The further adventures of Dances With Wolf Of The Desert
While we’ve been assaulted by nonstop coverage of the Hillary/Obama make-up strategy and campaign trivia that makes our heads hurt, our Big Chief has been promoting democracy in all the wrong places — the places where they know him and tolerate him like the pup he is. He’s received an embarrassing amount of bling in the form of gold-encrusted this and that while making a wrathy case, if ignored, about taking down Iran, still posturing about the ‘Filipino Monkey’ incident in Hormuz. He needs an enemy to bounce his “goodness” against — too bad he doesn’t look in the mirror.
I’ll let MoDo explain the Big Chief’s name, in the first article — then, a collection of what’s been going on at home while we haven’t been looking. NOT GOOD, dearhearts … the cogs continue to turn and the Bush-countdown clocks aren’t moving nearly fast enough. There is clearly an agenda to hog-tie the next president as best they can.
If you don’t have time to read all this, at least scan the article titles — this is Need To Know.
Jude
Faith, Freedom and Bling in the Middle East
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
January 16, 2008
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - As a Saudi soldier with a gold sword high-stepped in front of him, President Bush walked slowly beside King Abdullah through the shivery gray mist enveloping the kingdom, following the red carpet leading from Air Force One to the airport terminal.
When the two stepped onto the escalator, the president tenderly reached for the king’s hand, in case the older man needed help. He certainly does need help, but not the kind he is prepared to accept.
It took Mr. Bush almost his entire presidency to embrace diplomacy, but now that he’s in the thick of it, or perhaps the thin of it — given his speed-dating approach to statesmanship — he is kissing and holding hands with kings, princes, emirs, sheiks and presidents all over the Arab world and is trying to persuade them that he is not in a monogamous relationship with the Jews.
His message boiled down to: Iran bad, Israel good, Iraq doing better.
Blessed is the peacemaker who comes bearing a $30 billion package of military aid for Israel and a $20 billion package of Humvees and guided bombs for the Arabs.
Like the slick Hollywood guy in “Annie Hall” who has a notion that he wants to turn into a concept and then develop into an idea, W. has resumed his mantra of having a vision that turns into freedom that could develop into global democracy.
W.’s peace train quickly gave way to the warpath, however, with Mr. Bush devoting a good chunk of time to the unfinished war in Iraq and the possibility of a war with Iran.
In meetings with leaders, he privately pooh-poohed the National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. On Fox News, he openly broke with intelligence analysts, telling Greta Van Susteren about Iran: “I believe they want a weapon, and I believe that they’re trying to gain the know-how as to how to make a weapon under the guise of a civilian nuclear program.”
Less than a week after the president arrived in the Middle East, three violent eruptions — an Israeli raid killing at least 18 Palestinians, 13 of whom were militants; an American Embassy car bombing in Beirut; and a luxury hotel suicide-bombing in Kabul — underscored how Sisyphean a task he has set for himself.
“This is one of the results of the Bush visit,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, as he went to a Gaza hospital to see the body of his son, a militant killed in the battle. “He encouraged the Israelis to kill our people.”
Arab TV offered an uncomfortable juxtaposition: Al Arabiya running the wretched saga of Gaza children suffering from a lack of food and medicine during the Israeli blockade, blending into the wretched excess scenes of W. being festooned with rapper-level bling from royal hosts flush with gazillions from gouging us on oil.
W.’s 11th-hour bid to save his legacy from being a shattered Iraq — even as the Iraqi defense minister admitted that American troops would be needed to help with internal security until at least 2012 and border defense until at least 2018 — recalled MTV’s “Cribs.”
At a dinner last night in the king’s tentlike retreat, where the 8-foot flat-screen TV in the middle of the room flashed Arab news, the president and his advisers Elliott Abrams and Josh Bolten went native, lounging in floor-length, fur-lined robes, as if they were Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.
In Abu Dhabi, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan gave the president — dubbed “the Wolf of the Desert” by a Kuwaiti poet — a gigantic necklace made of gold, diamonds, rubies and emeralds, so gaudy and cumbersome that even the Secret Service agent carrying it seemed nonplussed. Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave.
Time’s Massimo Calabresi described the Kuwaiti emir’s residence where W. dined Friday as “crass class”: “Loud paintings of harems and the ruling Sabah clan hang near Louis XVI enameled clocks and candlesticks in the long hallways.” ++
Chertoff Permanently Installs Hand-Picked DHS Staffers, ‘Overextending His
Influence’ After 2008
Think Progress
1/16
Since its establishment in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been plagued by incompetent political appointees. As late as last year, ABC News noted that DHS was still “a political dumping ground,” with 350 White House-appointed staffers (compared to just 64 at the Department of Veteran Affairs).
For the past five years, the Bush administration has refused to fire these cronies. Yet last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that all of a sudden, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff had decided to replace many political appointees with career staffers. The reason for the White House’s sudden turnaround? According to Chertoff, they want to create a smooth transition for the next administration:
“We should not let ourselves drop the ball on the handoff,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a recent interview, adding that his department has assembled “something unusual from a historical standpoint” in its plans to hand over a fully-functioning homeland-security operation to the next administration.
Based on the administration’s track record, however, its real intentions may be less than magnanimous. The Wall Street Journal notes that the “transition planning may be perceived by the next administration as an effort by Homeland Security Chief Chertoff to overextend his influence.”
Instead of being able to appoint new, competent officials, the next administration will be stuck with Chertoff’s last-minute choices. Government-bureacracy specialist Paul Light at New York University notes:
- The incoming administration may well ask whether or not the career person was appointed on the basis of merit or on the basis of political connections. That creates quite a bit of tension.
Additionally, ThinkProgress spoke with a former Pentagon official who noted that at the end of many administrations, political appointees often choose to become career officials and continue their government work. By doing this, Chertoff’s cronies may be further entrenching themselves at DHS.
Will Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee investigate this issue? (Given his track record, probably not.) ++
Don’t Tie the Next President’s Hands
NYT Editorial
January 17, 2008
President Bush is discussing a new agreement with Baghdad that would govern the deployment of American troops in Iraq. With so many Americans adamant about bringing our forces home as soon as possible, a sentiment we strongly share, Mr. Bush must not be allowed to tie the hands of his successor and ensure the country’s continued involvement in an open-ended war.
Given what’s at stake in Iraq in terms of American and Iraqi lives lost, national treasure and broad national security interests, the negotiations on any new agreement must be fully transparent — which they are not. The national debate must be vigorous and thoughtful, and then Congress must vote on whatever deal results.
The White House and the Iraqi government decided in December to pursue the pact as a way to define long-term relations between the two countries, including the legal status of American military forces in Iraq. The ostensible goal is a more durable political, economic and security relationship than is possible under a United Nations resolution, the current international legal basis for the American military presence in Iraq.
Iraqi officials, increasingly unhappy with restrictions on sovereignty because of the presence of 160,000 foreign troops, have said that they won’t extend the United Nations mandate beyond this year. A Washington-Baghdad deal would have to take its place for the troops to stay.
Formal negotiations won’t start until February and few details are known, but already the two sides are laying down markers. The Iraqi defense minister, Abdul Qadir — apparently tone-deaf to the American political debate — told The Times’s Thom Shanker that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012 or be able to defend its own borders from external threat at least until 2018.
That is far too long for most Americans, but not for Mr. Bush, who is quite comfortable leaving American troops fighting in Iraq for another decade.
A related issue concerns whether the agreement would grant assurances that America would help Iraq defend against foreign aggression — something a senior White House official says has not been ruled out. That’s a worrying prospect. Such guarantees could further encourage Iraqi dependence on the American military and might draw the United States into a regional conflict. Among other questions still to be answered are how long the United States wants basing rights in Iraq and how it might assuage Iraqis demanding the right to try American troops and contractors accused of killing civilians and other misdeeds. (The United States almost always brings troops home for trial.)
Mr. Bush is rushing to complete a deal before he leaves office in January 2009. That is just as reckless and irresponsible as most of his decisions regarding Iraq. America’s interests demand that his successor has maximum flexibility to plot a course, which we hope includes a quick and orderly withdrawal of troops. One way to ensure that flexibility is to make sure that Congress approves any deal with Iraq, as leading Democrats, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, are insisting. The time for Congressional intervention is now. ++
George of Arabia: Better Kiss Your Abe ‘Goodbye’
Greg Palast
January 16th, 2008
Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.
Those bills in your billfold aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.
It’s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah’s camel.
Let’s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote ‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.
What’s really behind Bush’s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.
Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.
Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.
Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.
The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America’s private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah’s nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government’s Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It’s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah’s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.
Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai’s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi’s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.
So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn’t matter a twit whether it’s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi’s past Chairman.
It’s the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that’s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors’ interest burden quintupled in just two years.
As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:
- “The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. … There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”
In 2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars ($252 billion) for oil - and the USA received back 100% of it - and then some ($311 billion) via Gulf nations’ investment in US Treasury bills and purchases of US businesses and property. Bush’s trip to Abdullah’s tent is all about this vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.
The Bush Administration, rather than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back to us - so the party never has to stop.
It has been reported that the President’s Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts: Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas tanks. ++
Presidential Records Act - Without A Trace
Bush Admin. admits to destroying e-mails from start of Iraq War, Leak of Valerie Wilson’s name and DOJ investigation of leak
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washing [CREW]
16 January 2008
Very, very late last night, just before midnight, the Bush administration submitted a filing in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, our lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails. We first documented the massive loss of White House e-mails in our April 2007 report, WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act.
The latest filing from the Bush administration raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer. (The filing from the White House and related documents can be found here.) This is how CREW’s chief counsel, Anne Weismann, described the situation:
- With this new filing, the White House has admitted that although it has long known about the missing emails, it did nothing to recover them, or discover how and why they went missing in the first place. The missing emails are important historical records that belong not to the Bush administration, but to the American people. As a result, the public deserves a full accounting and hopefully, now that the matter is before a federal court, we will get one.
The White House has now admitted that it does not have an effective system for storing and preserving emails. This is no mere technicality; it is this failure that led to the likely destruction of over 10 million email. What the White House has not explained is why it abandoned the electronic record-keeping system used by the prior administration — a system that properly preserved White House email — but did not replace it with another effective and appropriate system.
The White House has also admitted that the only safeguard it has to its patently inadequate method for preserving email (dumping them in files that are put on EOP servers) is back-up tape media. These back-up copies, however, are only a “snapshot” of what was on the server at the time of the back-up. In other words they are not comprehensive, as the White House concedes.
Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes — instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President — at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.
The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.
The White House now claims there is a lack of documentation supporting both the fact that email are missing and the volume of missing email. Yet in January 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, in a letter to Scooter Libby’s lawyers, stated unequivocally: “We have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.” Moreover, when the problem was uncovered the White House Office of Administration created abundant documentation that included multiple estimates of the volume of missing email, not a single chart that the White House now suggests is the only documentation. Could it be that having now destroyed
the evidence documenting the missing email problem, the White House feels free to retreat from its acknowledgment to Mr. Fitzgerald that White House emails are missing?
Also missing from the White House’s latest explanation of the missing email is why, more than two years after it discovered the problem, the White House still cannot say what happened, why it happened and how many email were affected. And the White House has yet to offer an explanation for why it never acted to recover any of the missing emails, even when presented with a recovery plan by its own Office of Administration.
It is perfectly clear why the White House has used every strategic maneuver it can think of to avoid answering any questions about the missing email: its answers are likely to raise more questions than they answer. That, years after the problem was discovered, the White House is still questioning whether or not there is even a problem is deeply disturbing. ++
Bush Attempts Illegal Override of Court Order Protecting Whales from Sonar
Unprecedented Waiver Imperils Marine Mammals; White House Snubs California, Federal Courts and Congress
The Natural Resources Defense Council
January 16, 2008
LOS ANGELES – The Bush administration yesterday attempted to override a federal court order requiring the U.S. Navy to minimize harm to whales and dolphins during upcoming sonar exercises off Southern California. In an effort to nullify measures established to protect marine mammals from potentially lethal sound blasts, President Bush gave the Navy an unprecedented waiver under the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), and allowed the Navy a second “emergency” waiver under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Those statutes are the basis of a January 3 injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, requiring the Navy to monitor for and avoid marine mammals while operating high-intensity, mid-frequency sonar during the “SOCAL” naval exercises, now underway.
“There is absolutely no justification for this,” said California Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan. “Both the court and the Coastal Commission have said that the Navy can carry out its mission as well as protect the whales. This is a slap in the face to Californians who care about the oceans.”
Judge Cooper ruled that the Navy’s scheme to mitigate harm had been “grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure” in Southern California’s rich biological waters. Her injunction required the Navy to maintain a 12 nautical mile no-sonar buffer zone along the California coastline; to shut down sonar when marine mammals were spotted within 2,000 meters; and to monitor for marine mammals using various methods, among other measures.
The waivers would eliminate all of the court-ordered mitigations under the pretext of “emergency.” In fact, no emergency conditions exist: The SOCAL exercises are routine training drills planned long in advance, but without meeting legal standards. Indeed the exercises were challenged by the California Coastal Commission and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) a year ago.
Moreover, the court did not issue a blanket injunction, but instead produced a carefully tailored order that enables the Navy to conduct sonar training using the common-sense mitigations, many of which the Navy had already employed in previous exercises.
“The President’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at NRDC, which obtained the injunction against the Navy. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the President is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission, and a ruling by the federal court.”
Both waivers must survive court review for the Navy to legally ignore the injunction. However, the waiver under NEPA is illegal, according to NRDC, because that statute does not include an escape clause for the executive branch, as some statutes do.
“This is not a national security issue. The Navy doesn’t need to harm whales to train effectively with sonar. It simply chooses to for the sake of convenience,” said Mr. Reynolds. “By following the carefully crafted measures ordered by the court, the Navy could conduct its exercises without imperiling marine mammals. Instead, it is attempting to circumvent the court and our environmental laws through presidential fiat. These waivers are unnecessary and we doubt they will both survive judicial review.”
For more information about the effect of sonar on marine mammals, see “Sounding the Depths II: The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life” ++
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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