CIA Documents Fail To Support Cheney’s Claim

Spencer Ackerman has former VP Cheney’s statement about torture and the claim ( made in 2005) that certain CIA documents would reveal that torture saved the U.S. from further terror attacks,

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

The “interrogation process” referred has been known for decades as torture. There is no doubt that questioning suspects yielded information. If anyone argued against questioning suspects it was someone made of pure straw. The issue, as Cheney well knows, is whether torture was required to get good and actionable intel. The documents recently released by the CIA in no way give credence to Cheney’s claim that torture saved us all. Five Important Revelations From The CIA Inspector General Report

4. The CIA IG concluded that while high-value detainees did produce valuable intelligence, the measurement of the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques “is a more subjective process and not without some concern.” The CIA lists four reasons for this muddled view. First, “the Agency cannot determine with any certainty the totality of the intelligence the detainee actually possesses.” Second, “each detainee has different fears of and tolereace for” harsh techniques. Third, “the application of the same” harsh technique “by different interrogators may have different results.” The fourth reason that the effectiveness of harsh techniques could not be known objectively remains classified, and was redacted from the released document.

Let’s entertain for a moment the possibility that some actionable intel was obtained by torture and is buried under the redact. There is no proof that Dick Cheney seems able to supply that will support his claims and those of his kowtowing apologists that torture, a clear violation of established law, was the one and only  way to get suspects to talk. What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report

(2) As I wrote rather clearly, numerous detainees died in U.S. custody, often as a direct result of our “interrogation methods.”  Those who doubt that can read the details here and here.  Those claiming there was no physical harm are simply lying — death qualifies as “physical harm” — and those who oppose prosecutions are advocating that the people responsible literally be allowed to get away with murder.

Dick Cheney gets up every morning and uses a fire before putting on his pants. That’s a given that no doublespeak from from the Weakly Standard or conservative pundits can bury. All the conservative faux outrage and sniveling is probably unnecessary. As much as Dick and George should be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff ( an amateur conman compared to Dick and George) it looks as though the DOJ investigation will be limited to low level operatives, The Center for Constitutional Rights has issued a statement blasting the AG

Responsibility for the torture program cannot be laid at the feet of a few low-level operatives. Some agents in the field may have gone further than the limits so ghoulishly laid out by the lawyers who twisted the law to create legal cover for the program, but it is the lawyers and the officials who oversaw and approved the program who must be investigated.

The Attorney General must appoint an independent special prosecutor with a full mandate to investigate those responsible for torture and war crimes, especially the high ranking officials who designed, justified and orchestrated the torture program. We call on the Obama administration not to tie a prosecutor’s hands but to let the investigation go as far up the chain of command as the facts lead. We must send a clear message to the rest of the world, to future officials, and to the victims of torture that justice will be served and that the rule of law has been restored.

Cheney is on record as having approved of the use of EITs. Cheney Told CIA To Hide Program From Congress

Former Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA eight years ago not to inform Congress about a nascent counterterrorism program that CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated in June, officials with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

[   ]…Cheney played a central role in overseeing the Bush administration’s surveillance program that was the subject of an inspectors general report this past week. That report noted that Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, personally decided who in Bush’s inner circle could even know about the secret program.

I wonder if Cheney and apologists will be playing another round of let’s blame Speaker Pelosi. These are the very same people that think America should trust them when they talk about health-care.

Liz Cheney Revives Better Dead Then Red Rhetoric for the 21st Century

Even if we exclude Halliburton, the Cheney’s have made quite a nice living courtesy the American tax payer. Add in some substantial fringe benefits like continued security protection and government subsidized ( socialist?) health-care and what do we get in return; a lack of honesty that would get most six year olds restriction and no ice cream for a week. Then there is there utter lack of humility. Cheney recently left office with one of the lowest public opinion ratings since we started measuring such things. So low that its obvious even most Republicans do not like him. Dick having recently used up a considerable amount of network time and filling the atmosphere with a considerable amount of noxious gas appears to be taking a break, leaving Liz to fill the void. Obama Rewrites the Cold War – The President has a duty to stand up to the lies of our enemies Most of the editorial consists of M’s Cheney waving her arms wildly in the air echoing the unofficial neocon Chicken-Little anthem – we’re all gonna die if we do not do things the neocon way. Considering the ocean of innocent blood that is the neocon legacy – which they blithely dismiss as an introduction to democracy – it seems unlikely that anyone who is not drunk on the kool-aid will pay Liz much mind. Liz finally settles down to something that resembles a point,

Mr. Obama has become fond of saying, as he did in Russia again last week, that American nuclear disarmament will encourage the North Koreans and the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions. Does he really believe that the North Koreans and the Iranians are simply waiting for America to cut funds for missile defense and reduce our strategic nuclear stockpile before they halt their weapons programs?

[   ]….Perhaps Mr. Obama thinks he is making America inoffensive to our enemies. In reality, he is emboldening them and weakening us. America can be disarmed literally — by cutting our weapons systems and our defensive capabilities — as Mr. Obama has agreed to do.

M’s Cheney, surely by accident leaves out what Obama actually said and did, Barack Obama urges Russia not to interfere in neighbouring states

“In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonising other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over,” he said, speaking to graduates from Moscow’s New Economic School.

[   ]…Crucially, though, Obama indicated that Washington would not tolerate another Russian invasion of Georgia. Russia is winding up full-scale military exercises next to the Georgian border amid ominous predictions that a second conflict in the Caucasus could erupt this summer.

On Monday Obama reaffirmed Georgia’s sovereignty – severely undermined by last year’s war and Moscow’s subsequent unilateral recognition of rebel-held Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. Today Obama defended “state sovereignty”, describing it as “a cornerstone of international order”.

He also said that Georgia and Ukraine had a right to choose their own foreign policy and leaders, and could join Nato if they wanted.

In yet another chapter of imagine if: If Bush had made those statements the Right would have been rushing to their media outposts pounding their chests about the he-man toughness of the guy that thinks with his gut. Obama’s speech was almost out of a chapter of the old Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People. Tough talk punctuated with compliments. An arch of diplomatic tact that actually dates back to Franklin and Jefferson. President Obama’s new nuclear arms agreement made rather modest targets in the reductions of nuclear arms and their launchers. In future, as usual, The WSJ would probably publish any over the top doggerel Liz or Dick would like to have published, such is the nature of the librul press. That being the case the least the Cheneys could do is not look foolish and increasingly irreverent and read the WSJ. In a clever piece of concern trolling by Keith B. Payne (a member of the Perry-Schlesinger Commission which studies U.S. nuclear capabilities) in the WSJ wrote,

The Obama administration will undoubtedly come under heavy pressure to move to the low end of the 500-1,100 limit on launchers in order to match Russian reductions. But it need not and should not do so. Based solely on open Russian sources, by 2017-2018 Russia will likely have fewer than half of the approximately 680 operational launchers it has today. With a gross domestic product less than that of California, Russia is confronting the dilemma of how to maintain parity with the U.S. while retiring its many aged strategic forces.

So even a conservative expert, with a predictable agenda, admits that the number of launchers – bombers, subs, etc – the way nukes would be delivered in a nuclear conflict, is an area the U.S. would enjoy a considerable, maybe even two fold tactical advantage in strike capability if for no other reason then Russia’s economy will force them to reduce the numbers of launchers. Nuclear arms reductions is complex. The recent U.S.-Russia talks were only an opening round, Follow on to START

Well, we have a Joint Understanding for the START Follow-on Treaty.

I observe that Reuters, in one of those irritating self indulgent news analysis pieces, frames the question “Spin or Deep Cut?” (The article, by Guy Faulconbridge is actually pretty good; not as bad as the headline would suggest.)

I think this outline is neither spin, nor a deep cut. I view the START Follow-on as an interim agreement to preserve the verification mechanisms in START (which disappear with START in December) for a second agreement that will take two or three years to negotiate. Deep cuts will have to wait for this second agreement, to which the Obama Administration has committed publicly.

The key observation is

The new agreement will enhance the security of both the U.S. and Russia, as well as provide predictability and stability in strategic offensive forces.

Liz Cheney, like Charles Krauthammer and various cons are literally wearing their fifty year old Cold War mentality on their sleeve. Cheney quotes from President Harry Truman’s Cold War strategy,

The White House ought to take a lesson from President Harry Truman. In April, 1950, Truman signed National Security Council report 68 (NSC-68). One of the foundational documents of America’s Cold War strategy, NSC-68 explains the danger of disarming America in the hope of appeasing our enemies. “No people in history,” it reads, “have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies.”

Should someone tell Liz that Democrat Truman’s policies won the Cold War and the Soviet Union no longer exists. Its the 21st century, it is not in America’s interest to revive the use of the Civil War musket, the WW II carbine or the Cold War strategies of days long past. And don’t worry Liz we still have more then enough nukes to live up to that 50s slogan ‘better dead then red”.

Republicans Want Ahmadinezhad to Win and Lose, New Torture Revelations

The Boston Globe has some good though disturbing photos of some of the street conflicts taking place in Iran, Iran’s Disputed Election

Following up from last Friday’s entry about Iran’s Presidential Election, Tehran and other cities have seen the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Supporters of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, upset at their announced loss and suspicions of voter fraud, took to the streets both peacefully and, in some cases, violently to vent their frustrations.

Neocon Michael Ledeen weighs in on what he thinks President Obama should say and do. Before we get to his current childish bluster a quick review of his history,

A fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He is a former employee of the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council. As a consultant working with NSC head Robert McFarlane, he was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair — an adventure that he documented in the book “Perilous Statecraft: An Insider’s Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.”

[   ]…He was calling for attacks against Iraq throughout the 1990s, and the U.S. invasion on March 19 was a total fulfillment of his proposals. His attacks against the CIA and the State Department have contributed to the exclusion of these intelligence bodies from any effective decision making on Iraq. His attacks on Iran, even when Iran was assisting the United States, helped keep the Bush administration from seeking any rapprochement with Tehran. Were it in Ledeen’s hands, we would invade Iran today.

If Ledeen has his way we would have troops occupying Iraq, Syria and Iran or at the very least bombed those countries into oblvion. He also, like all good neocons sold the media and the public the Iraq WMD/al-Queda connection fairy tale. Mikie isn’t the kind of person that learns from mistakes, a soul mate of sorts to Cheney and Bush 43. Now he has deemed to bless us with his advice about the current events of Iran – a country and a people that Leeden now claims to care about so much, that would have been a nothing but a sand pit had Ledeen, Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani had their way. The bomb hasn’t been invented yet that can tell the difference between the average moderate minded Iranian and that countries authoritarin radicals – its the Brit Hume mentality – so what, its people that speak a funny language and they’re tens of thousands of miles away, mere collatareal damage.

Western governments have expressed dismay at the violence, and Obama, in his eternally narcissistic way, said that he was deeply disturbed by it, and went on to add that freedom of speech, etc., were universal values and should be respected by the mullahs.  I would have preferred a strong statement of condemnation–stressing the evil of killing peaceful demonstrators–but he finally said something.

He probably thinks he’s in a bind (he isn’t, actually).  He probably thinks that if he condemns the violence, and the regime wins, that will lessen his chances to strike the Grand Bargain he so avidly desires.  Somebody might remind him that Ronald Reagan was unstinting in his criticism of the Soviet Union (”The Evil Empire”), but negotiated no end of bargains with them, including quite dramatic arms reductions.

Ledeen should stop the bad mind reading act, this is the real world, not a cheesy Vegas magic show. The neocons rattled their sabers at Iran for almost eight years and their list of achevements include …… well zero. It defies common sense to go to a complete failure for advice. Might make a good reality show called Take Life or Death Advice from Infamous Losers. The Soviet Union fail because of years of incompetent and oppressive rule, not because their feelings were hurt by something Saint Ronnie said. It should go without saying that Reagan thought the USSR was evil, just as today’s neocons think Iran is evil, but Reagan negotiated with them anyway. On the other hand we have some neocons rooting for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,

Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, wrote that he was “rooting for Ahmadinejad” because it would be “better to have a bellicose, apocalyptic, in-your-face Ahmadinejad who scares the world than a sweet-talking Mousavi who again lulls it to sleep.”

An Iranian makes note of the obvious consequences of an Obama administration becoming just as bellicose and ultimately impotent as the Bush administration was,

Over the weekend, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told TWI that an Obama statement might allow Iran’s leaders to portray the unrest as a Western conspiracy.

Knowing that the Iranian government takes a lot of pride, if undeserved in the fact that their government is actually elected. Thus are more prone to respond in at least some marginally positive way with the statement that Obama made, Obama troubled by Iran post-election violence

“I am deeply troubled by the violence that I’ve been seeing on television,” Obama told reporters after talks with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the White House.

“The democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all those are universal values and need to be respected,” he said.

Obama stressed that the United States respected Iran’s sovereignty and could not judge how the election was run because neither U.S. nor international observers were present.

“The Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place,” Obama said.

“It’s important that moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.”

No empty rhetoric of the Bush years. No, Obama hit the Iranian government at their perceived strengths – they claim to have a legitimately elected government that rules by consent of the people. Obama undermines that assertion by highlighting the obvious. Obama’s words might not get a new election for Iran, but he has embarrassed the hard liners and encouraged resistance. No wonder the Right is grasping at straws, trying to put some kind of spin on events out of Iran, they’ve come up empty handed for years and it seems to irritate the hell out of them that merely having a president that knows when and how to throw the right punch for the situation is clearly embarrassing. See Rush Limbaugh and others zealots for hoping Obama fails. The Right has become known as the Culture of Death for a reason.

There used to be a a sign common in offices that said to screw up is human, to really screw up it takes  a computer. For the millennium that should be updated to, if you really want to screw up fellow the lead of Conservatives, CIA Mistaken on ‘High-Value’ Detainee, Document Shows

An al-Qaeda associate captured by the CIA and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques said his jailers later told him they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization’s hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden, according to newly released excerpts from a 2007 hearing.

“They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ ” said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President George W. Bush described Abu Zubaida in 2002 as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations.” Intelligence, military and law enforcement sources told The Washington Post this year that officials later concluded he was a Pakistan-based “fixer” for radical Islamist ideologues, but not a formal member of al-Qaeda, much less one of its leaders.

Whether its George Bush or Mike Ledeen, its the same mentality, the same rusted intractable and almost always wrong mind set. Torture does work, depending on how one defines works, Detainee says he lied to CIA in harsh interrogations

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ ”

Mohammed also appeared to say that he had fingered people he did not know as being Al Qaeda members in order to avoid abusive treatment. Although there is no way to corroborate his statements, Mohammed is one of the militants whom the CIA repeatedly subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The newly released information could amplify calls for the Obama administration to make public more details about the treatment of terrorism suspects or allow a broader inquiry into the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Monday’s disclosure represented a rare allegation by a detainee that he had lied while being subjected to harsh practices.

A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said Mohammed’s statements raised questions about the effectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation program.

“It underscores the unreliability of statements obtained by torture,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.

“While we are warriors, we are also all human beings”

Cheney Led Briefings of Lawmakers To Defend Interrogation Techniques

The revelations do not shed light on whether top Democrats, as Republicans contend, were aware that waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, was being used on terrorism suspects as early as the fall of 2002. That discussion has dominated Capitol Hill since last month, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was not present at any of the briefings that included Cheney, accused the agency of intentionally misleading her in a 2002 briefing about the use of waterboarding.

One of the major talking points missing from the Cheney Torture is Fun Tour is his explicit mention of what he informed Pelosi of. If she was as deep in the loop as Republicans would like to place the Speaker wouldn’t Cheney know.

Lawmakers at times challenged Cheney and CIA officials about the legality of the program and pressed for specific results that would show whether the techniques worked. In response, the CIA briefers said that half of the agency’s knowledge about al-Qaeda’s plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations.

Assuming the torture style interrogations are what is implied we know as Speaker Pelosi has said that there was some misleading language from the CIA. A senate report on detainee abuse stated,

(U) The collection of timely and accurate intelligence is critical to the safety of U.S. personnel deployed abroad and to the security of the American people here at home. The methods by which we elicit intelligence information from detainees in our custody affect not only the reliability of that information, but our broader efforts to win hearts and minds and attract allies to our side.
(U) Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies. In fact, the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” cited “pervasive anti U.S. sentiment among most Muslims” as an underlying factor fueling the spread of the global jihadist movement. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

To date no evidence has been produced that torture prevented any attacks against the U.S. or provided any valuable information that was not gained through non-coercive methods,

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

Here, they say, far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

Cheney has recently admitted that he lied to the nation to ramp up support for the  bloody and counter productive invasion of Iraq, Cheney admits there was never any evidence tying Iraq, 9/11,

Cheney’s comments are a marked shift from those he made in 2003. Pressed to disavow assertions that Iraq was in any way involved with the attacks, the then-VP claimed the administration was learning “more and more” about al Qaeda-Iraq ties.

Now, after 4,308 US servicemembers have lost their lives in Iraq, and no longer in office, the vociferous GOP hawk has appears to have changed his mind.

Here’s a vice-president more then willing to lie hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths; telling a few lies about torture would be of little moral consequence to someone with a mindset typical of the delusional authoritarian.

Difficult to condense so this is most of the post from Plumline, Yikes! Did Obama Really Call America A Muslim Country? Nope.

The Times piece is already spreading rapidly on the right. PowerLineBlog, for instance, asked: “In what possible sense can any rational person consider the United States to be a Muslim country?” But here’s what Obama actually said:

Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

Hard-core rhetoricians will note that Obama was employing an obscure tense known as the “conditional,” and an arcane rhetorical device known as a “hypothetical.” He said that if you were to take the number of Muslims in America, then one could see America as ranking up there with other Muslim countries — in numerical, hypothetical terms.

Sure, let’s fact-check the claim about the number of Muslims and analyze the policy implications. But come on, the man simply didn’t say America is a Muslim country. It’s going to be a long week.

Its difficult to get an excat figure on the total Muslim population of the U.S. – Pew Research says about 2.35 million. Wikipedia estimates as few as 1.8 million. Pew’s findings are also interesting in other ways,

* Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society. Most say their communities are excellent or good places to live.
* A large majority of Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off in this society. Fully 71% agree that most people who want to get ahead in the U.S. can make it if they are willing to work hard.
* The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.

Back to the population hypothetical from President Obama. He’s correct in the sense the U.S. has a larger Muslim population then Qatar, Oman and Kosovo and about as large as Kuwait. Turkey, an American ally since WW II and a member of NATO has a Muslim population of nearly 28 million.

Report of Motive in Recruiter Attack

A 23-year-old man charged with killing one soldier and seriously wounding another in a shooting outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., was once detained in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali passport and other counterfeit documents, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

The episode in Yemen prompted a preliminary inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other American law enforcement agencies into whether the man, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, had ties to extremist groups, the officials said.

Bledsoe sounds like the typical deluded extremist. Imagine the scenario, he goes to Yemen to maybe find some contacts with an extremist group. As an American probably treated with a suspicion. Since he acted alone in the murder of Pvt. William A. Long, Bledsoe probably did not have much success in hooking up with some other nut jobs.

“What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings”
— General David Petraeus

Conch on Beach wallpaper

Blue City Lake Skyline wallpaper, Melbourne City Skyline wallpaper

Blue City Lake Skyline wallpaper

Melbourne City Skyline wallpaper

Does CNN’s Tucker realize UAW’s “straight payback” includes loss of COLA, bonuses, dental?

CNN’s Bill Tucker reported that “some economists” say the Chrysler restructuring deal is a “straight payback” to the UAW from the Obama administration. But Tucker did not note any of the numerous concessions the union has reportedly made as part of a related deal.

Funny how the Right has tried to use the tea smokers/teabaggers as prof of their populist credentials, but at every opportunity not just to bash the rights of actual working Americans, but labor’s willingness to make concessions to business. Business management that just so great at doing business, looking out for the country, labor and the environment with that keen insight that the public should never question, much less regulate. The fairy tale the Right will sell America is that Chrysler failed because of labor, not because management sucked.

Mission accomplished. Remember that from six freak’n years ago, one year longer then it took a liberal to win two world wars.In Baghdad, dread grows with death tollReporting from Baghdad —

The crowds at the restaurants are thinning out. Parents have started to escort their children to school again. And cellphones are ringing more often than usual, with family members checking in just to ask, “Are you OK?” or “Is everyone safe?”

After a string of high-profile bombings and other attacks that killed 355 Iraqi civilians and security personnel and 18 U.S. troops last month nationwide, a pall has descended upon Baghdad, a lowering storm cloud swirling with echoes of the darkest days of Iraq’s civil war.

Above all, there is a sense of dread, rooted in the terrifying possibility that the calm that had brought the capital back to life over the last 18 months might have been just a lull.

“I feel a shadow of danger on the horizon, that the old days are coming back again,” Nidal Shahar, 36, said as she watched her children play in a nearly empty park along the Tigris River that would normally be crowded with families in the early evening hours. “It’s like we’re seeing the early phases again of the sectarian war.”

A Few Landscape Wallpapers and some news snips

American Classic and Wildflowers wallpaper

Rocks and Sea Shore wallpaper

Black and White Winter Mountains wallpaper

Military Families Still Pay The Price

Do you know that a US serviceman or woman still is killed every other day in Iraq? That an Iraq War veteran takes his or her own life nearly every day?

Iraq’s Gravedigging Industry Is at 100% Full Employment

Not far, in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad, what used to be a park is now a cemetery with more than 5,000 graves. According to the manager, most of the dead are never counted.

“Most of the bodies buried here are never reported in the media,” Abu Ayad Nasir Walid, 45, manager of the cemetery told IPS. He has been the manager here since the park was converted into a cemetery amidst the bloodletting from sectarian violence in early 2006.

Spending vs. Tax Cuts: Everything You Need to Know in One Chart

The takeaway? Food stamps, unemployment benefits, and infrastructure investment put the most money back into the economy for every dollar spent on them. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy do the least. (A payroll tax holiday, which is essentially a tax break for poor people, isn’t so bad.) Job creation maps similarly.

Democrats in Congress Need to Learn How to Lead

The question is: What are the Democrats in congress going to do about it? Are they going to roll over like they have for the past two years and give the Republicans what they want? (Just as McCain seems to think they will.) Or are they going to grow a pair and stand up not just for what they believe to be right, but, as importantly, what they were put in office by the electorate to do?

Governor Sarah Palin is another Republican that is pro aid for Iraq and anti-aid for America.

Extremists and Controlling the Historical Record

Russia rewriting Josef Stalin’s legacy – Archives on dictator seized from human-rights group Memorial

At first, the purpose behind the midday raid at a human-rights group’s office here was murky. Police, some clad in masks and camouflage, cut the electricity to Memorial’s offices and demanded to know if any drugs or guns were kept on the premises.

Five hours later, after police had opened every computer and walked out with 11 hard drives, the reason for their visit became clear to Memorial Director Irina Flige.

On the hard drives, a trove of scanned images and documents memorialized Josef Stalin’s murderous reign of terror. Diagrams scrawled out by survivors detailed layouts of labor camps. There were photos of Russians executed by Stalin’s secret police, wrenching accounts of survival from gulag inmates and maps showing the locations of mass graves.

“They knew what they were taking,” Flige said. “Today, the state tries to reconstruct history to make it appear like a long chain of victories. And they want these victories to be seen as justifying Stalin’s repressions.”

Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens, has been undergoing a makeover of sorts in recent years. Russian authorities have reshaped the Georgia-born dictator’s image into that of a misunderstood, demonized leader who did what he had to do to mold the Soviet Union into the superpower it became.

Bush has made a series of public appearances and a major network interview. For what purpose, to rewrite the history of his administration. Still on the taxpayers dime, he hopes to reshape the impression of being the imperial authoritarian that misled the country into an expensive foreign policy and human rights disaster. Cheney, in a rare appearance, used the occasion to dismiss the fact that as increasing numbers of the American public found that he had lied and withheld important facts about Iraq, strongly disapproved of the administration, simply replied “So?” The Bush term is nearly, but not quite over and they’re molding and rewriting the narrative. Bush claims that al Qaeda choose Iraq as the battle field, to take their last stand – all the while of course as he had let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora. While it will not stop them from trying Bush apologists are going to have as much of an up hill climb as Stalin’s. We may never see  Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice tried for war crimes, but the documentation of their wrong doing just keeps coming, Report: Gonzales And Rice Appear To Have Lied To Congress About Vetting Bush’s Pre-War Uranium Claims

Privileges of power

“The American Public has a Right to Know That They Do Not Have to Choose Between Torture and Terror”: Six questions for Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist

At 5:15 p.m. on June 7, 2006, two American F-16 fighters dropped 500-pound bombs on a farmhouse about five miles north of the Iraqi town of Baqubah. Within an hour, the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who had risen to become the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was confirmed. This resulted from one of the most important intelligence breakthroughs of the Iraq War. Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for an American Air Force major who, through a series of skillful interrogations, secured the information that allowed the military to pinpoint al Zarqawi’s whereabouts…

The major’s story may change a few minds, but ultimately the pro-torture crowd – right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Coulter,etc who have never served, will continue to be apologists for policies that endanger our troops and creates recruits for radicals. They like the idea of torture for the same reasons that some people like horror movies – they just do. The Major can present all the empirical proof he likes, but like so many other issues the rabid Right is immune to rationalism. We can take consolation in knowing that there are genuine heroes like the Major looking out for the best interests of America.

“Former Admiral Dennis Blair has been selected as the new Director of National Intelligence”, Blair is a centrist, and not the ‘center-right” choice described by the aptly named Conservative site Hot Air.

A commander of Pacific Command he’s known for pushing political and diplomatic engagement over military confrontation.

Make no mistake this is not a guy that has ever shied away from using force, but he knows that sometimes force is not always the best answer. As compared to modern Conservatives who think force is the answer to every situation, or threatening force at the slightest provocation, thus making diplomatic progress even more difficult.

Mountain and Winter Snow wallpaper

This just came in as I was finishing. Stalin and his defenders would be proud, Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

Gonzales’s March 2001 memo was the opening salvo in a war over information, one that began in the earliest days of the Bush administration and will continue beyond its end. The stakes, which no one could have predicted when the letter crossed Carlin’s desk, are now self-evidently enormous: when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. We still do not know how intelligence operatives, acting in the name of the United States, have interrogated suspected terrorists, and how they are interrogating them now (see sidebar: TORTURE). We do not know how many Americans’ phone calls and e-mails were scanned by the National Security Agency (see sidebar: WIRETAPPING). We do not know—although we can guess—who ordered the firings of the U.S. attorneys who didn’t comply with the Bush administration’s political agenda, and we do not know who may have been wrongly prosecuted by those who did (see sidebar: POLITICIZATION OF JUSTICE). There are large gaps in our understanding of the backstories to everything from pre-war intelligence in Iraq to the censoring of scientific opinion at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And those are the things we know we don’t know—there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns.

Flying Pigs and The Iraq Dead Enders

Where pigs fly

Some of the neocon dead enders like Charles Krauthammer and Fred Kagan have taken to writing and rewriting, what is basically the same column over and over again, all together they are the never ending Ode to the Iraq Cluster F*uck . The most recent rewrite, not just of recent Iraq history, but basic facts on the ground in Iraq comes courtesy the right-wing professor of the flying pigs myth, Chuckie Krauthammer – Milestone in Baghdad

The barbarism in Mumbai and the economic crisis at home have largely overshadowed an otherwise singular event: the ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States.

They must not pass unnoted. They were certainly noted by Iran, which fought fiercely to undermine the agreements. Tehran understood how a formal U.S.-Iraqi alliance endorsed by a broad Iraqi consensus expressed in a freely elected parliament changes the strategic balance in the region.

Other then the inclusion of a few current events, the same column that Kagan wrote in June of 2008. Imagine Chuckie and Fred standing in front of a bloody multi-car pile up. As they’re talking the viewer can clearly see bodies being carried off, but Chuck and Fred are looking into the camera swearing there is nothing here but a field of flowers and children playing. The neocons are playing the same twisted reality game with Iraq. Iran played a major role in facilitating the deescalation of violence in Sadr City and Basra. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s political coalition has been backed by Tehran  and Iran has strong diplomatic and some economic ties with Iraq. Removing Saddam was a gift to Iran – he was their enemy and supported by the Reagan administration in the 80s. As far as the details are known, the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) contains a clause, much lobbied by Iran, that American forces may not launch attacks against its neighbors (Iran) from Iraq. The dead enders like Chuck think these security agreements spell victory. A crude way of trying rehabilitate the original and false reasons that America went into Iraq – don’t look at the reality of  over 4 thousand American dead and counting, don’t look at 4 million Iraqis that were displaced or became refugees and don’t look at the hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions of Iraqi killed or maimed and don’t look at what might turn out, at a trillion dollars, to be the most expensive foreign policy debacle in our history. By the way, Chuck Krauthammer and Fred Kagan are ‘intellectuals’.

GOP Senator Wants More God In Government Visitor Center. From almost day one in 1776 E pluribus unum, Latin for “Out of Many, One,” was on the great seal of the U.S. Congress never adopted an official motto for the country, but that phrase, over the next hundred and eighty years came to be thought of as our national motto. The first 180 years of our history, our national spirit was based on that motto, so it is is a significant part of our history and who we are. In 1956  Congress passed H.J. Resolution 396 which officially made ‘In God We Trust” the official motto. So that motto as such has been around for the last 52 years. The Capitol Visitor Center has the first motto, the one we started the country with – it also happens to be more inclusive and less derisive then our recently adopted motto. Doesn’t matter to a couple of far Right senators. They want and apparently will have “E. Pluribus Unum” plastered over and “In God We Trust”. Since it it the lawfully passed official motto of the U.S. one can see including it, but since the other is of substantial historical importance, why aren’t both included in a Capitol Visitor Center which is designed inform visitors about our actual history, not the slightly revised one the Right would like to tell.
Employers Shedding Jobs As Recession Deepens

Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession.

The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, showed the crucial employment market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid clip, and handed Americans some more grim news right before the holidays.

As companies throttled back hiring, the unemployment rate bolted from 6.5 percent in October to 6.7 percent last month, a 15-year high.

Too bad we can’t plaster over the Republican economic policies that have lead to real problems.

How often have we heard the childish claim that the guy reading My Pet Goat on 9-11-2001 has kept America safe. Kinda depends on how one defines safe, Feds Set to Eliminate Water Regulations for Neurotoxin

Among the Bush administration’s final environmental legacies will be a decision to exempt perchlorate, a known neurotoxin found at unsafe levels in the drinking water of millions of Americans, from federal regulation.

The ruling, proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in October, was supposed to be formalized on Monday. That deadline passed, but the agency expects to announce its decision by the year’s end, before president-elect Barack Obama takes office. It could take years to reverse.

Natural Christmas Trees Klamath National Forest wallpaper

Bush Continues to Lie About Iraq Inspectors and Media Still Goes Along

The do-over presidency

Bush Still Lies about Iraqi Inspections

According to the text of the ABC News interview, which was released Dec. 1, Gibson asked Bush, “If the [U.S.] intelligence had been right [and revealed no Iraq WMD], would there have been an Iraq War?”

Bush answered, “Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.”

Of course, the historical record is clear: Hussein did let U.N. arms inspectors into Iraq in the fall of 2002 to search any site of their choosing. Their travels around Iraq in white vans were recorded daily by the international news media, as they found no evidence that Iraq had WMD stockpiles, even at sites targeted by U.S. intelligence.

Hussein and his government also declared publicly that they didn’t possess WMD, including providing the United Nations a 12,000-page declaration on Dec. 7, 2002, explaining how Iraq’s stocks of chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed in the 1990s.

However, still set on invading, Bush forced the U.N. inspectors to leave Iraq in March 2003…

Bush’s continued insistance that weapons inspectors were never in Iraq, despite little things like photos and video tape, government documents and press reports, is such an obvious whopper, one wonders if he doesn’t see it as a game. In 2006 Joe Conason wrote in this article “Saddam chose to deny inspectors”,

As the Washington Post noted the following day, “the president’s assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective.” That was putting it rather blandly (as I suggested here). The POTUS had denied reality, and the press corps blinked. The New York Times didn’t even report his bizarre statement, and the rest of the media followed along meekly.

ABC’s Charlie Gibsons correct Bush in this recent interview either. Has the lie been told for so long and so often that Bush, ala O.J. Simpson’s murders, believes it and most of the media doesn’t care. Bush and his sycophants still like to dazzle their detractors with the ‘diplomatic’ route failed nonsense about U.N. Resolution 1441 and Saddam’s noncompliance. Saddam did comply. Bush said he didn’t, keeps saying and shows no signs of giving up his purely invented history of how we got caught up in some bloody nation building. We knew then and we know now that Saddam destroyed his WMD capability back in the 90s. When Gibson asked Bush about his regrets if any regarding Iraq Bush said, “That is a do-over that I can’t do,” What a bizarre dissociation from a series of cold calculated lies and distortion that lead to so many needless deaths.

Keep in mind that Bush has had eight years to do this, Unions Angered as Bush Further Limits Eligibility

Government unions yesterday criticized a White House executive order that bars certain workers at five federal departments from joining a union because they are engaged in intelligence gathering, investigations and other national security work.

[  ]…ATF employees “have had collective bargaining rights for more than 30 years and there is no indication that having those rights interfered with their mission before,” Kelley said in a statement, vowing to work with President-elect Barack Obama’s administration to overturn Bush’s order.

Peter Winch, national organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees, called the move “an abuse of discretion in the last few days” of Bush’s tenure, noting that ATF was reorganized and moved from Treasury to the Justice Department in 2003.

To paraphrase Mr. Winch, what has happened in the last few weeks or since 2003 to suddenly make having some bargaining rights a threat to national security. After the last eight years, in failure after failure – from 9-11 to Iraq – why would Bush think he would be the best judge of what is best for our national security. Maybe President Obama’s first executive order should be that Bush and Cheney have to past a mental competency exam in order to collect their government benefits and have taxpayers provided Secret Service protection.

Holiday Moon wallpaper