’t like the way the Bushies do war, and Bloomberg because he’s a Republican who combines a degree of sanity with a much greater degree of wealth; he could finance his own campaign, relieving Unity ’08 supporters of that burden. The world of Kumbayah politics was recently set alight when Bloomberg and Hagel were spotted dining together in Manhattan, and is positively aflame now that Hagel has more or less declared that, contrary to some estimations, if he runs for president it won’t be as a Republican.
Sam Waterston, the tremolo-wielding Law & Order actor who fronts the group, says that the head of the oddball ticket would earn such political capital as a result of surfing to office on a tidal wave of formless voter anxiety that he or she “could summon the congressional leadership of both parties and both houses to the White House, shut the doors and get serious about finding answers they can all agree on.”
Continue reading Unity ’08 seeks 40 million passionately uninspired voters
By Eric Brewer, on May 13th, 2007
Two British men suffer for Bush’s sins… . . . → Read More: Expose Bush’s war crimes, go to jail
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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