Good news for a change. Alternative weekly Chicago Reader published a print-only story today about a fascinating Northwestern University history student named Conor O'Neil who is using formidable family financial resources to produce his own first-class speaker series with featured appearances by:
author and New Republic senior editor John Judis (last week),
According to Deanna Isaacs of the Reader, "Every lecture will be recorded on DVD and made available without cost to public libraries in Evanston and Chicago and to anyone else who asks for them.... He wants the organization, which is also screening documentary films (schedule at www.cliosociety.com), to be thought of as an 'open mike' and invites program suggestions. The group is applying for nonprofit status, after which O'Neil says foundation money should start coming in. In any case, he says, he'll keep it going: these thinkers and writers 'are my heroes.'"
Talk about using your powers for good and not evil. Add yourself to my list of heroes, Conor.
Even as he advises the Pentagon on war matters, Richard N. Perle, chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, has been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome Defense Department resistance to its proposed sale to a foreign firm, Mr. Perle and lawyers involved in the case said today.
Mr. Perle, an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, is close to many senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who appointed him to lead the policy board in 2001. Though the board does not pay its members and is technically not a government agency, it wields tremendous influence in policy circles. And its chairman is considered a "special government employee," subject to federal ethics rules, including one that bars anyone from using public office for private gain.
[...]
According to lawyers involved in the review and a legal notice that Global Crossing is preparing to file soon in bankruptcy court, Mr. Perle is to be paid $725,000 by the company, including $600,000 if the government approves the sale of the company to a joint venture of Hutchison Whampoa, controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, and Singapore Technologies Telemedia, a phone company controlled by the government of Singapore.
The influence of people like Perle is destroying America. The twisted illogic, the lying, the conniving, and, most of all, the pocket-lining reveal their complete lack of morality and not in the prurient Republican sense. Surely the only way Perle or anyone in the administration could get a blow job would be to pay for it with the money of foreign industrialists.
Could this administration and its influence brokers be any more unseemly?
UPDATE: Later I found out that Atrios and RuminateThis and bloggy were already all over Perle today.
Chemical facilities may be attractive targets for terrorists intent on causing economic harm and loss of life. Many facilities exist in populated areas where a chemical release could threaten thousands. EPA reports that 123 chemical facilities located throughout the nation have toxic worst-case scenarios where more than a million people in the surrounding area could be at risk of exposure to a cloud of toxic gas if a release occurred. To date, no one has comprehensively assessed the security of chemical facilities.
No federal laws explicitly require that chemical facilities assess vulnerabilities or take security actions to safeguard their facilities from attack.
More than a million times 123 is roughly half the US population.
While Tom Ridge fingerpaints with his terror colors and Rumsfeld serves as Secretary of Offense, no one's minding the security of the country itself except for the same GAO that Dick Cheney has effectively (and partisanly) silenced.
Instead I offer you only these additional words from the Washington Post tracing the pattern that arcs across a number of similar resignations:
Beers declined to comment yesterday, but close associates said he had considered leaving the high-pressure job for some time before submitting his one-paragraph resignation letter on Monday. Although some speculated that his resignation was a protest against the White House's increased concentration on Iraq at the expense of the overall counterterrorism effort, others cited general weariness with fighting internal battles.
News of Beers's departure was followed yesterday by the third resignation of a U.S. diplomat over Iraq policy since last month. Mary A. Wright, the number two official at the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia, had spent 15 years in the foreign service and 26 years in the Army and Army Reserves.
"I strongly believe that going to war now will make the world more dangerous, not safer," Wright said in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. "In our press for military action now, we have created deep chasms in the international community and in important international organizations. Our policies have alienated many of our allies and created ill will in much of the world."
Wright, the highest-ranking diplomat to resign over the current situation, also criticized what she called a "lack of policy on North Korea" and said she disagrees with the administration's "lack of effort" in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She said the United States has "done little" to end the violence. She called on the administration to "exert our considerable financial influence" on the Israelis and Palestinians alike.
"I have served my country for almost 30 years in some of the most isolated and dangerous parts of the world," concluded Wright, who won a State Department heroism award in 1997 in Sierra Leone. "I want to continue to serve America. However, I do not believe in the policies of the administration and cannot defend or implement them."
John Brady Kiesling, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Athens resigned in February, telling Powell in a letter that he no longer believed he was upholding the interests of the American people and the world by supporting President Bush's policies.
"The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests," Kiesling said. "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."
John H. Brown resigned last week from the foreign service after serving for 22 years. He said: "The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century."
I imagine it must be very difficult to act in any counterterrorist capacity when every executive decision contradicts your very purpose. US counterterrorism efforts the first line of true "homeland security" have been eviscerated by Bush and scribbled over by Tom Ridge and his tiny, useless box of domestic alert crayons.
Harkening back to the blissful state of America before 9/11/01, it's hard not to be reminded of ousted FBI counterterrorism expert John O'Neill who sparred with then-ambassador to Yemen and soon-to-be administratrix of postwar Iraq, Barbara K. Bodine. He, too, couldn't get Bodine or anyone above him in the FBI to listen to his Chicken Little arguments about the sky falling but the sky did fall on September 11, and it took him with it.
Because We the People can't hear a thing except for the bloodthirsty din of CNN and Fox News and the meaningless blathering of a docile White House press corps, the current crop of counterterrorism professionals is yelling a warning to all of us as loudly as they can with their feet.
Our proximity to the fighting is unarguable. The collision of network-era news gathering tools, weblogs and interconnected internet communities will produce a kind of ecstasy of information and communication. The war will be fought as if it were on the other side of the thinnest sheet of glass. It will be as if we are there.
But will our high definition connections with the front line and the increasingly powerful illusion of understanding provided by the weblogs and news sites genuinely close the gap of understanding? As we get closer to events, have we gained any moral proximity? Are we any closer to genuine connection with those affected by war, with the effects of our judgments and those of our leaders? The answer, inevitably, is no.
All the technological superiority in the world does not make Americans or the British morally superior. To borrow Clarence Thomas's phrase, the Iraqi people will be subjected to a "high-tech lynching."
UPDATE: In this bowblog post, commenter Mike Butcher points us to the personal word-, photo- and audioblog of CNN correspondent Kevin Sites who is now in northern Iraq.
The House on Wednesday considered legislation that would make it more difficult for consumers to erase their debts in bankruptcy court. Democrats assailed the measure as unfairly to people who have been knocked off their financial feet by tough economic times.
[...]
Democrats evoked the specter of last year's corporate scandals in floor debate Wednesday, contrasting executives of bankrupt companies like Enron who received millions of dollars in bonuses with the plight of ordinary employees and retirees who were wiped out and may have had to file for bankruptcy.
Under the new requirements of the bill, ``People ... will be in economic slavery for five years,'' said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
Democrats objected to Republicans having excluded from the vote several Democratic amendments, including one that would have made unemployed people who have exhausted benefits, terrorism victims and military personnel exempt from the bill's new requirements for bankruptcy filings.
The people at Webster's are feverishly rewriting the definition of "compassion," based on the degradation of American standards of usage.
"Give me one reason why Washington, D.C., and New York have to be protected and no other city should be protected," Daley said, noting they have stringent no-fly zones. "Don't you think we should have the same protection as the people of Washington, D.C.?"
Downtown Chicago is unusual in that it has a small working airport right at the edge of its illustrious skyline. About a mile away from Sears Tower is Meigs Field.
The FAA has not seen fit to create a no-fly zone in skyscraper-laden Chicago or to close Meigs Field, despite its proximity to the United States' tallest object of terrorist focus.
Why not? Because "homeland security" consists of protecting not American people but the really important stuff inanimate objects of presidential significance like Mount Rushmore.
In George W Bush's America, human beings are expendable. Presidential images are not.
This year, George Bush "forgot" to produce an aid budget for Afghanistan, until he was forced to provide another $300m by Congress.
The Afghan government, which has an annual budget of just $460m - or around half of what the US still spends every month on chasing the remnants of al-Qaida through the mountains - is effectively bankrupt. At the beginning of this month the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, flew to Washington to beg George Bush for more money. He was given $50m, $35m of which the US insists is spent on the construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul. Karzai, in other words, has discovered what the people of Iraq will soon find out: generosity dries up when you are yesterday's news.
Unfortunately for the majority of Americans who did not elect George W Bush, the consequences of this short-sightedness will be with us for generations.
Tomorrow's terrorists are cultured in the Petri dish of yesterday's news. That's how the current batch was made, and that's how the next, bigger batch will be made too.
US foreign policy exhibits no sense of cultural strategy short of cheap sloganeering and leaflet airdrops. This administration shows zero understanding of national uniqueness, a blindness toward complex human needs, and, most importantly, a faith-based lack of comprehension of the concepts of cause and effect.
What is alarming is that Bush seems to have no reservations about the notion that God and the good are squarely on the American side. As Joe Klein put it in Time, the President's "faith offers no speed bumps on the road to Baghdad; it does not give him pause or force him to reflect. It is a source of comfort and strength but not of wisdom."
Bush's actions, if not his words, seem also to be in line with end-times scenarios imagined by some conservative Christians and fictionalized in the "Left Behind" series that has sold over 50 million volumes since 1995. Up to 40 percent of Americans believe that we are living in the last days, says historian Paul S. Boyer, and that history is racing toward an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil. Millions of Americans believe that the Bible foretells regime change in Iraq, that God established Israel's boundaries millennia ago, and that the United Nations is a forerunner of a satanic world order (The Chronicle Review, February 14). Bush is giving tacit support to such a perspective with his hands-off policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his antipathy toward international cooperation and agreements, and his near apocalyptic discourse of good contending with evil.
Does the President believe we are living in the last days of history and does he see his own actions as leading toward a divinely ordained, cataclysmic conflict with the forces of evil? If it is not a literal reading of biblical prophecy that is informing his policies, then what does he mean by his talk of providence?
The American people have a right to know how the President's faith is informing his public policies, not least his design on Iraq.
The Christian Century describes itself as "a magazine that believes the Christian faith calls people to a profound engagement with the world--an engagement of head and heart. We think Christians must articulate their faith in a way that is socially meaningful and intellectually compelling."
The alarm these reasonably sympathetic Christians are feeling with respect to the potential outcome of Bush's rhetoric must be recognized for the threat it represents.
We secular American citizens must figure out more concrete ways to forestall an artificial, Republican-bred but American taxpayer-funded Apocalypse.
First comes a statement (Wall Street Journal, sub. req'd) that sounds reasonable, even honorable, upon first hearing during a White House news saturation cycle earlier this year:
In January Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. would not exploit Iraqi oil reserves for its own purposes, and that oil would be held "in trust" for the Iraqi people. The U.S. government has held talks this year with Iraqi opposition groups about administration of oil fields after Saddam Hussein leaves power.
Later, in whispered tones that you must listen closely for, comes the following (same article):
Speaking Friday at the European Institute conference, James Placke, Middle East specialist at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in the aftermath of a potential war, existing Iraqi oil field agreements with foreign companies will likely have to be recast.
"I think it's likely that the playing field will be leveled, which probably means that the existing memoranda of understanding will be renegotiated to fit into a very different framework from the one in which they were originally agreed upon," Placke said.
In the initial two-to-three-year phase of recovery and rebuilding, oil services companies like Halliburton Co. (HAL) and Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB) would be the main foreign contractors, rather than large integrated oil firms like Shell, he said. Assuming political stability and internal security, Iraq could use that transition phase to set a framework for longer-term relationships with foreign oil firms, he said.
Iraq's oil reserves are estimated at more than 112 billion barrels, the second-largest after those of Saudia Arabia. Recent production capacity under the U.N. oil-for-food program has been 2.5 million barrels a day, but industry analysts project production could be more than twice that level with sufficient time and investment.
In December the Council of Foreign Relations and the Baker Institute projected Iraq's oil export infrastructure would need investment of $5 billion, and its fields would need another $5 billion plus $3 billion per year in operating costs to raise production to pre-1990 levels of 3.5 million barrels a day.
"Likely have to be recast," "renegotiated," "assuming political stability," "could be," and "would need" conditionalize every promise ever made to anyone, anywhere. Except, of course, for clandestine promises made to Halliburton, Dick Cheney's company and current compensator extraordinaire.
But in the article you will find another name, Baker, that brings back unhappy memories of December 2000, when the name of the president of the United States was still unknown. Besides running post-election campaigns for children of his cronies, James Baker James A. Baker III to his friends has an institute of his own. This institute issues papers, like "Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq", which pays lip service to other concerns but is more about oil than anything else. The document is explicitly about the setting of priorities. For example, the 270 trillion cubic feet of Iraqi natural gas receive a chapter of their own in the addendum, entitled "Good potential, but not a priority."
With the international focus of its recommendations, this report appears to have been the foundation of Colin Powell's remarks in January. The uni-national involvement of Halliburton was evidently appended after the initial publicity, which suggests that the entire paper might have been a Powell-appeasing tactic from the get-go. "Let's get Colin to present this 'oil in trust for the Iraqi people' concept we can always change it later," is the thinking.
To better understand how these men want this campaign to unfold, we must go back in time. Like any good right-wing think tank, the Baker Institute comes up with radical ideas, pronouncements, and wish lists, such as those found in this set of policy recommendations from April 2, 1997:
...Iran's influence on the question of exports from Central Asia should also be revisited.
The United States, with its global responsibilities, must maintain a firm and consistent policy on Iran. However, the United States must recognize that it has not been successful in bringing our allies to the same level of sanctions on Iran.
Iraq is mentioned, but the focus on Iran in unmistakable. In other words, there will be an aftermath to the Iraq campaign, and it will consist of Iran.
"I think it's likely that the playing field will be leveled," Placke said in the first article cited above. Not "level." Leveled.
The playing field will indeed be leveled, one way or another, by unscrupulous US corporate concerns. The coming war is a campaign of military clear-cutting for American industrial interests to get closer to the assets they crave.
For the Cheneyesque gang, the playing fields from which obstacles must be removed are actually three: First, Iraq. Second, Iran. Third, the Central Asian republics.
As the Iraq drama unfolds, Mr. Cheney has become the war counselor with the lowest profile but the highest credibility with Mr. Bush. Repeatedly, he has defined the bottom line for U.S. policy: Mr. Hussein's prompt removal from power, with or without a broad international coalition.
Messrs. Bush and Cheney have shared that goal since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks made vivid the threat posed by anti-American terrorists who might obtain weapons of mass destruction. Before then, the administration had been content to contain Mr. Hussein. A debate over whether to join with Iraqi exiles in a renewed push for regime change languished inside the State Department. Mr. Bush never really addressed the question directly, for it never was pushed up to him.
Even after Sept. 11, the White House initially postponed its move toward regime change to keep focused on its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. "We've got Saddam Hussein bottled up for now," Mr. Cheney said at the time.
But with little public notice, Mr. Cheney began working on the Iraq issue with a new dedication. He quietly sought out experts on the politics and culture of the country. He reached out to Iraqi exiles such as Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile whose family led the country decades ago and who seeks to lead a post-Hussein Iraq. And he began hosting a series of small dinner parties -- some at his elegant official residence in Washington and others at the "undisclosed locations" where he'd been secluded for security reasons -- to share ideas with anti-Hussein intellectuals such as Princeton University scholar Bernard Lewis, Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami and conservative author Victor David Hanson.
The hard line struck at these gatherings provided intellectual support for Mr. Bush's own instincts. As the defense secretary in the first Bush administration, which closed the first Persian Gulf War without removing Mr. Hussein from power, Mr. Cheney had been called on for years to account for that decision. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld adopted a wicked grin once when he prodded the vice president to admit to a crowded room of Pentagon employees that "not going to Baghdad" was one decision he regretted from his stint as Pentagon chief. "Yeah, I guess you're right," the vice president responded.
[...]
State Department and CIA officials mistrust the wealthy, American-educated Mr. Chalabi, who was convicted in a Jordanian banking scandal more than a decade ago. But Mr. Cheney and his senior staff have remained stubborn advocates of Mr. Chalabi, a man they first got to know in the mid-1990s at the barbecues and golf games held at private seminars hosted by groups such as the Aspen Institute.
[...]
The last act of the diplomatic endgame has remained a subject for debate into its final hours. Administration officials say Mr. Powell doesn't want to force a Security Council vote that faces certain defeat, fearing long-term damage to the U.N. and American alliances. Mr. Cheney and his allies would be happy to force Security Council members to "show their cards," as Mr. Bush put it in a recent news conference.
He is also content to endure the barbs of world opinion to achieve the goal he shares with the president. Noting his own Western heritage, Mr. Cheney said on NBC Sunday that "the notion that the president is a cowboy ... is not necessarily a bad idea. He cuts to the chase ... . The leaders who will set the world, if you will, on a new course, deal effectively with these kinds of threats we've never faced before, will be somebody exactly like President Bush."
"Showing their cards"? "Cowboys"?
Enough with the manly metaphors. These are not rough-and-tumble cowpunchers. They are among the most insular and coddled men this country has ever produced, and Cheney's particular brand of partisan "cartel-capitalist" arrogance and incompetence, driven by insatiable industrial appetites, ranks among the most disgusting displays of official behavior in American history.
At least they're getting the linkage between oil and war right as opposed to W's administration which fraudulently insists that this all has something to do with 9/11/01.
But ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Shell and BP are not as stupid as American adults and are already jockeying for position (Newsweek) to get their share of the spoils of war.
The march of astroturf. Since ten days ago when we first located a fake Medicare letter that Republicans had written for shills to sign and send to their local papers, those letters have so far appeared verbatim in four newspapers:
Juneau Empire, courtesy of GOP shill Jeff Pomeroy of Eagle River.
A: When you read the Letters to the Editor in your home newspaper, the assumption is that you are reading the unvarnished opinions of your fellow citizens, not the scribbling-for-hire of professional political hacks at GOP headquarters. All questions of the mean-spiritedness of the policies themselves aside for the moment, the astroturf deception is especially insidious because it's so petty. You think you're reading your neighbors' views when in fact you're reading a political advertisement. Upon discovering that you have unwittingly read a piece of astroturf, you feel cheap, dirty and violated afterward. Or you should, anyway.
Q: Why do Republicans have to stoop so low?
A: Because their domestic agenda never resonates with anything resembling popular appeal, so they are forced to create phony consensus with tacky bribes, like the shabby bumper stickers, mouse pads, T-shirts and tote bags that astroturfers Jeff Pomeroy, Dirk Maurins, Paul Burnett and Raymond C. Joyner will receive for being good apparatchiks via GOP Team Leader, the official GOP propaganda and bribery website.
If you're just tuning in, "astroturf" refers to bogus Letters to the Editor because they represent "fake grass roots" politics.
