All hail the King
You’ll forgive me — every nerve in my Berkeley-born populist [sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing] body is offended by the following … and I’m rendered temporarily speechless. I expect to rant loudly later this evening, when I get over it … IF I do. I keep trying to swallow down something … that’s got me by the throat.
Jude
Bush has Doubled Admin’s Secret Service Protection;
Readies 103 Full-Time Agents for his Retirement. Soldiers still Lack Armor.
BuzzFlash
Tue, 05/29/2007
The 2008 campaign will require more Secret Service resources than expected, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The article also brings up some interesting highlights on Secret Service coverage for the Bush administration:
[T]he Bush administration has doubled the number of officials granted Secret Service protection, from 26 to 54, including top White House aides such as the chief of staff and national and homeland security advisers.
Guess the paranoia is justified considering their abysmal approval ratings. We always thought it was just a coincidence that Cheney never leaves his undisclosed location during full moons.
And while the 2008 campaign gets going, the service is also gearing up for January 2009, when President Bush is set to leave office … The service has begun training agents to fill 103 full-time slots as to be part of the current president’s retirement detail.
103 personal, full-time Secret Service agents after he’s retired? Bush must not be planning on making any more friends over the next year and a half.
And to think that these are the same folks who didn’t want Speaker Pelosi – second in line to the presidency – to have a military plane for official travel (much less a fighter jet to land on an aircraft carrier for a photo op).
If you think it’s crazy for the taxpayers to spend millions protecting a man who single-handedly pissed off the world, the American people, and even most of his own party, there is still hope: impeachment and conviction will prevent Bush from receiving the standard protection, office staff, and cushy pension afforded to retired presidents.
In fact, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter proposed doing just that to Bill Clinton… even after he had already left office! Booting our lame duck president now would not only spare the nation months of more torment but would also save us big bucks in his upkeep.
A 1997 law made Clinton the last former president to get lifetime Secret Service coverage, meaning Bush will only get a decade of official protection. After that, well, we guess it’s up to Blackwater.
Campaign Puts New Strain on Secret Service
Big Field and Early Start Force Cuts in Other Efforts
Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The U.S. Secret Service expects to borrow more than 2,000 immigration officers and federal airport screeners next year to help guard an ever-expanding field of presidential candidates, while shifting 250 of its own agents from investigations to security details.
Burdened by the White House’s wartime security needs, the persistent threat of terrorism and a field of at least 20 presidential contenders, the Secret Service was showing signs of strain even before the Department of Homeland Security ordered protection for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as of May 3, the earliest a candidate has ever been assigned protection in an election season.
Its $110 million-plus budget for campaign protection — two-thirds more than the record $65 million it spent for the 2004 election — was prepared when the service did not expect to be guarding Obama or anyone else until January. The agency has already been forced to scale back its efforts to battle counterfeiting and cybercrime.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has doubled the number of officials granted Secret Service protection, from 26 to 54, including top White House aides such as the chief of staff and national and homeland security advisers.
As recently as the beginning of Bill Clinton’s administration in 1993, no White House aides had such security details, although coverage had been extended before and was given later to national security advisers Brent Scowcroft, Anthony Lake and Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, said former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke.
And while the 2008 campaign gets going, the service is also gearing up for January 2009, when President Bush is set to leave office; officials are mindful of the 1993 assassination effort by Iraq against his father, former president George H.W. Bush. The service has begun training agents to fill 103 full-time slots as to be part of the current president’s retirement detail.
“You’ve just ticked off what you might say are unprecedented challenges,” said David G. Carpenter, formerly the head of Clinton’s Secret Service detail and assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security and now vice president of global security for PepsiCo.
The stresses come as the agency’s duties have grown faster than its funding.
Founded as part of the Treasury Department in 1865 to combat counterfeiting and tapped in 1901 as guardian of presidents, the service is best known for protecting individuals. By law, the agency guards presidents, vice presidents, candidates, their families and visiting heads of state. The president can also extend protection by executive memorandum.
But the service has taken on added homeland security jobs in recent years, such as screening White House mail and coordinating security at national events such as presidential conventions and Super Bowls. And while its budget has grown 50 percent since 2001, the number of agents, uniformed officers and support staff has increased by about 20 percent, to 6,500.
“The protection work of the Secret Service has grown in magnitude and complexity since 9/11. . . . The number of protectees under your responsibility has doubled since 2002. At the same time, the global war on terror is driving up the intensity of your protective operations,” Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) told Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan at a March hearing on his $1.4 billion 2008 budget proposal. “Your already stretched personnel and resources are going to be stretched even further.”
Saddled with new duties, the agency is cutting back its traditional work on financial fraud and cybercrime.
Counterfeit money in circulation grew 20 percent between 2003 and 2006, from $58 to $81 per million dollars, said Rep. David E. Price ( D-N.C.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security. Losses prevented by Secret Service investigations dropped 40 percent in 2006, from $556 million to $316 million.
While its goal is to spend 65 percent of its resources on investigations — 50 percent in presidential election years — the service is cutting investigators’ budgets and is on track to flip its usual ratio, spending nearly two-thirds on protective duties.
“Is it a systemic problem within the organization that there has been a drop-off regardless of the campaign? I would say it is,” Sullivan told Price’s panel. “We flat out need more people.”
The Secret Service, mindful of offending the White House or Congress, said in a statement that it “declines to participate with this story.”
The statement said plans are in place and the service’s personnel are prepared, adding, “We are currently working with the Department of Homeland Security in order to address campaign funding issues.”
But members of Congress in both parties are throwing jabs.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called on Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to “provide the necessary resources,” saying, “The stability of our nation and institutions of our democracy must be protected.”
“The Secret Service is being stretched thinner with these added requirements,” Rogers said. “It can’t be done on the cheap.”
The exceptionally early start of the 2008 race and its unusually large field have increased the pressure, forcing the Secret Service to scramble to keep up with the longest and costliest U.S. presidential campaign ever.
Candidate protection is expensive. Flight, lodging and per diem expenses are sizable, exceeding the $100 million that the Secret Service normally spends on travel per year. Security details require three shifts of agents that rotate every three weeks, bomb-sniffing dogs, sophisticated communications equipment, hundreds of vehicles, and even, at times, specialized gear such as detection and jamming devices.
Chertoff’s recent decision to authorize protection for Obama was also unexpected. The Secret Service initially estimated that it would need to staff 739 “candidate protection days” for 2008, on the low end of the range of 300 to 2,000 days it has staffed for campaigns over the past 40 years.
But with coverage of Obama starting 18 months before Election Day, his campaign alone could consume 540 days, at a rate of about $44,360 a day.
On the other hand, with more than 25 states proposing or holding caucuses or primaries by Feb. 5, the vast field could be cleared early, Price noted. Also, as a former first lady, Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ( N.Y.) already has a protective detail.
The reason for the Obama order is unclear. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who is backing Obama, expressed concern that the candidate is drawing large crowds that could impede his movement in an emergency, while Obama aides were concerned about threatening letters and Internet postings seeming to target the senator because of his race, congressional sources said, although there was no specific threat.
In interviews, Obama has expressed ambivalence about the change and played down any racial aspect.
“I’m not an entourage guy,” Obama told ABC News, saying that until recently he helped his wife shop for groceries. But he added: “If I don’t win it’s not going to be because of my race. It’s going to be because I didn’t project a vision of leadership that gave people confidence.”
While presidential candidates often object to Secret Service protection as intrusive and a barrier to voters, the agency’s presence can convey legitimacy to fledgling campaigns and lend experience, organization and speed to their travel operations.
Former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who received a Secret Service detail in 2004 as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has said he has no immediate plans to request protection this time. He told CNN that he would rather, “as long as possible, have the freedom to be able to be with people.”
Spokesmen for the Republican front-runners, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, said the campaigns have neither asked for nor received Secret Service protection.
Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr. and Mary Beth Sheridan and political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.
Wonders of The Imperial World
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
[open for dozens of revealing links]
Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.
We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods; nowadays, at least, it’s easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the veterans of that war; Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim; and the architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all — an embassy large enough to embody the Bush administration’s vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We’re talking, of course, about the still-uncompleted American embassy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad’s embattled Green Zone, now regularly under mortar fire. As Patrick Lenahan, Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, has put it (according to the firm’s website): “We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client’s vision a reality.”
And what a vision it was! What a reality it’s turned out to be!
Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush-administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein’s mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian-Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of UN sanctions.
Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, “The Hands of Victory,” supposedly modeled on Saddam’s own, holding 12-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly; while, as Jane Arraf has written, Saddam’s actual hands,”the hands that wrote the orders for the war against Iran and the destruction of Iraqi villages, the hands handcuffed behind his back as he went to trial and then was led to his execution are moldering under ground.”
It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad, wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant’s exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam’s pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday’s private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them themselves); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose — are you surprised? — one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Baghdadis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to Saddam’s benighted land.
And then, as the Iraqi capital’s landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration’s dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam’s palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn’t faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet’s New Rome.
Hence, Missouri’s BDY. That midwestern firm’s designers can now be classified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You can go to its website and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its Bush-inspired wonder, its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At $592 million, its proudest boast is that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it is coming in on budget and on time. Of course, with a 30% increase in staffing size since Congress approved the project two years ago, it is now estimated that being “represented” in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year. No wonder, with a crew of perhaps 1,000 officials assigned to it and a supporting staff (from food service workers to Marine guards and private security contractors) of several thousand more.
When the BDY-designed embassy opens in September (undoubtedly to the sound of mortar fire), its facilities will lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Saddam’s palaces and villas (and those of his sons), but they won’t lack for the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a “hardship” post. Take a look, for instance, at the embassy’s “pool house,” as imagined by BDY. (There’s a lovely sketch of it at their site.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discretely in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a year’s tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer’s dollar) is undoubtedly no small thing.
Admittedly, it may be hard to take that refreshing dip or catch a few sets of tennis in Baghdad’s heat if the present order for all U.S. personnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times remains in effect — or if, as in the present palace/embassy, the pool (and ping-pong tables) are declared, thanks to increasing mortar and missile attacks, temporarily “off limits.” In that case, more time will probably be spent in the massive, largely windowless-looking Recreation Center, one of over 20 blast-resistant buildings BDY has planned. Perhaps this will house the promised embassy cinema. (Pirates of the Middle East, anyone?) Perhaps hours will be wiled away in the no less massive-looking, low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in the promised commissary, the “retail and shopping areas,” the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website assures us, the “schools” (though it’s a difficult to imagine the State Department allowing children at this particular post).
And don’t forget the “fire station” (mentioned but not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first rockets hit. Small warning: If you are among the officials about to staff this post, keep in mind that the PX and commissary might be slightly understocked. The Washington Post recently reported that “virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the embassy] is imported from the United States, entering Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring fresh and processed food, including a full range of Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10 days.” Recently, there has been a “Theater-Wide Delay in Food Deliveries,” due to unexplained convoy problems. Even the yogurt supplies have been running low.
But those of you visiting our new embassy via BDY’s website have no such worries. So get that container of Baskin-Robbins from the freezer and take another moment to consider this new wonder of our world with its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of the above. When you look at the plans for it, you have to wonder: Can it, in any meaningful sense, be considered an embassy? And if so, an embassy to whom?
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books terms it a “base” like our other vast, multibillion dollar permanent bases in Iraq. It is also a headquarters. But what a head! What quarters! It is neither town, nor quite city-state, but it could be considered a citadel, with its own anti-missile defenses, inside the increasingly breachable citadel of the Green Zone. It may already be the last piece of ground (excepting those other bases) that the United States, surge or no, can actually claim to fully occupy and control in Iraq — and yet it already has something of the look of the Alamo (with amenities). Someday, perhaps, it will turn out to be the “White House” (though, in BDY’s sketches, its buildings look more like those prison-style schools being built in embattled American urban neighborhoods) for Moqtada al-Sadr, or some future Shiite Party, or a Sunni strongman, or a home for squatters. Who knows?
What we know is that such an embassy is remarkably outsized for Iraq. Even as a headquarters for a vast, secret set of operations in that chaotic land, it doesn’t quite add up. After all, our military headquarters in Iraq is already at Camp Victory on the outskirts of Baghdad. We can certainly assume — though no one in our mainstream media world would think to say such a thing — that this new embassy will house a rousing set of CIA (and probably Pentagon) intelligence operations for the country and region, and will be a massive hive for American spooks of all sorts. But whatever its specific functions, it might best be described as the imperial Mother Ship dropping into Baghdad.
Amazingly, despite complaints from Congress, the present U.S. ambassador is stumped when it comes to cutting down on that planned staff of his — every one more essential than the last — and the State Department is actually lobbying Congress for an extra $50 million to construct yet more “blast-resistant housing” on the vast site. Maybe this is what the “build and hold” strategy, pushed by many counterinsurgency types, really means. We’ll simply plan in Washington, design in Kansas City, build through a Kuwaiti construction firm using cheap imported labor, and try to keep building out forever from our “embassy” in Baghad.
As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole “hyperpower,” dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul — or a khan.
When completed, it will indeed be the perfect folly, as well as the perfect embassy, for a country that finds it absolutely normal to build vast base-worlds across the planet; that considers it just a regular day’s work to send its aircraft carrier “strike forces” and various battleships through the Straits of Hormuz in daylight as a visible warning to a “neighboring” regional power; whose Central Intelligence Agency operatives feel free to organize and launch Baluchi tribal warriors from Pakistan into the Baluchi areas of Iran to commit acts of terror and mayhem; whose commander-in-chief President can sign a “nonlethal presidential finding” that commits our nation to a “soft power” version of the economic destabilization of Iran, involving, according to ABC News, “a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions”; whose Vice President can appear on the deck of the USS John C. Stennis to address a “rally for the troops,” while that aircraft carrier is on station in the Persian Gulf, readying itself to pass through those Straits and can insist to the world: “With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces…. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region”; whose military men can refer to Iraqi insurgents as “anti-Iraqi forces”; members of whose Congressional opposition can offer plans for the dismemberment of Iraq into three or more parts; and all of whose movers and shakers, participating in the Washington Consensus, can agree that one “benchmark” the Iraqi government, also locked inside the Green Zone, must fulfill is signing off on an oil law designed in Washington and meant to turn the energy clock in the Middle East back several decades; but why go on.
To recognize such imperial impunity and its symbols for what they are, all you really need to do is try to reverse any of these examples. In most cases, that’s essentially inconceivable. Imagine any country building the equivalent Mother Ship “embassy” on the equivalent of two-thirds of the Washington Mall; or sailing its warships into the Gulf of Mexico and putting its second-in-command aboard the flagship of the fleet to insist on keeping the sea lanes “open”; or sending Caribbean terrorists into Florida to blow up local buses and police stations; or signing a “finding” to economically destabilize the American government; or planning the future shape of our country from a foreign capital. But you get the idea. Most of these actions, if aimed against the United States, would be treated as tantamount to acts of war and dealt with accordingly in this country, with unbelievable hue and cry.
When it’s a matter of other countries halfway across the planet, however, Americans largely consider such things, even if revealed in the news, at worst tactical errors or miscalculations. The imperial mindset goes deep. It also thinks unbearably well of itself and so, naturally, wants to memorialize itself, to give itself the surroundings that only the great, the super, the hyper deserves.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” inspired by the arrival in London in 1816 of an enormous statue of the Pharaoh Ramesses II, comes to mind:
-
“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In Baghdad, Saddam’s giant hands are already on the road to ruin. Still going up in New York and Baghdad are two half-billion dollar-plus monuments to the Bush imperial moment. A 9/11 memorial so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the Greatest Victims on the planet; and in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a monument to the Bush administration’s conviction that we were also destined to be the Greatest Dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.
From both these monuments, someday — and in the case of the embassy in Baghdad that day may not be so very distant — those lone and level sands will undoubtedly stretch far, far away.
“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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