Panic grips world's markets.

When President Bush told us that an urgent financial package was needed to prevent the entire collapse of the American financial system, there were very few of us who were happy with the idea that, once again, profit was private but any financial loss became public debt.

However, angry as the idea of bailing out Wall Street made me, there were people who knew far more about economics than I did arguing that the choice was this or the complete financial collapse of the markets. In my mind I came to the conclusion that it was better to save the markets and vow that no company should ever again be allowed to become "too big to fail".

Both the presidential candidates delivered the same message with McCain going further than Barack Obama by suspending his campaign and flying to Washington to make sure the deal went through.

Yesterday the Democratic caucus delivered 66% of it's members to support a Republican bill and the Republicans, despite McCain's dramatic dash to Washington, delivered only 35% of it's members. 140 Democrats voted for the bill, despite it's unpopularity amongst the electorate, with only 65 Republicans also putting their necks on the line.

Astonishingly, despite the fact that this was a Republican bill, pushed by a Republican president, voted down by a majority of Republicans, that same party sought to push the failure of the bill to pass on to the heads of Democrats.

As recriminations began, Republican leaders blamed the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for framing the crisis as a consequence of recklessness by the Bush administration. "The speaker had to give a partisan voice that poisoned our conference," said Republican leader John Boehner. This drew ridicule from Democrats. Barney Frank, chairman of the House financial services committee, said: "Somebody hurt my feelings so I'll punish the country? That's hardly plausible."

Don't get me wrong, I was only willing to support the bill once oversight had been inserted into it. I had no idea, and as I write this I still have no idea, whether or not the entire $700 billion would ever have had to be used, but the important thing we were told was that the markets needed to see urgent action to prevent imminent financial collapse.

At that moment, appalling as bailing out these people was to me, I thought that we couldn't take the risk that the markets might collapse and that we should put a clothes peg over our noses and vote for this thing. With oversight assured, we would only see the spending of what was necessary to calm the markets and avoid financial Armageddon.

The Republicans, fearful of voting for an unpopular bail out so soon to an election, have put their re-election in front of the country's good, despite the dramatic intervention of McCain into the middle of this negotiation.

The markets have reacted swiftly.

The Mortgage Bankers' Association reacted by warning of job losses as banks curtail credit to small businesses. Larry Fink, chairman of a leading US investment management firm, BlackRock, said critics had been wrong to characterise the plan as a bail-out of Wall Street. "This is a bail-out of Main Street," he said. "Banks have no ability to lend at the moment because their balance sheets are so gummed up."

The financial fallout was swift and brutal. Shares in leading US banks slumped: Bank of America by 16%, Citigroup by 12% and Goldman Sachs by 11%. Oil plunged by $10 a barrel to just over $96 as traders bet on a slump reducing the need for fuel. The dollar fell sharply and the price of gold surged close to record territory.

Peter Morici, professor of business at the University of Maryland, said: "Things are going to get so bad something will have to be done in the next few weeks. Banks will sink, credit markets will seize, the economy will go into something much worse than a recession."

When I listen to every complaint that the Republicans make about this bill, their main objection is that this is "socialism". That is what they object to. Democrats who object tend to do so because they question whether or not this intervention will work or whether or not it is necessary. Republicans fear that this will work and fear that this is necessary because it undermines their entire ideological belief system.

To that end they really are prepared to take the risk that the entire financial system might collapse, despite McCain's dramatic intervention to steer the bill through.

McCain's intervention is now revealed as the empty political gesturing which we always suspected it was and those same Republicans who worried about losing their seats now face even more weeks with the economy at the forefront of the American electorate's minds.

It is to that end that the Republicans yesterday sought to feign outrage over Nancy Pelosi's comments in a pathetic attempt to duck responsibility for whatever happens next.

Make no mistake, the Republicans voted down this bill and they are now going to make an awful lot of noise in an attempt to disguise that brutal fact.

Neither Bush nor McCain could persuade them to put country before self. The Democrats delivered, under threat of dire financial consequences, 66% of their caucus to vote for a bill which appals all of us, but which we were told was a necessity to avoid financial meltdown.

I would be delighted if the threats turn out to be overstated, but - lacking the financial knowledge to know whether or not that is true - I would choose not to take the risk, deeming it, in the same way as we call for action on global warming, better to find out that I was wrong further down the road than to wait for the disaster to hit us before I had got myself up to speed.

The Republicans made the opposite call. And, having been too cowardly to vote for an unpopular bill which we were told was needed, they are now going to try and push the blame for that towards the Democrats. They must not be allowed to do that.

UPDATE:

Even David Brooks gets it:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

UPDATE II:

Taking partisanship to new levels, McCain says it's not the time to attach blame; but that he blames Obama.



Pathetic.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Bush, Paulson, Pelosi, McCain, Obama, financial crisis, Wall Street, Main Street, economics

More Proof that Condi's lying....

It's now official, Condi's telling porkies... again. Keith Olbermann interviewed MSNBC terror analyst Roger Cressey who was director of trans-national threats on the National Security Council staff at the time Tenet says he was warning Condi of an imminent threat.

On Countdown he and Keith had the following exchanges:

OLBERMANN: My first question, you‘re now consulting within a firm with Richard Clarke, who was at that meeting on July 10, on the central question of whether Rice was warned then of an attack on the U.S. Do we know who‘s right here, Woodward or Secretary Rice?

CRESSEY: Yes, she was warned. I mean, there was a meeting. It was George Tenet, Dick Clarke, another individual from the agency, Cofer Black, and Steve Hadley. And what it was, Keith, was a briefing for Dr. Rice that was similar to a briefing the CIA gave to us in the situation room about a week before, laying out the information, the intelligence, laying out the sense of urgency. And it was pretty much given to Dr. Rice and Steve Hadley in pretty stark terms.

Later Olbermann asks this:

OLBERMANN: And lastly, Roger, about Secretary Rice‘s sharpness, she famously denied getting any warning before the August 6 PDB came to light. Last week she denied that Dick Clarke gave them a strategy to fight al Qaeda left over from the Clinton administration. Now she‘s denying what Tenet and Black say they, or apparently told Woodward. Where is Secretary Rice‘s credibility on this subject of pre-9/11 intelligence right now?

CRESSEY: I just don‘t understand why she keeps denying what has actually happened, because there‘s really—there‘s no good reason for it. The 9/11 Commission had it right about the summer of 2001, Keith, which was, there was an overwhelming body of evidence, but there was not that sense of urgency in the West Wing of the White House to be proactive and aggressive in going after al Qaeda and taking proactive steps, and directing the interagency to do so.

That‘s what was missing, and I think what you see in Bob Woodward‘s book is another recitation of that very sad fact.

Where is Rice's credibility indeed? I'll go further... she's simply a bare faced liar.

Click title for Olbermann transcript.

tag: Condi, Rice, Olbermann, Bob, Woodward, 9-11, lies,

C.I.A. Chief Did Warn Rice on Al Qaeda

Condaleezza Rice told reporters yesterday on board her plane that she did not recall meeting with George Tenet on July 10th 2001 - a meeting at which Bob Woodward claims that Tenet was given the brush off when he warned of an imminent attack on the US - and she said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

However, the White House have now confirmed that this meeting did indeed take place.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Condi's inability to even recall the meeting would appear to lend credence to Tenet's suggestion that she did not seem to be giving due attention to the severity of the warning he was imparting.

After all, even if she disagreed with his suggestion that the US was in danger of imminent attack, one would assume that such a warning was sufficiently unusual for the meeting to be retained in the memory banks. However, Condi went on the record yesterday to state that she has no memory of any meeting ever taking place and doubting that it ever happened.

This inevitably leads to either of two possible conclusions. Either she's an incompetent or she's a liar.

If a warning so severe has escaped her memory, then she's incompetent and should be fired.

The only other conclusion is that she remembers it very well and is dissembling in order to avoid the inevitable questions of why she didn't act upon such a highly unusual warning that the US was in imminent danger of being attacked.

Condi has always maintained that such an attack could not have been foreseen.

However, there are many factors that lead one to believe that this is untrue, not least of which is the unexplained decision of John Ashcroft to stop flying commercial jets from 26 July 2001 onwards. This implies that, not only was Ashcroft aware of an imminent attack, but that he also had some inkling that it included the use of jet airliners.

This is not the first time that Tenet and Rice have clashed over what did and did not happen.

In his own book, Mr. Woodward wrote that over time Mr. Tenet developed a particular dislike for Ms. Rice, and that the former C.I.A. director was furious when she publicly blamed the agency for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Mr. Hussein was pursuing nuclear materials in Niger.

“If the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone, without question,” Ms. Rice told reporters in July 2003.

In fact, the C.I.A. had told the White House months before that the intelligence about Niger was dubious, and had managed to keep the claim out of an October 2002 speech that Mr. Bush gave in Cincinnati.

More recently, Mr. Tenet has told friends he was particularly angry when, appearing recently on Sunday talk shows, both Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney cited Mr. Tenet as the reason that Bush administration officials asserted that Mr. Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney recalled in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk.’ ”

It is becoming a common enough theme for this White House to attempt to blame others for it's mistakes, but for Condi to claim memory loss for such a highly unusual meeting marks a new low.

The White House are now claiming that Condi, far from brushing off Mr Tenet, actually recommended that Tenet also brief Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. What a pity that she feigned memory loss before the White House had a chance to circulate this latest take on what Condi did and didn't do.

"The briefing was a summary of the threat reporting from the previous weeks," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters traveling with Rice in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. "There was nothing new."

However, McCormack's claims raise as many questions as it answers. If Tenet's briefing did include "nothing new" as he now states, why did Condi ask for Rumsfeld and Ashcroft to be briefed on this information? Why would they need to be briefed on something that was old news?

The administrations version of events simply doesn't hold water.

And even if the recent White House claims regarding her behaviour were true, Condi's confessed memory loss confirms her to be unfit for the office she now occupies.

What all are agreed on is this. Condi was warned by Tenet that all intelligence signals were pointing to an imminent attack on US targets.

She says she has no memory of this meeting.

That's simply astonishing. If you lack the ability to retain information that shocking and that important, then you really ought to find another job.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Rice, Tenet, July 10 meeting, CIA, al Qaeda, bin Laden, 9-11, attack, warnings, intelligence, briefings, White House,

The Case against Condi is growing.

The case against Condi Rice is growing.

The Washington Post have released the latest excerpt from Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" entitled: "Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice".

It tells of how the CIA became so concerned about the mass of "communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States" that Tenet and J. Cofer Black decided call the national security adviser from the car and to demand an immediate meeting with Rice in the hope that this dramatic request - Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice - would get Rice's attention.

The reports of an imminent attack were so hard to ignore that:

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

Tenet had been having difficulty in getting any movement on an immediate bin Laden action plan largely because Donald Rumsfeld had put forward the notion that all this noise on the intelligence networks could be a grand deception on bin Laden's part to test US reactions and suss their defences.

With this in mind:

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Having established that the threats were real, Tenet and Black approached Condi laying out their fears that an al Qaeda attack was imminent.

He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

It seems impossible to reconcile reports like this with Rice's claim - indeed, the claims from the entire Bush administration - that 9-11 came as a bolt from the blue that no-one could possibly have seen coming.

What we have here is the CIA Director and his counterterrorism chief making a highly unusual appointment with Rice in the hope that their "out of the norm" behaviour will startle her out of her complacency and result in some kind of action to thwart a possible attack. What they received was what one always gets from Condi - an over promoted loyalist who's greatest gift is her ability to continue to mouth Republican party "talking points" no matter what pressure she is under - a regurgitation of the need for Star Wars that ignored the entire context of what Tenet and Black were trying to convey to her.

It is now obvious why the Bush administration could identify bin Laden as the culprit the day after 9-11, a point that has previously confused me. They could identify him so quickly because they had been so forcefully warned about what he intended to do.

The line that the administration has so far successfully managed to maintain is that no-one could have seen this coming. That is now exposed as a lie.

They were forcefully warned about what was about to happen, but lacked the wherewithal to grasp what they were being told.

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

The Bush administration will now move into full defence mode and repeat ad nauseam their claims that no-one could have predicted this, as if repetition somehow enhances their argument.

If Woodward's sources are correct then Rice and Rumsfeld should be forced to reconsider their positions. And, if they won't, then Bush should fire them.

The argument that they couldn't have possibly seen this coming no longer holds water.

Tags: Rice, Woodward, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Black, al Qaeda, CIA, State of Denial, bin Laden, 9-11, attacks, prediction, warnings,

Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq

Bob Woodwards new book, "State of Denial", describes a White House at war with itself over the conflict in Iraq with Bush ignoring pleas from a top Iraq adviser who stated that thousands more troops were needed to combat the insurgency.

The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

It's also interesting to note that Bush declined to be interviewed for this book having made himself freely available for the two preceding books by Woodward. It also describes the lengths that Cheney went to in order to "prove" that Iraq possessed WMD.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

It is known that Powell was ambivalent about Bush's plan to invade Iraq but what is surprising is Woodward's claim that George Tenet shared Powell's viewpoint, although it is claimed that Tenet did not make these views known to Bush.

What does promise to be explosive though, especially in the light of Clinton's claim that the Bush administration did not do enough to capture bin Laden prior to 9-11, are Woodward's claims regarding Rumsfeld and Rice:

Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

It's a wonder that a man who thought al Qaeda were indulging in "an elaborate deception plan" and a woman who seemed not to take "the warnings seriously" should remain in their positions after the worst terrorist attack in US history, but that appears to be the story that Woodward is telling.

We can expect the Republican attack dogs to be set on Woodward any day now.

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial, Iraq, war, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, WMD

The lies of Condi Rice

Bhc, has a great post (covering work also done at Martini Republic) which details the sheer size of the lies currently being spouted by Condi Rice. As he rightly says, it's so untrue it's probably actionable.

Here's a taster:

Within days after taking office, National Counterterrrorism Director Richard Clarke left a memorandum for then National Security Advisor Rice summarizing the responses to al Qaeda which had been formulated to respond the threat of al Qaeda and the Cole attack, which had been linked to the terrorist group in late 2000.

More importantly, attached to Clarke’s Memorandum was the very thing Rice now denies she was given: a 13 page document entitled, Strategy for Eliminating Jihadist Networks of al Qida.

Click title for full article.

Tags: Condi, Rice, Richard, Clarke, 9-11, war on terror, lies

Votergate

The whole nature of American democracy is under attack by the installing of electronic voting machines. I've never understood why any nation would allow this, just as I've never understood why people in the world's "greatest democracy" have to wait hours in line to vote. In Britain, you never have to queue and you simply mark who you want to vote for with a pencil on a piece of paper. It works, so why do anything different?

Tags: Diebold, voting, electoral, fraud,