Tristero

Saturday, March 27, 2004

The Mind Of Osama Today  

When someone is behaving exactly the way you want them to behave, do you anger them, or attack them? Of course not. So consider this:

1. Vis a vis, the United States, Osama bin Laden had one primary goal: that America stop defiling the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest places.

Well guess what? Bush withdrew from Saudi Arabia once Iraq was invaded and occupied. He did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do.*

2. The most paranoid fantasy that bin Laden broadcast to the Arab world was that the United States would overrun and occupy an oil rich Arab country. Guess what? Bush has done exactly that.

3. Saddam's explicit goal was to become the new Saladin, driving the Israelis into the sea, becoming the hero of all Arabia. Guess who thwarted that insane ambition permanently? As bin Laden's must certainly see it, Bush has done bin Laden's personal cause a tremendous favor: he eliminated one of The Sheik's most serious and hated rivals.

To sum up everything so far, let's engage in a rather creepy thought experiment. You have crawled into the mind of Osama bin Laden.

You are ruthless, calculating, extremely smart and utterly dedicated to your cause. You are not a paranoid schizophrenic, but you are convinced that God has chosen you to lead the straying sheep of Islam back to the fold. You are surrounded by equally ruthless, calculating men who are as convinced as you are that your cause is right. Many might be cynical about you, but you know very well that at least a few believe you may, just may, be one of the greatest men in all of Islamic history. You hope they are right and often know they are. But your delusions of grandeur have not damaged your exceptional talent for assessing a situation and exploiting it to your advantage. Like your father, you have a keen sense of how to maneuver in a complex and hazardous world.

You observe that the United States under George W. Bush is doing almost exactly what you demanded or predicted they would do.

Since the US is being so cooperative, why would you waste time and personnel attacking that corrupt, powerful, but ultimately unimportant country anymore?

I know. These are strange thoughts and I'm not sure I entirely buy them, but bear with me a little longer here.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that bin Laden will never attack the US. Oh, I am certain he will try many, many times, and if he succeeds again (superstitiously, I cannot permit myself to think anything more ominous than "if"), it will be horrible. Rather, I'm saying this:

From bin Laden's perspective, the priorities for the war he thinks he is fighting have shifted, from the US and the West, to a far greater, more important struggle.

1. One major fallacy of US thinking in re: bin Laden is the assumption that we are the primary target, that bin Laden wishes to destroy us because (choose any or all) he hates freedom; is insane; he wishes to avenge some "American atrocity"; he thinks we won't fight back, etc. This is pure narcissism on our part. We are utterly unimportant to bin Laden, merely an annoying infidel pest that must be eliminated or neutralized so that he and his followers can focus on the important battles: the intra-Islamic war to reform Islam and restore the Caliphate.

Sure, radical Islamists dream of destroying the US, but the real jihad is between Muslims and radical Islamists. Bin Laden has his priorities: Once the Caliphate is restored and Sharia is followed throughout the united Arab Islamic world, then and only then will the fight against the West become the most crucial jihad. September 11? From bin Laden's standpoint, it was surely a great victory, but the truly great victories, the ones that really matter, are yet to come, and they lie entirely in his triumph over those false Muslims who corrupt Islam. The US is a minor, albeit well armed, annoyance in comparison.

I suspect Osama bin Laden reasons something like this:

The Islamic peoples, since the destruction of the First Caliphate have become corrupt. It is my divine mission to save the Muslims and bring them back to God. As for the United States, they are infidels - they are dirt, camel manure. Once the Caliphate is restored, we can begin to convert them, but first, I must save my own people, fellow Muslims, from eternal damnation.

So why did bin Laden attack us? Well, as Yussef Bodansky explained, the US was targeted simply because we were an easy way to unite the Arab world. Once Arabs are united (and every sampling of public opinion reports that Arabs have never been so united against the US as they are now), the US has served its purpose, so bin Laden can focus on important issues: the overthrow of the reprobates who corrupt Islam, the extermination of the house of Saud, and so on.

And hey, guess who's prepared to help bin Laden succeed? Well, if Perle and Frum are to be believed -and they most certainly, in the past, have meant exactly what they said - it looks like the US may be more than willing to lend bin Laden a vile, corrupted hand to overthrow - with gung ho, can-do American gumption - the governments of Iran (not an Arabic country, but hey, they'll take it, too), Syria, and the biggest prize of all, Saudi Arabia.

God works in mysterious ways, bin Laden must be thinking. That infidels who hate us are so willing to destroy our enemies to make sure we prevail.

But surely, regime change is in our interest, you might argue. The Middle East has mega-problems stemming from their oppressive governments. They must change, even if a bin Laden might exploit the situation.

Indeed they must. But bin Laden knows full well that Americans have little interest in having their own blood shed. And he also knows full well that we have short attention spans. So once the US loses interest, or returns enough young soldiers in transfer tubes (the latest Pentagon euphemism for body bags) to their mothers, bin Laden (or his successors) will move in to feast on the kill.

So to sum up:

1. Pre-911, bin Laden had considerable motivation to attack the US: to unite the world (and by that he means the Arab world only, the rest of us are worms) so that the corrupt governments in the Arabic countries will be destroyed.

2. Post-911, Afghanistan, and Iraq, bin Laden has some (ie, considerable but not as much) motivation to continue to attack us - vengeance for shedding the blood of Muslims, to hasten our departure from Iraq and Afghanistan, to maintain unity among Muslims. But the real battle has now shifted, to the conquest of Arabia.

And guess what? In Iraq, attacks have intensified on the nascent, fragile Shiite infrastructure. That is exactly what you would expect to happen if bin Laden's priority had shifted from uniting Arabs to his Intra-Islamic jihad.

(In our narcissism, we interpret this change of tactics primarily as the result of our increasingly effective security: the bad guys can't get close enough to US soldiers to harm them as much. True enough, but the primary reason for the change of tactics, perhaps, is that in the greater scheme of things, the US coalition just isn't that important. But a Shiite dominated goverment is anathema to bin Laden. Therefore, the focus of the battle has shifted back to an intra-Islamic struggle, a struggle that the US has neither the will nor the interest in engaging in. Yes, US soldiers are better protected and it would be, from bin Laden's viewpoint, nice to kill them. But they've never been the major target anyway, so let's shift focus.)

Yessirree, Bin Laden's delusions of grandeur are, indeed, as out there as we can imagine. But he and his close associates are also very smart, they have studied their enemy (other Arab leaders) and the habits of their enemies' dogs (the US), and they think in terms of the long haul.

Folks, not to put too fine a meaning on it:

The situation I've just described is what terrified allies in the Arab world mean when they say that the US has opened the Gates of Hell by invading Iraq.

And when you are staring at the opened Gates of Hell, a smart United States president who governs through the exercise of reason and not instinct is no frivolous luxury. Yes indeed there's a war on, but it's not the one that Bush and the neocons are fighting. It's the one bin Laden is fighting. If we continue to act as stupidly as we have since January,2001, bin Ladenism very well may prevail. So we need, and the world needs, leaders who understand what really is going on and act not only forcefully and decisively, but sensibly.**

In many ways -the entire world united against us, the Taliban remains strong (it was never defeated), an anarchic Iraq on the verge of slipping into civil war - it is already too late. The only question is how much horror will occur before the real threat of bin Ladenism is dealt with effectively. Most of that horror will take place in the Middle East and South Asia. But yes, we will see some here, because bin Ladenists still have considerable motivation to go after the US. That most of the horrors in the forseeable future may be outside the US should not make us feel relieved, but alarmed. Because they will come back here, and the outpouring of sympathy that many of us remember on 9/11, the offers of help...well, there really wont be as many, to put it mildly. And that will make US dealings with the rest of the world much harder than it already is.

So the sooner the US understands that we are not the main target, and never have been, the sooner an effective response to bin Laden will be crafted. And the sooner the horrors the world's enduring now will ebb. Step One? Get Bush out of the White House. Step Two? Involve the entire international community.

Step Three? There is no step three until Bush is out and the world can sit down to try to work on this thing together.


*As for the US cutting close ties to Israel, bin Laden's support has been tepid, as the PLO and others have been primarily secular based.

**It is an indication of how bizarre US discourse on foreign policy has become that a plea for US leaders to act sensibly needs to be articulated at all. It is ominous that such pleas are regularly ignored in favor of from the gut, intuitive, and emotional decision making.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:04 PM

There's Method In The Madness  

Who knows? Maybe Tom Tommorrow's right as he is about so much, but I think there's method there:

One question I have is: why has the Bush team's response to Clarke been so haphazard? They're obviously making it up as they go along--it's as if they had no idea Clarke was about to go public with these charges...

I think it must be due to the insular world in which they operate...

I think they are so out of touch with reality that they simply had no idea that Clarke's charges would resonate with the public. And when they realized that they had made a terrible miscalculation, they had to scramble.

Yes, possibly. But even if it is the case, that they are totally disorganized, I suspect something else might be going on, a variation of the old saw "all publicity is good publicity." Tom Tomorrow, and most folks, assume that the point of argumentation or rebuttal is make a logical consistent case. But with Bush, there's no reason to bother with such niceties.

With Bush, the goal is much simpler: prevent anyone who dares to criticize them from getting much time in front of a mic or tv camera.

Because every moment Cheney, Rice, Frist or whomever is seen lying on a talk show is a moment that Democrats and Clarke's friends don't have. They don't have the air time either to rebut the fake charges or tell more stories of Bush White House Horrors.

And it doesn't matter in the slightest if the administration is consistent or even contradicts itself, as Cheney and Rice did. After all, no single person can listen to it all. The ONLY thing that's important is that whenever people turn on the tube or the radio, people hear from someone in the administration and not from critics.


posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:19 AM

Frank Rich Needs A Better Fact Checker  

In an otherwise superb article, Frank Rich commits an atrocious error of fact:

Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show (Stewart's 'The Daily Show') has been in a booking war with a real news show ('Hardball') over who would first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu.

"Hardball" is a real news show???!!

Oh, puhleeze...
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:06 AM

Friday, March 26, 2004

Kerry May Get It From The Church  

Jeanne rounds up some troubling machinations that the GOP is perpetrating within the Catholic Church.

It is going to be a very ugly few months.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:01 PM

Ah, It Only Takes Two Years To Catch On  

But CAP does finally get it:

President Bush yesterday once again tried to fend off charges of gross negligence before 9/11, saying, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people." But with more evidence emerging this week that the White House received repeated warnings before 9/11 of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, the President's "had I known" defense raises two disturbing scenarios: Either a) the Administration is telling the truth, actually did not know of the threat despite receiving repeated warnings and was totally oblivious to a brewing national security crisis. Or b) the Administration is not telling the truth, actually knew about the threat from the warnings it received, and yet still failed to act with adequate urgency.

Indeed. And once again, I'd like to remind you:

As I wrote to friends when I read it that day, on May 17, 2002 Bush said:

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people."

This was said angrily and apparently off the cuff. But it was clearly scripted, as was the angry voice. Look at it closely. It's a classic Straw Man.

Bush is saying that if he had had specfic information that on September 11, 2001 "the enemy" would attack with airplanes, he would have done everything he could to stop them.

Well, sure, if he knew exactly what was about to happen and when, he would have tried to stop it. At least he admits that he didn't have to have the precise times the planes would take off. But that's about all.

But that level of knowledge was never the issue.

The issue was then, as it remains: why didn't the Bush administration take al Qaeda that seriously in the first 9 months of 2001? Indeed, we now have strong evidence they backed off surveillance of al Qaeda.

This is the question Bush has never answered, although he appeared to, above. That is why one needs to read Bush very, very closely, especially when he's cornered.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:44 PM

Low And Lower And Lowerer  

Now Clarke's a racist, sexist pig:

ROBERT NOVAK: Congressman, do you believe, you're a sophisticated guy, do you believe watching these hearings that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?

RAHM EMANUEL: Say that again?


ROBERT NOVAK: Do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman Condoleezza Rice?


RAHM EMANUEL: No, no. Bob, give me a break. No. No.

And then from Ann Coulter ...

Isn't that just like a liberal? The chair-warmer describes Bush as a cowboy and Rumsfeld as his gunslinger -- but the black chick is a dummy. Maybe even as dumb as Clarence Thomas. Perhaps someday liberals could map out the relative intelligence of various black government officials for us.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:07 AM

Safer, My Foot  

American Prospect has a fantastic article summarizing the number of terrorist attacks before/after 9/11 by al Qaeda and other bad guys:

A catalog of attacks linked to al-Qaeda since 9-11, listed at the end of this story, makes it plain that a new approach by terrorists has been in effect and used with increasing frequency by al-Qaeda affiliates over the past two years. Since attacking America on 9-11, al-Qaeda-linked groups and individuals have been involved in at least 15 different attacks. They have hit at groups of Germans (in Tunisia), French (in Karachi, Pakistan), Spaniards (in Madrid), Britons (in Turkey and Bali, Indonesia), Australians (in Bali), Pakistanis (in Pakistan), Turks (in Turkey) Saudis (in Saudi Arabia), and Jews (in Morocco, Turkey, and Tunisia). By contrast, there were about five major terrorist attacks linked to al-Qaeda before 9-11, all but one of which -- the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993 -- involved assaulting U.S. military or government entities.

If winning a war is not just about capturing the enemy's leaders -- and, with Osama bin Laden still at large, we have not even accomplished that -- but also about the cessation of hostilities and capitulation of the other side, the evidence to date suggests not a group "on the run," as Bush likes to say, but rather an escalating conflict with an adaptable organization that is increasingly geographically dispersed, highly active, and systematically targeting U.S. allies.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:01 AM

Great Catch, Atrios  

Man, oh man. Atrios must have Lexis/Nexis/Google in his DNA. Check out what Atrios found on CNN, from April 30, 2001:

Unlike last year's report, bin Laden's al Qaeda organization is mentioned, but the 2000 report does not contain a photograph of bin Laden or a lengthy description of him and the group. A senior State Department official told CNN that the U.S. government made a mistake last year by focusing too tightly on bin Laden and 'personalizing terrorism ... describing parts of the elephant and not the whole beast.'

Boy, I'd love to know who that senior State Department official was...
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:56 AM

More From FBI Whistleblower Edmonds  

When I wrote this post about Sibel Edmonds I was certainly unaware of the info in Salon's article about her today which has more explosive charges:

A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.


Referring to the Homeland Security Department's color-coded warnings instituted in the wake of 9/11, the former translator, Sibel Edmonds, told Salon, "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available." Edmonds is offended by the Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice [Washington Post Op-Ed on March 22] where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."..

Edmonds, who is Turkish-American, is a 10-year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination conducted by FBI investigators. She speaks fluent Farsi, Arabic and Turkish and worked part-time for the FBI, making $32 an hour for six months, beginning Sept. 20, 2001. She was assigned to the FBI's investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases, where she translated reams of documents seized by agents who, for the previous year, had been rounding up suspected terrorists.

She says those tapes, often connected to terrorism, money laundering or other criminal activity, provide evidence that should have made apparent that an al- Qaida plot was in the works. Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly because she's been under a Justice Department gag order since 2002.


"President Bush said they had no specific information about Sept. 11, and that's accurate," says Edmonds. "But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat we're facing."


Edmonds testified before 9/11 commission staffers in February for more than three hours, providing detailed information about FBI investigations, documents and dates. This week Edmonds attended the commission hearings and plans to return in April when FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify. "I'm hoping the commission asks him real questions -- like, in April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate information indicating the use of airplanes for an attack on major cities? And is it true that through an FBI informant, who'd been used [by the Bureau] for 10 years, did you get information about specific terrorist plans and specific cells in this country? He couldn't say no," she insists.

Well! This begins to answer why no heads rolled after the 9/11 attacks. It's nearly enough to make one think Bush would have had to fire nearly half the government, including himself, for gross negligence.

Hat tip to Dave Neiwert.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:47 AM

Seraphiel's Daily Cartoon Roundup  

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posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:59 AM

Bush Administration vs. Competence  

Condoleeza Rice, May 16, 2002

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

Richard Clarke, April 1996

Mindful of Ramzi Yousef's plot to blow up 747s and the images of Pan Am 103, I asked about aircraft. "What if somebody blows up a 747 over the [Atlanta] Olympic Stadium, or even flies one into the stadium?"

The Special Agent in charge of the Atlanta FBI Office was steaming under the cross-examination from the Washinton know-it-alls. "Sounds like Tom Clancy to me, " he sneered. I glared at him. "But if it happens, that's an FAA problem," he answered.


...I turned to Cathal Flynn, the retired Navy SEAL who ran FAA security.


...."Well, Dick, we could ban aircraft from over the Stadium during events by posting a Notice to Airmen," [he] reponded.


'But what if a terrorist hijacks an aircraft and violates that ban?" I asked.


"Then we would call the Air Force...But by then it would be too late," Flynn intoned in his deep baritone. [Spelling errors in The Road To Surfdom's transcription have been corrected]

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Age of Sacred Terror add these details:

In response, Clarke created an almost complete "air cap," a closure of the airspace around the stadium. The FAA agreed to declare the airspace off-limits to all nonofficial aircraft. FBI agents fanned out to every airstrip within a two-hundred-mile radius and asked airfield operators to report suspicious activity during the games..the Army provided Patriot radar which, at Clarke's request, was hooked up to the FAA system and that of a P-3 interdiction plane, a mini-AWACS, pulled off customs patrol for the Olympics. Finally, helicopters , also provided by Customs and carrying Secret Service sharpshooters...were deployed to intercept incoming craft and force them out of the no-fly zone.

All these arrangements were made quietly, out of sight of spectators.

Simon and Benjamin go on to explain that, of course, there was a terrorist incident at Atlanta '96, the bomb allegedly planted by Christianist hero Eric Rudolph. Even Clarke's obsessive attention to detail can't foresee everything.

But by all accounts, Clarke, Tenet, John O'Neill and numerous other counterterrorism mavens were screaming for attention during the summer of 2001. The Hart/Rudman report had been published in the spring. What was the Bush administration response to the increased chatter?

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Ashcroft was protected from harm and I mean that sincerely, not cynically.

But it sure would have been nice if the same care and attention had been taken to protect the rest of us that summer and fall. Had Clarke been listened to, would 9/11 been prevented? No, 9/11 probably would have happened anyway. But there's a more interesting question to ask:

Had Bush and the highest levels of his administration not been obsessing about Star Wars and Iraq, had Hart/Rudman been taken seriously, had O'Neill not been sidelined...in other words:

Had Gore been in the White House in 2001, where he certainly deserved to be, would 9/11 have happened?

I suppose we will never know, will we?
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:16 AM

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Frum's Fallacies  

David Frum has one of the more bizarre takes on Clarke:

I have yet to read his book, but I have studied his interview, and I think I understand his argument.

Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush admininstration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole. The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world. Instead, his way of presenting his concerns seems to have had the perverse effect of making the terrorist issue look small and secondary - of deflating rather than underscoring its importance.

And this propensity continues.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt - for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? - or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate - and it's the wrong side.

It's hard to type while laughing, and fortunately, I really don't need to type a lot, because Phil Carter makes mincemeat out of Frum's argument:

What's Mr. Frum saying? Is he saying that Mr. Clarke's allegations were right, but that he just wasn't articulate enough to sell his agenda to the President? Is Mr. Frum, who was part of the White House political apparatus, saying that Mr. Clarke's real failures were political -- not factual? Did the Bush Administration really ignore a national security threat because one of its advisors couldn't find a way to sell the problem politically? If true, this statement by Mr. Frum is a damning indictment of the entire White House and National Security Council, and it indicates a near-total breakdown of the national security process. The idea behind the NSC staff, intelligence community, Joint Chiefs, and all the other systems in the national security process is to professionalize the decisions of the President in this area -- not to politicize them. Now comes Mr. Frum, saying essentially that the White House ignored its in-house expert on terrorism because he couldn't package it well enough. That's a really disturbing relevation -- especially because it comes from one of the President's own.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:47 PM

The Every Sperm Is Sacred Amendment  

Ok, Catch-22, now that had some grounding in the absurdity of reality. But seriously, I never thought I'd actually be living inside a Monty Python flick:

The bill states that an assailant who attacks a pregnant woman while committing a violent federal crime can be prosecuted for separate offenses against both the woman and her unborn child, "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

I just love that little phrase "at any stage of development."

But when I stop laughing, I think this is a very, very ominous bill that will lead to mischief far beyond abortion.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:38 PM

A Contest  

CAPis holding an interesting contest:

Yesterday, on Hannity and Colmes, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said "the assertion that somehow the Bush administration wasn't paying attention when we came into office is just false." But, despite Rice's comments, we were unable to find a single instance where Rice, Vice President Cheney or President Bush said "al Qaeda" or "bin Laden" in public between Bush Inauguration and 9/11. (The closest thing we could dig up – despite extensive searches on Nexis and the White House website – was a routine written extension of an executive order dealing with the Taliban.) During the same period, however, we were able to identify roughly 400 times that Rice, Cheney and Bush publicly mentioned "tax relief" or "tax cut." Prove you're better than the Progress Report! Send any instance of Rice, Cheney or Bush uttering the words "al Qaeda" or "bin Laden" in public between 1/20/01 and 9/10/01 to pr@americanprogress.org.

Sounds cool! But, but... wait a minute. Listen to what the prize is:

The first person to submit a successful entry (which we can verify) will receive a free copy of "Deliver Us From Evil" by Fox News Anchor Sean Hannity signed by the members of the Progress Report team.

Um, would you mind substituting a wisdom tooth extraction without anesthesia for Hannity's book? I'd be much more motivated.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:44 PM

Sibel Edmonds  

Sibel Edmonds was a wiretap translator for the FBI, fluent in Turkish and other languages used in the Middle East. If it can be confirmed, and you are duly warned that the link is not to a "mainstream" news organization, this is just as explosive as the Clarke revelations. However, she appears not to have Clarke's droning demeanor, so she may be easier to dismiss:

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA. 

Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish and had been working part time with the FBI for six months-- commencing in December, 2001. 


In a 50 reporter frenzy in front of some 12 news cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft  told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI  I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts."
...

When we asked her if it was really true that she had been bribed by the FBI and DOJ, Edmonds said "You can interpret it as that."

...

Edmonds said "My translations of the pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date specific information enough to alert the American people, and other issues dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now."


Incredibly, Edmonds said "The senate Judiciary Committee, and the 911 Commission have heard me  testify for  lengthy periods of time time (3 hours) about very specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and specific individuals and activities."

On 60 Minutes, she had charged gross incompetence, and claimed that a co-worker had ties to one of the groups the FBI was investigating, charges that were confirmed by the FBI. But she was fired by the FBI anyway.

So she could be a very credible witness to the incompetence and a possible coverup in the FBI of same pre-9/11
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:38 PM

Why Bush/Iraq Will Increase The Problem Of Terrorism  

Clarke on Fresh Air. Gadflyer prints a partial transcript. Go take a moment and read it. It's what all of us have been saying since this nonsense began but this time it's being said by the fellow who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the US.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:07 PM

Quite An Education For Kids In Boston  

No Fundraiser Left Behind

A spokesman for the Boston Public Schools told the Globe that his transportation director just found out yesterday about a Bush-Cheney '04 fundraiser that will prevent kids from going to school because of blocked off streets and presidential security. The Globe says: "The president's visit unexpectedly canceled classes for 1,425 children at the Boston Renaissance Charter School, a K-8 institution on Stuart Street a block away from the hotel. The Boston Public Schools system, which provides about 30 buses to transport Renaissance students, said it could not guarantee timely pick-up of students at dismissal time, said Dudley Blodget, chief operating officer of the Renaissance School's foundation. The school also feared that the 300 parents who pick up their children would not be able to reach the school."


"It's a sad situation that you have to close off school because of a fund-raising event," said Roger F. Harris, Renaissance headmaster. Indeed.


But here's what's edging out reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic for those 1,425 students: About 500 people, paying $2,000 a pop, will listen to the president deliver a speech, "but in order to hold down costs there will be no food or entertainment," the Globe reports.

Not that education matters much under Bush.If you want to get a job that is.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:02 PM

Meanwhile, As Bush Jokes About The Missing WMD...  

Three U.S. soldiers reported killed in Iraq
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:41 PM

If Rice Has Something To Say  

She should say it under oath and release all the documents and and all classified portions of emails:

Rice released unclassified portions of an e-mail Clarke sent to her on September 15, 2001, four days after the attacks.

"Unclassified portions" proves nothing and should not be taken seriously by anyone who claims to be a reporter.

Who knows? Maybe releasing the whole thing will confirm Rice's assertions (but I doubt it). But an excerpt proves nothing whatsoever.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:40 PM

Real Science: The Panda's Thumb  

The Panda's Thumb is a great new blog devoted to explaining evolution. Kudos to Kevin Drum for posting a link to it and for writing a scathing denunciation of the latest creationist garbage.

As I've mentioned before, evolution is a fascinating subject, but not when it is discussed within the context of creationism and IDiocy. The real exciting stuff, if I'm reading the debate properly, seems to revolve around "punctuated equilibrium" and its importance.

The mission of The Panda's Thumb is both to explain evolution and critique the IDiots. One hopes that they will quickly dispose of the latter so we civilians can learn quite a bit more about the former.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:05 PM

Clarke On TV  

I watched 99% of Clarke's appearance but I needn't have bothered because Fred Kaplan summarizes what I saw perfectly.

In the second round of questioning, Thompson returned to the August 2002 press briefing. "You intended to mislead the press?" he asked, perhaps hoping to pound a wedge between the media and their new superstar.

"There's a very fine line that anyone who's been in the White House, in any administration, can tell you about," Clarke replied. Someone in his position had three choices. He could have resigned, but he had important work yet to do. He could have lied, but nobody told him to do that, and he wouldn't have in any case. "The third choice," he said, "is to put the best face you can for the administration on the facts. That's what I did."

Well, Thompson asked in a bruised tone, is there one set of moral rules for special assistants to the White House and another set for everybody else?

"It's not a question of morality at all," Clarke replied. "It's a question of politics." The crowd applauded fiercely. To invoke another sports metaphor: Game, set, and match.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:54 AM

Pass The Popcorn  

Condi Rice stars in a new film entitled Liar, Liar, Skirt On Fire from Center for American Progress with a hat tip to Atrios.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:35 AM

GOP Humor  

Har de har har:

Bush put on a slide show, calling it the 'White House Election-Year Album' at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.

There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. 'Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,' he said.

via Atrios.

Meanwhile, today over at War News, we read this:

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi civilians killed, two US soldiers wounded during firefight in Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Green Zone rocketed in Baghdad. One US contractor wounded.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi civilians killed in mortar attack in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers wounded in rocket attack near Balad.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen wounded by bomb in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi civilians killed by roadside bomb in Baghdad.

Bring ‘em on: Baghdad Sheraton attacked with rocket fire.

Bring ‘em on: Facility Protection Service officer wounded in ambush near Mosul.

One US soldier killed in non-combat related shooting near Mosul.

Polish ambassador in Seoul says no place in Iraq is safe for foreign troops.

Operation Enduring Bases.

Wounded Guardsman loses job over battle wounds. “But he was back on the job only a few days. The company, after learning secondhand about his injuries, asked him not to return to work until he supplied more information about his health, he said. In particular, Securitas wanted to know more about his diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.” The article says over 3,200 complaints from returning Guardsmen and reservists have been filed with the Department of Labor.

Soldier’s widow sounds off about Lieutenant AWOL’s lies. “’The evidence that's starting to come out now feels like he was misleading us,’ Mrs. Kiehl said. ‘It seems that he did not tell the whole truth. It's almost as though he had things 'fixed' so it would look like he needed go to war. He can claim he was truthful, but the evidence feels like he was misleading us.’”

And so it goes.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:24 AM

Roswell Science  

The best thing about incompetent idiots is that they never cease to surprise you with their infinite creativity. For example, who could imagine that even folks as brain dead as the Bush administration would take cold fusion seriously?

Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy Department to take a second look at the process, and last week, the department agreed.

No public announcement was made. A British magazine, New Scientist, first reported the news this week, and Dr. James F. Decker, deputy director of the science office in the Energy Department, confirmed it in an e-mail interview.

"It was my personal judgment that their request for a review was reasonable," Dr. Decker said.

As Dan Quayle once said, ""What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:16 AM

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Not A Moment Too Soon!  

Guess what great film masterpiece is being re-released on Good Friday? Oh, what joy!!!

And obviously, one of the Pythons has been reading Tristero regularly. Clearly, they recognize all the good ideas here.

Heh heh.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:13 PM

"Spreading Democracy" On The Bread Of The Arab World: Answers To Kevin Drums Questions  

Riffing off a muddled, fallacious excluded middle making the rounds on the right blogosphere, Kevin Drum writes:

"For anyone who's serious about this stuff, these questions deserve an answer:

Is it enough to simply build up homeland defenses and hunt down terrorist leaders? This is essentially what Sharon is doing.

Or is it necessary to also have a grander strategy of engaging the hearts and minds of the Arab world and spreading democracy? This is (allegedly) the strategy of the Bush administration.

For reasons that entirely escape me, Kevin treats this as a profound dialectic. He goes out of his way in an update to his post to remark that if you argue that both are important you are engaging in mere rhetorical fooforaw. But there is no profound dialectic at work here.

However, the American misapprehensions about the world that Kevin inadvertently exposes are very profound. And ominous.

To respond in detail:

1. Sure, we have to build up homeland defenses, to a reasonable extent. You can't lock down everything, of course, or America ends up like South Africa on steroids. Obviously, in this country, rail and port security needs to be improved, as well as security around nuclear plants, chemical weapons dumps, and so on. Nothing will ever provide perfect security (the myth of Star Wars protecting us fully is just that: a myth) but there is much that can be done to make a terrorist's job harder.

2. Of course, we need to hunt down terrorist leaders, but obviously, firing missiles to blow up frail old men is, to say the least, a remarkably stupid, self-defeating tactic. It's time to face an uncomfortable fact: Ariel Sharon is bad for the Jews. Surely, a strategy to capture/hunt down terrorists can be put into place that does not make martyrs out of criminals.

3. "Engaging the hearts and minds of the Arab world." Such a high falutin' term, implying tolerance and understanding. But to Americans, "engaging the hearts and minds of the Arab world" means a one-way engagement - we tell them how great the American Way is, how lousy the Arabian Way is, and sooner or later they realize how wrong they are, and adopt our government, our economic system, and our cultural products. And if they want to continue to ban women/minorities from driving and/or voting, well, that's okay; that's how we started, after all.

However, given even our autism, before "we" engage their hearts and minds, it could be exceedingly helpful for us to know the first thing about the Arab world.

"We" - that is, the United States - don't know squat about "them", despite this unseemly (to the rest of the world) eagerness to invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity - oh, excuse me, spread democracy. Indeed, the very phrase "Arab world," and the promiscuous way we bandy it about to conflate enormously complicated geographies and societies, demonstrates how woefully ignorant we are. As Edward Said once noted - a man I hardly agreed with most of the time - there are many Islams, not one Islam. Likewise, there are many Arab worlds. Furthermore, the Arab worlds and the Islamic worlds are hardly identical.

So before we "engage" them and turn their countries, hopefully, into better democracies than Florida, we damn well better learn a few things about them first. That starts with the study of Arabic, the Qur'an, the Hadith, and Sharia. But not even Juan Cole, who truly knows whereof he speaks, has emphasized how important this is; he's simply called for the translation of things like the Declaration of Independence into Arabic, as if "they" as a culture need to learn everything about us, but there is nothing essential we need to learn about them that we don't already know.*

But perhaps, if we learn about them before we "engage" them with the American Way, we might, just might, modulate our desires to make them and the rest of the world into a mirror of ourselves. This would be a Very Good Thing to learn.

4. Which brings us to "spreading democracy." Oh, what an awful phrase for a terrible strategy! It is incredible that such crude formulations are not only discussed by bloggers, but at the highest levels of sophisticated wonkism, such as Foreign Affairs.

"Spreading democracy" is merely an American evangelical obsession transmuted into imperialism.

Kevin, I assure you:

The followers of the Islamists, in supporting the creation of an Islamist state, are just as convinced that the world will become a better, safer and more peaceful place as you are that democracy will lead us to that promised land at The End of History.

Today, The White Man's Burden of Rudyard Kipling thrives in the garden of 21st Century American thought, grafted onto a mutated version of Manifest Destiny and planted in a soil manured with Wilson's ill-considered language urging the US to make the world safe for democracy.

The sheer arrogance behind the phrase "spreading democracy" boggles the imagination. That so many otherwise thoughtful Americans - Kevin is hardly the only one - accept it as a simple given rather than a foolish delusion is further proof of how widespread is our ignorance of the rest of the world.

To be clear: It simply is not our mission in the world to spread anything, let alone democracy, which - need I remind anyone after the 2000 debacle - we are far from expert at practicing for ourselves. Our goals in the world are -or should be- rather straightforward: First, to protect our citizens; second, to do no harm; and third, to forcefully intervene abroad (as part of a very broad coalition) in the very rare cases where a genocide or mass catastrophe is imminent or ongoing.

This is NOT isolationism or realism. This is prudence, to use the term Raymond Aron uses in Peace and War to describe a similar theory of international relations.

There is nothing about prudence in international relations that precludes a proactive encouragement of democracy, or free trade, or any other system of government or commerce. However, what most emphaticaly has no part of a prudent foreign policy is the moral fervor of true believers anxious to spread their own system of government.

(Sooner or later even intelligent folks who believe in the rightness of a mission to spread ideology X - Islam, communism, democracy, whatever - end up pushed towards justifying the unconscionable. This includes going so far as to endorse screaming yellow bonkers ideas like the unprovoked invasion of another country - which Kevin, Matt Yglesias, Michael Ignatieff, and Josh Marshall ,among others, did to a greater or lesser extent. One hopes against hope that the horrific moral transgressions committed by those blinded by the imminent success of The Cause, such as the grotesque example Atrios reminded us of recently, would snap such people back to their senses. Sadly, it rarely does. )

As long as thoughtful Americans believe they can define US foreign relations in such hubristic terms as "spreading democracy," or "crusade" (see Powell's unfortunate remark yesterday) or "being a force for good in the world," the fundamental problem of constructing a viable response to international terrorism will never be adequately addressed. Instead, "engaging the Arab world" inevitably leads to such embarassments as HI, the recent slick magazine in Arabic perpetrated by our clueless ministers of information.

When we begin to study other cultures, and start to understand their magnificent complexity, the appalling and dangerous naivete of our missionary zeal becomes all too apparent. We start to understand how bizarre such notions as an "End of History" that terminates with liberal democracy must seem to a culture that "knows" that history will end with a world united under Islam, or Christianity, or the return of the Jews to Israel.

One more point:

It is striking that Matt and Kevin - two major liberal bloggers convinced that America has a mission to spread its cooties everywhere - have begun careers "in the real world," hired by prestigious magazines known for their progressivism and liberalism. Those who aren't afforded an opportunity to write for that wider audience are those bloggers who, like (pulling two names out of a very fine hat full of choices) Digby or Mary at Pacific Views, who don't buy into the notion of American exceptionalism. This is not said to disparage to Kevin and Matt, who both do wonderful work, but to highlight how far off the radar screen those who do not accept the notion of American exceptionalism are, even if they are (like myself, and probably Digby and Mary as well) not in the least sympathetic to the extreme left.

That even liberal magazines don't seem to have much interest in exploring foreign policy except within the context of America's Manifest Destiny is quite distressing. Those people who were both totally right about the stupidity of the Iraq/Bush war AND who objected that even the moral argument for that war was immoral, reflecting the worst aspects of America's heritage, are still marginalized, even from such already marginal (in the sense of audience size) publications as Prospect and WaMo.

But a coherent American liberalism does not depend upon buying into the delusion of American exceptionalism. Hopefully, people far more knowledgeable than myself about foreign relations will begin to examine how the details of a prudent foreign policy for the US can be articulated. History does not end in liberal democracy, even if it is, to paraphrase Churchill, the least worst alternative. Even if it did, America has no business embarking on a mission to spread it.

Indeed, America has no mission at all, except to act prudently, to try to co-exist with other countries in peace and growing prosperity. And that, folks, a policy of prudence in Aron's sense, is a highly coherent foreign policy that is both realistic and idealistic, that is neither cynical nor naive, that is worth taking the trouble to articulate as one of, if not the most sensible, theory of international relations for us to discuss.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

...

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Rudyard Kipling, 1899

*Sure, there are English translations of many important Arabic and Islamic texts, but many are incomplete, poorly translated, and difficult to find. Inadequate access to the essential documents of a culture is only marginally better than no access, especially when dealing with a culture as narcissistic as ours, that holds that it is the right of every American to remain ignorant of the world.

[UPDATE: Armed Liberal also has some criticism of Kevin's questions, albeit quite a different take.]
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:14 AM

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The Ignored Peace March  

None of the cool-o bloggers I like to read so much as mentioned the peace march on March 20, so I will. It happened, it wasn't as big as last year, but it was still pretty big.Here are some pics from NY. Unfortunately, I was nowhere near a peace march this weekend, or I would certainly have marched.

Yes, The Cause (getting rid of Bush asap) is best served these days by activities other than marching. OTOH, there really should be some enjoyable, public way to show our strength, which is formidable.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:04 PM

Even More Medicare Hoo Hah  

Looks like the world is caving in on Bush:

Medicare will have to begin dipping into its trust fund this year to keep up with expenditures and will go broke by 2019 without changes in a program that is swelling because of rising health costs, trustees reported Tuesday.

Social Security's finances showed little change, and its projected insolvency date remained 2042.

The deteriorating financial picture for the health care program for older and disabled Americans is a result, in part, of the new Medicare prescription drug law that will swell costs by more than $500 billion over 10 years, according to the annual report by government trustees.

Provisions of the law that President Bush signed into law in December ``raise serious doubt about the sustainability of Medicare under current financing arrangements,'' the trustees said.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:31 PM

The World Is Changed Forever  

WTF?:

National Public Radio has bounced Bob Edwards, host of ``Morning Edition'' since its inception in 1979, out of his job.

The radio network announced Tuesday that Edwards, 56, will become senior correspondent of NPR News, with his reports being heard on various broadcasts, at the end of April.

Edwards said he was disappointed by the move, particularly that he won't be host when the program celebrates its 25th anniversary in November.

``You have to figure it's going to happen someday and you get out before they do it,'' he said. ``But I failed.''

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:29 PM

Clarke On What Clinton Did  

The standard hoohah on the right goes something like this:

So what, when they had the power to act effectively against al Qaeda, did these Clinton administration officials do? Little or nothing. Their most effective action was to bomb what turned out to be an aspirin factory in Sudan. They had the opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden, but decided not to do it because they were not sure their lawyers would approve.

For these people to criticize the Bush administration's efforts to protect Americans against terrorism, long after their own ineptitute had allowed al Qaeda to grow bold and powerful, is contemptible.

But here's what Clinton really did in re: al Qaeda:

During the Clinton administration, [Clarke] said, al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of 'fewer than 50 Americans,' and Clinton responded with military action, covert CIA action and by supporting United Nations sanctions.

'They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia,' Clarke said, 'They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up embassies around the world.' (Clarke transcript)

'Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S. soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,] Lebanon, and there was no retaliation,' Clarke said. 'Contrast that with the first Bush administration where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of] Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation.'

'I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal,' Clarke said. 'In fact, so much that when the Bush people came into office, they thought I was a little crazy, a little obsessed with this little terrorist bin Laden. Why wasn't I focused on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism?'

And they foiled the millenium attack under Clinton.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:53 PM

The WaPo As It Really Should Be  

Sean Aday in the Gadflyer writes:

In today's Washington Post story on the White House's kneecapping of former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) issued an important challenge to the Administration:

"This is a serious book written by a serious professional who's made serious charges, and the White House must respond to these charges."

But of course that comment is buried in the middle of the WaPo article which emphasizes the non-denial denials and the ad hominem attacks. So Aday proffers a thought experiment:

Imagine the difference between a story that begins, "President Bush's top aides launched a ferocious assault....", and one that starts:

"Bush campaign officials admitted today that a former White House counterterrorism official's charge that the President failed to act on the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001 and strengthened terrorists by invading Iraq were essentially true."

Of course, it's ridiculous to imagine such a thing. But that's the way it really should have been written.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:39 PM

Taliban Is More Reliable Than The US Press?  

This is scary:

In the early stages of the battle west of Wana in South Waziristan, Taliban spokesman Abdul Samad, speaking by satellite telephone from Kandahar province in Afghanistan, was quick to say that talk of al-Zawahiri being cornered was 'just propaganda by the US coalition and by the Pakistani army to weaken Taliban morale'. Subsequently, Peshawar sources were quoting al-Qaeda operatives from inside Saudi Arabia as saying that both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had left this part of the tribal areas as early as January.

When the Taliban releases more accurate information than the US media, it's time to be afraid. Very afraid. In fact, by the time of the attacks:

...the majority of the mujahideen previously based in South Waziristan had already managed to cross back to Paktika province in Afghanistan - mostly to areas around Urgun, Barmal and Gayan. This rugged, mountainous territory is quintessentially Taliban. Many local Pashtun tribals don't even know who (Afghan president) Hamid Karzai is. [Emphasis added.]

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:36 PM

Bush Sings The Same Old Song  

Today:

"... [H]ad my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on 9/11, we would have acted," Bush said.

May 17, 2002

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power.

It's the same old straw man and it's nonsense.

The question, as always, is, "How could you NOT have known?" And the answer is that they were warned, by numerous people, but they actually backed off the surveillance of al Qaeda. Not only Richard Clarke says this, but others as well, with equally impeccable credentials.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:19 PM

Chaos In Iraq  

Jesus. Nine policemen killed.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:17 PM

US Gas Prices At All Time High  

Someone's making out like a bandit on this.

The retail price of gasoline hit an all-time high Tuesday -- nearly $1.74 per gallon nationwide -- reflecting strong demand, tight supplies and the high cost of oil, AAA reported.

AAA, formerly the Automobile Association of America, reported that motorists are now paying $1.738 per gallon for self-serve regular unleaded gasoline, one-tenth of a penny higher than the previous record set Aug. 30 of last year.

And guess whose shoulders those costs are borne by the most?

``Unstable gasoline prices make budgeting for fuel costs extremely difficult for families and businesses,'' AAA said in a statement.

Indeed it does.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:14 PM

Salty Sea On Mars  

Wow:

NASA's Opportunity rover has demonstrated some rocks on Mars probably formed as deposits at the bottom of a body of gently flowing saltwater.

'We think Opportunity is parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars,' said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the science payload on Opportunity and its twin Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit.

Clues gathered so far do not tell how long or how long ago liquid water covered the area. To gather more evidence, the rover's controllers plan to send Opportunity out across a plain toward a thicker exposure of rocks in the wall of a crater.

NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science Dr. Ed Weiler said, 'This dramatic confirmation of standing water in Mars' history builds on a progression of discoveries about that most Earthlike of alien planets. This result gives us impetus to expand our ambitious program of exploring Mars to learn whether microbes have ever lived there and, ultimately, whether we can.'

'Bedding patterns in some finely layered rocks indicate the sand-sized grains of sediment that eventually bonded together were shaped into ripples by water at least five centimeters (two inches) deep, possibly much deeper, and flowing at a speed of 10 to 50 centimeters (four to 20 inches) per second,' said Dr. John Grotzinger, rover science-team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:14 PM

One More Bush Lie. On Small Businesses.  

Heh:

In the presidential race's war of words over the economy, President Bush makes it sound as if small-business owners are in the cross hairs of Democrat John Kerry's plan to roll back tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

But data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Census Bureau suggest the vast majority of small businesses provide their owners with incomes far below the $200,000-a-year mark where Kerry says he would begin eliminating tax cuts.

``Taxing the rich?'' Bush said during a recent White House forum where his guests included the owners of a hair salon, a convenience store franchise and an office supply dealer.

``When you're running up individual tax rates, you're taxing small businesses,'' he said.

The only problem is that most companies in the small-business world are so-called Main Street businesses with 10 or fewer employees, including restaurants, small retailers and small manufacturers, Census and IRS data show.

Their profits fall into a median range of $40,000 and $60,000, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, a leading advocate of the small-business community. That puts them just above U.S. median household income of $42,409.

``These are not rich people,'' said NFIB researcher Bruce Phillips. ``Changing the tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, for the most part, doesn't apply to our membership.''

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:01 PM

Monday, March 22, 2004

The Pathetic Attempts To Rebut Richard Clarke  

Here's the the latest article on Clarke with some quick comments on the Bush administration's attempts to rebut him:

"He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff," the vice president said.

Oh?

As Josh Marshall says

Clarke, as we've said, was the counter-terrorism coordinator at NSC. That means he ran the inter-agency process on terrorism issues. Cheney says Clarke wasn't in the loop; but that means that he actually ran the loop.

If he was out of the loop on the central points of what the White House was doing on terrorism that means there was a complete breakdown of the interagency process.

Saying Clarke was out of the loop is less a defense of the administration than an indictment of it.

Indeed. Then Cheney says:

Mr. Cheney noted that Mr. Clarke was in the government at the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; when American embassies were attacked in Africa in 1998; and when the warship Cole was attacked in 2000.

"The question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?" Mr. Cheney said.

Irrelevant, merely changing the subject from the administration's failures via an ad hominem attack on Clarke. The issue is the administration's incompetence, not Clarke's record during Clinton, which is another issue.

The article switches to Condoleeza Rice. But the article lists not a single specific rebuttal to Clarke, just says that she defended the administration.

Next, the article quotes press secretary Scott McClellan. I've annotated his remarks in brackets ( [ ] ):

"Well, I mean, why all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?"

In fact, he did. According to Center for American Progress, in an email, "Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked “urgent” asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack. The White House acknowledges this, but says “principals did not need to have a formal meeting to discuss the threat.” No meeting occurred until one week before 9/11.White House Press Release, 3/21/04

Mr. McClellan said. "This is one and a half years after he left the administration. And now all of a sudden he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had.[IRRELEVANT AND AD HOMINEM. DOES NOT ADDRESS CLARKE'S FACTUAL CLAIMS.]

"And I think you have to look at some of the facts.[BUT MCCLELLAN DOES NOT ADDRESS CLARKE'S FACTUAL CLAIMS.] One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. [IRRELEVANT. ] He has written a book, and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."[IRRELEVANT AND AD HOMINEM. DOES NOT ADDRESS CLARKE'S FACTUAL CLAIMS.]


"Let's look at the politics of it,"[IRRELEVANT AND AD HOMINEM. DOES NOT ADDRESS CLARKE'S FACTUAL CLAIMS.]
Mr. McClellan added. "His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy adviser to Senator Kerry's campaign." [IRRELEVANT. DOES NOT ADDRESS CLARKE'S FACTUAL CLAIMS.]

Those are all the objections to Clarke's assertions in the most recent rounds: One grossly misleading statement of the record and a pile of ad hominem attacks that do not address a single substantive issue.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:57 PM

It's The Brainpower, Stupid.  

Molly Ivins

For a long time, anyone who questioned Bush's ability to think was pointed to the opinion polls and told that discussing whether or not the President is borderline stupid was bad manners and counterproductive. Actually, that is the main problem with Bush: He neither reads, nor writes, nor speaks well.

It turns out that a C average is not good enough for the Presidency.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 5:54 PM