… but the greatest of these is secrecy

Here’s a quote from a Richard Reeves op/ed, posted last:

I would put it this way, then and now: Abideth in Washington, faith, dopes and secrecy, but the greatest of these is secrecy.

Listen to what JFK had to say about that problem, first link — and remember that his brother died believing in the conspiracy theory we still ponder today, convinced that secrets of the kind the Bushies embrace as “status quo” killed him. Bobby’s own death remains a question shrouded in secrets, as well.

Transparent government has always been a problem — but in these last years it’s become THE problem. Changes are happening on a broad scale that are designated secret … changes in average daily norms that we don’t know about until we put our foot in them and trip. This is called, in some circles, “entrapment.” Ask the folks who showed up in anti-Bush t-shirts and ended up in jail; with that in mind, I’ve included a couple of t-shirt reads in this collection, freedom of dissent is a hot topic right now.

Secrets + stifled dissent = police state and fascism.

Oh yeah, and open the muckracker link to see the ACLU ad on restoration of the Constitution, below the article — sweet!

Jude

JFK
on the dangers of secrecy and importance of free speech
Youtube

White House office that handles freedom of information requests is free no longer
John Byrne, Raw Story
Thursday August 23, 2007

The White House Office of Administration “is responsible for responding to requesters who are seeking OA records under the (Freedom of Information Act).”

This from the White House website.

Only there’s a small problem.

According to the Washington Post, “The Bush administration argued in court papers this week that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act as part of its effort to fend off a civil lawsuit seeking the release of internal documents about a large number of e-mails missing from White House servers.”

The office’s website, however, continues to say otherwise. Under a section titled “FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUESTS,” it says:

The word “handbook,” which appears to be a link on the site, is, alas, readable no longer.

“Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit in May seeking Office of Administration records about the missing e-mails, including when they were deleted from government computer files,” the Post’s Dan Eggen wrote Thursday. “CREW said it understood that internal White House documents had estimated at least 5 million e-mails were missing from March 2003 to October 2005.

“The Bush administration has not provided a number publicly,” Eggen continues. “Some of the records may have been subject to a document preservation law administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. Congress has sought access to them as part of its probe into the administration’s firing of nine U.S. federal prosecutors in 2006.”

“One has to wonder if this is an effort by the White House to keep secret the details of how millions of White House e-mail suddenly went missing,” remarked CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan. “The OA’s disingenuous claim that it is not subject to the FOIA is contradicted by its own actions and statements.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists and editor of Secrecy News, said the White House may yet be successful. In a 1996 case, courts ruled in favor of the National Security Council, when it asked to exempt itself from the law even though it had complied previously.

“It’s obnoxious, and it’s a gesture of defiance against the norms of open government,” Aftergood told the Post. “But it turns out that a White House body can be an agency one day and cease to be one the next day, as absurd as it may seem.” ++

McConnell: FISA Debate Will Kill Americans
Spencer Ackerman, TPMmuckraker
August 22, 2007

With a heavy heart, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told a Texas newspaper last week that due to the public debate over revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Americans will die.

McConnell, who before the late July-early August FISA legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan respect, placed the predicted deaths of Americans at the doorstep of an open society. Thanks to widespread efforts to understand what the NSA’s highly classified warrantless surveillance program is — from journalists, from legal scholars, from national security experts, from elected officials — the Bush administration was forced last month to reveal too much about how the program operates, in order to correct misunderstandings. And that means, McConnell said, “Americans are going to die.”

…So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

Q: Even if it’s perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

A: Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they’re using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq. [Emphasis added].

McConnell, when questioned by the reporter, seemed to understand that he had gone too far — but nonetheless reiterated his point:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ‘78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

If McConnell really believes that Americans are going to die as the result of debating the FISA bill, then he cannot possibly mean that “sunshine’s a good thing” here. That would entail him blessing the needless deaths of Americans at the hands of super-adaptable terrorists who now know what procedures they can undertake to avoid detection from the NSA. The likelihood of them actually knowing that, however, from either the debate or the incredibly complex Protect America Act it produced, is incredibly low — not least of which because not a single NSA surveillance method was disclosed by either. In fact, in his interview with the paper, McConnell gave more details — the effort isn’t “massive data-mining,” or that it takes 200 man-hours to prepare a FISA-warrant request, for instance — about the program’s operation than did the entire Congressional debate.

Is Congress going to be satisfied with being told that its attempt to debate a landmark piece of legislation represents a threat to national security? It should be noted that McConnell gave the interview on a trip arranged jointly with Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who has not objected to McConnell’s comments. ++

White House manual outlines protest policy
UPI
Aug. 22, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 (UPI) — A White House manual released as part of a lawsuit instructs advance staffers how to deter “potential protesters” from President George Bush’s appearances.

The “Presidential Advance Manual,” dated October 2002, says Bush appearances around the country must be open only to those given tickets by organizers and anyone entering the events must be checked for secret signs, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The manual, which is stamped “Sensitive — Do Not Copy,” was released to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a lawsuit brought by the organization and two people arrested for refusing to hide their anti-Bush t-shirts at a West Virginia State Capitol appearance in 2004.

The document states that any protesters who manage to enter the events should be shouted down by “rally squads” stationed in strategic locations in the crowd. If that strategy does not work, the manual says, the protesters should be removed.

The manual demonstrates “that the White House has a policy of excluding and/or attempting to squelch dissenting viewpoints from presidential events,” said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Miller. “Individuals should have the right to express their opinion to the president, even if it’s not a favorable one.” ++

White House muzzles agencies
Just don’t quote me
DALE McFEATERS, Capital Hill Blue
August 24, 2007

Bush administration political appointees have a proven track record of meddling in the work of the government’s career appointees, suppressing findings that conflict with GOP dogma and rewriting reports that might upset the party’s socially conservative base.

They seem to have surpassed themselves over at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which does the laudable work of researching ways to keep Americans from getting killed in their cars.

However, according to The New York Times’ “Wheels” blog, NHTSA administrator Nicole R. Nason has muzzled an entire agency.

According to blogger Christopher Jensen, “Without special permission, officials there are no longer allowed to provide information to reporters except on a background basis, which means it cannot be attributed to a spokesman.” Under the rules of most news organizations, that makes the information useless.

The information can be put on the record later, but only, it seems, after clearance with the NHTSA’s public-relations staff.

This is not the CIA or the Pentagon or the Justice Department, where information may have sensitive nuances. This is an agency that deals with automotive safety, for crying out loud.

The explanations for the new secrecy and lack of transparency given to Jensen make no sense except in the context of political appointees anxious that the agency stay “on message” and to build up the one person authorized to speak on the record, administrator Nason.

The people behind the clumsy attempt at image control probably didn’t think of it this way, but the taxpayers who pay for NHTSA to gather data and also pay for the experts to analyze it deserve unfettered access to both.) ++

Terror Suspect List Yields Few Arrests
20,000 Detentions in ‘06 Rile Critics
Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post
Saturday, August 25, 2007

The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness.

A range of state, local and federal agencies as well as U.S. embassies overseas rely on the database to pinpoint terrorism suspects, who can be identified at borders or even during routine traffic stops. The database consolidates a dozen government watch lists, as well as a growing amount of information from various sources, including airline passenger data. The government said it was planning to expand the data-sharing to private-sector groups with a “substantial bearing on homeland security,” though officials would not be more specific.

Few specifics are known about how the system operates, how many people are detained or turned back from borders, or the criteria used to identify suspects. The government will not discuss cases, nor will it confirm whether an individual’s name is on its list.

Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said. FBI and other officials said that they could not provide data on the number of people arrested or denied entry for the other half of the database hits. FBI officials indicated that the number of arrests was small.

The government says the database is a powerful tool for identifying and tracking suspected terrorists and for sharing intelligence, and that its purpose is not necessarily to make arrests. But the new details about the numbers, disclosed in an FBI budget document and in interviews, raise questions about the database’s effectiveness and its impact on privacy, critics said. They argued that the number of hits relative to arrests was alarmingly high and indicated that the threshold for including someone on a watch list was too low, potentially violating thousands of Americans’ civil liberties when they are stopped.

David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy organization, said the numbers “suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists.” He added that “this really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool.”

Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said focusing on arrests misses “a much larger universe” of suspicious U.S. citizens.

“There are many potentially dangerous individuals who fly beneath the radar of enforceable actions and who are every bit as sinister as those we intercept,” he said.

The database is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, a joint operation between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Rick Kopel, the TSC’s deputy director, called it “one of the best things the government has been able to accomplish since 9/11.”

The government said private-sector entities with a “substantial bearing on homeland security” could also gain access to the data, which is kept for 99 years, according to a notice in the Federal Register this week.

The watch list includes information from the Transportation Security Administration’s air passenger “no-fly” list, the State Department’s Consular Lookout and Support System list and the FBI’s Violent Gang and Terrorist Organizations File.

To be included in the database, a person must be “a known or suspected terrorist such as those who finance terrorist activities, are known members of a terrorist organizations, terrorist operatives, or someone that provides material support to a terrorist or terrorist organization,” said Michelle Petrovich, a spokesman for the Terrorist Screening Center. According to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the database contained at least 235,000 records as of last fall.

Using the database, U.S. and international authorities prevented “numerous attempts” at entry into the United States by an Egyptian citizen, Omar Ahmed Ali, who went on in 2005 to commit a suicide bombing in Qatar that killed one British citizen and injured 12, Petrovich said.

Many U.S. citizens are stopped, questioned and, if no arrest warrant is pending, released. They are not told their watch-list status. To do so, the government says, could tip off suspects that they are likely to be questioned or detained.

Some travelers who are repeatedly stopped can only speculate that they are on the watch list.

Abe Dabdoub, 39, and his wife, both U.S. citizens, live in a Cleveland suburb. He said he has been detained 21 times at Michigan’s border with Canada since last August. Dabdoub, who works for an electronics manufacturing company, said he has even begun to keep a spreadsheet. The first four times, he said, he was handcuffed. Once, his wife had to plead with the agents not to handcuff him in front of their 5- and 7-year-old boys, he said. The agents know him so well by now that they call him by his first name. Every time he asks them why he is being stopped, Customs officers tell him, “We can’t tell you, for national security reasons,” he said.

Customs officials declined to comment on his case.

Agencies nominate names to the list based on rigorous, classified criteria, Kopel said. The TSC has created a redress unit that ensures that watch-list and source information is accurate, officials said. Since 2005, the unit has resolved more than 90 percent of the several hundred complaints it has received, including by deleting names or adjusting data.

Each watch-list hit is a “positive encounter” — what the government says is a conclusive match against the database — by a customs officer or other official with an American or foreigner. U.S. citizens, if there is no arrest warrant, cannot be denied entry. About half of the encounters take place at land borders, airports or seaports. Other travelers are flagged at consular offices or by state and local police.

The number of hits has surged since the second half of fiscal 2004, when the database was created. That year, the FBI reported 5,396 encounters, with some people having multiple encounters. In 2005, 15,730 hits were logged. Next year, the FBI projects 22,400 hits.

FBI officials said the rising numbers result from wider information-sharing among international, federal, state and local authorities.

“A lot of times it’s not to our advantage to make an arrest,” FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. “We don’t want the subject to know what we know. It doesn’t mean we’re not paying attention. On the contrary, it shows that we’re being very proactive in trying to identify threats.”

But Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said growing use of this database magnifies the consequences of errors that are entered into it.

“There needs to be a reliable way to correct bad information and protect the innocent,” he said.

The government’s system casts too broad a net, and its definition of who should be watch-listed is too broad, said Harvey Grossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which has filed a class-action lawsuit against the government on behalf of 10 Muslim Americans who allege they were detained and mistreated after being placed on a watch list without grounds. People with only distant casual contact with a suspect might be listed, he said. “What you eventually get is a worthless list of people.”

In rare cases, citizens have discovered they are on the watch list.

Francisco “Kiko” Martinez, a Colorado lawyer and civil-rights activist, said he was detained twice in recent years by police officers who pulled him over on traffic stops and held him in one case more than three hours, and in another, in handcuffs. Through legal proceedings, Martinez obtained police reports that revealed his watch-list status.

“A driver’s license check revealed [Martinez] as a possible individual having ties with terrorism,” a state trooper wrote after a 2004 stop near Chicago, according to one report.

Last year, Martinez sued the federal government, claiming that he was unlawfully detained and that he was included on a watch list as a result of his political activities.

Last month, he won a $106,500 settlement from federal, state and tribal authorities.

Though the settlement did not address any of the underlying constitutional claims, Martinez asserted that it “shows that I shouldn’t have been on this terrorism watch list in the first place” and that “the government is misusing this so-called war against terrorism to target its domestic political opponents.”

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said the department declined to comment on the case.

Jim McMahon, chief of staff for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which represents 18,000 state and local police agencies across the country, said the database helps police officers “make a better judgment” about whether to detain a person. One of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Samir Jarrah, was ticketed for going 95 miles per hour on Interstate 95 in Maryland two days before the attacks, he said. “Today, chances are he would have been on the list,” he said. ++

Is it Possible That We Still Have the Right to Dissent
Norman Horowitz, HuffPo
August 25, 2007

In the movie “A Guide For A Married Man” a man, apprehended by his wife while in a compromising position with another woman says something resembling “… are you going to believe what you just saw with your own eyes or what I tell you that you just saw?”

This does not exactly relate to this story, but it is close enough for me, and anyway, I love the quote, and I use it at every opportunity.

This accurate quote is from the song “The House I Live In.”

“The place I work in, the worker at my side
the little town or city where my people lived and died
the “howdy” and the handshake the air of feeling free
the right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me.”

It is difficult for me not to conjure up these words being sung by Frank Sinatra so many years ago.

The Bush Administration has put placed our country in the unbelievable place of denying our freedom of expression, or “the right to speak my mind out.”

I loosely quote an article published on August 16th datelined Charleston W. Va.

“Feds pay $80,000 over anti-Bush T-shirts”

A man and a woman who refused to cover T-shirts that bore anti-President Bush slogans settled their lawsuit against the federal government for $80,000, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday.

The couple were handcuffed and removed from the July 4, 2004, rally at the state Capitol, where President Bush gave a speech. A judge dismissed trespassing charges against them, and an order closing the case was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Charleston.

They had spent a night in jail following their arrest.

“This settlement is a real victory not only for our clients but for the First Amendment,” said Andrew Schneider, executive director of the ACLU of West Virginia. “… Public Officials will think twice before they eject peaceful protesters from public events for exercising their right to dissent.” Sorry Andrew, $80,000 is not nearly enough to deter these guys.

White House spokesman Blair Jones said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing. He could have said”… are you going to believe what you just saw with your own eyes or what I tell you that you just saw?”

How about this for parsing words?

Blair Jones went on to say “The parties understand that this settlement is a compromise of disputed claims to avoid the expenses and risks of litigation and is not an admission of fault, liability, or wrongful conduct.”

Disputed claims? They were arrested and jailed for a protest. What disputed claims?

The front of the homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for “no” superimposed over the word “Bush.” The back of one T-shirt said “Love America, Hate Bush.” On the back of the other T-shirt was the message “Regime Change Starts at Home.”

The ACLU said in a statement that a presidential advance manual makes it clear that the government tries to exclude dissenters from the president’s appearances. “As a last resort,” the manual says, “security should remove the demonstrators from the event.”

Someone should advise Blair Jones that when the President or his people say or do something absolutely horrid that they should take responsibility for the event and say the magic words in society of “I am sorry, we made a mistake, and we are taking steps to insure that it does not happen again.

And now I present my usual venting of a usual upset with the people who should have the responsibility of reporting ALL violations of press freedom in our country to the citizens of our country. This of course would be The NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox Television Networks. This type of violation by the Government should not be treated so cavalierly by the media.

I have not observed a mention of this recent incident on television, and it should be reported with the same fervor used when dealing with the really important events like Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and Lindsey Lohan.

Most of the other Constitutional violations can be blamed on “we must protect Americans from terrorist activities.” But what could they possibly say about this one? ++

Bush hails freedom, but can he handle a lousy T-shirt?
USA Today Editorial
Fri Aug 24

President Bush’s speech at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on Independence Day in 2004, invoked the nation’s highest ideals: “On this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds. … Free thought, free expression, that’s what we believe,” Bush told the crowd.

Ringing words. Unfortunately, the White House advance team didn’t get the memo. Or the message.

More than an hour earlier, the advance officials, working with local police, had confronted and ejected a young couple who had come to the speech wearing T-shirts that fit any reasonable definition of free expression. The front of both shirts bore the name “Bush” surrounded by a circle with a slash through it; the back of Jeffery Rank’s shirt carried the slogan “Regime Change Begins at Home” and Nicole Rank’s shirt read, “Love America, Hate Bush.”

The Ranks refused demands to take the shirts off, turn them inside out or leave. Though they were on public property and not being disruptive, they were handcuffed, arrested and charged with trespass. The charges were later dropped, and with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ranks sued the White House advance personnel for violating their First Amendment rights.

Last week, the government settled the case, admitting no wrongdoing but agreeing to pay the Ranks $80,000. That avoidable expenditure of taxpayer dollars speaks volumes about who was wrong here.

It would be one thing if the Charleston incident were an isolated case of overzealousness. But it’s not. People have been kicked out of a Bush event in Denver because their car bore a “No More Blood for Oil” bumper sticker. Others have been kept out for wearing a Young Democrats shirt. Extraordinary efforts were made to prevent protests from marring the GOP convention in 2004 at which Bush was renominated.

During the Ranks’ suit, the White House was forced to cough up a heavily censored copy of its advance manual, which reads like something Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez would love. Among the advice: Advance personnel should ask the local police department to designate a protest area, “preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route.”

It’s vital, of course, that the Secret Service protect the president from physical threats when he appears in public. And it’s understandable that the White House wants to have the president speak without disruption from people who disagree with him. But it’s important that cloistered presidents know that there are people who disagree with them, and there are disorderly conduct laws to deal with protesters who cross the line.

Dissent is a bedrock of our system. The administration, with its penchant for secrecy and order, never quite gets that and repeatedly tries to draw the line too broadly.

Even people who might be sympathetic toward Bush are tiring of this cavalier arrogance.

When he returned to Charleston in 2006 for a fundraiser at a private home, the Secret Service demanded that the local police keep protesters off a bridge the motorcade would cross. Charleston Mayor Danny Jones, a Republican, refused. The Secret Service compromised, and protesters got onto most of the bridge.

If you profess to love “the freedom for people to speak their minds,” as Bush told the Charleston crowd in 2004, you have to assume you’re not always going to love what they say. Instead of a lengthy manual on preventing and handling demonstrators, Bush’s advance people need a refresher course on a somewhat older manual. It’s called the Constitution of the United States.

The White House declined to provided an opposing view to this editorial because, according to spokesman Tony Fratto, the Presidential Advance Manual is an issue in two other pending lawsuits. ++

FAITH, DOPES AND SECRECY
Richard Reeves
Fri Aug 24

NEW YORK — So, the CIA has been forced to declassify the summary of an investigation by its own inspector general saying that 50 or 60 agents and officials had a great deal of information as early as January 2000 that might have prevented the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.

The 19 pages, finally and grudgingly released more than two years after they were written, are devastating, confirming suspicions that the National Security Agency refused to give the Central Intelligence Agency transcripts of telephone conversations between al-Qaida conspirators, and the CIA did not tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation that two of those conspirators were in the United States.

The responsibility for that level of incompetence, said the summary, rests primarily with the CIA director at the time, George Tenet. That is, of course, the same George Tenet who was awarded the country’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, by President Bush on Dec. 14, 2004.

The medal was awarded that same day to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the military to easy victory in Iraq, without any planning for what to do after the battle and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. The medal also went to J. Paul Bremer, who was sent to Iraq as an American Caesar, and who ignored looting, disbanded the Iraqi army, and stripped away any experience and expertise that existed in the defeated country by dismissing all members of the former ruling Baathist party — while somehow losing billions of dollars of our money.

“Three Blind Mice” was the headline of London’s Daily Telegraph in reporting the White House ceremony honoring Tenet, Franks and Bremer.

I would put it this way, then and now: Abideth in Washington, faith, dopes and secrecy, but the greatest of these is secrecy.

The faith of George W. Bush’s White House comes down to this: God will provide, so why should we worry ourselves? Bad things will not happen to or be done by good people. And the dopes get the medals.

But it is secrecy that is the most dangerous and will be the most damaging legacy of these Bush years. This president is not the first to want to govern in secrecy — Richard Nixon comes to mind — but he is certainly the most small-minded. When it comes to information, this White House, as we know, refuses to accept that either Congress or the courts is an equal branch of government and wants almost all its actions and regulations classified under “executive privilege.” It is reclassifying formerly public information, both current and historical, and is in the process of effectively dismantling the Freedom of Information Act.

But that is not all. This is from the “Wheels” column of The New York Times, written by Christopher Jensen:

“If you want to know something as simple as who heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, don’t bother to ask the safety agency’s communications office. Without special permission, officials there are no longer allowed to provide information to reporters except on a background basis, which means it cannot be attributed to a spokesman.

“Without such attribution, there are few circumstances under which most reporters will report such information. … The agency’s new policy effectively means that some of the world’s top safety researchers are no longer allowed to talk to reporters or to be freely quoted about automotive safety issues that affect pretty much everybody.”

Stuff like that is not really aimed at the press. This administration has made it clear that it concedes no legitimate public purpose to what was once called the Fourth Estate. Maybe they’re right about that. But the real target of internal policies is controlling the flow of information to the public. If such policies are designed to protect corporations from concerned or angry consumers — and they are — then it is the people themselves who are the real targets.

What the people know and when they know it is the engine of democracy. What we don’t know or what we find out too late will hurt us. And that is the idea: The secrecy is necessary to protect the dopes and hide the incompetence. Protect them from whom? From the people; secrecy slowly but very surely throttles democracy. ++

“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.

Add comment August 25th, 2007

Throwing old meat to the NeoConivores

Dubby’s throwing a barbecue bash for his cousins, the Ditto Heads. Turns out this whole delusional flap about Vietnam — a topic Bush has been careful NOT to mention for years — is desperate bait to draw in the remaining NeoCon’s, and the down-wind Rambo-esque among us, propping up the old “we could have won it” debate by using our current occupation of a Muslim country as a chance to capture lost glory!

That’ll play big in the South, anyhow — the Rebs still think the Yanks are upstarts they could have whipped eventually; and the Iraqi’s aren’t the right color to count for much with the Guts and Glory crowd, anyhow. To them, the “gooks” are easily replaced with the “towels”; “Charlie” has become “Hadji” … pass my rifle. I’m sure there are Southerner’s that see the folly of this argument — but the “Dixie” thing, where time-honored notions of race and religion, and old Civil War victimization tapes, plays in a perpetual loop to color the South’s version of “exceptionalism.”

Well — wouldn’t be the first time a nation chose war because it’s “feelings got hurt,” like Saddam hurt Dubby’s. I’d like to think it might be the LAST. Old scores … tit/tat … us/them.

Yet for the moment, and even as the preponderance of news from Iraq is grim, nothing changes but the rhetoric Dubby uses to stir the pot. Sunni’s AND Shiia’s are running from secular violence, relocating, now, by the millions, and old diverse neighborhoods have become, as said one Iraqi woman, “a city of ghosts.”

Banner headlines tell us that GOP Big Dog and elder statesman John Warner wants the troops to begin drawing down by Christmas, and advising …

wait for it …

“I say to the President, respectfully, pick whatever number you wish. You do not want to lose the momentum. But certainly, in the 160,000 plus - say 5,000 - could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year.”

5,000 — coincidentally, the number that would probably have to rotate out anyhow, with replacements nowhere in sight. The Army has refused to consider further “extensions” for their exhausted troops, and a new report indicates that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace is expected to tell President Bush to cut the US footprint in Iraq next year by almost half, according to the LA Times [he’s since retracted.] Oh sure, that would work — Bush takes direction so well! He’s not about to let military leaders spoil his picnic!

So — step right up and fill yer plate, cousin. Sadly, our menu selection at Bush’s shindig will be same-old, same-old — from the History Repeats column, we’ll get a big helping of “Guts and Glory Redux,” along with a piping hot side of hubris and hegemony, served bloody. America will pick up the tab for all this even though their wants and wishes are turning slowly over the coals [along with Mr. Maliki, hog-tied to the spit] — while on the burner, Iraq will continue to boil right down to the bone. And at Dub’s little downhome jamboree, don’t forget to visit the thin and tattered reputation of the nation, which is being displayed, gutted on a platter, with an apple in its mouth.

A few “Vietrac” reads for you. If you’re cherry picking articles, be sure to read the last one by blogger, Baratunde Thurston — and don’t miss Jon Stewart’s video, first.

Jude

Magical History Tour
Jon Stewart - Comedy Central

Here are some quotes from Froomkin, at the Washington Post:

Rejected By Historians

Bush argued that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia three decades ago resulted in widespread death and suffering — just as it would in Iraq. Historians and analysts were quick to refute this Vietnam revisionism.

As Stockman and Bender write in the Globe, political analysts and historians are agog.

“‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Allan Lichtman, an American University historian, adding that far more Vietnamese died during the war than in the aftermath of the US withdrawal. Lichtman said the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal pro-communist regime, could as easily be attributed to American interference in that country.

“The president’s portrayal of the conflict ‘is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history,’ Lichtman said.

“Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, said Bush is drawing the wrong lessons from history.

“‘I don’t think what happened in Cambodia after the war has anything to do with Iraq,’ Laird said. ‘Is he saying we should have invaded Cambodia?

That’s what we would have had to do, and we would have never done that. I don’t see how he draws the parallel.’

“Other historians said Bush bypassed the fact that, after the painful US withdrawal was completed in April 1975, Vietnam stabilized and developed into an economically thriving country that is now a friend of the United States.”

Michael Tackett writes in the Chicago Tribune that Bush’s remarks “invited stinging criticism from historians and military analysts who said the analogies evidenced scant understanding of those conflicts’ true lessons….

“‘This was history written by speechwriters without regard to history,’ said military analyst Anthony Cordesman. ‘And I think most military historians will find it painful. . . . because in basic historical terms the president misstated what happened in Vietnam.’…

“Cordesman noted that human tragedies similar to those that occurred in the aftermath of U.S. involvement in Vietnam already have taken place in Iraq.

“‘We are already talking about a country where the impact of our invasion has driven 2 million people out of the country, will likely drive out 2 million more, has reduced 8 million people to dire poverty, has killed 100,000 people and wounded 100,000 more,’ he said.
‘One sits sort of in awe at the lack of historical comparability.’

“It also struck some historians as odd that the president would try to use a divisive issue like Vietnam to rally the nation behind his policy in Iraq.

‘If we get into a Vietnam argument, the country is divided, but if you are going to try sell this concept that the blood is on the American people’s hands because we left and were weak-kneed in Asia, that is a very tenuous and inane historical argument,’ said historian Douglas Brinkley.”

The Associated Press quotes more reaction from experts:

“The speech was an act of desperation to scare the American people into staying the course in Iraq. He’s distorted the facts, painting all of the people in Iraq as being on the same side which is simply not the case. Iraq is a religious civil war.” — Lawrence Korb, assistant defense secretary under President Reagan and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington.

“Bush is cherry-picking history to support his case for staying the course. What I learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there, the worse it’s going to get.”

– Ret. Army Brig. Gen. John Johns, a counterinsurgency expert who served in Vietnam.

“The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early. It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets.”

– Steven Simon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Opinion Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes:

“The only lesson he found in the nation’s last foreign quagmire of a war was that it ended too quickly.”

The Los Angeles Times editorial board writes:

“It’s true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal — whenever that occurs.

But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitely unless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades.

Killing fields? Iraq’s already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?”

Here’s David Gergen’s reaction to the speech on CNN:

“He’s tried all along to say this is not Vietnam. By invoking Vietnam he raised the automatic question, well, if you’ve learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire? Why didn’t you learn up front about the perils of Vietnam and what we faced there? …

“But here’s the other point, that if you look at Vietnam today, you have to say that Vietnam at the end, after 30 years, has actually become quite a driving country. It’s a very strong economy. So there are those who say, yes, when we pull back there were bloodbaths in the immediate aftermath, but after that the Vietnamese started putting their country together. Is that not what we want Iraq to do over the long term? …

“[And] the other issue and why it’s dangerous territory for him to go into Vietnam and the Vietnam analogy is reason we lost Vietnam in part was because we had no strategy. And the problem we’ve got now in Iraq, what is the strategy for victory? If the strategy for victory is let our troops give the Maliki government enough time to get everything solved, and the Maliki government is going nowhere, as everybody now admits, you know, what strategy are we facing? What strategy do we have to win in Iraq? It’s not clear we have a winning strategy in Iraq. And that’s what cost us Vietnam, and that’s why we eventually withdrew under humiliating circumstances.”

Here’s Democratic strategist Paul Begala on CNN:

“He’s saying, essentially, that 58,000 dead in Vietnam weren’t quite enough, that maybe we should have twice as big a tragic memorial on the Mall.

“And who’s saying it? A man who chose not to serve, took steps, used family friends to get out of serving in Vietnam, didn’t even show up for his own Guard duty, so that better, braver men could fight that war. He stood before those better, braver men today a coward in the company of heroes.”

Sen. John Kerry released this statement:

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars. Half of the soldiers whose names are on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after the politicians knew our strategy would not work. …

“As in Vietnam, we engaged militarily in Iraq based on official deception. As in Vietnam, more American soldiers are being sent to fight and die in a civil war we can’t stop and an insurgency we can’t bomb into submission. If the President wants to heed the lessons of Vietnam, he should change course and change course now.”

++

The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki
New York Times editorial
August 24, 2007

Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s removal, only to get Mr. Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Mr. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq’s first democratically chosen leader under the American-sponsored constitution.

Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.

Sectarian fracturing even extends to the electricity grid, where armed groups have seized control of key switching stations and refused to share power with Baghdad and other provinces.The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

That distinction is enormously significant, since President Bush’s current troop buildup is supposed to buy, at the cost of American lives, a period of relative calm for Iraqi politicians to bring about national reconciliation. How much calm it has brought is the subject of debate. But just about everyone in Washington now agrees that Mr. Maliki has made little effort to advance national unity.

The most recent intelligence report on Iraq, released yesterday, concludes that Mr. Maliki’s government is unable to govern and will become “more precarious” over the next six months to a year.That is why there can be no serious argument for buying still more time at the cost of still more American lives and an even greater cost for Iraqis. A report by an Iraqi correspondent for The Times earlier this week described the deadly sectarian hatreds that have torn apart life in his home province, Diyala, which is almost equally divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

The same day, an Op-Ed article by seven American soldiers serving in Iraq underscored the extent to which American troops have worn out their welcome among Iraqis as social and economic conditions have deteriorated and rampant lawlessness has destroyed the most basic sense of personal security.

When it comes to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, Washington and Baghdad are often at cross-purposes. In the western province of Al Anbar, the American military has registered some gains by enlisting local Iraqi Sunnis to fight against foreign-led Al Qaeda formations. That strategy depends on the sense of Iraqi nationhood among local Sunnis. But the Maliki government prefers to concentrate on fortifying Shiite political power and exploiting the immense oil reserves of southeast Iraq. It is hard to imagine any Shiite government acting very differently.

Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them. ++

Shameless: Bush’s Bogus History Lesson
Thomas de Zengotita, HuffPo
August 23, 2007

In today’s NY Times Thom Shanker summarizes the distortion of history that was Bush’s speech to the VFW on Wednesday. After years of refusing comparisons of Iraq with Vietnam, Bush is now flogging that comparison to veterans in yet another effort to manipulate their native patriotism. He wants them to support his last ditch effort to prove he was right after all by shoveling more of their children into cannon fodder. All he cares about is his image in history and he will do and say anything to rescue it if he can.

Shanker rightly highlights the ludicrous Bush claim that the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia was a consequence of American withdrawal from Vietnam when in fact it was the American invasion that inspired the formation of that insane gang in the first place.

But Shanker’s focus on specifics in Bush’s speech led him away from what we were told was America’s cause in Vietnam at the time. They said we had to win because if we failed communists would take over Indonesia and the Philippines and who knew what after that. Maybe Hawaii. That was what they said. I was there. I remember.

In fact, when we finally withdrew, no such thing happened. What happened instead was that the inherent Sino-Soviet split that our invasion of Vietnam had artificially suppressed finally opened up. What happened was that communist China evolved into the bizarre hybrid of tyranny and capitalism we know today and the Soviet Union went into self-inflicted collapse.

The whole justification for the Vietnam war turned out to be paranoid bullshit.

But what is most outrageous is the way Bush is still willing to take advantage of the historical ignorance of devoted Americans–after all the damage he has done. He has no shame at all. His cynicism and selfishness are unforgivable. ++

Iraq is to Vietnam as Dubya is to WTF!?!?
Baratunde Thurston
August 24, 2007

Just as effective democracy assumes and requires the consent of the governed, so does an effective analogy assume and require a common set of beliefs and experiences among its intended audience. This week, George W. Bush finally made the analogous connection he has so vehemently avoided between Iraq and Vietnam. But, as he has done with Biblical interpretation and the English language, the boy has badly mangled the meaning.

On August 22, Bush used his speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars to yet again to “reframe” the Iraq debate. How long can you “reframe” something before you realize that the problem is your crappy art and not the choice of a speckled mahogany vs. fluted sterling silver enclosure? Answer: at least four years.

After rehashing freedom-loving, fascist-hating arguments previously applied to American mid-century intervention in Europe, Shrubya used Microsoft Word’s search-and-replace feature to tell the story with Asians. That’s when he broke out the surprise Vietnam analogy.

However, it was neither the well-understood Vietnam-as-quagmire nor the equally-applicable Vietnam-as-conflict-he-avoided that the president relied upon. No, Bush rested his latest justification on Vietnam-as-lost-because-we-didn’t -stay-long-enough. Yeah, that was just the problem. Think about it. Had we stayed longer, we could have killed every last person in Vietnam and won the damn thing, but those perpetual back-stabbers in Washington again failed to support the troops.

Bush’s strategery in this case, as with global warming, evolution and other facts, depends on creating doubt. He said things like:

1. “Now, I know some people doubt the universal appeal of liberty, or worry that the Middle East isn’t ready for it.”

2. “Others believe that America’s presence is destabilizing, and that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us.”

3. “Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently.”

4. “Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.”

No, there isn’t. This is a complex literary device known as “bullshit,” which is employed all too often by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I, too, can invoke the tree hugging, ape-descending, freedom-hating “some” and “others” to create a “legitimate” debate where none legitimately exists. Watch me work my magic:

1. Some can argue that babies come from a magical stork that shoves the fetus into a woman’s body moments before birth then teleports back to its home in the trash can where Oscar the Grouch lives.

2. Others believe that babies are always inside of women, remote controlling them like that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain, Krang, the talking, fluid-dripping, pink brain that installed himself Shredder’s abdomen in order to defeat our turtle heroes.

3. There is a legitimate debate about how a woman becomes pregnant.

For Bush to sell the Iraq war by using America’s most shameful military expedition of the 20th century shows just how desperate he is. He’s not just drinking the Kool-Aid, he’s freebasing the powder. ++

“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

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