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By Eric Brewer, on July 14th, 2007
I’m puzzled. When Karl Rove finally spoke in public about the Plame Affair last week, he said that Armitage was the one who “used her name.” But didn’t Novak look it up in Who’s Who?
Aha. I see you subscribe to the immaculate leak theory of Plameogenesis.
It’s true that Novak started making that claim after the investigation began, but a couple of months earlier he told some reporters from Newsday, “I didn’t dig it out; it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name, and I used it.”
They?
The “two senior administration officials” who were the sources for his original column.
And who were they again?
Armitage and Rove.
But how did Armitage and Rove know about Valerie?
Well, Armitage first heard about the Wilson affair from Marc Grossman, an Undersecretary of State. I’m not sure who told Rove.
And how did Mr. Grossman know?
Continue reading The one who used her name
By Weldon Berger, on July 13th, 2007
This site’s new spam blocker, which keeps the comments section from being overrun by links to everything from porn sites to closet organizer merchants, was installed on June 26. As the graphic below shows, it has blocked more than 460,000 attempts to post comment spam since then. That’s about 1,000 per hour. If we . . . → Read More: Hope for renewable energy
By Weldon Berger, on July 13th, 2007
USA Today has obtained an Army report implicating Iraqi police in a January, 2007 insurgent raid during which four U.S. troops were captured and later slain. The story notes that the new Pentagon spokesman in Iraq, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, gave a briefing last week blaming Iran for the attack but neglecting to mention the complicity of the Iraqi police.
According to Juan Cole of Informed Comment, police in Karbala are dominated by the Badr Brigade, the militia fielded by the Iranian-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council — SIIC, formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) — which is one of the current government’s key political backers and which controlled Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which has authority over the police, until last year. SIIC leaders lived in Iran during their long exile from Saddam’s Iraq, and their militia was trained and armed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The U.S. has enjoyed a close relationship with SIIC, in part because of the group’s opposition to their coreligionist rival, Moqtada al Sadr, whom we officially detest and would like to see dead, and in part because SIIC has backed, at least on paper, most U.S. demands upon the Iraqi government.
All of which is to say that government forces, trained by us and associated with one of our closest political allies in Iraq, an ally that plays a key role in the government we’re propping up, helped plan and execute one of the scariest attacks on U.S. forces since we got there. Can we go now?
Continue reading Army report implicates Iraqi police in Karbala attack
By Weldon Berger, on July 12th, 2007
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill today that sets an April 2008 deadline for withdrawing (in theory) most combat troops from Iraq. The bill passed by a margin of 223-201.
In reality the bill would have little effect even if president Bush signed it, since it allows for troops necessary to protect the troops training the Iraqis, troops necessary to protect US facilities, including the Green Zone embassy, and troops necessary to fight terrorists. Since the administration would be in charge of deciding what numbers those requirements entail, and since the administration already says that everyone who is shooting at us is a terrorist, you can see how we’d need pretty much the same number of troops in April of next year, or possibly more if conditions deteriorate, as we’ve had there all along.
But that’s not what caught my eye in the San Francisco Chronicle story on the legislation and its chances for passage in the Senate.
Continue reading In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to get a bathroom break
By Weldon Berger, on July 12th, 2007
The chairman and chief medical officer of Aetna took to the pages of the Washington Post on Tuesday to offer their perspective on health care reform. They were motivated, they said, by the increasing number of Americans going without health insurance, a concern presumably unrelated to SiCKO, Michael Moore’s new and very popular film on the failings of the U.S. health care system, and by a mystifying public perception that “that our industry might be opposed to reform.”
The essay dovetails nicely, by virtue of its extraordinarily weak argument, with George Bush’s recent comments about health care, which included this bone-ignorant gem: “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room. The question is, will we be wise about how we pay for health care.”
The answer, obviously, is “not if I have anything to do with it,” and the Aetna guys are down with that. They say their industry only averages about a 6% profit, “less than many other for-profit sectors in health care; less than the margins at many not-for-profit health-care institutions; and far less than the numbers recently bandied about.”
Continue reading Aetna, we’re out to get ya
By Weldon Berger, on July 11th, 2007
Bob Woodward, whose reporting, or “reporting,” depending upon the circumstances, has long proven a reliable measure of establishment Washington’s rectal temperature, has a revelatory story in Thursday’s Washington Post describing the utterly pessimistic testimony of CIA director Michael Hayden to members of the Iraq Study Group during a session in November of last year. Hayden told the group that “[Iraq's] government is unable to govern. We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function.” Members of the group said Hayden told them that the government’s failures were irreversible; Hayden’s spokesman claims otherwise, but Woodward’s sources, which include six ISG members, are unanimous.
Among those sources is retired Supreme Court justice Sandra O’Connor, who, like Woodward, resides at the epicenter of Washington society and who is as responsible as anyone for the fact of George Bush’s presidency, by virtue of her deciding vote in Bush v. Gore. She and former Clinton defense secretary William Perry were the only two of the six ISG members to go on the record in the story; O’Connor to confirm Hayden’s remarks and offer a plaintive, hand-wringing comment about the mess that the man she made president has made of Iraq, and Perry to likewise confirm the CIA man’s gloom and add an unflattering description of Bush’s own contribution to the proceedings.
Woodward was also given access to the written minutes of the sessions held with Hayden, Bush and other top administration officials. The cooperation of the ISG members and the access to the notes convey plainly that he’s acting with the approval and cooperation of some heavy hitters among Washington’s old guard; his story represents both the latest salvo in that crowd’s war to force a change in the administration’s stance on Iraq and the official opening of a second front in Congress, and may well be of a part with the stand taken last week by another old guard stalwart, Republican senator Richard Lugar, whose appraisal of the situation dovetails neatly with Hayden’s.
Continue reading All lies, all the time: the Bush administration on Iraq
By Eric Brewer, on July 11th, 2007
11-15-02 [dates are linked]: The FBI announces that Al Qaeda may be planning “spectacular attacks” in the United States that will cause “mass casualties” and “severe damage” to the economy.
3-19-03: One of the real ones.
3-2-04: Fox News reports that in February 2004, U.S. officials released what they said was an intercepted letter written by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, outlining a strategy of spectacular attacks on Shiites aimed at sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war. The release of the letter (it was leaked to NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins, whose article about it made the front page of the Times) is later revealed to be part of a U.S. military propaganda campaign to exaggerate the importance of Zarqawi.
4-21-05: Retired Army general John Keane, just back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, warns that insurgents may be planning spectacular large-scale attacks to slow the momentum of recent military and political gains there.
9-10-05: A U.S. military intelligence official, Chief Warrant Officer Larry Tersone, predicts that militants in Afghanistan “will try to conduct an operation of a spectacular nature within a significant population center” as elections approach.
Continue reading Spectacular attacks, real and imaginary
By Weldon Berger, on July 11th, 2007
Richard Cohen wrote what may be his most pathetic column ever in the Washington Post yesterday, entitled “They Honor Us With Their Hate.” It’s not an original idea, echoing to one degree or another formulations such as Bush’s “they hate us for our freedoms,” or similar statements from anyone who celebrates antagonism to what they believe is a just cause; neither is it original in its synthesis of pride and victimization. What might be original is its very particular combination of stupidity with glimmers of enlightenment.
Cohen’s jumping-off point is the Palestinian celebration of the 911 attacks. For some thousands of Palestinian youths, the attacks were cathartic. Cohen should understand this; he cites U.S. support for Israel as one of his just causes, but alertly qualifies it by saying that the support is sometimes “over the top” and that the U.S.-supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are (were, in the latter instance) “an abomination.” He should understand the urge toward catharsis, misplaced or otherwise, in the face of injustice because he listed it in another column as one of his reasons for supporting the invasion of Iraq, with its consequent destruction of life and property. “In a post-Sept. 11 world,” he said, “I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.”
Continue reading In which a wealthy, privileged pundit celebrates his victimhood
By Eric Brewer, on July 9th, 2007
Check out this fascinating combination of articles in yesterday’s Washington Post ‘Outlook’ section:
Getting the CIA we need, by David Ignatius Our clueless intelligence system, by Amy Zegart Who runs the CIA? Outsiders for hire, by R. J. Hillhouse
Ignatius thinks that the CIA is something of a rogue outfit, because it doesn’t have . . . → Read More: Accountable spying?
By Weldon Berger, on July 8th, 2007
A couple of days ago, Eric Umansky wrote that “a month ago, I was speaking with Karen Green at NYU’s Center on Law and Security, who [said] something about Gitmo that’s stuck with me ever since: Time and again prisoners at Gitmo have insisted that they are innocent and asked the tribunals there to simply follow-up and try to corroborate their alibis. But the tribunals almost never do that.”
He brought the issue up in connection with an Associated Press story about a guy, Saddiq Turkistani, who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for five years because they suspected him of being an Israeli agent intent on killing bin Laden and then, when the Taliban were overthrown, was shipped off by the U.S. from the Afghanistan prison where he’d been held by the Taliban to Guantanamo Bay, where he’s been held for six years on suspicion of having been an al Qaeda agent.
One of Umansky’s readers suggested the reason was that releasing someone from Guantanamo laid the captors open to blowback should the someone prove later to have been a terrorist or, perhaps more likely, should they turn into one as a result of their ordeal. It’s easier and safer, and probably less personally frightening, not to make waves—to avoid altogether any genuine research into guilt or innocence.
Continue reading One thing you know for sure when you torture someone
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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Hope for renewable energy
This site’s new spam blocker, which keeps the comments section from being overrun by links to everything from porn sites to closet organizer merchants, was installed on June 26. As the graphic below shows, it has blocked more than 460,000 attempts to post comment spam since then. That’s about 1,000 per hour. If we . . . → Read More: Hope for renewable energy