Military Times Damages Credibility with Obama "Survey"

Military Times Damages Credibility with Obama "Survey" by Brandon Friedman

Once again, the widely-read Military Times is deliberately attempting to accentuate the perceived rift between the military and the incoming Obama administration by promoting an amateurish, unscientific survey called the "2008 Military Times Poll." Here's the headline for the main article:

2008 Military Times poll: Wary about Obama


Troops cite inexperience, Iraq timetable

Using the same data, they also have an accompanying piece with a similarly divisive lead:

Troops oppose repeal of 'don't ask'

Of course, both articles are full of self-selected, academically useless responses from the Military Times' older, white, subscribing readership. The only question is whether they're doing this deliberately, or whether no one who works at the paper is actually educated enough to know how important the difference is between a scientific survey and a haphazardly conducted poll of subscribers who choose to participate.

Either way, they've completely blown up the idea of journalistic credibility by actively pushing this nonsense. And this is critically important because the Military Times has long been the most respected source of objective information for uniformed service members.

Let's start with the main piece. It begins this way:

When asked how they feel about President-elect Barack Obama as commander in chief, six out of 10 active-duty service members say they are uncertain or pessimistic, according to a Military Times survey.

This is dishonesty right off the bat. By saying "six out of 10 active-duty service members," the Times is implying that they've randomly selected active duty members of the military for the survey -- and that their sample is representative of the entire military. They're implying this because that's how professional, credible polling companies conduct surveys. Unfortunately, the Military Times is either too cheap or too daft to do a poll the right way. So naturally, I looked for an explanation. At the very bottom of the page, I found a link with the fine print:

Although public opinion pollsters use random selection to survey the general public, the Military Times survey is based on responses from those who chose to participate. That means it is impossible to calculate statistical margins of error commonly reported in opinion surveys, because those calculations depend on random sampling techniques.


The voluntary nature of the survey, the dependence on e-mail and the characteristics of Military Times readers could affect the results.

No. Sorry guys. It couldn't just "affect the results." It actually invalidates the entire survey as anything resembling a realistic reflection of attitudes within the military.

Nevertheless, the Times spends the next 11 paragraphs highlighting the dissension and distrust within the ranks toward Obama--through commentary like this:

"Being that the Marine Corps can be sent anywhere in the world with the snap of his fingers, nobody has confidence in this guy as commander in chief," said one lance corporal who asked not to be identified.


For eight years, members of the U.S. military have served under a Republican commander in chief who reflected their generally conservative views and led them to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, the troops face change not only at the very top of the chain of command, as Obama nears his Jan. 20 inauguration, but perhaps in mission, policy and values.

Underlying much of the uncertainty is Obama's stated 16-month timetable for pulling combat troops out of Iraq, as well as his calls to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military, according to survey responses and interviews.

"How are you going to safely pull combat troops out of Iraq?" said Air Force 1st Lt. Rachel Kleinpeter, an intelligence officer with the 100th Operations Support Squadron at RAF Mildenhall, England. "And if you're pulling out combat troops, who are you leaving to help support what's left? What happens if Iraq falls back into chaos? Are we going to be there in five years doing the same thing over again?"

Oddly enough, after spending nearly half the piece suggesting that the survey is representative of the military as a whole, the Times quietly slips in these two sentences:

The responses are not representative of the opinions of the military as a whole. The survey group overall under-represents minorities, women and junior enlisted service members, and over-represents soldiers.

So they're basically saying, "Pay no attention to our divisive headlines or, in fact, most of our article. Just accept our conclusions as we've framed them, even though we're now telling you that we knowingly under-represented Obama's primary constituency, and that we have no scientific basis for what we're presenting as 'facts.'"

But it doesn't get any better. The second piece using the "data" is just as shoddy in its analysis of troop attitudes toward the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. First paragraph:

Most active-duty service members continue to oppose President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military, a Military Times survey shows.

Again, this is total dishonesty. By saying "most active-duty service members," the Military Times is insulting each individual who's ever worked hard to earn a graduate degree in the field of social sciences. They've provided no empirical evidence to corroborate such a statement. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But we have no way of knowing based on the ridiculous data they've provided.

To their credit, in this second piece, the Times does interview two supporters of the DADT policy and two who oppose it. However, the "expert" chosen by the paper to represent the anti-gay viewpoint is none other than Elaine Donnelly, to whom they allocate a full 20 percent of the article. For those who are unfamiliar, Elaine Donnelly is the unbalanced, homophobic, nutjob who reporters and Congressional committees trot out whenever they need a useful bigot to represent the minority of Americans who disapprove of homosexuality. Donnelly doesn't even have any connection with the military other than her vociferous opposition to gays serving in it. She never served in uniform and she has no discernible academic background on the topic (as the other expert for the piece does). As far as I can tell, she attended community college in Livonia, Michigan and then earned some undergrad credits at the University of Detroit. Which makes her as much of an expert on the matter as your average policy analyst from the local Klavern down on County Road 126.

Elaine Donnelly, the founder and president of the Center for Military Readiness, which supports the ban, said the number of discharges under "don't ask, don't tell" could be reduced to near zero if induction forms contained a question about sexual preference.


. . .

Donnelly warned of the consequences in repealing the ban, which she said could include forced cohabitation of heterosexuals and homosexuals in all branches of the military and disciplinary action against those who oppose or protest the integration.

So on top of faulty data, the Times is resorting to the use of a simple extremist to provide perspective on the debate.

The overarching problem with these pieces is that the Military Times has sacrificed journalistic integrity in order to portray itself as the final word -- as the authority -- on the views of America's troops. In reality, however, they were too lazy or too cheap to conduct a real survey. And by not doing so, they've now contributed to the false -- but titillating and dramatic! -- storyline they seem so eager to push.

I don't know if they just think it's what their readers want to hear, or if they think their readers are just too stupid to notice. I would assume, however, that the Military Times realizes that, while most of their subscribers older and white, the majority of their young, under-represented active duty readers likely pick up copies at the AAFES cash register -- and don't receive them via subscriptions. Personally, I used to read the paper version of the Army Times every week. But I've never met anyone with a subscription.

Regardless, by being so careless, they've done a disservice to both the military and its new Commander-in-Chief. If they're going to conduct self-selecting polls like these, they need to quit promoting them as representative of the entire military. Because they're not.

The Surge Worked? Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2008

Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2008
1. Iraqis are safer because of Bush's War. In fact, conditions of insecurity have helped created both an internal and external refugee problem:

' At least 4.2 million Iraqis were displaced. These included 2.2 million who were displaced within Iraq and some 2 million refugees, mostly in Syria (around 1.4 million) and Jordan (around half a million). In the last months of the year both these neighbouring states, struggling to meet the health, education and other needs of the Iraqi refugees already present, introduced visa requirements that impeded the entry of Iraqis seeking refuge. Within Iraq, most governorates barred entry to Iraqis fleeing sectarian violence elsewhere.'

2. Large numbers of Iraqis in exile abroad have returned. In fact, no great number have returned, and more Iraqis may still be leaving to Syria than returning.

3. Iraqis are materially better off because of Bush's war. In fact, A million Iraqis are "food insecure" and another 6 million need UN food rations to survive. Oxfam estimated in summer, 2007, that 28% of Iraqi children are malnourished.

4. The Bush administration scored a major victory with its Status of Forces Agreement. In fact, The Iraqis forced on Bush an agreement that the US would withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities by July, 2009,and would completely withdraw from the Country by the end of 2011. The Bush administration had wanted 58 long-term bases, and the authority to arrest Iraqis at will and to launch military operations unilaterally.

5. Minorities in Iraq are safer since Bush's invasion. In fact, there have in 2008 been significant attacks on and displacement of Iraqi Christians from Mosul. In early January of 2008, guerrillas bombed churches in Mosul, wounding a number of persons. More recently, some 13,000 Christians have had to flee Mosul because of violence.

6. The sole explanation for the fall in the monthly death rate for Iraqi civilians was the troop excalation or surge of 30,000 extra US troops in 2007. In fact, troop levels had been that high before without major effect. The US military did good counter-insurgency in 2007. The major reason for the fall in the death toll, however, was that the Shiites won the war for Baghdad, ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from the capital, and turning it into a city with a Shiite majority of 75 to 80 percent. (When Bush invaded, Baghdad was about 50/50 Sunni and Shiite). The high death tolls in 2006 and 2007 were a by-product of this massive ethnic cleansing campaign. Now, a Shiite militiaman in Baghdad would have to drive for a while to find a Sunni Arab to kill.

7. John McCain alleged that if the US left Iraq, it would be promptly taken over by al-Qaeda. In fact, there are few followers of Usamah Bin Laden in Iraq. The fundamentalist extremists, if that is what McCain meant, are not supported by most Sunni Arabs. They are supported by no Shiites (60% of Iraq) or Kurds (20% of Iraq), and are hated by Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan, who would never allow such a takeover.

8. The Iraq War made the world safer from terrorism. In fact, Iraq has become a major training ground for extremists and is implicated in the major bombings in Madrid, London, and Glasgow.

9. Bush went to war in Iraq because he was given bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. In fact, the State Department's Intelligence & Research (I & R) division cast doubt on the alarmist WMD stories that Bush/Cheney put about. The CIA refused to sign off on the inclusion of the Niger uranium lie in the State of the Union address, which made Bush source it to the British MI6 instead. The Downing Street Memo revealed that Bush fixed the intelligence around the policy. Bush sought to get up a provocation such as a false flag attack on UN planes so as to blame it on Iraq. And UN weapons inspectors in Feb.-Mar. of 2003 examined 100 of 600 suspected weapons sites and found nothing; Bush's response was to pull them out and go to war.

10. Douglas Feith and other Neoconservatives didn't really want a war with Iraq (!). Yeah, that was why they demanded war on Iraq with their 1996 white paper for Bibi Netanyahu and again in their 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to Clinton, where they explicitly called for military action. The Neoconservatives are notorious liars and by the time they get through with rewriting history, they will be a combination of Gandhi and Mother Teresa and the Iraq War will be Bill Clinton's fault. The only thing is, I think people are wise to them by now. Being a liar can actually get you somewhere. Being a notorious liar is a disadvantage if what you want to is get people to listen to you and act on your advice. I say, Never Again.

FOX News Teams Up With Karl Rove To Baselessly Suggest An Obama Report Cover Up In Blagojevich Scandal

FOX News Teams Up With Karl Rove To Baselessly Suggest An Obama Report Cover Up In Blagojevich Scandal
The release of the Obama team's report wasn't just not good enough for FOX News but they trotted out Karl Rove, without disclosing his Republican partisan activities, to raise unfounded suspicions that sinister facts had been concealed. Rove never found any actual evidence that any damning evidence existed but that didn't stop him from wildly speculating that something (he never offered up what, exactly) was amiss. With video.

In a 12/23/08 discussion on Hannity & Colmes, the suspicion-mongering began in the scripted introduction which baselessly suggested that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, may have been connected to the bribery: “It's also worth noting that from the report it appears that Emanuel did have several conversations with the governor's chief of staff about the open seat and even suggested names... (such as) Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. You will remember that it has been suggested that Jackson was one of the candidates whose supporters may have tried to bribe the governor. Jackson has denied that but his own attorney admits that the Congressman was indeed the so-called Candidate Number 5 named by the federal prosecutor.”

Nothing further was presented to indicate Emanuel had any improper ties to Jackson nor even that Jackson had committed any wrongdoing.

The introduction also stated, “It's important to remember that this report was not prepared by independent investigators but by the Obama transition team, themselves.”

The only guest for the discussion was Republican operative Karl Rove, disingenuously presented as a “FOX News contributor” who would provide “analysis.” So while FOX made sure that viewers knew Obama's report was not prepared by “independent investigators,” the “We report. You decide” network did not think it worth mentioning that its own scrutiny was not being provided by an independent analyst.

Rove announced that he saw no problems in the report. But then he launched into a series of “take-aways” that suggested there was something sinister being covered up.

“First of all, Barack Obama was more involved in this process than he let on two weeks ago in his news conference,” Rove said. “On the 9th of November, he has a meeting with people in which they agree upon a list and he directs Rahm Emanuel to give that list to Blagojevich. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing unethical. But I wish that he'd sort of laid that out to the American people at his first news conference.”

Rove implies that Obama said otherwise. But, in his press conference, Obama stated, “In terms of our involvement, I'll repeat what I said earlier, which is I had no contact with the governor's office. I did not speak to the governor about these issues. That I know for certain. What I want to do is to gather all the facts about any staff contacts that I might -- may have -- that may have taken place between the transition office and the governor's office. And we'll have those in the next few days, and we'll present them. But what I'm absolutely certain about is that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat. That I'm absolutely certain of.” This is consistent with what Obama said in his briefer previous statements.

There is nothing in Obama's statement that contradicts the later report and there's nothing in the report to suggest that Obama's statement was in any way misleading. Instead, it was Rove doing the misleading.

Is Dick Cheney a sociopath

Is Dick Cheney a sociopath
In an ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world, Vice President Dick Cheney wants you to understand that he has done nothing wrong over the past eight years. In fact, to hear him tell it to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday, we are all safer for his infallibility in the face of our own complacency. His liberal critics, for their part, answer Cheney's moral certainty by continuing to vigorously debate all the reasons to let him off the hook. What other possible response can there be to all that bristling manliness? History will remember Dick Cheney as the man who managed to make President George W. Bush look like a wimp.

One hesitates to waste too much time deconstructing Cheney's last-minute debater's tricks. The threats and insults stopped being impressive a long time ago. But the vice president's greatest rhetorical sleight of hand may be that he has completely inverted settled and open legal questions. As he snarks his way through his final exit interviews, he takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open.

First there's Cheney on the efficacy of torture. In his ABC interview last week he swaggered, "I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the No. 3 man in al-Qaida, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al-Qaida came from that one source."

Could this be a close call? In fact, the debate ended years ago, almost as soon as it began. You may remember back in 2002, some of us were actually engaged in discussing this issue. Alan Dershowitz at Harvard was poking at the possibility of judge-sanctioned torture warrants. Those charged with setting interrogation policy at Guantanamo were seeking inspiration from Jack Bauer. And boneheads like me were positing fascinating hypotheticals about the possible efficacy of abusing our prisoners.

Well, guess what? The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don't work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair's David Rose that he doesn't "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn't effective. The handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

What about the legality of torture? That's an easy one, says Cheney, again in his ABC interview. "On the question of so-called torture, we don't do torture. We never have. It's not something that this administration subscribes to. Again, we proceeded very cautiously. We checked. We had the Justice Department issue the requisite opinions in order to know where the bright lines were that you could not cross." Yet just a few moments later, when asked whether water-boarding a prisoner was appropriate, he said yes, adding that he was even involved in clearing the technique as part of the interrogation program.

Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.

Just as Cheney is able to sow legal doubt where none exists, he is adept at issuing blanket legal proclamations about questions that are open-ended and theoretical. Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent "the hard-core." Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago. Which brings us to Cheney's biggest whopper of the week. In yesterday's interview with Chris Wallace, he was as blunt as anyone can be in articulating the Nutty Version of the Unitary Executive Theory:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

The claim that "the nature of the world we live in" warrants a perennially unchecked executive branch can be delivered with all the gravitas in the world, and it still amounts to constitutional nonsense. To this end it's well worth reading Absolute Power, in which distinguished legal journalist John MacKenzie takes a close look at claims about the unitary executive. MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."

Bush's Midnight Regulations

Bush's Midnight Regulations
President Bush may have hospitably welcomed his successor and his wife into the White House while promising a "transition of the highest order," but despite voters' overwhelming rejection of Republican ideology, his administration has been using its waning days in power to codify a host of harmful new pro-industry, anti-environmental rules and regulations.

As R. Jeffrey Smith and Juliet Eilperin wrote recently in the Washington Post, "In a burst of activity meant to leave a lasting stamp on the federal government, the Bush White House in the past month has approved 61 new regulations on environmental, security, social and commercial matters that by its own estimate will have an economic impact exceeding $1.9 billion annually."

These so-called "midnight regulations" are free of Congressional oversight and will be completely legal once Bush signs off on them. They'll allow factories to pollute more, let food manufacturers hide their toxins more easily, gives states the chance to restrict women's access to abortion services and force municipalities to cut off aid to needy families in the middle of a recession.

On the environmental front, the latest rules show that the Bush administration is trying to lend a final assist to its crony industries that could be affected by looming pollution controls or wilderness-protection laws. A rule approved by the White House three days after the presidential election, for example, eased constraints on environmentally damaging oil shale development throughout the West, despite objections from Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and a majority of the state's congressional delegation.

Delusional Dick Cheney Says Bush Will Be Popular in 30 Years

Delusional Dick Cheney Says Bush Will Be Popular in 30 Years
In an interview with the Washington Times yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that Bush's "place in history likely would grow during the next 20 to 30 years." Arguing his case, Cheney cited President Ford's decision -- unpopular at the time -- to pardon President Nixon:

"By the time of [Ford's] passing a couple of years ago, opinion had totally turned on that," Mr. Cheney said. "In fact, most people by then, even many who had been very critical 30 years before, were in agreement that in fact it was a good decision, it was the right thing to do from the standpoint of the country.

"I'm personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we've been able to accomplish."

Of course, Cheney was also "personally persuaded" that violence in Iraq was in its "last throes," that there was "no doubt" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that Republicans were going to win election contests in 2006 and 2008.

Joe Klein's defense of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty

Joe Klein's defense of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty

Truly bizarre. Klein says that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling." But the bill that Klein simultaneously says he supports allows exactly that -- it allows the Bush administration to eavesdrop, in essence, on any international calls it wants, including those to which a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, is a party. That is the whole point of the bill, the whole reason why it is such a travesty -- precisely because it allows "actual eavesdropping on conversations . . . without a FISA court ruling."

Thus, in two short paragraphs, Klein manages to say: "I am absolutely opposed to X, and I vigorously support this bill which grants X." He's obviously writing about his support for a bill that he has not read and that he has not begun to comprehend. And yet he repeatedly writes articles on FISA for Time, the largest weekly newsmagazine in America. That isn't anything more nefarious or complex than just garden-variety sloth and ignorance.

Still, Klein's support for a new law that he does not understand and has not bothered to look at is instructive as to why the bill passed in August and why there is such a danger now that it will be made permanent. In the Beltway culture, granting more power to the Government -- particularly when that power is justified by The Terrorists -- is always a Serious, Inherently Good measure, because that power will be exercised by the Good, Serious Adults Whom are Trusted, the Admiral Mike McConnells and the Gen. Michael Haydens and soon-to-be Trusted and Responsible Michael Mukasey.

These are Good Men, seeking to Protect Us, and there is no reason to deny them the power they demand in order to keep us safe. That's how even Beltway "liberals" like Klein -- and David Ignatius -- show that they are Serious and Trustworthy members of the Beltway elite: by paying proper homage to the Goodness of high governmental officials who are trying to Keep Us Safe.

Read what they write about government surveillance and the only argument one finds, literally, is that our Leaders need more power because they want to protect us. The very notion that such power should not be vested without oversight and safeguards is, to them, considered unserious, because we are talking here about officials who are good and responsible and would never abuse their power. That is why Congress in August all but gutted the Fourth Amendment and vested the Bush administration with the power of warrantless eavesdropping with barely a peep of protest from our Beltway elite. To the contrary, when they speak about it at all, they do so by warning Democrats not to impede these "important" protections.

And it isn't only high government officials who warrant such protection, but also the most influential corporations with the most influential Beltway lobbyists as well. Thus, Klein not only defends the warrantless eavesdropping bill but also casually -- in passing, literally parenthetically -- defends the granting of amnesty to telecoms so that there are no consequences even if they are found by courts to have broken the law in allowing warrantless spying on their customers by the government.

Statement of Senator Carl Levin on Senate Armed Services Committee Report of its Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees

Statement of Senator Carl Levin on Senate Armed Services Committee Report of its Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees
On November 21st, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved its report on aspects of the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody since 2001. Today we’re releasing the executive summary and conclusions of that report. The Department of Defense is reviewing the body of the report for classification. Senator McCain and I have urged the Department to expedite that review.

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody compromised our moral authority and damaged both our ability to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism and to win the support of people around the world for that effort. In May 2004, just after the pictures from Abu Ghraib became public, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that the abuses depicted were simply the result of a few “bad apples” and that those responsible for abuse would be held accountable. More than seven months later, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Asked about accountability for detainee abuses, Gonzales said “we care very much about finding out what happened and holding people accountable.” Neither of those two statements was true.

Department of Defense investigations into detainee abuse failed to adequately assign accountability to those senior military and civilian officials who authorized abusive interrogation techniques.

Shortly after I became Chairman of the Armed Services Committee in January 2007, I set up an investigations unit of my Committee staff whose first order of business was to look into the origins of detainee abuses. Committee staff has spent more than a year-and-a-half conducting that investigation. They’ve reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents and conducted extensive interviews of more than 70 individuals, including a number of senior civilian and military officials. The Committee also held public hearings on June 17th and September 25th.

As we began to dig into what happened, the influence of SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) resistance training techniques on our interrogation policies and practices became more and more obvious and became the focus of our investigation. SERE training is intended to be used to teach our soldiers how to resist interrogation by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions and international law. In SERE school, our troops who are at risk of capture are exposed – in a controlled environment with great protections and caution - to techniques adapted from abusive tactics used against American soldiers by enemies such as the Communist Chinese during the Korean War. SERE training techniques include stress positions, forced nudity, use of fear, sleep deprivation and, until recently, the Navy SERE school used the waterboard. These techniques were designed to give our students a taste of what they might be subjected to if captured by a ruthless, lawless enemy so that they would be better prepared to resist. The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody. As one JPRA instructor explained, SERE training is “based on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the last 50 years.”

So, how did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them.

The Committee has previously released a large number of documents and information revealing the influence of SERE on the interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody beginning in 2002. For example, the investigation revealed that, beginning in the spring of 2002, Cabinet officials met in the White House to discuss the CIA’s interrogation program. Resistance training (the “R” in SERE) was a subject of discussion. We discovered that in July 2002, at the request of DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes’s office, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) - the DoD agency that oversees SERE training - provided Haynes’s office a list of techniques used in SERE school and an assessment of the psychological effect of using those techniques on students. In December 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized some of those same techniques for use against detainees at GTMO. We discovered that, in January 2003, SERE instructors travelled to GTMO and trained interrogators to hit detainees and put them in stress positions. And the investigation revealed that instructors from JPRA’s SERE school participated in at least one abusive interrogation and were present for others during a visit to Iraq in September 2003. The executive summary we are releasing today contains additional evidence of the influence of SERE on interrogations. I want to mention just one piece of that new evidence.

Following our first hearing in June, I sent a number of questions to Jay Bybee, who currently sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and was formerly the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). When he was at OLC, Judge Bybee signed two legal opinions, both issued on August 1, 2002. The first Bybee OLC memo, which was sent to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, addressed the legal standards applicable to interrogations. The second Bybee OLC memo – which was for the CIA and remains classified – evaluated the legality of particular interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. Senior Administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, David Addington, Counsel to the Vice President, and Attorney General John Ashcroft were consulted on the development of OLC’s legal analyses.

In his response to my questions, Jay Bybee said that, in July 2002 – just before those two OLC opinions were issued and about the same time Jim Haynes’s office requested a list of SERE training techniques and information on the psychological effects of SERE (including waterboarding), the CIA provided OLC with an assessment of the psychological effects of SERE resistance training. Jay Bybee wrote me that the assessment provided by the CIA was used to “inform” the August 1, 2002 OLC legal opinion that has yet to be made public. (CIA officials, including George Tenet and acting General Counsel John Rizzo declined to answer questions relating to both that assessment and the CIA’s interrogation program.)

Judge Bybee’s answers provide insight into how senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques used in SERE training, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

The message from the top was clear; it was appropriate to consider degrading and abusive techniques for use against detainees. Given that message, Secretary Wolfowitz’s characterization of detainee abuse as the result of “a few bad apples” is simply false. The Committee, in fact, reached the opposite conclusion.

Conclusion 1 of the Committee’s report states:

“On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.”

Conclusion 13 states:

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

And the Committee’s 19th and final conclusion states:

“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”

The impact of Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive techniques was profound. Shortly after his approval, the techniques – and the fact the Secretary had authorized them – became known to interrogators in Afghanistan. In fact, a copy of the Secretary’s memo was sent from GTMO to Afghanistan. And in January 2003 the Officer in Charge of the Intelligence Section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan said that she saw a power point presentation listing the aggressive techniques that had been authorized by the Secretary.

On January 24, 2003, the Staff Judge Advocate for Combined Joint Task Force 180 (CJTF-180), U.S. Central Command’s (CENTCOM) conventional forces in Afghanistan, produced an “Interrogation techniques” memo. Unclassified portions of a report by Major General George Fay stated that the memo “recommended removal of clothing – a technique that had been in the Secretary’s December 2 authorization” and discussed “exploiting the Arab fear of dogs” another technique approved by the Secretary on December 2, 2002.

From Afghanistan, the techniques made their way to Iraq. According to the Department of Defense Inspector General, at the beginning of the Iraq war, special mission unit forces in Iraq “used a January 2003 Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which had been developed for operations in Afghanistan.” According to the DoD IG, the Afghanistan SOP had been:

[I]nfluenced by the counterresistance memorandum that the Secretary of Defense approved on December 2, 2002 and incorporated techniques designed for detainees who were identified as unlawful combatants. Subsequent battlefield interrogation SOPs included techniques such as yelling, loud music, and light control, environmental manipulation, sleep deprivation/adjustment, stress positions, 20-hour interrogations, and controlled fear (muzzled dogs)…

Special mission unit techniques eventually made their way into Standard Operating Procedures issued for all U.S. forces in Iraq. On September 14, 2003, Lieutenant General Sanchez issued the first Combined Joint Task Force 7 interrogation SOP. That SOP authorized interrogators in Iraq to use stress positions, environmental manipulation, sleep management, and military working dogs to exploit detainees’ fears in interrogations.

In the report of his investigation into Abu Ghraib, Major General George Fay said that interrogation techniques developed for GTMO were implemented at Abu Ghraib. Following a September 9, 2004 Committee hearing on his report, I asked Major General Fay whether the policy approved by the Secretary of Defense on December 2, 2002 contributed to the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, and he responded “Yes.”

The Committee reached a number of other conclusions that expose efforts by administration officials to place responsibility for detainee abuses mostly on lower ranking military personnel as both inaccurate and misleading. Here are a few more of the Committee’s conclusions.

* Conclusion 2: Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period.

* Conclusion 6: The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) interrogation program included at least one SERE training technique, waterboarding.

Norm Coleman Just Another Corrupt Republican

Norm Coleman Just Another Corrupt Republican by Sam Stein
Did Norm Coleman's financial problems compel him to turn to friends and GOP donors for help with his living situation?

That's what a new story out of Minnesota alleges. Friday morning, a local Fox News affiliate reported that at the time that Coleman alleged received $75,000 in unreported payments from a prominent Republican businessman, he was also struggling to make payments for the restructuring of his home.

Good government officials wondered whether there was something more than coincidental to the financial exchange. And, indeed, there is other compelling -- and up to this point, unnoted -- evidence to suggest that Coleman was soliciting monetary favors from his GOP backers.

Around the same time that Coleman and/or his wife were allegedly receiving three $25,000 payments from businessman Nasser Kazeminy, the Senator was also getting cheaply discounted rent from a major Republican figure who served as his landlord in Washington D.C.

In July 2007 -- months after lawsuits assert that $75,000 was secretly funneled to the Colemans -- the Senator began paying $600 a month rent on his one-bedroom apartment on Capitol Hill, way below market value. His landlord, Republican operative and communications guru Jeff Larson, also was covering Coleman's utilities (under an apparent agreement that the Senator would be billed with an estimate once the year was over).

At the time, the D.C. arrangement raised a variety of eyebrows, mainly because Coleman had helped Larson secure millions in business related to the Republican Convention in St. Paul. The new revelations, however, suggest that the rent may have been more a favor that Larson was offering to Coleman than any sort of bribery.

Indeed, in two separate lawsuits that emerged this fall, it is alleged that, around this time, the Colemans (one of the Senate's least rich families) were in financial straits. According to one of the lawsuits in March of 2007, Kazeminy said that "U.S. Senators don't make s---" and that he was going to try to funnel money to the Minnesota Republican. From there, it is alleged, Kazeminy arranged for the three $25,000 payments to be made from his Texas-based Deep Marine Technology to Hays Companies in Minnesota for "insurance." Laurie Coleman is, officially, an employee at Hays. But she is not a licensed insurance agent.

The Bush-Republican Legacy

Watchdog group: Depth of Bush failures surprised even us
With the Bush administration about to leave office after reaching record-setting disapproval ratings, the nation might be in the mood for some New Year's resolutions pinpointing mistakes of the last eight years that it never, ever wants to make again.

For example, the country might want to do something about its massive backlogs in various essential government functions -- including 730,000 backlogged patent applications, 760,000 Social Security disability claims, and 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims.

The nation might also resolve to avoid a recurrence of the recent losses of hundreds of laptops containing sensitive law enforcement information, or to rethink the decision to keep plowing $12.5 billion into a joint civilian-military weather satellite system that is still incomplete and may leave gaps in crucial climate monitoring as older satellites fail.

The most comprehensive guide to these and other Bush administration failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently "set out to document just how off-track things have gone," assigning thirteen reporters to document the worst failures of the last eight years.

Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 "that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans."

US Company selling weapons to China

US Company selling weapons to China
Reporting from a Beijing police equipment expo in April, journalist David Hambling noticed a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) produced by California-based American Technology Corporation (ATC) on prominent display. The LRAD works by emitting from a dish high-energy acoustic waves that are said to be, at close proximity, louder than a jet engine. It is capable of reaching 150 decibels, enough to incite panic, inflict pain, and even cause hearing loss among large crowds.

But is it a weapon? ATC euphemistically describes it as a “directed-sounds communications system,” but in a November 2008 article in Maritime Reporter and Engineering News, the company’s vice president boasted of how the U.S. Navy was increasingly using LRAD devices to “prevent terrorist incidents” and repel Somali pirates. When the embargo was enacted, such devices didn’t even exist. It remains to be seen whether nonlethal crowd-control systems will be included in future arms-control agreements.

President-elect promises millions of jobs through green programs, infrastructure modernization, Internet

President-elect promises millions of jobs through green programs, infrastructure modernization, Internet
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday vowed to make the largest investment in the country's infrastructure since the 1950s and bolster development of broadband Internet connections as part of his program to create 2.5 million new jobs.

The announcement came less than a week after the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research officially said the United Sates was in a recession, which began in December 2007.

Last month, Obama announced that he had asked his economic team to develop an economic recovery plan that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs, while rebuilding US infrastructure, improving schools, reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil and saving billions of dollars.

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, the president-elect unveiled five specific components of the plan that he believes will help the country overcome the recession.

"We won't do it the old Washington way," Obama said about his plan. "We won't just throw money at the problem. We'll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve -- by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world."

Under the plan, the Obama administration will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient by replacing old heating systems and installing energy efficient light bulbs.

"Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that," said the president elect.

The future Democratic president also pledged to create employment on a mass scale.

"We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s," he said.

"We'll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we'll set a simple rule - use it or lose it," he said. "If a state doesn't act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they'll lose the money."

The plan, according to Obama, also calls for launching a sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings by making them energy-efficient and equipped with computers.

"Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools," he argued.

Obama also vowed to increase the accessibility of broadband Internet connections in the United States, making them available to schoolchildren and hospitals.

"It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," he said. "Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm president -- because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world."

The president-elect also said the government must ensure that hospitals are connected to each other through the Internet.

Obama has promised a series of strong anti-recession measures early in his administration, vowing to return people to work.

According to official government data, the US economy contracted at a 0.2 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2007 but grew 0.8 percent in the first quarter and 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2008. It then contracted 0.5 percent in the third quarter, based on a provisional estimate.

The committee that made the recession assessment issued no forecast on how long it will last, but said that in the past they have run from six to 18 months.

The jobless rate, based on a separate survey of households, rose last month to 6.7 percent, the highest since October 1993 but slightly better than the consensus estimate of economists of 6.8 percent. That survey showed 2.7 million people have joined the jobless ranks since the recession began.

The stunning retrenchment cut 533,000 jobs from US payrolls in November, sending the unemployment rate to a 15-year high, according to official data.

Why do bloggers continue to press issue of Obama's birth?

Why do bloggers continue to press issue of Obama's birth?
In the outer cosmos of the blogosphere, the presidential election isn’t over.

Barack Obama, now busily forming his administration, isn’t just the wrong person to lead the nation, claim Web sites such as America Must Know and Right Side News.

He is, they contend, constitutionally ineligible to be president.

The argument is over his place of birth — Hawaii, if you accept statements by Hawaiian officials, his 1961 birth notice in a Honolulu newspaper and a certified document his campaign obtained 18 months ago.

Still, legions of anti-Obama bloggers are so convinced he was born in Kenya that they’ve filed more than a dozen lawsuits nationwide.

They cite the Constitution’s requirement that presidents be "natural born citizens." They want the election declared void if Obama doesn’t deliver an original birth certificate — subject to an inspection by forensic experts — to be sure.

One litigant’s U.S. Supreme Court filing is scheduled to be discussed in private by the justices later this week.

Justice Clarence Thomas distributed to his colleagues a request that the high court weigh in before the Electoral College makes Obama’s victory official later this month. The justices may decide in a Friday conference whether to hear or cast away a lawsuit dismissed in a lower court and appealed by a retired New Jersey lawyer named Leo C. Donofrio, who also has his own Web site.

Yet another site, PeoplesPassions.org, beckons the president-elect: “If you’re eligible, show us the proof!”

Obama's campaign tried to settle all doubts months ago when it digitally scanned for all Web browsers to view a “certification of live birth,” signed by Hawaii’s registrar of vital statistics and carrying the state’s seal.

The skeptics response of "fake" prompted Brooks Jackson, who directs the nonpartisan FactCheck.org, to call the entire affair “the stupidest, silliest thing.”

FactCheck.org's research into Obama's birth records — and its rejecting of rumors that he was born anywhere but Hawaii — has been the most-viewed article in the history of the Web site. The site was launched five years ago by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

There, online visitors can see Obama’s birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, along with photos taken from all angles of the campaign’s certified copy of the birth document.

The original is said to be safely stored in Hawaii records vaults, though it, like other birth certificates, is inaccessible to the general public.

Government warned of mortgage meltdown

Government warned of mortgage meltdown
The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying -- along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK -- regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

This Year, Why Not Try Something Different

This Year, Why Not Try Something Different

ONE THING I am thankful for on Thanksgiving weekend is having absolutely no desire to go to the mall. I cannot remember the last time I did so, which by extension leaves me utterly out of touch with the national impulse to waddle out of bed at 4 a.m., especially the morning after the biggest collective burp on the American calendar.

It seems that it is not enough for Americans to watch football on turkey day. Obviously inspired by our beloved black-and-blue brutality, otherwise sane Americans treat Black Friday as their day in the NFL, blasting through the hole of the store opening to the 20-, the 30-, the 40-, the 50-percent-off sweater department! Then you chop-block the shopper ahead of you to advance from 53d to 52d in the checkout line.

All this sweat, tears, and occasional blood for the argyle for dear old Dad that becomes moth bait.

This year is, of course, different. Black Friday really turned tragic as a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in New York. This and the economy stinks. President-elect Obama has said for two years the planet is in peril. That originally only referred to global warming. But Americans keep thinking we can pilfer the planet at no peril. SUV sales are already picking up again now that gasoline is back under $2 a gallon, at the very same time we whine like the Wicked Witch of the West, shrinking to our knees screaming that our wallets are "melting! melting!"

This would seem like a great time to reassess the difference between what we want and what we need, both for the wallet and the planet. The National Retail Federation estimates that 49 million Americans were sure to go shopping this weekend. That is one-sixth of America. Depending how deep the discounts go, up to 128 million Americans could clog the aisles, over a third of the nation. One shopping center in Wisconsin, which opened at midnight after Thanksgiving, offered free pajamas to shoppers who came in pajamas. Mattel is throwing $50 Visa cards at $100 Barbie shoppers. Department stores were offering toys at half off and bringing back layaway plans.

The federation said this week, "For the first time since March 2005, the average price of self-serve, unleaded gasoline is $1.91, leaving shoppers with a little extra padding in their wallets . . . Shoppers who held off buying a DVD player or winter coat over the last few months will find that prices may literally be too good to pass up."

Like crack cocaine, I suppose. The Associated Press, in getting the reaction of motorists to the price of gasoline falling to an average of $1.79 in Columbus, Ohio, quoted one woman as saying, "It's awesome. With this gas guzzler, there was no way I could afford to keep paying, the way we're going."

Stimulus Now

Stimulus Now

But it is the policy, not the personnel, that is most important. The early signs are that the policy is essentially sound. Obama has directed his economic team to put together a major jobs package that would "put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies."

That's the good news. The bad news is that the economy is tanking so quickly we can't wait around until January 20, and a lame-duck government has essentially abdicated its role to Ben Bernanke's Fed and Hank Paulson's Treasury. But the Fed's attempts at monetary stimulus have lost almost all traction: long-term interest rates and the Fed funds rate are now moving in opposite directions.

We should expect no leadership from Bush and company at this point. But Congress can take steps now to hold the economy together and to move quickly toward a deeper stimulus package. Congress should reconvene after Thanksgiving to pass an immediate bridge loan for the auto industry and its workers to get them through to January, before debating a more comprehensive rescue package that transforms Detroit into a more viable, innovative, green industry

That Will Be With Me the Rest of My Life

That Will Be With Me the Rest of My Life
Nations in flux are nations in need. A new president will soon take office, facing hard choices not only about two long-running wars and an ever-deepening economic crisis, but about a government that has long been morally adrift. Torture-as-policy, kidnappings, ghost prisons, domestic surveillance, creeping militarism, illegal war-making, and official lies have been the order of the day. Moments like this call for truth-tellers. For Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. For witnesses willing to come forward. For brave souls ready to expose hidden and forbidden realities to the light of day.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson is such a man. He came to national prominence in October 2005 when -- having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year -- he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them. He had been inside the halls of power as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took shape. In Bush's second term, on the outside, he found that he had had enough. The American people, he thought, had a right to know just how their government was really working, and so he offered them this vision of the Bush administration in action: "[S]ome of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

In the years since, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, has not been reticent, especially when it came to "the militarization of America's foreign policy" and the practice of extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping of terror suspects and their deliverance into the hands of regimes ready and willing to torture them).

Nor, earlier this year, did he shy away from testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about how, in 2004, while still at the State Department, he had compiled "a dossier of classified, sensitive, and open source information" on American interrogation and imprisonment practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that yielded, he said, "overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture."

"We have damaged our reputation in the world and thus reduced our power," he told the panel in closing. "We were once seen as the paragon of law; we are now in many corners of the globe the laughing stock of the law."

Wilkerson has spent most of his adult life in the service of the United States government as a soldier for 31 years, including military service in Vietnam; as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College; and finally, from 2002 to 2005, as chief of staff to Powell at the State Department. His most vital service to his country, however, has arguably been in the years since.

Wilkerson has become a blunt truth-teller, and of all the truths he has told, there is one that's especially personal and painful; one that, after so many years, he could have kept to himself, but decided not to. It's a story, now decades old, of truth, consequences, and a dead little girl. It is no less timely for that, offering essential lessons, especially to U.S. troops engaged in seemingly interminable wars that have left countless civilians, little girls included, dead.

Nail That Double Standard to the Mast!

Nail That Double Standard to the Mast!
Since there's one standard for automakers and another for bankers, the quickest way for GM to pick up some loose change would be to buy a few banks and thus get the company's mitts on some of the Treasury's $700 billion. If insurance companies are doing it, why not GM?

A story on the Bloomberg wire on November 17 told us that four of the world's biggest insurers, including Transamerica and Hartford Financial Services Group, may buy some ailing S&Ls in trouble with the Office of Thrift Supervision for making shifty loans. That way the insurance giants can join the excited line at the back door of the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and dip into the moolah. "Hartford's $10 million acquisition of Sanford, Florida-based Federal Trust Corp.," Bloomberg's reporters wrote, "may entitle it to $3.4 billion of U.S. capital. Lincoln National in Philadelphia may win access to $3 billion by taking over Newton County Loan & Savings, which has three full-time employees and $7.3 million of assets."

Robert Gates As Bad As Rumsfeld?

Robert Gates As Bad As Rumsfeld?
"As Bad As Rumsfeld?" The title jars, doesn't it. The more so, since Defense Secretary Robert Gates found his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, such an easy act to follow. But the jarring part reflects how malnourished most of us are on the thin gruel served up by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

Over the past few months, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has generated accolades from FCM pundits—like the Washington Post's David Ignatius—that read like letters of recommendation to graduate school. This comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with Gates' dexterity in orchestrating his own advancement. What DOES come as a surprise is the recurring rumor that President-elect Barack Obama may decide to put new wine in old wineskins by letting Gates stay.

What can Barack Obama be thinking?

I suspect that those in Obama's circle who are promoting Gates may be the same advisers responsible for Obama's most naïve comment of the recent presidential campaign: that the "surge" of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007-08 "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Succeeded? You betcha—the surge was a great success in terms of the administration's overriding objective. The aim was to stave off definitive defeat in Iraq until President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney could swagger from the West Wing into the western sunset on Jan. 20, 2009. As author Steve Coll has put it, "The decision [to surge] at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush's] presidency would not end with a defeat in history's eyes. By committing to the surge [the president] was certain to at least achieve a stalemate."

According to Bob Woodward, Bush told key Republicans in late 2005 that he would not withdraw from Iraq, "even if Laura and [first-dog] Barney are the only ones supporting me." Later, Woodward made it clear that Bush was well aware in fall 2006 that the U.S. was losing. Suddenly, with some fancy footwork, it became Laura, Barney—and Robert Gates. And at the turn of 2006-07 the short-term fix was in.

But Please, No More Troops!

By the fall of 2006 it had become unavoidably clear that a new course had to be chosen and implemented in Iraq, and virtually every sober thinker seemed opposed to sending more troops. The senior military, especially CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid and his man on the ground, Gen. George Casey, emphasized that sending still more U.S. troops to Iraq would simply reassure leading Iraqi politicians that they could relax and continue to take forever to get their act together.

Here, for example, is Gen. Abizaid's answer at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Nov. 15, 2006 to Sen. John McCain, who had long been pressing vigorously for sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq:

Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no. And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad sent a classified cable to Washington warning that "proposals to send more U.S. forces to Iraq would not produce a long-term solution and would make our policy less, not more, sustainable," according to a New York Times retrospective on the surge by Michael R. Gordon published on Aug. 31, 2008.

Khalilzad was arguing, unsuccessfully, for authority to negotiate a political solution with the Iraqis.

There was also the establishment-heavy Iraq Study Group, created by Congress and led by Republican stalwart James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton. After months of policy review during 2006—with Gates as a member—it issued a final report on Dec. 6, 2006, which began with the ominous sentence, "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." The report called for:

"A change in the primary mission of US. Forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly… By the first quarter of 2008…all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq."

Robert Gates, who was CIA director under President George H. W. Bush and then president of Texas A&M, had returned to the Washington stage as a member of the Iraq Study Group. While on the ISG, he evidenced no disagreement with its emerging conclusions—at least not until Bush asked him in early November if he might like to become secretary of defense.

Never one to let truth derail ambition, Gates suddenly saw things quite differently. After Bush announced his nomination on Nov. 8, Gates quit the ISG, but kept his counsel about its already widely reported recommendations.

Gates to the Rescue

Gates would do what he needed to do to become defense secretary. At his confirmation hearing on Dec. 5, he obscured his opinions by telling the Senate Armed Services Committee only that "all options are on the table in terms of Iraq." Many Democrats, however, assumed that Gates would help persuade Bush and Cheney to implement the ISG's recommendation of a troop drawdown.

With unanimous Democratic support and only two conservative Republicans opposed, Gates was confirmed by the full Senate on Dec. 6, the same day the ISG report was formally released.

Yet, the little-understood story behind Bush's decision to catapult Robert Gate into his Pentagon perch hinges on the astonishing fact that Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, was pulling a Robert McNamara; that is, he was going wobbly on a war based largely on his own hubris-laden, misguided advice. As Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com has reported, in the fall of 2006 Rumsfeld was having a reality attack. In Rumsfeldian parlance, the man had come face to face with a "known known."

On Nov. 6, 2006, a day before the midterm elections, Rumsfeld sent a memo to the White House (see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/world/middleeast/03mtext.html). In the memo Rumsfeld acknowledged, "Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." The rest of his memo sounded very much like the emerging troop-drawdown conclusions of the Iraq Study Group report.

The first 80 percent of Rumsfeld's memo addressed "Illustrative Options," including his preferred—or "above the line"—options like "an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases…to five by July 2007" and withdrawal of U.S. forces "from vulnerable positions—cities, patrolling, etc….so the Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country."

Finally, Rumsfeld had begun to listen to his generals and others who knew which end was up.

The hurdle? Bush and Cheney were not about to follow Rumsfeld's example in going wobbly. Like Robert McNamara at a similar juncture during Vietnam, Rumsfeld had to be let go before he caused a president to "lose a war."

Acutely sensitive to this political bugaboo, Rumsfeld included the following sentences at the end of the preferred-options section of his Nov. 6 memo:

"Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not 'lose.'" (emphasis added)

The remainder of the memo listed "Below the Line—less attractive options." The top three in the "less attractive" category were:

"--Continue on the current path.
--Move a large fraction of all U.S. forces into Baghdad to attempt to control it.
--Increase Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces substantially."

In other words, a surge. (It is a safe bet that people loyal to Rumsfeld at the National Security Council alerted him to the surge-type of plans being hatched off line by neo-conservative strategists, and that he and his generals wanted to bury them well "below the line.")

But in the White House's view, Rumsfeld had outlived his usefulness. One can assume that he floated these trial balloons with Cheney and others, before he sent over the actual memo on Nov. 6, 2006. What were Bush and Cheney to do?