Aerobic Reading: More Shame for the Bush-Reich

I've bounced off several recent headlines that attempted to drag me back into the sorry subject of contracting corruption in Iraq. Each time my head, while acknowledging there is likely an absolutely scandalous story there, has insisted that Alito and the bribery/influence-peddling republican party corruption-fest are far more urgent.

But thanks to the brief synopsis below, my perspective is a little different, partly as it resonates with the book I am wrestling my way through. While recommended in terms of content, "Prelude to Terror - the Rogue CIA and the Legend of America's Private Intelligence Network" (J. Trento) is at least as full of discouraging news about our intelligence community and its long history of off-the-record illegal actions and sleazy corruption as the title suggests. A bit more on the book below. But here's the more-digestible web-morsel on the recent IG Audit on Iraq reconstruction:

The New York Times has printed a good, if woefully incomplete, story on the massive, death-dealing corruption of Bush's crony conquistadors in Iraq (Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects). One of the anecdotes of avarice related in the just-released audit of the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction could well stand as an emblem of the entire murderous, misbegotten enterprise: it's grubby, it's petty, it's driven by raw, bestial greed, and it resulted in the cruel, unnecessary death of innocent people.

Although the episode is mentioned in the lead - and full marks to reporter James Glanz for this radical departure from standard Big Media practice - you had to wade through the entire story until you came upon the details, buried full fathom five in the last two paragraphs of the story. But here it is, the very form and pressure of the Bushist age:

Excerpt: Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.

The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general's agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: "The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people."

For some of us it is absolutely breathtaking to think of profiteering in the face of crisis, horror, and war. OK, yes, there is that delightful sub-human pool of munitions traders eager to profit off killing machinery (GHWB family royally prominent here of course). It certainly goes a long way to explain the motivation for terrorism directed at any country that would be complicit in (or in this case responsible for) such obvious violations of basic human rights.

I recommend "Prelude to Terror" to anyone who has not paid proper attention to the machinations and corruption that could seem to be aberrations in the workings of the federal government. If you are anywhere near as innocent as me, a read of this book should take care of that particular cherry.

Probably there are other ways I could have learned of Bush 1's mistress, or the full-fledged bi-polar dedication to making a profit if we could disguise it as fighting communism during the Reagan regime. The CIA is the focus of this book, namely the overt and covert bivalence reaching all the way back to the early '50's, and how the latter was at times farmed out and at times both were conducted in the same house of horrors. Most conspiculously in Prelude, that horror was the Reagan/Bush regime, when the shoddy costume-figure so many hard-core conservatives want to venerate as the best prez ever paired (badly) with the former CIA director who "controlled" information so well that many have remarked how much we preferred him to his son. The scary part is that if son is truly competing with dad, based on the truly awful legacy detailed in this book, junior may still not feel he has won the ghastly contest. In terms of war profiteering and general corruption, from what I can tell GHWB has not gotten nearly enough "credit."

It's still unclear whether Prelude or I will be the victor when I have finished reading. Frankly, this book deserved better editing. Some parts are a struggle to process, due partly to too many names flung around and not nearly enough attention paid to a narrative line. Other parts are far better. It's unfortunate that it is not a "couldn't put it down" sort of a book, because the revelations, personalities, and connections documented here are of vital interest to anyone wanting to better understand the background to the Iraq debacle.

Another Connection

Connections, I just can't make no . . .

Oops, let me turn down the Stones. But I've always found making connections to be very rewarding and satisfying. There's some almost endorphin trigger for me in synapsing a couple people, two like concepts, a person and a book I know they'd bond with, and so forth.

This post is about someone else making a connection. I'd not but should have thought of this. Duhh.

Caution: do not read further those of you so deaf, dumb, and blinded or emotionally frail that you cannot tolerate any further discussion of vote fraud in the 2004 election. Vote fraud happened. Enough to change the outcome? Can't say, but it's a strong possibility. The majority of the post-election analysis for 2000 strongly suggests that Gore would have won if the votes had been counted fairly in Florida, instead of having the US Supreme Court step in and usurp the state's rights. With that precedent and all of the republican lying and mis- and malfeasance that followed, it seems extremely likely that the Abramoff-Bush-DeLay-Rove-Norquist-Cheney-Rumsfeld machine would have found a little 2004 election cheating like stealing penny candy after robbing Fort Knox. It's bad enough that we allowed the original thievery to go unchallenged. 2004 was the year when the old saying came home to roost:

Shame on us.

Bob Fitrakis connects the dots:

What do we make of the President boldly proclaiming that he has “spy powers?” Does he have X-ray vision too?

When he and his cronies crawl up into Cheney’s bunker with the sign on the door “He-man Woman-haters Club. No Girls Allowed (except Condi),” do they synchronize their spy decoder rings and decide what new absurd folly to unleash on the world?

Illegal invasion of Iraq, suspending writs of habeus corpus, secret CIA torture dungeons, or election rigging? Most people outgrow such childish games and fantasies by the time they’re ten years old. And by age twelve, most understand that the President is not a king. Or a dictator. That U.S. citizens have inalienable rights.

That there are such things as search warrants. If the executive branch of government is going to conduct surveillance on the American people, they have to get a warrant from the judicial branch specifying what they’re looking for and the reasons for the search.

The Bush administration’s utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the specific information we now know about its use of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance network should further call into question Bush’ 2004 presidential “election.” In a recent revelation, we have learned that the NSA shared the fruits of its illegal spying on behalf of Bush with other government agencies.

What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. The Franklin County Board of Elections, for example, tells us that it was a “transmission error” in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes and Bush, the Wonder Boy, received 4258 votes. It’s not magic, nor is it an accident or an act of God. If the vote total wasn’t so hugely illogical, no one would have caught it.

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This is precisely the type of game George W. and his He-man authoritarian boy’s club would engage in. Recently, Professor Steve Freeman of Penn spoke at a New York election reform forum and told the audience that a third of the Kerry voters who showed up in exit polls in rural Republican-dominated areas simply don’t show up in the actual vote tally. Not just in Ohio, but throughout the nation.

Would a president who believes he has spy powers, the right to torture, the ability to wage illegal wars based on bogus, manufactured intelligence reports, simply refuse to spy on Kerry and rig an election electronically? In Ohio, two burglaries occurred against the Democratic Party in Lucas County and Franklin County just prior to 2004 election involving computer theft.

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America Needs More Dissent - NOW

Obviously one of the primary reasons Mr. Alito is a truly awful choice for Supreme Court Justice is that he supports an even more outrageously powerful White House than we are already suffering under. There is plenty of speculation that his hard-core right-wing opinions (clumsily covered up by temporary amnesia during the non-hearings) are just frosting to the cowboy from New England. The real prize should he be confirmed is that he seems to be perfectly content with a change from president to fuhrer. That would make George's day, given how inept he is at even sharing crayons with others, never mind sitting in the room with other opinions besides his own (or Dick's, I should say). And don't you dare suggest that he get involved in trying to find common ground, negotiate, or seek consensus.

Of course he has almost all of the corporate media well-drugged by now to the point where they more or less repeat their lines unthinkingly. The Washington Post ombudswoman's recent silly parrot act was one of those rare events that actually got semi-public attention. That media behavior is not at all the exception though. The NYT editorial noted in my previous post is the exception. With few exceptions these days almost any famous corporate media figure you name engages routinely in propaganda-spreading on behalf of the party-in-power. My list of current events reading has been so long that I haven't yet gotten around to Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?," but any hardworking miner of media these days can pretty well understand where that title came from.

Take for example, just the most recent poppycock from Chris Matthews, a bag of gas trying to pass (pun intended) as a journalist if there ever was one:

The anger over Chris Matthews’ comment that Osama bin Laden in his new video sounds like Michael Moore, and the resulting campaign demanding that Matthews apologize, arises from much more than a single comment, and has little to do with Moore himself. The Matthews smear illustrates the fact that it has become routine in our national political dialogue, and among our nation's journalists, to equate opposition to George Bush with subversiveness, treason, and support for Al Qaeda.

The national media has truly adopted this dissent-quashing dichotomy created by the Bush White House: one is either a follower of George Bush who praises his war and terrorism policies, or one is an enemy of the United States who is on the side of Al Qaeda. That is not hyperbole. This is the manipulative and decidedly un-American view that is re-enforced again and again.

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This is all part of a broad, ongoing and potent campaign to equate opposition to George Bush with being pro-terrorist, and the origin of this campaign is the Administration itself. Bush himself thus uses the language of treason -- treason -- to instruct us that we are permitted to criticize his policies only on the narrowest grounds and with the utmost respect, otherwise we are guilty of aiding the enemy:

Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate -- and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas. . . . When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail. . . . So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy -- not comfort to our adversaries.

From the NSA scandal to the war in Iraq, the President and his followers repeatedly accuse those who oppose the President of aiding the terrorists and being on the side of Al Qaeda. And it is this smear – that anyone who opposes Bush is not just weak on national security but literally a supporter of the terrorists – that is the only “argument” which Bush followers have and it’s the only one they’ve needed. They have won two straight national elections wielding this McCarthyite filth and with the 2006 elections approaching, they are bidding for a trifecta:

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, gave nervous Republicans here a preview on Friday of the party's strategy to maintain its dominance in the fall elections . . . And he left little doubt that in 2006 - as in both nationwide elections since the Sept. 11 attacks - he was intent on making national security the pre-eminent issue.

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Speaking out, writing letters-to-editor, and agitating in general seem to me as important today as they have been since perhaps the time our nation was founded. We cannot let these would-be-dictators take our freedom and constitionally-based government down.

New York Times: No on Alito! Good On Ya, Gray Lady!

It's a stiff assignment these days keeping up with it all. Perhaps we should be grateful that Fitz apparently has enough of his daytime job in Chicago going that the Plame investigation is presumably just simmering nicely, to be served up somewhere down the line. The airwaves (well, okay, the Net anyway) could hardly find bandwidth were he to be making announcements right now.

I ran across advance notice of a great NY Times editorial apparently slated to come out tomorrow. It reportedly opposes the Alito nomination and explicitly calls the White House out on their attempts to manufacture a play to the effect that the nomination is a done deal. The gravy is that it calls out Chaffee, Snowe, and Collins by name as Republicans whose public postures on right-to-choose are mighty tough to reconcile with Alito's history.

On this score, I have been disappointed that neither of my senators have yet made public announcement of their opposition to the nomination. I await responses to emails I sent them yesterday with explicit instructions, for the specific purpose of counteracting this latest propaganda-injection of the rovebots.

DailyKos has the scoop:

In an editorial published in tomorrow's edition, the New York Times comes out against Alito:

If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious. Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power. He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy.

. . . It is likely that Judge Alito was chosen for his extreme views on presidential power. The Supreme Court, with Justice O'Connor's support, has played a key role in standing up to the Bush administration's radical view of its power, notably that it can hold, indefinitely and without trial, anyone the president declares an "unlawful enemy combatant."

. . . There is every reason to believe, based on his long paper trail and the evasive answers he gave at his hearings, that Judge Alito would quickly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it is hard to see how Senators Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, all Republicans, could square support for Judge Alito with their commitment to abortion rights.

. . . The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around this nomination. But there is no reason to believe that Judge Alito is any more popular than the president who nominated him. Outside a small but vocal group of hard-core conservatives, America has greeted the nomination with a shrug - and counted on its senators to make the right decision.

The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.

Indeed.