Telling The Truth

Was it just yesterday? Or the day before? That senile warmonger John McInsane had the big brass balls to tell Barack Obama he was going to instruct Obama about how peaceful Iraq was and how things are going so fucking well in Iraq?

Let's see, here's a few pertinent spittle-fleckings:

[...] McCain added, he [Obama, Ed.] will change his position on the war because of the success the U.S. is having there. “Sen. Obama was driven to his conclusion by ideology, not by the facts on the ground,” McCain said. “Success in Iraq is undeniable.”

The Seattle Times responds with an editorial that basically informs McInsane of what everyone else with a working brain cell already knows: the aged, cranky, nasty old Republican nominee is fuller of shit than a constipated cow. A pertinent snippet:

McCain is having a jolly time pretending he is the only candidate with enough cachet and experience to lead the U.S. on military matters, even offering to squire Obama around Iraq.

McCain's posturing would be silly one-upmanship if the costs of the war in Iraq and at home were not so enormous and never-ending. McCain has the wrong position. He supports continued military involvement in Iraq. Obama, more credibly, vows to end the war and bring troops home.

Kudos to the editorial writer! More than two-thirds of the American electorate is utterly sick and tired of this bogus war. Bombing the helpless populace of a small country that has done nothing to us is nothing less than a war crime. A war crime that has, incidentally, destroyed our economy and is threatening the combined economy of the rest of the world.

Does anybody remember the last time McInsane went to Iraq? March of this year. Protected by about 100 Marines, in full body armour, with helicopter gunships overhead, McInsane was photographed (at taxpayers' expense, of course) strolling about in Baghdad, proclaiming it safe. The old geezer conveniently forgot to mention to anyone during his recent spittle-flecked rant that his army escort would not let him go to the Shorja market where he had his picture taken last year, because it was "too unsafe."

Of course, someone who can't tell Sunni from Shi'a and doesn't even know how many troops we have in Iraq is hardly the authority on the war. If only fate wasn't tempted to give the old man the smackdown every time he opens his mouth and switches feet. Pertinent snippet:

McCain's comments about Mosul being "quiet" have also been criticized. On the day he made them, 30 Iraqis were killed by suicide bombings in the Mosul area.

Meanwhile, the town of Hit, near Baghdad, didn't want to be left out of the rush to smear a little egg on the erstwhile candidate's face. A suicide bomber in that town, no doubt having read or heard McLame's comments, rushed off to glory, taking ten people with him and wounding 12 others.

McLame displayed his usual tin ear on the issue:

McCain, speaking to reporters in Milwaukee, refused to acknowledge a mistake, saying that "I said we have drawn down. And we have drawn down."

Gee, where have we heard that refusal to admit making a mistake before? Oh, yeah, the previous two terms of Gee Dumbya Pumpkinhead.

In an attempt to defend the senile warmonger, his advisers said the flap amounted to nothing more than "nitpicking" about "verb tenses."

"It is the essence of semantics," said a frustrated Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, on a conference call organized by the campaign. "We're having this call about a verb tense."

Wow, they sure have learned their lessons well. They're borrowing from the arsenal of Karl Rove and Bill Clinton. Next they're going to tell us what the definition of "is" is. Good work, kids! No, let's rephrase that: Heckuva Job, Johnny!

In other convincing evidence of the peacefulness of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis turned out to protest the U.S. presence. Intelligence (a quality Mr. McInsane seems dreadfully short on) officials announced today that our progress in Iraq basically sucks wet monkey ass. The scheduled elections are already getting the Sunni mad at each other. Progress! Peace! Missing Limbs! Awakening Councils!

Is there anyone in Iraq that we haven't pissed off yet? Well, maybe McInsane's definition of "progress," "success," "drawdown," and so forth are not exactly the same as Merriam-Webster's or Oxford's OED, or, let's be honest, any fucking body else's.

Tell the truth, Mr. McCain. If you remember how that's defined any more, that is. And don't forget to tell all those American servicemen being blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan why you refuse to sign Jim Webb's GI Bill that would give them better benefits than the pile of steaming crap the Bush misadministration's been trying to feed them for the past X years.

Crossposted over at ThePoliticalCat

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General David Petraeus To Iran: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Notes on a personable administration military mouthpiece

Cross-posted @ My Buffalo River Home, and McClatchy

From McClatchy:

"Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, who briefed the president on Iraq along with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, also spoke out against Iranian intervention.

"Iran's senior-most leaders promised Iraq's that they would stop funding, arming, training and directing of militia extremists and other elements in Iraq that were creating security challenges," Petraeus said. "We are waiting, frankly, to see that carried out."


The Iranians said that they would attempt to prevent the aforementioned behavior. They NEVER admitted to arming ANY Iraqi insurgents with ANY weaponry, EFPs, or anything else!

You know the old saying: "Have the Iranians stopped beating their wives yet?"

David Petraeus is quite simply a personable administration military mouthpiece with a limited logical/rhetorical repertoire.

How DO you disprove something you aren't doing?

Do they have to start arming Iraqi militants (patriots) to stop and say they did, but they aren't anymore?

Anyone with a living brain can see that this is utter B.S.

The U.S. has not produced a single speck of physical evidence to back their claim, and there is NO DOUBT it would be just as fabricated as the "Iranian speedboat tape."

Perhaps using those 1/4 million missing AK47s lost by the Pentagon's favorite air carrier, Victor Bout... Former KGB, now Russian mobster with connections to AQ & the Taliban...

Mr. Petraeus had the temerity to say it was just "..a bookkeeping error"

His time is up. He lies too much, just like his boss, George W. Bush.

Da' Buffalo

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Dick Cheney Confession: The Continuing Story of "The Fall Of The House Of Bush"

Cross posted at Edgeing

During an interview with Craig Unger about his new book "The Fall Of The House Of Bush" Amy Goodman of Democracy Now (transcript here) refers to comments made by Dick Cheney in September 1992 after the first Gulf War, in a speech at the Economic Club of Detroit explaining why the George H. W. Bush administration did not go on to Baghdad after Saddam then.

Cheney's comments in the speech show clearly that they knew irrefutably in 2003 before the invasion, not only that Saddam Hussein was no threat militarily to any country, much less to the United States, but that they also knew exactly what the conditions in Iraq likely to be produced by an invasion would be, and that they did it with eyes wide open, with conscious and full intention of producing the humanitarian crisis and chaos and death that has followed.

And knew that the responsibility for it would be theirs.

Cheney's speech begins at about 3 min 50 sec into this Democracy Now Craig Unger interview video:


Parts two and three of the Democracy Now Craig Unger interview follow here:

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When You Know The Truth, The Facts Don't Seem So Important

Cross posted at DocuDharma and Edgeing

Jason Leopold of Truthout interviews Craig Unger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, on the Rise of the Christian Right and Neoconservatism.

Unger garnered national attention with his previous book, House of Bush, House of Saud. Michael Moore cited it as a key source for Fahrenheit 9/11, and the film popularized the author's reports on Saudi investments in Bush family enterprises.

In his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future, Unger turns his attention to neoconservative officials and theorists. At times he focuses so closely on neocon tactics that he misses other forces driving Bush-Cheney policies. Even so, the book offers a vivid account of the use of disinformation to promote extremism.

Leopold: Craig, thank you for being with truthout today. What are some of the issues in your new book that we don't know about - that the public does not know about?

Unger: Well, I think we've been told again and again that we got into the war in Iraq beacause of intelligence failures - that various things just turned out not to be true - that we made one mistake after another.

I actually think we got into the war for exactly the opposite reason - because of intelligence successes - and by that I mean black propaganda operations - disinformation.

Chris Pepus of Chicago Reader takes the book review further for us with...

Bush and the Neocons
By Chris Pepus, Chicago Reader, Thursday 20 December 2007

When you know the Truth, the facts don't seem so important.
Craig Unger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, garnered national attention with his previous book, House of Bush, House of Saud. Michael Moore cited it as a key source for Fahrenheit 9/11, and the film popularized the author's reports on Saudi investments in Bush family enterprises. In The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future, Unger turns his attention to neoconservative officials and theorists. At times he focuses so closely on neocon tactics that he misses other forces driving Bush-Cheney policies. Even so, the book offers a vivid account of the use of disinformation to promote extremism.

Unger traces the origins of Bush's foreign policy to the 1970s, when prominent bureaucrats and writers gathered around such converts to conservatism as Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. The neocons scored their first big success in 1976, when two of their allies in President Ford's administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, created a group outside the CIA to assess the Soviet threat. That panel, dubbed Team B, was staffed by neocon worthies and led by Richard Pipes of Harvard University. One of the group's advisers was a Wohlstetter protege named Paul Wolfowitz.

Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin's drive for world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering as CIA officers pointed out. Pipes's group held, for instance, that the USSR had probably deployed a top-secret antisubmarine system, even though U.S. intelligence had found no credible evidence of such a program. As Unger writes, "The absence of evidence, [Team B] reasoned, merely proved how secretive the Soviets were!" It was a bold preemptive attack on fact and logic.

Team B's creativity went unrewarded in the short term, as Jimmy Carter won the presidency that year. But Ronald Reagan would use the panel's report to justify his enormous military buildup (and consequent budget deficits) in the 1980s, and in the '90s Team B alumni and followers took aim at the Clinton administration's Middle East policy. In 1996 a group of neocons led by Richard Perle produced a policy statement, "A Clean Break," that prescribed military action to remove anti-Israel governments like Saddam Hussein's. When George W. Bush entered office, flanked by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, it became a blueprint for war.

Unger is at his best in these early chapters, where he convincingly links neocon biases to the Republicans' most disastrous policies. He gleans a thicket of reports and think-tank papers to reveal that the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi weapons programs followed the same pattern as Team B's exaggeration of Soviet power in the 1970s. Likewise, many of the administration's rosy projections for post-Saddam Iraq originated with the authors of "A Clean Break." In 1999 one of them, David Wurmser, stated that Iraq's Shiite majority "can be expected to present a challenge to Iran's influence" instead of aligning with Iran. Wurmser offered no factual support for his claim, but wrote that his thinking had been "guided" by his ideological allies, such as Ahmed Chalabi. By that point, Unger writes, "the neocon echo chamber had begun to rely on itself to reinforce its own myths."

Four and a half years into the Iraq war, the price of upholding those myths is rising. The president and vice president appear smitten by the idea of air strikes against Iran. Unger cites Philip Giraldi, a former CIA specialist in counterterrorism, who argued that in the case of Iran, Bush officials were "using the same dance stepsódemonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux."

Describing three decades of right-wing gambits, Unger paints a stunning portrait of arrogance and duplicity. The Fall of the House of Bush may be the definitive group biography of the neocons. But he makes a few missteps when the story moves beyond that group. For instance, he calls President Bush a "genuine born-again Christian," despite finding evidence that the president's professions of faith are as cynical as anything Team B ever presented. Bush maintains that Billy Graham converted him to evangelical Christianity in 1985, but Graham has disagreed with that and so has Mickey Herskowitz, a ghostwriter of Bush's 1999 autobiography.

Herskowitz told Unger that Bush couldn't recall the details of his 1985 meeting with Graham and replied negatively when Herskowitz asked him whether Graham had said something like, "Have you gotten right with God?" (Herskowitz was "stunned" by the book's account of Bush's conversation with the minister.) "Witnessing" about your relationship with Christ is a key element of evangelicalism. Lying about your conversion experience for electoral gain is just about the last thing a sincere evangelical would do.

Unger also underplays the importance of oil-industry leaders, including his previous subjects, the Saudis. In his 2006 book Armed Madhouse, journalist Greg Palast writes about a 2000 report by the Joint Task Force on Petroleum, cosponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute (named for and headed by Bush I's secretary of state). The panel, which included oil execs as well as foreign-policy specialists, complained that Iraq was a "swing producer" of oil, with a propensity to "manipulate oil markets."

Saddam Hussein had a history of abruptly suspending and restarting oil production. In fact, he interrupted petroleum exports for 12 days the month the task force began its work. His tactics undermined efforts by the oil companies and Saudi-dominated OPEC to control the price of crude. An earlier assessment by the Baker Institute put it this way: "In a market with so little cushion to cover unexpected events, oil prices become extremely sensitive to perceived supply risks. Such a market increases the potential leverage of an otherwise lesser producer such as Iraq." For its part the task force recommended "an immediate policy review toward Iraq," including military options. Palast says Cheney got its report early in 2001, and its economic considerations may have provided the strongest impetus for war.

Likewise, the Saudis have played a large role in developing Bush's aggressive approach toward Iran and Shiite Muslims throughout the Middle East. (Saudi rulers are Sunnis.) Bush and his aides choose to blame Iran for the disaster in Iraq, even though it's the Sunnis who've inflicted the majority of casualties on U.S. troops. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has reported that the administration has joined the Saudis in providing clandestine support to Sunni extremists in Lebanon and Syria. The president hopes these Sunni militias will attack Iran's allies and not America's, even though some of those receiving aid have ideological affinities with Al Qaeda. It's an astonishing policy, completely at odds with the lessons of 9/11 and battlefield realities in Iraq. That contradiction is the best indicator of the House of Saud's continuing grip on Bush-Cheney foreign policy. The administration's close ties with the Saudi royals demonstrate that there are limits to the influence of the neocons, many of whom advocate regime change in Saudi Arabia.

Bush and his aides cite Iran's nuclear capability as justification for air strikes. But Hersh has reported that American intelligence thinks Iran won't have the ability to produce a warhead until sometime between 2010 and 2015. And according to an intelligence estimate released December 3, the country shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. These assessments appear to have done little to deter the administration's drive toward confrontation. "Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," said President Bush in response to the new intelligence estimate. "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program?"

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Can we impeach Cheney now?

So - the administration has known for a year that all sixteen intelligence agencies have determined that Iran halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, but that little bit of inconvenient truth did not deter Cheney from not only advocating for another illegal war, one that would possibly (probably) use nuclear weapons, but he didn't stop there - he also attempted to stifle the report and tried to get the parts they didn't agree with stricken.

Remember how, a couple of months ago, the meme changed? Resident Evil said that the Iranians couldn't be allowed to have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon. In October, aWol gave a dire warning about WW III if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, and the warmongering old prick vowed "serious consequences" if the Iranians didn't (re)abandon their nuclear program. (It's all very cartoonish, in a tragic way. Remember your Looney Tunes? Bugs: "Batten down the hatches!" Buster:"I did! I did batten 'em down!" Bugs: "Well batten 'em down again. We'll teach those hatches!")

[Keep reading...]

Gareth Porter pointed out a month ago that the NIE was being held up. (h/t Kevin Drum)

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Cheney got his knickers in a twist over more than the nuclear part of the NIE. He was also furious that there was no conclusive evidence that the Iranians were meddling in Iraq and arming Shiite militias.

So, congresscritters, especially you, Nancy Pelosi, read the god-damned NIE for yourselves, and then riddle me this:

Is it enough yet? Can we please make with impeaching the warmongering, pathological old prick? We can't risk another year with this psychotic madman at the levers.

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