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host · 07-23-2006, 10:59 AM

The new "game" is to "blame" the Palestinians and Lebanese for "voting" Hamas and Hezbollah into political office. Are Americans ready to blame themselves for voting against their own economic and diplomatic interests ?
Afteralll....by the Nov. 2004 U.S. election, it was not difficult for an American to know whether he was voting for rigid religiously influenced extremists who advocated pre-emptive war in place of diplomacy, and secret, unaccountable government.....or not!

I was gonna start another thread, roachboy, titled, <b>"As Lebanon burns, consider that we must endure 30 more months of Bush/Cheney "leadership"...."</b>...but this is as good a place, as any, in view of the theme of your thread, to "park" yet another of bothersome "ole" host's "content rich" posts....the kind that are viewed as lower than "I know what I know" "banter" that passes for serious "discourse", all too often, on these threads:

Quote:

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0718nj1.htm
Bush Blocked Justice Department Investigation

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Updated at 8:40 a.m. Wednesday

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today that President Bush personally halted an internal Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales and other senior department officials acted within the law in approving and overseeing the administration's domestic surveillance program.....

..."The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales said in response to a question by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to know who denied the clearances to the investigators.

The statement by Gonzales stunned some senior Justice Department officials, who were led to believe that Gonzales himself had made the decision to deny the clearances after consulting with intelligence agencies whose activities would be scrutinized, a senior federal law enforcement official said in an interview.

Gonzales was questioned by Specter in light of a May 27 story in National Journal that reported that the OPR investigation was quashed because of the refusal to allow investigators security clearances. Senior Justice Department officials told National Journal then that the investigators were seeking only information and documents relating to the National Security Agency's surveillance program that were already in the Justice Department's possession.

A senior Justice official said that the refusal to grant the clearances was "unprecedented" and questioned whether the clearances were denied because investigators might find "misconduct by those who were attempting to defeat" the probe from being conducted. <h3>The official made the comments without knowing that Bush had made the decision to refuse the clearances. </h3>

H. Marshall Jarrett, OPR's lead counsel, wrote Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, on April 21, 2006, to point out that while OPR was denied security clearances to conduct its inquiry, requests from prosecutors and FBI agents tasked with investigating who first leaked details of the NSA surveillance program to the New York Times were "promptly granted."

"We note...," Jarrett wrote, "that the Criminal Division's request for the same security clearances from a large team of attorneys and FBI agents were promptly granted, and that their investigation of certain news leaks about the NSA program is moving forward."

Jarrett also noted that while he and his attorneys were denied the clearances, five "private individuals" who serve on the president's "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board have been briefed on the NSA program and have been granted authorization to receive the clearances in question." Private citizens -- especially those who serve only part-time on governmental panels -- have traditionally been considered higher security risks than full-time government employees, who can lose their jobs or even be prosecuted for leaking to the press.....

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001184.php
Ackerman: Don't Expect Phase II or Intelligence Reform from Pat Roberts
By Jeff Hughes - July 21, 2006, 2:27 PM

As long as Pat Roberts is chairman of the Senate Select Committeee on Intelligence, we may never see Phase II of the investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence.....

.....“Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sprinted off the blocks in early 2005. The very picture of an energetic committee chairman, he explained with a glimmer of excitement in his eye what his agenda for the next congressional session would be during a March 2005 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center. In the cards was vigorous committee oversight during the ongoing intelligence-community restructuring, as the CIA's role diminished and a new Director of National Intelligence arrived. Not in the cards, Roberts explained only in response to a question, was the committee's long-awaited report into the Bush administration's shaping of prewar Iraq intelligence.....

.....Not even last November's Democratic shutdown of the Senate has managed to pry the report out of Roberts, and committee insiders aren't hopeful that anything will change. A particular bone of contention is what the committee should say about Douglas Feith's famous Pentagon intelligence operation, which sought to highlight mostly-illusory links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. <h3>Frustration has grown to the point where the Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) took matters into its own hands last month, holding its own hearing with former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson and ex-CIA Mideast official Paul Pillar--</h3>much to the applause of DPC member Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the intelligence committee herself.....

.........The committee has been laughably inactive on intelligence reform, impotent in the face of mass CIA staff hemorrhages under now-ex-Director Porter Goss, and, despite Roberts's grumblings, unable to avert the flow of resources into short-term intelligence analysis, at the expense of longer-term foresight. All too predictably, Roberts has spent most of his time as chairman this year running interference for Bush on his illegal warrantless surveillance program, huffing at The New York Times for breaking the story and <h3>holding closed-door hearings about leaks, rather than investigating the controversial programs themselves.......</h3>

The following is the background of the guy who testified at the hearing held by congressional democrats, mentioned above, and described in Pincus's June 27 reporting, below:

Quote:

http://www.mideasti.org/articles/doc355.html
wayne white joins mei public policy center as adjunct scholar

Washington, DC
March 21, 2005

<H3>......White most recently served as Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia. White also served as principal Iraq analyst and head of INR/NESA’s Iraq team from 2003 to 2005.</H3> He was Chief of INR’s Maghreb, Arabian Penninsula, Iran and Iraq division and State Department representative to NATO Middle East working groups from 1990 to 2002.

Mr. White served as Political Officer at the US interest section in Baghdad in 1983.....

....White has a BA and an MA in Middle East history from Penn State University.

The following is a report about the hearing that Pat Roberts has prevented:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...601306_pf.html
Analyst Says He Warned of Iraqi Resistance
Danger Was Clear Early, White Said

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; A04

Days after the United States invaded Iraq, senior U.S. officials were warned that Iraqi Sunnis would strongly resist American troops' occupation efforts, according to testimony given yesterday before Senate Democrats.

<h3>Wayne White,</h3> a former deputy director in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told senators that when British soldiers were forced to repeatedly take the port city of Umm Qasr from Iraqi guerrillas, "I knew then and there that we would have a serious problem on our hands."

"I quickly warned, around the first week or 10 days of the war . . . that this spelled danger as we moved farther north, especially into Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland," White told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The advisory came in a formal bureau assessment that typically goes to senior officials at the State Department.

Noting that a Sunni insurgency began to gather momentum only after conventional fighting ended in May 2003, <h3>White said, "My warning was accurate, just a tad premature."</h3>

Yesterday's hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building was conducted, said committee Chairman Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), <b>"to understand what has happened in the recent past and what lessons can be learned from that with respect to the future."</b>

<h3>Dorgan said he had invited Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), who runs the Republican Policy Committee, to join the session, but Kyl declined.</h3>

Witnesses who came before the senators included Paul R. Pillar, a longtime CIA analyst and a former national intelligence officer covering Iraq, and Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

White and Pillar both discussed the lack of Middle East experience by White House officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who pushed for the Iraq invasion. White said that "lack was a major impediment to sound policymaking if one already does not have an open mind and is driven by a particular agenda."

Pillar said "little if any" of the warnings such as White's, on the problems that would be faced in post-Hussein Iraq, "influenced the decision-making on going to war."

Assessments by the intelligence community, Pillar said, showed that the "political culture" of Iraq "would not provide fertile ground for democracy," and analysts foresaw "a significant chance that the sectarian and ethnic groups would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it."

They also predicted that the occupying forces would become targets and that "war and occupation would boost political Islam, increase sympathy for terrorist objectives and make Iraq a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East," Pillar said.

<h3>White's and Pillar's testimony marked the first time intelligence assessments on postwar Iraq have been specifically discussed in a congressional session.</h3>

Wayne White, described above, was enough of an "expert" to retain his chief analyst position on Iraq, during both Powell and Rice's time at the State Dept

Quote:

http://harpers.org/sb-six-questions-...308402183.html
Six Questions on the Bush Administration and the Middle East Crisis for Wayne White

Posted on Sunday, July 23, 2006. Wayne White, now an Adjunct Scholar with Washington's Middle East Institute, was Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Middle East and South Asia Analysis until March 2005.....

1. Condoleezza Rice is leaving for the Middle East. Is her trip likely to lead to any favorable diplomatic outcome?

I don't think so. At least not anytime soon..........<h3>I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority.</h3> To cite just one disappointment, the apparent failure to engage senior Syrian officials directly.....

3. What does Israel hope to gain from its ongoing military operations in Lebanon, and is it likely to meet with success?

.......In fact, not learning from the American experience in Iraq—that trying to crush a guerrilla movement with conventional military force and thereby inflicting significant (in this case, even deliberate) collateral casualties might only generate thousands of other potential fighters bearing various grievances—the IDF could find itself mired in the same sort of seemingly open-ended confrontation.........

6. Will there be any negative consequences resulting from the administration's relatively passive diplomacy?

Very much so. As I have noted, the Israelis have embarked on a campaign that will most likely make matters worse over the long term. This crisis will further erode the United States' credibility in the Middle East—and beyond....

<b>....Washington used to be regarded</b> as a party quite often useful for intercession with the Israelis, but in this case the Bush Administration has seemingly given Israel a blank check to do whatever it wants for as long as it wants.....

......another extremely serious consequence of not working to bring this carnage to an early end, Lebanon already has absorbed billions of dollars of damage. By the end of the crisis, the cost of rebuilding Lebanon will be incredibly high and the rebuilding effort quite prolonged, leaving most Lebanese, aside perhaps from the hard-core Christian right, considerably more hostile to Israel—and the United States—than ever before. In this respect, I find scenes of devastated Lebanese urban areas not only appalling, but frightening.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/world/23bolton.html
Praise at Home for Envoy, but Scorn at U.N.
By WARREN HOGE
Published: July 23, 2006

.......The Bush administration is not popular at the United Nations, where it is often perceived as disdainful of diplomacy, and its policies as heedless of the effects on others and single-minded in the willful assertion of American interests. By extension, then, many diplomats say they see Mr. Bolton as a stand-in for the arrogance of the administration itself........

..........Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said, “He has done an extraordinary job representing the U.S. during what has turned out to be an extraordinary time at the U.N., and Secretary Rice thinks he’s doing a terrific job.”

But over the past month, more than 30 ambassadors consulted in the preparation of this article, all of whom share the United States’ goal of changing United Nations management practices, expressed misgivings over Mr. Bolton’s leadership............

.........Mr. Bolton came to the United Nations on Aug. 2 last year after a bruising battle in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Democrats on the committee cited accusations that he bullied subordinates, shaped intelligence reports to reflect his policy views and tried to engineer the removal of a C.I.A. official who disagreed with him. They also noted scornful references he had made about the United Nations like his comment that 10 floors of the Secretariat building could be lopped off without being missed..............

A European envoy said that Mr. Bolton was a difficult ally for his traditionally pro-American group because he often staked out unilateral hard-line positions in the news media or Congress and then proved unwilling to compromise in the give and take of negotiations.

In the aftermath of a 170-to-4 vote last spring on creating a Human Rights Council, which the United States opposed, Peter Maurer, <h3>the ambassador of Switzerland, characterized the American approach as “intransigent and maximalist.”

“All too often,” he said, “high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it.”....</h3>

The Bush era, if we survive it, will go down as a dark period for America, and the world, IMO.

The obsessive, penchant for secrecy precludes learning from "mistakes", the lip service paird to "diplomacy"....evidenced in the former State Dept. deputy secretary for Near East and South Asian affairs, Wayne White's July 22 comments (quoted in depth, above):

Quote:

I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority.

...in response to a question concerning Rice's "efforts" to "broker" a cease fire in the hostilities between Israel and it's neighbors......and in Bush's recess appointment, 12 months ago, of John Bolton as U.S. "ambassador" (saboteur ???) to the U.N., despite the fact that the senate failed to conffirm his appointment to that sensitive position, reveals the intent of this administration.

Why would Bush/Cheney deliberately send a man to represent the United States at the U.N., who was on record saying, <b>"that 10 floors of the (U.N.) Secretariat building could be lopped off without being missed"</b>, a man who failed to win confirmation by the senate to that ambassadorship,
if it was truly interested in building consensus for diplomacy at home, and abroad, as a priority over a military solution to the political conflicts in the middle east?

Why would no investigations be held, or even permitted, into the handling by the administration of pre-invasion Iraqi WMD intelligence "handling", or into the "end run" by the administration, of the FISA court in the warrantless domestice phone call monitoring controversy, if there was any priority placed by the ruling political party, in avoiding repetitive mistakes?

I submit that the "the rigidity of power" is a symptom, and a result of the rigidity of the thought processes, aggravated by a curiousity deficiency, and a flawed, emotion fueled, religious influenced patriotism, that leads too many voters to vote against their own best interests. Too many of the 50 percent of Georgians, for example, who control just 2-1/2 percent of the total private wealth in their state, voted for Saxby Chambliss instead of Max Clelland in Nov., 2002. Clelland, a veteran senator and democrat, former, admin. of the V.A., a former military officer who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was
painted by Ann Coulter as a beer drinking drunk who caused his own injuries, and by Chambliss, in televised campaign ads that flashed pictures of Saddam to "link" the Iraqi dictator with Clelland.

Instead of active military members and veterans voting in 2002, as they logically should have....for one of their own.....Clelland, too many were influenced by the republican propaganda machine to vote for Chambliss; a man who claimed a college football knee injury was the reason that he could not serve in the military. Chambliss went on to vote for the 2005 "Bankruptcy Reform" legislation.....ignoring the Harvard study that found that most personal bankruptcies were triggered by sudden illness induced income loss,
....and thus inflicted more enconomic hardship on the very folks who voted for him.....because Georgia is in the top 3 highest incidence of bankruptcies per 100 households, in the country.

As long as people are incurious to the avoidance of accountability by this leadership, and the fact that war has been chosen as policy that eclipses diplomacy, there will be much more economic inequality and dysfunction passing itself off a "leadership" in the U.S., more newly minted "terrorists", coming out of the muslim lands, and more empty chairs at holiday meals in U.S. households. You get what you vote for.