Projected Iraq oil costs up sharply

Well thank god Halliburton is there to take on the extra work.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has doubled the value of a contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry, to $2 billion, sharply driving up the projected cost of restoring the country's prewar capacity.

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Facing the Truth of Sept. 11

How can an unstinting investigation of the truth of Sept. 11 not be of paramount concern to any official sworn to protect the public? The approaching presidential election makes the administration's evasions even more suspect. Failure to document and face the truth will only feed conspiracy theories and undermine the nation's chances of weathering future threats.

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And yet, I just was told on cable news that the fires were Clinton's fault because he and all Democrats were such environmental wackos they wouldn't allow any clearing to happen anywhere. I actually did.

U.S. Rejected Davis on Aid to Clear Trees

FEMA spent six months studying the governor's request, then turned it down hours before fires began, saying state was already getting funds.

SACRAMENTO — The Bush administration took six months to evaluate Gov. Gray Davis' emergency request last spring for $430 million to clear dead trees from fire-prone areas of Southern California.

The request was finally denied Oct. 24, only hours before wildfires roared out of control in what has become the largest fire disaster in California history.

Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs), a leader in the effort to get federal assistance for fire prevention, questioned Thursday why the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not rule sooner.

"FEMA's decision was wrong," Bono said. "The timing couldn't have been worse.... We knew this disaster was going to happen with certainty. It was only a matter of when, and we were trying to beat the clock with removing the dead trees."

If Davis had received the denial earlier, Bono said, he would have had time to wage an appeal.

FEMA spokesman Chad Kolton said the agency denied Davis' request for an emergency declaration because California was already receiving more than $40 million from the departments of Agriculture and Interior to deal with a bark beetle infestation that has damaged thousands of acres of forest in the San Bernardino Mountains.

$430 million to clear dead trees was rejected because $40 million was already being provided for bark beetle infestation? And what is the impact on the economy of these fires? What is the true horrible price of these people who's homes and communities no longer exist. What do you say to those who are dead? Sorry, you see, Halliburton really needed the money more.

"Federal agencies were already engaged in a very substantive way," Kolton said. "Federal assistance was already being provided."

For beetle infestation.

Davis' request, made in a letter to President Bush dated April 16, took months to process, Kolton said, because "we obviously wanted to consider this issue very carefully."

And the obviously did a bad job.

Here is the sad truth. If Arnold wrote that letter California would have got the funds, quick, simple, end of story. Bush's petty politics has killed people, not only in Iraq, but in California.

- rob 3:22 PM - [PermaLink] -

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The Memory Hole > The Justice Dept's Attorney Workforce Diversity Study--Uncensored

Many things to trouble you here:
1. The Justice Department thinks Americans do not have the right to know that the DOJ feels that the DOJ needs to improve diversity within the DOJ.
2. The Justice Department goes so far as redacting much of the document. Are diversity issues considered national security?
3. The Justice Department in charge of such important things as our domestic security and finding out who in the White House outed a CIA agent can't even black out a page correctly. And you wonder why they haven't found the Anthrax Guy yet.

But troubling issues aside. This is funny:

With no notice, the Justice Department recently posted to its Website a long-awaited report. Justice spent $2 million for a study on the racial and gender diversity of its attorney workforce. The report has been complete for almost two years, but the Department stalled its release, despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests.

The report appeared on one of the FOIA sections of the Department's Website sometime in October. It's one of the most heavily-redacted government documents in recent memory. Even Congress' report on 9/11 had a smaller percentage of its contents blacked out. The Memory Hole has posted a version with no redactions; instead, those sections are highlighted in yellow, so you can easily zoom in on the parts originally deemed too embarassing for us to see.

- rob 12:46 PM - [PermaLink] -

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MediaWhoresOnline puts up a banner... but it wasn't their idea:



Army Times: Whose banner is it, anyway?

The president sought to distance himself from the upbeat message in the banner, explaining at Tuesday’s press conference that the idea for the sign came from the ship’s crew.

“I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way,” he said.

Turns out they may have been that ingenious
...

The White House communications office, well known for the care it takes with the backdrops at Bush speeches, created the “Mission Accomplished” banner in the same style as banners the president uses in other appearances, including one just a week before the carrier appearance in Canton, Ohio. That banner, with the same soft, brush-stroked American flag in the background and the identical typeface, read: “Jobs and Growth.”

- rob 12:40 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Another story from the I'm shocked and surprised department:

Report Says Iraq Contracts Reek of Cronyism

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many of the U.S. firms doing billions of dollars of work in Iraq and Afghanistan have been big donors to President Bush and his Republican Party and fill their boards with political and military heavyweights, a report on Thursday said.

The report by the watchdog group, the Center for Public Integrity, said most of the 70 firms and individuals getting up to $8 billion in contracts for post-war Iraq and Afghanistan donated more to Bush's presidential campaign -- a little over $500,000 -- than any other candidate in the past decade.

- rob 3:08 PM - [PermaLink] -

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From the "Gad Damn it people you are talking about voting here, the cornerstone of democracy and yet your basing your voting machines on Microsoft 'security is definitely on the radar for the future' code?" department. And also from "how can we have any feeling of security about any election result if the source code for the voting machine is available on Anonymous (no password required) FTP sites" department. And also from the "Again with the anonymous FTP sites, is it a requirement to have no idea of what security is to be involved in electronic voting, it was bad enough with Diebold but now it seems to be a god damn required for you guys (or at least your vendors)" department:

E-Vote Software Leaked Online

Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

The software, made available at ftp.jaguar.net, is stored on an FTP server owned by Jaguar Computer Systems, a firm that provides election support to a California county. The software is used for placing ballots on voting kiosks and for storing and tabulating results for the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen system.

The security breach means that anyone with a minimal amount of technical knowledge could see how the code works and potentially exploit it. According to a computer programmer who discovered the unprotected server, the files also contain Visual Basic script and code for voting system databases that could allow someone to learn how to rig voting results. The programmer spoke on condition of anonymity.
...

The files on the server also revealed that the Sequoia system relies heavily on Microsoft software components, a fact the company often has been coy about discussing since Microsoft software is a frequent target of hackers.

Jaguar, based in Riverside, California, left the data unencrypted and unprotected. The FTP server allowed anyone to access it anonymously.

Once a visitor gained access to the server, a small note stated that the server was meant for employees and clients of Jaguar. However, the company's own website directed visitors to the FTP server and noted that "our '/PUB' directory is stuffed with many of the files that we use." The website has since been changed by Jaguar.

Sequoia's AVC Edge voting machines were used in California's Riverside County for the 2000 presidential election and for last month's California gubernatorial recall election. The system also has been used in counties in Florida and Washington state.

It's the second time this year that voting machine code has been leaked on the Internet.

In January, source code for the AccuVote-TS system made by Diebold Election Systems was found on an unprotected FTP server belonging to the company.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities who read the Diebold code found numerous security flaws in the system and published a report (PDF) that prompted the state of Maryland to conduct its own audit of the software.
...

On its website, Sequoia makes a point of stating that its system is much more secure than the Diebold system, since it doesn't rely on Microsoft software. The website reads: "While Diebold relies on a Microsoft operating system that is well known and understood by computer hackers, Sequoia's AVC Edge runs on a proprietary operating system that is designed solely for the conduct of elections."

In fact, the system uses WinEDS, or Election Database System for Windows. WinEDS runs on top of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
...

The companies making electronic voting systems long have said that their systems are proprietary and their code needs to remain secret in order for the systems to be secure.

Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said information gained from the discovery of the Diebold and Sequoia codes indicates the exact opposite.
...

"This argument that everything needs to be kept secret is not viable because the stuff does get out whether companies intend it or not," he said. "Now two out of the three top companies have leaked their system.

"Scientists are being made to feel afraid to look at these things which in the end will be bad for our society. Why shouldn't everyone want scientists to look? If there's any feeling that there may actually be danger to our elections, how can we not be encouraging researchers to look at our systems?" Rubin said.

- rob 2:58 PM - [PermaLink] -

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From the "where the hell is America's Media?" department:

Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy'

Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith.

She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board".

Ms Kwiatkowski said the pursuit of national security decisions often bypassed "civil service and active-duty military professionals", and was handled instead by political appointees who shared common ideological ties.
...

In a separate interview, Chalmers Johnson, an authority on US policy, said that the Administration's neo-conservatives had in effect seized power from Mr Bush.

Dr Johnson said the neo-conservatives had pursued an agenda outlined in the controversial 1992 Defence Planning Guidance. That document, drawn up at the direction of Mr Cheney when he was defence secretary, said the world's only superpower should not be cautious about asserting its power.

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From the "everything is not roses President Whistle Ass" department:

The World’s Most Dangerous Place

WHERE TO STAY

Once in Baghdad you have to decide where to live. Baghdad now is essentially divided into two broad zones: the Green Zone and everything else. It’s not clear when everyone started calling the Green Zone that, anymore than it’s clear when everyone started calling Iraq Rummy World, though it predated Doonesbury. The Green Zone is also widely called The Bubble, but that’s considered derogatory. Perhaps it got that name because the zone does include some of the only green space in Baghdad, including most of the Zawra Park and Zoo, the Festival and Parade Ground, the vast grounds of the New Unknown Soldier monument, the Convention Center, the al Rashid hotel, the Republican Guard presidential palace, the National Assembly complex, the Hands of Victory monument, the 14th of July Monument and all or parts of five city neighborhoods.

Around the four-mile square Green Zone, a triple perimeter has been erected, consisting of an outer blast wall of concrete barriers 15-feet high, inside of which are coils of barbed wire, a space, and another row of barriers and concertina wire. The eastern side also fronts the Tigris River. The entire area now has one main entry point, next to the al Jumhariya Bridge, where 1st Armored Division soldiers, backed up by British rapid reaction commando teams, are on duty. Tanks are located at key points, with machine gun nests on buildings and teams of snipers on rooftops.

- rob 2:39 PM - [PermaLink] -

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From the Not Again department:

Sick soldiers wait for treatment

FORT KNOX, Ky., Oct. 29 (UPI) -- More than 400 sick and injured soldiers, including some who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, are stuck at Fort Knox, waiting weeks and sometimes months for medical treatment, a score of soldiers said in interviews.

The delays appear to have demolished morale -- many said they had lost faith in the Army and would not serve again -- and could jeopardize some soldiers' health, the soldiers said.

The Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers are in what the Army calls "medical hold," like roughly 600 soldiers under similar circumstances waiting for doctors at Fort Stewart, Ga.

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From the shock and suprise department:

Halliburton says KBR unit revenue profit, sales soar

HOUSTON, United States (AFP) - US oil industry services giant Halliburton said Thursday its Kellogg Brown and Root unit's profits rose four-fold and sales leapt 80 percent, boosted by work in Iraq.

Profits from the unit's operations soared to 49 million dollars in the three months to September from 12 million dollars a year earlier, helped by "government services activity in the Middle East," Halliburton said.

KBR, the engineering and construction division that netted a no-bid government contract to help rebuild Iraq's shattered oil industry, also posted an 80-percent jump in sales to 2.3 billion dollars.

Bush is rebuilding the economy - one crony at a time. You know war profiteering used to be something the government discouraged. Not any more.

- rob 2:10 PM - [PermaLink] -

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The Top Ten Conservative Idiots

5. Arnold Schwarzenegger
So the heady days of California's bizarre recall election are over, and now it's time to get down to business. Unfortunately it looks like Governor Groping Austrian Beefcake is about to take a shot in the gut from the phased plasma rifle of reality. According to the L.A. Times, Schwarzenegger got "a grim briefing on California's budget Thursday, and emerged appearing sobered." That's right - suddenly Arnold has realized that now he's the governor, he actually has to run the state. Bummer. "The problem was created over the last five years," said Arnie, "and so you can't expect that - even though I've played very, very heroic characters in the movies, but you can't expect me to walk into his office and all of a sudden come out with the answers." What? But surely during the campaign, Arnold kept going on and on about how he was going to swoop in and fix California's problems in the blink of an eye. I mean, I know he didn't explain how he was going to do it, but I got the impression that the fact he played "very, very heroic characters in the movies" was going to be an integral part of his governing technique. Does this mean that we can no longer expect him to pump up Sacramento? What a letdown. I was looking forward to that.
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9. Eric Cantor
Of all the conservatives who've gotten their panties in a bunch over CBS's forthcoming Ronald Reagan movie, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is surely sitting the most uncomfortably. During an appearance on Buchanan & Press last week, Cantor made not-so-veiled suggestions that CBS should have its license revoked if it went ahead with the movie. "I'm just saying I think as a representative of the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia and as a member of Congress we have a duty to make sure that licenses at the federal level are not abused...and abuse means using those licenses to advance a political agenda." said Cantor. Riiiiight. So CBS should have their license revoked for airing one movie, but "Fair and Balanced" Fox News should, don't tell me, be applauded for their evenhanded and unbiased approach to news reporting. Interesting that Saint Ronnie of Reagan is considered so untouchable that members of Congress will threaten to shut down TV stations for besmirching him. In fact, why not just go the whole hog? Perhaps Eric Cantor could simply a introduce a Constitutional amendment which says that any station caught broadcasting material unfavorable to the GOP will have their licenses revoked, their offices burned down, and their CEO's hung in the public square. That should put a stop to the evil liberal media once and for all.

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White House Admits 'Mission Accomplished' Banner

WASHINGTON -- Six months after he spoke on an aircraft carrier deck under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President George. Bush disavowed any connection with the war message.

Later, the White House changed its story and said there was a link.

Yes this is stupid and petty, especially compared with the fact that the entire war was sold on lies, but it is such a simple obvious lie. It is going to have impact. Of course the whole carrier landing was based on a lie anyway.

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GOP unity is strained by attacks

“Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,” Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”

Senator Lott making us proud. Not much more I can say about that, except that he actually is a powerful man in our government.

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Good Christian Phelps comes back the the New York area

Hate from the heartland



The picketers - eight family members from a church in Topeka, Kan., gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Bellmore school at 7 a.m. waving anti-gay signs, including one that read "God Hates Fags."

"When you teach children that it's okay to indulge in any kind of sex act that they like ... that it's okay to be gay, it is inevitable that they will end up being violent and doing things that they shouldn't," said Margie Phelps, who protested with a handful of relatives.

There seems to be a confusion between sex and violence in the right wing these days. Perhaps you can write off Mrs. Phelps connecting barbaric meat head football hazing practices to homosexuality as just her own brand of religious intolerence; but when combined with the right wing's defending Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual assults with Clinton's stupid immature but consenual sex you see a troubling pattern. Yes there is a some connection between sex and violence. Historically it has been proven that if you surpress sexual expression, if you shame it, some individuals will respond by expressing their sexaulity violently, by they Jack the Ripper or Ed Gein.

You want sexual violence you support Rev. Phelps. It really as simple as that.

Oh, and Rev. Phelps, God did not blow up the world trade center - religious nuts did, you know, like you.

Debbie Saladino, 37, shook her head in disbelief as she surveyed the family of protesters in front of her daughter's school.

"How they can turn hazing into homosexuality is beyond me," she said. Then she spotted a sign held by one of the Phelps sisters reading, "Thank God for Sept. 11th."

"That's a travesty. They have the audacity to come to New York and insult 9/11. A lot of people lost family members," Saladino said.

- rob 5:17 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Watch an ad to read the entire article

Why aren't Republicans more disturbed by the threat of computer cheating?

And although Levy refers to "conspiracy theories" buzzing around the Internet, he lends some credence to suspicions focused on the Diebold company, whose CEO Walden O'Dell is a partisan Republican and Bush fundraiser who says he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year."

Bolstering such concerns are the findings of top computer-security experts such as Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and David Dill of Stanford. Rubin, who was given a copy of the Diebold voting computers' source code several months ago, has declared its protections against fraud to be worthless. Dill told Newsweek that the risk of a stolen election is "extremely high."

The sickening irony of this situation is that it developed from congressional efforts to preclude another fiasco like Florida 2000. Now Rep. Rush Holt, D.-N.J., has proposed legislation that would require a separate printed record of every computerized vote so that recounts can be audited with a paper trail. But Rep. Bob Ney, the committee chairman, opposes Holt's Voter Confidence Act. Ney happens to be a Republican from Ohio. But why aren't Republicans -- many of whom fret incessantly about "ballot security" in black and Latino neighborhoods -- more disturbed by the threat of computer cheating?

- rob 5:11 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Bush Lies about even the small things

President Holds Press Conference

Bush: "The 'Mission Accomplished' sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way. "

So the staff put that up without any participation or cooperation of the White House, and for some reason it just perfectly lined up with him in the headshot of him giving his speech. I'm sorry silly bear, I don't think so, and why should you even lie or comment about it. You've already changed you website from "Combat Over" to "Major Combat Over" no your saying the sign wasn't your people's idea. Next thing we'll hear you wanted to give a much more somber speech on land, but the soldiers really wanted to be forced to stay out a sea an additional day so you could fly in and your crotch could be highlighted.

Here's more about how much attention Bush's advance man puts into his "shows": Keepers of Bush image lift stagecraft to new heights

The most elaborate — and criticized — White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Mr. Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech.

Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.

"If you looked at the TV picture, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and slight shadowing on his right," Mr. King said. "It looked great."

More from the press conference:

Q Mr. President, thank you. As you know, the Chairman of the commission investigating the September 11th attacks wants documents from the White House, and said this week that he might have to use subpoena power. You have said there's some national security concerns about turning over some of those documents to people outside of the Executive Branch. Will you turn them over, or can you at least outline for the American people what you think is a reasonable compromise so that the commission learns what it needs to know, and you protect national security, if you think it's that important?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. It is important for me to protect national security. You're talking about the presidential daily brief. It's important for the writers of the presidential daily brief to feel comfortable that the documents will never be politicized and/or unnecessarily exposed for public purview. I -- and so, therefore, the kind of the first statements out of this administration were very protective of the presidential prerogatives of the past and to protect the right for other presidents, future presidents, to have a good presidential daily brief.

Bush admits that the requested document that is causing difficulties is the daily brief, but that the independent bi-partison commision might politicize the document. If it ways what a lot of people think it says, he's right. It will be politicized (i.e. he was warned pretty specificly about high-jacking planes).

Q Thank you, Mr. President. You have said that you are eager to find out whether somebody in the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Many experts in such investigations say you can find if there was a leaker in the White House within hours if you asked all staff members to sign affidavits denying involvement. Why not take that step?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the best person to that, Dana, so that the -- or the best group of people to do that so that you believe the answer is the professionals at the Justice Department. And they're moving forward with the investigation. It's a criminal investigation. It is an important investigation. I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information. As you know, I've been outspoken on leaks. And whether they happened in the White House, or happened in the administration, or happened on Capitol Hill, it is a -- they can be very damaging.

And so this investigation is ongoing and -- by professionals who do this for a living, and I hope they -- I'd like to know.

"I'd like to know" but not enough to ask. Move on please.

- rob 2:54 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Miserable Failure

A fun idea from Old Fashioned Patriot.

A nice update to this fun one from 2000: Google Link Is Bush League
There's an old schoolyard taunt that goes, "When you look up 'stupid' in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of George."

Well, here's a tech spin on that insult, only this one is not for kids.

When you type "dumb motherfucker" into Google, the search engine's top result is a site about President Bush.

It doesn't work anymore of course, if you do that search now, the first thing that appears is the above article.

But if you have a website, please do place "miserable failure" with a link to dubya's bio some where on it. Hey, dissent need not always be mature.

- rob 12:47 PM - [PermaLink] -

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U.S. Progress Spurring Iraq Attacks

The quadruple attacks in Baghdad on Monday, killing nearly 40 people and injuring more than 200, complicated the White House effort to paint Iraq as a country where life is returning to normal. The bombings plunged parts of the capital into chaos, leaving scenes of broken, bloody bodies and twisted, burning automobiles.
...

The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become," Bush said.

"They can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos," Bush said.

Bremer added that "a lot of wonderful things have happened" in Iraq: The country has a functioning Cabinet, all schools and hospitals are open and electricity has returned to prewar levels.

(if you were wondering what the music in the background was, it was Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy)

Dean didn't receive his Soma this morning though, and says: "I just don't understand the president's logic — that because there is more violence and more deaths, things are going well. In my book, that means things are worse," said Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean.

But if Bush does think everything is fine, is it a lie?

According to The New York Times, President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions. The report on the "perception gap" suggests that the leader of the war on terror has no idea how badly that war — which must, ultimately, be a war for hearts and minds — is going.

Mr. Bush's ignorance may reflect his lack of curiosity: "The best way to get the news," he says, "is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff." Two words: emperor, clothes. Emphasis mine.

Read more of Krugman's excellent piece: A Willful Ignorance

Highly recommended.

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New Push for Corporate Tax Cuts Gives Special Treatment to Multinationals

One issue involves whether the proposed changes will actually serve the purpose of saving the U.S. manufacturing sector and encouraging corporate investment in the United States. This is because corporate taxes are at their lowest level since the 1930s, except for one year during Ronald Reagan's first term.3

The second issue involves fairness to U.S.-based companies. One bill offered by Ways and Means committee chairman Bill Thomas, focuses on relief for multinational firms, including expansion of tax shelters at a value of almost $80 billion.

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Thanks to Atrios for pointing out this excellent Toles cartoon, and for the Riverbend bit posted below.

- rob 11:30 AM - [PermaLink] -

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Neo-Cons continue to update 1984 for the new century.

Baghdad Burning

Is an internationally renowned blog by a woman living in Baghadad. It tells of troubles, delimmas, and possible solutions about everyday life in Baghdad. The url is Riverbendblog.blogspot.com.


Baghdad Burning

Is a website by a GOP "team leader." It is very excited about the new schools being build. It pretends to be the exact same person as the above blog, but now the person realizes all the wonderful and good things the US is doing. The url is Riversbendblog.blogspot.com.

If your ideas are better then have an open airing of your ideas. If you have to lie, cheat, imply, exaggerated than perhaps your ideas are not better.

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9/11 Commission Could Subpoena Oval Office Files

I'm not saying the Bush administration did anything wrong before 9/11, just like it acts like it did. What do they have to hide?

MADISON, N.J., Oct. 25 — The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks says that the White House is continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are not turned over within weeks.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Where's Madison, NJ? (wait... I know)

- rob 5:47 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Bush not satisfied with Patiot Act - Wants to do away with courts
(okay that's not the actual story title)

Bush wants three additional powers from Congress.

First, he wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without review by a court or grand jury.
...

Second, Bush wants to chip away at the right to bail. Current law allows a judge to deny bond for anyone shown to be dangerous or a flight risk. And, for anyone accused of international terrorism, there is a presumption against granting bond.

Not good enough, according to the president. He wants passage of the "Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003," a bill that would keep people accused of a whole range of new crimes behind bars pending trial by making those crimes presumptively "no bond" offenses.

This is an attempt to lock people up first and investigate later. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, more than 750 immigrants were jailed for months while the Justice Department looked into potential ties to terrorism. In the end not, one was charged. Now Bush wants the power to do the same thing to Americans and immigrants here legally.

And third, Bush wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to "domestic terrorism."

Under the Patriot Act, the crime of "domestic terrorism" couldn't be more broadly written. Any criminal act intended to influence the government through "intimidation or coercion" involving "dangerous acts" qualifies. Aggressive protesters of all stripes from Greenpeace activists to abortion foes could easily fall within this definition, opening the door for politically motivated executions.

Bush also wants the death penalty for those convicted of providing "material support for terrorism," a law that can be violated even when people think they are giving money to a charity and don't know the group is a designated terrorist organization.

So if you are a rapid supporter of George Bush: If you still believe we are a democratic society, you must understand that someday these laws, if passed, will be available to a President you don't like... say President Hillary Clinton or something.

If you still support these actions by Bush you:
1) Don't believe we are in a democratic society and that with these laws only people with the "correct views" will be elected President.
2) Don't like Freedom.

Those are the choices. If you don't like either one or two then you have no choice but to support anyone but Bush in 2004. Democracy is at stake.

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Dirs excluded by whitehouse.gov robots.txt

Okay this is a little odd, and I have no idea about why, but the WhiteHouse.gov site is purposefully making it so external search engines can't find pages about Iraq on the WhiteHouse.gov website. What did Bush say about Iraq? Well the White House site doesn't want you to know.

This is sneaky. People would complain if the White House started taking stuff down off their site, so they aren't, they are just making it so you can't find the pages.

For those of you who are confused be this: Search engines, like Google or Alta Vista routinely scour many websites and index them so they can do fast searches and have those pages come up in the results. They even scour and index little itty bitty sites like this one (most of my traffic is from search engines). Well every site can, if it wants, include a file called robots.txt (click here for the actual robots.txt file of White House.gov). The file is useful because it tells the search engines what pages you do not want indexed. This is important because you may have pages you just don't really need to have indexed like a site map, or your privacy rules, or some directory this is only there for the programming of the site and is not to be seen.

But look at this page. Bush has problems with the truth and history, but this is just odd. It as if the White House is waiting for someone to say, "but you said Iraq was about WMDs" so they can answer, "oh yeah well Google WhiteHouse.gov and find where we said that." And then they rub their hands together and giggle insanely. I really don't get this.

Thanks to, Atrios, I think, for this link.

UPDATE: Kicking Ass has a good theory

Why would the White House do this? Those pages are still public, and the White House search engine itself does index those pages, so users can still get to them.

It's easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that "combat" was over in Iraq, changing them to say "major combat."

One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change — and were able to prove it — was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.

Still Orwell has been updated for the post-1984 technological advances.

- rob 12:51 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Road to ruin

If it doesn't look like we're doing so well with the war in Iraq these days, well you can always think of a more important war, the war against self-destruction. That isn't going well either.

While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been telling its scientific advisers to do more research before it can consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists reported back that they had done all the research. The attitude of the White House to global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle.

In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming initiatives". Wow!
...

Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid. They built dams - about 250,000 of them. They built great cities, with skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared barely habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow. "It's the American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance anything - be it a force of nature, a country or a disease - can be vanquished," says Clapp. "It's a country founded on the idea of no limits. The essence of environmentalism is that there are indeed limits. It's one of the reasons environmentalism is a stronger ethic in Europe than in the US."
...

This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration, the first government in modern history which has systematically disavowed the systems of checks and controls that have governed environmental policy since it burst into western political consciousness a generation ago. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Bush is responsible for what is happening to the American environment. The crisis is far more deep-seated than that, and the federal government is too far removed from the minutiae of daily life.

But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader, Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip round town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation at the hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great hopes for her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt.

What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific eco-orthodoxy almost every week. Early in the year, there was much favourable publicity for a new work Global Warming and Other Eco-myths, produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organisation reputedly funded by multinational corporations. Outside Washington, it can be far nastier. "I've never threatened anyone in my life," a conservation activist in Montana complained to the Guardian. "I do know, though, that I have gotten very ugly threats left on my telephone answering machine over the past year, and twice had to scour my sidewalk in front of the building to erase the dead body chalk outlines."

Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularised by rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator Gordon Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the message that global warming is a lie. "I commute in a three-quarter-tonne capacity Chevrolet Silverado HD," he swanked in his latest book. "Four-wheel drive, off-road equipped, extended curb pickup truck, powered by a 300hp, overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine with 520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so everyone can see me coming and get out of the way. If someone in a little government-mandated car hits me, it is all over - for him." Fuel economy in American vehicles hit a 22-year low in 2002.

- rob 12:27 PM - [PermaLink] -

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If anyone remembers debates, election 2000, when asked about marines in Lebanon in 1983, Bush endorsed cutting and running 100 percent. For anyone who doesn't remember, we had a base that was a sitting duck for Syrians, who exploded a bomb that killed more than 240 marines in one blast. After that, we hightailed it; the United States turned and ran. Ever since, the area has been a hotbed for Hezbollah and myriad other terrorist orgs., proliferating scores of enemies. We ran like rabbits, and when pressed, George W. was all for abandoning the Alamo. This is public record.

Here we are now, sitting ducks in Iraq. The Vietnam analogy is irresistable, but think: on one hand, a cold war mind set got us entrenched in a Southeast Asian ground war that nobody in the Pentagon considered winnable at the time but that was prosecuted anyway; on the other, a post-cold war mind set has us entrenched in a Middle East war that nobody -- anywhere on the planet -- considers winnable but is prosecuted anyway. Bush's MO is that he tall talks and strongarms everyone when he has them over a barrel, but when his back's against the wall, he folds like a cheap suit. He hasn't got any moxie. That's what we have to worry about. Bush is a caver. He gives up. What is he going to do when the outcome isn't a guaranteed win-win -- like looking down 5000 years of blow us up, no matter what?

- Michael 1:04 AM - [PermaLink] -

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