Countdown: Al Gore on Iraq

Part One:



Part Two:

Tags: Countdown, Al Gore, Iraq war, Keith Olbermann

Patrick Cockburn: Militias act with impunity, despite US troop surge

By Patrick Cockburn

The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.

It has always been absurd to speak of men "dressed in police uniforms travelling in police vehicles" as if they were gunmen in disguise. "Of course they have the uniforms and the vehicles, because they are real policemen," said an Iraqi minister after a similar operation in which 150 people were abducted from the Ministry of Higher Education in the capital last year.

The unit that carried out this kidnapping is almost certainly Shia and is probably under the control of the Mehdi Army or the Badr Organisation.

The Finance Ministry in East Baghdad is in a heavily Shia district not far from the Oil and Interior Ministries. There are many checkpoints here, so it would be difficult for a detachment of Sunni insurgents to pass undetected.

The motive is political: Commercial kidnappers in Baghdad - numerous, violent and well-organised though they are - have never had the need or capacity to operate on this scale. The raid also shows good intelligence and a carefully worked-out plan to enter and leave the ministry.

The most obvious explanation for the abductions is that they werein retaliation for the killing of Abu Qader, also known as Wissam Wiali, the Mehdi Army commander in Basra, by a British-backed operation last week. It may be designed to send a message that any British action will be met with retaliation.

The other militia units capable of conducting a raid like this are police and police commandos under the control of that Badr Organisation, the military wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), whose men still largely run the Interior Ministry. Although it is the Mehdi Army that is invariably singled out for criticism by US and British leaders, the Badr Organisation played a central role in carrying out sectarian killings of Sunnis in 2005 and 2006.

The third suspects in mass abductions against US and British personnel in Iraq are the Iranian-run units that certainly exist. Iranian-inspired retaliatory operations in Iraq appear to have increased since five of their officials were abducted in a US helicopter raid on 11 January on the Kurdish capital of Arbil. The abductions at the Finance Ministry underline another truth about Iraq. In Arab Iraq, the US and Britain have no allies.

For four years the Sunni community has been in rebellion. But the Iraqi Shia only supported the US-led occupation as a means to an end, by which they would legally take power through elections. The Shia do not, at the end of the day, intend to share power with foreign occupiers.

One reason why so many foreign security contractors are employed in Iraq, at vast expense, is that the US, Britain and the Iraqi governments recognise they dare not rely on Iraqis to protect them.

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Tags: Patrick Cockburn, Iraq war, surge, US troops, Shi'ia, Sunni, Mehdi army, Badr organisation

Lugovoi claims UK 'behind Litvinenko poisoning'

The man that the British government have accused of poisoning ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko has made the bizarre claim that MI6 had already recruited Litvineko and also tried to recruit him.

Andrei Lugovoi, who the British authorities are attempting to have extradited to Britain to face charges, claims that the murder could not have been carried out without MI6's connivance. Russia is claiming that it is against Russian law to extradite a Russian citizen.

Litvinenko's murder was perhaps one of the most strange murders in recent years as it involved the use of the radioactive isotope polonium-210. Countless British citizens could have been exposed to contamination which is why Blair's government are not relying on diplomatic niceties. And Lugovoi's bizarre claim that MI6 were involved in the murder sounds like something that can simply be dismissed on it's face. Why would MI6 want to kill Litvinenko?

And, as Litvinenko had fallen out with Putin since around the late 1990's and had written a book alleging that FSB agents co-ordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in Moscow that killed more than 300 people, there are surely more obvious suspects who would have wanted him dead than MI6?

The Russian government has always blamed Chechen separatists for the apartment block blasts and later that year Russia poured troops into Chechnya in a new offensive.

A former KGB officer and British agent, Oleg Gordievsky, described Mr Lugovoi's claims as "silly fantasies". He denied Mr Litvinenko had been working for the British secret services.

"He used to be... a member of the FSB, it is a domestic organisation of the KGB, and MI6 is not interested in information about the domestic service, so Litvinenko was not needed," he told BBC News.

Lugovoi is blatantly responding according to orders from the Kremlin who appear to have decided to brass this one out, but I doubt there are many who will buy their version of events. Indeed, the collision course between Blair and Putin now appears unavoidable. With journalists falling out of windows left and right in Russia, Putin does appear to be acting like some kind of Mafioso knocking out the competition.

But even against that backdrop, Lugovoi's story is straining credulity.

Mr Lugovoi said that either British foreign intelligence agency MI6, the Russian mafia, or fugitive Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky were behind the killing.

Mr Lugovoi said that, like Mr Litvinenko, Mr Berezovsky was working for the British secret services, but that the two men had a falling out and that MI6 could no longer control Mr Litvinenko.

Mr Berezovsky, who has been granted asylum in Britain, has denied any involvement in Mr Litvinenko's death.

On Thursday, Mr Berezovsky said that it was now "clearer than ever" that the Kremlin was behind the murder.

"Everything about Mr Lugovoi's words and presentation made it obvious that he is acting on Kremlin instruction. If Mr Lugovoi would like to prove his innocence, I suggest again that he travel to London and face trial in the UK courts," he said in a statement.

Mr Lugovoi said he was "openly recruited as the British security service agent. They asked me to collect any... compromising information about President Putin and the members of his family".

He said he was initially asked to find economic information, but he said the large fees he was paid made him realise he was being recruited to do more than that.

He went on to say that he lacked the motive to kill Mr Litvinenko.

"Sasha [Litvinenko] was not my enemy. I didn't feel cold or hot from whatever he was doing, from the books that he was writing. I've been in business for a long time and I was not really interested," he said.

Mr Lugovoi is also ignoring the fact that a polonium-210 trail has been left all over London, including at London's Millennium Mayfair Hotel where Lugovoi had lunch with Litvinenko, the day he took ill.

Indeed, one can't help feeling that it is not the murder of Litvinenko on British soil that the British government are enraged about as much as the method of killing chosen. This was dangerous beyond measure and smacks of desperate recklessness.

No government can sit back whilst a crime of this type is carried out in it's capital. But all the indications are that Putin is not going to give an inch. The G8 should be fun....

Barack Obama in Iowa City talks about Amy and Health Care

Obama addresses the nightmare of America's health system and promises to do something about it. This is long overdue. Americans pay more than any other nation and yet rank around the seventeen mark when compared with other industialised nations in terms of life expectancy.

Tags: Barack Obama, US healthcare, US Presidential elections 2008

Neoconservative 'hopes, prays' Bush will bomb Iran

In the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, a leading neo-con thinker (if that's not a contradiction in terms) says that he "hopes and prays" that President Bush attacks Iran.

"Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war," writes the editor-at-large of Commentary, who also sits on the Council on Foreign Relations. "I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II."

Whenever people talk about WWIV, when most sane people are actually acutely aware that we have never had WWIII, it is very good indication of the general nuttiness of the speaker and Podhoretz is obviously out there ahead of the pack.

Podhoretz believes that "the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938."

"Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes," the op-ed continues. "Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs."

Podhoretz thinks that Bush "intends, within the next 21 months, to order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby....If this is what Mr. Bush intends to do, it goes, or should go, without saying that his overriding purpose is to ensure the security of this country in accordance with the vow he took upon becoming president, and in line with his pledge not to stand by while one of the world's most dangerous regimes threatens us with one of the world's most dangerous weapons."

Now, the fact that we are talking about a man who believes we are in the middle of WWIV tells us all we need to know about the mental health of Mr Podhoretz, but the scary thing is that people like this have long been listened to by the equally insane people who currently inhabit the White House.

He concludes:

"It now remains to be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory, and weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel," Podhorez writes in conclusion. "As an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart that he will."

What really is there to say about such people and such a mindset? Bush has been "battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other (President) in living memory"? I mean, is he for real here? Bush has been given a free ride by most of America's press until the stench of Iraq became so overwhelming that even they couldn't ignore it any longer.

However, reality is not something that the neo-cons have ever been fond of, as Richard Perle's rewriting of the Iraq war in today's Guardian attests to.

Perle was also interviewed by Phillipe Sands at the Hay Festival and he also indicated, similarly to Podheretz, that he is keen for an attack on Iran to begin.

He seemed to recant on his recanting of support for the war (in a Vanity Fair article). He dissembled, in my view, on the key facts: his claims that there were ties between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden, and that the WMD would definitely be found. But most significantly, he gave us a clear hint on when the bombing of Iran might begin: once US troop numbers in Iraq had diminished to the point where they could not be an easy target after the surgical strikes of Iran that he foresaw.

So both Poderetz and Perle, both neo-con loons who were proven wrong in everything they said prior to the Iraq war, are now both anxiously pushing the need for the US to expand it's Iraq disaster into Iran.

In any other country, under any other administration, these two men would be so fatally wounded from their false predictions regarding Iraq, that their words could be dismissed as the rantings of inconsequential lunatics.

Sadly, we live at the time of the Bush administration and both of these lunatics might actually be giving us a foretaste of what is to come.

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Foley: CIA's duty is to help facilitate war.

Alan Foley, the head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, led the CIA's investigation into whether or not Saddam had WMD. In a new book, The Italian Letter, examining the buildup to the Iraq war, there is a simply astonishing quote from Foley regarding the role of the CIA and the way it should approach the impending conflict:

One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: "If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so." The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.

Now who would have believed that this was the function of the CIA?

Hat tip to A Tiny Revolution.

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Advisers Fault Harsh Methods in Interrogation

As Republican Presidential candidates fall over themselves promising to torture terrorist suspects, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies have argued that harsh interrogation techniques are "outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history.

It's long overdue that someone said it, not only is torture abhorrent from a moral point of view, but in terms of intelligence gathering it simply doesn't work. In this regard it is typical of much of the behaviour of the Bush administration since 9-11, acting tough to please a base who are insisting that "something must be done" whilst actually proving ineffective at tackling the root causes of terrorism.

Tony Blair stated several years ago that the prime recruiting agent for al-Qaeda was Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and that finding a just resolution to this conflict would do more than anything else to win the war on terror by draining the swamp that encourages young men to sign up to al-Qaeda's cause. And yet, Bush's record on the Israel-Palestine dispute is simply the worst of any President that I can think of. He has literally sat around for six years of inactivity. No peace talks. No dialogue. No activity of any meaningful kind.

Oh, occasionally Olmert has agreed to meet with Abbas, but never to discuss anything of any merit. Olmert has always been able to define the subject matter in advance, usually reducing it to useful talks like "Palestinian terrorism". The subject of the illegal occupation has always been firmly off the table.

And, as with tackling matters that might actually reduce terrorism, we find that the experts are lined up against Bush when it comes to how to glean useful information from terrorist subjects.

They have stated, quite baldly, that harsh interrogation techniques simply do not work.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.

But some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion.

“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.

The experts are saying that powers of persuasion are much more useful than the use of force and also that Americans already have expertise in this field, an expertise that - until now - has mostly been used to sell people toothpaste, but which could be more usefully employed in persuading people to give up relevant information.

Robert F. Coulam, a research professor and attorney at Simmons College and a study participant, argued that the government had been using all it's energy to justify the use of force during interrogations rather than asking itself whether or not force resulted in better information being gleaned from subjects.

Mr. Kleinman, the former Air Force interrogator who took part in the “Educing Information” study, said the mistakes of the past five years “have made interrogation synonymous in many people’s minds with torture.” But he said the group wanted to redirect the debate toward the future of interrogation.

“Our intention is not to point fingers at anyone,” he said. “We’re just saying we have to bring interrogation up to the level of professionalism in other intelligence disciplines.”

It's yet another example of the ineffectiveness of lazy right wing thinking. Of bringing schoolyard bully boy tactics into the international arena and thinking that this will be effective. Of course, one should not be surprised. The Bush regime have long sought to use the threat of force as it's only negotiating tool, whether dealing with Iraq, Iran or captured terrorist suspects.

Six years on they still seem incapable - as they pile even more troops into Iraq in an attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - of engaging in any form of diplomatic solution. Force appears to be, literally, the only form of persuasion that they understand. And, even as the use of force delivers them defeat, their only answer is that we must have more of it.

If there has ever been a more intellectually stunted administration, I am unaware of it.

However, tucked in the middle of this report is a frank admission - previously denied - that the US have indeed been engaging in torture.

The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

Despite the denials of the Bush administration that "the US doesn't do torture", the admission that the US has, in the past, engaged in "waterboarding" would be enough for most people on the planet to conclude that torture has, indeed, been part and parcel of US interrogation techniques.

One would hope that a panel of experts advising that torture doesn't work would be enough to dissuade the Bushites from continuing such practices but past experiences tell us that common sense and morality is lost on this administration.

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Tags: Bush, Republicans, neo-cons, torture, war on terror, Iraq war, interrogation techniques

Cindy Sheehan quits as 'face' of anti-war campaign

The peace activist Cindy Sheehan has announced that she is stepping down as the "face" of the anti-war movement after being routinely attacked by both conservative and some liberal circles as an "attention whore".

"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost," wrote Mrs Sheehan on the website Daily Kos. Mrs Sheehan's son Casey, a US army reservist, was killed in April 2004.

"I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade," Mrs Sheehan wrote.

I think it is a great loss that Cindy Sheehan is stepping down. She contributed greatly to the anti-war movement by giving a face to the many mothers grieving for their lost children. At times she went too far, but that was easy to forgive given her loss.

And her initial visit to Bush's ranch, where she sat outside waiting for an audience for the President, revealed his cowardice at defending his position, as he simply refused to engage with her on any level. A wiser President would have taken her inside and then publicly stated that they would never see eye to eye but that he understood her loss. Bush attempted to ignore her, and the legend of Cindy Sheehan grew.

Celebrities and politicians beat a path to Camp Casey and, for a while, she became a focal point in the anti-war movement.

"I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then," she wrote.

"I have sacrificed a 29-year marriage and have travelled for extended periods of time away from Casey's brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings."

What shocks me about all this is that Sheehan claims she was attacked by the left using the same terminology as was used by the right wingers.

It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I would have thought that the sacrifice Sheehan has made, both voluntarily and involuntarily, would have given her the right to criticise anyone she chooses, to call the shots as she sees them without fear of reproach; certainly without fear of reproach from the left.

One could look at her and see an inherently decent woman attempting to make sense of painful loss and seeking to make sure no other mother suffered in the way that she was so obviously suffering.

And now, the failure of the Democrats to present a funding bill for Bush to sign that included a deadline for troop withdrawal has apparently proven too much for her to take.

"The most devastating conclusion that I reached ... was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think," she wrote.

"I have tried every day since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."

I wish Cindy Sheehan well and hope that she is able to rebuild her life and her family. She made an invaluable contribution to the voices ranged against Bush's illegal war in Iraq, and I hope that when she returns home that she is able to find some form of peace.

She deserves it. And we, on the left, should never forget the debt that we owe her. She deserves that as well.

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Shami Chakrabarti: We risk the values that make Britain worth defending

More than 50 years ago, with Britain as midwife, the European Convention on Human Rights was born of the ashes of the Second World War. Conceived by the generation who saw the horrors of the Holocaust, one of its non-negotiable articles is the complete prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.

Thirty-five years ago a British prime minister addressed Parliament and made clear that the military practice of hooding terrorist suspects was at an end. Even while staring terrorism in the face, democracies can never resort to torture.

These are great milestones in our democratic heritage. They reflect real consensus across the political spectrum which should span the ages. How tragic then is the story of the mistreatment of detainees in Iraq.

At the very least, what must come from this scandal is a firm commitment to train British troops in policing and detention functions.

We must not send young people into dangerous situations like Iraq with little more than a nod and a wink that mistreatment might be permitted. If we allow such behaviour by our forces, I firmly believe that we only jeopardise their safety in the hands of opponents. If we continue to argue that "the rules of the game" have changed since the twin-towers and London atrocities, we risk surrendering the values that make our country worth defending. I know this argument has had great currency in parts of the Government in recent times.

I note that during his brief spell as Defence Secretary, John Reid questioned whether the Geneva Conventions had kept pace with world events. Now in the dying days of his short term at the Home Office, he questions whether the Human Rights framework retains its relevance.

It is to be hoped that his gallop through the great offices of state is coming to an end.

I also look forward to a new prime minister dumping divisive rhetoric and re-building a security consensus inspired and sustained by the rule of law.

This consensus would remember that some values are universal and timeless. When the next chapter in our human rights history is written, there will be a special place for Lt-Col Nicholas Mercer and the many in the military and the law who think like him.

They know that there is no more important British value than the complete prohibition on torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. They know the human "wrongness" of hooding and beating detainees anywhere.If the Attorney General did not fight for this value in his advice, his place will be somewhat less attractive.

Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty

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Tags: Liberty, Iraq war, war on terror, torture, civil rights, human rights, Shami Chakrabarti, Blair, Brown, Goldsmith

Iran and US see 'positive' steps in first formal talks since hostage crisis of 1980

So the US and Iran have had their first meeting since 1980 and, by all accounts, it was a meeting that went well with "blunt" exchanges taking place. Both sides have described the meeting as "positive".

I always think that this is diplomatic talk for "we swore at each other but no-one actually threw anything".

The US brought up Iraqi security and Iranian interference but the main point of the meeting was, I thought, Iran's observations and offers to help regarding the training of Iraqi forces.

Mr Qomi, who described the US role in Iraq as that of an occupying force, told the Americans the training of the Iraqi army was proving to be too slow and ineffective, and offered to help - an offer Washington is unlikely to take up. Iran also proposed what it called a trilateral forum in which the US, Iran, and Iraq could meet regularly to discuss security matters. Mr Crocker said he would have to refer the proposal to Washington.

Considering the fact that the US have now been in Iraq for four years the lack of movement in the training of Iraq's army is little short of shocking. I mean seriously, how long does it take to train an Iraqi soldier? Why, four years later, is this still an issue?

Also, the Iranian offer of a regular trilateral forum is an interesting one, although it is unclear if the Bush camp will embrace this notion. Indeed, despite both sides stating how "positive" the meeting had been the US left the meeting giving the distinct impression that it was a one off.

Although Mr Qomi offered a second round of talks, Mr Crocker said the purpose of the meeting had been to lay out US concerns, and that had been achieved. "In terms of what happens next, we are going to want to wait and see - not what is said next, but what happens on the ground; whether we start to see some indications of change of Iranian behaviour," he said.

In other words, the meeting was a warning, it was the US telling Iran to back off and what happens next is dependent on whether the US is satisfied that the Iranians are no longer interfering. Of course, there are many of us who don't buy into the US logic regarding Iranian interference, so what should have been a positive first step may very well be allowed to wither on the vine.

This would be a great shame as the US badly needs to find a political solution to the problem of Iraq rather than a military one, and it's impossible to see how this can be done without some input from Iraq's neighbours.

If this meeting was merely an opportunity for the US to issue warnings to Iran, as Crocker seemed to imply, then this will turn out to be a lost one. However, if it is a first step to normalising relations with Iran and both sides working together to stabilise Iraq, then it could have great significance.

Why, when dealing with the Bushites, does the pessimist in me always presume it is the former?

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No Regrets

Richard Perle, one of the neo-con architects of the Iraq war, is to appear at the Hays Book Festival. It is understood that Perle will defend his actions in calling for the war but distance himself from the way that the war was conducted.

"I will take responsibility for what I argued which was that we should remove Saddam, and I am willing to defend that position today," says Perle, who is to be interviewed by Philippe Sands at the Guardian Hay Festival tonight. "Do I take responsibility for the things that went wrong afterwards? I had no influence over those things, unfortunately."

The problem for someone like Perle is that everything that went wrong afterwards was predicted. The tensions between Shia and Sunni elements in Iraq were always likely to break out into violence once Saddam was removed and the simple truth is that the Bush regime were warned about this and chose not to believe it.

At a time when the neo-cons appear to be on the run, with Wolfowitz recently hounded out of the World Bank and "Scooter" Libby facing jail time, the more one picks at the surface the more one realises that Perle - who was rumoured to have jumped the sinking ship in a Vanity Fair article last year - actually hasn't changed his way of thinking at all.

When questioned about Iran he admits that now might not be the best time to engage in air strikes, but:

"But if the only way to prevent Iran from being a nuclear weapons power is to destroy one or more facilities that will give them that capability I see no moral basis for rejecting that option," Perle says.

He would also like to see the US actively working to destabilise Iran by supporting opponents of the regime. The same lessons could then be applied to Syria, he says.

In other words, he hasn't given up on the Bush doctrine of pre-emption at all, despite the disaster of Iraq. Like a true neo-con he is still wedded to the notion of American military might as the solution to all the world's ills. Rather bizarrely, Perle claims to dislike the term neo-con and reminds anyone who will listen that he is still a registered Democrat. Which is a little like Hitler and Tony Blair claiming to be Socialists, they can apply whatever terminology they like, but it is by their actions that they will be defined, and Socialist they were not.

Perle nowadays justifies what he encouraged by sliding deeper into fantasy, by insisting - despite the lack of WMD - that Saddam was a threat and that he had to be removed.

Instead, Perle continues to cling to a view of events in Iraq that has now been comprehensively discredited. Even now, when it is abundantly clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that were the pretext for the war, Perle insists that it was the right decision to remove Saddam by force. "Even after recognising that some of the information was wrong, the judgment that Saddam proposed a threat and a serious threat was right," he says.

Against the reams of evidence to the contrary - including congressional inquiries into the administration's misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the war - Perle continues to insist that Saddam Hussein was a friend of al-Qaida.

Interviewed by Susan Goldberg in today's Guardian, Perle comes across as an arrogant buffoon, as man who simply refuses to ever admit that he got it wrong. Nor does he finger anyone too high up the ladder when he assigns blame for the debacle that was the Iraq war. He does not single out Bush nor any of his fellow neo-con travellers. So who does he blame?

Perle turns his ire on General Tommy Franks, the former commander of forces in Iraq. Among Franks's greatest blunders, Perle says, was his failure to stop the looting that erupted the day the regime fell. "The looting was just a serious and inexplicable mistake, made I believe principally by Franks and the military on the ground," he says. "I have, I concede, a low regard for Franks. I think he is a fool, and I thought that the first time I met him."

Many of us who would agree with Perle that the looting was the beginning of the breakdown of social order in Iraq, would set our sights on the Defence Secretary and his bizarre "Stuff happens" speech, but Perle is having none of it.

But Perle is understanding of that. "I think Rumsfeld thought, people have suffered under this regime so they are going to burn down the symbols of officialdom," he said.

However, like all proponents of the Iraq war, Perle really would like history to judge the rights and wrongs of the conflict. It's an answer that we'll really all only know long after we are dead.

Was it worth going to war against a regime that did not after all constitute an imminent threat? "It's the wrong issue to talk about imminence," he says. Would he agree the situation in Iraq is disastrous? Disaster is an overused term, he says. "It is what it is." When you get right down to it, he really isn't all that keen to talk about the reality of Iraq.

The scary thing about people like Richard Perle and William Kristol isn't that they simply refuse to admit that the mindset they embraced led us into this tragedy, although that would be bad enough. But what is even more serious is that people like this continue to be listened to by the Bush White House. I don't know where Perle stood on the issue of the surge but I certainly know that Kristol advocated that approach, an approach that the White House embraced and which seems to be failing, just as everything these nutters propose seems to fail.

So, in Perle, we have a man who will admit that things have gone wrong, mistakes have been made; although he will not concede that these mistakes were anything to do with the people who planned the war and rather chooses to lay the blame at the door of Tommy Franks.

But what's more scary is that, when it comes to possible future conflicts like Iran, Perle and his ilk would proceed with the same lack of care that defined their mindset before the Iraq war and make the same mistakes all over again.

These people should be national figures of fun, class dunces that are laughed at for their obvious stupidity. Instead they continue to have influence within the Bush White House, mostly due to the fact that the Vice President shares their mindset and their apparent belief that they can change reality by the force of their own will. Now, that's scary...

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The Creation Museum

There are some things that simply boggle my brain and creationists come very near the top of the list. A new creationist museum has opened near Cincinnati which claims that dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time as man did. All of this is an attempt to portray the Bible as an historical document. Now, I'm sure if such creatures existed in biblical times then someone, at some point in the Old Testament, might have mentioned them. I mean, they're not something that you would ignore are they?



Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Barack: Truth On Iraq

Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, Mit Romney, Iraq war funding, Iraq war

Reid's 'stop and question' powers for police are 'UK's Guantanamo'

John Reid, New Labour's astonishingly right wing Home Secretary, has proposed giving the police the right to stop and question anyone in the street in an attempt to combat terrorism.

Human Rights groups and politicians from all political parties have condemned his proposals as "draconian", with even Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland Secretary, warning that it could become the "domestic equivalent of Guantanamo Bay".

There have been several times over the past few years when I have thought John Reid is literally losing his mind as his rants have taken him ever further towards the loony edge of the political spectrum. There are almost no rights that Reid doesn't think we should sacrifice in our war on a noun.

At the moment, police can challenge people, regardless of whether they are suspected of breaking the law, in areas which are considered at risk of terrorist attack, such as Westminster and around political party conference venues.

The new anti-terror proposals would extend that power nationwide, giving officers the right to demand anyone's name and address or details of where they have been if police suspect terrorist involvement.

Anyone who refused to co-operate could be charged with obstructing the police and fined up to £5,000.

Of course, Reid is merely reflecting the same mindset that Blair represents. That we must all be prepared to sacrifice human rights for the right to be safe, even though every time he has made proposals to do so in the past, he has been unable to show how what we are sacrificing will make us any more safe.

In a typical Blairite rant, the Prime Minister yesterday accused the courts of putting the rights of terrorists before the protection of citizens. It is startling to realise that the three men who absconded whilst under control orders have never actually been proven to have any involvement in terrorism at all, so for the Prime Minister to talk in this way regarding them is almost libellous.

He said: "We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong."

He added: "Over the past five or six years we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism.

"Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgement."

Blair simply doesn't get it and never has. Most people in Britain lived with the threat of the IRA for 37 years and have become quite accustomed to living with risk. Blair and Reid are asking people to give up their rights whilst failing to demonstrate that the risk to their lives will in any substantive way be reduced.

As he marches out the door Blair continues his ridiculous rant that we must somehow give up our attachment to "traditional civil liberties".

Blair apparently fails to understand that many of us don't feel these rights are ours to give up. They were won by other brave British people on the fields of Normandy. London endured a blitz in order that we may enjoy the freedoms that Blair seems so keen to take away from us.

He fundamentally misunderstands the British character if he thinks that four bombs on London's tubes and buses will force the British to hand him rights that were fought for by their grandparents.

He can shout all he wants, but there are graves all over Europe that are a symbol of the price that Britain was willing to pay to ensure that no-one took those rights away from them.

It is Reid and Blair who are out of step with the mood of the British people, it is Reid and Blair who seem to think we should cower and give up all that we believe in because of some Afghans sitting in caves.

They seem to forget the old saying, "No war was ever won by bombing London". It means that by attacking Londoners, you only strengthen their resolve.

As Blair heads for the door, muttering like an angry old man about how foolish we all are, I wonder if he ever understood us at all?

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Tags: Blair, Reid, human rights, terrorism, police, UK

Israeli PM risks losing office as coalition partner begins leader poll

Ehud Olmert's problems look set to multiply as the Israeli Labour Party seek a new leader.

The two leading contenders to take the party's helm from Peretz have said that they will work to get rid of Mr Olmert, who has been under intense pressure following a damning report into his prosecution of last year's war in Lebanon. Labour is part of the ruling coalition along with Mr Olmert's Kadima party.

Peretz, who is also tainted by the debacle of the war in Lebanon, has said he will stand down as Defence Minister after the primaries, which will leave Olmert spectacularly exposed. Olmert's managing to cling to office for this long is already astonishing, but if a new Labour leader makes it is aim to unseat the Prime Minister it is very hard to imagine how Olmert could possibly survive, especially as his poll numbers say his job approval amongst Israelis currently stands between 2-3%. Allowing for errors in the polling numbers that could put him as low as 0%.

Opinion polls suggest that Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet internal security service, will win but may not get the required 40% of the vote to avoid a second round of voting. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, is second with Mr Peretz a distant third.

If there is no clear winner, a second count of the Labour Party's 104,000 members will take place on June 13. An opinion poll published in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said Mr Ayalon would win a second round with 49% to Mr Barak's 39%.

If Labour leaves the coalition Olmert will be left running a minority government with 59 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. He would then have to try and make a deal with United Torah Judaism, the party of the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox, or even the Likud party. Either way, Olmert would have to sacrifice political principle to remain in office. Luckily for Olmert, political principle is something he long ago stopped pretending to have, the best example of this being his decision to invite the fascist Avigdor Lieberman to join his cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister.

It is moves like this that have managed to keep Olmert in power but one can't help thinking that he is now running out of places to hide.

Whatever the result of the primary, it will lead to an extended bout of horse-trading as Mr Olmert will try to offer a high enough price to the new leader to encourage him to stay in the government and continue supporting him.

Shmuel Sandlar, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that whatever the result, Mr Olmert did not have much to look forward to.

"The worst case for Olmert is an Ayalon victory. He must ask Olmert to resign and the Kadima party may be more interested in the survival of the party than the survival of the prime minister," he said.

And all of this is because Olmert chose to go to war rather than to agree to a prisoner exchange, an exchange that he will still have to make if he wants to have his soldiers returned.

He tried to prove that he was as militarily competent as Ariel Sharon and only succeeded in making himself look clueless and Israel looking weak. I do honestly find it astonishing that almost a year after the Israeli-Lebanon war that this man is still in office at all.

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Tags: Israel, Olmert, Israel-Lebanon war, Kadima Party, Ayalon, Peretz, Barak

Gay activists beaten and arrested in Russia

Riot police in Russia watched neo-Nazis beat up gay campaigners and then stepped in to arrest the campaigners, which included several European parliamentarians, giving us all some indication of the state of human rights in Russia.

The aim of the protest was to persuade the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, to lift his ban of a Gay Pride March through the city. The Mayor had previously described gay rallies as "satanic".

Witnesses have said riot police stood by whilst far right skinheads beat up the marchers whilst chanting "Death to homosexuals".

"It was absolutely shocking," the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told the Guardian yesterday. "The police stood there while people knocked me to the ground and kicked me. Four or five neo-Nazis attacked me. The police watched. At a certain point the police then arrested me and let my neo-Nazi attackers walk free."

Religious orthodox protesters and skinheads hurled eggs and stones - injuring Mr Tatchell in the eye. They also attacked Richard Fairbrass, the gay singer from the pop group Right Said Fred.

"When we were in the police van the police taunted us," Mr Tatchell said after his release. "They said, 'Are you a member of the sexual minority?' We said yes. They said, 'We are going to have some fun with you at the police station.' What happened here shows the flawed and failed nature of Russia's transition to democracy. There is no right to protest in Moscow."

Relations between Europe and Russia have been heading steadily southwards over the past few months, especially with the Russian refusal to hand over Andrei Lugovoi, who the British authorities say they have enough evidence to charge with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The Russians are refusing to extradite Lugovoi which threatens to put relations between Russia and the UK into deep freeze.

But for the police, for the state itself, to take part in such acts of blatant homophobia will alienate Russia from the rest of Europe quicker than almost anything else. One of the greatest steps forward taken by Europe over the past thirty years has been the acknowledgement of minority rights, and for a policeman to taunt Tatchell in this way is simply unforgivable. In Europe any policeman who made that sort of comment would now be facing dismissal.

That the Russian police could behave in this way in the twenty first century will send shock waves through the European Parliament, especially as MEP's were amongst those detained.

The chairwoman of Germany's Green party, Claudia Roth, yesterday called on the chancellor, Angela Merkel, to raise the issue of rights with President Vladimir Putin at next month's G8 summit.

As a member of the Council of Europe and signatory to the European convention on human rights, Russia is obliged to allow demonstrations. "It has been shown once again today that human rights are systematically abused in Putin's Russia," Ms Roth said.

The activists had tried to deliver a petition signed by 50 MEPs calling on Moscow's mayor to respect freedom of assembly, but 30 of them were arrested and they did not make it to his city hall office. Mr Beck was later released. Three Russian gay rights campaigners were kept in custody and charged with disobeying police.

Astonishingly, the neo-Nazi thugs attacked several of those arrested again after they were released according to witnesses.

"This is terrible but I am not scared," a Russian named Alexey said, blood streaming from his face. "This is a pretty scary place, a pretty scary country if you are gay. But we won't give up until they allow us our rights."

The G8 Summit should take Putin over the coals for this. Putin has agreed and has signed the European convention of Human Rights and that states that people have a right of assembly.

It's no use allowing people to assemble if you then allow others to attack those assembling whilst the police stand by apparently agreeing with the stance being taken by the Neo-Nazi thugs.

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US and Iran to hold key meeting

For the first time since 1979 the US and Iran are to have face to face meetings. The only subject on the table is the be Iraqi security.

The US is expected to present claims that Iran is providing technology and other support to Iraqi militia groups.

For its part, Tehran says it has uncovered several spy networks run by the US and its allies inside Iran.

On Sunday, the Iranian authorities summoned the Swiss ambassador to demand an explanation of the networks, which Iranian TV said were seeking to commit "infiltration and sabotage in western, central and south-western areas of the country".

Switzerland represents US interests in Iran.

The White House said it did not confirm or deny allegations about intelligence matters.

The US has backed down from the set of conditions it initially insisted upon before any meeting could take place. Whatever has brought about this sudden lurch into adult behaviour from the Bush administration, it is to be welcomed.

Meetings between the two sides should be interesting. The US have long claimed that Iran are interfering in Iraq, a claim that many of us believe is simply an excuse from the US to prepare the public for some kind of action against the Iranians.

The Iranians are claiming that they have evidence that the US is operating within Iranian territory, which is something that Seymour Hersh has been claiming for a long time.

It is unlikely that any great breakthrough will come from these talks, but the importance of the talks is that they are taking place at all.

Iran's position on the talks has been dictated by the country's ultimate authority - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

He said the aim of the meeting was to remind the American occupiers of Iraq that they had a legal responsibility to bring security to the country.

Ayatollah Khamenei says the US government is colonial, bullying, arrogant and expansionist.

However, the Iranians also have their problems as they are now under sanctions from the rest of the world community as well as the US because of their uranium enrichment programme, although I understand the discussions are to be strictly limited to the subject of Iraq.

And the Iranians can remind the Americans until they are blue in the face that it is their legal responsibility to restore order to Iraq, but the simple facts on the ground appear to be that the US have no idea how to even begin to do that. Which is why I presume they have agreed to this meeting.

I can only presume that Dick Cheney must be tied up in a cupboard somewhere otherwise it's hard to see the US being allowed to make such a sensible move. Normally Dick forbids anything that seems like common sense to the rest of the planet so it's very hard to work out how this got under his radar.

Or perhaps things are so desperate in Iraq that even Dick has realised that negotiations with the Iranians is the only sensible way forward.

Either way, it's a welcome move. And it would have been more welcome had they done it long ago.

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Ron Paul on where the Republicans have gone wrong.

Tags: Bill Maher, Ron Paul, war on terror, why is the US hated

No 10 under pressure as cash-for-honours inquiry reopened

Scotland Yard are to reopen the Cash for Honours enquiry in the dying days of Blair's premiership, casting the shadow that the prime Minister may be interviewed again, and that this time it will be under caution. Blair only avoided being interviewed under caution last time because he let it be known that he would resign if the police made this a requirement.

It's somewhat bizarre that a man who took the nation to war without a UN mandate, a war which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, now finds himself being hounded by an old law that few of us even knew existed. Many of us can foresee a day when Blair has to stand in a courtroom and account for his actions, but I certainly never expected it would be over which old fart received which gong for how much money.

In a sign that the Crown Prosecution Service is taking the case extremely seriously, police have been told to find key pieces of evidence to strengthen the case. The move will unnerve Downing Street staff, who have been privately expressing confidence that nobody will be charged in the affair.

Angus MacNeil, the Scottish Nationalist MP whose complaint to the police led to the launch of the inquiry, said the news increased the prospect of another police interview for Tony Blair.

"This is clearly going to reverberate around the dying days of the Blair Government, and once Blair has retired it might be more interesting still," he said.

It was always unlikely that Blair would be prosecuted whilst he was a sitting Prime Minister, but that will all change very shortly.

This leaves the Labour Party in a terrible financial mess as auditors are currently going through their accounts and may very well be unlikely to sign the party off as a going concern as the £10 million in loans was supposed to be paid off this year. If the party finds this impossible to do, and there is every indication that this is the case, then members of the party's governing body, the National Executive Committee, will become personally liable for the party's debt.

And strangely enough, all these problems stem from Blair's attempts to distance the party from the unions. This ended with Blair's Faustian deal with Lord Levy, where Levy would secure large loans from private individuals as long as New Labour became pro-Israel and stopped the criticisms of Israel's actions that had defined past Labour governments.

Indeed, Blair's own demise can be traced from that same deal he cut with Levy, for it was Blair's refusal to call for a ceasefire in the Isreal-Lebanon war last summer that finally - after the debacle of the Iraq war - became the straw that broke the camel's back and set off a backbench rebellion which forced Blair to concede to last years Labour Party Conference that he would never again address them as their leader.

And now that same deal promises to follow Blair even after he has left office.

It's almost bankrupt his party, it's led to him having to announce he would stand down, and the police are examining whether or not what took place was actually criminal.

It's fair to say that this was a deal that we can assume Blair will come to regret.

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Tags: Blair, Levy, Cash for Honours

Army must come clean on torture in Iraq, say MPs

The British Army are coming under heavy pressure from an influential committee of MPs to explain the "stark inconsistencies" between the department's official line on what is permissible during interrogations and evidence given at the recent court martial of seven British soldiers.

The court martial into the death of Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died after sustaining 93 separate injuries, heard evidence that senior British officers in Iraq sanctioned the 'conditioning' of prisoners, which included the use of hooding and forcing detainees to stand for hours in stressful positions.

The MoD, however, told the joint committee during its recent inquiry into the UK's compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture that the use of hooding and stress positioning for the purpose of interrogation has been prohibited since 1972. The Committee has now written to the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, seeking an explanation.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights will ask Des Browne to explain how there could be such a difference between what is actually taking place on the ground and the rules that the MoD insist are being followed, in what could potentially be a major embarrassment for the MoD as it could be found to be acting outside of international human rights laws.

'The Government should now accept our recommendation that the provisions of the torture convention should apply to all of our armed forces' actions,' Andrew Dismore, the committee's chairman, said. 'It should ensure that our troops are suitably trained to equip them with the skills and knowledge needed to comply fully with our international obligations.'

Leanne MacMillan, director of policy and external affairs at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, welcomed the decision to seek answers from the MoD. 'It is quite clear that assurances given to parliament by the then Prime Minister Edward Heath in March 1972 have not been honoured,' MacMillan said.

'He stated quite unequivocally in the House of Commons that conditioning techniques such as hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, the withholding of food and drink, and bombardment with loud noise would not be used by Britain's armed forces unless sanctioned in advance by parliament. It is quite clear, however, both from the court martial, and from what the Medical Foundation has learnt from former army interrogators, that the techniques have continued to be used.'

There are many who have questioned whether or not hooding and stress positions constitute torture, as if torture - in the words of Bill O'Reilly - only really begins if one "loses a finger".

However, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that such techniques are inhumane and degrading and, indeed, the United Nations Committee Against Torture has recently ruled that such practices do amount to torture.

It's one of the most distressing things that has taken place since the establishment of Guantanamo Bay and Rumsfeld talking about enemy non combatants. We, in the west, now find ourselves arguing over what constitutes torture and what doesn't. What has happened to us?

We once led the world by example, it was taken for granted that we didn't engage in the kinds of actions that one might expect to find taking place in tinpot dictatorships. Then came 9-11 and the US, the world's source of moral authority, began to be rumoured to be taking people to secret prisons, we had a US Vice President who appeared to be arguing that the US must reserve the right to torture and a Congress falling over itself to give the president the power to engage in "enhanced interrogation techniques". These are techniques which the President and the administration tell us fall short of torture whilst refusing to say which acts they would consider as constituting torture.

And, of course, where the US goes, her allies eventually follow. So now Des Browne will have to explain why the British Army appear to be engaging in techniques which we have outlawed since 1972.

I expected many reactions post 9-11, but I honestly never thought the world's supposedly great civilisations would ever find themselves arguing over what constitutes torture and what doesn't.

The very fact the question is being asked is a measure of how many of our principles we have thrown away.

Nor can we be comforted by blaming al-Qaeda. For our response to any provocation is a chosen one. We chose this path. That should be a source of shame to all of us.

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Al Gore: A Drive for Global Domination Has Put Us in Greater Danger

The pursuit of "dominance" in foreign policy led the Bush administration to ignore the UN, to do serious damage to our most important alliances, to violate international law, and to cultivate the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive appeal of exercising unconstrained unilateral power led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that brought to life the worst nightmare of the founders. Any policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the US and recruits for al-Qaida, but also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating terrorists who wish to harm and intimidate America. Instead of "dominance", we should be seeking pre-eminence in a world where nations respect us and seek to follow our leadership and adopt our values.

With the blatant failure by the government to respect the rule of law, we face a great challenge in restoring America's moral authority in the world. Our moral authority is our greatest source of strength. It is our moral authority that has been recklessly put at risk by the cheap calculations of this wilful president.

The Bush administration's objective of attempting to establish US domination over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war - a painful misadventure marked by one disaster after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the American men and women in uniform trapped over there, and the Iraqis themselves. At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded respect for the US in favour of fear. That was the real meaning of "shock and awe". This administration has coupled its theory of US dominance with a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, regardless of whether the threat to be pre-empted is imminent or not.

The doctrine is presented in open-ended terms, which means that Iraq is not necessarily the last application. In fact, the very logic of the concept suggests a string of military engagements against a succession of sovereign states - Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran - but the implication is that wherever the combination exists of an interest in weapons of mass destruction together with an ongoing role as host to, or participant in, terrorist operations, the doctrine will apply. It also means that the Iraq resolution created the precedent for pre-emptive action anywhere, whenever this or any future president decides that it is time. The risks of this doctrine stretch far beyond the disaster in Iraq. The policy affects the basic relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Article 51 of the UN charter recognises the right of any nation to defend itself, including the right to take pre-emptive action in order to deal with imminent threats.

By now, the administration may have begun to realise that national and international cohesion are indeed strategic assets. But it is a lesson long delayed and clearly not uniformly and consistently accepted by senior members of the cabinet. From the outset, the administration has operated in a manner calculated to please the portion of its base that occupies the far right, at the expense of solidarity among all Americans and between our country and our allies. The gross violations of human rights authorised by Bush at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and dozens of other locations around the world, have seriously damaged US moral authority and delegitimised US efforts to continue promoting human rights.

President Bush offered a brief and halfhearted apology to the Arab world, but he should make amends to the American people for abandoning the Geneva conventions, and to the US forces for sending troops into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly, he owes an explanation to all those men and women throughout our world who have held high the ideal of the US as a shining goal to inspire their own efforts to bring about justice and the rule of law.

Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its failure to take action in advance of 9/11 to guard against an attack. Hindsight casts a harsh light on mistakes that should have been visible at the time they were made. But now, years later, with the benefit of investigations that have been made public, it is no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace from the American people. It is useful and important to examine the warnings the administration ignored - not to point the finger of blame, but to better determine how our country can avoid such mistakes in the future. When leaders are not held accountable for serious mistakes, they and their successors are more likely to repeat those mistakes.

Part of the explanation for the increased difficulty in gaining cooperation in fighting terrorism is Bush's attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation that disagrees with him. He has exposed Americans abroad and in the US to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and wilfulness, in particular his insistence upon stirring up a hornet's nest in Iraq. Compounding the problem, he has regularly insulted the religion, the culture and the tradition of people in countries throughout the Muslim world.

The unpleasant truth is that Bush's failed policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have made the world a far more dangerous place. Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted this war.

We as Americans should have "known then what we know now"- not only about the invasion of Iraq but also about the climate crisis; what would happen if the levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; and about many other fateful choices that have been made on the basis of flawed, and even outright false, information. We could and should have known, because the information was readily available. We should have known years ago about the potential for a global HIV/Aids pandemic. But the larger explanation for this crisis in American decision-making is that reason itself is playing a diminished, less respected, role in our national conversation.

By Al Gore.

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As Goodling as it Gets

Tags: Jon Stewart, Daily Show, Goodling, Fired Attorneys, Gonzales

Secret memo shows Israel knew building settlements was illegal

The government of Israel were advised after the Six Day War that the building of settlements in the captured territories would be illegal. The advice was given by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser at the time and today one of the world's leading international jurists, and he has stated recently that he has never changed his opinion.

This is a serious blow to Israel's argument that the settlements do not violate international law, as it shows Israel - at the time - being warned that any settlements would be a violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent" and reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author's summary, "that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank - one of the main problems to be solved in any peace deal: "I believe that I would have given the same opinion today."

Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet progressively sanctioned settlements. This paved the way to growth which has resulted in at least 240,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank today.

Judge Meron, 76, is now an appeal judge at the Tribunal. Speaking about his 1967 opinion for the first time, he also tells tomorrow's Independent Magazine: "It's obvious to me that the fact that settlements were established and the pace of the establishment of the settlements made peacemaking much more difficult."

Blaming restrictions on Palestinian movement for the devastation of the Palestinian economy, the World Bank earlier this month acknowledged Israeli security concerns but added that many of the restrictions were aimed at "enhancing the free movement of settlers and the physical and economic expansion of the settlements at the expense of the Palestinian population." The settlements and their "jurisdictions" effectively control about 40 per cent of the area of the West Bank.

The settlements, which George Bush recently referred to as "facts on the ground" - implying at the time that Israel could keep them - have always flown in the face of international law. Israel have tried many ways to get around this fact, including bizarrely claiming that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to this particular conflict, despite several rulings by the international community all insisting that Geneva does apply. This document now exposes the fact that Israel have known all along that Geneva applies and have sought to keep the advice they received secret.

The memorandum was written in September 1967 as the Eshkol government was already considering Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, seized from Syria during the Six Day War. It says that the international community had already rejected the "argument that the West Bank is not 'normal occupied territory'."

It pointed out that the British ambassador to the United Nations, Lord Caradon, had already asserted that Israel's position was that of an occupier. It added that a decree from the army command saying that military courts would "fulfil Geneva provisions" indicated that Israel thought so too.

Israel's argument surrounding the illegal settlements has always been a duplicitous one and it has now been revealed that she has always known that her argument was false.

Which means that Israel's actions have now been revealed as what many of us always suspected they were: land grabs. An attempt to take Palestinian land and to establish Eretz Israel despite the fact that their own legal advisor had told them that what they were proposing was completely illegal.

But they did it anyway...

Why has the international community allowed this? Why has the world sat around so impotently whilst Israel has engaged in such blatant illegality for the last forty years? We all know the answer. It is because one country wielded a veto every time the UN attempted to censure Israel for it's illegal actions.

And they wonder why they are hated? If most Americans knew the truth about what was being done in their name the world would be a very different place.

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Tags: Israel, Palestine, illegal settlements, land grab, 1967 war, six day war

US rejects all proposals on climate change

It appears as if Bush is to humiliate Blair one last time before he steps down by totally rejecting any prospect of a deal on climate change at the G8 summit in Germany next month, according to a leaked document.

Blair has expressed confidence that the US will sign up to "at least the beginnings" of actions to cut carbon emissions, but a leak from the US says that they are "fundamentally opposed" to the proposals.

The note, written in red ink, says the deal "runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to".

"This document is called FINAL but we never agreed to any of the climate language present in the document ... We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position," it says.

The tone is blunt, with whole pages of the draft crossed out and even the mildest statements about confirming previous agreements rejected. "The proposals within the sections titled 'Fighting Climate Change' and 'Carbon Markets' are fundamentally incompatible with the President's approach to climate change," says another red-ink comment.

Blair said, only on Thursday, that the US was moderating it's position on climate change as the summit approached, so this is embarrassing to say the least. It certainly now seems impossible that Blair will manage to get Bush to sign up to any proposal on climate change before he leaves office.

The truth is that Bush has given Blair nothing for all his support.

Before visiting the White House this month, the prime minister suggested that he was close to persuading George Bush to accept the establishment of carbon trading schemes, one of five main proposals drawn up ahead of the G8. But Washington rejected the sections on carbon trading, saying to back trading schemes would imply acceptance of emission caps.

It is impossible now to imagine the summit producing anything other than a meaningless agreement. I'm really not going to swipe at Blair now as I do think he has honestly tried to sway this stupid man the White House, but the thick little ideologue is obviously so sworn to his particular mindset - that ignores every scientific fact known on this subject - that he is not going to be swayed.

As well as cutting global emissions, Germany had stated in its draft that it wanted agreement to curb the rise in average temperatures this century to 2C and raise energy efficiency in power and transport by 20% by 2020. Both positions are compatible with policies in California and other US states, which have set their own targets and timetables.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, this week suggested that there was little hope of a deal. She said preliminary talks at the EU-Russia summit and in meetings with G8 members had been "difficult".

The director of Greenpeace, John Sauven, said the leaked document proved Britain had failed to influence the US. "Despite his protestations to the contrary Tony Blair's efforts to persuade George Bush of the importance of tackling climate change have singularly failed," he said.

Germany is now about to raise the stakes, saying that they will block decisions on all other matters until the US and others agree to make changes in environmental policies stating: "America doesn't want to commit to firm goals. We can't put the global future of our children at risk because of the narrow-mindedness of individual negotiating partners."

And "narrow-minded" is the best way to describe the Bush mindset. Blair had a hard time persuading a creationist of the importance of scientific research and it's implications for the future of the planet. We can hardly blame Blair for that, can we?

A man who believes that children should be taught creationism in schools obviously doesn't have any understanding of what scientific theory is, so Blair was obviously always hitting his head off a brick wall attempting to persuade such a person of the dangers of climate change.

However, it is the entire planet that will pay the price for Bush's stupidity.

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Pussy Party

Tags: Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Democrats, Iraq war, Iraq war funding

Choice - the Bush way....

Only on Planet Bush could these two statements be made in practically the same sentence.

I obviously thought he had weapons, he didn't have weapons; the world thought he had weapons.

And then, seconds later:

As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his to make. And he made -- he made a choice that has subsequently left -- subsequently caused him to lose his life.

Saddam did disclose. He said he didn't have them. The problem was that Bush refused to believe that Saddam didn't have them.

And, given the fact that he didn't have the weapons, we can assume it was impossible for him to disarm a second time, so what was Saddam's choice again?

Tags: Saddam, Bush, 1441, press conference, Iraq war

Iran 'accused of attacks in Iraq to bolster US strategy'

A leading British think tank has stated what we all suspect anyway, that the Bush administration may be highlighting accusations that the Iranian government is behind attacks in Iraq in order to strengthen its hand in preparing for military strikes on Iran.

The independent think-tank Basic cast doubt on the US claims of links between attacks in Iraq and the government of Iran, claiming that the intelligence this was based on was "sketchy".

It has always seemed ludicrous to me that the Shia government of Iran would aid and fund the Sunni elements in Iraq who are actually the people fighting the coalition forces. Indeed, they are actually killing Iraqi Shias, which is what makes the Bush administrations accusations so nonsensical.

The UK and US governments have frequently accused Iran of aiding militant groups in Iraq who are attacking coalition forces. However, the report said that "despite efforts by the Bush administration to confirm the strength of evidence presented, doubt still surrounds the case against Iran, particularly with regard to the degree of direct involvement of the Iranian leadership.

"Whatever the true extent and nature of Iranian military action in Iraq, few independent analysts believe Tehran is playing a decisive role in the sectarian warfare and insurgency," said the report.

Turning to the US strategic motivation for highlighting the Iranian role in Iraq, Basic (British American Security Information Council) suggested that Iran could be a "useful scapegoat to divert the blame" for failures in Iraq away from the occupying powers. But also, "if Tehran can be cast as a source of regional instability in the eyes of the international community, then the US administration's hand will be strengthened as it seeks support for stronger measures to oppose Iranian nuclear ambitions".

In order to facilitate this new policy of turning logic on it's head, the administration set out a new strategic alignment in January of this year.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.”

She made this bizarre statement at the very moment that US soldiers are being killed by a Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

Seymour Hersh has already reported on this earlier this year:

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

So, in order to facilitate an attack on Iran the administration are turning logic on it's head, insisting that Iran is behind attacks on US troops in Iraq.

The real reason they are doing this is because they are refusing to enter into negotiations with Iran regarding her nuclear ambitions, which are, of course, perfectly legal under the nuclear non proliferation treaty as long as they remain for civilian purposes only. The US ultimately want Iran to desist from any nuclear development, which is why I suspect Bush is avoiding negotiations and is, instead, attempting to bully and cajole Iran into stopping it's nuclear programme.

In any negotiations the legality of Iran's civilian nuclear programme would have to be taken as a given under the nuclear non proliferation treaty and we would have to enter into an agreement of inspections to ensure that Iran had no plans to develop a nuclear weapon. Bush would be reluctant to go down this path and would simply prefer a non-nuclear Iran.

One of the consequences of Bush's demands that Iran suspend all nuclear enrichment before talks can begin - and the subsequent sanctions that were imposed because Iran refused to do so - is that the IAEA has been prevented from verifying how far down the line Iran's nuclear programme is.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has warned that there will be "major confrontation" unless a way is found to end this dispute.

I suspect that Dick Cheney and some Likud supporters would love a "major confrontation" with Iran, and Bush is certainly leaving himself with a diminishing set of options. Indeed, there may be some in the administration who would prefer attacking Iran rather than negotiating with her.

Let's be honest, Bush could easily meet the Iranians without them suspending uranium enrichment and arrange for inspectors to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but what he wants is for the nuclear club to be reserved for the US and it's allies.

Indeed, if the Iranians were to suspend nuclear enrichment in order to facilitate negotiations I think Bush would find himself in a corner. For how could the US, as a signatory to NNPT, tell Iran that it actually wanted that country to forego all it's rights to nuclear energy? Now, most of the planet have already worked out that the NNPT is a sham, as none of the nuclear powers who are signatories have made any attempt to disavow themselves of these weapons, which is their obligations under the treaty. No, they are rather using the treaty as a way of maintaining a nuclear club and reserving membership of that club for the select few.

So rather than attempting to solve this problem diplomatically, Bush - as always - is simply upping the ante.

President George Bush said he was instructing the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to press for tougher sanctions against Iran. "The world has spoken and said ... no nuclear weapons programmes. And yet they're constantly ignoring the demands," he said.

Of course, none of us know if Iran is developing a nuclear weapons programme, so Bush has no idea whether Iran is ignoring the world's demands. What he is doing here is conflating demands that Iran suspend it's perfectly legal uranium enrichment with his fear that she might develop a nuclear bomb and presenting one as proof of the other. It's the kind of linguistic sophistry that has come to define this administration.

However, unlike the situation that existed before the invasion of Iraq, when Bush was last issuing similar threats, the military options open to the US regarding Iran are much more limited.

The only serious options open to the US are air strikes, and they are almost guaranteed not to work.

Senior United States military commanders have told the Bush administration that military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities would probably fail to destroy them, the New Yorker magazine reported on Sunday.

"The target array in Iran is huge, but it's amorphous," the magazine quotes one unidentified general as saying.

And not only would they fail to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons, but the price for the US would be huge:

The senior commanders also warned that any attack could have "serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States," the article says, citing unidentified U.S. military officials.

Perhaps Bush is hoping against hope that Ahmadinejad is going to back down under the pressure of further sanctions, because otherwise - by refusing to negotiate unless Iran suspends uranium enrichment - Bush is backing himself into a very tight corner.

It's true, as always, that the US have a very large gun; but, in this instance, firing it might do more damage to their long term interests in the region than to their opponents.

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Republican memory loss

Hamas cabinet ministers seized by Israel troops

Mahmoud Abbas has been running around like a man demented attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between Hamas and Fatah forces and to stop the "absurd" rocket attacks from Palestinian militants on to Israel.

Perhaps, the Israelis are trying to help unite the Palestinians by arresting a Palestinian cabinet minister and 32 other Hamas officials, because that is certainly what they have achieved with even non-Hamas politicians objecting to members of their rivals being subjected to this treatment.

Troops moved into Nablus during the night and took the Palestinian Education minister Naser al-Shaer, three Hamas members of parliament, the pro-Hamas mayor and deputy mayor of the city and other Hamas officials in neighbouring towns and villages.

Mr Shaer's wife, Huda, said soldiers knocked on the door of their home and took him away. The mayors of Qalqiliya and Beita, and the head of the main Islamic charity in Nablus, Fayad al-Arba, were also detained. Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian Information minister and an independent, condemned the seizures as a "very serious escalation and an attack on Palestinian democratic institutions". He called on the international community to protest at what he said was an attack on the Palestinian Authority in breach of the Oslo agreements.

This is exactly what the Israelis did last year after the kidnap of Gilad Shalit and it is, again, being criticised by the international community.

The problem is not the arrest of Palestinian parliamentarians as no-one is arguing that parliamentarians are above the law; the problem is that last year parliamentarians were arrested and, to the best of my knowledge, there were not even any charges brought, let alone trials. This is a form of judicial kidnap, Israel seizing people important to the running of the Palestinian Authority's day to day affairs simply because she can.

The reasons for the arrests given by the Israelis would not stand up in any court of law, which is why they probably never send those arrested before one.

The Israeli military declared: "The Hamas terror organisation is currently involved in enhancing the terror infrastructure in the [West Bank] region, based on the model used in the Gaza Strip. The organisation exploits governmental institutions to encourage and support terrorist activity."

Amir Peretz, the Defence minister, by contrast linked the arrests directly to the continued rocket fire, which killed an Israeli woman in the southern border town of Sderot this week, declaring on Army Radio: "Arrests are better than shooting. The arrest of these Hamas leaders sends a message to the armed organisations that we demand that this firing [of rockets] stop."

You will notice that Peretz actually admits to kidnapping. He doesn't describe any crime that these men are supposed to have committed, but rather admits that they have been arrested because it "sends a message to the armed organisations".

I can't think of any other democracy - apart from Britain and the UK with their bizarre non-democratic reactions to terrorism - where people could be arrested with no charges being brought against them, nor any trial looming. They are arrested simply in the hope that their arrest might send a signal to others.

It's the sort of thing that one might imagine Mugabe doing. Certainly it is the kind of reasoning he might use to justify his actions.

However, even in the US and Britain, the people detained are at least suspected of possible involvement in terrorism, or at least some vague connection to it. I find the British practice of house arrest and the American habit of locking people in Guantanamo deplorable enough, but the Israelis are actually going much further.

They are not even pretending that these men have committed any crime, they are arresting them simply to warn others.

Bush and Blair have often stated that terrorists want to destroy our way of life. But what's really interesting is how quickly - certainly with regard to law and due process - that we, in the west, have abandoned our commitments to certain tenets that we have, until now, used to define ourselves as civilised.

Now Israel leads the way showing us where we might go next. Arrest people who have committed no crimes, because it might send a signal to others.

The people leading us are looking less and less like governments, and more and more like gangs.

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Olbermann on the Democratic sell out

Olbermann takes the Dems to task over their failure to stop the Iraq war and the recent deal they did with the White House regarding the funding of this war.

Tags: Olbermann, Democrats, Republicans, Iraq war funding

Ex-Justice Aide Admits Politics Affected Hiring

Monica Goodling has admitted that she "crossed the line" when she took into consideration applicants political beliefs in what is the clearest indication yet that, under the Bush administration, the Justice Department is becoming politicised, caring more about party advantage than the writ of law.

Of course, she was only being so candid because she has been granted immunity from prosecution which means, unlike her boss when he took the stand and a bout of amnesia, she can actually tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

When she says she "crossed the line", she is actually admitting to crossing the line between what was legal and illegal.

She did eventually, after much probing, admit that she had broken the law:

Goodling stumbled several times before admitting, "The best I can say is that I know I took political considerations into account."

"Do you believe they were illegal or legal?" asked Scott.

"I don't believe I intended to commit a crime," she answered, confirming that Regent University graduates are indeed trained to speak in a lawyerly manner.

Scott pressed: "Did you break the law? Is it against the law to take those considerations into account?"

"I believe I crossed the lines," Goodling replied, "but I didn't mean to."

By "crossed the lines," Scott asked, did she mean that she had violated federal civil service laws?

Goodling responded: "I crossed the line of the civil service rules."

Scott clarified that those "rules" are, in fact, "laws."

And the lengths she went to in order to find out applicants political leanings was quite extraordinary.

She said she had done Google or Nexis searches on job candidates or searched their names on campaign-finance databases to see if they might have given money to Republican or Democratic candidates. She also pressed applicants’ references, at times, to ferret out the political background of the job candidates they were endorsing.

Civil service rules prohibit such questions when federal agencies are hiring or promoting staff members for career positions. Violations could be unlawful, although probably not a crime, Justice Department officials have said. Two internal investigative units have begun an inquiry into Ms. Goodling’s screening practices.

However, it was worth granting her the immunity as what she had to say was fairly important:

Goodling went on to:

• confirm that former DOJ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson had compiled a list of US Attorneys who would be fired -- apparently for being insufficiently partisan in their inquiries and prosecutions -- and that Gonzales had been aware of the list and involved in meetings about it,

• place White House political czar Karl Rove in a room where the firings were discussed,

• acknowledge that, as early as 2OO5, there was talk about forcing US Attorneys out to make way for White House favorites and

• explain how US Attorneys were "rewarded" for helping to promote and defend the Patriot Act, at a time when that law was under attack as an assault on basic liberties.

There was plenty to make one think that Gonzales had been less than frank when he was questioned by the Committee. He stated that he had not spoken to any of his aides since the firings "to protect the integrity of this investigation".

However, that was not the story that Goodling told:

During a meeting in March before she resigned, Ms. Goodling said, Mr. Gonzales asked her questions that left her uncomfortable. She thought he might be trying to compare recollections, so their stories would be consistent if they were questioned about their actions, she said. “I just thought maybe we shouldn’t have that conversation,” she said.

Brian J. Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Gonzales “has never attempted to influence or shape the testimony or public statements of any witness in this matter, including Ms. Goodling. The statements made by the attorney general during this meeting were intended only to comfort her in a very difficult period.”

Nevertheless, it does appear that Gonzales was having the very conversations that he previously claimed not to have had.

Virginia Congressman Bobby Scott concluded by stating that in Alberto Gonzales' Department of Justice "the culture of loyalty to the administration was more important than loyalty to the rule of law."

There was very little that Monica Goodling had testified which contradicted that statement.

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Tags: Monica Goodling, Gonzales, fired US Attorneys

Most Palestinians killed in Israeli raids were civilians, Amnesty says

During last years military bombardment of Gaza, Israeli Security Forces killed more than 320 Palestinian civilians, a threefold increase on the previous year according to Amnesty International. During this same year 21 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian militants, the lowest annual figure since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000.

The human rights group's 2007 report says that over half of the more than 650 Palestinians killed in 2006 were civilians, 120 of them children and young people under 18. Amnesty defines civilians, "as people that are reasonably supposed never to have been involved in armed operations".

While Amnesty said that dozens of Palestinians were killed in the West Bank it pointed out that most of the increase resulted from aerial and artillery bombardments in Gaza after the abduction of the Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit in late June and in response to increased Qassam rocket fire on Israel. These included, for example, the shelling of a house in the northern town of Beit Hanoun which killed 17 members of the Athamneh family.

The Israeli assault on Gaza was a war crime as it was an act of collective punishment against a group of people who had nothing to do with the kidnap of Gilad Shalit.

Indeed, it is very hard to think of any other country who would be backed by the US if they launched such a disproportionate response to one of their soldiers being kidnapped. Any other country that launched an aerial and artillery bombardment upon another over the kidnap of a soldier would almost certainly receive America's disapprobation.

Amnesty also accused soldiers and settlers of committing "serious human rights abuses, including unlawful killings against Palestinians mostly with impunity". Although it said settler attacks on farmers in the West Bank had decreased, they were continuing.

It said that, at times, security forces were present at such incidents and did not intervene. It also accused the security forces of often only opening investigations after the cases had been highlighted by journalists and human rights groups.

The Israeli military said yesterday it did its utmost "to avoid harming innocent people... in contrast to terror organisations that do their utmost to harm innocent civilians".

The Israelis often make this claim which is, of course, blatant nonsense. When Olmert strewed cluster bombs over civilian areas in southern Lebanon in the last days of last summers conflict, was he "doing his utmost to avoid harming innocent people"?

Indeed, Israel made a similar claim during the war last summer which was examined by Human Rights Watch and found to be nonsense. Israel claimed that many civilians were killed because Hizbullah were hiding weapons amongst the populace and, whilst there were cases of this happening, in many, many cases of innocent's killed this was found not to be the case.

Human Rights Watch investigated some two dozen bombing incidents in Lebanon involving a third of the civilians who by then had been killed. In none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack.

How do we know? Through the same techniques we use in war zones around the world to cut through people's incentive to lie. We probed and cross-checked multiple eyewitnesses, many of whom talked openly of Hizbullah's presence elsewhere but were adamant that Hizbullah was not at the scene of the attack. We examined bombing sites for evidence of military activity such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers and military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters. If we were unsure, we gave the IDF the benefit of the doubt.

The case of Kana shows how this works. After two Israeli missiles killed 28 civilians in a house there on July 30, the IDF initially charged that Hizbullah had been firing rockets from the vicinity of the targeted house. But Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Kana found that there had been no Hizbullah presence near the bomb site at the time of the attack. IDF sources later admitted to an Israeli military correspondent that Hizbullah wasn't shooting at all from Kana that day.

In some cases, the IDF trotted out video of Hizbullah firing rockets from a village. But it has yet to show that Hizbullah was in a civilian building or vehicle at the time of an Israeli attack that killed civilians. Blaming Hizbullah is simply not an honest explanation for why so many Lebanese civilians died. And without honest introspection, the IDF can't meet its duty and self-professed goal to do everything possible to spare civilians.

The truth is that "Israeli forces systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon".

One has to remember that the attacks on Gaza were taking place at the exact same time as Israel was bombarding Beirut, and was being conducted with the same reckless abandon. The bombardment of Gaza as a means of rescuing Gilad Shalit was not even what one could reasonably claim was a feasible policy. Indeed, there were many of us who thought the bombardment of Gaza might make it all the more likely that Gilad would be killed. It was an act of revenge upon a civilian population who had done nothing.

When one remembers the wanton destruction of last summer, the destruction of the Beirut's bridges, it's power plants, it's roads, it's buildings, it's airport, it's viaduct; one really has to wonder whether, if that level of damage had been wrought by an East European for the cause of rescuing kidnapped soldiers, if the individual who wrought such damage wouldn't be sitting in the Hague right now.

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Video: "I May Have Taken Inappropriate Considerations Into Account On Some Occasions. And I Regret Those Mistakes"

The Justice Department's former White House liaison testified to Congress today about her role in the firings of US Attorneys last year. In an opening statement, Monica Goodling told the committee, "Nevertheless, I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions. And I may have taken inappropriate considerations into account on some occasions. And I regret those mistakes"



Monica Goodling Takes the 5th, But Is Compelled to Testify

A hostage situation

Paul Krugman has an interesting take on the Iraq war funding fight over at the New York Times.

A Hostage Situation, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job...

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

What’s at stake ... is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.” ...

What I haven’t seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources.

As long as a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could be counted on to rubber-stamp the administration’s requests, you could say that this wasn’t a real problem, ... just part of its usual reliance on fiscal smoke and mirrors. But this time Mr. Bush decided to surge additional troops into Iraq after an election in which the public overwhelmingly rejected his war — and then dared Congress to deny him the necessary funds. As I said, it’s an act of hostage-taking.

Actually, it’s even worse than that. According to reports, the final version of the funding bill ... won’t even set a hard deadline for withdrawal..., only an “advisory,” nonbinding date. Yet Mr. Bush plans to veto the bill all the same — and will then accuse Congress of failing to support the troops.

The whole situation brings to mind what Abraham Lincoln said ... in 1860, about secessionists who blamed the critics of slavery for the looming civil war: “A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”

So how should Congress respond to Mr. Bush’s threats? ... Confronting Mr. Bush on Iraq has become a patriotic duty.

The fact is that Mr. Bush’s refusal to face up to the failure of his Iraq adventure, his apparent determination to spend the rest of his term in denial, has become a clear and present danger to national security. Thanks to the demands of the Iraq war, we’re already a superpower without a strategic reserve, unable to respond to crises that might erupt elsewhere in the world. And more and more military experts warn that repeated deployments in Iraq — now extended to 15 months — are breaking the back of our volunteer military.

If nothing is done to wind down this war during the 21 months — 21 months! — Mr. Bush has left, the damage may be irreparable.

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Tags: Paul Krugman, Iraq war funding bill, Republicans, Democrats, Bush, Pelosi, Reid

Democrats Pull Troop Deadline From Iraq Bill

The Democrats have backed down in their battle with Bush over the funding of the Iraq war and have agreed, in what is a devastating U-turn, to allow a bill to go forward for a vote on war financing without a timetable for troop withdrawal being attached.

However, certain high profile Democrats have said that when the bill comes before the House that they will not vote for it.

But even so, many Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, indicated that they would not support the war money, meaning that a significant number of Republicans would have to sign on to ensure the plan’s approval.

Ms. Pelosi made clear that if money for the war was going to be provided without a timeline for withdrawal, it would be without her personal support. “I would never vote for such a thing,” Ms. Pelosi said as she entered the office of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, to put the final touches on the $120 billion proposal.

The Democrats appear to be bowing to the inevitable here as they simply do not have enough votes to overcome Bush's veto. However, the Democrats were elected to bring this war to a close and this strikes me as right up there with the most useless of gestures.

Pelosi won't vote for it but the chances are that, whatever version of the bill is finally passed, the war will slide on.

There are many anti-war groups who will be, rightly, very disappointed with this stance.

It was summed up best by Feingold:

“There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action,” said Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who was unsuccessful last week in his push for a withdrawal of combat troops by spring. “Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq.”

I'm with Feingold on this one. Talk is cheap, and it really is time that the Democrats grew some balls. They have, however, prepared a fall back position aimed at easing the pain:

In an effort to appease antiwar Democrats, the party’s leaders plan to allow two votes in the House. One would provide the war money, and seems likely to be opposed by large numbers of Democrats. The other, separated out to allow more Democrats to vote in favor, would include popular measures that are also part of the package, including a minimum wage increase and $17 billion in added domestic and military spending.

The bills would then be combined into one and sent to the Senate, with the idea of getting the measure to the president by the weekend.

And if Bush vetoes that, demanding that a clean bill be sent to him without any additions, will they cave in at that point?

This is far from a total victory for Bush though, as the new legislation will insist that the Iraqi government show progress on improving security and forging political unity.

Bush has always maintained that there was no room for Congressional intervention in the day to day running of Iraq and has always resisted benchmarks. The new bill not only has such benchmarks, but it has strong support from a number of Republicans.

“We don’t have a veto-proof Congress,” Mr. Reid said. “But no one can say with any degree of veracity that we haven’t made great progress, and this bill is further proof of that.”

The increase in the minimum wage is a significant victory for the Democrats, but it's a victory that comes at the cost of continuing a war that they were elected to end.

In these circumstances it's hard to get very excited about it at all.

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Tags: Democrats, Republicans, Iraq war funding, troop withdrawal, Iraq war, Pelosi, Reid, Bush

Bush may turn to UN in search for Iraq solution

The man who ignored the UN before invading Iraq, stating that he didn't need "a permission slip" to defend the United States of America, has performed a rather dramatic U-turn and now says that - if the surge fails - he plans to internationalise the Iraq dispute and find an expanded role for UN forces.

I'm sure other country's all over the world simply can't wait to send their youngsters into this American quagmire and help take the heat off the Republicans before the 2008 elections.

It's about as insane an idea as I have ever heard and the greatest admission of failure one could ever expect to hear from a man and an administration that have not only treated the UN with contempt but, by insisting that the UN must rubber stamp their wars, they have often acted as if they don't even understand what the UN was set up to do.

The move comes amid rising concern in Washington that President George Bush's controversial Baghdad security surge, led by the US commander, General David Petraeus, is not working and that Iran is winning the clandestine battle for control of Iraq.

"Petraeus is brilliant. But he is the captain of a sinking ship," said a former senior administration official who questioned whether Iraq's divided political leadership could prevent a descent into chaos. "Iraq's government is a mobile phone number that doesn't answer. Iraq probably can't be fixed."

Having said that he would know if the surge was working after three months, Bush increased the time needed to six months and there are now reports that, when Petraeus presents his "progress" report in September that Bush may ask for another six months.

While insisting that no decision had yet been taken on an extension, the Pentagon announced last week that 35,000 soldiers from 10 army brigades had been told they could expect to be deployed to Iraq by the end of the year. That would enable the US to maintain heightened troop levels of about 160,000 soldiers through to next spring.

According to an analysis published by Hearst Newspapers yesterday, the number of combat troops could almost double - to 98,000 - by the end of the year if arriving and departing combat brigades overlap. By the same calculation, the overall total including support troops could top 200,000 - an increase the report said amounted to a "second surge".

It seems obvious that, no matter what happens, Bush is not going to admit defeat here, and is simply piling more and more troops towards a problem that he is not fixing.

And to sweeten that bitter pill he plans to announce that he's inviting other nations to take over responsibilities that currently belong to the US. This would allow him to placate public and congressional opinion by talking of a drawdown of US forces.

There's only one problem with this plan. Why would any other nation wish to send troops into Iraq? Why should other nations take over a mess that is not theirs, which they did not vote for at the UN, and which the whole world can see is a disaster?

Why should the UN bail out Bush?

"The administration's plan calls for moving on several fronts," the former official said. "Firstly, there is the international plan to win political, economic and military support for the Iraqi government and state, not least by going to the UN and asking for a UN command and flag to supplant the US coalition command.

"Regionally, there is diplomacy aimed at mobilising more Arab neighbours to understand that there is no Sunni leader coming back to Baghdad and that countries like Saudi Arabia should support Maliki [Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shia prime minister] before he has no choice but to fully align with Iran," the official said.

"Internally, the plan is for US forces to help isolate takfirists (fundamentalist Salafi jihadis), peel off Sunnis from the insurgency, contain hardcore elements of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, and halt Iranian and trans-Syrian infiltration of troops and materiel."

This whole plan is typical of this regime in that it simply ignores reality and acts as if reality is something that the US can fashion as it likes on the ground. Maliki's government is already aligned with Iran and no amount of American wishful thinking is going to change that fact.

I also notice that, even when staring defeat in the face, Bush has still not found a realistic role for Syria and Iran in restoring order in Iraq as requested by the Baker Report. This is the policy of lunatics, the finest example of which is reported as Dick Cheney's "deep fall back option".

If all else failed, the US might seek an arrangement with Mr Sadr, if only to secure an orderly transition, the official claimed. "Cutting a deal with the Mahdi army is [vice-president] Dick Cheney's deep fallback option."

Good luck with that Dick, the last time Mr Sadr attended peace talks the US Army attempted to kill him, so I'm sure he'll be falling over himself to accept your invitation.

The US are said to be putting their hopes on the fact that Kofi Annan - one of the wars harshest critics - has been replaced by Ban Ki-moon at the UN. However, for this plan to work the other nations of the world would still have to vote to send their troops there to take the place of US forces and there are surely few nations who would be willing to do that.

Indeed, with the forthcoming election of Gordon Brown there must now be questions over how committed Britain is going to remain to the Iraq war as Brown has already given large hints that he intends to review Britain's involvement.

While it was uncertain whether the new "internationalised" approach to Iraq would get off the ground, the political stakes as the 2008 presidential and congressional elections approached could hardly be higher, the former administration official said.

"The blame game has already begun. The Democrats want to run against a 'chaos in Iraq' scenario. The Republicans will want to keep extending it [the surge] past next February. The White House may offer a schedule for a drawdown - but what does that really mean?... The only policy Republicans have is a policy of delaying the inevitable."

In a sign that personal as well as governmental damage limitation is under way, key Bush administration figures appear to be distancing themselves from current policy. National security adviser Stephen Hadley is expected to hand over many Iraq-related duties to Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, who some in Washington are already describing as a fall guy.

Similar senior-level role changes involving officials dealing with Iraq at the state department and Pentagon has fed speculation that people who helped launch Gen Petraeus's "sinking ship" are now abandoning it.

The Republicans can try as hard as they like to distance themselves from this conflict, but they will not succeed. For four years these people ignored international law and treated the UN as if it was an irrelevance, and there is a certain schadenfreude in watching these arrogant arseholes re-approaching the UN on their knees, although I am convinced that they have left it far too late for the UN to be able to help them.

The Republicans are hoping to avoid being punished for the disastrous policy that they forged ahead with against all world opinion, but there would be no justice if they were allowed to escape the consequences of their arrogant foolishness. Thousands of innocent people are dead because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz wanted Saddam toppled at any cost. In order to facilitate this they "fixed the facts" around the policy.

Crimes on that scale deserve to be punished. And no amount of dancing around at the UN will ever make any of us forget whose war this really was.

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Majority in poll want Bush impeached.

There's fascinating vote taking place over at MSNBC asking whether or not President Bush should be impeached. So far there have been 446,358 responses and the overwhelming majority - 88% - favour impeachment.

Go over and cast your vote by clicking here.

I find it fascinating that, whenever the public are asked this question, they have a clarity of purpose that the Democrats seem to lack.

Here's how the figures stood for Clinton at the height of the Monika Lewinsky affair. That adds a bit of perspective doesn't it?

Click title to impeach.

Tags: Bush, impeachment, MSNBC

PEOPLE CHEER ON RON PAUL AT FUNDRAISER

This is the reaction he gets in Austin, Texas of all places. He gets applauded when he say that US Foreign policy is f@cked.

Tags: Ron Paul, Republican leadership contest

Godfather IV

Tags: Gonzales, Bush, wiretapping

Lebanese Army and Islamists Battle for 2nd Day

Once again death walks the streets of Lebanon. We had the horrors of the Israeli invasion last summer with it's brutal bombing of Beirut, we had the nightmare of children being killed by Olmert's hastily strewn cluster bombs after the war was over, and now we have internal violence reminding us all of the brutal civil war that for fifteen years gripped Lebanon.

The Lebanese Army are now spending a second day outside a Palestinian refugee camp battling members of a radical Islamist group and raising concerns for thousands trapped inside.

Government officials said at least 60 people had been killed — 30 soldiers, 15 militants and 15 civilians — in the fighting that began when a police raid on bank robbers early Sunday escalated into one of Lebanon’s most significant security crises since the end of the civil war in 1990.

The militant group, Fatah al Islam, which is thought to have links to Al Qaeda, fired antiaircraft guns and mortars and had night vision goggles and other sophisticated equipment. The Lebanese Army does not have such gear.

Lebanese television stations reported that among the dead militants were men from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab countries, although the reports could not be confirmed. Security officials said some of the men wore explosive belts used by suicide bombers.

Around the outskirts of the camp, called Nahr al Bared, the scene was reminiscent of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s, with tanks and heavy armor rumbling past, occasionally opening fire at buildings in the camp, while snipers on rooftops fired at anything that moved inside.

It's a testament of the tinder box that Lebanon has become that all this fighting has come as the result of an attempt to arrest men accused of bank robbery. This has led to the deadliest internal fighting since the civil war which only ended in 1990.

That, of course, is the story that we are hearing. But there's another side to all of this.

This is being reported as if an attempt to arrest bank robbers has flared into something bordering on civil war. But this is ignoring the undercurrents. It's ignoring the fact that the west are attempting to shore up the government of Sionora, the same Western powers who backed Olmert has he pounded Beirut to dust have now, somehow, cast themselves as Lebanon's saviour. It's a bizarre situation indeed to watch the people who ignored his tears as he begged the world to stop Olmert's blatant collective punishment of the people of Lebanon for a crime they did not commit, now cast themselves as his partner in a war "to save democracy".

The truth is that Siniora's government is now desperately clinging to power, hanging literally by a thread, as Nasrallah and Hizbullah wait in the wings determined to take their reward for their victory over Israel, and that Bush and Co are equally determined to avoid them from obtaining it.

And caught in the middle of this tussle for power are the Palestinians, always the poor bloody Palestinians. Once again in refugee camps, reminding all of us of the horror of Sabra and Chatila, the memory of which might be the only thing that is restraining the Lebanese Army.

Bush, as always, sees the hands of outsiders. He relies on most people's ignorance of what is going on here to push his agenda. Predictably, he lays this scenario at the door of Syria.

"Extremists that are trying to topple that young democracy need to be reined in," President George Bush told the Reuters news agency. But Mr Bush, though deeply distrustful of Syria's role in Lebanon, stopped short of accusing Damascus of involvement. "I'll be guarded on making accusations until I get better information, but I will tell you there's no doubt that Syria was deeply involved in Lebanon. There's no question they're still involved," he said.

But there's another story here. It's the story of the neo-con support for Olmert's attempt to "wipe out" Hizbullah. It's the story of a war which Israel - thanks to goading from Bush and the neo-cons - entered into without a proper plan, and it's the story of a war which Israel lost.

Nasrallah and Hizbullah feel that it is time to pay the piper. Bush and Co are desperately slapping the bottom of the pond, muddying the picture so that it's impossible for anyone to actually tell what is going on here. Seeing al-Qaeda monsters and Syrian agents behind every tree.

And in the middle of this grotesque farce are the poor people of Lebanon. As is so often the case, they are the pawns in other people's chess games. And in the middle of this most recent spat, we have the Palestinian refugees, another group of people who often find themselves in the middle of other people's wars.

And as Bush has - in a rare moment of honesty - admitted, all of this is to prevent the government of Siniora from falling.

Which sort of takes for granted the answer to a larger question. Does Siniora's government deserve to stand?

When the US invaded Iraq they had enough power in the region to order the Syrians to leave Lebanon forthwith. As their power has drained down the Iraq plughole their ability to influence events in Lebanon has lessened, and their backing of Israel's insane attack upon the Lebanese last summer is the main reason that the government of Siniora now hangs over a precipice.

Both Olmert and Siniora retain office without anything that one could possibly call popular support. We do not yet know what price will be paid for the neo-con backed adventure that was last summer's Israeli-Lebanon war, but we do know that - in the interim - the immediate price will, as always, be paid by the poor people of Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees.

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Hands Held High

This is wonderful.



You can read the lyrics here.

Tags: Linkin Park, Hands Held High video

Congressman Ron Paul on the Late Edition

Ron Paul is the only Republican running for office that has the courage to break from the rhetoric that the rest of them have learned by rote.

Republicans are even said to be attempting to prevent him from taking part in further debates. He argues that peace is a positive message rather than a negative message, which sounds so foreign to anyone who has been listening to Bush for the past six years that it must boggle fellow Republican's minds. Paul's problem is that he is actually talking Republican values to a party that no longer holds such values. It has become the party of Coulter somewhere along the line.

Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr

The Bush regime attempted to kill Muqtada al-Sadr after luring him into a house for peace negotiations and then attacking it, according to a senior Iraqi government official.

The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. "I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild," the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai'e told The Independent in an interview.

It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with little thought for the consequences include the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the Baath party.

This is yet another example of the recklessness with which this administration pursues it's aims.

It goes without saying that any attempts at negotiations between the US and al-Sadr will now prove almost impossible to bring about.

It appears that it 2004, when the US and the Mehdi Army were battling in Najaf, that the meeting was set up in the house in Najaf of Muqtada's father Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr who had been murdered by Saddam's gunmen with two of his sons five years before.

However, US Marines opened fire on the house before al-Sadr had even arrived and he was able to make his escape. It is hard to believe that an order to engage in this kind of treachery and double dealing could have come from anywhere but the very heights of the Bush administration. To allow an enemy to attend peace talks at which you attempt to kill them has got to be the lowest of the low. How could anyone ever again agree to attend any conference or negotiations that these people attempt to set up?

When parties agree to meet to discuss peace, both sides have given their word that they are attending on good faith. The location is known to both. To attack peace talks almost beggars belief. And yet, the news that the US did so is coming from a highly qualified Iraqi source:

Although Dr Rubai'e, as Iraqi National Security Adviser since 2004 and earlier a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, is closely associated with the American authorities in Baghdad, he has no doubt about what happened.

He sees the negotiations as part of a charade to lure Mr Sadr, who is normally very careful about his own security, to a house where he could be eliminated.

"When I came back to Baghdad I was really, really infuriated, I can tell you," Dr Rubai'e said. "I went berserk with both [the US commander General George] Casey and the ambassador [John Negroponte]." They denied that knew of a trap and said they would look into what happened but he never received any explanation from them.

This is also not without precedent as the US also attempted to kidnap Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in a botched raid in Arbil whilst they were on an official visit to meet with Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

As Patrick Cockburn said in the Independent newspaper at the time, the only equivalent action to put this into perspective is to imagine what the US would say if the Iranians swept into Pakistan or Afghanistan and arrested the head of the CIA and MI6 whilst they were on official business.

This is all further proof that the Bush administration are determined to operate out of the accepted norms, although all indications are that this will increase rather than diminish their problems in the region.

It's also a further indication of the Bush regime's contempt for negotiation and their willingness to rely almost exclusively on military solutions to all of their problems.

But to attack peace talks has to be a new low, even for these guys.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Cheney, al-Sadr, Mahdi Army, Iraq, Iraq war.

Bush presidency worst in history, says Carter

Having had a pop at Tony Blair for his sycophancy towards George Bush, Jimmy Carter rounded off his weekend by declaring George Bush the worst US President ever. To be fair, they are both targets begging to be attacked, but it is highly unusual for a former President to attack a sitting one. Then again, it is highly unusual for a sitting US President to declare that he is above the law without being impeached so it's the season for unusual and strange happenings.

The White House spokesman yesterday called Mr Carter "increasingly irrelevant", adding that his "reckless personal criticism is out there".

This White House have routinely failed to engage with critics, for instance dismissing Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" as a "statement of the obvious", but whatever they may have done to minimise the damage from his book, it didn't work. Ever since Katrina, Bush has appeared to be running a Presidency that is increasingly dysfunctional, and his ability to fob off critics with a casual line has proved to be waning.

However, to dismiss a man who - in the last few years - won the Nobel Peace Prize as "increasingly irrelevant", smacks of a sort of desperation.

There will be many who question whether Carter should have been so forthright about a sitting President, but there will be many, many more nodding their heads in agreement.

In a newspaper interview, Mr Carter said of the Bush years: "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." And speaking on BBC Radio 4, Mr Carter criticised Mr Blair, who leaves office next month, for his close relations with Mr Bush, particularly concerning the Iraq war.

It is certainly true that, under this arrogant and ignorant administration, anti-US feeling across the planet has reached unprecedented levels. It is also true that people like myself have a hard time thinking of a worse President than the one currently holding office.

What have been his achievements? Nixon, for all his faults, opened relations with China. Reagan engaged with Gorbachov.

The only thing I can imagine Bush supporters listing is that he rid the world of Saddam Hussein, although even they would have to admit that chaos has followed in the wake of that action, a chaos that the US has been singularly unable to contain. And indeed, that failure to contain the chaos has led to a marked drop in the way the world views the US as a superpower.

Before the Iraq debacle most of us assumed the US could do as she pleased, but as we have watched the US unable to contain rebellion in a small nation like Iraq, this image of US invincibility has been severely damaged. More worryingly for Americans, under Bush's leadership the US has enjoyed the third lowest ranking in a poll of popular nations, which found the US only beaten to the least popular nation vote by Israel and Iran.

So, he has diminished the US's image as an invincible superpower whilst, simultaneously, making her amongst the least popular countries in the world. And he has done so whilst running his country into unprecedented debt, a debt that even Conservative economists have labelled as "bankrupting America". He has also declared his nations right to attack other nations based on nothing more secure than his belief that they may one day threaten the United States, in effect, dismantling international law. That's quite a track record. And it does mean that he deserves to be considered one of the US's worst ever Presidents.

Indeed, it is on that last point that Carter is most scathing.

He (Carter) told one newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, over the weekend that Mr Bush had taken a "radical departure from all previous administration policies" with the war. "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," Mr Carter said.

The Bush Doctrine is, indeed, an insane policy almost designed to make the US hated worldwide as it smacks so repulsively of Empire. It rips up international law which country's that do not have America's firepower rely upon and, consequently, makes the rest of the world feel less safe.

The Bush Doctrine basically says that the US can do as she wants. And, while I can understand why this must be very pleasing to right wing Americans, I would hope that they could also understand why the rest of the planet - the people who do not live in the most heavily armed nation on Earth - might find this disturbing.

All of the above - the fact he has damaged his own country's reputation as an invincible superpower, the fact he has made his country one of the least popular on earth, and the fact that he has also almost bankrupted his country as he has done so - makes the charge against Bush as the worst President in US history certainly worthy of consideration.

So right wingers might tut tut at Carter attacking a sitting US President, they might even display the arrogance that has made Bush so spectacularly unpopular and dismiss the opinion of the rest of the world as irrelevant, but they should also know that, for each of them that is tutting, there are many more across the world who are agreeing with what Carter has said.

Click title for full article.

The FOX News GOP Debate in 45 Seconds

Bill Maher sums up the Fox News GOP debate in 45 seconds....



Hat Tip to Crooks and Liars

Tags: Bill Maher, GOP Debate, Republicans, Torture

FOX NEWS SAYS: Wall Street Loves Torture!

Fox News are furious that certain candidates for the Republican ticket won't specifically endorse waterboarding. But they are sure of one thing, Wall Street and the American people love candidates who advocate the use of advanced interrogation techniques.

One of them even brings up the ticking clock/hidden bomb scenario and asks what should be done? He then answers himself - "Waterboard them!"



Here's an example of the kind of torture that these guys are defending. The US have admitted privately that they arrested El-Masri by mistake but have refused to acknowledge this in court. Indeed, the case has been dismissed as, the US government have claimed that, even for the case to be heard, "would be a risk to national security". Hard to believe that this is happening in the United States rather than Uzbekistan.



And here's what that little sleazebag Gonzales didn't have to say about why the US sent a Canadian citizen to Syria...

Sunday's cartoon.

Those lazy, hazy, days of Ashcroft...

It's an extraordinary sign of how far the Bush administration have strayed towards authoritarianism that one finds oneself longing for the good old days of John Ashcroft, a man whose hobbies included covering up women's breasts on statues and visiting churches where he liked to partake in that lovely religious ritual of talking in tongues.

However, with Gonzales on his present quest to give the President, not so much advice, but rather anything that he wants, then one finds oneself looking back to the days of Ashcroft as a heady time of liberalism.

It now transpires that Ashcroft occasionally said "No" to the President, a concept that is completely lost on the current Attorney General:

In addition to rejecting to the most expansive version of the warrantless eavesdropping program, the officials said, Ashcroft also opposed holding detainees indefinitely at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without some form of due process. He fought to guarantee some rights for those to be tried by newly created military commissions. And he insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers, be prosecuted in a civilian court.

Of course, within the mindset of the Bush administration, a person who promotes such concepts was considered about as heretical as Galileo was to the Catholic Church when he announced that the Earth revolved around the sun.

And who led the movement to have Ashcroft excommunicated for preaching this sort of heresy? Well, wouldn't you just know it...

These internal disputes often put Ashcroft at odds with Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said the officials, who recalled heated exchanges in front of the president. In the end, the officials said, the conflicts contributed to Ashcroft's departure at the conclusion of Bush's first term, when the president replaced him with a close friend from Texas, Alberto R. Gonzales, who presumably would be more deferential to the White House.

Every time this administration finds itself mired in shit, the fingerprints of Dick Cheney can always be found on the steering wheel.

What does it say about the present administration if they found John Ashcroft too liberal for their tastes?

Here is a taster of what Ashcroft promoted:

He championed a broad expansion of government power to investigate possible terrorist cells through the USA Patriot Act, authorized the detention of hundreds without charges in the days after Sept. 11, pushed immigration agents to fully use their power to deport foreigners, secured new authority to peer into private records even in libraries, and oversaw legal interpretations that opened the door to harsh interrogation techniques that critics called torture.

And yet this man was considered too dangerously liberal for the Bush hawks who replaced him with Gonzales, literally: A Man Who Just Can't Say No.

Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way and one of Ashcroft's strongest critics over the years, said the incident told more about his successor, Gonzales, who was one of the two Bush aides at the hospital that night.

"I did not think it was even possible to make John Ashcroft into a civil libertarian," Neas said in an interview. "But somehow Alberto Gonzales for at least one moment managed to make John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution."

It takes some doing and deserves to be recognised as the unique achievement that it is. All Hail Alberto Gonzales, the man who makes us long for the "liberal" days of John Ashcroft.

That is how extreme this regime has become. That's how far removed they are from the Constitution. That's how much these thugs have slipped into blatant criminality.

Suddenly Ashcroft, having been viewed by many as Caligula, has been transformed into Tiberius, such is the awfulness of what has followed him.

Who would have thought that things could slip so far that we would find ourselves longing for the return of a man who enabled torture?

Out of loyalty to Bush, former aides said, Ashcroft did not make these dissents public.

"He was a voice for moderation on a wide range of issues that he never got credit for because he did it the right way, behind the scenes," said another former official who asked not to be named. "On many, many issues the administration has gotten itself in trouble on, if they had listened to his advice, they would have been better off."

Now there's a line you never thought you'd see in print...

Click title for full article.

Tags: Ashcroft, Gonzales, Justice Department, eavesdropping, wiretapping, torture, US Constitution, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld

Brown's vision for a nuclear Britain

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those of us hoping for a change of direction once Blair swans off to the US lecture circuit were given an indication of things to come by Gordon Brown when he made, as one of his first pronouncements as Prime Minister in waiting, a promise to build up to eight new nuclear power stations, possibly within 15 years.

The reaction was swift and negative:

Greenpeace last night condemned his plans. A spokesman said: 'Reaching for nuclear power to solve climate change is like taking up smoking to lose weight. Is it a simple answer? Yes. Is it an effective answer to the climate change crisis? Absolutely not.'

Of course, Alastair Darling - the Trade and Industry Secretary, who is a close Brown ally - sought to sell this as a way to combat global warming by insisting that Britain will also be investing in wind farms located offshore.

Darling will make clear that Britain will have to embark on a major renewal of nuclear power if it is to guarantee power supplies while delivering a 60 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. 'This is a really urgent problem,' Darling told The Observer

A major push to harness wave power and build hundreds of new wind farms - many of which will be based offshore - are also likely to be approved. 'A mix of energy supply is right,' Darling said of his plans to boost low-carbon energy, particularly offshore projects where there are fewer planning hurdles.

Although Darling insisted that no formal decisions had been made, it is clear that nuclear and wind will provide a significant part of future energy needs. He said: 'The global demand for energy is going up. We've got to come to a decision one or way or another this year. If you didn't do anything [then in 10 to 15 years] you'd come perilously close on very cold days or very hot days to seeing interruptions in supply.'

Darling was, of course, one of the nuclear industries harshest opponents when he was first elected to Parliament twenty years ago, just as Tony Blair was once a member of CND.

Now Blair wants to renew Trident and Darling wants to renew our nuclear power stations.

And both of these highly contentious positions will be eagerly accepted by Brown, despite no consultation with the public over these matters.

And they wonder why there is voter apathy in the UK? Perhaps if there was a Labour option, a genuine choice between two contrasting political values, then the public might get engaged enough to get off their arses and vote. As things presently stand they have a choice between Tory and Tory-Lite.

We really are living in the world of Yes, Prime Minister:

Sir Humphrey: "With Trident we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe."

Jim Hacker: "I don't want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe."

Sir Humphrey: "It's a deterrent."

Jim Hacker: "It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it."

Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't."

Jim Hacker: "They probably do."

Sir Humphrey: "Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know."

Jim Hacker: "They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't."

Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would."

Twenty billion pounds on a weapon that we can't use without American permission and nuclear power stations littering our coast lines. New Labour...

The more things change....

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Tags: Brown, nuclear power stations, trident

Amid the bombs, Blair remains upbeat on farewell tour in Iraq

Tony Blair's farewell Boogie Bus yesterday alighted in Baghdad and Basra, where the man who had despatched British troops to Iraq dropped in to say goodbye to the men and women he has landed in the shit, who must have found it somewhat ironic that their leader was standing before them - as shells and mortars dropped all around them - and said, "You're doing a great job, I'm outta here!"

As exercises in shamelessness go, this was right up there with the best of them. He looked like a man saluting lemmings as they career off a cliff, only he's sitting in a golf buggy ready to quickly move off in the opposite direction towards safety.

'This is my last chance to thank you for the work you have done,' Blair said. 'Sometimes the impression is completely negative but what you have done here is absolutely remarkable.'

The PM contrasted the situation in Basra with that of Baghdad, plagued by sectarian violence and al-Qaeda. 'When you go out and talk to the majority of people here they tell you they want to live in peace.'

He concluded that the fighting in Iraq had global consequences. 'What you are doing has implications for Iraq and also for the wider world. If we don't sort this region out then there is, in my view, a very troubled and difficult future for the world ahead of us.'

Of course, he's ignoring the fact that - before his ill advised intervention - there was no civil war in Iraq and there were no al Qaeda terrorists, all that came about because Rumsfeld employed far too few troops to complete the job and the occupation forces never had enough men and women to restore basic order to Iraq.

As Blair promised the equivalent of the campaign song that accompanied his initial election ten years ago, "Things can only get better", it was hard to share his optimism as by every measurement known to man things in Iraq are steadily getting worse.

And, as always when Blair talks of Iraq - the war that will define his Premiership - he often abandons reality altogether in favour of hyperbole.

Blair re-emphasised Britain's commitment to the country. 'I've no doubt at all that Britain will remain steadfast in its support for the Iraqi people. The policy I introduced is a policy for the whole of the government. Even when I leave office I'm sure that will continue.'

Now I know that this was really a side swipe at Gordon Brown and a reminder that he was part of the government that got Britain involved in this mess, but it reads as if he's saying that the British people continue to support this war, which is, of course, a dreadful nonsense.

Recent opinion polls simply couldn't be more bleak on this subject:

72 per cent predict that Iraq will descend into civil war if British and American troops withdraw

61 per cent believe Britain's experience in Iraq makes them less likely to support military intervention

72 per cent say that Tony Blair's support for George Bush calls into question his political judgement

62 per cent believe that British troops should be withdrawn from Iraq as soon as possible

72 per cent believe that the war in Iraq is unwinnable

As Blair stood in Iraq yesterday, repeating his message that the public have long stopped listening to, mortars were literally hitting places he had only recently left.

Both in Baghdad and later in Basra, where he met British troops, mortars landed in the locations he visited. He brushed off the attack on the Green Zone, during which one bomb hit the British embassy compound shortly before his arrival, saying: "There are mortar attacks and terrorist attacks happening every day. We don't give in to them."

The Prime Minister appeared tetchy at repeated questions about levels of violence. Iraqi officials had assured him that there were signs of progress on security, he insisted. "There is violence and terrorism in Iraq, but what they are saying is that there is also hope and change."

What a mantra! Where there is violence and terrorism there is also hope of change. It is his campaign song! Things are so appalling that.. one, two, three... "Things can only get better"...

Of course, things in Iraq are actually so bad that General Dannatt has forbidden Prince Harry from joining his regiment when they are despatched there, and last month was the bloodiest for British troops in Iraq since the war was declared over in May 2003, with 12 soldiers killed last month alone.

Not that one would know any of this from Blair's triumphant farewell. For him it's all resolve, resolve, resolve...

Which is easy to say as you prepare to swan off to the States for a lucrative visit to the lecture circuit leaving young men and women to die in a war that happened on your watch, based on things that you said that turned out to be untrue.

I am not joking when I say I found this visit both shameful and embarrassing.

Supporters of the war like to cast themselves as Churchill and the wars detractors as Chamberlain. However, it is interesting to note that - as Blair swans off leaving chaos in his wake- he becomes one of the very few British Prime Ministers to start a war which they did not see through to completion before leaving office.

The most famous of those is, of course, Chamberlain. Despite all his rhetoric, that is the historical company that Blair now keeps.

As he prepares to depart we should, as Robert Fisk so wisely recommends, see him off with Cromwell's statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated - with such wisdom - by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Click title for full article.

Carter attacks Blair's Iraq role

Former President Jimmy Carter has lambasted Blair's blind support for Bush in the run up to the Iraq war calling it, "abominable, loyal, blind, and apparently, subservient".

He has also said that, had Blair stepped back from Bush in the run up to the war, it might have made Bush's march to war harder, as the support of the British gave Bush a credibility that it would not otherwise have had.

He says he feels sad as the "war was unjustified, unnecessary and has brought tragedy to the Iraqi people."

He also hopes that the election of Brown as Prime Minister might bring about the US and UK's exodus from that country.

This is not the first time that Carter has been critical of Blair's obsequience to the Bush regime. Last September he stated:

"No matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy without exerting its influence.

This was the case "in the Middle East peace process, in the case of the Lebanese/Israeli war in the recent past and certainly in the ill-advised abandonment of the war against terrorism to substitute the war in Iraq", he said.

Asked if he thought Britain was exerting its influence behind the scenes, Jimmy Carter replied he had seen no evidence of that.

"I haven't seen the corrective effect of British disagreement with what the White House has proposed. It may be there, it hasn't been evident to the public," he said

I am glad that Carter has the courage to speak so plainly about a man who should be his political ally. Blair has never been a Labour leader in the way that most of us had hoped, and it's good that a man as respected as Carter has called him out. If only to mark Brown's card that the road Blair walked must never be travelled again by a Labour Prime Minister.

Blair leaves the world stage almost humiliated by the way the Bush regime has treated him. It is unlikely that Gordon Brown will give Bush the opportunity to treat his political future as lightly as he has treated Blair's.

Listen to Carter's comments here.

Click title for full article.

Bush ducks another question

The Young Turks discuss how Bush totally avoids answering whether or not he sent Card and Gonzales to bully Ashcroft as he lay in intensive care. He totally ducks the question.

Tags: Bush, Gonzales, Card, Ashcroft

Bush Impersonator

This young guy is seriously funny. If more young Americans share his mindset then there's hope for us all.

Tags: Bush Impersonator, global warming

Ministers urge Brown to launch Iraq inquiry

It strikes me as astonishing that some four years after the Iraq war began that there has never been any official enquiry into how the war began, how the intelligence proved to be so wrong; indeed, into whether or not the intelligence was cherry picked to arrive at a previously decided conclusion.

Oh, we've had the Butler enquiry and the enquiry into David Kelly's death, but both of those enquiries were deliberately framed in such a way as to leave the political process that led to the war out of bounds.

As Blair stands down the calls for such an enquiry are becoming deafening and it's looking as if the new Prime Minister may have no choice other than to launch such an enquiry as a way to draw a line under the festering wound of Iraq.

Tory leaders joined Labour deputy leadership candidates and military families against the war in stepping up calls for an inquiry to be announced by Mr Brown soon after he succeeds Tony Blair on 27 June. Those lobbying for an investigation claim it would restore trust in government in the post-Blair era.

The Government has been reluctant to accept the demands for an inquiry into the mistakes over Iraq, but supporters of Mr Brown believe it could help draw a line under the Blair years.

Labour deputy leadership candidates lined up to support an investigation after Alan Johnson expressed a personal belief at a hustings meeting that an inquiry would be held. Jon Cruddas, the first deputy leadership candidate to call for an inquiry said it would be "part of the reconciliation process and part of rebuilding trust in the Government".

Blair and his gang always resisted such an enquiry on the grounds that our troops were still employed in Iraq and that an enquiry might undermine them, although many of us believe that Blair actually simply wanted to be out of office before the sheer scale of the lies he told were revealed.

And there can be little doubt that Blair did lie. His own words condemn him.

He claimed that the "assessed intelligence" had "established beyond doubt" that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons. The facts on the ground proved that this statement was false. Indeed, Blair later admitted that the intelligence that he had described as "extensive, detailed and authoritative" was, in actual fact, "sporadic and patchy."

Indeed, even Lord Butler who led one of the former enquiries into Iraq, has now confirmed that Blair has lied to us.

In the UK House of Lords last month, Lord Butler was scathing about that - though his speech went largely unreported in the media.

He accused Tony Blair of being "disingenuous" in the way he used intelligence - Whitehall-speak for "deliberately misleading".

"[Mr Blair] told Parliament... that the picture painted by our intelligence services was 'extensive, detailed and authoritative'. Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him."

Indeed, Blair has even argued that the Attorney General said that the war in Iraq was lawful.

However, when the Attorney General's actual advice - advice that Blair withheld from Parliament and his cabinet - was finally released, it turned out that the Attorney General, far from baldly stating that the war was legal, actually stated, "That a reasonable case could be made that the action was lawful." He did, however, state that were the legality of this action ever to be challenged in a court of law, "We cannot be certain that they would not succeed."

In other words he was saying that they could argue it was legal but courts may not agree. It was hardly the ringing endorsement that Blair claimed it was. Nor did it confer upon the action the legality that Blair implied it did.

There are many reasons, now that Blair is stepping down, for Britain to finally hold an enquiry into the myriad of lies that were told before this conflict began. We would do well to finally wash this dirty laundry in public, from the Downing Street Memo through to why two civil servants felt the need to expose evidence that they say led them to believe a "madman" was in the White House.

All of these questions deserve, four years after the initial invasion, to finally be answered.

Brown would do well to make such an enquiry one of the first things he orders upon entering office.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Blair, Iraq war, enquiry, lies

As Blair leaves Washington, US hardens stance on climate change

The man who George Bush admitted might have lost his Premiership because of his friendship with him, has had his last visit to Washington end as so many of his previous visits ended, with lots of rhetoric that appeared to suit his cause and zero actual action on the ground.

Together in front of the microphones, Bush said what Blair wanted to hear:

"We spent a lot of time on climate change. And I agree with the Prime Minister, as I have stated publicly, this is a serious issue, and the United States takes it seriously." Mr Blair welcomed the comments and said in response: "The important thing is that we see that it's possible for people to come together on an agreement for the future that will allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Meanwhile, away from the cameras, the US delegation to Bonn was talking a very different language:

"We don't believe targets and timetables are important, or a global cap and trade system," he said. "It's important not to jeopardise economic growth."

Speaking on condition of anonymity a senior climate negotiator, party to the talks, said that the US was even stalling progress on negotiations on a successor to Kyoto which had been due to get under way at a summit in Bali later this year.

"We were not expecting a big change of stance but we need them to stop obstructing all progress across the board," said the source.

And therein lies the rub of their relationship. Bush may talk the talk, but on this - as on so many other issues - he simply will not walk the walk. It's easy to say you are serious about climate change, but if you are not prepared to change any of your actions then how can anyone take what you say seriously.

Kevin Conrad, the chief negotiator for Papua New Guinea, which has emerged as a leading voice among poorer nations, has described that United States as "impotent" on climate change and, worse, implied that this impotence comes from the very top of the US administration. Why do the words "Dick Cheney" fly through my mind?

"There is a huge gap between rhetoric and reality," said Mr Conrad. "Saying 'we're taking it very seriously' but not putting any serious tools in place to do anything. The missing link is the White House, where there's no vision and no direction."

The US delegation are insisting that further technical work is needed before talks can begin on a son-of-Kyoto agreement, which could delay things for a further year, when no-one can be sure what the effects of a further years delay will be. Already Australia is facing drought and having to divert water away from 40% of it's agricultural region in order to ensure that it's populace can drink. Ironically, Howard was one of the world's leading sceptics on climate change, although even he admits that he now broadly accepts the science behind it.

And, while Bush wastes another year, deforestation continues unabated, which is considered one of the main reasons for global warming.

The Bush presidency has long been seen as disastrous for the United States, but may now have consequences for the entire planet.

Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists, said: "This is a climate change cop-out. America must stop using technical objections to obstruct the process and concentrate on visionary means of reaching our goal. Each year that agreement is not reached raises the stakes on global warming and is a tragedy for the world's rainforests with a further 8 billion tonnes of CO2 and biodiversity going up in smoke."

To anyone who wants to argue that Bush may have a point and that we can't know for certain what the consequences of delay will be, I will say only this: If we wait until we know for certain what the consequences will be, it will be too late. We have to act NOW.

If we are wrong, if global warming is a myth, then we lose a few pounds. However, if - and most experts believe this to be the case - global warming is real and we delay, then we risk losing huge swathes of the planet.

I've always said that Bush is a very bad gambler, but he is now gambling for stakes that he's not qualified to bet with.

And so Blair leaves Washington, as he has on so many previous occasions, with George Bush's warm words of praise ringing in his ears and bugger all of any practical value in his hand.

That really has summed up the "special relationship" for the past six years. George Bush: the present that keeps on taking.

Blair has gained nothing from this "special relationship", a relationship that Bush himself admits might have cost him his Premiership.

Brown should take note, lest he join Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar as another political sacrifice at the altar of King George.

The truth about PM's 'special relationship' with Bush

Iraq

Britain disagreed with the US over two key decisions in May 2003, two months after the invasion - to disband Iraq's army and "de-Ba'athify" its civil service. Geoff Hoon, on 2 May 2007, said: "Sometimes ... Tony (Blair) had made his point with the President, I'd made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell] and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed (Vice-President Dick) Cheney."

Iran

Britain's Foreign Secretary at the time, Jack Straw - now Gordon Brown's campaign manager - led calls for Iran to be drawn into talks. The White House rejected the calls, even when they were backed up by the President's Iraq Study Group. The US this week opened talks with Iran.

Guantanamo Bay

The White House rebuffed repeated requests by British ministers, led by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, for the release of UK nationals held in Cuba as part of the "war on terror". Eventually, nine Britons were freed by the US - but none of those men have been charged in this country. At least three British residents remain in custody at Guantanamo and MPs have launched a campaign to win their freedom.

Conditions at the camp have been condemned by human rights activists worldwide, and British ministers have called for it to be closed.

The Middle East

Mr Blair pleaded for an "even-handed approach" to the Middle East in April 2004 and called for greater priority to be given to the "roadmap" to peace. Within 48 hours, his call was rejected by President Bush. Jack Straw underlined Britain's unease, saying: "President Bush ... has to make his own judgments. We make our own." Last year, the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said Bush had been "crap" on the road map.

The Natwest Three

The US demanded the extradition of three ex-NatWest bankers, using a treaty it had not ratified, in relation to the collapse of the energy giant Enron. Mr Blair was reduced to pleading for the accused to be released on bail.

There really is no way to underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by Dick Cheney. Behind every disastrous decision, the fingerprints of that man can be found.

Click title for full article.

Comey Don't Play That

Tags: Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Gonzales, McNulty, Comey, Bush, wiretapping, Ashcroft

Washington Post: Gonzales is a continuous liar.

There is an astonishing editorial in today's Washington Post - a paper which, more than any other, has sought to minimise any scrutiny of the Bush regime's behaviour - in which it states:

Mr. Gonzales's lack of candor is no longer surprising....

The article itself is entitled, "The Gonzales Coverup" which implies that there has certainly been wrongdoing and a concerted effort to conceal that wrongdoing from public gaze. However, to say that Gonzales's "lack of candor is no longer surprising" is to baldly state that the Attorney General of the United States of America is a confirmed and repeated liar.

And this is not being said by an organisation that is known to be hostile to the Bush regime, this is now being said by an organisation that has bent over backwards to peddle the line that, as long as Bush reassures us that all is well and that proper procedures are being followed, then there really is no need for us to ask any further questions.

Oh, how the pendulum has swung when we now find the Washington Post - of all newspapers - referring to what happened at Ashcroft's bedside as a "shameful episode".

The editorial then goes on to describe what took place that night and subsequently:

Consider: Mr. Gonzales, as the president's lawyer, went to the hospital room of a man so ill he had temporarily relinquished his authority. There, Mr. Gonzales tried to persuade Mr. Ashcroft to override the views of the attorney general's own legal counsel. When the attorney general refused, Mr. Gonzales apparently took part in a plan to go forward with a program that the Justice Department had refused to certify as legal.

Then, when part of the story became public, Mr. Gonzales resorted to word-parsing. "[W]ith respect to what the president has confirmed, I believe -- I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you're identifying had concerns about this program," he said.

In the pages of the Washington Post we now have Gonzales's lies laid bare. Indeed, this pillar of the Conservative establishment now says that the Attorney General of the United States's "lack of candor is no longer surprising". They are saying that he lies so often and so repeatedly that one can no longer find such a revelation shocking. His lying has now been acknowledged as commonplace. Routine. Par for the course.

How can this man remain in office? What is Bush saying about his contempt for the American people if he allows a confirmed liar to hold the highest law office in the land?

How long can Bush's supporters continue to pretend that there's nothing wrong here when even the Washington Post are writing editorials like this one?

Click title for Washington Post editorial.

Tags: Alberto Gonzales, George Bush, wiretapping, Ashcroft, James Comey

Hitch vs. Hannity on Falwell

It's so rarely that I find myself in agreement with Christopher Hitchens that I'm going to have to go and lie down in a darkened room.

Ralph Reid argues that Hitchens shouldn't make the points he's making and that we should "elevate the civility of our discourse" when someone dies. This ignores the many comments made by Falwell towards homosexuals and others which was hardly "elevating the civility of our discourse". Hannity is reduced to calling him a "Jackass" and can't believe that Hitchens has nothing good to say about Falwell.



I've found another Hitchens clip that I like:

Tags: Jerry Falwell, Christopher Hitchens, Hannity

'I do not regret close relationship with Bush'

Mork and Mindy had their final press conference in Washington yesterday with Blair insisting that he had been right to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the US and with Bush admitting - for the first time - that Blair's decision to attach his truck to Bush's bandwagon may have been the thing that cost him his Premiership.

Mr Bush winked at a British reporter who had asked whether the president was responsible for Mr Blair's resignation. "I haven't polled the Labour conference, but ... could be."

He added: "The question is, am I to blame for his leaving? I don't know."

And, at a time when the British are asking why Blair is remaining in office when Brown has already been chosen as his successor, Bush mouthed a line that was obviously handed to him by Downing Street, so clearly did it align itself with the arguments that have been made recently by Blair's supporters:

"My attitude is this: This man here is the prime minister. We've got a lot of work to do until he finishes. He's going to sprint to the wire," said Mr Bush.

"Sprint to the wire" was the exact phrase that Downing Street used yesterday to explain that Blair wasn't a lame duck Prime Minister. So Bush has, at last, given Blair some reward for his loyalty, even as he admits that this loyalty has possibly cost the Prime Minister his job. Just as loyalty to the Toxic Texan cost the jobs of both Berlusconi of Italy and Aznar of Spain. Blair now joins the long list of people brought low because he bought into the neo-con world view and the disasters that this has unleashed.

Blair and Bush both seemed preoccupied with the fact that their time in power is fast running out.

But for all the efforts of British and US officials to turn the talk towards climate change and trade, Mr Blair and Mr Bush and everyone on the folding chairs in the White House rose garden knew that this was the end. It was the last time the two men would stand at their twin podiums, shoulder to shoulder in the war against terror. Last night was the last they would spend sitting out on the Truman balcony talking about, Mr Bush said, world affairs. It was Mr Blair's first - indeed only - sleep-over at the White House. Both men struggled valiantly to describe this last encounter as a working meeting. But the sentiment kept seeping back in, as they exchanged repeated sidelong glances, and copious praise. Mr Bush said he honoured Mr Blair and described him as a man of courage.

Blair decided to go out in a blaze of glory apologising for nothing and proclaiming that all that he had done - indeed, the very things that had brought his Premiership crashing around his ankles - had all been the right things to do.

Mr Blair denied harbouring any regrets for his decision to support Mr Bush in the war on Iraq. "It's not about us remaining true to the course that we've set out because of the alliance with America," he said. "It's about us remaining steadfast because what we are fighting, the enemy we are fighting, is an enemy that is aiming its destruction at our way of life."

This is, of course, the most fantastic nonsense. The enemy we face may blow up our trains or attack our buildings but they cannot destroy "our way of life" as Bush and Blair constantly claim. Our way of life lies within our laws and our customs, they are not things that can be blown up or destroyed unless we decide to destroy them.

And there are few people on earth who have done more damage to "our way of life" than Bush and Blair by suspending Habeas Corpus. The laws and customs by which we have defined our civilisation have been suspended by these two men, as if they are somehow inappropriate for the times in which we live, so it's a bit rich for these two to preach to anyone about saving "our way of life".

Nonetheless, this is Tony's last trip to the US, and he has risked so much for this friendship that it can hardly surprise anyone that - as he takes his final bow - he murmurs "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien".

He has no choice. He played the hand that he was dealt. However, watching him standing there, and knowing the great achievements he has had as Prime Minister, one couldn't help feeling that - had Al Gore won in 2000 - we would now be talking about this man as one of Labour's greatest ever leaders.

Watching him standing next to that smirking Frat Boy, I can't help thinking that, in the wee small hours of the morning, Blair must wonder what might have been?

Click title for full article.

Tags: Blair, Bush, Iraq war, war on terror

After bitter battle, Wolfowitz resigns from World Bank

Paul Wolfowitz has lost his battle against the "old Europeans" and has finally agreed to step down from the World Bank on 30th June. This comes after a protracted attempt by the White House to save his skin in the face of mounting worldwide opposition to him staying on.

This represents the third neo-con to go down in a blaze of his own arrogant glory as Wolfowitz joins Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton as supremely arrogant supporters of Bush who flew too close to the sun one time too many.

Mr Wolfowitz's resignation ended a saga which convulsed the bank for weeks, opening a chasm between America and European members, after it emerged that he had engineered a $60,000 pay rise for Ms Riza in violation of bank rules. The bitterness of the dispute was exacerbated by a fierce campaign by Mr Wolfowitz to shift some of the blame for that pay rise to other officials at the bank.

In the end, he appears to have prevailed. In its statement last night, the bank's board said: "A number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration", and that "the bank's systems did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed".

In return, Mr Wolfowitz said he had concluded it would be in the best interests of the bank if he stood down. "I am pleased that, after reviewing all the evidence, the executive directors of the World Bank group have accepted my assurance that I acted ethically and in good faith in what I believed were the best interests of the institution, including protecting the rights of a valued staff member," he said.

Of course there is no-one in their right mind who buys this baloney for a second as we all know that the bank's panel found that Wolfowitz had committed ethical and governance violations and that Wolfowitz was demanding that they clear him off all charges before he would resign.

Indeed, such was the level of distrust between Wolfowitz and the World bank that they insisted that he give them a written guarantee that, if they cleared him, that he would, in fact, resign. That alone speaks volumes about how trustworthy the World Bank views Paul Wolfowitz as.

The Bush White House immediately launched it's own version of events - well, they do claim to be able to create their own reality - with a Bush spokesman summing up what had taken place:

President Bush earlier in the day praised Mr. Wolfowitz at a news conference but signaled that the end was near by saying he regretted “that it’s come to this.” A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said, “We would have preferred that he stay at the bank, but the president reluctantly accepts his decision.”

Anyone who actually believes that Wolfowitz is leaving the World Bank because of his own decision is beyond help, no doubt enthralled to Bush's alternative universe, where victory in Iraq is just over the next hill and history will view the Bush presidency more kindly than the rest of us do.

The decision to appoint Wolfowitz to head the World Bank was another of Bush's hallmark appointments, designed to stick his finger up the world's collective ass. It was a similar appointment as to that of John Bolton to represent the US at the UN, where one couldn't help feeling that the person appointed had been done so to facilitate the President's infantile Frat Boy humour, as they were so inappropriate that one was left with no other conclusion to draw.

They were both disastrously bad choices and both ended up mangled on history's floor.

There are, at least, signs that the damage done to the World Bank has been so severe that even the Frat Boy President seems unwilling to repeat his mistake.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said Thursday that he would “consult my colleagues around the world” before recommending a choice to Mr. Bush, in what seemed to be an effort to assure allies that the United States would not repeat what happened in 2005 when Mr. Bush surprised them by selecting Mr. Wolfowitz, then a deputy secretary of defense and an architect of the Iraq war.

It's odd. The rest of the world knew that Bush was making an appalling choice two years ago, but France and Germany decided not to fight him for fear of reopening old wounds over the war in Iraq.

However, as Wolfowitz crashes to the floor and the war in Iraq staggers on, it is stunning to realise that in this, as in the argument over Iraq before the invasion, Europe has always been right and this Frat Boy President has always been wrong.

For even as Wolfowitz steps down, there is much discord left at the Bank over the wording that preceded his resignation, with many thinking the Bank should not have acceded to the White House's request that he be found not guilty before he stepped down.

Also angered was the bank’s staff association, which had called for Mr. Wolfowitz’s resignation in early April. The bank’s internal blogs were filled with denunciations of the action on Thursday evening.

Late in the evening, the association issued a statement saying, “Welcome though it is, the president’s resignation is not acceptable under the present arrangement,” and that it “completely undermines the principles of good governance and the principles that the staff fight to uphold.”

Wolfowitz may be going but the damage he has wrought on this organisation will take a long time to mend. And the blame for all of this lies with the infantile man who gave Wolfowitz the appointment in the first place.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Wolfowitz, World Bank, Bush White House

Turley on NSA Spying: “I don’t know of a more potential charge of impeachment”

I'm so glad that George Washington University Constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley, has the same reading of this as I do. He says that this would be a "clear impeachable offense." Bush was told that what he was doing was illegal and yet he did it anyway.

There can no longer be any question over whether or not this President has committed impeachable offenses, the question now is whether or not Congress has the balls to pull him on it.

Alberto Gonzales Carefully Tailors Warrantless Wiretapping Testimony

Gonzales is playing semantic word games when he claims that the President is not working outside of the law when he uses "this program". He always makes sure that his denials are only regarding "this program". Indeed, when he's asked if there are other programs he replies, "I don't know how to answer that".

This is chilling stuff.



Watch the whole thing here.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Tags: Gonzales, NSA, wiretapping, FISA, Bush, illegality

Brown secures the crown but he must wait still longer to take power

Gordon Brown has been confirmed as having enough votes to make him the next Labour leader and the next British Prime Minister rendering the need for an election pointless and raising the question; if there is not going to be a leadership election, then why are we waiting six weeks to hand him his crown?

Blair is in the US saying goodbye to Bush and has no real function as Prime Minister now that it is known that he is going, so why can't he simply go now and put us all out of our misery? What possible purpose is served by us waiting for six weeks?

The Chancellor crossed the finishing line last night when it became clear that the left-wing MP John McDonnell would not be able to muster the backing of 45 Labour MPs needed to secure a place on the ballot paper.

At 6pm last night, Labour announced that Mr McDonnell had been nominated by only 29 Labour MPs, while Mr Brown had secured the backing of 307 of 354. Mr McDonnell conceded defeat at 8.30pm yesterday when another MP signalled his intention to back Mr Brown.

Although Mr Brown has won the leadership in an unopposed "coronation", he will have to wait almost six weeks before he moves into 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair could now face pressure to stand down earlier than 27 June, the date he announced last week. "He is in office, not in power," one Labour source said, in a deliberate echo of Norman Lamont's wounding description of John Major's ailing Tory government.

As Mr Blair had dinner with President George Bush on his final trip to Washington as Prime Minister, his allies insisted he would not stand down early. "He has work to do, he will be at full speed up to the wire," one said.

This is, of course, a nonsense. Blair cannot actually do anything now without Brown's permission as policy will from now on be decided by Brown rather than Blair. So we are all left sitting about twiddling our thumbs for a month and a half whilst Tony swans around the world stage making his protracted goodbyes.

Blair's aides are pointing that American Presidents take two months to make any handover and that this six week period allows for a "stable and orderly transition". This rather ignores the fact that British elections are fought in a very different way from American elections and that outgoing Prime Ministers who have lost elections find the removal vans at their door the very next morning and the new incumbent waiting eagerly at the gates. If this can be done overnight when an entire administration is changing political colours, it seems bizarre that it must take six weeks when the new occupant of Number Ten is a member of the administration and, indeed, thanks to Blair living in Number Eleven during his term of office because of the children, when the new Prime Minister already lives in Number Ten!

We are now being told it will take six weeks for Gordon to move nowhere. It will take six weeks for him to live in the same place and change his title from Chancellor to Prime Minister.

A contest would have been preferable to this coronation as it would have given Brown an opportunity to spell out what he regards as his vision and inform the electorate about how his style of governing might differ from that of Blair. However, as things have panned out, that is obviously no longer going to be possible. So what the Hell are we waiting for?

Blair's team will no doubt cite the two upcoming summits at which Blair will represent British interests, but as Blair will no longer have anything to do with Britain's future after 27th June surely the person who should attend these summits is the person who will be in charge of Britain's interests for the next few years?

Blair's team are saying that he remains in office to put the final polish to his legacy, but I can save them a lot of bloody time: His legacy is one word.

IRAQ.

And there's no amount of polish that will make that turd shine.

The long goodbye

There are 42 days to Gordon Brown becoming Prime Minister...

Today John Prescott chairs Cabinet, while Tony Blair is in Washington. Nominations for leader and deputy leader close at 12.30pm. Brown expected to be declared leader.

20 May Brown joins hustings tour for deputy leadership candidates in Coventry.

21 May Hustings at Westminster for MPs for deputy leadership and Brown.

26 May Hustings run by the unions in Bristol.

27 May Hustings in Bradford for Brown while Blair in Africa as part of his 'farewell' tour.

30 May Brown at the deputy leadership hustings in Leicester.

2 June Hustings in Glasgow.

3 June Hustings for unions in Newcastle.

6 June Blair attends G8 summit in Germany.

9 June Hustings in Cardiff.

10 June Labour young members' hustings Oxford.

16 June Hustings London.

21 June Blair at EU summit in Germany.

27 June Blair will resign as Prime Minister. Brown will be invited to receive the seals of office from the Queen.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Blair, Brown, Labour leadership election, UK, UK politics, British Prime Minister

Wolfowitz Said to Push for Deal to Quit

Paul Wolfowitz appears to have given up any hope of retaining his job as head of the World Bank and is now furiously negotiating the terms of his release, insisting that the World Bank should find him innocent of all the charges that have been made against him before he will tender his resignation.

This will be extremely difficult, as the bank have already found him to be guilty of ethical and governance violations and there are many at the bank who are not keen to back down from the charges that Wolfowitz has been found guilty of.

The White House began negotiations saying that if the bank softened it's stance that Wolfowitz would stand down sometime in the future, although that stance has hardened into a much more quid pro quo arrangement where the White House now state that he will stand down immediately if he is exonerated.

It's a bizarre aspect of this White House's dealings with the outside world that they are insisting this man be found innocent before he will resign. Surely if he were innocent then there would be no need for him to resign? But such small matters as facts have never really concerned the neo-cons who continue to insist that reality is what they state it to be, they will even take this to the lengths of forcing the World Bank to declare Wolfowitz innocent before he stands down.

And the man who warned the bank that if they "fucked" with him, he would "fuck them"; moved to do so yesterday:

People close to the negotiations said that the threat to oust Mr. Wolfowitz had, in the previous 24 hours, taken a bizarre U-turn, with Mr. Wolfowitz challenging the bank’s directors to vote him out, knowing that the United States would oppose that move. Previously, Mr. Wolfowitz had been doing everything in his power to prevent such a vote.

In effect, bank officials said, he was using the fear among European leaders at the bank of a possible rupture with the Bush administration at a time when the United States and Europe are struggling to cooperate on Iran sanctions, trade and other economic issues. While the United States cannot prevent the ousting of Mr. Wolfowitz, it has by tradition picked the president of the bank and has such influence that its consensus-driven members want to avoid an open break with Washington.

“The bank board is ready to vote Wolfowitz out of office, and Wolfowitz is calling their bluff,” said a bank official briefed on the negotiations. “It’s going to be difficult for the board to drop its charges against him, but they’re going to have to do it if they want to resolve this.”

The bank are so distrustful of Wolfowitz and the Bush White House that they are reportedly asking for a guarantee from Wolfowitz, in writing, that he will step down if the bank softens the language of the charges against him.

It really is saying something when world diplomats - at this level - can't take the White House or Wolfowitz at their word and have to insist on a written guarantee. Perhaps Wolfowitz and the White House are unaware of the level of insult that is being perpetrated upon them. In a world where a man's word is his honour, they are implying that Wolfowitz and Bush's White House have none. They are literally saying that they will not believe a single thing that this man says and will only be reassured if he puts pen to paper giving them a document that they can flourish in public should he rescind on his promises.

They are saying that Wolfowitz has no honour.

It has to be said that Wolfowitz has played his cards here terribly, insisting like a true neo-con that he could change reality by the sheer force of his will - a sort of "I'm the decider" if you like. His stance has infuriated the Europeans who are now circling him like sharks and - despite having the full confidence of Bush's White House - the chances of him staying are now nil, and the best he is left with is negotiating the terms of his departure.

The negotiations over Mr. Wolfowitz’s possible exit unfolded quickly on Wednesday, officials said. As recently as late on Tuesday night, they said that a last-minute appeal by Mr. Wolfowitz to deny the charges against him and to demand a fair process in which he could stay on the job seemed to backfire. Especially galling to bank board members, officials said, was Mr. Wolfowitz’s request that the 24-member board reject the conclusions of its seven-member subcommittee charging him with violating several codes of conduct and trying to cover up his involvement in Ms. Riza’s salary and promotion.

The events of the day added up, in any case, to a hairpin turn in the fortunes of the beleaguered bank president, who over his two-year tenure has alienated virtually all segments of the bank, and a fair number of economic ministries around the world. In the last few weeks, he has reinforced their anger by dismissing the charges of misconduct against him as a “smear campaign.”

The saga seemed to be playing out according to a time-honored Washington formula: confrontation, impasse and crisis, followed by sudden negotiations to avert a possible breakdown of the institution.

True to form it is said that Tony Blair has now entered the fray - using Thomas Scholar, the British director on the board - in an attempt to find a way for Wolfowitz to leave his position with honour.

This will, of course, be impossible. When the bank have already insisted that you give a written declaration that you will resign if they phrase things a certain way, then they have already declared that honour is something that you don't possess.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Wolfowitz, World Bank, Bush, neo-cons, Riza

Prince Harry will not go to Iraq, head of the army rules

After agonising over the decision for months, General Sir Richard Dannatt has finally decided that Prince Harry will not be going to Iraq.

I always thought the decision to send him was a dangerous one, as he would have been a special target and make things especially hazardous for any other soldiers in his unit.

Specific threats to the prince "expose not only him but also those around him to a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable", the general said. He insisted that though his squadron was willing to share those risks, he was not prepared to "export those risks to the families".

The royal family and the government had always said the decision was up to Gen Dannatt.

"It's an operational decision taken by the military which we of course respect," Downing Street added.

Gen Dannatt referred in his prepared statement yesterday to a number of "specific threats - some reported and some not reported - which relate directly to Prince Harry as an individual".

The general continued: "I have to add that a contributing factor to this increase in threat to Prince Harry has been the widespread knowledge and discussion of his deployment. It is a fact that this close scrutiny has exacerbated the situation and this is something that I wish to avoid in future".

So, Dannat has managed to throw some of the blame for the situation towards the media, as if a young Prince being sent into a battlefield is not news, and he's attempted to take the heat off the underlying truth that the army simply couldn't guarantee Harry's safety in Iraq.

Prince Andrew served in the Falklands and, even though he was a high priority target for the Argentineans, the Navy managed to keep him relatively safe. It would appear that the situation in Iraq is of a different measure, and that the Army couldn't offer the same degree of protection for a royal as the Navy could in the South Atlantic.

All of which undermines the attempts by many in Downing Street to portray the situation in Iraq as an improving one. It is obviously not, as only a few months ago, Harry's unit was being sent there - with him amongst them - in a blaze of publicity. Indeed, only a few months ago it was argued that not to send him would be to hand a victory of sorts to the insurgents:

The MoD was also acutely aware that a decision not to let him go could be seen as a propaganda victory for those who promised to track down the prince, notably elements of the Mahdi army, the Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

A commander in the Mahdi army told the Guardian last month that Prince Harry would be a prime kidnap target for insurgents in Iraq. "One of our aims is to capture Harry; we have people inside the British bases to inform us on when he will arrive," claimed Abu Mujtaba, who commands a unit of around 50 men active in the Mahdi army in Basra.

The kidnapping - or worse - of the prince by the militia, or any other insurgent group, would have provoked an unprecedented crisis for the government as well as the army and given insurgents in southern Iraq a big propaganda victory.

Gen Dannatt now regards those threats as credible, though at the time defence officials dismissed them as rhetoric and propaganda, and attacked the media for publishing them.

It would now appear that this victory for the insurgency has been deemed preferable to the alternative, which is the capture of the young prince by insurgents and the taunting of the British government with videos of the third in line to the throne being tortured and God knows what else. Understandable though the decision is, it is undoubtedly a victory of sorts for the insurgency, as the British Army are now stating that things are so bad in Iraq that they cannot guarantee the safety of a single soldier within that war zone.

The decision not to send him has, nevertheless, angered the relatives of other young men and women who are going to Iraq.

Reg Keys, whose son, Thomas, was killed in Basra in 2003, said he found the decision distasteful. "It would appear that Harry's life is more valuable than my son or the other nearly 150 service personnel who've given their lives."

Rose Gentle, whose son, Gordon, was killed in Iraq, said: "If it's too dangerous for Prince Harry, it's too dangerous for the rest of the boys. They should all come home". Mr Keys and Mrs Gentle are both members of Military Families Against the War.

Prince Harry had always threatened to resign from the Army if he was left "sitting on my arse" whilst the rest of his regiment went to war, however Clarence House now say that the prince "fully understands and accepts" the situation and remains committed to his army career.

Click title for full article.

Comey Testifies that the President Broke the Law

Comey testified as follows:

(i) that he, OLC and the AG concluded that the NSA program was not legally defensible, i.e., that it violated FISA and that the Article II argument OLC had previously approved was not an adequate justification (a conclusion prompted by the New AAG, Jack Goldsmith, having undertaken a systematic review of OLC's previous legal opinions regarding the Commander in Chief's powers);

(ii) that the White House nevertheless continued with the program anyway, despite DOJ's judgment that it was unlawful;

(iii) that Comey, Ashcroft, the head of the FBI (Robert Mueller) and several other DOJ officials therefore threatened to resign;

(iv) that the White House accordingly -- one day later -- asked DOJ to figure out a way the program could be changed to bring it into compliance with the law (presumably on the AUMF authorizaton theory); and

(v) that OLC thereafter did develop proposed amendments to the program over the subsequent two or three weeks, which were eventually implemented.

The program continued in the interim, even after DOJ concluded that it was unlawful.

UPDATE:

This is simply mind boggling stuff and proof that Bush acted outside of the law even after he had been told that the programme he was engaged in was illegal.

Read Glenn Greenwald's take on this:

Yet even once Ashcroft and Comey made clear that the program had no legal basis (i.e., was against the law), the President ordered it to continue anyway. As Comey said: "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality."

Amazingly, the President's own political appointees -- the two top Justice Department officials, including one (Ashcroft) who was known for his "aggressive" use of law enforcement powers in the name of fighting terrorism and at the expense of civil liberties -- were so convinced of its illegality that they refused to certify it and were preparing, along with numerous other top DOJ officials, to resign en masse once they learned that the program would continue notwithstanding the President's knowledge that it was illegal.

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

There is now a very clear case for impeachment. Even the Washington Post - as pro-Bush a newspaper as one could find - recognises that this is "an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source."

Tags: Gonzales, James B. Comey, FISA, wiretapping

Bush chooses his war czar — just don't call him that

Stephen Hadley has managed, at last, to find someone to take the blame for the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq by appointing Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as his war czar. This, of course, was supposed to be Stephen Hadley's job but, as things head south in both conflicts, it has become an administration priority to find a scapegoat for the failings.

Bush mouthed the usual tripe he always mouths when he makes a new appointment:

"General Lute is a tremendously accomplished military leader who understands war and government and knows how to get things done," Bush said.

You could take out Lute's name and insert any other and the wording would have been exactly the same.

If he keeps his current rank, as expected, Lute will be in the difficult position of overseeing people who outrank him, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, a Marine four-star general, and Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq.

Lute's relationship to Vice President Dick Cheney, who has played a major role in shaping U.S. policy in Iraq, also is unclear.

What's interesting about his appointment to a job that almost no-one else wanted, is that he will be required to oversee the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan from 7,000 miles away, which was - of course - the charge Bush made against the Democrats when they tried to tie troop funding to troop withdrawal.

Apparently it's okay to micromanage wars from 7,000 miles away if you're a Bush appointee.

Nor are the Bush regime referring to him as a war czar anymore, he's now a "full-time manager" of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration have found this role almost impossible to fill with certain people they approached, like retired Marine Corps four-star Gen. Jack Sheehan, going public over what he saw as the White House's "huge shortcomings"in their Iraq strategy.

"What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration," wrote Sheehan, "is that there is no agreed upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region."

And more interesting still, Lute's not even a supporter of Bush's accelerate and surge strategy:

Indeed, in choosing Lute, Bush picked a key internal voice of dissent during the administration review that led to the recent troop buildup in Iraq.

Reflecting the views of other members of the Joint Chiefs, Lute argued that a short-term increase would do little good and that any sustained increase in forces had to be matched by equal emphasis on political and economic steps, according to officials informed about the deliberations.

Lute's selection ends a long White House search for a war czar. Some senior military officers who were approached said they weren't interested.

Are they setting Lute up to be the fall guy? One things for sure, Hadley's now got someone else to blame for things going pear shaped.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Iraq war, war czar, Lute, Stephen Hadley

Ron Paul vs. Giuliani on the Root Causes of Terrorism

Giuliani finds Rep. Ron Paul's statement that 9-11 was "blowback" for American interventionism "absurd". Giuliani obviously agrees with Bush's statement that al-Qaeda hate the US for their freedoms.



Here's what Michael Scheuer, the former station chief of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden task force, has to say:

Osama Doesn't Hate Our Freedom: The fundamental flaw in our thinking about Bin Laden is that "Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than what we do." Muslims are bothered by our modernity, democracy, and sexuality, but they are rarely spurred to action unless American forces encroach on their lands. It's American foreign policy that enrages Osama and al-Qaida, not American culture and society.

How is the United States threatening Muslim lands? The post-9/11 crackdowns on Muslim charities have effectively ended tithing, which is one of the five pillars of Islam; our casual denunciations of "jihad" sneer at a central tenet of the Muslim faith. America supports corrupt anti-Muslim governments in Uzbekistan and China, "apostate" governments in the Middle East, and the new Christian state of East Timor. And, above all, it continues to house occupying forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Tags: Giuliani, Paul, Republican debates, 9-11

Whatever happened to Ahmed Chalabi? (the man whose lies about WMDs took us to war)

By Patrick Cockburn:

Ahmed Chalabi stands on the bank of the Tigris river within easy sniper range of the opposite side and surveys the twisted steel girders of the al-Sarafiyah bridge in Baghdad, its central spans torn apart by a massive truck bomb last month. The force of the blast impresses him.

"I am surprised that the explosion managed to bring down three spans," he says as he looks at the wreckage. It is a placid enough scene but nothing in Baghdad is truly safe. I supposed that Mr Chalabi's numerous and heavily armed police and army guards knew their business but I was hoping that we would not dawdle too long.

The al-Sarafiyah bridge, once one of the sights of Baghdad, connected the Shia district where we were standing with Wazzariyah, where there had been clashes with Sunni insurgents. I selected a reassuringly vast concrete plinth of the bridge to dodge behind if there was any shooting.

Conspicuous in a dark business suit, Mr Chalabi seemed uncaring about our possible vulnerability to hostile fire and was talking with some of the men in charge of rebuilding the bridge. There were no signs of reconstruction.

He stepped into a small, dark, river police patrol boat which circled below the bridge for a few moments. Returning to the bank he remarked that one of the policemen on the boat had told him that "five out of 16 river policemen in his unit had been killed". "Snipers at Taji," one of his aides commented. As for the bridge, Mr Chalabi said reconstruction was "very slow - they should be working now".

The broken remains of the al-Safariyah bridge was a strange place to meet the man whom opponents of the invasion of Iraq regard as a hate figure who gulled the US into a bloody and unnecessary war by concocting evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

He has always had an impressive array of enemies. Demonised by Saddam as a creature of the Americans, he was simultaneously loathed by the CIA and the US State Department mainly because he would not obey American orders.

Whatever his political future, Mr Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi politics. "Never ever write him off," Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, said to me last year. For a start he is still alive despite numerous assassination attempts.

Aged 62 he has seen extraordinary reversals of fortune. He comes from a wealthy Shia family that flourished in Baghdad until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. Always an opponent of Saddam Hussein, he became a banker in Jordan only to see his bank collapse in controversial circumstances in the late 1980s. In the 1990s he was in Iraqi Kurdistan vainly seeking to use it as a platform to overthrow Saddam. Forced to flee again in 1996 he seemed to have failed, but 10 years later Saddam is in his grave and Mr Chalabi sits in his heavily fortified house in Baghdad.

Meeting political leaders in Baghdad is different than in other countries, where the difficulty is generally in securing the interview in the first place. Getting to it is just a matter of calling a taxi.

In Baghdad the main problem may be covering the last 500 yards to see the person to be interviewed without undue danger. It is quite evident meeting Iraqis and foreigners in the Green Zone in Baghdad that few have the slightest idea of the risk involved in coming to see them. One ambassador happily gave a party starting at 9pm and invited people from outside the zone when not a cat is stirring in the streets of Baghdad.

I had called Mr Chalabi's office in the morning. I was in fact in the Green Zone seeing Kurdish friends when the reply came that he could see me almost immediately. He does not live in the Green Zone but in a fortress-like villa not far away.

Two vehicles filled with armed men were sent to pick me up. We drove through the desolate streets of west Baghdad, which these days look like a war zone, at great speed, zig-zagging around concrete blast walls and rolls of razor wire. Mr Chalabi was waiting at the house in the al-Mansur district, once known as the embassy quarter of Baghdad but now a lethally dangerous place. There were few cars about and by early evening those shops that had opened were closing. There were nervous-looking soldiers and police everywhere. We were to go on to another house, known as The Farm, that had once belonged to his father.

For a man who is not officially a member of the government his police and army escort boasted significant firepower. I had met Mr Chalabi in the early 1990s and had always been impressed by his skill as an operator and his ability to bounce back from defeat. He also had an ability to irritate his friends and attract the loathing of his enemies to a degree which seemed beyond reason.

A few days before I met him in al-Mansur an official in the Green Zone had told me with feeling that he considered Mr Chalabi to be "evil". Yet much of what he had done during the 1990s was what all exiled oppositions do when trying to overthrow an authoritarian regime. They try to foment unrest, coups or mutinies inside their country and look for the backing of neighbouring states and the great powers. Mr Chalabi did what others in the Iraqi opposition did but with greater success.

The US had failed to go on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991. The opposition always wanted to lure it to try again. Attempted coups and mutinies had all failed by 1996. This was probably inevitable. Mr Chalabi once said to me that people "outside Iraq did not realise how difficult it was to try to overthrow a government with a violent and pro-active security service." Did he invent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or prompt witnesses to do so?

In fact all the opposition, particularly the Kurdish security services, were doing this. But it was absurd for the CIA and assorted American services and newspapers along with MI6 to later claim that they were misled. They knew what President George Bush and Tony Blair wanted and gave it to them.

Mr Chalabi's own justification for encouraging the US to invade is simple. He says he favoured the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US but not the subsequent occupation of Iraq to which he attributes all the disasters that followed. It is not an argument that goes down well in Washington or London.

In April 2004 a meeting in the White House discussed a memo drawn up by the National Security Council entitled "Marginalising Chalabi". Action swiftly followed. Mr Chalabi was accused of being too close to the Iranians and of telling their intelligence station chief in Baghdad that the USA had broken Iranian codes. The FBI was told to investigate. A few days later, on 20 May, US-led forces raided his headquarters in Baghdad. His fortunes waned.

After the parliamentary elections in December 2005 he was part of the Shia alliance that triumphed. He became deputy prime minister. At the election at the end of the year he stood outside the Shia alliance and did not win a single seat.

Sitting in his garden, Mr Chalabi is sceptical about the success of the security plan for Baghdad. He says that "there are less sectarian killings and places that were expected to be difficult like Sadr City [the Shia slum that houses two million people] were not." But he says the latter success was only possible because of successful negotiations that led to the Mehdi Army, the main Shia militia body, being stood down, through the influence of its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iranians and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He does not think that US-Iraqi army plan to seal off areas, the so-called gated communities, is going to work. He points out that in a Sunni commercial area such as al-Adhamiyah, most people who work there live outside the enclave. "In any case it is consecrating division in the city. There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution."

At the same time he says firmly that "the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. They were encouraged to go on the offensive by Arab states that did nothing for them." He identifies one factor in the weakness of the Sunni that is confirmed by election results. They are far less numerous in Baghdad than they had supposed. Some had spoken of Baghdad being equally divided but Mr Chalabi thinks that the proportions in the capital are 80 per cent Shia and 20 per cent Sunni. He sees the most immediate problem in Baghdad as being the return of people driven from their homes and detainees.

"Efforts must be made to bring them back otherwise security is reversible. The displaced people are very angry and want to go home."

Through popular committees he is trying to get mosques returned to their original community. His judgement is different from that of many Iraqi and American officials in the Green Zone. He does not think that the Sadrists, the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, is disintegrating: "A lot of it is wishful thinking. Their local leaders will all comply with what Muqtada al-Sadr says."

A key element in ending the war is bringing in the Iranians: "An understanding through the Iraqi government between the US and Iran." He does not think that Washington's famous "benchmarks" are more than slogans in Iraq. Giving Saddam Hussein's security services back their old jobs is just not acceptable. He does not add that the Shia and Kurds will veto such an idea but they certainly will.

On US threats to withdraw he says "many Iraqis are asking if this is a promise or a threat" but he wants an agreement on the limits of the authority of the multinational forces, essentially the Americans and the British.

At this stage Mr Chalabi sees a US withdrawal as something that will be a function of US politics and not what is happening in Iraq. Essentially he sees the US and Britain as having unwittingly committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. "The US found that it had dismantled the cornerstone of the Arab security order."

The US and Britain have been trying ever since to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Baath party. They wanted "to prevent Shia control and limit Iranian influence in Iraq and in this they have not succeeded." And that is why they will leave.

Ahmed Chalabi was one of the key figures in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq as a leading Iraqi exile in Washington, where he lobbied the US government to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He supplied intelligence from Iraqi exiles and defectors to his backers in the Pentagon and the White House - and to The New York Times - on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of WMDs which was later proved to be unreliable. He was also accused of working for Iranian intelligence.

Backed by the Pentagon as a future leader of Iraq, he returned home after the 2003 invasion at the head of a small fighting force in hopes of building political legitimacy.

In the early 1990s, his Iraqi National Congress was funded by the CIA which subsequently distanced itself from him after a failed uprising in Kurdish Iraq. Chalabi was also convicted in absentia by a Jordanian court of embezzlement, theft, forgery and currency speculation over the collapse of the private Petra Bank, and sentenced to 22 years in prison. He has always maintained his innocence.

Click title for source.

Tags: Chalabi, Iraq war, neo-cons, Bush

European knives sharpen for Wolfowitz

Despite American attempts to separate consideration of Paul Wolfowitz's rule breaking from any decision over whether or not to fire him, European nations are forging ahead, taking a very hard line against the leader of the World Bank.

The US, in a conference call with leaders from the Group of Seven, convinced only Japan to agree to their proposal with even Canada joining the European governments, including Britain and Germany, in opposing the US move, leaving Mr Wolfowitz's fate in the hands of the bank's powerful executive board.

It now appears as if the writing is on the wall for Wolfowitz and even the White House are now accepting the inevitability of his removal from the organisation.

Sources close to the board last night suggested the most likely outcome, within the next few days, was a statement of "no confidence" in Mr Wolfowitz's presidency and a call for his resignation, followed by a period to allow Mr Wolfowitz to voluntarily step down.

If Mr Wolfowitz refused to do so, he could then be fired by the board - although there is some confusion within the bank whether the board's vote would be conducted by simple majority of its 24 members or weighted by shares.

The failed US attempt came after the White House signalled it was prepared to throw in the towel over Mr Wolfowitz's tenure, in an abrupt U-turn from its earlier position.

The Bush administration yesterday declared that "all options were on the table". The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, told journalists: "This has been a bruising process. You've got to figure out how you maintain the integrity of the institution and how you handle its stewardship going forward."

Earlier a senior White House official told ABC News that "it is an open question" whether Mr Wolfowitz should remain as president. "If you don't have board support and you don't have staff support, it is hard to get anything done," the official said.

Incredibly, the White House are still trying for a formulation where the World Bank declare that Wolfowitz acted in good faith, and had made some kind of honest mistake, but it's hard at this stage to see any way in which that kind of deal is going to prove possible.

The World Bank has already declared that Wolfowitz acted as if the rules did not apply to him, so it's hard to see how they can now come up with a formulation that is pleasing to the White House.

Even more damning evidence is emerging of Wolfowitz's way of dealing with people who insist that he play within the rulebook.

Yesterday evening Mr Wolfowitz met with the board to address a damning report by an internal panel of investigators published on Monday night. It concluded he had acted improperly in rewarding Ms Riza during negotiations over her secondment outside the bank in order to avoid regulations barring couples from working together.

The official investigation found that Mr Wolfowitz rode roughshod over bank rules and violated his own contract. In testimony by one key witness, Mr Wolfowitz threatened to expose other senior bank officials. "If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too," he was reported as saying by Xavier Coll, the bank's head of human resources.

This is a perfect example of the neo-con mindset that has dominated Washington for the past six years. Rules are for other people and, if you try to tie these people down to your rules, you are fucking with them and they will fuck you too.

This is why I always refer to the current administration as thugs, because they really do operate within a Mafioso mindset. It is the language of the street. They understand and adore only brute force and power. Negotiation and diplomacy are lost on such people, indeed, they probably regard such qualities as weak and sissy.

Domination is the only language that they deal in.

Unfortunately for them, they are now dealing with what Rumsfeld has referred to as "old Europeans", people for whom negotiation is an art form. Nor are they weak and sissy as the neo-cons would presume. These are people who have run Empires, they have - in their time - controlled huge swathes of the globe. But, unlike these neo-con thugs, they have learned to hide their knives within velvet gloves.

And their knives are now out for Wolfowitz. The neo-cons can threaten all they like, Bush can berate and make all the demands he wishes, he can say how much he has confidence in Wolfowitz until the cows come home, but the "old Europeans" are circling Wolfowitz, and my money is going on them taking him down.

The Bush administration is about to be taught a lesson in the art of diplomatic killing.

Click title for full article.

The Lost Year in Iraq

Part 1.



Part 2.



Part 3.



Part 4.



Part 5.



Part 6.

Iraqis resist U.S. pressure to enact oil law

As Bush pushes the Iraqi Parliament to meet it's so called bench marks as a way of continuing to ensure congressional support for his Iraq policies, there are signs that the Iraqi's are not keen to move forward on what Bush would no doubt see as essential legislation: Iraq's new oil laws.

It seems certain that the May deadline that Bush has set for the passing of this new law is not going to be met with resistance amongst Iraqis varying from vehement to measured. But, almost across the board, the new oil laws are meeting with resistance.

Republican leaders in Washington have warned administration officials that if the Iraqi government fails to meet those benchmarks by the end of the summer, remaining congressional support for Bush's Iraq policies could crumble.

Their impatience was underscored Wednesday by Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit here. "I did make it clear that we believe it's very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion, and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain," Cheney told reporters.

But Iraqi lawmakers show little sign of bending to accommodate Bush on an issue as crucial as oil.

"We have two clocks — the Baghdad clock and the Washington clock — and this is a perfect example," said Mahmoud Othman, a lawmaker from the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. "This has always been the case. Washington has been pushing the Iraqis to do things to fit their agenda."

One of the main objections that the Iraqis have is to how vague the new law is regarding how much foreign investment is to be allowed under the legislation with some estimates putting it as high as 70%.

"Quite a lot of it is not good, to be honest," said a Western energy expert in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Iraqi officials.

"A lot of the difficult questions were fudged, like revenue sharing and who controls the oil fields. These obviously are vitally important, but they wanted a benchmark passed, so it was pushed," he said, referring to U.S. officials.

This is already in violation of existing US legislation (No: 109-234) which stipulates that "no funds...may be made available to establish permanent United States military bases in Iraq or to exercise control by the United States over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq."

More than 60 Iraqi experts and officials signed a petition against the new oil law in March 2007. One member of the Iraqi parliament participating in the Amman-Jordan conference said, "This law must be rejected as whole, there is no way it can be enhanced or fixed." Many Iraqis and Iraqi parliamentarians agree.

The Bush administration, however, are unsurprisingly rushing this through, although - thankfully - it is appearing unlikely that the Iraqis are going to be rushed on a subject as important as the future of Iraq's oil, especially as many Iraqis suspect that the US invaded Iraq to get their hands on the country's oil.

Even those who support the proposal as a framework have reservations about the details.

"All in all, we need the new law. The existing ones are very old," said Haider Abadi, a member of Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, a Shiite group. "Having said this, though, it does not mean that at this stage we are for a full opening of the doors to foreign investment in the oil sector."

Salim Abdullah Jabouri, a spokesman for the Sunni bloc, also expressed concern about having foreign companies profiting from Iraqi oil. "We think that the timing of this law is not suitable," he said.

Some of the fiercest opposition has come from oil workers, who threatened to go on strike this week to protest the legislation.

Imad Abdul Hussain, a leader of the Federation of Oil Unions, said workers want oil production to remain in government hands.

"Oil is Iraq's sovereignty. It is the only wealth in Iraq. It unifies Iraqis. When we give it to a foreign investor, this means the sovereignty is taken away," he said.

I have no doubt that getting their hands on Iraq's oil was a very large part the Bush oil administration's grand plans, and it gives me some pleasure to note that, for the moment, the Iraqi parliament is simply not playing ball.

The Iraq oil law, if implemented in it's proposed form, could possibly hand most of Iraq's basic resource to foreign investors with an amendment that states that the law cannot be changed for twenty five years no matter what a new Iraqi parliament wishes.

The Iraqis are right to treat it with suspicion and Cheney's threat - that congressional support will dwindle if the Iraqis don't give the Bushites what they want - deserves to be treated with contempt. Even the prospect of an escalating civil war is preferable to handing over your country's only asset to American oil companies for the next quarter century.

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Tags: Iraq, Iraq war, Iraq's oil, Iraq's new oil laws, Iraqi Parliament, Maliki, Bush, Cheney

CBS fires General who criticizes Bush

Tags: Olbermann, Countdown, General, Batiste, Iraq War, CBS

FRONTLINE "Spying on the Home Front"

A new documentary from the Frontline team about the Bush regime's programme of spying on it's own citizens. You can watch it tonight on PBS or online.



As Glenn Greenwald says:

The real value in the program is to serve as a reminder for just how little we know about what our government is doing in spying on our domestic activities and communications and the data it is collecting. In particular, it is striking how little we still know about the NSA's actions as it relates to the revelation that the Bush administration has been violating the law by eavesdropping on our telephone conversations in secret and without any judicial oversight.

Tags: FISA, spying, wiretapping, surveillance, US, Bush

Bank’s Report Says Wolfowitz Violated Ethics

A World Bank committee investigating the actions of Paul Wolfowitz has said that he violated ethical and governance rules as bank president by showing favouritism to his companion in 2005. The Bush regime have moved swiftly in an attempt to defend Wolfowitz but the language used by the report appears so harsh that it is hard not to think that the Europeans have lost all faith in Wolfowitz as leader of the World Bank Group.

The report charged that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules and the ethical obligations in his contract, and that he tried to hide the salary and promotion package awarded to Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, from top legal and ethics officials in the months after he became bank president in 2005.

Citing what it said was the “central theme” of the matter, the report said Mr. Wolfowitz’s assertions that what he did was in response to the requests of others showed that “from the outset” of his tenure he “cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution.”

“He did not accept the bank’s policy on conflict of interest, so he sought to negotiate for himself a resolution different from that which would be applied to the staff he was selected to head,” the committee said, adding that this was “a manifestation of an attitude in which Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

“It evidences questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest over institutional best interest,” it said.

The Committee have now passed the problem along to the larger governing body asking that they determine, “whether Mr. Wolfowitz will be able to provide the leadership needed to ensure that the bank continues to operate to the fullest extent possible in achieving its mandate.”

The Americans are arguing that Wolfowitz may deserve some form of censure but that the facts do not warrant his dismissal.

Indeed, the Bush White House have circled the wagons around Wolfowitz, just as they have around Gonzales.

Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview with Fox News in Jordan before the committee’s findings were released that Mr. Wolfowitz was “one of the most able public servants I’ve ever known” and that “he’s a very good president of the World Bank, and I hope he will be able to continue.”

White House and Republican officials said that from the beginning, President Bush has seen the controversy over Mr. Wolfowitz as a proxy fight waged by liberals at the bank opposed to Mr. Bush’s policies, and that he would not toss him or Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales overboard just because opponents want them out.

Beyond pride and politics, administration officials said that having someone at the bank who is viewed as committed to combating corruption and waste in aid programs, and who commands the confidence of Republicans and conservatives, helps guarantee Congressional funding for the bank’s projects.

However, European governments are saying that they will not be able to fund the World Bank should Mr Wolfowitz stay.

The appointment of Wolfowitz to head the World Bank was as unwise as the appointment of Jon Bolton to the United Nations. It was the reward of an ideologue and a two finger salute to the rest of the world that seems to epitomise Bush's Frat style Presidency. He is an unserious person dealing with very serious organisations.

There are some who think that the damage Bush has wrought with this appointment may be permanent.

These clashes of perspective have ruptured the bank’s governance system so deeply that finance officials in many countries worry that it may be irreparable whatever happens to Mr. Wolfowitz. If he refuses to resign, many said he might find it hard to travel or issue directives. If he leaves, a fight over choosing his successor is sure to erupt.

Wolfowitz's whole modus operandi here appears typical of the neo-con mentality that normal rules do not apply to them.

Let us remember what he did to lead us to this impasse. Wolfowitz attempted to circumnavigate the World Bank's rules by having his girlfriend work under his supervision. When the Bank's ethics committee told him that this was impossible he transferred her to the State Department but gave her a salary increase that meant that she was earning more than Condaleezza Rice, and this increase was being paid for by the World Bank.

Wolfowitz has claimed that the bank's ethics officers were well aware of the arrangement that he had made and has implied that they approved of what he did.

The new evidence that surfaced Monday revolved around Mr. Wolfowitz’s charge that one of his accusers, Xavier Coll, the bank personnel director, was wrong in recalling that Mr. Wolfowitz tried to cover up the salary and promotion package for Ms. Riza.

Mr. Coll, according to the report issued Monday, said that he had told Mr. Wolfowitz that the pay package for her was “outside the staff rules” and that the bank president had told him not to inform two top ethics officers, Roberto Daniño, then the bank’s general counsel, and Ad Melkert, head of the board’s ethics committee.

Wolfowitz has argued that Coll is wrong and said that Coll stated to him that he thought the president was embarking on “a reasonable way to move forward.”

However, the bank committee have rejected Wolfowitz's version of events and have backed Mr Coll's recollections rather than Mr Wolfowitz's. The bank committee have also rejected Wolfowitz's claim that he did not attempt to keep what he was doing secret from the bank's ethics officers.

The conclusion of the report is an almost textbook description of the neo-con mindset:

The report concluded, “Mr. Wolfowitz has taken the position that there were no rules that applied to the situation and therefore no rules could have been broken in resolving the matters as he did.”

He will cling on for the moment, but it's impossible for anyone to argue that he can continue to effectively lead an organisation when the vast majority of the people that he supposedly "leads" are vehemently opposed to him continuing to do so.

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Tags: Wolfowitz, World Bank, Bush, neo-cons

An American nightmare: US search for kidnapped troops in Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn

Even by Iraqi standards Youssufiyah is a violent place. At first sight the well-watered farmland and groves of date palms look attractively green but then you notice the bullet-riddled hulks of cars. Iraqi soldiers and police appear more than usually frightened. The streets of the ramshackle and grimy town conveys a sense of menace.

I used to disguise myself with a red-and-white Arab headdress to pass safely though the lethally dangerous area south of Baghdad where three American soldiers are being held captive. I would sit in the back of my car hoping that the small boys selling cigarettes beside the road didn't recognise me as a foreigner.

Thousands of American and Iraqi troops were desperately searching these towns and the land round about yesterday in the hope of finding a bunker or secret room where three abducted soldiers are being held. It may already be too late. The Islamic State of Iraq, the group which claimed yesterday to have captured them and to which al-Qa'ida belongs, may already have spirited them out of the area.

Here, at 4.44 am on, a US patrol in two vehicles was surprised and overrun by insurgents. The burned bodies of four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were found on the road. Three others had disappeared. It was obviously a mistake for a small and isolated detachment to be in an insurgent-controlled area. Such is the fear of roadside bombs that a relieving force took an hour to reach them.

The capture of Americans - like the hostages in Lebanon in the Eighties or in the Tehran embassy in 1979 - has traditionally had a greater impact on the US public than the death of soldiers. It is the nightmare of American commanders, going all the way to the Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, for US servicemen to be in enemy hands. The loss of these three prisoners could prove to be even more significant this time, as the public is already firmly against the war. A drawn-out hostage crisis, that ends in tragedy, could be the final blow to President's Bush's faltering support amongst Republicans.

For the soldiers searching for the three men, the US faces the additional danger of losing even more because of booby traps and roadside bombs.

Even with drones and helicopters, it is difficult country to search. Broken by irrigation canals and small channels that draw their water from the Euphrates, it is heavily inhabited. It is only 15 miles from the insurgent bastion in south Baghdad and a little further from the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah. Paradoxically, this dangerous place, where even heavily armed US troopers cannot survive, is a birthplace of civilisation. Outside Youssufiyah are the ruins of the ancient city of Sippar marked by the remains of a ziggurat. Twenty years ago Iraqi archaeologists excavated a temple here and found a library of Sumerian clay tablets neatly laid-out on 56 shelves and classified by topic.

Ever quick to score a propaganda point, al-Qa'ida said the attack on the soldiers' convoy was to seek retribution for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in the same area a year ago. "You should remember what you have done to our sister Abeer," said a statement by the Islamic State of Iraq group referring to five American soldiers who were charged in the rape and killing of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi and the deaths of her parents and her younger sister last year.

The crime in the city of Mahmoudiya was one of the most shocking atrocities committed by US troops in the war. Three soldiers have pleaded guilty in the case.

The war came early to this part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein had planted Sunni Arab settlers here to control the road leading to the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf. There was sectarian cleansing here early in 2004 and there have been bitter Sunni-Shia feuds, particularly in Mahmoudiyah to the east of Youssufiyah, where one side of the main street was Sunni and the other Shia.

The destruction of the small American patrol is another sign of how little the so-called "surge", the 30,000 extra US troops sent to Baghdad, is having on security in Iraq. On Sunday alone 126 people were killed in Iraq. Sectarian killings are down in the capital but 20 or more bodies, tortured and mutilated, are still being found every day.

It is a measure of the lack of success of American and Iraqi government anti-guerrilla operations that the insurgent grip has never been permanently broken.

The red-and-white keffiyeh that I used to wear in this area turned out to be an extremely bad idea. One day, sighing with relief at having driven through what was deemed the most dangerous 15-mile stretch on this road, I took the road to the Shia city of Kufa on the Euphrates. We were stopped by a checkpoint of the Mehdi Army, the militia of the Shia nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. One of them snatched off my Keffiyeh and shouted: "American Spy! American Spy!"

For some time the militiamen seemed to be planning to shoot us until they agreed to take us to their leaders in a green domed mosque nearby. A man close to the insurgents later told me: "We always look at people wearing keffiyehs more closely in case they are trying to hide their identity."

The Islamic State of Iraq warned last night that the US searches might endanger the captives' lives. In the past captured soldiers have apparently been killed because it was feared that they might be rescued.

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Kristol: Republican 11 Can Be “Beaten Back”

Bill Kristol continues to argue that victory lies just over the next hill and that the 11 Republicans who voiced their concerns to Bush can be "beaten back". This man has been wrong in every statement he has ever made about the Iraq war, so why is this ludicrous little armchair general still listened to?



Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Tags: William Kristol, Iraq war, surge and accelerate, Republicans

New Labour's secret pro-Israeli stance.

Recently, whilst reading John Kampfener's Book, "Blair's Wars", I came across the statement that Blair decided - after being schooled on the Middle East by Lord Levy - to make New Labour pro-Israel. This is something that Blair never made clear to the public, although it does go some way to explaining some of his more bizarre decisions, including his decision not to condemn the Israeli bombing of Beirut during the latest Israel-Lebanon war. It was a decision that stretched his relationship with the traditional Labour party too far and led to the coup that forced him to state that his speech to last year's Labour Party conference would be his last.

It was the rock on which his Premiership perished.

Labour has always traditionally backed the Palestinians as the occupied people rather than throwing their weight behind the occupiers, and many Labour MP's were unaware - as were most Labour supporters - that Blair had decided to reverse traditional Labour policy on this matter.

Indeed, it is only now that Blair is standing down that the influence that The Labour Friends of Israel group has enjoyed in Blair's Downing Street is becoming clear.

While Labour originally carried a reputation for having more voices sympathetic to the Palestinians – especially during the Thatcher years – the New Labour government of Tony Blair has reversed this orientation. Although one of Tony Blair’s first acts after becoming an MP in 1983 was joining LFI, the relationship truly developed in the early 90s, when as shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair met Michael Levy at a private meeting at the latter’s house. Michael Abraham Levyis a former chairman of the Jewish Care Community Foundation, a member of the Jewish Agency World Board of Governors, and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. According to Andrew Porter of The Business, Levy expressed his willingness “to raise large sums of money for the party” which led to a “tacit understanding that Labour would never again, while Blair was leader, be anti-Israel”. The partnership proceeded as Levy started inviting potential donors for tennis at his palatial home where Tony Blair would join them for a set or two. Levy would then proceed to ask the guests for donations after Blair had left. The genius of Levy’s fundraising strategy ensured that most of Labour's election funds came from private sources, rather than its traditional source – the trade unions, thereby weakening their say over policy.

Levy’s investment eventually paid off, with Blair’s accession to power. The reward was not long in coming as Levy was ennobled and subsequently retained as a “special envoy” to the Middle-East, leading predictably to the development of a strong pro-Israel line. Given the fact that Levy has both a business and a house in Israel and his son Daniel used to work for Yossi Beilin – the former Justice Minister of Israel – speaks of a serious conflict of interest, especially when he is the man assigned by Blair to negotiate impartially with Palestinians and Israelis. The fact that Levy acted as a fundraiser for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak casts further doubt on his capacity for impartiality. According to Neil Sammonds of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2002, Four of the previous five ministers with Responsibility for the Middle East had been active members of LFI.

I find it simply astonishing that this change of direction has never been made clear to the public or, indeed, to Labour's own supporters. Most Labour supporters instinctively back the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel's brutal colonial war and many would be shocked to discover that the Labour party have deserted the Palestinians simply because they have found, through Lord Levy and his contacts, a way to fund the party that circumnavigates the unions.

I was also dismayed to discover that Gordon Brown is also a member of LFI which means we can expect more pro-Israeli stances to be taken by New Labour when Brown takes over.

And the LFI have also gone as far as to use their influence to intimidate the BBC into adopting a pro-Israeli line when reporting on the Middle East.

LFI has used its influence to intimidate British media into adopting an openly pro-Israel position. A recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group revealed the systematic bias in BBC and ITV’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict which often reproduces the official Israeli narrative uncritically, whereas very little time or detail is devoted to the Palestinian side[20]. Some, who dared to criticize the Israeli position have faced bans, as Faisal Bodi, of BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight did. According to Bodi, LFI members play a "crucial propaganda role, carrying the flag for Israel in parliament, and lobbying editors to toe the Israeli line".[21] Tim Llewellyn, a Veteran Middle East correspondent for the BBC, has gone to the extent of calling BBC’s reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict downright “dishonest”. He has attributed it to the “unremitting and productive” efforts by “Israel's many influential and well organised friends”.[22] However, this still did not preclude LFI’s Andrew Dismore from expressing “concern” about the BBC for being “anti-Israeli and biased towards the Palestinians."[23] This charge could not have been more frivolous given that BBC has referred to Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘capital’ – a view otherwise shared outside of Israel by two out of the world’s nearly two hundred countries.

Blair's unremittingly pro-Israeli stance was what finally caused the fissure which ended his Premiership, with many Labour MP's and supporters simply baffled b