Gary Webb in Eugene, OR - 1999

Last Friday, Gary Webb blew his brains out. Who is Gary Webb? The reason investigative reporting is all but dead in America. Eight years ago Gary Webb, then a reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News, wrote a series of articles detailing the way the Reagan Administration was protecting drug traffikers as part of its support for the Contras, traffikers who were financing ex-Somoza thugs masquerading as 'Freedom Fighters' by selling drugs and guns to black and Hispanic street gangs in California. Almost everything Webb wrote has since been verified and confirmed, but writing it meant the destruction of his career.

He was vilified by the mainstream press, and his boss at the Mercury-News, no Ben Bradlee he, caved in to pressure and threw his own reporter to the sharks. It was an ugly episode in so-called American journalism, one of those eye-opening events in which one man turns over a rock he wasn't supposed to and finds all the poisonous snakes the powerful are trying to hide.

DeDurkheim at Rising Hegemon, who brings this to our attention, writes:

The major news media did not rally to Webb's defense, as they should have. Instead the media themselves played an active role in attacking and destroying Webb's career in the 1990s when he tried to break through the maze of cover-up of this horrible scandal. The bitter disgusting irony is that even when the CIA and the government admitted its institutional guilt in drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan contras, the nation's leading commentators, newspapers, and media continued an insistent attack on Webb. The issuing of denials or blaming low level CIA operatives took the place of serious consideration of Webb and his reporting.

Gary Webb was the reason I learned how far gone the American media was. For a while it looked like his series was going to finally put paid to the phony Reagan 'legacy' and lace the increasingly flaccid spine of US press with some new backbone. Then the reaction set in. Robert Parry, who broke the story for the AP 11 years before Webb's series, writes on Consortiumnews how the counterattack began with the Moonie Washington Times but was quickly taken up by the WaPo and the rest of the mainstream media.

When black leaders began demanding a full investigation of these charges, the Washington media joined the political Establishment in circling the wagons. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack against Webb’s series. The Washington Times turned to some former CIA officials, who participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.

But – in a pattern that would repeat itself on other issues in the following years – the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the conservative news media. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s story.

The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news – “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post reported – and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted – that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on of Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.

But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to crack on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.

It is, as Parry points out, a now familiar story. We've seen them follow exactly the same pattern in the lead-up to the iraq war, in the Saudi connection to 9/11, in the matter of Bush's desertion of his TANG responsibilities, and, indeed, in the way they stonewalled or dismissed or ignored Bush's whole history as a failed businessman constantly being bailed out by Poppy's friends and getting rich in the process. In these and dozens and dozens of similar stories, the mainstream press has been more than complicit in hiding the truth, they've actively tried to destroy the careers of any investigative reporter anywhere who challenged their chosen narrative.

But Parry, I think, is wrong about their motivation. They weren't trying to protect the CIA, they were trying to protect a) Grandpa Reagan's precious reputation, and b) the reputation of the whole conservative movement, which had been hip deep in Iran-Contra. Gary Webb was threatening to expose to the world the willingness of ultra-conservative wackos to turn crack and automatic weapons loose on American streets in order to support the extreme right-wing Somozan exiles' attempt to get 'their' country back from the people who had thrown them out.

Webb paid for that with his job, his marriage, and finally his life. It was a warning to any journalist who might be thinking about exposing the anti-democratic activities of conservatives, and the message was read loud and clear: 'Don't be a hero. Go along to get along. Depart from the accepted fairy tales and we'll destroy you.'

On May 11, 1997, when Mercury-News editor Jerry Ceppos caved in to the pressure and wrote an editorial distancing himself from both his reporter and the series, denying that Webb had any proof for his allegations--which wasn't true--investigative journalism in America died.

Now Gary, too, is gone.

(You can read Gary's own version of events in the transcript of a speech he gave in 1999.)

Republicans have stolen yet another election, this one for mayor of San Diego.

SAN DIEGO — The hotly disputed race for mayor here took a sharp turn Tuesday as a review of disputed ballots showed that Councilwoman Donna Frye would have beaten incumbent Mayor Dick Murphy if all votes had been counted.

Tuesday's review looked at ballots that had not been counted in the official tally. It was conducted at the request of The Times, four other news organizations and two pro-Frye voters.

The results threw the politics of the state's second-largest city into confusion more than a month after the Nov. 2 election. The disputed election comes at a high-stakes time for San Diego. Whoever is mayor will face a deep financial crisis and a federal investigation of city officials. Both stem from the city's failure to properly fund its employee pension plans.

As the candidates and their lawyers and advisors plotted their next moves, Republican and Democratic political consultants and activists said the ballot review had severely weakened Murphy's position.

Just a week ago, Murphy, a Republican, was sworn in after being certified as the winner with a margin of 2,108 votes over Frye, a Democrat who was a write-in candidate.

The ballot review Tuesday uncovered at least 4,854 additional, uncounted votes for Frye. That total will probably grow today as thousands more absentee ballots are surveyed. In all, 455,694 votes were cast.

"Dick Murphy is now the phony mayor," said Scott Barnett, former executive director of the San Diego County Taxpayers Assn. and a Republican. "He already had only about a third of the vote; now there's an incredible cloud over him."

What happened was real simple--no complicated butterfly ballots here. The Republican election commissioner simply used a legal technicality to throw out any ballot for the Democrat that wasn't perfect.

Frye entered the race only a month before the election, so she had to run as a write-in candidate. The ballot contained a line for her name to be written, but next to it was an empy oval. That oval was supposed to be filled in. In thousands of ballots, voters wrote Frye's name but neglected to fill in that stupid little oval. The Republican commissioner threw all of those ballots out despite the fact that writing the name clearly signified voter intent. We're not talking about the meaning of a hanging chad here--the voters wrote her name. Throwing those ballots out seems a pretty clear violation of the voting rights act that was passed after the 2000 election. But that isn't worrying The Dick.

"To me it's clear. I'm the legitimate mayor," he added. "The state Legislature passed the law that says you must fill in the oval …. That's the way it works in America. We are a society that follows the rule of law."

Yeah, well, we're all familiar with that argument. That's the one where if the letter of the law favors Republicans we're supposed to be strict and if it doesn't we're supposed to be 'flexible' and let it go. Bullshit.

Election law experts, however, say the law is far less clear. The question of whether to count the empty-oval ballots pits two principles of election law against each other: honoring the intent of voters versus requiring compliance with rules.

"The question is how much knowledge of the process can you require on the part of voters?" said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Are you going to disenfranchise people who didn't follow the rules?"

We know the answer to that one, too: if they vote Republican, No; if they vote Democratic, Yes. This is just another of the Republicans' sleazy tactics to maintain their obviously tentative hold on power no matter what. Let's face it: a Democratic challenger who entered the race only a month before the election with a write-in campaign beat the pants off a Publican incumbent with every advantage. That has to be scaring the Pubs--San Diego is one of the most conservative cities in California, almost as conservative as ultra-conservative Orange County. That a maverick Dem with no organization behind her mounting a write-in campaign for a mere month could whip their boy like mashed potatoes can't be a good sign.

Frye and her legal advisors haven't decided what to do about this yet but if they don't decide to challenge the outcome in court, they'll be letting everybody in the country down who still has hopes that the Pubs can be stopped from rigging the system, and Frye will be telling us that she's just another spineless Dem who deserves to lose.

From the absurd, moronic pandering of a Dan Balz to the legitimate investigative reporting of Douglas Jehl.

An internal CIA memo from Aug, '03 orders Company agents to stay away from 'Special Forces' (military intelligence) interrogations.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - Concerns about harsh techniques used by Special Operations forces prompted the Central Intelligence Agency last year to bar its officers in Iraq from taking part in military interrogations where prisoners were subjected to duress, intelligence officials said.

A classified directive issued by the agency's headquarters on Aug. 8, 2003, to all its personnel in Iraq advised that "if the military employed any type of techniques beyond questions and answers, we should not participate and should not be present," according to an account provided by a senior intelligence official.

In telling C.I.A. personnel to keep away from interrogations where military personnel were using harsh techniques, the directive was more restrictive than was previously known. Officials first disclosed the agency's order last September, saying that it had barred C.I.A. officers from interviewing the military's prisoners unless military officials were present.

The new disclosure is the latest sign of longstanding unease in intelligence circles about the military's interrogation techniques in Iraq. Complaints by the Defense Intelligence Agency about the rough treatment of prisoners by the same Special Operations units were made public last week in a document disclosed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

MI is the entity that everybody involved in the abuses has been pointing their fingers at since the investigations began, from Gen Janet Karpinski to the poor dogfaces who are taking the rap for them in military court-marshals, yet NO MI personnel have been in the dock or under public scrutiny like the troops they ordered around.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Lindy England--and the others on trial--did NOT invent the torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Those techniques were developed by the Israeli Army for use on Palestinian detainees and passed along to Army MI, probably at the School for the Americas where they've been training their interrogators for almost 40 years. The techniques were designed specifically to humiliate men of Arab descent and have been used by the Israelis for twenty years or so.

Torture is neither a new idea nor an innovative practice for MI interrogators. Since the mid-60's, MI interrogation specialists have been involved in training foreign police and intelligence services in all these techniques. It was Army MI, not CIA, who trained the torturers in Guatemala's Guardia Civil, Pinochet's Chilean Army, Somoza's Death Squads, and even the South African Special Police during apartheid after the Church Committee revelations forced the Company out of the business of torture in the mid-70's. Indeed, it may well have been the memory of that embarassment that caused the memo to be written--nobody in the CIA wants to go through that again when the pendulum shifts back to sanity, as it will eventually. MI only escaped the same scrutiny because the Church Committee inquiry was restricted to investigating the civilian intelligence agencies.

What is new is that MI is no longer just training the police of right-wing authoritarian states to apply torture but applying it themselves, thanks to directives from Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself that OK the use of 'harsh questioning'.

Legal rulings by the Bush administration have granted the C.I.A. greater flexibility in conducting interrogations of suspected terrorists, including the use of harsh methods. The C.I.A. issued its directive on the military's prisoners in Iraq shortly after the agency's station in Baghdad complained in a July 16, 2003, cable about the use of noise, bright light and other techniques by Special Operations forces who were working in joint teams with C.I.A. personnel.

The agency also barred its employees last year from entering a secret interrogation facility in Baghdad used by Special Operations forces. The restrictive C.I.A. guidelines remain in effect, intelligence officials have said.

Army documents first obtained by The Denver Post show that an Iraqi prisoner was found dead in June 2003 at the classified interrogation facility used by Special Operations forces in Baghdad after being restrained in a chair for questioning and subjected to physical and psychological stress. An autopsy determined that the prisoner died of a "hard, fast blow" to the head, the newspaper reported last spring.

Whether that particular death caused by MI officers--or any of the others we now know about--contributed to the CIA memo, nobody is saying, but it would be reasonable to assume a connection: If MI's going to go that far, they must have said to themselves thinking of the debacle of the Church Committee, we don't want to be there when they do. 'Harsh questioning' of Al Qaeda members is one thing; using the same techniques on Iraqi civilians en masse, civilians who may be entirely innocent of either terrorist activity or knowledge of any, is something else.

The Aug. 8, 2003, cable from the C.I.A.'s headquarters noted that all prisoners in Iraq were the responsibility of the military, and that while the C.I.A. might have an interest in questioning them, it should recognize that "we do not own, control or have custody of them," one intelligence official said.

Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, the site of the worst known prisoner abuses in Iraq, is run by American military forces.

The cable said that the C.I.A. should not suggest, condone or concur in any interrogation techniques beyond questions and answers with prisoners in military custody in Iraq, the intelligence official said.

The cable might have-and should have--ordered Company personnel to report abuses they saw, but that's probably too much to ask.

Here's one you may have missed. The Bush White House has a Thinker.

I capitalize it because, believe it or not, that's his job. Peter Wehner is head of the grandly-named Office of Strategic Initiatives. A former assistant speechwriter, Wehner is now in charge of 'analyzing and explaining' the Bush presidency. It's a tough job but somebody, I guess, has to do it. Not surprisingly perhaps, the OSI was Karl Rove's idea, and once you know that, the quality of Wehner's 'thinking' won't surprise you. First the job description.

The office, tucked away on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, conducts research on the presidency -- looking for historical patterns or analogies to guide the administration's strategic thinking. A current folder on Wehner's desk is labeled: "2d Term/Analysis." It is a compendium of how other presidents often went wrong in their second terms, history Bush hopes not to repeat.

But Wehner also takes Rove's words literally, peppering Rove and other White House officials with e-mails and memos analyzing current trends, highlighting issues that may be ripening or framing arguments to advance the president's policies. Recent works include an analysis of the 2004 election and a memo reflecting on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments about freedom, democracy and the Middle East.

Golly. Sounds serious, don't it? All that 'analyzing' important stuff like Tony Blair's fawning speech? But not to worry. There's nothing daunting about Wehner's analysis. Why, you could almost call it, well, common.

Wehner also examined why the 43rd president of the United States has become such a polarizing political figure, after having arrived in Washington with a promise to unite the country and change the tone in Washington. "My view, as I read history, is that almost all consequential figures -- political figures -- are polarizing figures," he said, because they are bold and tackle significant issues.

There you go, all explained. Bush polarizes America because he's a Great Man. Like, you know, other Great Men.

He ticks off other political figures he says were polarizing, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher. After 2000, Bush's opponents expected a milquetoast president, Wehner said, but instead they got someone who liked to swing for the fences.

Let the astounding comparison of Emperor Jr to Martin Luther King linger in your brainpan a little while--but not too long, lest the cognitive dissonance it sets up fry your medula oblangata, or whatever. Then ask yourself if it might be possible that the American people thought they were getting 'a milquetoast president' because Karl did everything in his power give us a false picture of Junior's radical, extremist views and beliefs. Yes? That was NOT, oddly enough, part of Wehner's in-depth 'analysis'. Go figure. But it can't be because he didn't think of it because Wehner is fully trained as a Thinker. He even went to school for it. By mail.

Wehner came to Washington in 1983 as an intern from the University of Washington and never left, lured into the world of ideas and think tanks. He eventually finished his degree by correspondence courses.

Well, I'm convinced. But if any of y'all still have doubts, why, this encomium from his ex-boss, speechwriter Michael Gerson, ought to set them to rest.

"Pete really believes in the power of ideas in American politics," Gerson said. "It's the reason he takes such care to make arguments. There are plenty of people at the White House who write talking points. There are very few who make sustained arguments. He doesn't overstate, and his arguments have a lot of integrity."
(emphasis added, needless to say)

In other words, Wehner is one of the few in the WH capable of stringing more than a few stock phrases. He actually constructs whole sentences. In the Bush WH, that practically makes him a pointy-headed intellectual, and he has high hopes of making his brilliance a regular part of the WH day.

Wehner said he hopes that one legacy of the OSI will be the inculcation of "intellectual seriousness" in the White House.

"I'm not sure you can leave that for another [administration], but this should be an office that engages ideas in a serious way, that approaches criticisms in an intellectually honest way," he said.

By now, you're probably hungering to know what kind of brilliant insights of 'intellectual seriousness' Wehner is going to bring to the table.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Dig:

Wehner was asked whether he finds it ironic or is infuriated that Bush is stereotyped, fairly or not, as a president who is not interested in ideas and is not intellectually curious. "I'm not," he said, "because in the end, the truth wills out."

'The truth wills out'? OK, so grammar ain't his strong suit. That much of a pointy-headed intellectual he ain't, but get the depth, the clarity, the sheer genius of such a penetrating insight. And Wehner is full of stuff like that.

Bush is changing the political and intellectual landscape, Wehner argued, ticking off the president's education policy that has asserted a strong federal role from a conservative perspective, as well as the concept of compassionate conservatism. Personal savings accounts for Social Security represent another break with conventional thinking.

On foreign policy, he cited Bush's controversial doctrine of preemption -- noting that, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy articulated a similar doctrine. Wehner said Bush's determination to spread democracy to the Middle East represents a break with decades of thinking about that region.

"You can't judge those things in real time," Wehner said. "You have to wait and let history make its judgment -- and reality take hold." He argued that Reagan was judged harshly during his presidency but since has been treated more favorably -- and he believes the same will hold for Bush. Wehner said: "I think he's on the right side of history and is on the right side of the important debates of our time, and he's comfortable in that."

Wow! What 'intellectual seriousness'! George W Bush is really John Fitzgerald Kennedy come back from the dead! Who knew?

OK OK, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that a lot of this sounds, well, ordinary, like any Rove-minion spouting automatic praise for the Emperor, what with comparing him to Martin and Jack and St Augustine and Alexander the Great and all. But you're missing the point. Wehner isn't just another of Karl's Legion of PR Hacks; he's a intellectual, a Thinker, and he carefully analyzed the situation in exhaustive detail, looking at all the relevant data, and he still reached the conclusion that The Emperor Is A Genius and A Great Man, and by gawd, that's good enough for me.

This 'article' was written by WaPo staff reporter Dan Balz, and just goes to show why the state of the American Press is what it is. Only a moron could so totally fail to notice how moronic everything Wehner said was. Or a coward. So which did you leave at home in order to write this propaganda, Dan? Your balls or your brain?

(Thanks to Noam Scheiber of &c.)

The parlous state of diplomacy in the Bush Admin is showing up in the discussions flying around about Iran's nuclear capability. Whether or not it's a threat remains an open question, but it's becoming clear that if you take the military option away from BushCo, they don't know what to do.

Pentagon war planners, reviewing available options, say there are no good options for Mr. Bush - or for Israel, which has expressed even greater alarm about a nuclear-armed Iran if negotiations fail.

Almost unanimously, these planners and Pentagon analysts say there are no effective military ways to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden and broadly dispersed across the country, including in crowded cities. Confronted with intelligence evidence, Iran admitted to inspectors last year that it had hidden critical aspects of its civilian program for 18 years, and even today there are questions about whether all of its nuclear-related sites are known.

The Bush administration has talked about the possibility of going to the United Nations to seek sanctions against Iran if a recent accord with the Europeans falls apart, as a similar agreement did last year. But the Iranians themselves are aware of the whispers about military strikes, many of them fueled by Israeli officials who view the threat as much more urgent than the Europeans do.

Even so, such talk may amount to little more than bluffing in a high-stakes diplomatic game that the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, recently described as "kind of a good-cop, bad-cop arrangement," with Washington playing the bad cop.

That the question of Iranian nukes is being handled by Defense rather than State is already a bad sign. It means that Bush, true to the form we've come to expect from him, doesn't have a clue how to handle a touchy situation without a military option to lean on. Bushie's neocon advisors don't believe in diplomacy. Or rather, the only 'diplomacy' they believe in happens when they've got a gun pointed at the head of the opposition and it's their way or the highway. Take the gun, and they're at a total loss.

[T]he military options range from the bad to the unimaginable.

None guarantee success, military planners say. Many risk causing not only casualties but a political crisis in the Middle East. The planners, many of them involved in the war against Iraq, argue vehemently that Iran presents a growing proliferation problem better approached through diplomatic channels than by airstrikes, Special Operations missions or an all-out invasion.

Apparently it's necessary in the BA to first convince the neocons that war is a Bad Idea before you can even talk about diplomatic initiatives. In other words, like everything else in topsy-turvy, Bizarro BushWorld, war is now the first resort and negotiation the last. It's as if the govt was being run by a bunch of the redneck yahoos whose first answer to any international problem is, 'Nuke the bastards.' You know, the kind of guys who sit around drinking beer and bragging about the deer they cut in half with an Uzi the week before the season opened, the guys who couldn't find the Earth on a globe.

The BA has been so focused on Iraq from the beginning of its first term that it has ignored the threat from Iran despite pleading from people like Sandy Berger that they take it seriously. The only plan they had--which Rummy let slip in a press conference in March, 2001, only days after Bush had taken (the right word, in his case, though 'stolen' might be more accurate) office--was the Perle/Libby/Wolfowitz fantasy of sequential invasions: first Iraq, then Iran, then Syria, after which they would mop up Libya and North Korea, ending with the crushing of the Muslim rebellion in the Phillippines. They envisioned all this activity as relatively quick and painless, what with the Soviets being out of the way. How could those junk countries hold out against US firepower wielded this time by a Republican extremist who saw the world exactly as they did: as the newest US acquisition?

Now that it hasn't worked out that way, they're stumped. They didn't have much of a plan to begin with, and no back-up plan at all. They don't believe in negotiation and they don't trust any negotiation they're not controlling. They're sort of p[laying around with the idea of telling the UN to put sanctions in place, but coming from the exact same people who excoriated Clinton for using sanctions instead of flexing military muscle and invading, it's going to sound awful weak and whiny. Not to mention hypocritical. Besides, they don't believe in sanctions, either.

These bimbos have only one arrow in their tiny quiver, and once they've used it, empty bluster and gin-soaked confusion are all they've got left.

PS. I hear they've inspired Jimmy Breslin to start work on a new book called The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight.

Hard on the heels of his last idiotic column, David Brooks would seem to be intent on lowering the pundit bar to the level of questions like 'Who's buried in Grant's tomb?' His latest effort takes on the thorny issue of SocSec reform by concluding that a) it's about the stock market (no shit, Sherlock) and b) that Democrats are hysterical anti-corporate whiners in a conspiracy to defraud the nation of its rightful place at Wall Street's table.

Harry Reid has begun his tenure as Senate minority leader by doing his best imitation of Huey Long: "They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong!"

What you hear these days is not liberalism. It's conspiracyism. It's the belief that the Bushite corporate cabal is going to do to domestic programs what the Bushite neocon cabal did in the realm of foreign affairs. It's the belief in malevolent and shadowy forces that will grab everything for their own greedy ends. This is Michael Moore-ism applied to domestic affairs, and it will leave the Democrats only deeper in the hole.

I don't deny that many business and Wall Street types would like to capture the system for their own benefit.

Big of you, Dave, especially considering that you live in NY, the state where AG Eliot Spitzer has had to work 20 hrs a day just to contain the rampant theft by pigs eager to empty the trough now that the farmer's back is turned.

Republicans today place corporate interests ahead of consumer interests. When regulators, such as those in my office, try to call them on their cronyism, they portray our efforts as bureaucratic meddling in free markets. But we did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping off small investors. We sought to right the wrong, reestablishing the level playing field that is a prerequisite to market competition and ensuring that every investor enjoys the same opportunity to profit that the insiders have.

Similarly, we did not ask the courts to stop predatory mortgage lending because we begrudge lenders an appropriate rate of return. We did so because what was happening to borrowers was illegal and wrong and needed to be stopped so that people could, in fact, have a true ownership stake in society. We didn't investigate mutual-fund companies because of a desire to increase government regulation. We did it to stop a scam that allowed a favored few insiders to benefit at the expense of all other investors.

The Bush administration, in the name of free markets, has allowed business to take advantage of the small investor, victimizing those who want to own a piece of the U.S. economy. The scandals involving Wall Street analysts, banking, and mutual funds all demonstrated the Republicans' failure to protect those Americans who want to play their part in the Ownership Society.

But don't let that sort of thing deter you, Dave. Really, the growing hatred of Wall Street on Main Street is totally out of whack because, as DaBrooks explains simply enough so even he can understand it, 'corruption is the price we pay for economic freedom, and the benefits of that freedom vastly outweigh the costs.'

I shit you not, people. He actually wrote that sentence. Hit the link and see for yourself if you don't believe me. Corruption? Thievery? Eh. NBFD. Get used to it. It's the price of doing business in a free society.

DaBrooks must be a graduate of the Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney School of Ethics. What? They're looting the Baghdad Museum of priceless antiquities while our troops are stationed down the street protecting worthless banker-paper at the Oil Ministry? Tough. Shit happens. That's the price we pay for freedom. Our troops are rooting around in the garbage for armor to put on their vehicles? Too bad. Deal with it. It's the price we pay for freedom. Every time they fuck up or get caught stealing us blind, it's really all good because It's The Price We Pay For Freedom.

Dave Dave Dave. I know you get these directives from the RNC and you're a puppet and you have to say what they tell you to say, but do you have to pick the dumbest and least defensible talking points to support every time? Could you pretend, just once, that your readers are over 12? Or is that beyond you?

If Grover Norquist is a toad--and he is--DaBrooks is the wart on his ass.

Next Time: Can Dave sink any lower?

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about the role and relevancy of the Electoral College, that odd invention, unique to America. Why bother, one wonders? What's it good for? It's a rubber stamp, a formality. Technically there is no president until the EC meets and votes but that hasn't stopped Bush--or any other president-elect--from acting as if it's a done deal.

And why not? The parties control the electors and have since they were formed early in the 19th century. The electors do as they're told, a system that resulted in the first known case of presidential election-theft (by Republicans, naturally) in the infamous Hayes/Tilden campaign of 1876. Why should anyone take the EC seriously?

The Constitution, that's why.

Article II, which established the EC, says nothing about the electors having to follow the popular will, the party's will, or anybody else's but their own. They cast their votes in secret and they can vote for whoever. The decision is entirely theirs, and so is the responsibility. They are America's electoral jury--the law may guide them but in the end they can do whatever they want to do.

Now, one of the arguments advanced to justify the EC came from the conservative Hamiltonian wing who were nervous about popular elections. They thought that allowing the hoi-polloi to vote for their representatives was quite enough of a risk to take with the governance of a new country under a new system that hadn't been tried since the fall of Ancient Greece. Letting them vote for president was, they thought, tantamount to granting liberty to chaos. The EC, populated, they figured, by men of rank, breeding, and power in the community, would act as a check on what they feared most: the rise of a charismatic populist figure--a demogogue--who would lead the masses in a revolt against the men of rank, breeding and power in the community.

Parenthetically, it has always been hard for people who worship money to believe that there are people who don't. They are absolutely convinced that, deep in our hearts, we have the same greedy dreams they have and--given half a chance--would be just as unscrupulous as they have been to achieve them. The Hamiltonians, all of whom were heavily schooled in Roman history, had the lesson of the Gracchi before them, the populist uprising that terrified the Roman plutocrats even more than the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. All the slaves wanted was freedom, but the Gracchi wanted land distribution. The plutocrats then--just as do the ones currently surrounding Emperor Jr--thought that though the slaves might murder them in their beds, the Gracchis would steal their money which was much worse. Servants of Moloch throughout history have maintained, in the teeth of all available evidence, their steadfast conviction that everybody is as greedy and ruthless as they are; that beliefs of honor, spirituality, generosity, tolerance, equality and brotherhood only go as deep as the first available drachma.

But though their belief was based on their hysterical fear of an unlikely eventuality, still, they had a point. Psychology--and the history of the last century--have demonstrated pretty conclusively that, as Goering said, the masses can be easily led to the most outrageous excesses, much more easily than individuals can be led there. To some extent, the idea that a body should exist for the express purpose of putting the brakes on when the masses are being led over a cliff is a good one.

Since there is no other possible excuse for their existence these days, one is entitled to demand that they live up to the one duty they have left: to protect us from ourselves.

I therefore call upon the EC to do its Constitutional duty and reject, in the name of The People, the election of the worst president in US history. The Kool Aid Drinkers and Bush Cultists will hate you but your grandchildren will honor your name for centuries.

What d'ya say? Do it for posterity. Do it because it's the right thing to do and you know it. Do it just because you can. But do it.

You're our last hope.

What's this? The Bush Admin backing off its most cherished (supposedly) Middle East initiative?Junior patently NOT 'staying the course'? The Great Leader of Democracy abandoning his most compelling reason for starting the Second Gulf War? That can't be!

But it is.

Tamara Wittes and Sarah Yerkes of The Brookings Institute's Saban Center for Middle East Policy take a look at his Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and come away underwhelmed.

Nearly two years old, MEPI has already spent over $103 million on behalf of educational, economic, and political reform and women's empowerment in the Middle East.

MEPI was meant as an antidote to America's traditional focus on government-to-government, large-scale aid programs, and a recognition by the U.S. government that effective reform in economies and society had to be accompanied by increased political freedoms. Instead of large projects, MEPI was designed to provide smaller grants to build partnerships with non-governmental Arab groups and local citizens, and to build links across Middle Eastern countries. Inherent in this approach was a judgment that Arab governments had not sufficiently recognized their looming demographic and economic challenges, and had not fully embraced the need for political, economic, and social reform. Instead, the thinking went, they would need to be goaded toward change by a combination of independent American assistance and grassroots activism.

After close to two years of operation, how well is this new democracy-promotion tool meeting its aims? A review of MEPI's spending, programs, and priorities reveals three troubling flaws: a scatter-shot approach to promoting reform; an overemphasis on government-directed assistance that repeats instead of repairs the errors of our past assistance in the region; and, most worrying, a lack of support at higher policy levels for its goals and projects. MEPI's problems in fact reveal the deep ambivalence with which the president's forward strategy of freedom is being implemented. As such, its record raises troubling prospects for democracy promotion as an aim of American policy in the Middle East.

Any of that sound just the tiniest bit familiar? I mean, haven't we heard practically the exact same charge leveled at every initiative this Admin has attempted that didn't involve a deliberate sale of govt resources and prerogatives to a corporation? The only thing these bozos seem to be good at is corruption. Anything else they take on, they don't even seem to know how to start.

MEPI's first main flaw is the evident lack of a coherent strategy, which hampers the program's ability to have a noticeable impact on deeply entrenched social problems and reluctant target governments. In its first nineteen months of operation, MEPI spent its largest share of funds on political reform projects (33 percent or $34,015,000), and the smallest share on women's empowerment projects (16 percent or $16,981,904). Education reform and economic reform received 25 and 24 percent of MEPI's funding (or $25,900,000 and $24,626,280), respectively. In principle, this allocation, with political reform most prominent, reflects the president's stated priorities for Middle Eastern reform. But in practice, the programs funded by MEPI present a scatter-shot approach to reform that does not take account of the political hurdles to economic and social reform and that splits an already-small funding pie into miniscule fragments.

MEPI's first-year programs run the gamut from the mundane to the visionary. Economic reform grants include funds to translate Algeria's documentary submissions to the World Trade Organization ($963,000), link Tunisian and American companies for investment ($100,000), train entrepreneurs ($786,575), and boost intraregional trade ($600,000). Education programs include "English in a Box" teaching resources for Jordanian and Moroccan teachers ($400,000), internet links between Yemeni and American high schools ($1.5 million) and a "child centered education program" for selected states in North Africa and the Gulf ($1.1 million). Women's empowerment programs include projects to teach women to read and advocacy programs to combat honor killings. While these projects individually present worthy opportunities to improve the lives of Arab men, women, and children, the sheer diversity of audiences and issues addressed by these programs means that their impact is likely to be limited in both scope and longevity.

That might qualify as the understatement of the week, if not the year, but the authors are missing the connection between all those programs--they may, indeed, be scattershot but there's a unifying thread betraying a two-pronged approach to a single goal. The two strands of that thread are signaled by the program to 'link Tunisian and American companies for investment' and the 'English in a Box' program.

Strand One: Making the Middle East Safe for Democracy American Corporations

From the minute that Gardener was replaced as Viceroy because he wasn't friendly enough to American business and didn't seem to understand that his job was to make sure US corporations got all the inflated contracts and a free hand to implement them any way--and at any price--they chose without interference or oversight by the likes of him, it has been perfectly clear that the Admin's only real interest in Iraq lies in its potential as a bonanza for American business. But even before that, the signs were there. Troops being sent to guard the Oil Ministry while the Iraq Museum down the street was being looted due to the lack of protection showed pretty clearly where the BA's priorities were. Safeguarding the oil fields makes sense, but the Ministry? That's the depository for contracts and project details. Paper. And paper that would be of no interest or value to anyone not seeking to track and control the production and sale of Iraqi oil.

The aim of MEPI's first arm is just as clearly to promote the insertion of American corporations into the Middle East's economic infrastructure and facilitate the making of contacts if not laws that will give them an important leg up in a region that has been a notoriously hard nut for American companies to crack. Even relatively friendly govts like Egypt's have been reluctant to cede control of their native industries and resources to US firms eager to buy in. The BA is aiming to change all that.

Strand Two: Indoctrinating the Locals to an Understanding of Their New Status as American Puppets Client States Partners

Note that for all the talk of supporting the local economy and encouraging local democracy, MEPI programs like 'English in a Box' aren't aimed at facilitating a native version of what that might mean but at grooming a population more in tune with our demands and better able to communicate not with each other but with the US, especially with the US corporations that will soon be doing business with them--at the point of a gun if necessary.

Again, from the beginning of the BA's propaganda effort in the Middle East, the theme has been centered on their acceptance of us rather than the focus being on our working with them. If it were not, the money would be flowing to local community and political groups who emphasize democratic reforms. Instead, it's going to govts that aren't always friendly to such efforts.

One of MEPI's distinguishing features at its founding was its determination to reject large, government-to-government aid programs in favor of direct assistance to Arab civil society groups. But despite MEPI's intention to encourage the growth and activity of the Arab civic sector, the vast majority, over 70 percent, of MEPI's first $103 million in grants was distributed to programs that either directly benefited Arab government agencies (in activities ranging from translating documents to computerizing schools) or provided training programs and seminars for Arab government officials (including ministry bureaucrats, parliamentarians, and judges). Only eighteen percent of the allocated funds supported either American or Arab non-governmental organizations working in the region, and five percent went to build the Arab private sector and promote U.S.-Arab business ties. 5.7 percent of the funds were spent on exchange programs, with the only other beneficiary, the U.S. government, receiving just under one half of one percent.

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But the governments' reform strategies do not fully accord with America's goals. Most Arab leaders recognize that their stagnant social environments and state-dominated economies cannot meet the expectations of their young and increasingly restless populations. Yet most also seek to reform in ways that improve governmental and economic performance without changing the distribution of political power. While a few forward-leaning regimes have placed limited power in the hands of their peoples through constitutional and electoral reforms, many others are trying to create just enough sense of forward motion and participation without power to alleviate the building public pressure for change at the top. When a government demonstrates a real commitment to improving its responsiveness to citizen needs and its openness to citizen participation, it can be both appropriate and helpful for MEPI to provide government-to-government support. But where this will is absent, weak or feigned, MEPI's funding can have the effect of subsidizing an Arab government's attempts to build a kinder, gentler autocracy.

In principle, MEPI was supposed to avoid this trap by finding nascent liberal politicians within civil society, giving them funding and training, and helping them grow their followings so as to secure velvet revolutions. In fact, very little MEPI funding is actually directed to this goal. Of the projects we reviewed, only 10 representing a mere $5.4 million of MEPI's money, were directed to help local NGOs expand their work in areas such as family law and anti-corruption campaigns. In the key area of political reform, MEPI tends to fund programs carried out by American NGOs that do not cross the red lines of regime-sponsored reform, or that simply do not match the political realities Arabs face. MEPI's political reform program has trained Morocco's newly elected members of parliament, whose legislative authority pales in comparison with that of the reigning monarch, in "the functioning of parliament and roles and responsibilities in the legislative process," to the tune of $600,000. MEPI also conducted a "Gulf Regional Campaign School" to train women political candidates from Gulf countries—but only two Gulf states allow women to run for office at all.

By devoting such a large percentage of its funding to programs benefiting Arab officialdom, MEPI is effectively choosing to support the regimes' chosen strategy of "controlled liberalization."

The suggestion of the authors is that this is misdirected action. It isn't. It's clearly directed and the direction has to do with implanting the notion that the US govt is the Arab govt's 'partner' in their governing--an astonishing reversal of the heretofore intractable notion of national sovreignty. When we gave such money to govts in the past, it was because they were in dire straits economically and often because they were in the midst of a crisis. The Arab govts we're helping to fund are neither, and the injection of the US directly into their governing process is the precursor to their acceptance of us as an important player in their respective countries.

In his new book, Intelligence Matters, former Sen Bob Graham, who spent 10 years in the Sernate Intelligence Committee and is one of the most honest national pols we've got left after elections in which slightly more than half the population voted their hysteria, has some startling things to say about both 9/11 and the wars it led to. In a MoJo interview, Sen Graham talks about some of what's in his book. There was one section that caught my attention because it was a conversation in which we see a very different Tommy Franks from the Bush cheerleader on tv. Here's the passage:

MJ.com: How cooperative were President Bush and his administration with your inquiry?

BG: They started out with a lot of representations of how helpful they would be, in the same way that they did to the citizens’ 9/11 Commission that followed us. But when you actually started to dig close to sensitive information -- the most sensitive being the role of the Saudis -- they began to erect barriers.

MJ.com: When did you first realize that the administration was shifting its focus away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and toward Iraq instead?

BG: In February 2002. The U.S. Central Command, which has military responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia, is based in Tampa, Fla. I’ve had a practice of going there during military operations to get a briefing. On that particular day, the subject was the war in Afghanistan. At the conclusion of a fairly upbeat briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks -- who was the commander of Central Command and subsequently the commander of the war in Iraq -- took me into his office and said, “We’re no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan; we’re engaged in a manhunt.” He went on to say that some of the military personnel and equipment which had been most important in the early successes in Afghanistan were being relocated to get ready for a war in Iraq. He then went on to describe how he thought the war on terrorism should be conducted: staying in Afghanistan until we crushed Al Qaeda there, then moving to other areas, such as Somalia and Kenya, where there were large numbers of Al Qaeda cells. He was also suspicious of the intelligence that was coming out of Iraq, and said that the Europeans knew more about weapons of mass destruction there than we did. That was my first recognition that we were about to abandon the war on terror against the enemy that had just killed 3,000 Americans, in order to shift our attention to a bad, evil person -- but a bad, evil person who had never killed any Americans other than in combat.
(emphasis added)

That isn't what he was saying publicly, of course.

I'm not a big Tommy Franks fan but I never got on him like some in the 'sphere because I was pretty sure he wasn't the one calling the shots. Rummy was working this one from his office. It brought back memories of civilian interference in Nam and the debacle that resulted from McNamara trying to make day-to-day decisions on the running of a war that was 6000 miles away. I'm glad he used civilian control to stop Westmoreland from using nukes, but apart from that, civilian control was a unmitigated disaster.

Kind of makes you wish Rummy had been listening to Franks instead of Laurie Mylroie, don't it?

Duncan Hunter got the Pentagon what they told him they wanted: a toothless intelligence 'reform' that leaves almost all of their perogatives--budget control, operations control, strategic control--intact. As signed, the bill no longer defines either the new intel czar's role or duties, significantly muddying the already turgid swamp of competing agencies' turf wars.

WASHINGTON - While opinions are divided over whether the revamp of the US intelligence community laid out in the compromise bill just approved by Congress will improve the performance of the relevant agencies, there is little doubt that the failure of President George W Bush to push the bill through would have badly damaged his political credibility.

In the end, Bush was forced to pressure recalcitrant members of his own Republican Party - and his own top Pentagon officials - who opposed the reorganization out of fear that the Defense Department might have to give up some of its control over the sprawling US intelligence apparatus to go along with the reform.

But to rally support, Bush also weakened some of the most important innovations in the original bill, notably the authority of the new director of national intelligence (DNI) to control the allocation of the community's estimated US$40 billion budget among its 16 agencies.

"Substantively, the intelligence bill's main importance is that it serves as an illustration that the United States government did something in response to the 9-11 Commission report," said John Prados, an independent expert on the national security bureaucracy, referring to last summer's report by the bipartisan group mandated by Congress to examine why US agencies failed to prevent al-Qaeda's devastating September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

"The form and content of the commission's idea for the DNI post were considerably watered down, and, in the final form, the position's authority remains very much undefined," he noted. "Ultimately, the problem is that the commission's recommendations have not really been acted upon."

Which was, after all, the whole point. Nobody really wanted to change anything. What they wanted was the appearance of change, and in the end that may be a good thing. The intel bill was, so far as I am concerned, fatally flawed as proposed. It granted so much power to the czar it put smack dab in the middle of the WH infrastructure that politicization of all the intel services was a foregone conclusion. Junior would have been able to put Feith and Libby in charge of the whole apparatus, assuring more of the 'conclusions first, facts later' mindset of the Bush Admin that led to Iraq without the dissenting voices that eventually made their way to the surface after the invasion.

That doesn't guarantee dissent, of course, but at least it leaves open the opportunity for it, and that's better than nothing. Now the intel bill, rather than being actively hostile to politically incorrect information, amounts to little more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sad when that's the best result you could hope for.