Yes, He Would

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Via True Blue Liberal you can read today’s Paul Krugman column without breaking through the NY Times firewall. Here are two terrible truths Bush supporters cannot face, never mind refute:

First, it’s clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion between Mr. Bush and Tony Blair. In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.

Second, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war — a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds — rested on suspect evidence. For example, in the 2003 State of the Union address Mr. Bush cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas of the National Journal reports that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.

These two truths have been verified way beyond a shadow of a doubt, yet righties cannot address them honestly. Instead, when challenged, they concoct a straw man and argue with that. For example, Gateway Pundit’s defense of the newest leak revelation is titled “Media Appalled that George Bush Dare Defend Himself.” And, of course, no one is appalled that Bush would defend himself. We’re appalled that he keeps lying his ass off to do it.

But Krugman’s main point is that no one should doubt Bush could invade Iran.

“But he wouldn’t do that,” say people who think they’re being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn’t sensible. It’s wishful thinking. …

… Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.

And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.

See also John Steinberg of Raw Story —

In a rational world, Bush’s dismal track record (by our standards) would hasten the handing of the car keys to a designated driver. In the strange world that Bush and Karl Rove inhabit, it means that a bigger distraction must be created.

Now, I don’t think the public would back an invasion of Iran unless a new, major terrorist strike could be blamed on Iran, or if, as Steinberg suggests, a couple of American warships happened to sink in the Persian Gulf. That might do it.

William M. Arkin of the Washington Post writes in “Goldilocks and Iran” that there are three ways Iran and the U.S. could enter into a war:

  • We could go to war if a cornered Iran lashes out.
  • We could go to war if the intelligence community assesses that Iran has clandestinely acquired nuclear weapons and an administration decides that the U.S. must preempt.
  • We could go to war if intensified military activity on both sides leads to greater possibilities for contact leading to an accident or incident that escalates out of control.

    • None of those sound all that farfetched to me.

    Fred Kaplan at Slate talks about a “Global Game of Chicken“:

    They’ve been revving the engines and rattling the sabers loud and hard lately. In the past few weeks, President Bush has released a document on national-security strategy that declares Iran to be the single biggest threat on the planet. Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that Iran will face serious consequences if it continues to enrich uranium. Joseph Cirincione, a sober-minded nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment, writes in the new issue of Foreign Policy:

      For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

    BTW, the Cirincione article quoted above is titled “Fool Me Twice” and is a good read.

    At a series of seminars at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, analysts and ex-officials debated the pros and cons of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but they agreed that keeping the conflict to a snappy “limited strike” was unlikely; it would almost certainly escalate to all-out war, with regional and possibly global repercussions.

    Yes, that’s certainly not comforting.

    In the new issue of Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows discusses a “war game” sponsored by the Atlantic in 2004.

    … under the guidance of Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who had conducted many real-world war games for the Pentagon, including those that shaped U.S. strategy for the first Gulf War, we assembled a panel of experts to ask “What then?” about the ways in which the United States might threaten, pressure, or entice the Iranians not to build a bomb. Some had been for and some against the invasion of Iraq; all had served in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or other parts of the nation’s security apparatus, and many had dealt directly with Iran.

    The experts disagreed on some details but were nearly unanimous on one crucial point: what might seem America’s ace in the hole—the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations in a pre-emptive air strike—was a fantasy.

    Fallows elaborates and explains the reasons why this is a fantasy, which I will not list here. Bottom line, the panel agreed that Iran’s getting nuclear weapons capability would be a very bad thing. But trying to solve this problem by dropping bombs on it would fail militarily (for reasons given in the article) and would also cause other more serious problems. Like Iraq, only worse.

    If you are doom and gloomed out now, Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian looks at the bright side. Unfortunately, it’s only the bright side for Brits.

    Britain is unlikely to participate in the nuclear bombing of Iranian atomic weapons research facilities. Instead, our role in any forthcoming nuclear blitz will be to fill the blogosphere with sarcastic posts and make tut-tutting noises. The latter may or may not be heard above B61-11s slamming nukes into Iran’s Natanz centrifuge plant, which is challengingly located 75ft below ground.

    (The lousy exchange rate makes Britain damn expensive, but maybe my Welsh relatives will take me in for a while. …)

    Cross-posted at The American Street.)

    Update: See also “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.”

    How We Liberated Iraq!

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    Nancy A. Youssef writes for Knight Ridder about the gratitude of liberated Iraqis:

    In the middle of methodically recalling the day his brother’s family was killed, Yaseen’s monotone voice and stream of tears suddenly stopped. He looked up, paused and pleaded: “Please don’t let me say anything that will get me killed by the Americans. My family can’t handle any more.”

    Oh, wait …

    The story of what happened to Yaseen and his brother Younes’ family has redefined Haditha’s relationship with the Marines who patrol it. On Nov. 19, a roadside bomb struck a Humvee on Haditha’s main road, killing one Marine and injuring two others.

    The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.

    The Marines initially reported that 15 people died in the explosion and that 8 insurgents were killed in subsequent combat. The Navy began an investigation only because a Time magazine reporter spoke up. On Friday three officers of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment were relieved of duty, but the Navy won’t admit this was because of the incident at Haditha.

    The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.

    She fainted after the Marines burst through the door and began firing. When she regained consciousness, only her 3-year-old brother was still alive, but bleeding heavily. She comforted him in a room filled with dead family members until he died, too. And then she went to her Uncle Yaseen’s house next door.

    Neither Yaseen nor Safa have returned home since.

    Haditha is an insurgent stronghold, and the Marines there frequently come under attack. It’s not hard to imagine the Marines were stressed beyond comprehension and acted in the conviction they were shooting at insurgents. The real criminals are the politicians in Washington whose incompetence and hubris put those Marines in Haditha, IMO.

    Indeed, many in this town, whose residents are stuck in the battle between extremists and the Americans, said now it is the U.S. military they fear most.

    “The mujahadeen (holy warriors) will kill you if you stand against them or say anything against them. And the Americans will kill you if the mujahadeen attack them several kilometers away,” said Mohammed al-Hadithi, 32, a barber who lives in neighboring Haqlania. With a cigarette between his fingers, he pointed at a Marine patrol as it passed in front of his shop. “I look at each of them, and I see killers.”

    Generations of Iraqis will hate us, I suspect.

    Over at Thomas Paine’s Corner, Jason Miller writes about “America’s ‘Noble’ Cause“:

    “Why are we over there in Iraq?”

    “To protect our freedoms.”

    “How are the Iraqis threatening our freedoms?”

    “They attacked us on 9/11.”

    “If that is true, why are so many Americans against the war?”

    “I don’t know, but I think Cindy Sheehan and all the other war protesters should be rounded up and shot.”

    Sounds familiar, huh? And, of course, the only reason anyone would be opposed to the Iraq War is hatred of President Bush.

    Miller’s article — a diatribe against the American Empire — seems a tad harsh even to me, but there’s little in it I can argue with. One of his points is that “Americans” (I wish he would distinguish Bush supporters from the rest of us) believe that the U.S. has an inalienable right “to murder an unlimited number of innocent civilians so long as our military machine does the killing and we label the victims as ‘collateral damage.'”

    I ‘spect if any rightie bloggers comment on Nancy A. Youssef’s article today, it will be to claim that Yaseen’s family must have deserved to be shot. And if not they should still thank us. We’re bringing them freedom, after all.

    Sorta related: “Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate“; “Democracy in the Arab World, a U.S. Goal, Falters“

    No Excuse Left Behind

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    I realize we’ve got sexier issues to think about today — lies, corruption, global thermonuclear war — but I’d like to take a moment to reflect on No Child Left Behind. If education issues aren’t your bag, feel free to skip the details between asterisks (***) and go right to the conclusions.

    ***

    When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he talked a lot about education. He promised to be The Education President. This was an odd issue for a Republican to run on, considering the Reagan/libertarian wing of the party long had wanted to eliminate the Department of Education and leave public schooling entirely to the states. But, conventional wisdom said, talking about education made Bush more palatable to suburbanite soccer moms. It was a big part of his “compassionate conservative” shtick.

    In 2000, and again in 2004, the Bush campaign touted education reform as among Bush’s biggest achievements as governor of Texas. His ads claimed “dramatic results” in Texas education. In fact, CBS reported in 2003 that much of this “success” came from cooking the books — reporting false dropout rates and test scores. But that didn’t stop Bush from continuing to brag.

    The centerpiece of President Bush’s education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, was signed into law about four years ago. Bush is proud of this act. He mentioned it frequently during the 2004 campaign. The Department of Education building in Washington DC — I don’t know what they do in there, but it’s one big mother of a building — is festooned with NCLB banners, and the entrances are decorated with cheery “little red schoolhouse” facades. The building serves as a billboard promoting NCLB.

    Sydney H. Schanberg provides a thumbnail explanation of NCLB in this Village Voice article from 2003:

    The president’s No Child Left Behind law requires every public school system to administer rigorous annual testing of students, starting in the third grade, in such subjects as English and math. If the test scores of any segment of a school’s population — such as Latinos struggling with English or disabled students in special-ed classes — do not meet the proficiency levels set by the law, the entire school is listed as “failing” and students can choose to transfer to a school in the district that is doing well. In other words, averaging the test scores of the entire student body might produce a successful result, but the scores of the struggling segment will still, under the law, brand the school as “failing.” In addition to placing new financial and space demands on successful schools, the law’s requirements will also lay serious new money burdens on the ones with troubles, for such things as additional teacher training and additional classes.

    In February 2004, Rep. George Miller, Senior Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, released this statement:

    The Bush budget continues to renege on the commitment to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act. This year the Bush Budget underfunds the No Child Left Behind Act by $9.4 billion. As part of this shortfall, the Bush budget underfunds the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program by $1 billion, eliminating afterschool programs for over 1.3 million children. The Title I program is underfunded by $7.2 billion. The Bush Budget leaves nearly five million disadvantaged children without extra academic help and services. Cumulatively, President Bush and the Republican Congress have underfunded NCLB by $27 billion since its enactment.

    Naturally, during the 2004 campaign, whenever a Democrat complained that NCLB was underfunded, the Bush campaign accused that individual of being against education.

    But an op-ed in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Elaine Garan says there are, um, more problems.

    In the past year alone, the revolt has included suits filed by the state of Connecticut and the National Education Association, as well as state legislation in Utah, Virginia and other states seeking to trump the federal law.

    Dissatisfaction covers a wide range of issues, from complaints that it is underfunded to allegations that it is unconstitutional. There are objections to the inequities of standardized testing and its restrictions on the curriculum, and to the unfair penalization of teachers and schools for factors outside their control. There also have been serious questions about flaws in the scientific research determining the programs schools can use, as well as alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the awarding of grants for the law’s Reading First initiative.

    Naturally, Bush Administration officials have not been working with states and educators to see how the Act could be improved. That is not the Bush style. The Bush style is to use a combination of bullying and bullshitting to keep naysayers in line and prop up allegiance to the holy NCLB exactly as it is. “The Bush administration has expended enormous time and energy scrambling to put out brush fires of resistance and keep angry states and districts under control” writes Garan.

    And then came Katrina.

    Education Secretary Margaret Spellings initially expressed unwillingness to grant waivers to schools affected by Katrina. For weeks, schools waited in limbo until she reluctantly agreed to allow automatic one-year waivers from accountability standards — but only for those Gulf Coast schools that were destroyed or severely damaged. In effect, the secretary’s compassionate flexibility amounted to this: Schools that no longer exist and have no students to teach, much less test, will not be punished [for] failure to meet their “adequate yearly progress” targets.

    Further, schools that have taken in the traumatized student refugees of Katrina will not receive automatic exemptions from federal punishment if they miss their standards.

    (Can somebody explain the point of this? If not to destroy public schools? That’s the only plausible explanation.)

    A news google of “No Child Left Behind” showed other interesting consequences. Thanks to the budget demands of NCLB, schools are cutting Gifted and Talented programs. Teacher certification requirements are causing hardships for rural schools. Because NCLB emphasizes math and reading standardized test scores, educators complain they are being forced to shortchange science, history, and other subjects to make time to “teach to the test.” (More here.)

    More than a quarter of the nation’s schools failed to meet standards this year, says the Department of Education. But here’s another kicker — the Act requires schools to bring students up to a certain level of proficiency, but leaves to the states to decide what that “proficiency” is. Therefore, the Act rewards states with lower standards and punishes states with higher standards. Several states are considering lowering standards so as not to incur the draconian NCLB punishments for failure.

    In spite of all this, the Bush Administration is proud of NCLB and proclaims it is “working.”

    ***

    Conclusion: The NCLB is a big, expensive mess, yet it remains one of the Administration’s finest domestic policy achievements. How can that be?

    From the Administration’s perspective, what’s not to like? NCLB is a wonderful program. The title of the Act is both catchy and warm/fuzzy at the same time. It provides an excuse for the President to get his picture taken with children (more warm/fuzzy). And even though in the long run it is unlikely to result in better educated children, I’m sure eventually some numbers will be creatively crunched, or cooked, to make it look as if something is being achieved, which to the Bushies is all that really matters.

    The only flaw that I can see is that NCLB hasn’t resulted in any big defense industry contracts, but give ’em time.

    And through it all we see the Bushie modus operandi — create a stupid program; refuse to work with anyone outside the bubble to improve the program; instead, campaign relentlessly to punish anyone who badmouths the program; and even if it fails, declare the program a great success and exploit for its PR value.

    Now, given that in more than five years the Bush Administration has failed to achieve anything substantive — this includes job and economic growth — don’t forget the debt — why does anyone still support this clown?

    There is no rational answer to that question. Clearly, people who still support Bush do so because they want to. He represents something to them that they desire, desperately. And they’ve invested too much of their egos into supporting him to let go without serious existential angst. So they continue to make one excuse after another for the ongoing catastrophe that is the Bush Administration.

    A die-hard Bushie cannot be reasoned with. However, Bush’s falling poll numbers tell us there are more reachable people out there than I used to think possible. Truly, a couple of years ago I figured the absolute basement of Bush support would settle out at no lower than 40 percent, but we’ve pushed it lower than that.

    The day may come we can leave Bush and his minions behind. Let’s hope.

    Interesting Times

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    You know you’re living in interesting times when news that the United States is seriously considering use of nuclear weapons against another country is not the top story.

    In fact, the most linked-to article in the Blogosphere today seems to be this one, by Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post. Highlights:

    As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a “concerted action” by “multiple people in the White House” — using classified information — to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” a critic of President Bush’s war in Iraq. …

    … One striking feature of that decision — unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it — is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

    Regarding the “sixteen words“:

    United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair’s role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that “certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

    It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney’s direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure uranium” in Africa.

    This isn’t news to most of us who hang out in the Left Blogosphere, of course, but it’s nice to see the evil MSM finally catching on after, what, three years?

    The Right and its allies are trying to bury the central issue of this case under truckloads of verbiage — e.g., the President didn’t do anything illegal; the President didn’t specifically direct Libby to “out” Valerie Plame; the Sixteen Words were not technically a lie, etc. The Washington Post itself is running an editorial today claiming the NIE leak was “good.” “President Bush was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons,” it says. [UPDATE: See SusanG]

    But that is not why the NIE was declassified. Bush didn’t go to war because the NIE told him Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons, because that same NIE said the “intelligence” in back of that claim was suspect. As Gellman and Linzer write, the “evidence” that was leaked had already been disproved months before.

    It is obvious that the leaking was not about making anything clear, but about spreading disinformation for political purposes. It was, in fact, about making things muddy.

    But as another indication of how interesting our times have become, the central issue is no longer about Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson. As Ron Chusid writes in the Democratic Daily Blog, the goal of the Bush Administration leakers was to discredit anyone who criticized Bush. It was not about explaining the President’s reasons for invading Iraq; it was not about setting records straight; it was not about preventing Matt Cooper from publishing inaccurate information; it was about shutting down legitimate criticism of Administration policies. Trashing Valerie Plame’s career and exposing ongoing intelligence operations were just collateral damage.

    And, ultimately, it was about deceiving the American people.

    Joe Wilson was on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos this morning, and Wilson said that if President Bush wants to salvage his reputation there are two things he should do. First, he and Cheney should release the transcripts of their interviews with Patrick Fitzgerald about Plame. Second, since recent court filings have revealed that “multiple people” in the White House took part in the Wilson-Plame smear campaign, Bush should find out who those “multiple people” are and fire them.

    It won’t happen, of course, and I’m sure Wilson knows that.

    See also: Larry Johnson, “George W. Bush, Rogue President” and “George Bush, A Slam Dunk Liar“; Murray Waas, “What Bush Was Told About Iraq.”

    Update: Michael Smith, London Times, “‘Forgers’ of key Iraq war contract named“

    Brave New El Salvadore

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    I’ve written before about abortion in Latin America. I’ve written about how abortion rates in Latin America are higher than rates in the U.S. in spite of the fact that abortion is illegal in most of Latin America. I’ve written about the approximately 5,000 Latinas who die every year from botched illegal abortion.

    In this Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Jack Hitt focuses on one Latin American nation, El Salvador, which eight years ago criminalized all abortions. All of them, for any reason. Women can get a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison for getting an abortion. [Update: See correction to the Hitt article here.]

    Physicians are under pressure to report any women who might have aborted to the proper authorities, on pain of prosecution —

    “Many doctors are afraid not to report,” says Mira, the obstetrician I spoke to. This fear is heightened for doctors, she explains, by the fact that nurses also have a legal duty to report abortion crimes but are often confused about their obligation of confidentiality. So doctors are afraid that the nurses will report them for not reporting. “The entire system is run on fear,” Mira said.

    The criteria for deciding whether a woman aborted sound like something out of The Crucible.

    If the woman is “confused in her narrative,” Vargas said, that could well indicate that she’d had an abortion.

    Vargas offered me an example. “Last year, in March, we received a 15-year-old who came referred from a hospital in an outer area,” she said. “She had a confused patient history. She had already been operated on and had a hysterectomy and had her ovaries taken out. She was in a delicate state, on respiratory assistance in intensive care. The doctors there said they had seen a perforation in the space beneath the cervix.

    “This was around Eastertime last year, and the prosecutor’s offices were closed,” Vargas said. She had not seen any of the evidence herself, she said, but saw that the other doctors “had tried to call the prosecutor’s office, but it was closed. I came in, and on the chart what was pending was to call the police. So I called them.”

    Courts can order vaginal inspections of women under suspicion. If a woman needs a hysterectomy after a suspected back-alley abortion, the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute for examination. If the case goes to trial, the organ may be used as evidence against the woman.

    El Salvadore’s laws are so insane physicians cannot even terminate an ectopic pregnancy before it becomes critical —

    Consider an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that occurs when a microscopic fertilized egg moves down the fallopian tube — which is no bigger around than a pencil — and gets stuck there (or sometimes in the abdomen). Unattended, the stuck fetus grows until the organ containing it ruptures. A simple operation can remove the fetus before the organ bursts. After a rupture, though, the situation can turn into a medical emergency.

    According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. “That is our policy,” Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject. “That is the law,” she said. “The D.A.’s office told us that this was the law.” Valdés estimated that her hospital treated more than a hundred ectopic pregnancies each year. She described the hospital’s practice. “Once we determine that they have an ectopic pregnancy, we make sure they stay in the hospital,” she said. The women are sent to the dispensary, where they receive a daily ultrasound to check the fetus. “If it’s dead, we can operate,” she said. “Before that, we can’t.” If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture. If they are able to persuade the patient to stay, though, doctors can operate the minute any signs of early rupturing are detected. Even a few drops of blood seeping from a fallopian tube will “irritate the abdominal wall and cause pain,” Valdés explained. By operating at the earliest signs of a potential rupture, she said, her doctors are able to minimize the risk to the woman.

    Hitt interviewed one woman serving a 30-year sentence whose three children are growing up without her. He describes young women chained to hospital beds and guarded by police. Clandestine networks, something like the Underground Railroad, help poor girls travel to abortion providers in other countries.

    The Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, says “El Salvador is an inspiration,” an important victory for the “pro-life” movement.

    Every now and then I run into a so-called “libertarian” who wants to criminalize abortion. You can talk to these lamebrains until you are purple, and they will not understand why criminalizing abortion limits the liberty and dignity of women.

    Well, assholes, this is why.

    Update:     See also Scott Lemieux.

    Top Ten Reasons Why Sy Hersh’s New Article Should Scare the Stuffing Out of You

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    Read, and weep:

    10. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a whackjob who is determine to enrich uranium.

    9. Our President, George W. Bush, has a messiah complex and is convinced that “saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

    8. The Pentagon is already engaging in clandestine activities, called “force protection,” that can be classified as military, not intelligence, operations; e.g., preparing a battlefield. Such activities are not subject to congressional oversight.

    7. U.S. military planners believe that bombing Iran will cause Iranians to rise up and overthrow the mullahs who rule them. Most Middle East experts think this notion is right up there with Cheney’s “Iraqis will greet us with flowers” delusion.

    6. A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said: “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”

    5. The White House has been talking to members of Congress about Iran. However, the only ones they’re talking to are the same bunch who led the charge against Iraq.

    4. “The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. ‘Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,’ the former senior intelligence official said. ‘”Decisive” is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.’

    3. “He went on, ‘Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out’—remove the nuclear option—’they’re shouted down.'”

    2. Bombing Iran could “provoke ‘a chain reaction’ of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world.”

    1. See reasons #9.

    Rightie Watch

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    A rightie blogger is outraged that Eleanor Clift, best known as the token liberal on “The McLaughlin Group,” is biased in favor of liberalism.

    Any faithful watcher of “The McLaughlin Group” knows that one of the most transparently biased members of the antique media over the past two decades has been Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Week in and week out, Eleanor rips apart every Republican on the political landscape while oozing nothing but adoration for those on the opposite side of the aisle even when they are found guilty of serious transgressions.

    The other regulars, including Tony Blankley, Pat Buchanan, and McLaughlin himself are, of course, the very measure of objectivity. Snort.

    Clift’s op-ed posted at Newsweek’s website on Friday is a fine example. After somewhat misrepresenting the seriousness of the recent allegations that have emerged from Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby concerning unclassified information from a National Intelligence Estimate by President Bush, Clift went right into a stump speech: “The only way the American people can stop Bush’s imperial expansion of power short is to turn out in massive numbers to take back one or the other body of Congress from Republican control.”

    My goodness, Eleanor: You’re supposed to be a journalist. This isn’t reporting.

    Of course it’s not reporting, you stupid twit. Newsweek clearly labels the op-editorial as “commentary” in big red letters. That means it’s the columnist’s personal opinion and analysis.

    It won’t surprise you that the blogger who can’t tell the difference between commentary and reporting has dedicated his blog to “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” If you define liberal media bias as “everything I don’t want to hear because it contradicts MY biases,” and you’re an idiot to boot, there’s no question that liberal bias in media is as common as onions. People with functioning frontal lobes might not agree, of course.

    The Clift op ed, btw, is pretty good. The first page, anyway. On the second page she devolves into Joe Biden apologia.

    Yesterday I commented on this E.J. Dionne column about the ongoing crisis in American conservatism. Well, the same rightie genius linked above came up with this excuse:

    I guess E.J. must have written this piece before this morning’s announcement by the Labor Department that the economy added more jobs in the past three months than in any first quarter since before the stock market bubble collapsed, and that over five million jobs have been added since Conservatives fought for tax cuts in 2003.

    Conservatism’s dead, E.J.? Hardly.

    About that announcement, see Hale Stewart, “Bush’s Job Creation Record Worst of Last 40 Years (Still).”

    According to the National Bureau of Economic Research the last recession ended in November 2001. That means we have had 54 months of an economic recovery. First, notice how Bush uses May 2003 as the starting point of his comparison? Why is he doing this? Because May 2003 is the lowest point of establishment job creation in his administration. Since the actual trough in November 2001 Bush’s economy has created 4,083,000 jobs. At the same point (54 months) all other expansions of the last 40 years had created more jobs.

    At 54 months,

    The expansion starting in February 1961 created 6,550,000 jobs

    The expansion starting in November 1970 created 6,240,000 jobs

    The expansion starting in March 1975 created 13,565,000 jobs

    The expansion starting in November 1982 created 12,366,000 jobs

    The expansion starting in March 1991 created 8,718,000 jobs.

    Therefore, Bush’s economy would have to create 2,157,000 jobs to be second to last on this list.

    There is no way that Bush can create enough jobs to increase his rank to 4th on the list. At this point, he will go down as presiding over the weakest records of job creation of the second half to the 20th century.

    The excitement when Bush’s economy squeezes out some jobs is akin to watching, say, a trained pig push a ball with his nose. The wonder is not that the pig is so skilled, but that it can do the trick at all.

    As the Lies Unravel

    Posted on by

    John Dean has a new column at FindLaw that separates fact from assumption about Bush’s role in Plamegate. In particular, Dean challenges the assumption made by most news reports that the President didn’t do anything illegal when he authorized leaks as Scooter Libby alleged. Later in this post I point to allegations from Knight Ridder reporters that the right-wing media echo chamber, in particular Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard, was a participant in a White House disinformation campaign. But I want to address the legal/illegal question first.

    The new leak revelation “has been accompanied by a number of public misstatements, which call for correction,” writes Dean. One of these misstatements is that Bush authorized the release of Valerie Plame’s covert status at the CIA. I haven’t personally seen anyone make that claim, but I guess Dean has. In fact, Fitzgerald’s filing says on page 27 that the President didn’t know what Libby and Cheney were up to regarding Plame (see “plausible deniability“). “The filing does indicate that the President authorized the release of classified information,” Dean says, “but it was different information — a National Intelligence Estimate that had been classified pursuant to an executive order.” Dean also notes that what Libby told the Grand Jury about what Bush allegedly said to Cheney is hearsay.

    On the other hand …

    Dean says it is not necessarily true that the President didn’t do anything illegal, as many news stories claim. Here’s the critical part of Dean’s column:

    Assuming that Libby’s testimony is accurate, did the President do anything wrong by so declassifying the NIE? Given the fact that the national security classification system is created by executive order of the president, it would appear logical that the president has authority to unilaterally and selective declassify anything he might wish. However, that is not the way any president has ever written the executive orders governing these activities. To the contrary, the orders set forth rather detailed declassification procedures.

    In addition, there is law that says that when a president issues an executive order he must either amend that executive order, or follow it just as others within the executive branch are required to do. At present, we have so few facts it is difficult to know what precisely Bush did and how he did it, and thus whether or not this law is applicable. There is also the problem that no one has standing in court to challenge a president’s refusal to follow his own rules. But voters may take note of the disposition of this administration to play by the rules, and put a Democratic Congress in place to keep an eye on the last two years of the Bush/Cheney presidency.

    What is apparent, however, based on Fitzgerald’s filing, is that no one other than Bush, Cheney, Libby and apparently Addington was aware of this unilateral and selective declassification – if, indeed, the NIE was declassified. The secrecy surely suggests cover-up. For example, Fitzgerald notes that Libby “consciously decided not to make [then Deputy National Security Adviser] Hadley aware of the fact that defendant [Libby] himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified.” (Also, CIA Director George Tenet apparently was not aware of the partial declassification by Bush.)

    Whatever authority Bush may or may not have had, however, it is crystal clear that Vice President Cheney did not have any authority to unilaterally and selectively declassify the NIE.

    Recently, Cheney made the public claim (to Brit Hume of Fox News) that he had authority to declassify national security information. Learning of this, Congressman Henry Waxman asked the Congressional Reference Service of the Library of Congress, which issues non-partisan reports, whether Cheney was right. CRS found that the Vice President has limited declassification authority, generally speaking. And their report shows Cheney had no authority in this instance — only in situations where the Vice President had been the authority to classify the material in the first place, could the Vice President have the authority to unilaterally declassify it.

    There’s more. Fitzgerald’s filing implies that the NIE was not declassified at the time it was leaked, but retroactively (boldface mine):

    Fitzgerald reports that Libby “testified that he was specifically authorized … to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller” because the information “was ‘pretty definite’ against Ambassador Wilson… and that the Vice President thought that it was ‘very important’ for the key judgments of the NIE to come out.”

    When Libby raised the problem of discussing the NIE with Miller because of its classified status, the filing reports that Libby “testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized” Libby to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE. (Emphasis added.)

    The word “later” here, in the filing, is crucially ambiguous: Did the President authorized Libby’s actions before Libby actually revealed the classified information to Miller, or afterward? The distinction may make a large difference in Libby’s defense: If the authorization was retroactive, then Libby initially revealed classified information without permission to do so; thus, he would have reason to lie.

    In addition, Cheney’s counsel (now Chief of Staff) “opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document.” (Emphasis added.)

    Again, the language here is telling. The filing says that the President’s actions “amounted to” declassification, not that the President had unilaterally declassified the material. To the contrary, it appears the material was not declassified for several days.

    So, based on what we know so far, we cannot say whether the President did or didn’t do anything illegal when he authorized the NIE information to be released. It appears Cheney, on the other hand, exceeded his declassification authority.

    Even if the President was within the law, that doesn’t mean he was within the right. Warren Strobel and Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder write that the new revelation is part of “a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration’s political agenda.”

    Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

    But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

    In other words, they selectively leak lies and misinformation to throw media off the scent of what they’re really up to.

    On Friday, White House officials said that the administration declassified information to rebut charges that Bush was manipulating intelligence.

    Without specifically acknowledging Bush’s actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: “There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified.”

    Except that what the Administration selectively declassified (if indeed it was declassified) and leaked was false, and the “irresponsible and unfounded accusations” were, in fact, true. And the Bush Administration knew it at the time. Which means they sure as hell know now, even if they won’t admit it.

    Strobel and Hutcheson provide a list of Bushie-generated misinformation that I won’t repeat here. However, I got a kick out of this bit toward the end of the article —

    In November 2003, the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard published highly classified raw intelligence purporting to a show a link between Saddam and al-Qaida.

    The Pentagon disavowed the report. But in early January 2004, Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News newspaper that the magazine report was the “best source of information” about the Saddam/al-Qaida connection. That connection has never been proved.

    I’m pretty sure this is the article in question. I remember this article well; it was linked to robustly by the rightie blogosphere and cited by many other news sources as the definitive proof that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. But it appears that Stephen Hayes was filling the Judy Miller role for the Weekly Standard — Cheney would dictate to Hayes what to write, and then later Cheney would cite the Hayes article as if it were independent corroboration of his assertions. And the righties embraced it all as gospel.

    Who says the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is a myth?

    Speaking of the VRWC, the Bush Bitter Enders are working overtime to crank out excuses. I haven’t surveyed the entire Right Blogosphere, but the dumbest excuse I’ve seen so far comes from Riehl World View. Truly, the Riehl post is a study in pathological denial, but the best part is from this old NewsMax post about alleged Clinton Administration leaks about Paula Jones and Linda Tripp! Yes, bless us, the Clinton did it too dodge! And, of course, discrediting Linda Tripp about a BJ is so much more significant than spreading disinformation about national security intelligence and a war that is tearing the nation apart. Oh, wait …

    See also: The Reaction, “Follow the Mendacity”