Saw this embed link in my goodreads update and thought i might try updating this blog again - we'll see if it works.
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Excellent historical fiction. Long, but didn't seem long because it was an easy, fast read. Can't wait for parts two and three of expected trilogy.



View all my reviews

Post Election - Hooray for Obama

AMAZING - 220 years of anglo-saxon names as President (one Celt Kennedy) no Sky's or Stein's not even an Italian - the first Presidential name to end in a vowel and it is a black man - how awesome is that. 

Here's an interesting map of election results from the New York Times about where Democrats increase their vote percentage over 2004 and where the Republicans did.  I think it is fair to say that the places where the Republican vote increased can be attributed to racist areas that don't have enough black population to offset the scared whites.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/05/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_RECAP.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

And he won even without the new knowledg of just how stupid Sarah Palin really is!  She's actually being compared to those idiots that Jay Leno interviews on the streets of L.A.  FOX NEWS of all organizations is reporting that she didn't know that Africa was a CONTINENT - thought it was a country.  Did not know what countries were in NAFTA (I mean seriously there are only 3 countries in North America!)  GOOD LORD!

The Op-ed piece that launched a thousand crimes

I'm watching the PBS program "Frontline: Bush's War" which I highly recommend to every American citizen. Anyway, they just discussed the effect that Joseph Wilson's letter had on the White House, particularly Cheney because at the time the piece was published it was becoming obvious to everyone that there were no WMDs in Iraq, despite the Bushies repeated insistence to the contrary prior to the war. Wilson's piece, for the first time, suggested that much of the "evidence" of wmd's that had been presented to Americans and the world before the invasion had not merely been based on misinformation, but perhaps had been intended to mis-inform. Perhaps the piece of "evidence" Wilson had debunked was not the only debunked evidence that was nonetheless presented as solid fact. He was, in a sense the first person to say that the emperor had no clothes - or, at the very least, he had no ability to create mushroom clouds. The saddest part of this incident to me is that Wilson was only first in that he was the first one in the "mainstream" media. Sy Hirsh had been saying similar things for MONTHS in the New Yorker, but because the media had drunk the kool-aid in their excitement over being "embedded" that they ignored anyone like Sy that might keep this big adventure in Iraq from happening. The best thing that came out of this letter is that Scooter Libby has been disbarred once again making me feel good about my profession as a whole despite the small percentage of bad apples

At any rate here's the text of the Wilson letter to refresh your memory.

July 6, 2003 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR What I Didn't Find in Africa By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th ASHINGTON -- Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council. It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me. In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office. After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government. In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible. The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq — and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival. I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place. Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired. (As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors — they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government — and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.) Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip. Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure. I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country. Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case. Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government. The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted. I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed. But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons. Joseph C. Wilson 4th, United States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, is an international business consultant. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top

Oscars

Check out the "Oscar" widget in the sidebar. Apparently this will give you all kinds of Oscar info, including nominees and trivia. Enjoy!

Sy Hersh Gets the real News AGAIN

I've been telling people for four year that everything we found out about the Bushies after they invaded Iraq - ie: that there might not be any WMD, that the post war chaos could be huge and if not contained could blow up into civil war was all spelled out quite nicely by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker beginning around October 2002 until at least his expose on the Abu Ghraib scandal. Now he has a new piece in this Week's New Yorker that discloses more lies and more importantly, more perjury by the administration. It is not just "More of the same" Hersh's particular talent is his ability to convey the subtext in the room. You see Rumsfeld's attempts to intimidate General Taguba who had been charged with investigating the atrocities from the moment he walks in the door. By the time of that meeting, Taguba's report had been widely circulated, and at some point was leaked to the press. Rumsfeld makes it clear that he thinks Taguba leaked it and therefore he, Rumsfeld, believes he's justified in treating Taguba like Sh*t. Taguba was not the leaker, we know because the person to whom it was leaked (Sy Hersh) says that it was not Taguba. More importantly, Rumsfeld had NO evidence that Taguba was the leaker.

Anyway, the most important piece of information that comes out is that everyone above a certain rank had easy access to the report and had been sent numerous back-channel emails describing the problem long before the report was released. Nonetheless, Rummy showed up in front of Congress pretending to be totally in the dark -- he never saw the pictures before they were put on TV. According to Taguba Rumsfeld is, at best, in denial, and he is MUCH more likely to simply have committed perjury as so many of our high ranking officials seem to be doing these days.

The link to the article is to the right in my "Shared Items" frame. It is the article entitled: "The General's Report."

END OF TORTURING?! FINALLY?

FINALLY! Of all the harmful things perpetrated on this country by the Bush administration, I truly believe that the worst is it's use of torture and secret prisons. These actions are antithetical to everything that America supposedly stands for. Now it seems that Congress is finally ready to put a stop to these appalling practices. See the article from Salon, below:

A Senate panel rejects Bush's secret interrogations

As administration lawyers scramble to find a new legal underpinning for "tough" interrogation techniques, the Senate Intelligence Committee slams a once-secret CIA program and its methods.

By Mark Benjamin

Jun. 01, 2007 | The Senate Intelligence Committee has signaled to the White House that an infamously abusive secret CIA program to interrogate high-level al-Qaida types may have to be scrapped, given "the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad." It is a stinging rejection of a program that President Bush late last year called "one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history" and comes as administration lawyers are reportedly crafting new, secret rules to govern it.

The rebuke to the White House was delivered in written comments that were passed by the committee last week and released Thursday to accompany the annual bill authorizing intelligence activities. Military intelligence experts and human rights advocates have already slammed the abusive techniques purportedly employed by the CIA -- sleep deprivation, stress positions, slapping, induced hypothermia and simulated drowning, or "waterboarding" -- for producing unreliable intelligence from subjects who will say anything to make the pain stop. Now the senators on the intelligence panel, which has direct oversight over the CIA, seem to agree, according to the testy language passed last week. "The Committee believes," wrote the senators, "that consideration should be given to whether it is the best means to obtain a full and reliable intelligence debriefing of a detainee."

This skeptical view comes months after Bush endorsed the "tough" techniques as particularly effective in a Sept. 6 White House press conference, during which he also revealed the existence of the previously secret CIA program. And the Intelligence Committee said in these new comments that the skepticism might have come much earlier, if only the White House hadn't kept all the panel members except the chair and the ranking minority member in the dark for the past five years. "The administration's decision to withhold the program's existence from the full committee membership for five years was unfortunate in that it unnecessarily hindered congressional oversight of the program."

The committee also dumped cold water on the White House argument that the CIA should operate under separate, special rules that would allow tougher interrogation methods that are clearly off limits to the military. (The same day that Bush announced the existence of the CIA program, Pentagon officials held their own press conference to disavow coercive interrogations and announced the release of a revised interrogation manual tailor-fitted to the Geneva Conventions.) The intelligence panel's statement frowns on any special arrangement to allow the CIA to use what Bush has referred to euphemistically as "an alternative set of procedures."

"Both Congress and the administration," wrote the panel, "must continue to evaluate whether having a separate CIA detention program that operates under different interrogation rules than those applicable to military and law enforcement officers is necessary, lawful, and in the best interests of the United States."

The stiff message from the Intelligence Committee was passed in a voice vote on an amendment offered by the chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W.V., but members of both parties told Salon it reflected a bipartisan consensus. "While the language in the provision is a bit stronger than I would have preferred," said Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the committee, in a statement to Salon, "I am in agreement with the broad concerns it lays out." Explained a committee aide, "It lays out some concerns that the committee has ... It says that the committee is not sure that this program is the way to go as we move forward." Though the message does include the concession that "individuals detained in the program have provided valuable information that has led to the identification of terrorists and the disruption of terror plots," that bipartisan meeting of the minds makes this language a solid shot across the White House's bow.

The sharp retort couldn't come at a worse time for the White House. Administration lawyers are reported to be hard at work at new rules to govern the CIA interrogation program. The rules have been seen as an effort to burrow a hole in the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress late last year, which would seem to bar abusive interrogations outright. That law also requires the Bush administration to publish an executive order providing some legal rationale for the continuation of the CIA's interrogation program. But the executive order has long been delayed, reportedly as the administration struggles to draft a rationale that would allow the CIA to go further than the military when questioning so-called high-value detainees.

Meanwhile, the status of the CIA's secret interrogation program remains unclear. President Bush said that the network of secret prisons used for interrogations was empty when he unveiled the program late last year. But then on April 27, the Pentagon announced that Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former top advisor to Osama bin Laden, had arrived at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He had been in CIA custody for months, but the agency had declined to alert the International Committee of the Red Cross of his detention. His treatment at the hands of the CIA during that period is unknown.

-- By Mark Benjamin

Another area where the Bushies are clueless.

An excellent article from today's "Slate". Bushies think words speak louder than
actions.




war stories
Bush's Failed Campaign To Rebrand America
The administration believes public relations is a synonym for diplomacy.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007, at 5:50 PM ET

You've probably never heard of a State Department official named Price Floyd (I hadn't until a few days ago), but his resignation-in-protest, late last March, is as damning a commentary on President George W. Bush's foreign policies as any of the critiques from retired military officers.

Floyd was director of media relations at Foggy Bottom, the most recent of several diplomatic posts that he'd held over the past 17 years, beginning in the administration of Bush's father.

He explained his reason for quitting in a little-read op-ed piece in the May 25 edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (his former hometown newspaper): Basically, he was tired of trying to convince journalists, here and abroad, "that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words."

Ever since Sept. 11, the State Department, he noted, has embarked on "an unprecedented effort" to explain U.S. foreign policy to both American and foreign audiences. His office arranged more than 6,500 interviews, half with international media. On any given day, senior officials were doing four or five interviews. And yet, poll after poll revealed rising animosity toward America.

But the problem wasn't our words; as he put it, "What we don't have here is a failure to communicate." Rather, it was our actions, "which speak the loudest of all."

Rejecting the Kyoto treaty, dissing the International Criminal Court, revoking the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo—"these actions," Floyd wrote, "have sent an unequivocal message: The U.S. does not want to be a collaborative partner. This is the policy we have been 'selling' through our actions." As a result, our words are ignored or dismissed as "meaningless U.S. propaganda."

In a phone interview today, Floyd—who is now director of external relations at the Center for a New Security, a Washington think tank—elaborated on what led him to abandon his career at the State Department, the only place he'd ever wanted to work.

"I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," he recalled. "They'd say, 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say, 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.' "

He recounted a phone conversation with a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad who wanted Floyd and his colleagues to sell the media more "good-news stories" about the war in Iraq. "I said, 'Fine, tell me a good-news story, I want good-news stories, too.' There was a silence on the other end of the line," he recalled. "It was like you could hear crickets chirping."

Floyd would tell his colleagues that the administration's message was drifting dangerously out of synch with reality. He was finding it increasingly difficult to place officials' op-ed pieces in serious newspapers. Few broadcast media, other than Christian radio networks, wanted to interview the department's experts, dismissing what they had to say as "more blah-blah from the State Department."

After a few recitations of these warnings, his bosses, as he put it, "started telling me to shut up. They didn't want to hear this."

The problem, of course, went—and still goes—well beyond the State Department bureaucracy. Ever since 9/11, President Bush and his top aides have acted as if they needed only to "rebrand" America—devise a slogan or set of images—in order to clear up hostile foreigners' misunderstandings about our nature and intentions.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks, Bush hired Charlotte Beers, a prominent advertising executive, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. She spent nearly a year producing a slick documentary, which preview audiences greeted with howls and catcalls, before hightailing it back to Madison Avenue. After Beers came Margaret Tutwiler, James Baker's can-do press aide during the presidency of Bush's father, who, it turned out, couldn't do this job, either. Then came Karen Hughes, Bush Jr.'s own former spin-master, who embarked on two disastrous trips to the Middle East early on in her tenure and has lain low ever since.

The problem wasn't Beers, Tutwiler, or Hughes personally. Rather, it was the assumption that led Bush to believe that they were qualified for the job to begin with—the assumption that public relations is a synonym for diplomacy.

Back in 2004, the RAND Corporation issued a report that anticipated the main point Floyd would later make from the inside, equally in vain—that the key factor in public diplomacy is not what the U.S. government says but rather what it does.

"Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism," the report concluded. Many foreigners understand us just fine; they simply don't like what they see. It's "some U.S. policies [that] have been, are, and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism." (Italics are in the original.)

One crucial aspect of this problem antedates George W. Bush's presidency. It goes back to the mid-1990s, when Jesse Helms, then the xenophobic Republican chairman of the Senate foreign-relations committee, gutted the U.S. Information Agency and swept its tattered remnants into a dark, dank corner of the State Department.

In its Cold War heyday, the USIA had been a fairly independent agency mandated with blaring the principles of American culture and democracy across the world. It sponsored jazz concerts and radio broadcasts, speaking tours, public libraries filled with classic political documents. The operation was so independent from policy-makers that, during the 1960s and early '70s, some American scholars sent out on USIA-sponsored speaking tours openly opposed the Vietnam War.

The agency's relative independence—and its staff's attunement to foreign cultures and languages—conveyed an attractive image of America. But it was also what annoyed Sen. Helms, and so he dismantled the whole operation.

Price Floyd traces the decline of America's standing in the world to this moment. "Back then, the USIA transmitted American values—and this was separate from selling American policy," he said. "The two aren't separated now. There's no entity that makes it possible to separate them. So, if you disagree with our policy, which is easy to do now, then you hate America, too."

In the interview and in his Star-Telegram op-ed piece, Floyd called for something like a restoration of the old USIA, at least in spirit—a return to public diplomacy (as opposed to public relations), a sustained demonstration that America is about more than bombs and soldiers, a realignment of America's words and its actions.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.