Ray McGovern to Colin Powell: Come clean dude

ConsortiumNews has an article up by the wonderful Ray McGovern. Ray is the man that spoke truth to power when BushCo was lying their way into the Iraq War. Ray spent an entire career working for the CIA as an analyst. He is also co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has a few choice words for Colin Powell on how to restore his reputation. From the article:

Dear Colin,

You have said you regret the “blot” on your record caused by your parroting spurious intelligence at the U.N. to justify war on Iraq. On the chance you may not have noticed, I write to point out that you now have a unique opportunity to do some rehab on your reputation.

Ray then goes on to point out the obvious to Powell:

Your U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003 left me speechless, so to speak - largely because of the measure of respect I had had for you before then.

Outrage is too tame a word for what quickly became my reaction and that of my colleagues in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), as we watched you perform before the Security Council less than six weeks before the unnecessary, illegal attack on Iraq.

The purpose - as well as the speciousness - of your address were all too transparent and, in a same-day commentary, we VIPS warned President George W. Bush that, if he attacked Iraq, “the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

Catastrophic is an understatement. What happened is beyond catastrosphic to me. McGovern then goes on to list each lie perpetrated by either Powell or the smarmy idiots in the Bush Administration. He doesn’t mince words and he backs up what he says. Its worth a read, so check out the entire article. Here is what McGovern suggests Colin Powell do:

Let me suggest that you offer yourself as a witness to help clear the air on these very important issues. This would seem the responsible, patriotic thing to do in the circumstances and could also have the salutary effect of beginning the atonement process for that day of infamy at the Security Council.

If we hear no peep out of you in the coming weeks, we shall not be able to escape concluding one of two things:

(1) That, as was the case with the White House Situation Room sessions on torture, you were a willing participant in suppressing/falsifying key intelligence on Iraq; or

(2) That you lack the courage to expose the scoundrels who betrayed not only you, but also that segment of our country and our world that still puts a premium on truth telling and the law.

Think about it.

With all due respect,

Ray McGovern

Its simple and straightforward isn’t it? McGovern suggests Powell appear before Conyer’s committee and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Any bets on whether Powell will do it? My guess is no..how about yours?

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Ron Suskind on his new book about BushCo inventing evidence.

From the wonderful folks over at Crooks and Liars we have Suskind on the Today show talking about his new book entitled: The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. The book has some new findings, per C&L:

It has some explosive information about the White House’s plan to forge documents to persuade the American public that we should attack Iraq. This is incredible stuff. Suskind appeared on the TODAY show and gave his first interview about it…He says it’s “one of the great lies in modern political history.”

Exact quotes from pp. 369-372 of Suskind’s book are in bold print below:

In the months before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, British intelligence had secret meetings in Amman, Jordan, with Habbush, chief of Saddam’s intelligence network. Habbush demanded a safe way out, if-and-when the U.S. invaded.  Habbush repeatedly told the British that Saddam had no WMD; all programs had ended in the 1990’s; and the book says the Bush White House didn’t want to hear it - and didn’t want to hear more reports on what Habbush was saying.

The U.S. invaded in March ‘03. Habbush was ready. He slipped out of Baghdad with the help of U.S. intelligence and into Amman…

In October ‘03, CIA paid Habbush $5 million as part of his resettlement. By then, the White House had finally thought of a way to use Habbush. … The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq - thus showing, finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda… The letter also mentioned suspicious shipments to Iraq from Niger set up with al Qaeda’s assistance. The idea was to take the letter to Habbush and have him transcribe it in his own neat handwriting on a piece of Iraqi government stationery, to make it look legitimate. CIA would then take the finished product to Baghdad and have someone release it to the media.

Even five years later, (Rob Richer, who worked in CIA for 30 years and was in charge of “clandestine ops” in the Middle East-now working as an executive at Blackwater USA and in line to be CEO of Blackwater according to this book) remembers looking down at the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written. “The guys from the Vice President’s office were just barraging us in this period with one thing after another: Run down this lead, find out about that. It was nonstop. Of course, this was different. This was creating a deception.” Richer passed the directive down the chain, to the Iraq Operations Group. ((IOG was a CIA team co-led by John Maguire, clearly also a source for Suskind))

…”When it was discussed with me, I just thought it was incredible,” Maguire recalls. “A box-checking of all outstanding issues in one letter, from one guy.”

…Suskind is NOT able to report exactly how it was done, whether Habbush himself definitely did it, but reports what you can find through Google searches: The Sunday Telegraph reported the letter; it caused a sensation. Suskind does report that Richer remembers George Tenet passing to him the White House’s orders to concoct that letter.  Suskind asserts that it’s an apparently illegal act, to forge or concoct that fake letter to Saddam.:

Under a 1991 amendment to the statutes that in 1947 created CIA and that govern its actions, there is a passage that reads, “No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.” The operation created by the White House and passed to the CIA seems inconsistent with those statutory requirements. …It is not the sort of offense that brings jail time. It is much broader than that… the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”

Check out the C&L link for all the 411. Tenet denies all of course…

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Special Comment on Obama, FISA and the Bush Administration

What say you Obama???

corporatocracy =2, american people =0

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well. . . .

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. . . . The Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal, effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge has played out.

From Bad American’s Let em eat mad cow and The International Herald Tribune.

And a little background: The infectious agent responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy has a loooooong incubation period and is not killed by cooking. Testing 1%. Denying companies that want to do better (wait, what happened to the free market?) . . . Burger anyone?

Admin Note: the picture below is a human brain infected with Mad Cow Disease.

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The $300 Billion betrayal

Our soldiers arent’ getting the protection and the equipment they need. Yet BushCo has squandered 300 Large on boondoggles like we see in the video. From Alternet. These people are Absolute Corruption.

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Iraq doesn’t like our offer..go figure.

The US and Iraq have been in ‘negotiations’ for awhile now over a permanent..cough..pact. A pact that will govern how and what we are allowed to do within Iraq’s borders. No matter what Bush says, Iraq is a soveriegn nation, right? Yes, we saved them from themselves and brought democracy to all the citizens of Iraq and yet, they have the audacity to bitch and piss and moan that we are pushing them around. The nerve! (snark) From Reuters:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday talks with the United States on a long-term security pact were at a stalemate because of U.S. demands that encroached on Iraq’s sovereignty.

The United States and Iraq are negotiating a new security deal to provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq after December 31, when their United Nations mandate expires, as well as a separate long-term agreement on political, economic and security ties between the two countries.

Some folks in the Iraqi government have gone so far as to say…wtf dudes? We don’t need your stinking bases and thousands of troops! The wingnut Al-Sadr hasn’t been quiet either on this issue. Flapping his gums so to speak, via a letter, to the great unwashed masses he said this, via CNN:

“the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. This new group will be defined soon by me.”

Sigh…Al-Sadr didn’t stop there of course. He had to bring up the “M” word a few times as well:

“We will not stop resisting the occupation until liberation or martyrdom.”

One of the reasons the deaths in Iraq have dropped is because Al-Sadr’s army is in a ceasefire mode. Bush or Petraeus conveniently forget to mention this when they are bragging about how low the death count has been lately. Johnny McCain doesn’t either. Imagine that.

The Iraqi government is threatening to pull out of the talks and write their own ‘take it or leave it’ pact for the American occupiers. BushCo mouthpieces whine that Iraq is circumventing the whole process by taking their gripes public. Seems the Iraq government just doesn’t cotton to us as the ‘great liberators’. Could this be because we want to build roughly 50 permanent bases in their country, control their airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors?

Nah, that can’t be whats pissing them off..cough. Oh Hell No!

Artwork by The Worried Shrimp. Crossposted at Bring It On!

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When in Doubt, Blame Gays and Lesbians

Homosexuality is an Unhealthy Lifestyle

What’s wrong with this article? I mean besides the fact that there isn’t a single reliable fact within it. Moreover it is little more than a rant by ChristoFascists who have nothing better to do with their time than unifying the Republican Base by rallying that base against the GLBT community. In an attempt to remedy that situation I am republishing Part III of THE FOURTEEN CHARACTERISTICS OF FASCISM, a piece about this very topic.

By
Daniel
With Assistance from
Brian

A defining characteristic of fascism is the manner in which it singles out minority groups for deliberate persecution. Whenever fascists decide to test the water, when they want to see how much they can get away with, they invariably begin with a chosen minority or minorities, inflicting their abuse on a specific group or groups before they, the fascists, brutalize society as a whole.

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D’Oh! That Smarts! High School Kids Finds Flaws In College Textbook

“I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong,” said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School.

The most glaring thing about the book in question, “American Government”, is not the fact that topics including global warming and the separation of church and state were “skewed”. It’s not even the fact that it turns out that the kid was right about all the “errors” and what amounts to evidence of political bias, in the book (which was written by a couple of conservatives). It’s the fact that one of the book’s illustrious authors, John Dilulio, used to be the Director of Faith-based Initiatives, for the Bush administration.

Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that occasionally every once in a while rarely a conservative and even a former member of the Bush administration has come out with a book that was worth reading. But, didn’t anyone (namely a grown-up, an actual professor, even) vet this book for errors before passing it off as a book suitable for any educational purposes, much less a college education (or AP education, in this case), especially in light of the fact that Bush has shown a proclivity for cronyism and not so much shown that he honestly knows how to pick smart people to work for him (”Brownie”, anyone)?

crossposted: Hypocrisy.com

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A Secret prison inside Gitmo? You don’t say..

From The Guardian by way of TruthOut we get this gem:

AP Confirms Secret Camp Inside Guantanamo
By Andrew O. Selsky
The Associated Press

Wednesday 06 February 2008

Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba - Somewhere amid the cactus-studded hills on this sprawling Navy base, separate from the cells where hundreds of men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban have been locked up for years, is a place even more closely guarded - a jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.

For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided a few details about the maximum-security lockup.

Guantanamo commanders said Camp 7 is for key alleged al-Qaida members, who must be kept apart from other prisoners to prevent them from retaliating against long-term detainees who have talked to interrogators. They also want the location kept secret for fear of terrorist attack.

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Californias Feinstein still on the fence about Telco immunity? Help push her off!

Watch this short commercial by Brad Whitford about the two bills that greatly differ with regards to the retroactive telecom immunity that BushCo is trying to shove down our throat. Chris Dodd, bless his heart, has promised to filibuster the craptastic one. DiFi hasn’t said how she feels about the bill.

 

 

Call DiFi and tell that slut to make up her little mind and support NO amnesty for the Telco’s.
Her phone numbers:

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The 14 Characteristics of Fascism continued..

PART VI: CONTROLLED MASS MEDIA

“Our Wonderful Corporate Media.”
By PraeterOne and BibleBelted

Warner Brothers Pictures, Morgan Creek, New Regency, Warner Brothers Animation, a partial stake in Savoy Pictures, Little Brown & Co., Bullfinch, Back Bay, Time-Life Books, Oxmoor House, Sunset Books, Warner Books, the Book of the Month Club, Warner/Chappell Music, Atlantic Records, Warner Audio Books, Electra, Warner Brothers Records, Time-Life Music, Columbia House, a 40 percent stake in Seattle’s Sub-Pop Records, Time Magazine, In Style, Martha Stewart Living, Sunset, Asia Week, Parenting, Weight Watchers, Cooking Light, DC Comics, 49 percent of Six Flags Theme Parks, Movie World and Warner Brothers parks, HBO, Cinemax, Warner Brothers Television, partial ownership of Comedy Central, E!, Black Entertainment Television, Court TV, the Sega Channel, the Home Shopping Network, Turner Broadcasting, the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks, World Championship Wrestling, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, New Line Cinema, Fine Line Cinema, Turner Classic Movies, Turner Pictures, Castle Rock Productions, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNN/SI, CNN Airport Network, CNNfi, CNN radio, TNT, WTBS, and the Cartoon Network:

Those, according to Eric Alterman, in his 2003 book, What Liberal Media, are companies that were acquired by AOL when it acquired Time Warner.

Between AOL-Time Warner and the likes of Disney, Bertelsmann, the News Corporation, General Electric, Viacom, and Disney, the vast majority of everything we see and hear n the supposedly “liberal” mass media comes from only six–that’s right, six–mega media corporations. As I have suggested in previous posts and comments, this is why the media should be independently owned. All too often liberals believe that conservative media owners directly order journalists to cover or not to cover certain stories, when, in fact, the truth is a little more complicated than all that.

In the first place we need to understand that journalists have very little in common with your typical welfare recipient or elderly person who may need energy assistance to survive a northern state winter. According to sociologist David Croteau, “95 percent of elite journalists earned more than $50,000 a year, and 31 percent earned more than $150,000.” On other words, this often puts journalists in the same economic class as the right wing free market politicians who they are supposed to be covering.

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