disturbing the comfortable

Bush’s Lies Continue To Be Exposed
Does anyone not believe that Bush lied about Iraq? The longer we watch and listen and read, the more we learn about how things “work” in this country.
The first posting, from CNN, indicates that Bush was so eager to go to war (well, not him specifically—he prefers to stay at home when there’s a war, but he likes the idea of sending others to fight and die) he overlooked a very simple opportunity: to let Saddam Hussein abdicate. If you remember, “regime change” was the next justification for the war after WMDs.
The next article is from Jim Hightower. Would Bush really be so crass and arrogant to veto any legislation that prohibits torture? Yes, I believe he would. He has already turned America into a pariah nation; the only people who are satisfied are the ones at home: cheap oil, low taxes, always the police to take care of any perceived threats, a strong military (the strongest and most expensive in the entire world) just in case anyone wants to take away our god-given rights to take what we want...Hell, yes, Bush will veto anti-torture legislation. America more and more is coming to resemble the old South Africa or the present Israel.

NEWS DISSECTOR November 3, 2005

SADDAM WAS WILLING TO GO TO AVERT WAR
CNN reports from Dubai:
” DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Days before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein agreed in principle to accept an offer of exile from the United Arab Emirates, but the deal fell through, a UAE government senior official told CNN.
“The reported offer came before an emergency Arab League meeting in Egypt in discussions between UAE officials and a Hussein aide, said the senior official, who was then a member of the UAE delegation to the Arab League."
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BUSH TO VETO ANY ANTI-TORTURE LEGISLATION
Comments Jim Hightower:
“The White House says that Bush will issue the first veto of his presidency, claiming that the ban on torture would tie the president's hands. ... Well, gosh... yes! The very idea of the ban is to bind our government's leaders to a standard of behavior recognized by all civilized nations. Military leaders know that torture yields worthless information, false confessions, and a bitter determination by the armies of those tortured to return the favor."
www.jimhightower.com
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Republicans Lead Lives Rich in Sexual Fantasies?

And, just to try to figure out what’s satire and what’s for real, here’s this piece from Atrios about Republican writing. Fiction...well, novels, as opposed to the fiction that grinds out of the White House on an hourly basis.

Atrios observes,

Between Horny Bear Scooter and Strip Search Sammy I’m really starting to wonder what the hell is up with your modern Republican party.

But that snippet seemed a little too pithy, so I followed the links to Amanda’s house, and she led me to Shakespeare’s Sister, where I read all kinds of things about Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice, via this “Talk of the Town” item by Lauren Collins in the latest New Yorker.

All of which is prelude to saying that I was just a-skimmin’ the Internets one fall evening when I came across this passage, penned by Scooter Libby himself:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And I thought, well, now, between Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl, and Scooter’s little fantasy of ten-year-old girls being raped by bears, yes, there really does seem to be something quite odd going on here.

Now, I know there is no indication whether, in Libby’s novel, the girls are strip-searched before they are raped by bears, and of course I know there’s no paper trail as to whether Alito would approve of such a search. And I know, from reading the comments at Shakes’s Sis’s place, that there are some readers out there who’ll say, “get a grip already, you liberals! Scooter Libby was *** merely fantasizing about ten-year-old girls being raped by bears! Yeesh! Whatta bunch of literal-minded types you liberals are! No appreciation whatsoever for the right-wing literary avant-garde!”

But still, the evidence does seem to be piling up, like unto a heap of naked, abject bodies, that there’s something very rotten, very foul living in the heart of the darkness of the right-wing imagination. James Dobson and his extraordinary lifelong fetish for beating small children with belts and spoons, even when the children are as young as eighteen months. Rick Santorum and his fears about men having sex with dogs (for John Cornyn, it was box turtles). Alberto Gonzales and David Addington (Scooter’s replacement!) and the whole prisoner-torture crew. Rush Limbaugh and his hand-rubbing glee over the Abu Ghraib photographs, likening them to Madonna kissing Britney on MTV. And, of course, the Abu Ghraib - Guatanamo phenomenon itself, with its PUC-fucking, its serial rapes of women and young boys, its lethal, days-long beatings of kids who just happened to drive by at the wrong time.

Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls. You know, next to this stuff, a little abuse of parliamentary procedure here, a crooked Supreme Court decision there, and couple of well-coordinated smear campaigns against critics of the Iraq War look like plain vanilla evil.

So I asked a couple of scientists and philosophers what they make of all this, and they said, “Michael, we don’t believe in ‘repression’ or the ‘unconscious’ or weirdo psychoanalytic things like that. Remember, Freud’s work was never empirically verified; strictly speaking, it’s not a science at all. You literary critics really should stop making up these extravagant ‘explanations’ of human behavior and listen to the neurobiologists. After all, Alan Sokal proved that none of you know what you’re talking about.”

Well, since they were no help, I turned back to Shakespeare’s Sister, who writes,

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has toiled under a lifetime of repression, and spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn’t enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn’t succumb to exhortations to do the same.

They like to say that the sexual liberation of women and gays has some alleged detrimental affect on society, but I don’t see it. What I do see is a collection of perverts whose own sickness pours out of them given the slightest opportunity, and whose fervent belief yet that they are the moral ones encourages them to create a whole other generation of screwed-up people, as they legislate the promotion of abstinence, repression, in sex ed classes.

To which I have to add, remember the good old days, when Newt Gingrich, accomplished womanizer and sick-wife-abandoner, was telling us that Democratic policies were to blame when Susan Smith left her two kids to drown in a car?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

Well, that was in 1994. Since then, y’all have voted Republican. And my, how things have changed.

I’m beginning to think that Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year only partly out of political despair—and mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.
Posted by Michael

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Rumsfeld to get rich(er) off flu vaccine!

Rumsfeld is a stake-holder, as we say nowdays, in the company that holds the patents on Timilflu, the product most-hyped as a way to beat Avian Flu. His holdings are reported at somewhere between 5 and 25 million USD. I will say that the right wing financial world is able to rejoice at a few things...like disasters and their aftermaths. The Pentagon, in July, signed a $25 million contract for the drug.

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Gulf of Tonkin Incident another Washington excuse for war.

And finally (at least finally until I have lunch), here’s a piece from the NY Times about how the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was manufactured into the WMDs of the Viet Nam War. Nobody has a corner on cooked intellience. And McNamara is quoted in the article as saying he never heard there might be anything hincty about the official version of the incident. She-it.


The New York Times
October 31, 2005
Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.

The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.

The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.

Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok's Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.

"This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform," said Mr. Aid, who is writing a history of the N.S.A. "To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong."

Mr. Aid's description of Mr. Hanyok's findings was confirmed by the intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research has not been made public.

Both men said Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.'s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Mr. Aid said.

Asked about Mr. Hanyok's research, an N.S.A. spokesman said the agency intended to release his 2001 article in late November. The spokesman, Don Weber, said the release had been "delayed in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."

Mr. Weber said the agency was working to declassify not only Mr. Hanyok's article, but also the original intercepts and other raw material for his work, so the public could better assess his conclusions.

The intelligence official gave a different account. He said N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called "Spartans in Darkness." Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.

Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency's. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam. They note that Johnson apparently had his own doubts about the Aug. 4 attack and that a few days later told George W. Ball, the under secretary of state, "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"

But Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview last week that he believed the intelligence reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.

"I think it's wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war," Mr. McNamara said. "But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating."

Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.

"That really is surprising to me," said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before Congress. "I think they ought to make all the material public, period."

The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the American destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history. Johnson responded by ordering retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on Aug. 7, 1964.

It authorized the president "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force," to defend South Vietnam and its neighbors and was used both by Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon to justify escalating the war, in which 58,226 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese died.

Not all the details of Mr. Hanyok's analysis, published in N.S.A.'s Cryptologic Quarterly in early 2001, could be learned. But they involved discrepancies between the official N.S.A. version of the events of Aug. 4, 1964, and intercepts from N.S.A. listening posts at Phu Bai in South Vietnam and San Miguel in the Philippines that are in the agency archives.

One issue, for example, was the translation of a phrase in an Aug. 4 North Vietnamese transmission. In some documents the phrase, "we sacrificed two comrades" - an apparent reference to casualties during the clash with American ships on Aug. 2 - was incorrectly translated as "we sacrificed two ships." That phrase was used to suggest that the North Vietnamese were reporting the loss of ships in a new battle Aug. 4, the intelligence official said.

The original Vietnamese version of that intercept, unlike many other intercepts from the same period, is missing from the agency's archives, the official said.

The intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is "about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun - you can come to no other conclusion."

Despite its well-deserved reputation for secrecy, the N.S.A. in recent years has made public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A study by Mr. Hanyok on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, titled "Eavesdropping on Hell," was published last year.

Two historians who have written extensively on the Tonkin Gulf episode, Edwin E. Moise of Clemson University and John Prados of the National Security Archive in Washington, said they were unaware of Mr. Hanyok's work but found his reported findings intriguing.

"I'm surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at N.S.A.," Dr. Moise said. "But I get surprised a lot."

Dr. Prados said, "If Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it adds to the tragic aspect of the Vietnam War." In addition, he said, "it's new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out to be not that at all, just as in Iraq."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company