Sunday, March 30, 2008

Jerry Brown Hints At Another Run For California Governor. California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown spoke at the state Democratic Party convention Saturday, and boy, did he sound an awful lot like a candidate for Golden State governor -- again. Eerie. Brown, who served two terms as governor from 1975 to 1983 before term limits took effect, reminded his Democratic audience assembled in San Jose of some of his "highlights," like getting rid of former Gov. Ronald Reagan's bulletproof limousine and using a blue Plymouth from the state motor pool. Brown said he kept the Plymouth for eight years and put 240,000 miles on it, adding: "Now that's sustainability." He acknowledged his reputation for coming up with unconventional ideas as governor. "They didn't call me Moonbeam for nothing," said Moonbeam. "I worked hard to get that." Even so, Brown said, he accomplished more than his Republican successors. "I tried hard not to build freeways, but we built three times more than [Pete] Wilson and [George] Deukmejian combined," he said of his Republican successors. "Even without trying, we did more than those idiots." After blasting the Bush administration for its record on education and the environment, the current state attorney general and former Oakland mayor hinted to his partisan audience that he might run for governor again in 2010. "I don't do much these days except sue people," he said. "But maybe one of these days I'll get around to doing more than that, and maybe you'll help me." Keep reading. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 6:31:20 PM    comment []

Hagel: 'Arrogance, Incompetence' Fuel Bush's Run To War. Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who will not seek a new term in the Senate, continues to offer some of the most potent criticism of the Iraq War out there. Asked by Late Edition's Wolf Blitzer to elaborate on a passage from his book, America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel offers up a brand of "straight talk" that's less obtuse and obsequious that the stuff being pimped by another Republican I could name: BLITZER: All right. I just want to read one quote from the book because it's a powerful quote. And get your explanation. "So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called neoconservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience, who keenly felt the burden of leading the nation in the wake of the deadliest terror attack ever on American soil." But the words "arrogance" and "incompetence" jumped out at me. Do you want to elaborate what you meant by writing those words? HAGEL: Sure. I did write those words and I meant it and I still mean it, and I think it was arrogance and incompetence that put this country in such a hole around the world. Arrogance meaning they wouldn't listen to anyone. They didn't listen to our allies. Every major leader in the Middle East that I talked to, and I certainly know the President and others talked to before we invaded Iraq, warned the President, warned the Vice President, warned Secretary Powell not to do this. Even a number of senior Israeli officials warned them not to do it. Members of Congress asked questions, I was among one those, who said wait a minute, slow down, let the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency officials finish their job. Slow this train down. They wouldn't listen to anybody. It was just raw arrogance. Incompetence? I think it was incompetence, they wouldn't look at history, that part of the world. The complications the combustability, they didn't factor in the context of consequences for their actions to get us into a war. I quote Eisenhower in the book, he said this in the 1950s, that America should never put American troops in the Middle East. Don't get bogged down in that kind of a war. Other great leaders have said the same thing. and there was both, in my opinion, arrogance and incompetence that led us into this. [WATCH.] [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 3:54:56 PM    comment []

Coleen Rowley: Skirting the Law Does Not Make Us Safer. FULL DISCLOSURE: I wrote the following op-ed almost two weeks ago when an abundance of wishful thinking and the importance and timeliness of the push for FISA changes, investigation of the administration's out-of-control, error-laced terror watch list and other national security-civil liberty issues deluded me into thinking there was a chance of publication in the main stream media. Although one newspaper did apparently give it serious consideration, the op-ed got turned down in the ensuing two weeks by a succession of three different newspapers. So I give up! The blessing in disguise, however, with what would have been otherwise just a waste of time seeking hard print (and the best thing about on-line publication here on the Huffington Post) is that it comes with the ability to insert a couple of links to Glenn Greenwald's expose yesterday of Michael Mukasey's lies. Despite their tears, it's pretty clear that none of the President's men, including this theatrical AG, have any real interest in connecting the dots to make us safer. Skirting the Law Does Not Make Us Safer The Bush-Cheney Administration continues to press to gut the FISA law while rationalizing away the erosion of other constitutional protections after 9-11. The 9-11 Commission, the congressional oversight committees and other national security experts have told us how and why 19 Al Qaeda terrorists were able to successfully attack the United States on 9/11. For those who have forgotten, the general consensus was that 9/11 happened due to "a failure to connect the dots". No expert believed that 9/11 occurred because there were too few dots. Even officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of ample pre 9-11 intelligence, explaining away things like the NSA's failure to translate Al Qaeda conversations (that had been intercepted but not listened to before the attacks) as "like trying to take a sip of water out of a firehose". The purpose of my (now well-publicized) 12 page memo back in May of 2002 was to better shed light on one of those main clues that had existed before 9-11. Even without a massive electronic monitoring of Americans' e-mails and international telephone calls and without any use of harsh interrogation techniques, FBI investigators had come to possess information about Zacarias Moussaoui which was so probative that it quickly traveled straight up to the highest level of the intelligence community, to the Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. He was briefed via powerpoint entitled: "Fundamentalist Learns to Fly" sometime around August 23, 2001 (or about 2 [radical]Ǭ[omega] weeks before 9/11). But for various reasons, the terrorist suspect was not further investigated until after the attacks. The 9/11 Commission subsequently described Moussaoui, as an "Al Qaeda mistake and missed opportunity," the investigation of whom may have led to the center of the Al Qaeda plot if it had been pursued in a timely and effective manner. That's right, we actually found the proverbial needle in the haystack this time but nothing was done with it. As it turned out, there were other significant pre 9-11 dots that the Bush Administration was not eager to share with the public, and which the Senate Intelligence Committee conveniently swept under the rug. The President did not want people to know, for example, that he had been briefed that Osama Bin Laden was "determined to attack" in early August, that his national security advisor Condi Rice had brushed off Richard Clark's warnings in July and that his Attorney General John Ashcroft had ranked terrorism as the Department of Justice's lowest priority in August 2001, scolding the Acting Director of the FBI that summer that he didn't want to hear any more briefings about terrorism. Bush and Cheney fought tooth and nail to keep this truth from being exposed, including opposing investigation by the 9-11 Commission. There were just far too many dots that had been ignored to explain away. Some things did leak out but it took almost three years for the 9-11 Commission to produce its report. That was plenty of time for the Administration to do what they wanted: blindly launch round-ups of innocents; institute illegal monitoring of domestic communications and massive data collection programs about American citizens; conduct torture; launch the unjustified invasion of Iraq (a country with no connections to Al Qaeda); set up the Guantanamo camp where prisoners are detained without even the basic right to habeas corpus; and roll back legal and oversight protections to pre-Watergate times under Nixon. The oft-repeated mantra took hold that "we have to do something." All legalities aside, the simple truth is that none of these measures actually addressed any of the pre 9-11 lapses. We have even more intelligence now but no more competence in connecting the dots. Now, rather than a "firehose" of intelligence to get a drink from, we have Niagara Falls. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department Inspector General's recent audit found the government's "Terror Watch List", reportedly grown to hold as many as 900,000 of us, to be full of inaccuracies. It's mathematically that much harder for analysts to connect any relevant "dots" in the mess of non-relevant (and mostly illegally collected) data and people. But since the President seems incapable of admitting a mistake (or certainly his own illegal actions), he still falsely seeks to blame the law itself as being the problem. That's what the President's men have done in castigating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), forcing Congress to pass the "Protect America Act" and in seeking immunity for telecommunications companies who followed their illegal orders. Additionally, by dismantling the Intelligence Oversight Board that's been in place since the FISA became law and refusing to appoint qualified persons to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended by the 9-11 Commission, Bush and Cheney hope US citizens will remain none the wiser. By and large, human errors, not the law, and certainly not lack of pertinent intelligence, were the problem to begin with. It's too bad the American people are being so misled because it is certainly not making them any safer. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 3:50:55 PM    comment []

Katrina Victims May Have to Repay Money. John Moreno Gonzales of The Associated Press writes: "Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant. Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars." [t r u t h o u t] 11:54:03 AM    comment []

Zbigniew Brzezinski | The Smart Way Out. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in The Washington Post, "Both Democratic presidential candidates agree that the United States should end its combat mission in Iraq within 12 to 16 months of their possible inauguration. The Republican candidate has spoken of continuing the war, even for a hundred years, until 'victory.' The core issue of this campaign is thus a basic disagreement over the merits of the war and the benefits and costs of continuing it." [t r u t h o u t] 10:10:07 AM    comment []

Newsweek: Afghan Farmers Forced To Sell Their Daughters To Pay Loans. Khalida's father says she's 9--or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can't keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can't keep her much longer. Khalida's father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It's the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he's losing far more than money. "I never imagined I'd have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter," says Shah. The family's heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family's little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah's entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. "It's my fate," the child says. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 10:04:23 AM    comment []

Wiretapping program sparked legal concerns within hours of its adoption.. In a new book entitled “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice,” NYT journalist Eric Lichtblau writes that the warrantless wiretapping set off legal concerns inside the Bush administration almost immediately after being implemented in October 2001. Inside the FBI, “technicians stumbled onto the N.S.A.[base ']Äôs program accidentally within 12 hours of its inception, setting off what officials described as a brief firestorm of anxiety among senior officials. … ‘What[base ']Äôs going on here? Is this legal?’ one F.B.I. official asked after learning of the N.S.A. operation on American soil.” [Think Progress] 9:48:52 AM    comment []

Cities Black Out For Earth Hour. CHICAGO — From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change. The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were. The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun. "What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody." Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change. In Chicago, lights on more than 200 downtown buildings were dimmed Saturday night, including the stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center. The red-and-white marquee outside Wrigley Field also went dark. "There's a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don't understand that this is a problem that we're lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong," Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climate change vice president for WWF, said in Chicago on Saturday. Workers in Phoenix turned out the lights in all downtown city-owned buildings for one hour. Darkened restaurants glowed with candlelight in San Francisco while the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and other landmarks extinguished lights for an hour. New Zealand and Fiji were first out of the starting blocks this year. And in Sydney, Australia _ where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year _ the city's two architectural icons, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, faded to black against a dramatic backdrop of a lightning storm. Lights also went out at the famed Wat Arun Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand; shopping and cultural centers in Manila, Philippines; several castles in Sweden and Denmark; the parliament building in Budapest, Hungary; a string of landmarks in Warsaw, Poland; and both London City Hall and Canterbury Cathedral in England. Greece, an hour ahead of most of Europe, was the first on the continent to mark Earth Hour. On the isle of Aegina, near Athens, much of its population marched by candlelight to the port. Parts of Athens itself, including the floodlit city hall, also turned to black. In Ireland, where environmentalists are part of the coalition government, lights-out orders went out for scores of government buildings, bridges and monuments in more than a dozen cities and towns. But the international banks and brokerages of Dublin's financial district blazed away with light, illuminating floor after empty floor of desks and idling computers. "The banks should have embraced this wholeheartedly and they didn't. But it's a start. Maybe next year," said Cathy Flanagan, an Earth Hour organizer in Dublin. Ireland's more than 7,000 pubs elected not to take part _ in part because of the risk that Saturday night revelers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles. Likewise, much of Europe _ including France, Germany, Spain and European Union institutions _ planned nothing to mark Earth Hour. Internet search engine Google lent its support to Earth Hour by blackening its normally white home page and challenging visitors: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn." ___ Associated Press writers Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin, Ireland; Tanalee Smith in Sydney, Australia; and other AP reporters worldwide contributed to this report. ___ On the Net: Earth Hour: http://www.earthhour.org Google appeal for Earth Hour: http://www.google.ie/intl/en_ie/earthhour [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 9:14:57 AM    comment []