at-Largely

Former Republican Senator's "Chilling Account" of first meeting with Cheney...

The below snip is taken from former Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee's new book, Against the Tide, featured on NPR:

"Early in December 2000, Senator Specter asked Richard Cheney, our Republican vice presidential candidate, to have lunch with us on Wednesday, December 13. The vote-counting fiasco in Florida was under way and no one knew whether Texas Governor George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore had been elected the nation's 43rd president.

Then, the night before we were to meet with Mr. Cheney, the news broke: the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the Florida recount unconstitutional. The Court authorized Katharine Harris, Florida's Republican secretary of state, to declare Bush and Cheney victorious.

We Republicans had won the presidency by a single vote in the Electoral College and a single vote in the Supreme Court. In the executive branch, winning by a whisker is as good as winning in a landslide, but not so in the Senate. For the first time in a century we had a Senate split down the middle, 50-50, with a Republican vice president available to break a tie in our favor. That whisker-thin margin of victory had real consequences to my way of thinking.

It meant that our small club of five moderate Republican votes would be vital to President-elect Bush if he had any hope of getting his legislative initiatives through.

That was why Vice President-elect Richard Cheney came to our lunch that day: Not to say he needed us, but to tell us that he and George W. Bush were in charge and no one else.

In steady, quiet tones, the Vice President-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: A clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness.

We would seek confrontation on every front. He said nothing about education or the environment or health care; it was all about these new issues that were rarely, if ever, touted in the campaign. The new administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us. I knew that what the Vice President-elect was saying would rip the closely divided Congress apart. We moderates had often voted with President Clinton on things that powerful Republican constituencies didn't like: an increase in the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights, and campaign finance reform.

Mr. Cheney knew this, but he ticked off the issues at the top of his agenda and did it fearlessly. It made no difference to him that we were potential adversaries; he was going down his to-do list and checking off Confrontation Number 1.

Senator Arlen Specter spoke first. As the most junior member, I would have my say last, if at all. I could hardly sit still as I waited to hear my respected friend wade into this outrageous manifesto.

And then, in a moment I can only describe as infuriating, Senator Specter took no leadership role in representing the moderate point of view. He acquiesced, and others followed his example.

As each of my colleagues spoke in turn, I waited for one of them to push back. Surely one of them would have the presence of mind to say, Whoa! Time out! What are you talking about, Mister Vice President? You weren't elected to scrap international agreements. You never said to the voters: Elect us and we promise to bring back deficit spending and drive the next generation into debt.

But no one resisted. We sat there and listened as Mr. Cheney made divisive pronouncements of policy that would come as a complete surprise to many of the Americans who had voted to elect the Bush/Cheney ticket. I stopped waiting for someone to challenge Mr. Cheney when I saw my Republican friends around the table nodding in agreement as he held forth.

Jeff's Week Endnotes

Posted by Jeff Huber

Here are the stories that got my attention this week.

1. Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, “U.S. Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan,” Washington Post, Thursday. 
Wright and Warrick note that U.S. strikes on al Qaeda sites (i.e., “villages”) in Pakistan are taking place in accord with “a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan.”  My question is, and has been, who in the U.S. is ordering these operations and under what authority?  I’ve also asked this question about Somalia, where we’re also bombing selected al Qaeda villages. 

I’ve heard the answer that the host governments have invited us in, and that’s dandy.  But host governments don’t order U.S. troops into hostilities; the president does that, and he does it with either a) a declaration of war from Congress or b) specific statutory authority of Congress.  One can reasonably argue that the original Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of September 2001 covers our activities in Afghanistan, and the separate Iraq AUMF authorizes combat actions there.  But there is no AUMF for Pakistan or Somalia.  No one in Congress or, that I can find, the mainstream media is raising an eyebrow over this, although plenty of these folks are screaming about other executive branch abuses of constitutional authority.

More Saudi Censorship Ploys...

Saudi billionaire and terrorist financier, Khalid bin Mahfouz, is a bit upset because a new book documents his role... wait for it... as a terrorist financier.

Mahfouz is so upset about the publication of Funding Evil: How Terrorism  is Financed and How to Stop It, that he is willing to make sure the book's author, Rachel Ehrenfeld, serves as an example to others who are interested in following the money to his doorstep.

"Rachel Ehrenfeld writes about terrorism for a living. But now she is the one who feels targeted. Her modest midtown Manhattan apartment is filled to the ceiling with books, most having to do with global terror networks and Mideast conflict. Sitting at her desk, she gazes out at the Hudson River. She says she has a hard time placing her work. She says she has been blacklisted. If she travels to England, she fears she will be arrested.

"I feel like a leper," she said.

Ehrenfeld faces a $225,000 judgment obtained in a British court in a libel suit brought by a former banker to the Saudi royal family, billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz. "That's the Damocles sword effect. He's holding it above my head to intimidate me and others," she said.

The source of the trouble is Ehrenfeld's book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It," published by Bonus Books. In it, she named bin Mahfouz as a financier of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Bin Mahfouz responded by suing Ehrenfeld -- not in the U.S., but in England, which is friendlier to libel claims.

Bin Mahfouz maintains Ehrenfeld's statements about him are false and reckless and says she is perpetuating myths that have followed him around the globe, endangering his business affairs."

I think Mahfouz protests too much. The reality of his involvement in terrorism networks is undeniable. Let's focus on just on, of many, ties that Mahfouz has to terrorism - let's focus on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal. I warn you now that you will need to do some reading, because this is far too complex for a summary.

• Congressional Investigation (Senator Kerry's report) on the BCCI scandal
• BCCI Overview
• FAS's excellent overview of the players in the BCCI scandal, as well as the role of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi
• The Pakistani ISI's funding (BCCI)

Iraq, In Books - Feith And Chalibi

Posted By Cernig

Just a quick heads-up on two new books to add to the vast body of "he's to blame" literature about the Iraq war, which by now has come to be split into two distinct sub-genres. The first is by Douglas Feith and is of the "he's to blame, not me" sub-genre now perfected by ex-officials of the Bush administration. Emptywheel de-constructs the internal politics of the 900-page belated CYA. He ends with what should be the book-jacket blurb:

900 pages of Dougie Feith insisting that if only Ahmad Chalabi had been given control of Iraq, all of Dougie's dreams of flourishing democracy would have succeeded.

Which brings us neatly to Aram Roston’s “The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.” Muckraked digs into this example of the "he's to blame, exposed" sub-genre and finds, among other gems, that Chalibi supported McCain over Bush back in 2000 as the man most likely to deliver Chalibi's dreams of Iraqi rule.

The Spooks And Media Stenography

Posted By Cernig

The UK's Independent newspaper has an excerpt today from Nick Davies new book "Flat Earth News", in which he "argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale". It's well worth a read.

Davies points to the way in which one minor terror figure - Abu Musab al Zarqawi - was hyped by propaganda which succeeded in turning him into the very thing they said he was, increasing Al Qaeda's influence in Iraq and endangering US troops in the process. Powell mentioned him in his 2003 address to the UN and every statement about Zarqawi turned out to be false. Letters from him appeared and were widely pushed by the Pentagon and media stenographers - even though those letters were fakes. And then:

the US campaign on Zarqawi eventually succeeded in creating its own reality. By elevating him from his position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US campaign to "villainise Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy audience, making it easier for him to raise funds, to attract "unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni Iraqis and to score huge impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in December 2004, Osama bin Laden gave in to this constructed reality, buried his differences with the Jordanian and declared him the leader of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation.

But he also writes about the wider black propaganda war:

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

...This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

...So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?

Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group [the MeK - C], for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

There's no actual law to prevent British intelligence producing such propaganda. And in the U.S., the Pentagon and CIA have made it clear that they follow the Bush administration's claim that Constitutional rights stop at the border. If the Pentagon produces black propaganda in Iraq or gives it to a UK newspaper, then that isn't illegal. If US media stenographers then pick up on those reports and import them wholesale and unexamined back to the U.S., then that's the media's lookout as far as they are concerned. But despite the Bush administration and its intelligence producers saying this clearly, the mainstream media continues to churn and repeat their overseas press releases as gospel.

'The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington' by Ronald Brownstein

I have not yet read the book, but from this column I get the sense that the Brownstein is the most sane person adding to the current public debate about politics:

"Take the concept of an hourglass economy, in which the middle is squeezed to near nonexistence, and apply it to politics -- the major parties and the gravitations of the electorate -- and you have approximated our plight as Ronald Brownstein lays it out in "The Second Civil War." Wielding a catchphrase lifted from Ken Mehlman, campaign manager for George W. Bush in 2004 and chairman of the Republican National Committee for part of Bush's second term, Brownstein calls this "the age of hyperpartisanship," in which almost every force related to our political life "operates as an integrated machine to push the parties apart and to sharpen the disagreements in American life."

Party leaders have taken the gloves off, and Brownstein wants them put back on before we're sorry -- although he suspects many of us, whether red state or blue, are sorry already and waving the white flag. "What's unusual now is that the political system is more polarized than the country," he writes, and "the impulse to harmonize divergent interests has almost vanished from the capital"; increasing divergence, "not the breadth of the underlying divisions itself, is the defining characteristic of our era."'

I tend to see it as the Cold Civil War, but agree entirely that if something does not change soon, we will in fact end up in a violent domestic war.

"Brownstein, former chief political correspondent for The Times and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of presidential elections, contends that we are caught in a feedback loop of extremism in party politics: The GOP delivered a punishing preemptive strike, and the Democrats, caught off guard and pummeled from snoozy to woozy, are attempting to shake it off by fighting back in equally blunt fashion. Like a breeder reactor, this type of politics creates its own fuel.

Many surely consider revivified opposition to the party in power all to the good, but Brownstein argues cogently for why the overall situation is not, and why -- when it comes to such matters as border security, budgetary concerns, greenhouse gases and fighting terrorism -- we are stalemated by either/or choices and kept from "the constructive compromises between the parties required to confront these problems." Using polls from Gallup and the Pew Foundation and election studies conducted since 1948 by the University of Michigan to buttress his points, along with plentiful interview material and examples drawn from congressional history throughout the last century and into this one, Brownstein presents both a biting critique of current political practices and an investigation into their origins."

So, time to buy the book me thinks. What do you folks think? Would things better if we separated into smaller countries like the EU? Or is it better to remain tied together, despite the abuses?