John McCain has said that America is still more Right than Center … he’s going to be proved wrong on that. I don’t think the Conservative party is in melt-down now just because it’s been helped along by the frightening behavior of its lunatic leadership … I think the world is finally outgrowing its mentality.
We can’t afford to think like this — there’s too many of us. Using Moyers definition, this is property rights v. human rights — and there’s a bewildering amount of humans on the planet, a lot less property.
If the lot of those in poverty are left to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” those gated communities the Conservatives favor will have to dig alligator moats to go with the gates, and barbed wire barricades to protect the reptiles. Crime and violence always makes a good showing when there is lack of decent education, opportunity and recourse … and when the government becomes dismissive and heavy-handed.
The military-industrial complex that this nation depends on, the consumerism that feeds a false bottom line, all that must fail eventually. The housing bubble has flattened but not yet burst … people are being laid off right and left in anticipation of the “pop,” and it should be noted that new construction has kept the nation deceptively stable for several years. People are keeping up their standard of living by borrowing — foreclosures are beginning to flood the market — safety nets are folding — and none of this can continue forever. We’ve got to get a grip on rogue Capitalism and greedy Corporatism, impede the war machine and find a Vision that moves us ahead without victimizing everyone.
We’ve stepped into the Aquarian Age … it’s in its infancy — but its altruistic energy signal is clear. We can’t afford Conservative policies anymore. I think what we’re seeing now is a kicking/screaming death rattle — Conservatism as it’s drawn today is a dying concept. The American economic model needs a revamp … and so does its social framework — that’s a ways off, it won’t be easy … but it’s coming.
John Edwards has said some interesting things that points to progress being made on that front. He has said that he can’t get behind gay marriage [although his wife evidently can,] and he’s explained himself well. He “isn’t there yet,” he says, although he feels badly about that. He sites his early church training, Southern Baptist. He knows it isn’t logical, and he admits it. He’s the only politician I’ve heard be that honest. His reluctance to embrace gay marriage as a civil right is the product of Fundamentalist rhetoric and Southern homophobia — and he hasn’t gotten over it yet, even though he’s efforted. His daughter reports from college, however, that in her peer group, gay marriage is a given … and that by the time she and her friends are mature enough to rule the nation, it will no longer be at question.
Conservatism is a fear-based operation … it’s constricting energy, it protects its investment no matter the human cost … and a majority of its true believers are seniors, who are using up the last of their years on this plane. Meanwhile, we’re moving into an energetic signal of expansion and imagination, compassion and equality. There will always be Conservative voices … they will always add to the conversation, but they will not be running the show. Their time has come … and gone — and if you want to thank somebody for making that clear, write Dubby and tell him what a fine job he’s done.
Below, the latest absurdity from the uber-Conservative think-tanks … Dinesh D’Souza, the Right-respected young pundit of Conservatism, has made a splash with his new book, The Enemy At Home [that's you and me, kids ... the liberals that have been responsible for every dangerous thing that's happened to America, including 9/11] and who thinks that we can and must win in Iraq. Ted Rall will explain that second proposition to you, you’ll LOVE his ledeline … and so you’ll know that this kind of junk does not go unthwarted, a Stephen Colbert book review and interview that will make you both laugh and cringe.
Jude
MEMO TO REPUBLICANS: SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!
Iraq Fiasco Exposes Faith-Based Reasoning
Ted Rall, Yahoo
Wed Jan 31
NEW YORK–Attention right-wing neoconservative Republicans: We Americans have done things your way since 1981, when an actor named Reagan convinced us that we weren’t entitled to anything from the government other than a canceled check for our taxes.
We supported dictators against democratic movements.
We started wars against tiny weak countries like Grenada and Panama and Afghanistan just because we could.
Even when we had a Democratic president, he bought into Reagan Republicanism; Clinton cut rich people’s taxes, signed NAFTA and got rid of social welfare programs.
Twenty-six years into the NeoCon nightmare, everybody hates the United States. We’re broke. Here’s how screwed up we are: we can’t even get out of a war that 91 percent of Americans are against. Republicans got us into this mess.
I say: Enough is enough. Three thousand dead soldiers and $2 trillion say it’s time for anyone who ever argued in favor of invading Iraq to shut the eff up. Sell your laptop on eBay, Ms. Coulter. Use your ill-gotten gains to take some Middle Eastern history classes, Mr. Friedman. Step away from the golden EIB microphone, Mr. Limbaugh. Resign, Senators Clinton and McCain, and never show your faces in public again.
Yeah, right.
Since these pundits and politicians were and are so spectacularly wrong about such a straightforward and momentous issue as this idiotic war, no one should take them seriously again. Right-wingers deserve to be marginalized and ignored. The American left–the real, non-accommodationist, non-Hillary, left–ought to define the mainstream from now on. Only the left, from Noam Chomsky on the left left to Howard Dean on the right left, have been consistently correct. Not to worry, we still have two legitimate political parties: Democrats and the Greens.
The post-Iraq bankruptcy of the GOP thinkers came into sharp relief the other night in the form of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest radio editorial, on NPR, of all venues. “Iraq,” he began, “is not Vietnam. And here’s why.”
I listened closely, for Stanford University’s D’Souza is one of America’s most–arguably the most–respected conservative thinkers. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. His speaking fees start at $10,000. D’Souza has done so well as a pundit that he lives in an exclusive gated community near San Diego. According to the San Diego Reader, his “nearly 8000-square-foot house has six bedrooms, seven and a half baths, and a four-car garage, where [he and his wife] keep their maroon 1992 Jaguar XJS.”I thought I already knew why Iraq wasn’t like Vietnam: we might have won in Vietnam. Since D’Souza is raking in a lot more pundit bucks than me, however, I paid close attention.
“First, we had no vital interest in Vietnam,” he said. “The United States got involved in Vietnam starting in the 1950s, due to an elaborate, but misguided theory of dominos. So if Vietnam went communist, the whole of Asia would become communist. Well, it didn’t happen. But my larger point is that when Vietnam did fall to the communists, America’s foreign policy interests and economic interests were largely unaffected.”
Fair enough. The Domino Theory was used to sell the war by political leaders, some of whom actually believed it.D’Souza continued: “Iraq, by contrast is strategically vital.”
How? My butt crept up to the edge of my seat.
“Consider [Iraq's] neighbors: Iran. Turkey. Kuwait. Jordan. Syria. Saudi Arabia. If Iraq falls into the hands of the Islamic radicals, they would control two major countries: Iran and Iraq. Next we would expect them to target Egypt and Saudi Arabia.” Huh?
Call me a loser who couldn’t afford to heat an 8,000-square-foot home, much less buy one, but isn’t that–well–a Domino Theory?
“Second, in Vietnam,” D’Souza continued, “we were allied with the bad guys. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt and tyrannical, and our only reason for supporting it was that it was a better alternative to the communist regime in the North. In politics, it is often a necessity: you ally with the bad guys in order to avoid the worse guys.
But the bad guys remain bad guys. They alienate their people and the popular resentment that they provoke often carries over to us.”
OK. I was with him again. We’ve repeatedly paid a high price for our partnerships with unsavory regimes–most recently on 9/11.
“By contrast, in Iraq,” D’Souza went on—”we are allied with an elected government. Braving bullets, the Iraqi people went to the polls and elected the current regime.”
Ahem. Iraq’s government is so corrupt that it sells weapons we give it to fight insurgents on the black market, often to the insurgents themselves. Oh, and South Vietnam did hold presidential elections in 1967, a year before the Tet Offensive turned the American public against the war. Doesn’t D’Souza know that?
“We have a government that represents the will of the Iraqi majority. That’s a good thing, because it means we have local allies in Iraq who have popular support.”
I’d had it. “Moron! Idiot!” I shouted at the radio. This was a succinct way of expressing what I was thinking, which was: Even if it’s true that the current Iraqi regime has majority ( i.e., Shiite) support–and it’s doubtful–the problem is what it does with that electoral legitimacy.
Prime Minister Maliki employs Iraqi police units that carry out ethnic cleansing operations against Sunni citizens. Shiite death squads employed by the Maliki government dump the bodies of dozens of Sunnis in the streets of Baghdad every day, some murdered by electric drills driven into their heads. Definitely not “a good thing.”
D’Souza’s pleasant voice droned on.
“Finally, in Vietnam, there was no way to win the war and preserve our dignity. The United States and Vietnam faced several hundred thousand resolute communists on the other side. These were guerilla fighters fighting on familiar territory against American boys who didn’t know why the heck they were going over there…Vietnam was a no-win situation. Iraq is not.”
Sigh. The Pentagon itself estimates that at least 90 percent of Iraqi insurgents are locals fighting on their own turf. These guerillas are fighting American soldiers who’ve been fooled into thinking Saddam had something to do with 9/11. What’s the difference?
“America can win in Iraq…All the strength in the world is useless if you don’t have the will to fight. We saw the same loss of will over the Vietnam War. But Vietnam was a lost cause. In Iraq, we are in danger of losing a war we can win.”
And…? That was it. Not one single line supporting his thesis that Iraq isn’t another Vietnam; if anything, I am now more convinced than ever that the two quagmires have a lot in common.
D’Souza wallows in the circular logic that has become the rhetorical currency of the right:
1. The Domino Theory that led us into Vietnam was bogus but we have to stay in Iraq because of a New Domino Theory (but we won’t call it that).
2. Our South Vietnamese ally was unpopular but our Iraqi ally isn’t (if you ignore the millions of Iraqi refugees voting with their feet).
3. We couldn’t win Vietnam but we can win in Iraq because, well, we just can.
If this eye-rolling sophistry were a sloppy homework assignment turned in by a student in 10th grade debate, it would merit an “F” and a chuckle in the teachers’ lounge. But these scattered ravings are the product of one of the brightest minds of our current political establishment, representative of thinking at the highest levels of government, and thus contribute to the deaths of thousands of people.
It’s frightening that conservatives continue to believe in economic and military theories that have been proven wrong again and again. What’s downright terrifying is the way they think. They don’t bother to present proof, evidence or even arguments to support their claims. They believe what they believe because they believe it. That’s it. Q.E.D.
I’ve been against the Iraq War since the beginning, yet I could compose a logical argument for staying the course. Why can’t those who are for it do the same? And why is NPR–or any other media outlet–paying attention to these idiots’ faith-based reasoning?
Treason
Barbara Ehrenreich, HuffPo
Last night, just as I was about to give a talk about my new book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, I got a cell phone call from my nephew in Minneapolis. “Aunt Barb,” he reported breathlessly, “Newsweek is calling you a terrorist.”
I told him to hold that thought, but as I approached the podium I couldn’t help mentally scanning my last six months of to-do lists, where the only remotely terrorizing entry I could find was “trick or treat with granddaughters.”
Fortunately, someone in the audience cleared up the mystery. Newsweek hadn’t called me a terrorist, it had reviewed rightwing author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Enemy at Home, in which I am listed as an accomplice of al Qaeda along with dozens of others including Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Cameron Diaz, Sharon Stone, George Soros, Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and … well, you get the drift. According to D’Souza, we’ve all contributed to making America into what bin Laden - and apparently D’Souza - see as the “worst civilization in the history of mankind,” riven with fornication, homosexuality, drinking, and gambling. In other words, America deserved that hit on 9/11, and it’s all because of us “enemies at home.”
So let me confess: We do meet regularly, usually at Cameron’s place, because it has plenty of room now that Justin’s moved out. This is a fractious bunch, as you can imagine, with Rosie and Michael in the same room, but Nancy uses her “mother of five’ voice to keep us on track, knitting sweaters for the brave lads in the Taliban.
Stephen Colbert interviews Dinesh D’Souza
Video
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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February 5th, 2007
Is the message coming through? Is it clear? Definitively — from the Reality-Based Megaphone that everybody is finally listening to — there are a series of “new trues.” They’re actually the “old trues,” in case anybody notices … but they can’t be argued today [by anyone but our presidential pariah, GWB.] It’s a good start.
1. Iraq is irretrievably broken — according to a new intelligence report, the Sunni and Shiia will NOT live together, will NOT cease killing one another without a strong-arm in place … which makes Saddam and his blended, intermarried and relatively cooperative society look downright progressive. Democracy will not happen there … and the Grand NeoCon Experiment has failed.
2. The Vice President of the United States [and by implication, his superior, as well] was actively involved in rushing to war, spinning the truth and breaking the law to do it. As well, it appears that the VP assumes that he, too, has presidential powers to do as he wishes … and remain immune from censure or rule of law.
3. Global Warming is real, and the human footprint is making it worse by the minute — while the Bush administration has been buying and bullying scientists to keep them quiet. Testimony in Congress has recently revealed the extent of abuse, and some 11,000 scientists, including 52 Nobel laureates, have signed a statement condemning the abuse of science and calling for a restoration of scientific integrity to federal policy making.
There’s another “new true” being developed today, as Dub has submitted his 2.9 TRILLION dollar budget plan including massive “surge” in war funding and similar cuts in Medicaid and Medicare — after the Dems quit laughing, and the Pubs quit crying, our Dubby may hear a word with which he is unfamiliar … not only no, but HELL NO!
Op/ed’s to go with MSM reports, including Mo Dowd and Frank Rich, below.
Jude
Intelligence report describes unraveling of Iraq
Greg Miller, LA Times
February 2, 2007
WASHINGTON — Iraq is unraveling at an accelerating rate, and even if U.S. and Iraqi forces can slow the spreading violence, the country’s fragile government is unlikely to deliver stability to its people during the next year, according to a much-anticipated assessment by America’s intelligence agencies.
The report, titled “Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead,” catalogs an array of forces pulling the country apart and concludes that to call the situation a civil war “does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict” because the causes of violence are so varied.
The assessment says there are scenarios that could lead to political progress and slow recovery, but also identifies “triggering events” that could push Iraq into complete chaos, with neighboring nations choosing sides in what could become a regional conflagration.
“Given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard-pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the (18-month) time frame of this estimate,” the report says in a blunt, bottom-line summary.
The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, does not specifically address the prospects for success of President Bush’s plan to send an extra 21,500 troop to Iraq in the coming months in an attempt to secure Baghdad. But the report provides fodder for proponents and critics of that plan.
It warns that the presence of U.S. troops remains “an essential stabilizing element in Iraq,” and that if there were a rapid withdrawal, Iraqi security forces “would be unlikely to survive as a nonsectarian national institution.”
In such a scenario, neighboring countries — including Iran and Saudi Arabia — “might intervene openly in the conflict; massive civilian casualties and forced population displacement would be probable.”
White House officials argued that this assessment helps make the case for the president’s plan, which is under increasing fire on Capitol Hill.
“This NIE is not at war with this … new strategy the president has developed,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters. The assessment, he said, “explains why the president concluded that a new approach, a new strategy was required,” and the report “generally supports it.”
But the document also notes that “even if violence is diminished” over the next 12 to 18 months, prospects for “sustained political reconciliation” among Iraq’s warring factions are dim.
That means that even under optimistic scenarios, the nation’s top intelligence analysts do not envision meaningful stability within the period during which Bush has said additional U.S. troops would be deployed — raising the prospect that the so-called “surge” might drag on much longer than the administration has indicated.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a contender for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination, called the report “a devastating repudiation of the president’s new tactics in Iraq.”
“It plainly shows the current strategy isn’t working and that there is a dire need for a political settlement to give (breathing) room to the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds,” Biden said in a written statement. “Without it, Iraq will slide into further chaos and violence.”
The report’s release comes as the Senate is engaged in a fight over whether to approve a nonbinding resolution sponsored by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., that criticizes the president’s plan to increase troop levels.
Most Democrats and some Republican senators have lined up behind Warner’s measure, expected to be debated next week.
But Republican Senate leaders emerged from meetings Friday making clear that they would seek to keep the measure from coming to a vote unless they are allowed to bring forward alternative resolutions less critical of the president’s policies. Democrats were working Friday to line up the 60 votes needed in the 100-member Senate to thwart a GOP effort to block the Warner resolution.
The assessment by the intelligence agencies was requested in July by senators alarmed by the deteriorating security situation in Iraq. The violence has worsened since then, and the NIE concluded that without significant political and military progress in the short-term, “the overall security situation will continue to deteriorate at rates comparable to the latter part of 2006.”
The NIE was assembled by the nation’s top intelligence officials, and represents the consensus of all 16 U.S. spy agencies. The Director of National Intelligence took the extraordinary step of releasing the document’s key judgments publicly even as the full, 90-page classified version was being delivered to members of Congress and senior government officials.
In outlining the factors that have pushed Iraq toward chaos, the report cites the “insecurity” of Shiites who were repressed for decades under dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni; the refusal of Sunnis to accept their declining political fortunes in the wake of the toppling of Saddam’s regime in early 2003; and the disappearance of a large swath of the Iraqi “professional and entrepreneurial classes” that has fled to neighboring countries.
The report offers a bleak assessment of the Iraqi Security Forces that are supposed to play the leading role under Bush’s plan in stemming the violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country.
These forces will be “hard pressed” to carry out their responsibilities and operate against Shia militias, the report concludes.
The reasons for this, it says, include sectarian divisions that “erode the dependability of many units.” The report adds that the forces “are hampered by personnel and equipment shortfalls, and a number of Iraqi units have refused to serve outside the areas where they were recruited.”
That assessment seems at odds with recent assertions by U.S. military officials, including Gen. George Casey Jr., who testified before Congress on Thursday that “Iraqis are poised to assume responsibility for their own security by the end of 2007, still with some level of support from us.”
Echoing concerns that Bush has raised, the NIE warns that if the United States were to withdraw, al-Qaida “would attempt to use parts of the country — particularly Anbar province — to plan increased attacks in and outside of Iraq.”
But the document does not indicate that intelligence officials believe Iraq is poised to become an al-Qaida sanctuary — a scenario cited frequently by Bush as a reason for rejecting calls for setting specific timetables for a withdrawal of U.S. forces.
The NIE is measured in its assessment of the roles played by Iran and Syria in fostering the violence in Iraq.
The report says that Iran has fueled the fighting by providing “lethal support” to groups of Iraqi Shia militants, and that Syria continues to provide safe haven for displaced members of Saddam’s Baath party.
Even so, the report finds that meddling by Iran and Syria “is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics.”
Bush and other administration officials have stepped up their criticism of the role Iran is playing in Iraq, with the president giving U.S. forces greater latitude to pursue Iranians who are fomenting violence in the country.
The role played by Iraq’s neighbors was the subject of some dissension among intelligence officials involved in assembling the report.
The classified portions of the NIE is said to include “alternate” judgments that reflect disagreements over whether the Syrian government is directly involved in allowing Islamic militants to cross its border into Iraq and the extent to which Iran is aware of and tolerating al-Qaida activity in its territory. In giving the alternate assessments prominent placement alongside the document’s key judgments, U.S. intelligence officials said they were responding to criticism of previous NIE document ts in which dissenting views were often relegated to footnote status and overlooked by policymakers.
Downplaying dissenting views was one of many major flaws of an NIE produced before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, which concluded erroneously that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.
The new NIE concludes with a discussion of scenarios that could push Iraq into deeper chaos. The “triggering events” could include mass sectarian killings, assassinations of major religious or political figures, and Sunni defection from the government, it says.
“Should these events take place, they could spark an abrupt increase” in violence and shift Iraq’s course “from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political and security consequences,” according to the report.
It says “three prospective security paths might then emerge,” including a “de facto” partition of the country into sectarian groups; the emergence of a “Shia strongman” seizing control of the country, and an atomization of the nation into a “checkered pattern” of local militias and groups. ++
Times staff writers Maura Reynolds and Noam N. Levey contributed to this report.
No Way Out
Maureen Dowd, NYT
2/2/07
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true. And I am deeply sorry about that.” Who said it?
(a) George Bush, about the chilling new intelligence report on Iraq.
(b) Joe Biden, about his self-imploding prolixity.
(c) Condi Rice, on her ability to understand Peyton Manning’s vulnerabilities better than Nuri Kamal al-Malaki’s.
(d) Silvio Berlusconi, on his wife’s Junoesque lightning bolt after his public flirting.
(e) Jacques Chirac, after giving a Gallic shrug at the prospect of Iran getting un or deux nuclear weapons.
(f) Hillary Clinton, on enabling the president to invade Iraq.
(g) Barack Obama, for the ultimate sin of not being black enough or white enough.
(h) Mary Cheney, on her decision to work on her terrifying dad’s homophobic campaign because the thought of John Kerry was “terrifying.”
(i) Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about his affair with his campaign manager’s wife.
The answer is Gavin Newsom.
It’s rare to get a simple apology when a complex obfuscation will do.
Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled “Iraq: We’re Cooked,” Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.
In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell: “The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence.”
As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti: “Civil war is checkers. This is chess.”
Far from Dick Cheney’s claim of “enormous successes” and Gen. William Casey’s claim of “slow progress,” the report shows that any path the U.S. takes in Iraq could lead to a river of blood. It says that in the absence of any strong Sunni and Shiite leaders who can control their groups, prospects are dim for a cohesive government, much less a democracy.
If the violence gets worse, the report concludes, three sulfurous possibilities loom: chaos leading to partition, the emergence of a Shiite strongman or anarchy “mixing extreme ethnosectarian violence with debilitating intragroup clashes.”
So after four years of war, we get to choose between chaos, another Saddam or anarchy. Good work, W. And at such bargain prices; the administration is breaking the record for the military budget, asking for $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan this year and $145 billion more for 2008.
The White House thinks it can somehow spin the Iraq apocalypse so it sounds as if multiple wars are better than one civil war.
At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Bob Gates rebuffed the idea of a civil war, saying: “I think that the words ‘civil war’ oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq. I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq. One is Shia on Shia, principally in the south. The second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad but not solely. Third is the insurgency, and fourth is Al Qaeda.”
That’s a relief, all right — we’re in four wars in Iraq and threatening another with Iran.
Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, agreed that the term civil war is unacceptable: “We need to get across the complexities of the situation we face in Iraq … and simple labels don’t do that.”
When General Casey testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, he sounded as if he was talking about a completely different Iraq than the one limned in the intelligence report. “Today,” he said, “Iraqis are poised to assume responsibility for their own security by the end of 2007, still with some level of support from us.”
Compare that with the bleak tone of the report, which states that “the Iraqi Security Forces — particularly the Iraqi police — will be hard-pressed in the next 12 to 18 months to execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with success.”
It’s official. We’re in a cycle of violence so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.
We can try or we can leave, but either way, it seems, we’re cooked. ++
Vice President’s Shadow Hangs Over Trial
Testimony Points Out Cheney’s Role in Trying to Dampen Joseph Wilson’s Criticism
R. Jeffrey Smith and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post
Sunday, February 4, 2007; A05
Vice President Cheney’s press officer, Cathie Martin, approached his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to ask how she should respond to journalists’ questions about Joseph C. Wilson IV. Libby looked over one of the reporters’ questions and told Martin: “Well, let me go talk to the boss and I’ll be back.”
On Libby’s return, Martin testified in federal court last week, he brought a card with detailed replies dictated by Cheney, including a highly partisan, incomplete summary of Wilson’s investigation into Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction program.
Libby subsequently called a reporter, read him the statement, and said — according to the reporter — he had “heard” that Wilson’s investigation was instigated by his wife, an employee at the CIA, later identified as Valerie Plame. The reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was one of five people with whom Libby discussed Plame’s CIA status during those critical weeks that summer.
After seven days of such courtroom testimony, the unanswered question hanging over Libby’s trial is, did the vice president’s former chief of staff decide to leak that disparaging information on his own?
No evidence has emerged that Cheney told him to do it. But Cheney’s dictated reply is one of many signs to emerge at the trial of the vice president’s unusual attentiveness to the controversy and his desire to blunt it. His efforts included the extraordinary disclosure of classified information, including one-sided synopses of Wilson’s report and a 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq.
Under questioning from FBI agent Deborah S. Bond, Libby acknowledged that he and Cheney “may have talked” aboard the plane from Norfolk that day about whether to make public Plame’s CIA employment, Bond testified Thursday.
Her testimony brought Cheney closer than ever to the heart of the controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s efforts to discredit Wilson, who had accused the White House of twisting intelligence he had gathered as it sought to justify the invasion of Iraq.
White House officials testified that Cheney was irritated because he thought Wilson had alleged the vice president sent him on the fact-finding trip to Niger but rejected the investigation’s conclusions. Time after time at the height of the controversy, they said, Cheney directed the administration’s response to Wilson’s criticism and Libby carried it out.
Cheney personally dictated other talking points for use by the White House press office; helped negotiate the wording of a key statement by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet; instructed Libby to deal directly with selected reporters; told Libby to disclose selected passages from the national intelligence estimate and other classified reports; and held a luncheon for conservative columnists to discuss the controversy.
Throughout this period, Cheney kept a news clipping of Wilson’s criticisms on his desk, annotated with the question, “did his wife send him on a junket?” according to court statements. Libby told a grand jury that he and Cheney discussed it on multiple occasions each day.
Randall Eliason, a former chief of public corruption prosecutions for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, said, “There has been significant evidence of how deeply the vice president was involved. If Cheney is personally, deeply involved in it, it’s Libby’s job to be personally, deeply involved.”
Wilson was a former U.S. ambassador dispatched by the CIA the previous year — at the suggestion of his wife but on a decision by other officials — to determine whether Iraq had recently tried to acquire nuclear materials from Niger. The agency later said that it was responding to inquiries made by Cheney’s office, the State Department and the Defense Department.
On July 6, 2003, 16 months after his return, Wilson publicly accused the administration of ignoring his report, which debunked the Iraq-Niger speculation, and of twisting his information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Wilson’s allegations provoked a political firestorm. Within days, the White House was forced to repudiate a key assertion President Bush had made in his State of the Union address, and Tenet issued an unusual public apology for failing to stop the president from making it. But rather than tamping down the controversy, the administration’s backtracking only “made it flare up,” as then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer testified last week.
In its response, the White House wound up training its fire not only on the substance of Wilson’s allegations but on him personally, trial testimony has shown.
Over the course of that week in July, bracketed by Wilson’s published criticism and Cheney’s flight back from Norfolk, three senior White House officials — Libby, Fleischer and special presidential assistant Karl Rove — inaccurately told or suggested to five reporters that Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Plame, according to the testimony. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage separately told columnist Robert D. Novak that Plame worked at the CIA, and Novak made that news public July 14.
The belittling implication of the disclosure, as Fleischer and others testified last week, was that nepotism, rather than Wilson’s knowledge and experience, lay behind his involvement in the matter.
While Cheney and Libby have asserted that their sole intent in contacting journalists was to defend the credibility of their policy, prosecutors disclosed new evidence on Wednesday that the administration was focusing on Wilson himself. Cheney’s then-communications director, Mary Matalin, advised Libby in a phone call July 10, prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg said.
Matalin, according to notes Libby made of the conversation, called Wilson “a snake” and warned that his “story has legs,” Zeidenberg said. She laid out a plan: “We need to address the Wilson motivation. We need to be able to get the cable out. Declassified. The president should wave his wand.”
While arguing unsuccessfully that the jury should see all of Libby’s notes on the conversation, Zeidenberg said, “All we have heard from the defense all along is that Mr. Libby was only interested in responding on the merits.” He said it was significant that Libby wrote down word for word “an extremely negative and ad hominem attack, if you will, about a critic.”
Plame’s employment at the CIA was classified, making it illegal for any official to knowingly and intentionally disclose it. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s 22-month investigation did not produce charges of that offense.
But Libby was indicted on charges of making false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury for denying that he was aware of Plame’s employment and had disclosed it to journalists.
In courtroom testimony, witnesses have asserted that Cheney and two others told Libby about Plame in June, and that he told two journalists and Fleischer — who in turn said he told two more journalists. It was, in short, a hot topic of gossip by the administration.
According to Martin’s testimony, Cheney directed her early in the week of July 6 to keep track of daily news coverage of the controversy, including “who was continuing to comment.” During a meeting on Capitol Hill, Martin said, Cheney “dictated to me what he wanted me to say” about it to reporters.
In a meeting July 8, Martin said, Cheney also decided that Libby would call NBC News reporters Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory to discuss the matter. Martin said she walked out during Libby’s subsequent calls to the reporters.
After Mitchell suggested in a broadcast that the White House was “pushing blame” for the mess toward the CIA, Martin said, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley looked directly at Martin during a staff meeting and said such efforts were improper. At that moment, Martin said, Libby “looked down,” in effect leaving her to absorb the blame.
Three months later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan publicly cleared Rove of leaking Plame’s name — inaccurately, as it turned out — but provided no such statement about Libby.
According to Cheney’s own notes, introduced at the trial last week, Cheney told McClellan that such a statement “has to happen today. Call out key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl. Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” ++
Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
Frank Rich, NYT
Sunday, February 04, 2007
In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq.
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago.
When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring. It’s entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.) But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn’t find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president’s State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful “uranium from Africa” in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration’s deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of “major combat operations” by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren’t even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was “unacceptable.” It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson’s revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby’s trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby’s lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was — and still is — a stooge for the vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge.
Even the declassified passages released on Friday — the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence — foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”) A Pentagon inspector general’s report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to “effectively complete their missions.” Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that “five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky.”
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell’s notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war’s escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying “advanced weaponry and training to our enemies,” even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our “friends” in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls “a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration’s case.” Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
Still, we can’t push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can’t wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood. ++
[Climate change] Report spurs calls for aggressive action
White House accepts findings but rejects mandatory cuts
Zachary Coile, San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, February 3, 2007
(02-03) 04:00 PST Washington — The dire forecast by an international panel of scientists Friday that the Earth will warm and sea levels will continue to rise for centuries even if the world starts limiting greenhouse gases spurred new calls for urgent action.
In Paris, where the report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released, scientists and top officials called for new talks toward an agreement among all nations to cut emissions. In Washington, lawmakers called the report the “scientific smoking gun” that puts to rest the debate over whether warming is a danger to civilization.
Even the Bush administration embraced the report’s findings, which were based on the work of hundreds of U.S. scientists. But the White House said it still opposes any mandatory cuts in emissions, warning of potential damage to the U.S. economy.
“For us to set up something that would limit carbon emissions in this country alone is not a solution to the problem,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said. “One would be concerned that one would find an export of jobs and industries abroad. You’d have the same effect or worse in terms of the impact of greenhouse gases on the global climate.”
The United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases with about 25 percent of global emissions, is already under intense pressure from allies in Europe and elsewhere to act. The Democrat-led Congress hopes to pass legislation this year to cut emissions, and the report offers new ammunition for the bill’s proponents.
“Global warming is a 100 percent certainty, and this report states that there is a 90 percent certainty that humans are causing most of it,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “This report must serve as a wake-up call to those policymakers who have ignored this issue — we must take action now.”
Among the report’s most alarming findings:
– The accumulation of past and future greenhouse gases will continue to contribute to global warming and the rise of oceans for more than 1,000 years — even if the industrial nations immediately start to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases.
– Man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to the rapid melting of ice sheets, glaciers and snowpack; a global rise in sea levels; fewer cold days and more warm days; increased salinity of oceans; more heavy rains and flooding; more droughts and heat waves; and stronger and more frequent storms.
– By 2100, temperatures will increase by 2 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.2 to 7.1 degrees was the researchers’ best estimate), and sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches, leading to flooding affecting millions of people.
But the scientists and international officials who put together the report said its bleak forecast should not be used as an excuse to claim it’s too late to act.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., challenged President Bush to seize on the report’s conclusions by working with Congress on legislation to reduce emissions.
“He should call together the leaders of the world to obtain their binding commitment to reducing pollution around the globe,” Reid said.
The White House reacted to the report by boasting that it had spent $29 billion on climate change research, adding that hundreds of U.S. scientists contributed to the report’s findings.
“We’re very pleased with it, we’re embracing it, we agree with it,” Bodman said.
But while the administration acknowledged the problem of global warming, it again called for voluntary emissions cuts by industry and investments in clean energy technology.
Critics say the administration’s approach is woefully inadequate, especially given the report’s predictions of severe consequences for the planet.
“It sounds like the Bush administration, having seen the very real shadow of scientific evidence of global warming, has chosen to go back into its hole of denial,” said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who is expected to head a new select House committee on global warming.
Former Vice President Al Gore, whose Oscar-nominated climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” drew public attention to the issue, was in San Jose on Friday for a meeting with business and government leaders. Gore said the new report should end the debate, fueled by a small group of skeptics, over whether humans are causing climate change.
“The degree of certainty, which was already very high, is now as close to certainty as scientists are ever going to say,” Gore said. One scientist said the certainty is 99 percent, Gore said, quipping, “And there is a 1 percent chance the world is flat and gravity won’t operate.”
Gore also pointed out a story in the Guardian newspaper of London that the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington that has received funding from Exxon Mobil, offered to pay for articles by scientists, economists and others skeptical of the new report. The group has said it was only looking for independent reviews of the findings.
A key critic of the new report was Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe, who has called climate change a hoax, said the U.N. report was written and edited by government officials and is “a political document, not a scientific report.”
Environmentalists said the report, based on the work of more than 2,000 scientists, will build momentum in Congress for legislation. Three leading 2008 presidential contenders — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. — are co-sponsors of a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said he’s heard from administration officials that Bush probably won’t veto a climate change bill if it reaches his desk, although he won’t push for it.
“The president can veto it, but it would only buy them a year,” Clapp said. “If President Bush vetoes a bill in 2008, it will pass in 2009, and the next president will sign it into law.” ++
Chronicle staff writers Jane Kay and Carolyn Said contributed to this report.
The Hellish Vision of Life on a Hotter Planet
Mark Lynas
Saturday, February 3, 2007 by the Independent / UK
Buried within the newly released IPCC report is an apocalyptic warning: if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, global warming by the end of the century could total 6.4C. The scientists don’t say so explicitly, but a rise in temperatures of this magnitude would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe. It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.
An eco-alarmist fantasy? Unfortunately not - having spent the past three years combing the scientific literature for clues to how life will change as the planet heats up, I know that life on a 6C-warmer globe would be almost unimaginably hellish. A clue to just how unpleasant things can get is contained within a narrow layer of strata recently exposed at a rock quarry in China, dating from the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago. For reasons that are still not properly understood, temperatures rose by 6C over just a few thousand years, dramatically changing the climate and wiping out up to 95 per cent of species alive at the time. The end-Permian mass extinction was the worst ever: the closest that this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock orbiting the sun. Only one large land animal survived the bottleneck: the pig-like Lystrosaurus, which for millions of years after the disaster had the globe pretty much to itself.
Clues as to how the world looks in a long-term extreme greenhouse state also come from the Cretaceous period, 144 to 65 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole and much of Europe and North America was flooded by the higher seas. Tropical crocodiles swam in the Canadian high Arctic, whilst breadfruit trees grew in Greenland. The oceans were incredibly hot: in the tropical Atlantic they may have reached 42C, whilst at the North Pole itself, the oceans were as warm as the Mediterranean is today. The tropics and sub-tropics were so hot that no forests grew, and desert belts probably extended into the heart of modern-day Europe.
During the Cretaceous, of course, species evolved over millions of years to be able to survive on a much hotter planet. Nowadays very few species could survive such a sudden transition. Cold-adapted species like polar bears would obviously be an early casualty, and coral reefs will also disappear from the tropics. The Met Office’s Hadley Centre has predicted that the Amazonian rainforest could start to burn as early as 2050, gradually transforming towards desert as temperatures soar in the interior of South America. Ash and smoke would blanket much of the southern hemisphere, and nearly half of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity would be wiped out at a stroke.
How people might fare is anyone’s guess. With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean. As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges. The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.
Atmosphere of Pressure
Political Interference in Federal Climate Science
Union of Concerned Scientists
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Federal climate science research is at the forefront of assessing fundamental causes of global warming and the future dangers it could pose to our nation and the world. It is crucial that the best available science on climate change be disseminated to the public, through government websites, reports, and press releases. In recent years, however, this science has been increasingly tailored to reflect political goals rather than scientific fact.
Out of concern that inappropriate political interference and media favoritism are compromising federal climate science, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Government Accountability Project (GAP) undertook independent investigations of federal climate science. UCS mailed a questionnaire to more than 1,600 climate scientists at seven federal agencies to gauge the extent to which politics was playing a role in scientists’ research. Surveys were also sent to scientists at the independent (non-federal) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to serve as a comparison with the experience of federal scientists. About 19 percent of all scientists responded (279 from federal agencies and 29 from NCAR).
At the same time, GAP conducted 40 in-depth interviews with federal climate scientists and other officials and analyzed thousands of pages of government documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and inside sources, regarding agency media policies and congressional communications.
These two complementary investigations arrived at similar conclusions regarding the state of federal climate research: while scientists hold a high regard for the quality of federal climate change research, there is broad interference in communicating scientific results.
UCS Senior Scientist Francesca Grifo testified about the report in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Find her written testimony in the “related links” box on this page.
Congress and agency leaders must act to end political interference in science. Federal agencies should adopt communications policies that promote a free and open exchange of information and include the following points:
Scientific freedoms—Federal scientists have a constitutional right to speak about any subject so long as the scientists make it clear that they do so in their private capacity. Scientists must also have a “right of last review” on agency communications related to their research.
Scientific openness—Scientists should not be subject to restrictions on media contacts beyond a policy of informing public affairs officials in advance of an interview and summarizing the interaction for them afterward.
Communication of scientific findings—Federal agencies should support the free exchange of scientific information in all venues.
Whistleblower protection—Scientists who speak out when they see interference or suppression of science should be protected from retribution. Agencies should affirmatively educate their employees of their rights under these statutes.
Furthermore, Congress should extend whistleblower protection to scientists who report interference and should continue to hold oversight hearings and investigations into allegations of manipulation, suppression, and distortion of science.
Political interference is not unique to climate science. Use the links on this page to explore the climate survey, surveys of scientists at other federal agencies, and scores of examples of the abuse of science on issues ranging from childhood lead poisoning to toxic mercury emissions to endangered species. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
February 5th, 2007