Wednesday, November 16, 2005

"No wonder Senator Stevens was so adamant about not placing the oil executives under oath," says one observer in response to a White House document obtained by the Washington Post that says 'Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force' on energy policy. [Cursor.org] 2:42:14 PM    comment []

The CIA's Secret Budget. How big is the intelligence budget? Usually we don't know because it's classified. Except this year we do know[~]it's $44 billion. How do we know? Because someone accidentally let it slip a few days ago: At a public intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the CIA and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion. Big mistake? No, not at all. That $44 billion number shouldn't have been a secret in the first place. Several former CIA directors have already come out and said that the overall intelligence budget figures should not be classified, that publishing these numbers wouldn't harm national security so long as individual budget items were kept secret. The Brown-Aspin Commission in 1996 concurred. Indeed, from time to time I do wonder why no one ever takes article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution seriously: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time. Yet this statement has obviously never applied to either the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency. So why don't constitutional orginalists ever start complaining about this? One explanation is that this clause has been violated almost continuously since the country's founding. In 1790, Congress appropriated $40,000 for "intercourse between the U.S. and foreign nations," but didn't require George Washington to account for how he actually spent the money. In 1794, Congress gave the president $1 million in a similar fashion[~]the money ended up being used as ransom money for American hostages in Algiers. Regardless of how useful these moves were, they were clearly unconstitutional, allowing Congress to decide willy-nilly when and where it gets to spend money without public oversight. My preference would be to make everything related to intelligence and defense fully public, and carve out exceptions only if absolutely necessary, after long debate. Excessive secrecy has rarely served the country well. Now that the CIA is getting in the business of running a secret network of gulags around the world, and who knows what else, that holds doubly true. But this will never happen, especially since Democrats seem to place a premium on CIA secrecy these days. More realistically, Congress should at least publish overall figures for the intelligence budget and the basic purposes for which they're spent. Meanwhile, the GAO, the government's auditing arm, still has only limited access to reviewing CIA programs. At the time of the Pike Commission in the early '70s, the agency had no access to any budgetary information whatsoever. Today, the GAO has "broad authority to evaluate CIA programs," but it still faces limitations: it lacks access to the CIA's "unvouchered" accounts, and has no way to "compel" access to foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information. As I said, we're not likely to get sunlight anytime soon, but giving the GAO increased access would be a good start. [MoJo Blog] 2:39:15 PM    comment []

Jeremy Pikser: Bernie Kerik: Where Is He Now?. I sit down to a cup of coffee and today's NY Times. What's new? Well, it seems the new democratic government of Iraq has been torturing people. Of course, with George "we don't torture" Bush as president, we aren't really ones to throw stoneS - even at adulterers. But, once the US admitted that its intelligence (read "propaganda") was inaccurate (read "fraudulent"), the justification (read "desperate attempt to deflect disgust and anger, if not criminal charges") for the catastrophe of murder and suffering unleashed on the Iraqi people was that we had rid the world of a vicious, torturing dictator (read "disobedient former client"). Imagine that. Now we find that liberated Iraq tortures, too. What a shocker. (read "not"). And then at the bottom of the page -- another shocker -- the man Bush nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security (read Department of Fear Mongering, Cronyism, and Incompetence), Bernie Kerik, is charged with something more serious than having an illegal nanny: taking hundreds of thousands in kickbacks and bribes as head of NY Dept of Corrections. Imagine, if Bush had had his way, this man would have been Brownie's boss for Katrina! Bernie and Brownie. What a team that would have been. Hard to imagine anything worse than Brownie and Mike "The Grim Reaper" Chertoff, but if nothing else, the Bush Regime regularly surpasses the imagination. And what is Bernie doing now? He's a "consultant" to the government of Jordan. What? The Jordanians, traumatized by the recent spread of Iraqi violence to their country, must be greatly comforted to know another Bush freedom fighter is on the scene. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 2:36:05 PM    comment []

From Capitol Hill Blue FUBAR GOP memo touts new terror attack as way to reverse party's decline By DOUG THOMPSON Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue Nov 10, 2005, 06:19 A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people." The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could "validate" the President's war on terror and allow Bush to "unite the country" in a "time of national shock and sorrow." The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit it's a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are "blue sky thinking" that often occurs in political planning sessions. "The President's popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks," admits one aide. "Americans band together at a time of crisis." Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country. "We also have to face the fact that many Americans no longer trust the President," says a longtime GOP strategist. "That makes it harder for him to become a rallying point." The memo outlines other scenarios, including: --Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead); --A drastic turnaround in the economy; --A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war. GOP memos no longer talk of "victory" in Iraq but use the term "successful resolution." "A successful resolution would be us getting out intact and civil war not breaking out until after the midterm elections," says one insider. The memo circulates as Tuesday's disastrous election defeats have left an already dysfunctional White House in chaos, West Wing insiders say, with shouting matches commonplace and the blame game escalating into open warfare. "This place is like a high-school football locker room after the team lost the big game," grumbles one Bush administration aide. "Everybody's pissed and pointing the finger at blame at everybody else." Republican gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey deepened rifts between the Bush administration and Republicans who find the President radioactive. Arguments over whether or not the President should make a last-minute appearance in Virginia to try and help the sagging campaign fortunes of GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore raged until the minute Bush arrived at the rally in Richmond Monday night. "Cooler heads tried to prevail," one aide says. "Most knew an appearance by the President would hurt Kilgore rather than help him but (Karl) Rove rammed it through, convincing Bush that he had enough popularity left to make a difference." Bush didn't have any popularity left. Overnight tracking polls showed Kilgore dropped three percentage points after the President's appearance and Democrat Tim Kaine won on Tuesday. Conservative Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum told radio talk show host Don Imus Wednesday that he does not want the President's help and will stay away from a Bush rally in his state on Friday. The losses in Virginia and New Jersey, coupled with a resounding defeat of ballot initiatives backed by GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California have set off alarm klaxons throughout the demoralized Republican party. Pollsters privately tell GOP leaders that unless they stop the slide they could easily lose control of the House in the 2006 midterm elections and may lose the Senate as well. "In 30 years of sampling public opinion, I've never seen such a freefall in public support," admits one GOP pollster. Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin says the usual tricks tried by Republicans no longer work. "None of their old tricks worked," he says. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) admits the GOP is a party mired in its rural base in a country that's becoming less and less rural. "You play to your rural base, you pay a price," he says. "Our issues blew up in our face." As Republican political strategists scramble to find a message - any message - that will ring true with voters, GOP leaders in Congress admit privately that control of their party by right-wing extremists makes their recovery all but impossible. "We've made our bed with these people," admits an aide to House Speaker Denny Hastert. "Now it's the morning after and the hangover hurts like hell." © Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue 2:11:22 PM    comment []

Harry Shearer: The Writing on the Iraq Wall. First, in the "we weren't all wrong" department, I just unearthed this from a David Corn email dated December, 2001: Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterrorism chief (who worked in the Reagan White House on the programs that provided covert support to the contras in Nicaragua and the mujahhedin in Afghanistan), argues it would be a "huge mistake" to redirect the war on terrorism against Iraq. The wider-war advocates, he says, "cannot find a pretext for doing it related to September 11, so they are now saying Iraq is involved in weapons of mass destruction. But they have no reasonable plan, no magic button to push. They want to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but the only way to do that is put U.S. ground forces in Iraq. That would be a bloody mess and we would have no support whatsoever from other countries." Cannistraro is adamant that the Hussein-hunters have a policy goal (bring me the head of Saddam!) but no strategy for achieving that end and "no concept of a post-Hussein" Iraq. "If you want," he adds, "you can have bombing in Iraq and throw money at the INC" -- the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Hussein opposition group that heretofore has displayed minimal effectiveness -- "but that won't do the trick." To have any hope of removing Hussein, the Bush administration would have to mount a go-it-alone, expensive occupation involving massive numbers of U.S. troops. And that, Cannistraro maintains, would undermine U.S. efforts against terrorism everywhere else. Okay, so let's hire Vince. Second, I wrote in an email blast to my radio show listeners in May of 2003 (not available to me on this computer) a self-described "wild idea" in answer to the question then ambient--if Saddam didn't have WMD, as it was then appearing he didn't, why would he have stiff-armed the UN inspectors for so long? My answer: he's a brutal dictator enormously weakened by Gulf War 1 and the subsequent sanctions, he's living in a hostile neighborhood, and he was trying to keep the Syrians, Iranians and Israelis in some doubt about his ability to do them harm. I cite that only to prove that sometimes just a year in Harvard grad school in poli sci puts you in a better position to make informed guesses than going for the whole doctorate. In that spirit, I go out on the following limb: the Senate's oh-so-delicate walking away from full arm-link with the President on the war is just the beginning. Here's how this story ends: for purely political reasons, the US gets out far sooner than the true believers would like, far later than the anti-war folks would have wanted, and at a time determined (as was the onset of the war) by the political calendar. And this was all predictable: the US public may have a long attention span for certain things--celebrity trials, celebrity marital disputes, missing white women--but, when it comes to foreign wars, there's a time-and-casualty clock ticking in the nation's head. You can't be sure exactly when the alarm rings that signals end-of-toleration for the adventure, but we've clearly passed that point, and now all that's left is to manage the pullout as deftly (and, if you're the President, as much as you can to show we've "won") as possible. What I've always found so shocking about the neo-cons is not their ignorance of the history of Iraq--check the experience of the Brits at the end of World War One if you want to read some familiar-sounding quotes. After all, the "best and the brightest" that got us into Vietnam were similarly ignorant about the history of that country. What is indeed shocking is how ignorant the neocons were/are about this country; viz, you can't run an empire from a nation whose population really doesn't give a fuck about the rest of the world. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 10:25:30 AM    comment []

this is a test ksro radio 10:21:33 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Patricia Thurston.