Charity Begins With One's Enemies

Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic, David Atkins observes, are significantly less enthusiastic about voting in 2012 than are Republicans. The "professional left," critical of the White House's approach and derided (at least until recently) by the Administration, seems to have been right all along.

Atkins cites three reasons for the enthusiasm gap: 1) "playing nice with Republicans is a fool's errand;" 2) "playing nice with Wall Street is pointless;" and 3) "abandoning the base is a very dangerous thing to do politically."

Whoa. Let's go back to #2.

Atkins points out that Wall Street has turned against the President, switching allegiance to the Repub Party (as it did in 2010) and especially to Mitt Romney. The Los Angeles Times cites hurt feelings when Obama referred to "fat cat bankers." But as Joan Walsh writes (and with which Atkins surely would agree), little has been effectuated to reform the financial sector, given

whether it’s “Volcker’s Rule” keeping banks out of speculative, proprietary trading; Gensler’s effort to force the trading of poorly understood derivatives on “exchanges” where their shady contents could be better examined; or Bair’s push for a contingency plan to force the toxic behemoth Citibank into bankruptcy; the tough reforms never materialized. They were watered down to insignificance, or as in the case of the Citi breakup, abandoned completely.

Jon Stewart, therefore, asked on September 20 of Ron Suskind, author of Confidence Men, the key question (video below):

We keep hearing that the Wall Street guys hate Obama, and my sense is ‘why?’ They’ve had it as good as anyone in this country over the past two and a half years, probably better. What’s their beef?

That elicited the answer that sums up this Administration better than has almost anything. Suskind responded

I asked the same question. I talked to a senior Wall Street guy. I said '"what gives with this thing with Obama? You're after him; he's anti-business. God, he couldn't have done more. He basically opened the federal purse for you guys. He saved your skin." This guy says "you bet, you bet.'" And he says "no, no, you see. Of course, he's not anti-business. But when we say he's anti-business, he just ends up dong more for us. So we're going to keep saying it."

You, the reader, suspected this. But now we know it.

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Torture And False Confessions

As early as January 22, 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney was hard at work trying to convince the American people of a link between Sadaam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The Center for American Progress quotes him as claiming

There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there.

CAP notes the following sources as refutation of this central claim of the war:

"According to documents, "Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. The document provides another piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda terrorists." [NY Times, 1/15/04]

"CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam." [NY Times, 1/15/04]

"Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Powell said." [NY Times, 1/9/04]

“Three former Bush Administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying Al Qaeda was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.” [National Journal, 8/9/03]

Declassified documents “undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.” [LA Times, 7/19/03].

“The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.” [NY Times, 6/27/03]

"U.S. allies have found no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.'We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' said Europe's top investigator. 'If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.’" [LA Times, 11/4/02]

But sometimes a lie dies a slow death, and fictitious claims of a connection may be at the heart of the current controversy over the torture regime established by the CIA. According to this article in the New York Times, the enhanced interrogation tactics taught to the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency were based on a chart which in turn "had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."

Torture as a means to obtain false confessions. Now here is investigative journalist Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World, explaining on Rachel Maddow on 4/22:

I heard some of that back when I was reporting the book, but I really couldn‘t confirm it and you need, you know, several sources confirming to put it in the book.

And what‘s fascinating here, if you run the timeline side by side, you see, really, for the first time from that report that the key thing being sent down in terms of the request by the policymakers, by the White House, is find a link between Saddam and al Qaeda so that we essentially can link Saddam to the 9/11 attacks and then march into Iraq with the anger of 9/11 behind us. That was the goal and that was being passed down as the directive.

It‘s, you know, it‘s often called the requirement inside the CIA for both agents with their sources and interrogators with their captives. “Here‘s what we‘re interested in, here‘s what we, the duly elected leaders, want to hear about. Tell us what you can find.”

What‘s fascinating, in the Senate report, is finally clear confirmation that that specific thing was driving many of the activities, and mind you, the frustration inside of the White House that was actually driving action. The quote, in fact, inside of the Senate report from a major said that as frustration built inside of the White House, that there was no link that was established—because the CIA told the White House from the very start there is no Saddam/al Qaeda link. We checked it out. We did every which way. Sorry.

The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.

Mind you, Rachel, this is important. This is not about an impetus to foil an upcoming potential al Qaeda attacks. The impetus here is largely political diplomatic. The White House had a political diplomatic problem. It wanted it solved in the run-up to the war....

My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.

Perhaps this is what Dick Cheney means when he refers to the "success" of the "enhanced interrogation" tactics. The scheme was borrowed from the (Chinese) Communists who got false confessions out of it, and the Administration needed someone on the other side, a terrorist, an enemy combatant, somebody to say there was a connection between the guy the U.S. military deposed and the architects of the worst attack ever on American soil. This may seem nefarious, but for the crew who ran things, their way, into the ground the last eight years, pretty standard fare.

Attack On Iran?

In a report it was not able to confirm, the Jerusalem Post on September 1, 2008 wrote

The Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, has called off an operation aimed at infiltrating and sabotaging Iran's weapons industry due to an assessment that a US attack on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program is imminent, according to a report in the country's De Telegraaf newspaper on Friday.

The report claimed that the Dutch operation had been "extremely successful," and had been stopped because the US military was planning to hit targets that were "connected with the Dutch espionage action.

This reminded me of an interview with Ron Suskind, author of "The Way of the World," on 8/7/08 on National Public Radio's Fresh Air.

NPR: I want to talk just a little about this fascinating episode you describe in the summer of 2006, when President Bush is very anxious about some intelligence briefings that he is getting from the British. What are they telling him?

SUSKIND: In late July of 2006, the British are moving forward on a mission they’ve been–an investigation they’ve been at for a year at that point, where they’ve got a group of “plotters,” so-called, in the London area that they’ve been tracking…Bush gets this briefing at the end of July of 2006, and he’s very agitated. When Blair comes at the end of the month, they talk about it and he says, “Look, I want this thing, this trap snapped shut immediately.” Blair’s like, “Well, look, be patient here. What we do in Britain”–Blair describes, and this is something well known to Bush–”is we try to be more patient so they move a bit forward. These guys are not going to breathe without us knowing it. We’ve got them all mapped out so that we can get actual hard evidence, and then prosecute them in public courts of law and get real prosecutions and long prison terms”…Well, Bush doesn’t get the answer he wants, which is “snap the trap shut.” And the reason he wants that is because he’s getting all sorts of pressure from Republicans in Congress that his ratings are down. These are the worst ratings for a sitting president at this point in his second term, and they’re just wild-eyed about the coming midterm elections. Well, Bush expresses his dissatisfaction to Cheney as to the Blair meeting, and Cheney moves forward.

NPR: So you got the British saying, “Let’s carefully build our case. Let’s get more intelligence.” Bush wants an arrest and a political win. What does he do?

SUSKIND: Absolutely. What happens is that then, oh, a few days later, the CIA operations chief–which is really a senior guy. He’s up there in the one, two, three spots at CIA, guy named Jose Rodriguez ends up slipping quietly into Islamabad, Pakistan, and he meets secretly with the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. And suddenly a guy in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf, who’s kind of the contact of the British plotters in Pakistan, gets arrested. This, of course, as anyone could expect, triggers a reaction in London, a lot of scurrying. And the Brits have to run through the night wild-eyed and basically round up 25 or 30 people. It’s quite a frenzy. The British are livid about this. They talk to the Americans. The Americans kind of shrug, “Who knows? You know, ISI picked up Rashid Rauf.”

NPR: So the British did not even get a heads-up from the United States that this arrest was going to happen?

SUSKIND: Did not get a heads-up. In fact, the whole point was to mislead the British…The British did not know about it, frankly, until I reported it in the book…What’s interesting is that the White House already had its media plan already laid out before all of this occurred so that the president and vice president immediately–even, in Cheney’s case, before the arrest, the day before–started to capitalize on the war on terror rhetoric and political harvest, which of course they used for weeks to come, right into the fall, about, “The worst plot since 9/11, that has been foiled, and this is why you want us in power.”

Apparently, by July of 2006 the White House had developed a scheme to maximize political advantage for the GOP in the upcoming fall elections, by exploiting arrest of plotters across the ocean to convince voters to keep his party in power. That month, Prime Minister Blair visited President Bush and advised the American president that the British are methodically moving on this group of plotters in the London area so as to gather sufficient evidence and prosecute the individuals most effectively. Mr. Bush was not pleased and voila!: a few days later a CIA agent met secretly with the Pakistani intelligence service, which then arrested the guy who is the contact in Pakistan for the British plotters. Angry, the British were left with with no option than suddenly one night to zip around and arrest, prematurely, 25-30 individuals.

I don't know whether the report in the Dutch newspaper is accurate. Hopefully, it is not, at least in part because it would be another example of George W. Bush as "cowboy"- the go it alone impulse of a President more concerned with his ego than with international cooperation to fight terrorism.

Just Another Priority

Suppose you have been concerned: over the rise of terrorism in the Gulf as a result of our invasion of Iraq; the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan, with the growing strength of Al Qaeda in northwestern Pakistan; inadequate inspection of shipping containers entering the United States; or with apparent partisan political considerations in hiring practices at the Department of Justice. Suppose, in other words, that the priority placed by the Bush Administration on combatting terrorism has you concerned.

Nevertheless, you are reminded again by Repub politicians that there has been no terrorist attack inside the United States since September 11, 2001. Perhaps you're almost convinced.

But don't be. A posting of 8/8/08 by Jonathan Schwarz on the site thismodernworld.com links to the interview of the previous day on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" of Ron Suskind, author most recently of "The Way of the World." Here Schwarz's excerpt of the interview, in which President Bush's reaction and response to the British investigation of terrorists in 2006 is described:



NPR: I want to talk just a little about this fascinating episode you describe in the summer of 2006, when President Bush is very anxious about some intelligence briefings that he is getting from the British. What are they telling him?

SUSKIND: In late July of 2006, the British are moving forward on a mission they’ve been–an investigation they’ve been at for a year at that point, where they’ve got a group of “plotters,” so-called, in the London area that they’ve been tracking…Bush gets this briefing at the end of July of 2006, and he’s very agitated. When Blair comes at the end of the month, they talk about it and he says, “Look, I want this thing, this trap snapped shut immediately.” Blair’s like, “Well, look, be patient here. What we do in Britain”–Blair describes, and this is something well known to Bush–”is we try to be more patient so they move a bit forward. These guys are not going to breathe without us knowing it. We’ve got them all mapped out so that we can get actual hard evidence, and then prosecute them in public courts of law and get real prosecutions and long prison terms”…

Well, Bush doesn’t get the answer he wants, which is “snap the trap shut.” And the reason he wants that is because he’s getting all sorts of pressure from Republicans in Congress that his ratings are down. These are the worst ratings for a sitting president at this point in his second term, and they’re just wild-eyed about the coming midterm elections. Well, Bush expresses his dissatisfaction to Cheney as to the Blair meeting, and Cheney moves forward.

NPR: So you got the British saying, “Let’s carefully build our case. Let’s get more intelligence.” Bush wants an arrest and a political win. What does he do?

SUSKIND: Absolutely. What happens is that then, oh, a few days later, the CIA operations chief–which is really a senior guy. He’s up there in the one, two, three spots at CIA, guy named Jose Rodriguez ends up slipping quietly into Islamabad, Pakistan, and he meets secretly with the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. And suddenly a guy in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf, who’s kind of the contact of the British plotters in Pakistan, gets arrested. This, of course, as anyone could expect, triggers a reaction in London, a lot of scurrying. And the Brits have to run through the night wild-eyed and basically round up 25 or 30 people. It’s quite a frenzy. The British are livid about this. They talk to the Americans. The Americans kind of shrug, “Who knows? You know, ISI picked up Rashid Rauf.”

NPR: So the British did not even get a heads-up from the United States that this arrest was going to happen?

SUSKIND: Did not get a heads-up. In fact, the whole point was to mislead the British…The British did not know about it, frankly, until I reported it in the book…
What’s interesting is that the White House already had its media plan already laid out before all of this occurred so that the president and vice president immediately–even, in Cheney’s case, before the arrest, the day before–started to capitalize on the war on terror rhetoric and political harvest, which of course they used for weeks to come, right into the fall, about, “The worst plot since 9/11, that has been foiled, and this is why you want us in power.”


To summarize: by July of 2006 the White House has developed a scheme to maximize political advantage for the GOP in the upcoming fall elections, by exploiting arrest of plotters across the ocean to convince voters to keep his party in power. That month, Prime Minister Blair visits President Bush and advises the American president that the British are methodically moving on this group of plotters in the London area so as to gather sufficient evidence and prosecute the individuals most effectively. Mr. Bush is not pleased and voila!: a few days later a CIA agent meets secretly with the Pakistani intelligence service, which then arrests the guy who is the contact in Pakistan for the British plotters. Angry, the British are left with with no option than suddenly one night to zip around and arrest, prematurely, 25-30 individuals.

Yes, President Bush is concerned with terrorism. It has been one of his highest priorities, after overthrowing the dictator in Iraq who bedeviled his father; expanding the power of the Executive Branch over American citizens; establishing corporate control of the country; producing electoral gains for the Repub party; and a few other things. We can be thankful we haven't been hit in this country in almost seven years- but it is in spite of, rather than because of, GWB.

Again, Our Failed President

There is important news coming out of the book "Way of the World" written by investigative journalist Ron Suskind, published on August 5, 2008. Suskind reports that the White House ordered George Tenet's CIA to forge a letter (first "revealed" in 12/03) from Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, and politico.com quotes the author:

The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.

Suskind writes also that, prior to the invasion, an unnamed, top Iraqi intelligence official informed the CIA that there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

There have been denials all around but Suskind assured Keith Olberman on 8/5/08 that his interviews were taped.

It seems, therefore, that the Bush Administration was unsure about the existence of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and that intelligence was rigged to demonstrate a link between the 9/11 hijackers and Saddam Hussein. And Suskind believes that GW Bush thus may have committed an impeachable offense by violating a statute prohibiting the CIA from conducting covert operations “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media.”

Suskind makes other interesting points, including one about an American President whom, you may recall, on July 16, 2001 at a press conference gushed about former KGB agent Vladimir Putin

I very much enjoyed our time together. He's an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable leader. I believe his leadership will serve Russia well.

And who a few minutes later in response to a question said something even more idiotic:

I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.

Politico reports that Suskind writes:

In the first days of his presidency, Bush rejected advice from the CIA to wiretap Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2001 in Vienna, where he was staying in a hotel where the CIA had a listening device planted in the wall of the presidential suite, in need only of a battery change...."The CIA had warned him that Putin “was a trained KGB agent … [who] wants you to think he’s your friend.”

From Truman to Bush 41, Democrat and Republican, nine American Presidents served during the Cold War and contributed to bringing down the Iron Curtain. Fortunately, George W. Bush did not occupy the Oval Office during that period. I hear Russian is a difficult language to learn.