They knew, but did nothing
By Philip Shenon, The Commission – The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation, Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2008
Repeatedly in 2001, [Richard] Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden’s network and the “nearly existential” threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage – in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke’s frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.

“Are we serious about dealing with the al-Qaeda threat?” he asked Rice. “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al-Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US.

Bass’s colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 email was so sensitive – and potentially damaging, especially to Rice – that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not “significantly reproduce” the wording of a classified document.

Bass decided he would have to try to memorise it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.

The day he discovered the document, Bass all but burst into the commission’s offices and rushed over to Hurley.

“Holy shit, chief,” Bass said excitedly. “You won’t believe what I found.”

He told Hurley that Clarke’s September 4 memo was a “document that grabs you by the throat, a document that you write when you’re at the end of your tether – or well past it”, as Clarke clearly was in the weeks before September 11. Hurley instantly understood the significance of what he was being told by Bass. The question for both men was whether Zelikow would allow them to share any of it with the public.

No torture. No exceptions
Washington Monthly, Jan/Feb/March, 2008
In most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly—despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.

Carbon output must near zero to avert danger, new studies say
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, March 10, 2008
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

“The question is, what if we don’t want the Earth to warm anymore?” asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about.”

Although many nations have been pledging steps to curb emissions for nearly a decade, the world’s output of carbon from human activities totals about 10 billion tons a year and has been steadily rising.

For now, at least, a goal of zero emissions appears well beyond the reach of politicians here and abroad. U.S. leaders are just beginning to grapple with setting any mandatory limit on greenhouse gases. The Senate is poised to vote in June on legislation that would reduce U.S. emissions by 70 percent by 2050; the two Democratic senators running for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), back an 80 percent cut. The Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), supports a 60 percent reduction by mid-century.

NSA’s domestic spying grows as agency sweeps up data
By Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2008
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Sniping by aides hurt Clinton’s image as manager
NYT – The morning after Senator Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign by winning five contests in one weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new campaign manager — Maggie Williams, who had taken over in a shake-up the night before — assembled the curious if demoralized staff.

“You may not like the person next to you,” Ms. Williams told dozens of aides who ringed the conference room at the campaign’s Virginia headquarters last month, according to participants. “But you’re going to respect them. And we’re going to work together.”

Ms. Williams’s demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected the urgent need to overhaul a campaign that at that point had set itself apart for its level of disorder and dysfunction.

Obama and the bigots
Nicholas Kristof – … the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn’t about either race or sex. It’s about religion.

Confronting the kitchen sink
Bob Herbert – We have seen election after election in which candidates have won by fanning the anxieties of voters. Elect me, or something terrible will happen to you! That is now the Clinton mantra, which is a measure of how grim our politics have become.

Sure, Obama’s a smart, sweet guy — but can he fight?
McClatchy – Can Barack Obama take a punch? Can he throw one? Will he fight back when sweet reason doesn’t work? Can he plunge into a smack-down without endangering the image he’s crafted as the avatar of a kinder, gentler politics that unites rather than divides?

The Israel litmus test
Aaron David Miller – Why do so many American Jews demand unwavering commitment to Israel from their politicians?

Iraq will not be a Qaedistan
Olivier Roy – One of the key questions in the U.S. presidential race is what will happen if U.S. troops leave Iraq. Of course nobody knows for sure. But I can say this: Al Qaeda will not take power and establish an Islamic state.

Feith assails colleagues over run-up to war
WP – In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Saudis offer pioneering therapy for ex-jihadists
The Observer – Psychologists are turning militants into model citizens as they ‘deradicalise’ and providing education and financial help with marriages and cars.

Lost from Lebanon
Franklin Lamb – The case of Brigitte Gabriel, anti-Muslim bigot and pro-Israel apologist, highlights the indignity of those that celebrate military aggression against ordinary civilians

Look out below. The arms race in space may be on
NYT – It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how badly war in space could unfold. An enemy — say, China in a confrontation over Taiwan, or Iran staring down America over the Iranian nuclear program — could knock out the American satellite system in a barrage of antisatellite weapons, instantly paralyzing American troops, planes and ships around the world.

The unstudied art of interrogation
NYT – How do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.

Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton’s ‘silly’ Irish peace claims
By Toby Harnden, The Telegraph, March 8, 2008
Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”

Clinton’s experience claim under scrutiny
By Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2008
The debate over readiness for the global arena is emerging as the flash point in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, crystallized by a dramatic Clinton campaign commercial asking who is best prepared to answer a 3 a.m. phone call to the White House during a crisis.

Clinton says she is the answer, arguing that Obama’s major achievement was his early opposition to the Iraq war in 2002. Indeed, Obama doesn’t have much in the way of experience managing foreign crises, nor does Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, for that matter. In fact, it is rare for any president to have that kind of experience before coming into office.

In Clinton’s case, she may well have exercised influence on foreign policy that is hard to document because she had a unique opportunity to offer private counsel to her husband, President Bill Clinton.

But while Hillary Clinton represented the U.S. on the world stage at important moments while she was first lady, there is scant evidence that she played a pivotal role in major foreign policy decisions or in managing global crises.

Breaking the final rule
By Gary Hart, Huffington Post, March 7, 2008
It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party’s nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party’s nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

As a veteran of red telephone ads and “where’s the beef” cleverness, I am keenly aware that sharp elbows get thrown by those trailing in the fourth quarter (and sometimes even earlier). “Politics ain’t beanbag,” is the old slogan. But that does not mean that it must also be rule-or-ruin, me-first-and-only-me, my way or the highway. That is not politics. That is raw, unrestrained ambition for power that cannot accept the will of the voters.

McCain’s consistent folly on Iraq
By Steve Chapman, RealClearPolitics, March 6, 2008
On the campaign trail, John McCain has retreated on immigration, changed his mind on tax cuts and admitted economics is not his strong suit. But all that’s unimportant, we are told, because he was Right On Iraq — back at the beginning, when he endorsed the invasion, and again over the past year, when he has stoutly supported the surge. So, whichever Democrat he faces, the November election could be a referendum on the Iraq war and his support for it.

If so, that may not be a plus for McCain. McCain has been consistent about Iraq, in the sense of being consistently wrong. If the American people get a long look at what he’s said and a clear picture of our fortunes in Iraq, he may yearn for the days when he was being pilloried for offering “amnesty” to illegal immigrants.

The Iran hawks’ latest surge
By Gregory Levey, Salon, March 7, 2008
Recently, I asked former Mossad officer Michael Ross what he thought of the latest U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released in December, which downplayed the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. “That farce?” he replied, adding that many in Israeli intelligence were “furious about it — not just the conclusion of the estimate, but its timing as well.” Some Iran hawks believe that the United Nations Security Council was poised at the time, with the United States leading the charge, to tighten the vice on the Iranian regime with tough new sanctions. But in the wake of the NIE’s disclosure, there was a powerful shift in world opinion about Iran’s alleged nuclear program, and the momentum was apparently lost.

Quiet US support for Egypt’s Gaza effort
By Anne Gearan, AP, March 7, 2008
To defuse the threat from Gaza militants to Israel and President Bush’s Mideast peace program, the U.S. has decided that the ends justify the means.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, is considered a terrorist group by Washington. U.S. law forbids official contacts. Nonetheless, the Bush administration is giving quiet support for Egypt’s attempt to broker a deal with Hamas for a truce in Gaza.

Under this approach, which U.S. officials and Mideast diplomats confirmed, Hamas would halt rocket attacks from Gaza. Israel would agree not to launch the kind of military incursions that nearly wrecked the U.S.-sponsored peace talks last weekend and would ease its blockade of Gaza.

Another milestone on the road to serfdom
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, March 8, 2008
This weekend, the darkness continues to descend in Washington, the powers of the state continue to grow and the mechanisms of accountability rot away unused. Americans are focused on the selection of a new president. Many of them share the naïve assumption that on January 20, 2009, when a new leader takes the oath of office from the south steps of the Capitol Building, the Founders’ constitutional order will once more be set aright and the extra-constitutional excesses of the Bush years will be but a bad memory. But whoever is installed as the new guardian of presidential power will not likely part with many of the rights that Bush claimed and was allowed to use, unchallenged.

And this weekend, we should regard the three remaining candidates from a more skeptical predicate. This weekend, the curtain of tyranny descends further in Washington. The Bush regime, bolstered by a surging 17% public acceptance in one poll, moves more closely towards a façade of legality for its national surveillance state. It acknowledges its abuse of other legislation and will suffer no consequences for that abuse, and in a symbolic coup de grâce, Bush will veto the latest Congressional prohibition on torture–for indeed, torture is the very talisman of his unchecked rule and his arrogant indifference to the rule of law. And in the midst of this, where, this weekend, are the three presidential finalists? They busy themselves with the accumulation of delegates for their march on the White House. They will mutter fine sounding words on the campaign trail—sentences will glimmer with “freedom” and “liberty”—but they will offer no action that shows those words have content.

Bush announces veto of waterboarding ban
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, March 8, 2008
President Bush vetoed Saturday legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, saying it “would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror.”

“This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.

Why Iraq could blow up in John McCain’s face
By Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch, March 8, 2008
In Baghdad the Iraqi government is eager to give the impression that peace is returning. “Not a single sectarian murder or displacement was reported in over a month,” claimed Brigadier Qasim Ata, the spokesman for the security plan for the capital. In the US, the Surge, the dispatch of 30,000 extra American troops in the first half of 2007, is portrayed as having turned the tide in Iraq. Democrats in Congress no longer call aggressively for a withdrawal of American troops. The supposed military success in Iraq has been brandished by Senator John McCain as vindication of his prowar stance.

Sadr takes break from politics, cites failures
By Liz Sly, Chicago Tribune, March 8, 2008
Iraq’s elusive Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr has decided to drop out of politics for the time being because his disillusionment with the political scene in Iraq has left him sick and anxious, he said in an unusually personal letter to his followers released Friday.

In a written response to a query from a group of followers asking why he hadn’t been seen in public for so long, Sadr said he had decided to devote himself to a period of study, reflection and prayer after failing in his core mission to rid Iraq of the U.S. occupation or to turn it into an Islamic society.

He also cited the betrayal of some followers, whom he accused of falling prey to “materialistic” politics.

“So far I did not succeed either to liberate Iraq or make it an Islamic society — whether because of my own inability or the inability of society, only God knows,” Sadr wrote.

Officials lean toward keeping next Iraq assessment secret
By Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, March 7, 2008
A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

8 burials for Jerusalem seminary’s dead
By Isabel Kershner and Steven Erlanger, New York Times, March 8, 2008
It was unclear what group, if any, was responsible for the massacre. The radical Islamic Hamas movement, which praised the deed on Thursday but did not claim it, on Friday took responsibility in an anonymous phone call to the Reuters news agency and said that details would come later. But Fawzi Barhoum, a senior Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said that no claim was official unless made in a written statement signed by the military wing of Hamas. The gunman’s family said he was intensely religious but did not belong to any militant group.

Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that the government would act after proper investigation and deliberation, and he condemned those, like Hamas, who celebrated the killings with parades in Gaza. “That Hamas calls this a heroic act, and praises it, this exposes them for what they are,” he said.

The young men died as they were studying in the library of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, a major center for the national-religious movement that provides the backbone of Israeli settlement in the West Bank — settlements like this one, which Israel intends to keep in any future peace treaty.

Gazans see attack on yeshiva as unusual achievement
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, March 7, 2008
The celebratory shooting in the air in Gaza that followed the terrorist attack in Jerusalem last night showed that the penetration of Merkaz Harav was viewed as an unusual political and military achievement for the group responsible.

The attack brought something to a wide public in the Gaza Strip that it had been waiting for all week – revenge.

The horror scenes from Gaza at the beginning of the week sent Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups racing for a terror attack, knowing that whoever managed to pull one off first would score major points in the Arab and Palestinian street.

Talk to Hamas
By Nehemia Shtrasler, Haaretz, March 4, 2008
In these days “all of Gaza has become Hamas,” a former Fatah security officer who is far from being a Hamas supporter, told Haaretz. Al Jazeera is broadcasting to every home the horror pictures of the deaths of dozens of children and women.

In this situation, hatred triumphs and the only hope is the desire to take revenge. The rocket launchers are thus the heroes who gain the people’s sympathy, and support for Hamas is not getting any smaller – it’s growing.

So there is no escape but to talk to Hamas. We cannot choose our enemies. We embraced Yasser Arafat after saying for dozens of years (in the words of Yitzhak Rabin) that “we’ll meet the PLO only on the battlefield.”

U.S. policy is gasoline on the Gaza fires
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, March 4, 2008
Once upon a time, Israelis and Palestinians looked to the U.S. to intervene at moments of heightened confrontation to mediate between the two sides and contain the damage. The Bush Administration, however, has proved entirely incapable of playing this role, because its own diplomatic efforts are hidebound by the requirements of its own war on Hamas.

Condi Rice is sticking doggedly to that script, even though all the other players are making clear that the game is up. The New York Times tells us, for example, that U.S. officials are worried that efforts to broker a cease-fire to end the carnage in Gaza might undermine Washington’s priority, which is not to restore peace, but to isolate and eliminate Hamas: “Ms. Rice wants to avoid the word ‘cease-fire’ because administration officials believe that a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas — which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization — would legitimize Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people,” the Times reports. “The fear, administration officials said, is that a negotiated cease-fire would likely undermine Mr. Abbas and make it look like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating, and not Mr. Abbas.”

Israeli journalism
By Yonatan Mendel, London Review of Books, March 6, 2008
A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.