Despite violence drop, officers see bleak future for Iraq

Posted on Wed, Aug. 15, 2007

Despite violence drop, officers see bleak future for Iraq

Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: August 15, 2007 11:14:36 AM

BAGHDAD — Despite U.S. claims that violence is down in the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officers are offering a bleak picture of Iraq’s future, saying they’ve yet to see any signs of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims despite the drop in violence.

Without reconciliation, the military officers say, any decline in violence will be temporary and bloodshed could return to previous levels as soon as the U.S. military cuts back its campaign against insurgent attacks.

US spy satellites to be used on Americans

08/15/2007 @ 8:35 am

Filed by Nick Juliano

Local and federal agencies are to have vastly expanded access to information gathered from spy satellites in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reports.

Information from "some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools" will soon be at the disposal of a wide array of law enforcement agencies at all levels of government, reports Robert Block in the Journal Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell decided to increase access to the spy data earlier this year and asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to facilitate access to the spy data by civilian agencies and law enforcement.

The age of endarkenment

Why is no one questioning the rise of new-age nonsense in the name of science, asks David Colquhoun

Guardian Unlimited
Wednesday August 15 2007

"Education: Elitist activity. Cost ineffective. Unpopular with Grey Suits. Now largely replaced by Training." Michael O'Donnell, in A Sceptic's Medical Dictionary (BMJ publishing, 1997)

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

STUPID AND EVIL

By David Podvin

Conservatives believe America must fight the terrorists over there or we will have to fight them over here, so George W. Bush has deliberately transformed Iraq into the Middle Eastern version of a roach motel. The concept is that while Americans maintain occupation villains from throughout the Islamic world will flock to the country and – as the commercial famously boasts – they will check in but they won’t check out.

The strategy has two major flaws, the first of which is that it’s demonstrably stupid. Al Qaeda has more members now than it had on 9/11. Rather than being a graveyard for the jihadist movement Iraq has become an incubator, producing terrorist hatchlings by the ton. No matter what transpires in Iraq Bush’s enhancement of the al Qaeda membership roll will inevitably make America less secure. This disturbing little fact would deter normal people from staying the course, but if conservatives were normal people they wouldn’t be conservatives.

Bush's lethal legacy: more executions

The US already kills more of its prisoners than almost any other country. Now the White House plans to cut the right of appeal of death row inmates...

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 15 August 2007

The Bush administration is preparing to speed up the executions of criminals who are on death row across the United States, in effect, cutting out several layers of appeals in the federal courts so that prisoners can be "fast-tracked" to their deaths.

With less than 18 months to go to secure a presidential legacy, President Bush has turned to an issue he has specialised in since approving a record number of executions while Governor of Texas.

Bush's lethal legacy: more executions

US delegation views slow recovery from Katrina nearly 2 years after storm

NEW ORLEANS: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday led a Democratic congressional delegation on a tour of areas still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina nearly two years after the storm, trying to determine where more federal help is needed.

Katrina and its aftermath were a "challenge to the conscience of the country in a huge way," Pelosi said.

Pakistan: "The Taliban's Godfather"?

Washington D.C., August 14, 2007 - A collection of newly-declassified documents published today detail U.S. concern over Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban during the seven-year period leading up to 9-11. This new release comes just days after Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged that, "There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil." While Musharraf admitted the Taliban were being sheltered in the lawless frontier border regions, the declassified U.S. documents released today clearly illustrate that the Taliban was directly funded, armed and advised by Islamabad itself.

Petraeus’ September Report Will Be Written By The White House

The Los Angeles Times reports that Gen. David Petraeus’ upcoming Sept. 15 report on Iraq will be authored by the White House:

Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

The Myths of World War II

By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
Posted on August 13, 2007, Printed on August 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59653/

Back in April, the Library of Congress Veterans History Project and the Public Broadcasting Service announced a collaborative initiative to collect war stories, which will include Ken Burns' new film, The War, slated to air on September 23.

Given Burns' masterful look back on the two best cultural gifts America has ever given the world -- jazz and baseball -- I'm looking forward to his soon-to-be-released documentary.

Fox News Caught Editing Al Franken's Wikipedia Entry

Posted by Matt Stoller on August 15, 2007 at 5:54 AM.

This post, written by Matt Stoller, originally appeared on Open Left

There's a new tool out there that lets you search the destination IP addresses for people editing wikipedia entries. Arthur Bergman found that folks at Fox News's IP address were editing Al Franken's entry. Apparently, Fox News propagandists deleted Franken's statement that Fox News's legal case against Franken was ""literally laughed out of court" and that "wholly (holy) without merit" is a good characterization of Fox News itself." The Fox News users also added a 'liberal' adjective when characterizing the NPR show 'Fresh Air'.

The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products

By Vanja Petrovic, AlterNet
Posted on August 15, 2007, Printed on August 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59714/

American industry would have you believe that taking potentially hazardous and toxic chemicals out of everyday consumer products -- removing phthalates from children's toys and cancer-causing coal tar from hair dye -- would damage our economy and result in a loss of American jobs. In his latest book, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products, Mark Schapiro busts this myth and reveals the grim fact that some companies, whether American or international, often have two production lines: one that manufactures hazard-free products for the European Union and another that produces toxin-filled versions of the same items for America and developing countries.

Glenn Greenwald: The Islamists are coming

Glenn Reynolds today sends his readers to this absolutely exquisite essay from Roger Simon of Pajamas Media, who explains why his support for gay marriage and women's rights leads him to be such a committed warrior in the War against Islamofascism:

I never cease to be amazed –- and perhaps it is my own myopia – that my former colleagues on the Left can be blind to this situation. They act as if the threat is not real and is only a blip caused by a post 9/11 overreaction by George Bush, thus ignoring virtually all of Western history since the year 800, not to mention the overwhelming demographic changes of recent decades. (John Edwards –- interestingly an opponent of gay marriage -- recently called the "War on Terror" a bumper sticker. At least, he’s consistent.).

Paul Krugman: It's All About Them

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 13 August 2007

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your father's political campaign.

Last week, at one of Mitt Romney's "Ask Mitt" forums, a woman in the audience asked Mr. Romney whether any of his five sons are serving in the military and, if not, when they plan to enlist.

The candidate replied with a rambling attempt to change the subject, but near the end he let his real feelings slip. "It's remarkable how we can show our support for our nation," he said, "and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I'd be a great president."

Glenn Greenwald: The truth behind the Pollack-O'Hanlon trip to Iraq

Last Wednesday, I interviewed Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution regarding the trip he recently took to Iraq and the highly publicized Op-Ed in the New York Times about his trip, co-written with his Brookings colleague, Ken Pollack. The full transcript of the interview, which lasted roughly 50 minutes, can be read here.

O'Hanlon's answers, along with several other facts now known, demonstrate rather conclusively what a fraud this Op-Ed was, and even more so, the deceitfulness of the intense news coverage it generated. Most of the critical attention in the immediate aftermath of the media blitz focused on the misleading depiction of the pro-war Pollack and O'Hanlon as "critics of the administration." To his credit, O'Hanlon acknowledged (in my interview with him, though never in any of the media appearances he did) that many of the descriptions applied to him -- including Dick Cheney's claim that the Op-Ed was written by "critics of the war" -- were inaccurate:

First, I think that to an extent, at least, it's certainly fair to go over a person's record when that person themself is being held up as playing a certain role in the debate. So while I'm not entirely happy with some of the coverage I've received here [on this blog] and elsewhere, I agree with the basic premise: that if I'm being held up as a "critic of the war", for example by Vice President Cheney, it's certainly only fair to ask if that is a proper characterization of me. And in fact I would not even use that characterization of myself, as I will elaborate in a moment.

TPM Muckraker: Today's Must Read

By Spencer Ackerman - August 13, 2007, 9:31 AM

Here's a guide for future intelligence chiefs who want to take a shortcut around the law. Start out with a genuine problem. Propose a genuine solution, but build into it a bit more leeway for intelligence collection. Negotiate slowly and deliberately. Then use the threat of a terrorist attack at the end of the congressional session to ram through an evisceration of the problematic law, carving out from it all meaningful protections for American citizens. Watch a stunned opposition acquiesce.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times present that general outline to explain how the Bush administration gutted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act earlier this month. As reported earlier, the FISA Court ruled in March -- the Post provides the date -- that foreign-to-foreign communications, previously unprotected under FISA, required warrants for surveillance as they passed through U.S. communication switches. Admiral Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, saw the National Security Agency "losing capability," in the words of one intelligence official, due to a surveillance backlog generated by the Court ruling.

In Fundraising's Murky Corners

Candidates See Little of Millions Collected by Linda Chavez's Family

By Matthew Mosk

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 13, 2007; Page A01

Linda Chavez rose to prominence in the 1980s as a tart-tongued Reagan administration official and candidate for the Senate, eventually becoming a well-known Latina voice on social issues and President Bush's choice to lead the Labor Department. With her conservative celebrity came book deals, a syndicated column, regular appearances on the Fox News Channel -- and a striking but little-known success at political fundraising.

In the years since she was forced to pull her nomination as Bush's labor secretary after admitting payments to an illegal immigrant, Chavez and her immediate family members have used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. Their solicitations promise direct action in the "fight to save unborn lives," a vigorous struggle against "big labor bosses" and a crippling of "liberal politics in the country."

Author Mansfield Envisions a "Better Society...Less Open to Non-Christian Religions"

By DonByrd

Last week, USAToday published a troubling On Religion column by Stephen Mansfield. In it, the author of The Faith of George Bush called up all of the standard church-state myths and misdirections: that the Founders intended America to be a Christian nation, that religion is being stripped from the public square, that there is no constitutional wall of separation, that preachers are now forbidden from speaking out on the issues of the day by godless "storm troops" like the ACLU... Sadly, we hear these untruths often.

But in a recent interview with Focus on the Family, promoting his new book, Ten Tortured Words: How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America ... and What's Happened Since, Mansfield painted a shockingly blunt picture of his goals. Read on for the details...

The Real Reason for Rove's Resignation

Posted by Jane Hamsher at 7:59 AM on August 13, 2007.

Jane Hamsher: What does the mainstream press know, that they're not telling us, about Rove's resignation announcement?

This post, written by Jane Hamsher, originally appeared on FireDogLake

Watching the morning kabuki on television about Rove's resignation is quite something. They're all taking it at face value and nobody is speculating as to what the truth of the matter might be. You know that behind the scenes they're saying something else amongst themselves, but they really just do not see their identity as journalists who report what they know. Their loyalty is to a "tribe," a whispering coffee klatch that viewers simply do not get a chance to be a part of.