:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 4.29.2005 ::

:: RE Tony ::

Red-Faced Blair releases legal opinion
The Globe and Mail

London -- In an embarrassing about-face ahead of Britain's national election, Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced yesterday to release a secret memo warning of the legal consequences of invading Iraq without a second United Nations resolution.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 9:00:00 AM [+] ::
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:: RE George II ::

Bush vs. The Press
From The Washington Post
By Howard Kurtz

Why have Bush's numbers reached the lowest point of his presidency?

Everyone's got a theory, just as everyone is now floating a theory on whether he helped himself at last night's rarity of a prime-time press conference.

One thing is clear: the 47 percent president (according to ABC/WP) hasn't gotten off to a rip-roaring start for someone who took his second oath of office just 3-1/2 months ago.

A popular view, endorsed by David Broder , is overreaching. Bush used much of his capital pushing a divisive Social Security plan that seems to be going nowhere fast. He's still pushing big tax cuts despite a scary deficit. He rammed through a bankruptcy bill and tort-law measure to pander to his business base. And he went along with the GOP charge to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, which proved to be quite unpopular with the country. Oh, and Iraq is still a mess.

Read more here.

ALSO
Wrap-Up: Bush Holds Prime-Time News Conference
NPR (audio), D.C

AND
His Social aims

Before a prime-time audience and against a loss of force on issue, Bush touts benefit plan for low-income retirees.

Democrats have called private accounts a deal-killer and last night showed no new interest in coming to the bargaining table, leaving the ultimate effect of Bush's new proposals unclear.

"All the president did tonight was confirm that he will pay for his risky privatization scheme by cutting the benefits of middle-class seniors," said a joint statement by House and Senate Democratic leaders.


posted by me

:: 8:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Outrage over Gyllenhaal's 9/11 comments" ::

From The Guardian UK

Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal has waded into sensitive political waters by raising questions about the September 11 attacks and US foreign policy.
Gyllenhaal, 27, stars in The Great New Wonderful, a film which deals with the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center. She said in an interview last week that the United States "is responsible in some way" for the attacks.

A fan website devoted to Gyllenhaal was overwhelmed with criticism, forcing the site's editor to remove the ability to post messages "because it's gotten too outta hand." The local daily tabloid, Newsday, reports that a firefighter chatroom has encouraged users to voice their criticism on the actor's fan site and the newspaper has also conducted its own online poll over the remarks.

In a statement issued earlier this week, Gyllenhaal said September 11 was "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world. Because it is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict.

"Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11." She also expressed her grief for "everyone who suffered and everyone who died in the catastrophe."

Gyllenhaal's recent film appearances have included Secretary, Mona Lisa Smile and Donnie Darko. She is the older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal and lives in Manhattan.

The Great New Wonderful is being shown at the Tribeca film festival in New York.

ALSO
Gyllenhaal refuses apology about 9/11 comment
Newsday, NY
Even as a Web site devoted to her was overwhelmed with scathing criticism, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal refused Monday to back down from her statement that the United States "is responsible in some way" for the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Newsday poll as of 11:35amEST

What do you think?
Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal is being criticized for remarks suggesting the U.S. bears some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. What do you think?

22.8%
I disagree and think she should apologize for the remarks. (2553 responses)

41.7%
I agree with her position. (4671 responses)

12.7%
I disagree but think she has a right to voice her opinion. (1418 responses)

3.1%
I don't have an opinion either way. (350 responses)

19.8%
I think this incident has been blown out of proportion. (2215 responses)

11207 total responses

AND
Maggie Gyllenhaal fan site

posted by me

:: 10:39:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Open-Source Journalism" ::

All the News That's Fit to Wiki
From Wired News
Six months after launching an experimental site that lets anyone become a reporter, organizers of the Wikipedia encyclopedia are finding the news business is a far cry from running a reference website. By Joanna Glasner.

ALSO
from Wired News
Smile! Yahoo Photo Service Grows
Business: In Brief » New service will let shutterbugs upload photos and pick up prints at their local Target. Also: Dead Marine's family gains permission to access son's e-mail.... Companies join talks to end high-definition DVD battle.... and more.

posted by me

:: 2:49:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Muslims Detained at Border Sue U.S. Homeland Security" ::

From The Washington Post
By Michelle GarciaSpecial
Thursday, April 21, 2005; Page A08

NEW YORK, April 20 -- American Muslims detained at the border as they returned from a religious conference in Toronto sued the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday alleging they were targets of ethnic and religious profiling.

The five Muslims, all U.S. citizens, say customs officials detained dozens of others from their conference in December, subjecting them to interrogations, fingerprinting and photographing. Four carried U.S.-issued passports; the other had a New York state driver's license, which is an acceptable form of identification at the Canadian border.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:16:00 PM [+] ::
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:: RE The Penguin's Evolution? ::

Is Linux Becoming Windows?
ZDNet.com

Is Linux becoming like Windows, so overwhelmed with features that it’s bloated?

Some people are starting to think so. There is support for so many features in the Linux 2.6 kernel that it may be getting so fat as to be unstable. (Just add one more feature. It’s wafer-thin.)

ALSO
SCO case nearing its climax

SCO is still swinging in its legal war. But the show could soon close.

The company had a conference call on the quarterly report filed in April and blamed the Groklaw web site for its financial troubles. The company also issued its 10-Q filing with the SEC, dated April 14.

On the call President Darl McBride hinted darkly that Groklaw founder Pamela Jones "isn’t who she says she is," but declined to say exactly who she is, saying that would be released "at a certain point in time." Jones was on the call, and posted an immediate response.

Meanwhile Judge Dale Kimball, who is hearing the SCO vs. IBM case, denied SCO’s motion to amend its complaint and set a hearing date for April 21. It’s possible the case will be dismissed at that time.

[Respond to either story in TalkBack]

posted by me

:: 11:27:00 AM [+] ::
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:: The latest Molly Ivins column ::

Manners, by Tom DeLay
Tom DeLay, of all people, recently issued a fatwa on the need for good manners, a concept so bizarre there is no appropriate comparison.

posted by me

:: 5:33:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "U.S. Marks Anniversary of Oklahoma City Bombing" ::

From The NY Times
By TERENCE NEILAN

For each victim, a second of silence; 168 seconds in all.

Ten years after explosives packed in a rented truck smashed into a federal building in Oklahoma City, many hundreds of survivors and families of the dead were among those who gathered to remember at the site today.

They were joined by Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Bill Clinton, who was in office when the entire northern face of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was sheared off at 9:02 on the morning of April 19, 1995. Also present were 40 survivors of the even deadlier 9/11 attacks.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 5:24:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Can the Spy Agencies Dig Out?" ::

From The Washington Post
By David Ignatius
Friday, April 15, 2005; Page A25

"You have a blank slate" to fix the CIA and other spy agencies, Sen. Pat Roberts told the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, this week. And that's true -- to a frightening extent. The future of U.S. intelligence is up for grabs, almost literally.

The uncertainty within the intelligence community was evident at a conference last week at Harvard, where 100 or so spooks gathered with a few academics and journalists to discuss ways to restructure intelligence for the 21st century. I wish Negroponte had been there to hear some of the ideas, and also to get a sense of just how disoriented intelligence professionals are these days. He's walking into a world where people aren't sure which end is up.

There's a certain gallows humor among CIA officials as they try to absorb devastating criticism from the Sept. 11 and WMD commissions.

posted by me

:: 10:55:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Patriot Act Evasions" ::

From The Nation
The Patriot Act is the gateway drug for an Administration addicted to the expansion of unaccountable power.

posted by me

:: 10:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: So Weird ::

From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird (.895)

LEAD STORY
Defensive back Randall Gay wore a New England Patriots jersey as a member of this year's Super Bowl-winning team, but when one of his former college professors tried to order a personalized jersey in tribute to Gay in mid-February, she was turned down. The National Football League's official online merchandiser, NFLshop.com, refused to imprint "Gay" on the back of a Patriots jersey because it was a "naughty" word, one of 1,159 the shop has banned. (Two weeks later, after the Web site Outsports.com picked up the story, the word was removed from the list.) [Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 3-3-05]

Great Art!
In 1992, News of the Weird reported that artist Janine Antoni carved huge blocks of chocolate and lard using her teeth, but at New York City's "LMAKprojects" gallery in February, artist Emily Katrencik gnawed sections of the drywall separating the gallery's exhibition space from the director's office, for 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Katrencik said she concentrates on thinking of "the things in the wall that are good for me, like calcium and iron." But, she said, "I prefer cast concrete because it has a more metallic flavor." [New York Times, 2-6-05]

Below the Fold
Apparently important to actor Robert Blake's acquittal on a murder charge in March was the lack of credibility of the prosecution's witnesses, including an alleged methamphetamine abuser who once thought his house was surrounded by large, horned animals and "people dressed like sagebrush or Joshua trees." To testify that drug users are unreliable witnesses, the defense presented a UCLA psychopharmacologist who revealed that in the course of his own drug use 25 years ago, he had once crawled into a cage of monkeys that were smoking crack cocaine. [Los Angeles Times, 3-4-05]

Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net

posted by me

:: 1:03:00 AM [+] ::
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:: From the archives ::

CIA admits employing Nazis
Free Press International, Texas
(BBC News, 4.28.2001)

Files released by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States have confirmed that World War II Nazi war criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies.

However, the files dispel the widespread view that one of Hitler's closest allies, Gestapo chief Henrich Muller, survived World War II and went on to work for the CIA.

They show that Muller died in 1945, but that other former Nazi officers were employed by the CIA, in particular for their knowledge of the Soviet Union.

A US Justice Department spokesman, Eli Rosenbaum, said the files demonstrated that the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals.

Other declassified documents give more background information on key Nazi figures, and a report which suggests that Adolf Hitler's own doctor thought the Fuhrer was insane.

Mr Rosenbaum said many Nazi war criminals "were able to escape justice because East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other that they lost their will to pursue Nazi persecutors".

He deplored the CIA's use as intelligence sources of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon".

Barbie was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity by a French court.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, a Jewish human rights organisation, said the publication of the CIA material was "long overdue".

One CIA document says that in 1937, Hitler's doctor thought he noticed growing signs of insanity in the Nazi leader before the start of World War II, and predicted he could become "the craziest criminal the world ever saw".

Later that year, the doctor said "the swing towards insanity" seemed to have taken place.

Waldheim 'not a CIA source'

The files also shed light on former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, finding that he was not among CIA sources, as had been suspected by some historians.

Mr Waldheim, a former president of Austria, was barred from entering the US in 1987 after an investigation of his wartime activities as a German army lieutenant in the Balkans.

The file on Mr Waldheim suggests that the CIA knew little about him and that neither the US State Department nor other government agencies that had an interest in his appointment to the UN asked for a background check on him when he was a candidate for the job.

RELATED
Bush and the Nazi Connection
A huge page of links!

posted by me

:: 12:21:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Loudoun Judge Gives Spammer 9-Year Prison Term" ::

Case is 1st Such U.S. Felony Conviction
By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer

A Loudoun County judge yesterday sentenced the first person convicted of felony spam charges in the nation to nine years in prison but allowed him to remain free on bond during his appeal.

Jeremy Jaynes, 30, of the Raleigh area of North Carolina, was convicted in November of violating Virginia's anti-spam statute by illegally flooding America Online accounts with tens of thousands of bulk e-mail advertisements. The case was tried in Loudoun because the e-mails, which peddled such products as stock pickers and a computer program, ran through an AOL server in the county.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:59:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "One Step Beyond" ::

FYC (for your consideration)
A page w/ Links to political broadcasts by researcher Dave Emory. I used to listen to him Sunday nights on KFJC in northern Cal. Some engaging, provocative stuff! Check it out.
7Gen Politics: Dave Emory

Dave Emory has been researching a peculiar line of reasoning for a couple decades, namely the continued existance of elements from Nazi Germany. His research draws from material published in mainstream newspapers, magazines and books. What he does is connect the dots which are otherwise separated too widely for the general public to make the connections themselves. The conclusion one draws from his research is that these elements from Nazi Germany are alive, well, and greatly influencing world events.

ALSO
Search Dave Emory's Anti-Fascist Archives

For more than a quarter century Dave Emory's "For the Record", "Radio Free America" and other radio productions and lectures have presented thoughtful, scruplously documented and vitally important political information and analysis. The sum total of his work constitutes a unique body of audio resources for all citizens who want to be informed about the continuing fascist threats, internal and external, to the United States.

These programs are available at nominal cost from a tape and disc duplication service called Spitfire. Also many of the For The Record programs are available for free download in Real Audio® format from one of the radio stations that presents his work, WFMU in New Jersey.

Mr. Emory provides annotated summaries of many of these programs. This page provides a way to use the Google® search engine to find topics of interest in those program summaries. Just enter any word(s) or name(s) you want to search for below and you'll get Google's listing of matching pages on just the Spitfire site.

posted by me

:: 10:22:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Playwright brings Iraq controversy to Actors" ::

By Judith Egerton
The Courier-Journal, KY

Two years ago during the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kia Corthron cast her penetrating eyes on the ethics of cloning humans in her play "Slide Glide the Slippery Slope."

This year Corthron returns to the Humana Festival with "Moot the Messenger," an ambitious examination of censorship and patriotism with more than a dozen characters. Commissioned by Actors Theatre, the play scrutinizes the policies behind the war in Iraq and the failings of the news media in reporting it.

Like Corthron, a political playwright with a definitive point of view, the central character of "Moot" is an idealistic woman who takes seriously the adage that journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Corthron, 43, a Cumberland, Md., native with a master's degree in playwriting from Columbia University, lives in Harlem, N.Y. Her plays have been staged at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and New York's Playwrights Horizon. She talked with me recently about her new play and a trip to the Mideast that she took with a previous Humana playwright, Louisville native Naomi Wallace.

Have you been to Iraq?

I've not been to Iraq. I've been to Jerusalem. In 2002, I took this trip with Naomi Wallace. ... We visited theaters in Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank and some in Israel. ... Naomi had invited me, and I was very excited to see for myself what was on the news and not on the news.

Was that the inspiration for this play?

I think it was there that I decided I wanted my next play to deal specifically with the media. ... There was something about being there in the midst of it that made it more crucial to me. It made me think this was something that I shouldn't just allude to in a play but I should write an entire play about.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:39:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "New Iraqi PM named" ::

From The Guardian, UK

One of Iraq's leading Shia politicians, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was today appointed as Iraq's next interim prime minister by the country's new presidential council.
Mr Jaafari, a 58-year-old former London GP, said he would form a new government within one or two weeks. Officials said the previous interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, had formally resigned.

The new prime minister was appointed by the new interim president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, and his two vice presidents, shortly after they were sworn in during a ceremony in the new national assembly in Baghdad.

But the event did not go smoothly. After his inaugural speech, Mr Talabani, a Kurdish leader, walked off the stage, returning after most television feeds of the event were cut off to say he had forgotten to name the new prime minister.

Some Shia officials were angered by the action, but Mr Jaafari was diplomatic. "This day represents a democratic process and a step forward," he said.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:32:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Bloggers Pitch Fits Over Glitches" ::

From Wired News
Media Hack » Technical troubles slam Google's blogging site. The problem is, Blogger is a lot like a public utility, and when it goes down, so does discourse on much of the blogosphere. Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg.

posted by me

:: 12:23:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "AP Calls Criticism of Pulitzer Win for Photos Deeply Offensive" ::

From Editor & Publisher
By Greg Mitchell

NEW YORK As always, not everyone in the press and on the Web agrees with the selection of Pulitzer Prize winners, announced earlier this week. But what’s relatively rare is that criticism surrounding one choice this year has a partisan edge.

The Pulitzer Board anointed 11 Associated Press photographers as winners in the category of breaking-news photography. The award-winning photos were from war-torn Iraq -- and some in conservative circles claim the images were, on the whole, overly helpful to the insurgent cause. At least one of the photos raised an uproar from the same quarters when it was first published late last year.

According to a count by The Jawa Report site, “11 of the 20 photos would likely cause anti-American inflammation. Only two show Americans in a positive light.” By a count on another blog, called Riding Sun, three photos reveal U.S. troops “looking overwhelmed or uncertain,” two showed “Iraqis celebrating attacks on U.S. forces,” and zero featured U.S. forces “looking heroic.”

Columnist Michelle Malkin and the popular Powerline blog, meanwhile, returned to the controversy over the widely published AP photo of terrorists executing Iraqi election workers in Baghdad. Malkin asked on Tuesday if the Pulitzer judges were “ignorant of the controversy.” Powerline called the award a "Pulitzer Prize for felony murder." Last December it had charged that “the terrorists wanted to be photographed carrying out the murder, to sow more terror in Iraq and to demoralize American voters. That’s why they tipped off the photographer, and that’s why they dragged the two election workers from their car, so they could be shot in front of the AP’s obliging camera.”

The “tipped off” refers to the AP revealing that the photographer had been notified that a car bombing had occurred in the area where the attack on the election workers eventually took place. Contrary to the Powerline assertion, however, there is no evidence that the photographer knew anything about the attack in advance or, indeed, that the killers knew a photographer was poised and ready to snap that image. Indeed, according to AP, the lensman was 300 meters away. Salon.com quoted an unnamed AP source calling this charge of pre-arrangement “ridiculous.”

Today, Kathleen Carroll, the AP's executive editor, told E&P: "The allegations on these Web sites are complete baloney and deeply offensive."

As for possible political bias of the Pulitzer judges: They hailed from a hardly liberal group of papers (The Washington Times, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.) plus the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Spying As a Business" ::

A Wired News report

Whether they're driving through a tunnel or taking a cigarette break, Americans are finding even their most mundane movements captured on video.

The surveillance camera market has swelled to between $5 billion and $6 billion from about $2 billion before Sept. 11 -- and is projected to grow at 25 percent a year.

Nice Systems (NICE), a surveillance company, has seen its share price jump nearly 50 percent in the past five months. Meanwhile, net earnings for thermal night-vision camera maker Flir Systems (FLIR) increased more than 60 percent in 2004.

While privacy advocates have expressed concern and question the cameras' effectiveness in deterring crime and terrorism, they also acknowledge that Americans have become increasingly tolerant of having their movements recorded since September 11th.

- - -

posted by me

:: 1:00:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "WMD Commission Stonewalls" ::

From Yahoo News
Op/Ed - The Nation
By David Corn

The stonewall continues.

On Thursday, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction intelligence released a 692-page report that harshly criticizes the US intelligence establishment. It notes that "the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of it pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure." That's no news flash. The Senate intelligence committee issued a report last July that said the same. But like the Senate committee, Bush's commission--cochaired by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and former Senator Chuck Robb, a Democrat--ignored a key issue: whether Bush and his aides overstated and misrepresented the flawed intelligence they received from the intelligence agencies. As I wrote about days ago, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, promised last summer that his committee would investigate the administration's prewar use (or abuse) of the WMD intelligence after the 2004 election, but more recently Roberts backed away from that vow, claiming such an inquiry would now be pointless. The commission, which claimed it found no evidence that Bush officials pressured intelligence analysts to rig their reports, notes in a footnote,

Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the Administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it.

So two years after Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, there still has been no official inquiry into how he and his lieutenants handled the prewar intelligence. The question is whether Bush and other administration officials exaggerated the intelligence community's overstatements. And the evidence suggests they did. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda before the war, but the CIA had not reported that. Bush said Hussein had amassed a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons, yet the intelligence community had only reported (errantly) that Iraq had an active research and development program for biological weapons. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have so far succeeded in keeping his role in the WMD scandal out of the picture. (Democrats, where are you?)

The presidential WMD commission found numerous problems within the intelligence community. It says, "we still know disturbingly little about the weapons programs and even less about the intentions of many of our most dangerous adversaries." (This is bad news for anyone who wants to bomb Iran or North Korea.) The report is mostly depressing, as it describes severe dysfunctions within the intelligence establishment. But the commission casts little, if any, blame toward the person ultimately responsible for the intelligence community: the president of the United States. And the current president even bestowed upon former CIA director George Tenet, who was at the helm during this period of screw-ups, the presidential Medal of Freedom. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz received one, too. And yesterday the Rand Corporation released a report concluding that his Pentagon failed to plan adequately for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. The Rand study says that stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.")

The WMD commission took only a few modest steps toward addressing--in the most general terms--the role played by Bush and the policymakers in the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. For instance, the commission notes,

The Intelligence Community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policymakers-sometimes to the point of discomfort. Analysts must be pressed to explain how much they don't know; the collection agencies must be pressed to explain why they don't have better information on key topics. While policymakers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn't fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true.

It's obvious that Bush did not push the intelligence services in this fashion. As the White House has conceded, Bush did not even read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in October 2002. This was the intelligence community's ultimate summary of its intelligence on Iraq. A close reading of the document could have led Bush or national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who also did not read the 90-page paper) to raise the sort of questions the commission suggests. But that did not happen. When Silberman was asked at a press conference if Bush had been inquisitive enough, he referred to a passage in Bob Woodward's latest book in which Bush is depicted asking Tenet if the intelligence is sound and Tenet maintains it is a "slam-dunk." That clearly was not good enough.

[The commission also observes...]

The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.

The commission suggests that it is partly the responsibility of the president to guarantee that conventional wisdom is questioned. But Bush did no such thing. With this report, the CIA is again cast as the fall guy. And Bush escapes merrily.

A government nonproliferation expert with experience dealing with intelligence analysts, who has read the report, sent me his/her assessment. This source asked to go unnamed, fearing retribution at the workplace for publicly blasting the report. Below is an excerpt of his/her analysis:

[The commission] focuses on how and why the dogs barked [and got it wrong]. The real point, however, is: why didn't someone look out the window? And why have no policymakers taken responsibility, anywhere, for drastically wrong assessments on Iraq?

The Commission's report is a good read and thorough. The recommendations -- to collect better intelligence, do better analysis, and communicate better -- however, reflect the absurdity of having intelligence experts tell each other how to do their job better. The users of intelligence should be involved. The Commission had 60 staff members, but only three have identifiable expertise in nonproliferation and none have nonproliferation policy experience. Why didn't the Commission include more nonproliferation experts?

There are lots of reasons....The Commission was appointed by the president and it is politically easier for this administration to focus on intelligence rather than policy failures, for obvious reasons. Nonproliferation experts might point out that even though the intelligence was flawed, someone with enough nonproliferation experience would have asked more questions. Despite the fascinating details of how and why the intelligence on uranium from Niger was faulty, an expert would point out that there were tons of natural and low-enriched uranium already in Iraq: even if Iraq got uranium from Niger, it wouldn't make a discernible difference in the quantity it could enrich. Iraq's first choice would be to take the safeguarded material (just as it planned to do before the 1991 war) and use that. Faster and less complicated. A nonproliferation expert would also know that the CIA's arguments that Iraq was reconstituting its cadre of nuclear weapons personnel were an old, tired mantra repeated since the early 1990s. In interagency meetings ten years ago, I used to ask them, what evidence do you have? "Well," the analysts would say, "we think he's doing it." Apparently their evidence never got any better.

For Bush--or the commission--to say he was misled by the intelligence community is not a sufficient explanation or defense. First, Bush didn't ensure the intelligence he received was solid. Then he and his lieutenants repeatedly said in public that the intelligence was beyond doubt, and they made dramatic assertions about the supposed threat presented by Hussein's WMDs that went far beyond what the intelligence (wrongly) claimed. In keeping the spotlight exclusively on the intelligence gang and not turning it also on the policymakers at the White House, the WMD commission has served Bush well, but not the public.

[David Corn is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.]
*******************

posted by me

:: 10:21:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "WOLFOWITZ TURNS DOWN WORLD BANK POST" ::

NEOCONSERVATIVE ACCEPTS BLAME FOR INTELLIGENCE ERRORS
From an e-newsletter
by Greg Palast

[Brussels] In a unexpected turn of events, controversial US Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz has turned down the post of President of the World Bank. The Deputy Defense Secretary had won unanimous support of World Bank trustees in a vote Thursday despite widespread objections to the appointment in the European press.

In a statement issued today by the Deputy Secretary before departing Brussels, Mr. Wolfowitz cited the release of the Silberman-Robb Commission report to the President on failures of US intelligence in Iraq.

Mr. Wolfowitz noted that on March 27, 2003, he had testified before the US Congress that the post-war reconstruction of that nation would not cost any "US taxpayer money." Rather, Iraq's oil would pay the tab for the post-conquest rebuilding.

The price tag is now inching toward $200 billion. Mr. Wolfowitz, long associated with neo-conservative factions in the Bush Administration, angrily responded to the Silberman-Robb Commission's accusation that his intelligence on Iraq was flawed or deficient.

"That's just plain wrong. In fact, the Pentagon had incontrovertible evidence that my projections were as phony as a three-dollar bill. Don't blame the CIA. We saw their intelligence and preferred an alternative reality."

A World Bank spokesman reached in Washington, when asked about the Wolfowitz rejection of the institution's presidency, said, "It's sounds like another cheap April Fool's Day trick by Greg Palast to call attention to his investigative report on the Bush Administration's secret plans for Iraq's oil -- out in this month's Harper's Magazine."

[**** THIS WAS ORIGINALLY TO BE POSTED ON APRIL 1**** ;]

View Greg Palast's BBC Television Newsnight report, "US Secret Plans for Iraq's Oil," at www.GregPalast.com - and read the expos? ... in the April edition of Harper's Magazine.

posted by me

:: 10:00:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "Ex-CIA Chiefs Rebut Bush Panel Conclusions" ::

From Newsday, NY

WASHINGTON -- Two former CIA chiefs on Friday disputed claims cited by a presidential commission that agency officials warned them that the government's leading source on Iraq's biological weapons had a reputation for making things up.

In a scathing report released Thursday, President Bush's intelligence commission found that the CIA "failed to convey to policy-makers new information casting serious doubt on the reliability of a human intelligence source known as 'Curveball.'" The commission found that several agency officers said they had doubts about the source and raised those doubts with senior leadership, including then-CIA Director George Tenet.

In separate statements Friday, Tenet and former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin denied the accounts.

"It is deeply troubling to me that there was information apparently available within CIA as of late September or October of 2002 indicating that Curveball may have been a fabricator," Tenet said in a detailed seven-page rebuttal. "There is nothing more serious or galvanizing in the intelligence business than associating the word fabricator with a human source."

McLaughlin said "unequivocally" that he wouldn't have allowed Curveball's information to be used "if someone had made these doubts clear."

Despite the apparent concerns, the commission found that information from Curveball remained a centerpiece of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations about the need to attack Iraq, as well as in an authoritative intelligence estimate prepared for policy-makers in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:11:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Bush, Cheney, Get Their Whitewash" ::

The Progressive Web exclusive
Editor Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day

Another investigation, another whitewash.

The presidential commission on how the U.S. was so wrong about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction gives Bush and Cheney exactly what they wanted: cover.

The Silberman-Robb report lays the blame primarily on the CIA for "poor tradecraft and poor management" and for presenting Bush with "alarmist" information in his daily briefings.

And it essentially exonerates Bush and Cheney from the charge that they cooked the intelligence. "In no instance did political pressure cause [analysts] to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments," it said.

Never mind that Cheney virtually set up camp at the CIA while they were drawing up those judgments.

How his unprecedented lurkings didn't represent political pressure is just beyond me.

And what about the possibility, or in my mind, the likelihood, that Bush conveyed to CIA Director George Tenet that he go get whatever he could find to help build the case against Iraq?

Does the fact that neither Tenet, whom Bush gave the Medal of Freedom, nor Bush himself admitted this mean that it didn't happen?

Even the commission recognized that the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefings were "selling intelligence in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."

What better way to keep him interested than to provide him with the morsels he so craved?

The commission also acknowledged that "it is hard to deny that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

Now why was that?

Could it just possibly be that Bush and Cheney helped create that unskeptical environment?

To believe otherwise is to suspend rationality.

posted by me

:: 1:42:00 PM [+] ::
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:: "Spooks and the Art of the Dissenting Footnote" ::

Commentary by Robert Carlin (chief of the Northeast Asia division of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1989 to 2002 and before that an analyst in the CIA)

A presidential commission is recommending that disagreements among intelligence analysts be clearly flagged to alert policymakers to the fact that the intelligence community, which likes to use the imperial "we," is not really of one mind. This is an idea that pops up now and again, no matter that it rarely seems to work. In fact, the IC has paid lip service to the importance of airing dissent for years.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 10:06:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "After 14-Month Inquiry..." ::

Many Questions Remain
Washington Post

Judge Laurence H. Silberman, co-chairman of the commission that released its report on U.S. intelligence failures yesterday, was given "full and complete access" to whatever information he needed. But when it came to what questions President Bush asked of the CIA, Silberman learned everything he needed to know from Bob Woodward.

posted by me

:: 9:51:00 AM [+] ::
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:: "What the report didn't say..." ::

An Op/Ed from USATODAY.com

Sometimes the most intriguing news is found in what's left unsaid. That was certainly true Thursday, as a presidential commission issued a blistering, if unsurprising, indictment of U.S. intelligence-gathering in the months leading up to war in Iraq.

The commission found, as others had, that the nation's spy agencies were "dead wrong" about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. It cited a panoply of failures - from a lack of spies in the right places to the agencies' tendency to squash dissenting views. The report describes how the agencies, unwilling to admit that they lacked hard facts, instead relied on worthless information, bad assumptions and a key source who was lying.

Many of the same weaknesses persist today. The agencies "know disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the commission found.

On a practical level, those findings may help deter any backsliding on changes already underway to unify the nation's splintered intelligence system. Those reforms were driven by an equally scathing report issued by the 9/11 Commission last August.
More interesting, though, is what's missing from this new report. The report didn't attempt to connect the intelligence failures to the fateful decision they encouraged: to go to war on what proved to be false grounds.

If the report is taken at face value, this was all the fault of the spy agencies' blundering. The bipartisan commission found no evidence that intelligence judgments were changed because of political pressure. The commission chairs, senior federal Judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia senator Charles Robb, reiterated that finding on Thursday.

But in a few telling paragraphs among more than 600 pages, the panel allowed that some analysts were influenced by the conventional wisdom, which said Saddam Hussein was hiding an arsenal, and "the sense that challenges to it - or even refusals to find its confirmation - would not be welcome."

Little wonder. In the months before the war, Vice President Cheney said there was "no doubt" Saddam was amassing weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even "a trained ape" knew it was true. President Bush repeatedly made the case not just that war in Iraq was necessary, but that it was urgent.

That is not a climate that would lead anyone to conclude that facts still needed to be discerned. And it is one that needs change, beginning at the intelligence agencies.

Even 9/11 and the deaths of more 1,500 U.S. troops in Iraq haven't budged them from bad habits, particularly refusals to share information and encourage differing views, the commission said. The nation's new intelligence czar will need to knock heads.

For the political leadership, the task is simpler. They need only leave room for facts to get in the way of their conclusions - and use war only as a last resort.

posted by me

:: 9:42:00 AM [+] ::
...

:: "Spooks and the Art of the Dissenting Footnote" ::

Commentary by Robert Carlin (chief of the Northeast Asia division of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1989 to 2002 and before that an analyst in the CIA)

A presidential commission is recommending that disagreements among intelligence analysts be clearly flagged to alert policymakers to the fact that the intelligence community, which likes to use the imperial "we," is not really of one mind. This is an idea that pops up now and again, no matter that it rarely seems to work. In fact, the IC has paid lip service to the importance of airing dissent for years.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 8:59:00 AM [+] ::
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