Thursday, September 14, 2006

How Bush made of the last remaining superpower a banana republic

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Nothing said by Bush about Iraq has been true. Nothing said by Bush about 911 has been true. Nothing said by Bush about the "war on terrorism" has been true. All are lies. Let's take them one by one.

Bush said Saddam had WMD! He didn't. Bush has repeatedly tried to link Iraq with the war on terrorism. Bunkum. Even Bush has admitted of late that Saddam had nothing to do with 911 and, within a week, Bushies were back on the liar's trail again with yet another absurd spin: Iraq is a part of the war on terrorism —a blatant and nonsensical lie. Besides, if Iraq —a debacle —is part and parcel of the war on terrorism, then what is to be said of the "war on terrorism"?

The war on terrorism, therefore, is as catastrophically failed as is the Iraq occupation. Bush has not identified an enemy in either war and his implication that we are killing "terrorists" in Iraq is a lie. Insurgents are not terrorists; they are guerillas resisting an illegal occupation —their right under international law. Compounding Bush's failure is the fact that Bush is creating enemies in Iraq. One wonders —how many more allies and friends might this nation have if demogogues had not needed enemies more?

Bush apologists claim that if we don't fight them there, we'll fight them here! Who is "them"? I wonder. Certainly, the some 140,000 civilians whose murder was ordered by George W. Bush would never have made their way to the United States in order kill a single American. Bush and his apologists know their cover story is a lie but they tell it anyway.

The Bush administration has witnessed a deteriorating situation in Iraq even though Saddam is jail and on trial. So —who's to blame? Saddam? No! George W. Bush and his incompetent policies.

“The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power,” Bush says not with a straight-face, but with a smirk. "He was a clear threat,” Bush says. To whom? I put it to his forum: Iraqis were better off under Saddam than under the incompetent and brutal occupation of the US military. Secondly, Bush's body count among Iraqi civilians is most certainly higher than that of Saddam, called a "brutal dictator" by Bush.

Dick Cheney chimes in: "...the world is better off" without Saddam. Rather, the entire world would be even better off without Bush.

Not only Iraqi civilians but American soldiers too have paid with their lives for Bush's incompetence and stupidity. For the most part, these soldiers are from the millions of US citizens literally robbed by GOP "trickle down" economics. No Child Left Behind is GOP-speak for Every Child for Him/Herself. When the future consists of flippin' burgers or greeting Wal-Mart shoppers, who is not seduced by empty promises and wars that look like video games?

Bush tells Matt Lauer that he is protecting American citizens! The truth is Bush creates enemies faster than he can murder them. But let's look at this from another angle. Who protects us from the Bush —a man who wages war on Americans by destroying jobs and opportunities? by plotting to destroy the retirement of older Americans? by leaving New Orleans to its fate? by putting the tax burden on any one lucky enough to find a job?

Bush/Cheney tell you that Iraq is a central front in the mythic —if not mythical —war on terrorism. This is cruelest lie of all! Wager: when we pull out, terrorism in Iraq ceases! Moreover, as I have written repeatedly, if Iraq was not a hot bed of terrorism before the US invaded, it is now. Rational people would draw the correct conclusion that Bush's war of naked aggression is the world's number one cause of terrorism. That was so during Ronald Reagan's similarly failed war and I have previously cited the FBI stats to prove it.

The Middle East is not merely aflame it is destabilized. Three civil wars rage in Iraq and American troops are caught in the cross fire. Credible sources support the conclusion that the world has very narrowly averted World War III. Bush gave Ehud Olmert a green light to attack Hebollah on the pretext of avenging the alleged kidnapping of Israeli soldiers inside Israel. Oddly, however, the story changed in later versions. The original AP story stated that the soldiers in question were captured inside Lebanon —not Israel. Who attacked who? Bush, meanwhile, urged Olmert to attack Syria. By that time, Olmert must have seen a debacle in the making and refused to take the bait. An attack on Syria would most certainly have been intended to draw Iran into the conflict. World War III? Possibly! Was Bush trying to start it? Possibly!

The US, meanwhile, is increasingly isolated and reviled. We have not helped our case by torturing people upon no evidence or probable cause. We have not helped our case by making stupid comments about how "we" —the world's last remaining superpower —are not obliged to International Law but all other nations are! We have not helped our case by demonizing allies like France. We have not helped our case by being hypocrites. We have not helped our case by acting like stupid, spoiled brats.

The war on Iraq is a complete and utter disaster, a quagmire of biblical proportions and the entire world knows that to be the case. It is bad form for Bush to strut around like a bantam rooster on hormones. It is counter-productive for the world's last remaining superpower to hold a nuke over another nation's head and rub their noses in Bush's excrement. It does not help our case that Bush cannot define the enemy in Iraq. Who is it? Is it the Kurds, who want autonomy in the north west? Is it the Shias, who want dominance in Baghdad? Is it the Sunnis, who likewise want control over central Iraq? And why does the US wish to get involved with purely internal and largely sectarian controversies that only Iraqis can sort out for themselves? And, finally, what has all that to do with "terrorism". Nothing!

The world is sick and tired of this mountebank, this demagogue, this poser, this fraud who dares to threaten the world. Billions the world over have seen the naked emperor and called his bluff. Billions have had enough of a talent-less mediocrity who dares to lecture his betters.

That Bush may have no regrets about Irag says more about Bush's pathology than it does about the cause, if cause there be for mass murder, war crimes, oil theft, and lies. Bush has no regrets because he is utterly without humanity or empathy. Thousands have died for Bush's vainglorious dreams of conquest and military glory. The attack and invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation, was and remains a war crime. It was Dr. Gustav Gilbert, the allies Nuremberg psychologist, who said that evil is an utter lack of empathy. That is a perfect description of the man who usurped the White House and made of this last remaining superpower nothing more than a banana republic.

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great?

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare



U.S. to Bush: Get yourself a good lawyer; you're gonna need one!

There may be probable cause to try George W. Bush for capital crimes. Bush is losing it. He's combative, belligerent, rambling, disconnected and overtly defensive. He's desperately trying to come up with various defenses on various fronts —all ex post facto. One is tempted to tell him: give up, George! Surrender to the authorities! You get one phone call; use it to get in touch in Jim Baker. Get your lies straight!

The issue is torture —a heinous act that Bush insists on calling "...an alternative set of procedures". Interviewed by Matt Lauer, Bush tried to justify torture as necessary even as he denied that the US was torturing. Bush tried to avoid the question: if torture is "legal", then why did the US try to keep it secret throughout Eastern Europe? Bush may choose to refer to torture by some Orwellian term. The rest of us know the truth of it! In the name of decency and humanity, we will call the US program of atrocity what it is: war crimes!

Bush openly claims the right to torture —at his personal discretion. The dictatorial powers that he claims —work against him. They make him personally culpable for all crimes that follow from his lead, his example, his direction.

All the various lies are now laid bare —that abuses were perpetrated by low-level grunts; that the US was/is above the Geneva Convention, that the Geneva Convention did not apply, that the Nuremberg Principles could not restrain the mighty US, that soldiers were ignorant or poorly trained when prisoners were beaten, abused, tortured, water boarded, or humiliated. All were lies!

Despite the fact that the truth is now known, Bush gets in Matt Lauer's face and declares that he is protecting the people of the United States, that the US —under his incompetent misrule —is going to torture people when he —the decider —sees fit, and that whenever he is questioned, his word is final. Even if that were true, Bush makes enemies abroad faster than he can murder them in our name. Bush's irrational statements convict him. At the very least, they are —in themselves —probable cause to bring him to trial for capital crimes, crimes against the peace, war crimes.

Here's Bush in his aggressive/defensive/thin-skinned mode, interviewed by Matt Lauer:

A war is lost when atrocities begin. There are good reasons to believe that US atrocities began with the US invasion of Afghanistan. Bush was referring to Afghanistan when he said of victims of US aggression:
Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way —they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

—George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003

If by "different fate", Bush means summary executions of Afghan citizens, he is in violation of US Codes; Title 18, § 2441. War crimes
(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

—Cornell Law School, US Code Collection, US Codes; Title 18, § 2441. War crimes

It is no wonder that Bush is agitated and defensive under Lauer's cross examination. Capital crimes are a serious matter. That there is probable cause that capital crimes have been committed —even more so.

I suggest a complete reading of the Geneva Conventions relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. But here is a small portion which flies in the face of the numerous lies that are told about Geneva by Bush partisans:

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

...

Article 13

Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. In particular, no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.

Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited.

—Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

As four US Supreme Court justices agreed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld recently, Article 75 is “indisputably part of the customary international law.””[see:Marjorie Cohn Israel Creates Humanitarian Crisis].

A war is lost when those perpetrating a war of aggression question the patriotism of legitimate critics. Recently Donald Rumsfeld called the Democratic opposition "Nazi appeasers". In the meantime, Bush denies having committed the very crimes he now wants to make legal. Why would he want to do that, if he were not guilty?

His efforts are futile. Such a law —an ex post facto law —is specifically and unambiguously prohibited in Article 1 of the US Constitution:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

—Article 1, US Constitution

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took a strong stand against torture. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre said of torture that it was intended "...to reduce men to vermin". Like the US in Iraq, the French used torture to suppress the Algerian resistance. Like the Bush administration, the French denied the practice even as they declared its effectiveness against the Algerian Liberation Front. Sartre, however, was true to his avowed "existentialism", urging others others to ask of themselves as he asked of himself: what would I do if I were tortured!

If we Americans are to hold on to what's left of our humanity, we simply must learn to think objectively about Bush and about the role our nation now plays throughout the world. Are we, in fact, a force for good —or evil? We must be honest if Bush is not! There is, indeed, a choice to make but not the one falsely framed by Bush. We must demand that the atrocities end now! We must rise up and demand that the United States withdraw immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan! We must demand full and transparent investigations into every outrage perpetrated by Bush in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere! We must ask of ourselves as Sartre asked of himself: What would we do if we were tortured by the armed forces of a belligerant aggressor nation?

Some updates:

EU tensions over CIA prisons

From correspondents in Brussels
September 16, 2006

THE European Union has declared that secret prisons run throughout the world by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are against international law.

"The existence of secret detention facilities where detained persons are kept in a legal vacuum is not in conformity with international humanitarian law and international criminal law," the EU presidency said.

"We reiterate that in combating terrorism human rights and humanitarian standards have to be maintained," said Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja after chairing a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

US President George W. Bush admitted last week for the first time that the US Central Intelligence Agency covertly held prisoners in overseas camps, reports of which had been publicly denied by many of the countries involved.

He also defended the interrogation tactics used by the CIA.

Mr Tuomioja said the issue had been raised at the meeting by Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot.

"The European Union reiterates its commitment to combating terrorism effectively using all legal means and instruments available. Terrorism is itself a threat to our values based on the rule of law," Mr Tuomioja said.

On Thursday, a European parliamentarian probing the suspected secret CIA prisons denounced Bush and members of his administration as liars.

"I am stunned that he lied to us for months. Mrs (US Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice lied to the European Council," Italian socialist deputy Claudio Fava told other members of the investigating commission. ...

Bush Takes Security Push to Capitol Hill

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 14, 2006

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the House speaker, heading into a meeting with the G.O.P. members of the House.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A rebellious Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday and approved terror-detainee legislation he has vowed to block, deepening Republican conflict over terrorism and national security in the middle of election season.

Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, normally a Bush supporter, pushed the measure through his Armed Services Committee by a 15-9 vote, with Warner and three other GOP lawmakers joining Democrats. The vote set the stage for a showdown on the Senate floor as early as next week.

Earlier in the day, Bush had journeyed to the Capitol to try nailing down support for his own version of the legislation.

''I will resist any bill that does not enable this program to go forward with legal clarity,'' Bush said at the White House.

The president's measure would go further than the Senate package in allowing classified evidence to be withheld from defendants in terror trials, using coerced testimony and protecting U.S. interrogators against prosecution for using methods that violate the Geneva Conventions.

The internal GOP struggle intensified along other fronts, too, as Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, declared his opposition to the president's plan.

''The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,'' Powell, a retired general who is also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter. ...

Sidney Blumenthal Calls George W. Bush 'The Most Uniquely Radical President We’ve Ever Had'

Why do I call him a radical? I call him a radical because he is undertaking a fundamental transformation of our Constitutional system of government and of our longstanding policies that have been accepted for literally generations. He thinks to concentrate unaccountable power in the Executive. He thinks you alter the laws so that, as Commander in Chief, he can determine, under what he says are wartime conditions, what the laws are, which laws should be enforced, and declare by fiat what our policy should be, even abrogating longstanding international treaties.

This is a long project whose main driver is the Vice President, Dick Cheney. Bush has overthrown a sixty-year consensus on foreign policy. He has exhibited hostility to science that no other president has ever displayed. He has adopted a formal policy of so-called preemptive, first-strike attack that was rejected openly by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. And he has deliberately polarized and divided the country for political purposes, politicizing the most basic questions of war and peace for partisan advantage. Those are some of the policies and politics he’s pursued that lead me to call him the most uniquely radical president we’ve ever had in the White House.

—Sydney Blumenthal, Buzzflash Interview

How Bush Rules: Bush's Radicalism is Leading to a GOP Crackup

The inescapable signs of disillusionment surrounding the Bush administration in its sixth year, facing a second mid-term election, suggest far more than the usual syndrome of incumbent weariness. These are the rumblings of a regime crisis.

President Bush's whole party bears the burden of his accumulated self-generated difficulties not only because of their overwhelming scale but also because the Republicans have sustained disciplined one-party rule in which congressional oversight has been largely suppressed.

The congressional Republicans' feeble assertion of institutional authority has made changing the Congress the only way to revive it and check and balance Bush's radical presidency during his remaining two years.

Bush's radicalism dominates policy and politics, as I document in my book new How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.

His all-encompassing "war on terror," conflating the disparate al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iraqi insurgency as "a single movement," is also reflected in his dismissal of diplomatic and political solutions, urgently advocated by U.S. military commanders in Iraq for years, and Vice President Dick Cheney's sneering denigration of "law enforcement" in favor of the militarization of policy. ...

Additional Resources:






The Existentialist Cowboy

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Bush's Orwellian campaign of deception, distraction, and linguistic legerdemain

Right out of George Orwell's 1984, George Bush comes up with another Orwellian corker: torture is no longer torture; it's an "alternative set of procedures".

Bush is a coward —afraid to call torture what it is: torture. Bush talks about torture obliquely, in language reminiscent of his state of the union address of 2003 when he talked about the treatment and, quite possibly, the deliberate murder, of thousands of detainees presumably captured in Afghanistan. At the time, Bush said:

"Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way —they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies".

—George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003

Bush is back in that newspeak mode referring not to a "different fate" (murder?) but calling torture an "alternative set of procedures".
We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used--I think you understand why--if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

George W. Bush, Text of President Bush's speech, September 07, 2006

In other words: torture! Let me address the following comment directly to George W. Bush. NO, Bush, torture procedures DO NOT comply with our laws, our constitution, or our treaty obligations. In fact, torture itself blatantly violates ALL of the above. Torture is repugnant to American values, decency, morality and civilization. Civilized nations do not torture. Legitimate administrations do not torture. Barbaric, cruel nations do. Torture, which you have not the courage to call by name, is an offense, an affront to our very basic "American" values.

As Spencer Ackerman wrote, Bush continues to exploit the ignorance of the American people. The truth of the matter is this: there is no need to torture anyone; nor is it effective. Intelligence gathered by torture is notoriously inaccurate and often misleading. As Bush said of evil, I say of Bush's un-American program of torture: if it is not evil then what is?

Bush wants to continue his program of torture and wants the congress to change the laws so that he can. Bush had already broken the law; his torture program was denounced by a federal court. In the face of laws, morality, and American values, Bush urges Congress to pass a terrorist surveillance act. It will give Bush the authority he wants to try what Bush expects us to believe are "al-Qaeda detainees" currently held in secret CIA facilities throughout Eastern Europe. The existence of this gulag archipelago was denied vociferously but now it is openly admitted because Bush holds out hope for an ex post facto law. Bush had to admit his crime but only because it was the only way he could get congress to make legal the crimes he's already committed. I read the Constitution. Congress has not the power to pass ex post facto laws of any sort.

When Bush is not playing Orwellian language games to hide the truth, he is telling bald faced lies:

Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations.

George W. Bush, Remarks by the President on Iraq Cincinnati Museum Center - Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, Ohio, White House.gov

Here's yet another corker from the same speech:
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
And this absurdity from his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September, 2002:
And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.

—George W. Bush, UN Speech

Events have proven those statements untrue. Bush found it necessary to link Iraq with terrorism for several reasons. Members of his own administration had already identified Al Qaeda as responsible for 911. From the get go, Bush wanted to attack Iraq where the terrorists weren't; he needed to figure out a way to pin 911 on Saddam. It was a problem for Bush that almost no terrorists exist in the United States. [See: Foreign Affairs, Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?, John Mueller] Bush needed a fall guy!

At last, even members of Congress will allow that Bush deliberately hoaxed the Congress and the public. If this is not treasonable and impeachable, what is? Must Bush solicit oral sex that this nation might be saved two more years in which Bush wages dangerous, heedless, reckless war upon the entire world?

At last, Bush has employed every evil to achieve his goal of global domination. Most pernicious among these evils is the right wing debasement of language to obscure, to distort, to pervert. No one can be free when language is defiled. Language is liberty.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

—William Hazlett, 1778

Rockefeller: Bush Duped Public On Iraq

CBS News Exclusive: W.Va. Senator Says Iraq Would Be Better Off With Saddam In Power

Sept. 9, 2006

(CBS) When the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified version of its findings this past week, the Republican chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts, left town without doing interviews, calling the report a rehash of unfounded partisan allegations.

Its statements like this one, made Feb. 5, 2003, by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell that have become so controversial, implying Iraq was linked to terror attacks."Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants," Powell said.

But after 2 1/2 years of reviewing pre-war intelligence behind closed doors, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who voted for the Iraq War, says the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone's eyes.

"The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said 'we want to go to war,'" Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. "Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said 'my vote was wrong.'"

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'"
Because Bush exploits fear with lies, his entire administration has taken on an hysterical tinge of late, born, no doubt, of Bush's own knowledge that he is a fraud.

In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal

Millions to Go to Digging Up Dirt on Democrats

By Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006; Page A01

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads. ...

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear

September 10, 2006

BY MONROE ANDERSON

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaeda's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again. ...

We best observe the anniversary of 911 by reflecting upon the fraudulent nature of Bush's various "wars" —his war of deception, distraction, and Orwellian legerdemain. Just how great is the so-called terrorist threat? I am confident that you will find many authoritative sources for the following fact: your chances of getting killed by a terrorist are about point 0000001%. And we gave up our freedom for that?






The Existentialist Cowboy

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Bush's new "offensive": old lies wrapped up in newer desperation, hubris, arrogance and bigotry


by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Charles Gibson of ABC pressed the issue: what had Iraq to do with 911? Bush leaned forward aggressively and shot back: I just told you!! Oh ..well!!! That clears up everything, doesn't it?

Bush's new offensive is summed up thus: repeat the same old lies but do it belligerently! The same old lies —no argument, no facts, no evidence! You are expected to take the word of a proven liar who, faced with an unprecedented national debacle, goes back to the well, summoning the old bogeyman: terrorism! Here's Bush's new package of old lies:
In the war on terror, we face a global enemy.
—Bush
But who is the enemy? Is it the people of Afghanistan? The people of Iraq? Evil doers? Why don't we start with the "evil doers" in Bushco? Or —perhaps Bush prefers to murder them in order to save the infidel souls that he has "liberated"!
And if we were not fighting this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle; they would be plotting and trying to kill Americans across the world and within our own borders.
—Bush
That's the if we don't fight them there, we will have to fight them here argument. Bush is lying again. No one —certainly not the administration —has made the case that there were "terrorists" in Iraq before the US invaded. What are improperly called "terrorists" or "insurgents" by Bush are, in fact, guerillas resisting by whatever means an illegal, oppressive occupation. Such a resistance is recognized as legitimate by International law and is, therefore, not terrorism.
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms,—never! never! never!
--William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. (1708–1778), Speech to Parliament, Nov. 18, 1777
Those not making up the guerrilla resistance to the US are of three remaining groups: Kurds fighting for control of the northwest; Shi'ites and Sunnis fighting one another for control of Baghdad. What is that if not civil war? Bush either does not understand this or is deliberately misstating the facts in order to mislead the American people.
Against this enemy there can be no compromise, so we will fight them in Iraq, we will fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.
—Bush
Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warns of this "clash of civilizations" rhetoric; if Bush continues, warns Brzezinski, the US may find itself on the losing side of just such a confrontation. The term "Islamo-fascism" is a made up word —the work of paid GOP focus groups and the right wing blogosphere. There is no such thing. It is pure and misleading propaganda designed to conceal the true nature of the conflict just as the term "insurgent" conceals the nature of Iraqi resistance to the US occupation.

Even if there were such a thing as "Islamo-fascism", how are we to know who to murder and who to spare? "Islamo-fascism" has its roots in racism, jingoism, and bigotry, just as do the terms "raghead" and "sand nigger". Islam is insulted and ought to be. As the bigot that he is, Bush has denied humanity to millions if not billions of the world's population.

Victory, meanwhile, seems even more elusive now than ever. Some three years after a Blitzkrieg called "Shock and Awe" more than 2,300 Americans are dead and more than 17,000 wounded. Iraqi causalities vary but the best estimates are some 40,000 dead from "Shock and Awe" alone; total dead between 100,000 to 140,000.

Of course Bush will exploit the terrorism card again. The opinion surveys reveal growing disenchantment, impatience with a war that is increasingly associated with torture, atrocities, escalating death, horror, and the absolutely unacceptable deprivations that the US has forced upon a civilian population.

There is no justification for what the US has done to the people of Iraq.
Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 911; Saddam doesn't even like Bin Laden, a right winger, a creation of the American CIA. Saddam had no WMD. Saddam's Iraq had not been a haven for "terrorists" before the US invaded, and even now, most of the so-called "terrorists" are guerillas who oppose an aggressive war by the United States. No ex post facto rationale put forward by Bush has ever, in any way, justified the heinous level of deprivation and horror exacted upon that civilian population by Bush.

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is absolutely correct: Bush is bogged down in the Iraq quagmire because he doesn't understand the nature of the conflict, the nature of Middle East politics, the subtleties of Middle Eastern culture. Speaking on NPR this weekend, Brzezinski, characterized Bush's recent statements as hubris and ignorance. Brzezinski had earlier stated that the US would lose a war of attrition. We have already lost our legitimacy.

Another Bush lie implies that the US is involved in a struggle to bring democracy to Iraq. That's the lie; now here's the truth: if the Middle East never becomes democratic , it will be because Bush has made a dirty word of "democracy". Throughout the Middle East, you will find this admonition: "Be nice to America....or it will bring 'democracy' to you!"

By violating all democratic principles to wage war of naked aggression against Iraq, Bush lost! Villages are not saved by destroying them; democracy is not defended when it is subverted. When the US is eventually forced to withdraw ignominiously from Iraq, it will have lost all credibility, all influence, and, most tragically, its own democracy at home. If it were true that terrorists "just hate freedom", then Bush succeeded where every terrorist failed!

The US is now thought to be the most dangerous nation on earth. Even our closest ally —Britain —will soon rid itself of the once promising Tony Blair who owes his demise to his association with George W. Bush.
Now I would like to say very briefly that in my view, that war which was a war of choice is already a serious moral set back to the United States. A moral set back both in how we start, how it was justified, and because of some of the egregious incidents that have accompanied this proceeding.
The moral costs to the United States are high. It’s a political setback. The United States has never been involved in an intervention in its entire history like it is today. It is also a military set back. “Mission Accomplished” are words that many in this administration want to forget.
—Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Charting a U.S. Foreign Policy Road Map for 2005 and Beyond 
Desperate to link Iraq to his phantom menace, the "war on terrorism" and, more recently, the "war on Islamo-fascism", Bush has become a war criminal under international law and a capital-crime felon under US criminal codes. When he can no longer hide behind the Presidential seal, Bush may very well find himself in the dock, charged with capital crimes. [See  U.S. Codes, Title 18, 2441]

The issue is not only aggressive war but torture. Contrary to the official cover story, George W. Bush authorized torture with a memo of Feb. 7, 2002. His deliberate act violates both Geneva and the above cited US criminal codes that were approved by a Republican-led Congress in 1996. Now that Bush has at last admitted the existence of the torture camps that his administration had initially denied, he seems more prosecutable than ever.
So let's take a step back and analyze what just happened.
  • First of all, Bush instantly pissed off what few European allies he had left, because he told them that the secret prisons didn't exist.
  • Bush once again painted himself as a liar. He might as well be wearing a sign reading "I cannot be trusted".
  • Not only did he lie about the existence of the secret prisons, but he must have also lied about the torturing of detainees. He has denied all along that "we don't torture", but the only reason for shipping them off to non-US territories is to have them out of the bounds of US laws & protections. Bottom line - of course they're being tortured.
  • In the process of admitting to secret "black-site" prisons, and having 'renditioned' these detainees for 'special interrogation', Bush is also pushing for congressional action to allow for a change in the Geneva Conventions and military tribunals. The Supreme Court has already ruled against this, but now Bush is trying to change the laws... right now... in a hurry... in time for the November election. Gee, could it be that Bush is politicizing his tough-on-terrorism rhetoric for GOP advantage?
  • Public Affair Magazine
 Now —appallingly —Bush insists upon "staying a course" when there is no course to stay. Old lies are no truer now than they were then. Bush insists upon miring the US in a Middle East quagmire in which there is not only no victory but no definition of one. Bush insists upon staying the course when, in fact, his incompetent administration has failed to define the "enemy" beyond an infantile description of "evil doers" and "terrorists".

Bush has committed the United States to a perpetual war that it has already lost, from which it cannot withdraw with honor, and cannot stay with even less. Whatever campaign of un-American aggression Bush has committed this nation to, I can tell you that it is not war. It is, rather, bloody murder —a campaign of aggression, oil theft, and imperial, vainglorious hubris. As Pogo said: "We have seen the enemy and he is us!" Bush has made of us Nazis!

We are the aggressors! We will not win! We will not have deserved to win! Bush has damned the US to a perpetual, un-winnable conflict which Bush does not and cannot understand, against a mythic enemy which Bush has not and cannot define, with tactics which do not and will never address reality!

Additional resources:
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Monday, September 04, 2006

Hezbollah will rebuild Southern Lebanon faster than Bushco will rebuild New Orleans

In another year, New Orleans will still be a shadow of its former self —if it survives at all. More effort has been spent making excuses than restoring one of America's great cities. There will be more empty words and over the course of another year nothing will have changed. In the meantime, there is Southern Lebanon —already rebounding with help from an organization that Bush deems "terrorist".

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the force fighting and defending the villages, at the same time started helping the population as soon as the Israeli bombing began. The Lebanese resistance provided the ambulances and scores of searchers who pulled people from the rubble. They helped organize getting tens of thousands of refugees to schools, public parks and private homes. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 16)

In Beirut alone, Hezbollah organized 10 mobile medical teams that cared for 14 schools each, in two-day rotations, helping 48,000 people. Another 70,000 were treated in houses by other professionals.

In a Hezbollah kitchen near downtown Beirut, volunteers prepared 8,000 hot meals a day—part of a daily total of 50,000 they distributed across Beirut, reported the Monitor.

In New Orleans, families evacuated from the Superdome and the Convention Center were scattered all over the country. Parents were sometimes separated from children. Some didn’t know if loved ones lived or died. Three months after Katrina hit, 6,500 people were still unaccounted for, and more than 400 bodies still unidentified, according to the National Center for Missing Adults.

—Joyce Chediac, Lebanon rebuilds, New Orleans waits

So —who are the terrorists? Bushco or Hezbollah?

If I had been a New Orleans resident victimized by the shoddy job done by the US Army Corps of Engineers and, later, by the Bush gang of crooks and incompetents, I might be inclined to call the US government a terrorist organization.

If I were an Iraqi citizen with family members among some 140,000 civilians murdered in Bush's initial wave of bombings —Shock and Awe —I might be inclined to call Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld terrorists.

If I had family members murdered in cold blood by US troops at Haditha, I might be inclined to label the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld a terrorist organization.

If I should find myself thrown into Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or an Eastern European gulag where I am tortured, sodomized, electrocuted, humiliated or, possibly, murdered, I might be inclined to use the term "terrorists" to describe and denote Bush, the Pentagon, the Military/Industrial Complex, a private army of un-accountable private contractors, and the enablers of the GOP!

Significant progress by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon will finish Bush politically at a time when the US has no leverage anywhere in the world. Surely, no one believed Bush when he declared Hezbollah defeated; by contrast, probably everyone believed Hezbollah when it declared "victory". Bush is testy and anxious and it shows. Billions of people know him to be a liar, a fraud, a war criminal, and an incompetent!

How did Hezbollah —called "terrorist" by Bush —win? For one thing, Hezbollah was in much better touch with its "base" than Bush with anyone but a tiny, wealthy elite. Hezbollah began a defense of villages as soon as Israel began a widespread bombing campaign. When Bush is forced by reality and an increasingly livid American populace to pull out of Iraq, who will undo the harm done there by Bush and his criminal gang?

Who will rebuild Baghdad?

Will we withdraw the troops and send in FEMA?

Can Brownie do a heckuva job in Baghdad where everyone else has failed?

Will anyone go to Baghdad in order to take the fall for Bush?

I suppose Bush hasn't thought that far down the road. It might have been David Hume who said that there is a moral imperative to be intelligent. Iraq was a "war of choice". Likewise, Bush's stupidity is the result of a deliberate choice. No one but Bush is to blame for Bush's stupidity. Less privileged people must learn quickly and choose wisely in order to survive. Bush did neither and winds up ruling the world. What's up with that?

As to be expected, Howard Zinn, gets right to the heart of the matter: Bush's war machine is impotent:

I remember John Hersey's novel, ``The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

...

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a ``war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

—Howard Zinn, War is not a solution for terrorism

The following story is hardly an update. It was published immediately after the dedication of the Clinton library. It is especially unsettling in retrospect. Since Bush mused about a single submarine "taking out" the Clinton library, Forbes reported that the said "Israeli soldiers" were captured inside Lebanon —not kidnapped inside Israel; the Jerusalem Post reported that Bush had urged Olmert to attack Syria, presumably to draw Iran into the fray. The Israeli source bluntly called Bush nuts for "egging" Olmert on! In short, there is abundant evidence to support the conclusion that George W. Bush is a violently inclined psychopath. Here he is fantasizing about an attack on the Clinton library:

At Bill library, Bush sounds sub-versive

President Bush and top strategist Karl Rove (l.) took a trip to the Clinton Library to seek inspiration for W's own legacy-building. President Bush once daydreamed about blasting Bill Clinton's presidential library to smithereens, according to a new book.

In "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime," former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal recounts a November 2004 visit by Bush and his political guru Karl Rove to the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., on the banks of the Arkansas River.

"Bush appeared distracted and glanced repeatedly at his watch," Blumenthal writes about a presidential tour during the library's dedication. "When he stopped to gaze at the river, where Secret Service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: 'Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there.' Bush replied: 'A submarine could take this place out.'"

The author muses: "Was the President warning of an Al Qaeda submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton Library? Is that where Osama Bin Laden is hiding? Or was this a wishful paranoid fantasy of ubiquitous terrorism destroying Clinton's legacy with one blow?"

Blumenthal, who attributes his account to two anonymous eyewitnesses, adds that "Rove showed keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy.

"'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools.'"

Amen to that.
Did Bush and his gang fantasize, at one point, about airliners attacking the WTC?

Friday, September 01, 2006

George Bush loses five middle east wars —three of them in Iraq!

Irag continues its slide into chaos though the MSM says Civil War is merely possible. In fact, Shi'ites and Sunnis are involved in a violent conflict for control of Central Iraq; Kurds are trying to secure the NW. What is that if not two, separate civil wars? Moreover, so-called "insurgents" —more properly described as "resistance" —oppose the failed US occupation. What is that if not a guerilla war? Clearly —US forces are in the crossfire of a Civil War, bogged down in a guerrilla resistance that it cannot win.
You know, I hear people say, well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box.

George W. Bush, August 7, 2006

A majority of Americans reject Bush's latest strategy: linking Iraq with the "war on terrorism". [Source: PBS Washington Week] Both wars are failed; both are premised upon Bush misconceptions, his inability to "...do nuance", his deliberate lies.

Even the Pentagon's latest report is one of gloom and doom, a picture of a failed occupation. It was supposed to be a cake walk. Some cake. Some walk. We've been at war longer than World War II. Cheered then, we are jeered now! We have achieved nothing but pointless death and destruction. Even our allies hate us. Enemies grow stronger as American citizens are bled by the very government that promised to "liberate" —not annihilate —Iraq! Seeing how precariously perched is the dollar, I wonder: just who is the enemy? Pogo knew. He said: "We have seen the enemy and he is us!" Likewise, I have seen the enemy who wages war daily on both the Iraqi people and the American people. The enemy is Bush.

Billions of people the world over have wisely concluded that Bush is the enemy of peace and humankind, if Americans have not. Billions, whose news is not filtered by a US corporate MSM, have Bush's sorry record to cite in their support. Even in America, the tide has turned. By December 13, 2005, fifty-eight percent of Americans told CNN that Bush had no clear plan for victory in Iraq. Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq. It's only gotten worse since then.

So Bush declared a great "war on terrorism" but failed to think past some several months of hysterical war fever. How is such a war won? More recently, influenced by the right wing blogs, Bush's definition of success consists of Republi-babble about Islamo-Fascism. In earlier statements, his promises to "smoke out" Bin Laden and bring him to justice were no more connected to reality. Equally vague, Bush said he would treat nations harboring terrorists as if they were terrorists themselves. Bush would, seemingly, wage war on any nation funding terrorists; Bush would wage war on the world. But applying that principle would necessitate attacks on the United States itself, then Saudi Arabia, possibly Great Britain, and most certainly Israel. Bush has never been able to think clearly about terrorism or the US role.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

—January 20, 2002, President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address

Just this week, Bush compared suicide bombers in Baghdad to terrorists who attacked the United States. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was busy comparing Democrats to Nazi appeasers. The better analogy is Rumsfeld to Goebbels; both Bush and Rummie have used every dirty trick in the Hitler/Goebbel's playbook, impugning dissent and opposition.

With regard to the "insurgency" in Iraq, it's time to stop calling it insurgency —a rebellion against legitimate, lawful authority. It's time to start calling it what it is: a guerilla war against an illegal force of occupation, Bush's occupation, Bush's war of aggression, Bush's war crime, Bush's capital crime. The vocabulary of this war is unlike that of any other war including Viet Nam where even the Viet Cong were recognized guerilla fighters. Bush-speak deliberately conceals the true nature of this conflict. Even the word "war" is suspect. Our illegal occupation of what had been a sovereign nation cannot be legitimately called war. Better words are heist, mass murder, plunder, occupation. Not war!

What Bush called the Axis of Evil —like Poland and Czechoslovakia who were similarly demonized by the Nazi Hitler —never had WMD. What they do have in common with one another is poverty and "third world" status —not unlike that of six other nations similarly threatened and/or attacked by the big bully on the block. Those nations are Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Sudan and now Afghanistan and Iraq! It is Bush, rather, who threatens world peace; it is Bush who has failed on five fronts.

Bush might not have intended to define victory in Afghanistan but in his previously cited State of the Union Address he said:

In Afghanistan, we helped liberate an oppressed people. And we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society, and educate all their children -- boys and girls.

—January 20, 2002, President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address

We have not liberated anyone. The people Bush claims to have liberated never asked Bush to liberate them. They do not feel liberated now —not that Bush has bothered to ask.

"Liberation", it turns out, is another ex post facto rationale for war! Afghanistan was supposed to be a quick and easy victory. Bush fell for the Rumsfeld doctrine and attacked Afghanistan on the cheap. Bush had really wanted to attack Iraq but because Colin Powell insisted, Bush was momentarily diverted. Cheney and Rumsfeld persisted. The better targets, they said, were in Iraq. Eventually, Bush —advised by the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis of arrogance —would attack where the terrorists weren't.

An August New York Times article entitled “Losing Afghanistan” summed up rising concerns about the alarming state of the US occupation of Afghanistan quite aside from Bushco's first obvious failure there: smoking out Bin Laden. NYT concluded: "...there is no victory in the war for Afghanistan, due in significant measure to the Bush administration’s reckless haste to move on to Iraq and shortsighted stinting on economic reconstruction”.

Some of the strong indicators of Bush's ignominious defeat in Afghanistan include the following developments:

  • There are now some 40,000 guerillas fighting against the American occupation of Afghanistan.
  • NATO forces in the southern provinces have met strong opposition resulting in fighting described as "...persistent, low-level dirty fighting" not seen by the British since the Korean War or World War II.
  • In Kandahar, some 2,300 Canadian troops have reported heavy casualties this month alone.
  • "Insurgents" —more properly called "resistance" to an aggressor — and the Taliban itself have benefited from outrage over "...routine searches, detention and killing[s]" of civilians.
Bush never bothered to define "victory" in Afghanistan apart from "smoking out" Bin Laden and "bringing him to justice". It is only fair, then, to judge the war by Bush's standard. After some five years, it is an utter failure. If judged by yet another standard, never articulated by Bush himself, that winning means establishing a stable occupation over all of Afghanistan, then, clearly, the occupation and the war has failed and failed utterly.

It gets harder daily to give Bush the benefit of any doubt. It's impossible not to conclude that Bush has taken the bait, that Bin Laden outsmarted Bush with a wily and nuanced strategy:

Bin Laden's only way to reduce American influence in the Middle East is to make the cost of dominating the region outweigh the benefit. ... If he can gain access to enough US assets on [Al Qaeda] controlled turf he's confident he can prick us to death. Bin Laden knows he will have one shot at an attack on American soil sufficient to lure the US into a decisive military move in the Middle East.

Bill Cusack: Osama Bin Laden is Kicking George Bush Ass

Bush's fifth lost war is, of course, his most recent: his war by proxy with Iran. Bush supported if not egged Olmert to attack Lebanon. According to the Jerusalem Post, Bush urged an Israeli attack on Syria with the intention, presumably, of drawing Syria and Iran into the conflict. It must have been a bitter pill for the bellicose Bush to have lost that war, to see the demonized Iran emerge strengthened and emboldened. It is no surprise to see Bush begin yet another offensive —a PR offensive designed, as always, to mislead the American people and the world. It is an act of desperation that can be heard in his voice. It is the last gasp of a failed President —the worst President in American history.

A video update. Watch how defensive and thin skinned Bush is about everything:







The Existentialist Cowboy

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Bush plays politics with terrorism, resorts to McCarthyism and old lies

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Bush's new PR offensive is a recycled old lie and thinly disguised McCarthyism. Bush will try to convince the American people that Iraq is a part of the war on terror and, opposing the war is un-American. Never mind that Bush's war on terror is not only phony, it makes real terrorism worse and endangers American lives. What will happen when we get a real terrorist threat? Merely asking makes you a "Nazi appeaser". Bush and Rumsfeld breathe new life in odious McCarthyism. This cynical exploitation of fear does not makes us safer. It endangers us all.

Secondly, even Bush admitted —after having lied it about it for years —that Saddam had nothing to do with 911. So which is it? It's unclear how Bush intends to convince people that Iraq now has anything to do with terrorism when only a few days ago he told the truth at last by denying it. So —when Bush now says that Iraq is a part of the war on terrorism, Americans should ask themselves: was Bush lying then or is he lying now?
Clearly —the oft called "insurgents" had nothing to insurge against before the US invasion. Is this what Bush hopes you will believe are terrorists? If so, then Bush's failed US policy has caused it. It will simply dissipate when Bush admits that he has committed capital crimes and removes US troops from the war of aggression that he ordered in violation of Geneva, the UN resolution, Nuremberg Principles and US Codes, Title 18 § 2441. War crimes. Read Title 18. It's a capital crime.
And Bush has already lied about his new "PR offensive". He claims that it is not politically motivated.

But surely it is a response to the fact that the latest British terror alert did nothing to restore American confidence in Bush's utterly failed administration. Americans seem immune now to color codes, MSM hyperbole about improbable "binary bombs", and empty rhetoric about terrorism.
Bush now finds it impossible to tell the truth without confessing to a multitude of previous falsehoods. None of his various pretexts for war were true; all of them have been proven false during a long and miserably failed American occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 911, a sovereign nation that never attacked, never posed a threat to the people of the United States in any way.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, meanwhile, is among a growing chorus that sees the "war on terrorism" for what it is: a boogeyman exploited by a cynical, extremist administration that now dares to slap the label "Nazi appeaser" on legitimate dissent and criticism.

Olbermann has said what millions have already known: Bush is "playing politics" with terrorism", exploiting terrorism for political purposes and endangering American lives by doing so. Olbermann, at last, openly questions and documents the curious and statistically questionable timing of a series of phony terror alerts:

SLC Mayor: BuPresidensh Is The Worst t In History

(KUTV) Video: Mayor Anderson blasts President Bush

 Sky2 Video: Protesters march thru the streets of SLC

 Slideshow: Pres. Bush's Visit To SLC

During a large-scale protest in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Mayor Rocky Anderson unleashed perhaps his harshest criticisms yet of President George W. Bush -- just hours before the president was scheduled to arrive in Utah.

"Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the United States... and there was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Anderson said from the steps of the Salt Lake City & County building.

Mayor Anderson also said that President Bush will go down in history as the worst president in U.S. history and called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "incompetent." ...

Study calls Iran 'biggest beneficiary' of US war on terror

Another analysis blames weak US approach to Iran on poor intelligence.
Two new reports criticize the US's handling of Iran, just as the West gauges Iran's response to a proposal meant to rein in Tehran's nuclear ambitions. One report says the US war on terror has strengthened Tehran, the other slams America's poor intelligence on Iran.
The first report, released Wednesday by the non-government Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House) in Britain, says that Iran, despite being a part of US President Bush's "axis of evil," has been the "chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East."
The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments — the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 — but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures. The outbreak of conflict on two fronts in June –July 2006 between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon has added to the regional dimensions of this instability.
Consequently, Iran has moved to fill the regional void with an apparent ease that has disturbed both regional players and the United States and its European allies. Iran is one of the most significant and powerful states in the region and its influence spreads well beyond its critical location at the nexus of the Middle East, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia and South Asia.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Catastrophic and Reckless: How Bush brought America to the brink of economic ruin!

Just a year ago Bush played guitar while New Orleans drowned. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has changed. New Orleans is morbidly fascinating because Americans, intuitively, have seen in that disaster our nation's future. But Bush, like a fiddling Nero, stays a failed course amid warnings that our nation is falling apart at the seams heading for third world status and catastrophe.

The warnings come amid the valid assessment that Bush's tax cut for the rich failed to make good on two empty promises: it did not trickle down or prime the economic pump and it did not pay for itself as Bush himself had promised it would. In fact, the poor have gotten poorer, the rich exceedingly rich. The nation is bankrupt to boot. The dollar is allowed to slide and we are dependent upon China, Japan, and the EU to keep the anemic dollar propped up. Were it not for that we would have no purchasing power at all.

Ronald Reagan made the same promises in 1982 —but, according to the US Census Bureau, only the upper quintile prospered. Every other income group lost ground even as Reagan's deficit grew exponentially. Unfortunately, Bush is still being assessed. But just one year after Congress bowed to Bush and passed the tax cut of 2001, the Brookings Institution would write:

The official federal budget outlook has deteriorated dramatically since early 2001, due to last year's tax cut, the economic slowdown, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In addition to the pressures from the long-anticipated increase in entitlement spending as the nation ages, the government now also faces growing spending needs for defense and homeland security. These trends imply that future taxes must rise, future spending outside of defense and the elderly must decline, or obligations to the elderly and to defense be reduced.

—Alan Auerbach, William G. Gale, and Peter R. Orszag
June 2002, The Budget Outlook: Options for Restoring Fiscal Discipline, Brooking Institution

But GOP supply side, trickle down economics also promises more opportunity, a growing economy, more jobs.
Some in Washington say we had to choose between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit….Today’s numbers show it to be a false choice. The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send our tax revenues soaring. That’s what has happened.

—George W. Bush

But that's not what happened. Wealth has never trickled down and there is no "higher pie". A Treasury Department analysis refuted Bush directly, confirming in its analysis what many experts and Bush critics had been saying all along: tax cuts do not come remotely close to paying for themselves. [PDF] . In other words, the two promises of "trickle down" theory are dead wrong: wealth does not trickle down and tax revenues do not increase to make up the short fall.

As Dizzy Dean said: it's deja vu all over again! Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies. Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit and the budget would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, he doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated togwb0602a.gif - 10559 Bytes receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...

Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau make stark reading:
Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:
  • Twenty percent of the population owns 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
  • In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
  • Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
  • And more unequal than any other developed nation today.
Inequality.org
Why are failed strategies repeated? The GOP prescription seems to be: just take another dose of whatever it is that's making you sick.

Unfortunately, there is an entire caste of people who leech off the labors of others. They dare to call it "free enterprise". GOP policies have built our economy around our chief export: death and destruction. It is served up by our biggest industry, the biggest single slice in our budget pie chart —the military! Tax cuts, meanwhile, favored a tiny elite even as purchasing power of the ever poorer American working class depends upon the good graces of China. One is tempted to believe that what normal people perceive as Bush incompetence is, in fact, a deliberate and cynical GOP policy. Bush may have given the game away when he addressed a meeting of the "upper one percent" of the population —the primary beneficiaries of his tax cut. Predictably, he smirked and called them his "base".

Some updates with the very latest Census Bureau info:

Data show one in eight Americans in poverty

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S.
Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip. ...

The last time poverty declined was in 2000, the final year of Bill Clinton's presidency, when it fell to 11.3 percent.

The stagnant poverty picture drew attention from Democrats and others who said not enough is being done to help the nation's poor.

"Far too many American families who work hard and play by the rules still wind up living in poverty," said Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record) of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Around a quarter of blacks and 21.8 percent of Hispanics were living in poverty. Among whites, the rate edged down to
8.3 percent from 8.7 percent in 2004.

"Among African Americans the problem correlates primarily to the inner-city and single mothers," said Michael Tanner of CATO Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington. He noted that blacks also suffer disproportionately from poor
education and lower quality jobs.

Black median income, at $30,858, was only 61 percent of the median for whites. ...

The Bush Record: More Poverty, More Uninsured

Bush says “the foundation of our economy is solid, and it’s strong.” That’s true, for some: corporate profits have now climbed to their highest share of GDP since the 1960’s.

But new Census Bureau data show the real state of the current economy. The Bush record on combating poverty and insuring more Americans is an undisputed failure.
Poverty, All Races (Millions)

Number of Uninsured (Millions)


More on the new census data HERE.

A great update courtesy Mark:

Devaluing Labor

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page A19

That America is as dead as the dodo. Ours is the age of the Great Upward Redistribution. The median hourly wage for Americans has declined by 2 percent since 2003, though productivity has been rising handsomely. Last year, according to figures released just yesterday by the Census Bureau, wages for men declined by 1.8 percent and for women by 1.3 percent.

As a remarkable story by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in Monday's New York Times makes abundantly clear, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of gross domestic product since 1947, when the government began measuring such things. Corporate profits, by contrast, have risen to their highest share of the GDP since the mid-'60s -- a gain that has come chiefly at the expense of American workers.

Don't take my word for it. According to a report by Goldman Sachs economists, "the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income."

As the Times story notes, the share of GDP going to profits is also at near-record highs in Western Europe and Japan.

Clearly, globalization has weakened the power of workers and begun to erode the egalitarian policies of the New Deal and social democracy that characterized the advanced industrial world in the second half of the 20th century.

For those who profit from this redistribution, there's something comforting in being able to attribute this shift to the vast, impersonal forces of globalization. The stagnant incomes of most Americans can be depicted as the inevitable outcome of events over which we have no control, like the shifting of tectonic plates.

Problem is, the declining power of the American workforce antedates the integration of China and India into the global labor pool by several decades. Since 1973 productivity gains have outpaced median family income by 3 to 1. Clearly, the war of American employers on unions, which began around that time, is also substantially responsible for the decoupling of increased corporate revenue from employees' paychecks.

Washington Post

Here's a breaking story somewhat off topic, but timely, indeed:

Bashir: CIA used 'micro nuclear' bomb in Bali

Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir claims America's top spy agency was involved in the devastating 2002 Bali bombings.

Bashir, who was convicted and imprisoned for having prior knowledge of the attacks which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, is also appealing for the lives of three convicted bombers to be spared.

Bashir, the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), was released from prison in June after serving nearly two years.

Amrozi, Ali Ghufron - also known as Mukhlas - and Imam Samudra are awaiting execution for their part in the plot.

In an interview tonight on ABC television's Foreign Correspondent, Bashir claims the device that killed most people in the Bali attack was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "micro-nuclear" bomb. ...









The Existentialist Cowboy

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Americans are paying for Bush's war of aggression at the bank, the store, the pump, and the graveside!

Bush would give you the impression that the Iraq war is free or cheap. But that's a hoax! The war is paid for with hidden taxes, higher prices, and American lives; the cost of the Iraq war has more than tripled since Bush declared "...major combat operations in Iraq have ended!"

War is a racket fought by the masses for privileged elites. Bush's war on Iraq is not merely fought for the benefit of no-bid contractors like Halliburton, it is financed by America's working poor and middle classes who pay for the war —with their lives abroad and with their jobs, their retirement prospects, and their access to health care at home. Bush's base —the nation's elite, his corporate sponsors, and the so-called defense industry —have paid nothing, risked nothing! Rather —they feed at the trough. The upper one percent of the population has gotten several tax cuts while the big oil companies report record profits rising concurrently with higher prices at the pump.

Just two days after 9/11, I learned from Congressional staffers that Republicans on Capitol Hill were already exploiting the atrocity, trying to use it to push through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. ... We now know that from the very beginning, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress saw the terrorist threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a political opportunity to be exploited. The story of the latest terror plot makes the administration’s fecklessness and cynicism on terrorism clearer than ever.


Hoping for Fear, by Paul Krugman, Using Fear Commentary, NY Times

One of the more insidious falsehoods about Iraq has turned out to have been Bushco estimates of its cost. In 2002, George W. Bush himself predicted the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion —tops! To be expected —Bush was dead wrong. A report by the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee now estimates that Bush's war of aggression in Iraq could cost the US $646 billion by 2015 —depending on the scope and duration of operations. Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University, estimates the cost of the war from one trillion to two trillion dollars!

Ongoing operations in Iraq were estimated at $5.6 billion per month in 2005. And costs have surely risen since then as the intensity of fighing increases accompanied by significant losses of materiel and maintenance.

The Bill So Far: Congress has already approved four spending bills for Iraq with funds totaling $204.4 billion and is in the process of approving a “bridge fund” for $45.3 billion to cover operations until another supplemental spending package can be passed, most likely slated for Spring 2006. Broken down per person in the United States, the cost so far is $727, making the Iraq War the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years.

Long-term Impact on U.S. Economy: In August 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at current levels would nearly double the projected federal budget deficit over the next ten years. According to current estimates, during that time the cost of the Iraq War could exceed $700 billion.

Economic Impact on Military Families: Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 210,000 of the National Guard’s 330,000 soldiers have been called up, with an average mobilization of 460 days. Government studies show that about half of all reservists and Guard members report a loss of income when they go on active duty—typically more than $4,000 a year. About 30,000 small business owners alone have been called to service and are especially likely to fall victim to the adverse economic effects of military deployment.

The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops, Institute for Policy Studies
The Bush administration has been able to keep the precise cost of the war a matter of guess work and estimates. But however much is wasted killing civilians in Iraq that is money that is not being spent educating Americans, providing for health care, fixing Social Security, rebuilding a deteriorating infrastructure, or addressing real threats to our environment. However much has blown up in Iraq, it is lost forever to the victims of Bush's incompetence in the face of Katrina just one short year ago. It is lost forever to those millions losing retirements to corporate mismanagement and greed. It is lost forever to those unable to pay the high costs of education, transportation, housing, and getting enough to eat each day.
U.S. Budget and Social Programs: The Administration’s FY 2006 budget, which does not include any funding for the Iraq War, takes a hard line with domestic spending— slashing or eliminating more than 150 federal programs. The $204.4 billion appropriated thus far for the war in Iraq could have purchased any of the following desperately needed services in our country: 46,458,805 uninsured people receiving health care or 3,545,016 elementary school teachers or 27,093,473 Head Start places for children or 1,841,833 affordable housing units or 24,072 new elementary schools or 39,665,748 scholarships for university students or 3,204,265 port container inspectors.

Social Costs to the Military/Troop Morale: As of May 2005, stop-loss orders are affecting 14,082 soldiers—almost 10 percent of the entire forces serving in Iraq with no end date set for the use of these orders. Long deployments and high levels of soldier’s stress extend to family life. In 2004, 3,325 Army officer’s marriages ended in divorce—up 78 percent from 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion and more than 3.5 times the number in 2000.

Costs to Veteran Health Care: The Veterans Affairs department projected that 23,553 veterans would return from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005 and seek medical care. But in June 2005, the VA Secretary, Jim Nicholson, revised this number to 103,000. The miscalculation has led to a shortfall of $273 million in the VA budget for 2005 and may result in a loss of $2.6 billion in 2006.

Mental Health Costs: In July 2005 the Army’s surgeon general reported that 30 percent of U.S. troops have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home from the Iraq War. Because about 1 million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops, Institute for Policy Studies
Many delusions were promoted in order to commit this nation to aggressive war. In the short months after 9/11, Bush erected a strawman upon which to direct American frustration, anger, and vengeance: an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. His intentions were made clear at the time: this "Axis of Evil" was responsible for world terrorism in general and our nation would wage war against it. Bush's speech was most notable, however, for what he did not say. Bush did not tell the American people that he had no intention of paying for the war. He would leave the deficit to future administrations and generations. Rather than expect his privileged base to pony up, he would reward their loyalty with several tax cuts. Nor are sons of daughters of that base required to serve their nation militarily. Bush's base gets a free ride as the rest of the nation bears the cost of war —in both lives and dollars.

If wars are not paid for upfront, they are paid for in the form of higher interest rates, prices, and lives. Wealth does not trickle down; but the effects of a falling dollar is felt by everyone. The exponential rise of wage and income inequality began with a vengeance in the Reagan 80's, most closely associated with the Reagan tax cut of 1982. Only the top 20 percent of the population benefited. Wage/income disparities have increased since then with only a short respite in the Clinton years. The current trend began before a great wave of technical change and a computer revolution —none of which has benefited working Americans. Indeed, if you work for a living you have paid and continue to pay for Bush's war of aggression while Bush's base gets preferential treatment!

It is no coincidence that as prices increase, so, too, the national deficit. American credit abroad is dodgy. As the dollar continues to slide on world exchanges, not only gasoline prices increase but also prices of imported goods. Bush had said that he favors a strong dollar but, in fact, his administration has let the dollar slide, a cynical ploy designed to finance the Iraq folly upon the backs of working Americans. That it provides a moderate relief to US exporters is a bad trade off. What, after all, do we export these days? How many new jobs are created when, in fact, Ford is only one of many American corporations in big trouble.

Like Bush's mythical "Axis of Evil" the idea that a nation can wage a free war is an evil GOP fairy tale. Wars are always paid for, if not now, later, and in ways you won't like.

By way of Mark, this update from the Washington Post:

Securing Future Fiscal Health

By Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman

The economic and moral case for long-term reform of fiscal policy is clear. Yet politicians refuse to act. If this stalemate persists, it could end in catastrophe.

Over the next 30 years, spending on federal programs is on track to go up by 50 percent as a share of the economy. If revenue remain at their historical level, the resulting deficits will approach 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2036 -- almost 10 times the current size. The debt will surge to 200 percent of GDP -- twice what it was at the end of World War II.

Political realities explain why nothing has been done about this. Changing course would require substantial spending cuts from projected levels or equivalent tax increases. Neither party wants to be the first to propose these tough choices out of fear that the other side would attack it. Similarly, neither side wants to discuss possible compromises of its own priorities, out of fear that the other side will take the concessions and run. Unfortunately, these fears are justified.

Since the regular legislative process seems incapable of dealing with the impending crisis, some alternative has to be found. President Bush has suggested a commission. Having served on many commissions, we understand their potential value. We also understand how they can go wrong. In our view, a new commission could be very useful, but only if it recognizes fiscal and political realities. It needs five elements to succeed. ...

Securing Future Fiscal Health, Washington Post

From Fred Kaplan writing in Slate, this update:

What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference!

It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or …...
An excerpt:

...

Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. … Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy—"

Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."

First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective, but it's not a strategy—any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.

Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives—or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly—what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?

It's all just words to Bush and that's just as well. He doesn't know the meaning of any of them anyway. The war on Iraq is a war of aggression, i.e. a war crime. Whenever a crime is committed, one must ask: Qui bono?

Cheney's remaining US investment

Firestarter5 asked a question in a previous post about who of the neo-cons has stock in Halliburton. Well, we certainly know that Cheney does. In 2005, his 433,333 stock options soared by 3,281%. Now, Cheney says he has "pledged" the proceeds to charity. Yeah, and did you also know that the insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes"? I hope this so-called "charity" isn't counting on Cheney's word on this. Unless, of course, it is a charity run in the mold of Tom DeLay's "charitable organisations."Halliburton's government contracting has increased by 600% under the Bush/Cheney administration and was the fastest growing contractor between 2000 and 2005. The stock did drop, although lately it has recovered and leveled out, as this five year plot shows (vertical scale is compressed compared to the Cheney stock options value graph.

No doubt this is due to the fact that Halliburton has raked in about [all] it is going to from US government contracts in Iraq, unless Bush keeps all those troops over there for as long as he can -- and he certainly intends on doing that. KBR will then keep pulling in some change.

As far as other of Cheney's neo-con cohorts, well, not much is readily apparent. I'm certain that any investment in Halliburton by these others is probably well-veiled. ...
An update:

Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams; becoming third world

By Chuck McCutcheon
Newhouse News Service

A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country's basic operating systems are deteriorating.

"When I see events like these, I become concerned that we've lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation's infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation," said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (www.christianbeckner.com).

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

"I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm," said Casey Dinges, the society's managing director of external affairs.

British oil company BP announced this month that severe corrosion would close its Alaska pipelines for extensive repairs. Analysts say this may sideline some 200,000 barrels a day of production for several months.

Then an instrument landing system that guides arriving planes onto a runway at Los Angeles International Airport failed for the second time in a week, delaying flights.

Those incidents followed reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence world's electronic eavesdropping arm, is consuming so much electricity at its headquarters outside Washington that it is in danger of exceeding its power supply.

"If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation's busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating," Beckner said. "And yet we've essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves."

The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating "at an alarming rate." ...

Some additional resources:








The Existentialist Cowboy