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Tuesday, December 4, 2007 |
State Dept. gave bonuses to staff overseeing Blackwater.. Spencer Ackerman reports that the State Department has quietly given bonuses for “outstanding performance” to two officials who had “direct oversight” over Blackwater:
On November 20, an internal cable, listed as State 158575, went out to State employees announcing the recipients of bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $15,000 for “outstanding performance.” Among them: Kevin Barry and Justine Sincavage. You can read the cable here. Barry’s name is listed on page 2, and Sincavage’s is on page 5. Both Barry and Sincavage already earn approximately $150,000 annually. Their bonuses are scheduled to take effect on December 20, in time for the holidays.
In October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also promoted Barry and Sincavage.
[Think Progress]
8:48:51 PM 
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Podhoretz’s ‘Dark Suspicion’: Intel Community Trying To Sabotage Bush With NIE.  Norman Podhoretz, widely reputed to be the “godfather” of neoconservatism, has been one of the most aggressive hawks clamoring for war with Iran. Podhoretz laid out the “The Case For Bombing Iran” in a June cover story in the right-wing Commentary Magazine. He insisted that the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon:
[Iran’s] effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all. […]
“[A]ll this negotiating has had the same result as Munich had with Hitler. That is, it has bought the Iranians more time in which they have moved closer and closer to developing nuclear weapons.”
Yesterday’s NIE proved Podhoretz’s claims were false. Rather than modify his views on Iran, Podhoretz — who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 — aired a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday, attacking the authors of the NIE and accusing the intelligence community of deliberately “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush:”
I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. […]
But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.
After insisting that Iran was “only a small step away from producing nuclear weapons,” and after pushing for military strikes against Iran for months, Podhoretz is apparently determined not to let facts get in the way of his prayers for an Iran war.
UPDATE: Podhoretz isn’t the only conservative desperately spinning the NIE to buttress his hawkish positions. Some other examples from conservative blogs: (more…)
[Think Progress]
12:35:56 PM
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Robert J. Elisberg: Newsweek Pleads Insanity.
Sometimes, you look at something and can only scratch your head and say, "Honestly. What were they thinking????"
Getting rid of Coke for New Coke is one of those moments. Asking Roseanne Barr to sing the National Anthem is another. You try to be fair and look at all possible reasons from every conceivable angle...and just can't see any rational, human reason behind the thinking.
We can add to the list Newsweek hiring Karl Rove as a commentator.
Honestly. What were they thinking????
I mean, sure, we all know what their justification is, but understand that Ford can show you all the crack research that explains why the Edsel was going to be one great-selling car.
Yes, Newsweek will explain it's important to have a conservative voice in the mix. And that it's interesting to have someone with government experience.
Hey. This is Karl Rove we're talking about. We're not idiots, ya know. This isn't a conservative voice with government experience. This is Fagan teaching all the lost urchins how to pickpocket and not get caught. Scooter Libby is a conservative with government experience, too - Newsweek could have gotten him, and he doesn't even have to write from behind bars, thanks to Mr. Rove's former boss. And keep in mind that Karl Rove only escaped indictment himself by about 15 minutes, because some lawyer blabbed and gave Rove time to change his story before Patrick Fitzgerald handed him a "Go Directly to Jail" card.
And Newsweek hired him as a commentator.
Honestly - what were they thinking????
Yes, the magazine will tell us that they can justify hiring Karl Rove as a commentator because it balances things after hiring Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos.
Hint: if you hire someone to explain about being nice to people, that doesn't mean you should get Josef Stalin to balance that position.
Newsweek has hired a man to write commentary who told interviewer Charlie Rose that "one of the untold stories about the war is why did the United States Congress, the United States Senate, vote on the war resolution in the fall of 2002...This administration was opposed to it."
As Keith Olbermann put it, the story was untold because it's not true. As documents on the White House website put it, it's not true. Little babies teething understand it's not true. That tree outside my front door knows it's not true. Whoever you are, you know it's not true.
And Newsweek hired him as a commentator.
What were they thinking????
(It gets worse. Mr. Rove tries to squirm out some explanation why we should believe the administration was opposed to it. "Because we didn't think it belonged within the confines of the election," he weaseled. "We thought it made it too political." There is nothing this administration thought was too political. If someone hugged a puppy, and the Bush White House could think of how to make it political, they'd have made it political.)
This is a free peek at what Newsweek hired. It is not opinion. It's not even propaganda. What this is, is lies. It is lies. And everyone, including the 31% who still support George Bush understand that it is lies. Indeed, one of the very reasons those 31% still support George Bush is specifically because he pressured Congress into voting America into war.
Newsweek has hired a man who tells lies, like other people take breaths. And for the same reason, because they need to, or else they will die. This isn't whimsy, the history of Rove lies have been overwhelmingly documented throughout the land, most notably in James Moore and Wayne Slater's book, "Bush's Brain."
And Newsweek hired this known, documented liar as a commentator.
What in the world were they possibly thinking????
Back in January, I wrote a piece, "Getting Advice from the Chronically Wrong." For some reason, the media is still inviting certain commentators to give their opinions despite having been shown to be wrong on pretty much everything. Yet William Kristol, Kate O'Beirne, Sean Hannity, Bay Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the like continue to be trotted out like show ponies. That's bad enough. But for Newsweek to go to the next level and hire as a regular columnist someone who not only has been wrong on pretty much everything, but has driven the U.S. into a bottomless hole and lied about it, that is utterly incomprehensible.
Did they think Karl Rove would attract the far right-wing base? Those people aren't readers. And they don't trust the press. And they most-especially hate the Washington Post, which owns Newsweek.
So, all that can come of hiring Karl Rove as a commentator is to destroy the magazine's credibility, and drive other readers away. It's hard not to imagine Newsweek subscriptions being cancelled.
Honestly. What were they thinking?????
This assumes, of course, that they were thinking.
 [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
9:07:49 AM
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Bush: DNI Told Me âo[breve]We Have Some New Information, He Didnâo[dot accent]t Tell Me What The Information Wasâo[dot accent]. At a press briefing this morning, President Bush said he was told by his Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell “in August” that “we have some new information” regarding Iran’s nuclear program. But Bush asserted “he didn’t tell me what the information was”:
BUSH: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was John — Mike McConnell came in and said, We have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.
Later, when a reporter followed-up on this statement, Bush asserted no one ever told him to stop ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran:
REPORTER: Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as World War III was making it into conversation — at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?
BUSH: No — I’ve never — nobody ever told me that.
Watch it:
Yesterday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said, “when the President was told that we had some additional information, he was basically told: stand down; needs to be evaluated; we’ll come to you and tell you what we think it means.” Later in the briefing, Hadley reversed course and said, “In terms of stand down, they did not tell the President to stand down and stop talking about Iran’s nuclear program.”
White House officials are obfuscating on what they knew and when they knew it because the answer has the potential of further damaging the credibility of what they have asserted about Iran in the past few months. As ThinkProgress has noted, while the intelligence community was processing new information that Iran was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons,” President Bush was specifically warning that Iran was trying to “build a nuclear weapon.”
To recap: At the same time Bush was ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran, he was told by his National Intelligence Director that that have “some new information.” Yet Bush wants the public to believe he never learned what the information was, nor was he interested.
[Think Progress]
8:33:43 AM
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Prominent Stem Cell Researcher Praised By Bush Rips White House’s Stem Cell Policies.  Last month, University of Wisconsin professor James Thomson — the first scientist to successfully isolate embryonic stem cells — and his colleagues published a paper in Science Magazine stating that human skin cells could be “reprogrammed” into embryonic stem cells.
President Bush has refused to directly fund embryonic stem cell research, twice vetoing such legislation. The White House was therefore quick to herald Thomson’s work, claiming it vindicated Bush’s position:
President Bush is very pleased to see the important advances in ethical stem cell research reported in scientific journals today. By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries.
Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer declared, “The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.” “An official of one group fiercely opposed to destroying embryos said the “scientists should thank ‘pro-life voices’ for pushing them to find alternatives.”
But Thomson and American Association for the Advancement of Science President Alan Leshner could care less about the administration’s approval. In a Washington Post op-ed today, the duo slams the right-wing response to their work, stating that the Bush administration’s restrictive stem cell policies are “counter to both scientific and public opinion” and are inhibiting potential treatments:
At a time when nearly 60 percent of Americans support human embryonic stem cell research, U.S. stem cell policy runs counter to both scientific and public opinion. President Bush’s repeated veto of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which has twice passed the House and Senate with votes from Republicans and Democrats alike, further ignores the will of the American people. […]
[U]nder the policy President Bush outlined on Aug. 9, 2001, at most 21 stem cell lines derived from embryos before that date are eligible for federal funding. American innovation in the field thus faces inherent limitations. Even more significant, the stigma resulting from the policy surely has discouraged some talented young Americans from pursuing stem cell research.
As Science Progress noted, the skin cell research could not have been accomplished without the knowledge from prior embryonic stem cell research.
Furthermore, Thomson and Leshner emphasized that it “remains to be seen whether reprogrammed skin cells will differ in significant ways from embryonic stem cells…it’s too early to say we’re certain.”
In June, then-White House spokesperson Tony Snow said Bush’s veto of stem cell research was evidence of him “putting science before ideology.” In reality, the scientific community — including Bush’s own science advisers — thinks the opposite.
[Think Progress]
8:30:31 AM
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Gay Ambassador Resigns Over State Departmentâo[dot accent]s Discrimination Against Gay And Lesbian Employees.  Appointed by President Bush in 2001 to be Ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest was the first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. Ambassador. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly noted the presence of and positively recognized Guest’s same-sex partner, Alex Nevarez, during the swearing-in ceremony. The Human Rights Campaign called Powell’s acknowledgement of Nevarez a “small gesture that spoke volumes.”
But serving as an openly-gay ambassador under the Bush administration proved not to be as pleasant as his swearing-in. Guest retired recently, and at his retirement ceremony, “he did what few people do — displayed uncommon courage and threw a rhetorical hand-grenade into his own party.” The New York Times reports, “Guest took Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was not present) to task for failing to treat the partners of gay and lesbian foreign service officers the same as the spouses of heterosexual officers.” Guest said that was the reason for his departure:
“Most departing ambassadors use these events to talk about their successes . . . But I want to talk about my signal failure, the failure that in fact is causing me to leave the career that I love,” said Mr. Guest, 50, whose most recent assignment was dean of the leadership and management school at the Foreign Service Institute, the government’s school for diplomats.
“For the past three years, I’ve urged the Secretary and her senior management team to redress policies that discriminate against gay and lesbian employees. Absolutely nothing has resulted from this. And so I’ve felt compelled to choose between obligations to my partner — who is my family — and service to my country. That anyone should have to make that choice is a stain on the Secretary’s leadership and a shame for this institution and our country,” he said.
“Unlike heterosexual spouses, gay partners are not entitled to State Department-provided security training, free medical care at overseas posts, guaranteed evacuation in case of a medical emergency, transportation to overseas posts, or special living allowances when foreign service officers are assigned to places like Iraq, where diplomatic families are not permitted.”
“This is not about gay rights. … It’s about equal treatment of all employees, all of whom have the same service requirements, the same contractual requirements,” said Guest.
While the Bush administration has previously indicated an unwillingness to outlaw employment non-discrimination, Guest courageously highlights the fact that the administration is also practicing it.
[Think Progress]
8:28:12 AM
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"I Will Never Leave Guantanamo". Sabin Willett, of The Boston Globe, writes: "for two years and three months he'd been asking the federal judiciary to hear a few simple facts. No judge ever has. 'I also have something important to tell you,' Joseph said. 'About my wife. I want you to tell her that it is time for her .... to move on.' 'You mean ...?' 'Yes. I will never leave Guantanamo.'" [t r u t h o u t]
8:20:07 AM
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Bob Herbert | Iraq, Now and Forever. Bob Hebert writes for The New York Times: "Most of the time we pretend it's not there: The staggering financial cost of the war in Iraq, which continues to soar, unchecked, like a rocket headed toward the moon and beyond. Early last year, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the "true" cost of the war would ultimately exceed $1 trillion, and maybe even $2 trillion. Incredibly, that estimate may have been low." [t r u t h o u t]
8:18:58 AM
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As the Bush administration informs a British court that it has the right to kidnap anyone -- not just alleged terrorists -- that it suspects of a crime, the Washington Post recounts tales of torture from a 'holding cell for the CIA' in Jordan's spy agency. [Cursor.org]
8:09:12 AM
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Our serious foreign policy geniuses strike again. (updated below - Update II - Update III) Over the past year, the rhetoric from our Serious Foreign Policy establishment regarding the supposed threat posed by Iran's active pursuit of nuclear weapons has severely escalated both in terms of shrillness and threats. Opposition to this building hysteria has been led by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who -- exactly as he did prior to the invasion of Iraq -- has been relentlessly warning that there is no real evidence to support these war-fueling allegations. Because of that, he has been relentlessly attacked and smeared by our Serious Foreign Policy elite -- yet again. And yet again, ElBaradei has been completely vindicated, and our Serious Foriegn Policy Experts exposed as serial fabricators, fear-mongerers and hysterics. In 2005, the Bush administration vigorously (though unsuccessfully) sought to block ElBaradei's re-election as IAEA head on the ground that he was right about Iraq's non-existent weapons stockpiles: The U.S. has complained ElBaradei has been too soft with Iraq, and has clashed with him over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ElBaradei balked at U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted WMD. The administration went so far as to tape record ElBaradei's conversations with Iranian officials in order to prove he was in league with them, all "in search of ammunition to oust him as director general." As The Washington Post reported, even back then (2005), administration officials "with access to the intercepts" were accusing ElBaradei of being "way too soft on the Iranians." According to the Post: "Some U.S. officials accused ElBaradei of purposely concealing damning details of Iran's [nuclear] program from the IAEA board." Less than three months ago, the Very Serious Foreign Policy Expert Fred Hiatt published a scathing Washington Post Editorial attacking ElBaradei for warning of the dangers of an unnecessary war with Iran and pointing out that the evidence is non-existent that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Hiatt's Editorial accused ElBaradei of being a "Rogue Regulator" right in the headline. ElBaradei's crime in Hiatt's eyes: he was trying to "use his agency to thwart their leading members -- above all the United States." And how, according to Hiatt, was ElBaradei engaging in his dastardly obstruction? By pointing out that the claims from American warmongers regarding Iran's nuclear program were exaggerated or false. Hiatt said that ElBaradei's chief sin was "to excuse the Iranian activity that most justifies the would-be bombers -- uranium enrichment." Hiatt actually went so far as to warn that ElBaradei's insufficiently hysterical statements might mean that we will run out of time to act before Iran gets The Bomb -- exactly the same way that hysterical warmongers like Charles Krauthammer argued that we could not afford to wait for the U.N. inspections process in Iraq to be complete because, by then, Saddam might have The Bomb and it would be too late to act. Hiatt: The IAEA issued a report last week playing down the centrifuge operation, saying that "only" 2,600 were operating or being installed and tested in July. But Mr. Ahmadinejad announced over the weekend that 3,000 were in place -- and even the lower number is a 50 percent increase over the number that inspectors counted earlier this year. By the time the IAEA and Iran are done talking about past questions, Iran will almost certainly have enough working centrifuges to produce a bomb within a year. . . . Moscow and Beijing could join Mr. ElBaradei in arguing that nothing should be done before the end of the year. By then, the options of the Bush administration and other governments that believe Iran's nuclear program must be stopped, and not accommodated, may be greatly attenuated -- thanks to a diplomat who apparently believes he need not represent anyone other than himself. Showing his true allegiances, Hiatt mocked ElBaradei for having "set himself a new task: stopping what he considers to be the 'crazies' in Washington who 'want to say, 'Let us go and bomb Iran.'" Hiatt loyally defended his friends in the the "Bomb Iran" crowd: "we consider its members saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Identically, earlier this year, Hiatt's neoconservative comrade John Bolton went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and repeatedly smeared ElBaradei for suggesting that there was no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. After Blitzer showed Bolton a clip of ElBaradei on CNN downplaying the threat of Iran's nuclear program, Bolton angrily blurted out: "Mohammed ElBaradei is an apologist for Iran. . . . He needs to learn that he works for the members governments of his agency, not the other way around." Naturally, Bolton escalated the "Iran apologist" accusation against ElBaradei on Fox News. When Bolton accuses a U.N. weapons expert bearing the name "Mohamed ElBaradei" and an Egyptian accent of being an "Iran apologist" -- and when the Bush administration tapes his conversations with Iranian officials to prove he's in cahoots with them -- the reprehensible meaning could not be clearer. In Bolton's CNN appearance, after Blitzer pointed out that ElBaradei was re-elected and therefore obviously has the confidence of most member states, Bolton lamented: "I don't think we were effective in our campaign to oppose him, and I don't think we did nearly what we should have done, and I think we are paying the price now and will pay it into the future. Then this exchange: BLITZER: In fairness to Mohamed ElBaredei, before the war in Iraq, when Condoleezza Rice and the President were speaking about mushroom clouds of Saddam Hussein and a revived nuclear weapons program that he may be undertaking, [ElBaradei] was saying that there was absolutely no such evidence, he was poo-poo-ing it, saying that the Bush Administration was overly-alarming and there was no nuclear weapons program that Saddam Hussein had revived. He was right on that one? BOLTON: Even a stopped clocked is right twice a day. Even Blitzer pointed out the obvious: "That was an important issue in trying to justify the war -- the mushroom cloud, the fear that the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud -- that's not just a little issue. He was right on a major, major justification for going to war." Yet Hiatt himself maligned ElBaradei and Hans Blix exactly the same way prior to the war in Iraq as he did this year concerning Iran, as Hiatt wrote in a March 11, 2003 Editorial urging the invasion of Iraq without waiting for completion of the inspection process (via LEXIS): So why do the inspectors sound so upbeat? Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei are international civil servants who are desperate to prove that agencies like theirs can be effective . . . Mr. ElBaradei has responded to similar problems by turning on Iraq's accusers. . . . He has used his two subsequent presentations to dispute evidence offered by Britain and the United States, while coming close to declaring Iraq free of any nuclear program. Last Friday, Mr. ElBaradei made headlines by denouncing one secondary piece of evidence, about an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain fissile material from Niger, as a forgery. But the allegation is not central to the case against Saddam Hussein, and it did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council. Such diversions have lamentably become the substitute for U.N. oversight of real Iraqi disarmament; weeks or even months more of them may help unify the international community, but can yield little else. ElBaradei's warnings about the lack of evidence for Iraqi WMD were, to Hiatt, mere "diversions" to getting on with the war. In attacking ElBaradei for daring to "dispute" U.S. claims about Iraq, Hiatt -- as always -- was channelling Dick Cheney. When Cheney went on Meet the Press a week before the invasion of Iraq, Tim Russert asked him: "even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said [Saddam] does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?" Cheney replied:He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past. Yet now, four years later, we have the very same Serious Warmongers who were proven so spectacularly wrong about Iraq -- the John Boltons and Fred Hiatts and Joe Liebermans and Bill Kristols and Dick Cheneys -- once again smearing Mohamed ElBaradei for pointing out, accurately, that the hysterical, fear-mongering war-fueling claims about The New Enemy are simply false. And exactly the same result has occurred. From this morning's New York Times:In Vienna, the American intelligence finding was embraced by the International Atomic Energy Agency as proof that its conclusions about Iran's nuclear program were correct. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog agency, is seeking to resolve questions about Iran's suspicious activities in the past, but has been criticized for not pressing Iran hard enough on curbing its current nuclear program and for conducting diplomacy that seemed at odds with Security Council strategy. "Despite repeated smear campaigns, the I.A.E.A. has stood its ground and concluded time and again that since 2002 there was no evidence of an undeclared nuclear weapons program in Iran," a senior agency official said. "It also validates the assessment of the director general that what the I.A.E.A. inspectors have seen in Iran represented no imminent danger" . . . . Gregory L. Schulte, the American envoy to the agency, telephoned Dr. ElBaradei, who was traveling in Uruguay, and told him that the American assessment is "close to what you've been saying," the agency official said. Somehow, it was decided in our political establishment that being completely wrong about the worst strategic disaster in our country's history -- the invasion of Iraq -- is not a cause for any diminished credibility at all (and having been right is no cause for enhanced credibility). Even after the invasion of Iraq, our Hiatt-modeled political establishment even proceeded to smear and target those such as Mohamed ElBardei who were clearly proven right, as though being right was a crime. But how about trying to start a second war, this one against Iran, based on exactly the same completely fabricated claims? Might that be considered credibility-impeding? Here's what senior Giuliani foreign policy advisor Norman Pordhoretz said in May when he went to the Wall St. Journal to urge the bombing of Iran: As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department's latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all . . . . In short, the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938. On the January 20, 2006 edition of Fox Special Report with Brit Hume, Fred Barnes said: "the truth is that we're way behind anyway in moving diplomatically. . . . the Iranians are moving so quickly toward a point of no return on getting to nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapon, that I think this diplomatic stuff doesn't mean much." Based on such patently false claims, people like Joe Klein and Rudy Giuliani have actually mused out in the open about a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran. These are truly the lie-fueled rantings of "crazy" people, just as ElBaradei said that they were. In a minimally rational society, the Fred Hiatts and John Boltons and Norm Podhoretzs and Rudy Giulianis and Joe Liebermans would be considered laughingstocks. In light of this track record, what rational person would trust a single thing they say? Yet as always in our political culture, those hungry for American wars -- both old and new -- are, by definition, Serious and Respectable, and those who try to stop such wars (such as ElBaredei) are losers and "apologists" whose judgment and allegiances are equally suspect. Just compare the Very Serious Fred Hiatt's fact-free, war-pursuing attacks on Mohamed ElBaradei in both 2002 and 2007 with the fact that ElBaradei -- both times -- was absolutely right on the most vital matters of the day, and one finds all one needs to know about how sad and broken our political establishment is.
UPDATE: Norman Podhoretz, horrified and petrified that the consensus of our intelligence agencies "just dealt a serious blow" for his desire for a new war, unloads what he aptly calls his "dark suspicions" that this is all just a ruse by our dishonest intelligence community "to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations" (h/t Zack). Did I mention that this is the Senior Foreign Policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani? Does Giuliani harbor similar "dark suspicions" about the allegiances of our intelligence officials? Podhoretz's predictable attack also underscores one of the most dishonest maneuvers one has seen in some time. It was, of course, Podhoretz, Cheney and their friends who incessantly pressured and manipulated the intelligence community to conclude that Saddam had WMD so that they could start the war they desperately wanted for so long. And now, they use the false conclusions which they foisted on the intelligence community to cast doubt on the credibility of intelligence officials with regard to Iran -- as though neoconservative warmongers were the victims of the pre-war intelligence failures rather than the perpetrators. Their dishonesty in the service of new wars knows no bounds.
UPDATE II: From the Beacon of Foreign Policy Seriousness, Kenneth Pollack, in a September, 2005 interview with Spiegel: SPIEGEL ONLINE: How compelling is the evidence that Iranians are developing a nuclear weapons program? KENNETH POLLACK: Obviously, the evidence is circumstantial, but it is quite strong. As ElBaradei was pointing out, the evidence was actually non-existent. Nonetheless, the following year, the Senate Foriegn Relations Committee brought in Pollack to share his great wisdom (.pdf) about "Iran's nuclear program." And even through today, one would have to smash one's television sets to pieces in order to avoid hearing Pollack hailed as a wise and serious foreign policy expert, despite his being wrong about everything that matters over and over and over.
UPDATE III: Fred Hiatt, September 26, 2007, in "The Iran Impasse" (h/t Thomas C):As France's new foreign minister has recognized, the danger is growing that the United States and its allies could face a choice between allowing Iran to acquire the capacity to build a nuclear weapon and going to war to prevent it. The only way to avoid facing that terrible decision is effective diplomacy -- that is, a mix of sanctions and incentives that will induce Mr. Ahmadinejad's superiors to suspend their race for a bomb. . . . . Even if Tehran provides satisfactory answers, its uranium enrichment -- and thus its progress toward a bomb -- will continue. That doesn't trouble Mr. ElBaradei, who hasn't hidden his view that the world should stop trying to prevent Iran from enriching uranium and should concentrate instead on blocking U.S. military action. . . . . European diplomats say they are worried that escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, if fueled by more sanctions, could lead to war. What they don't make clear is how the government Mr. Ahmadinejad represents will be induced to change its policy if it has nothing to fear from the West. Iran's "race for a bomb." Our political establishment is led by reckless war-lovers who will say anything, no matter how little basis there is, in order to beat their chests and threaten and start more wars (all the while accusing their latest desired bombing targets of being "rogue nations" and "threats to peace").  [Salon: Glenn Greenwald]
8:07:59 AM
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© Copyright 2008 Patricia Thurston.
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