Category Archives: Bush Administration

OPINION: Murky oil deals for Bush cronies

Iraq oil deal gets everybody’s attention
By Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post, September 24, 2007

The oil deal signed between Hunt Oil and the government in Iraq’s Kurdish region earlier this month has raised eyebrows, in no small part because it appears to undercut President Bush’s hope that Iraq could draft national legislation to share revenue from the country’s vast oil reserves. Making the deal more curious is that it was crafted by one of the administration’s staunchest supporters, Ray Hunt.

Hunt, chief executive of the Dallas-based company, has been a major fundraiser and contributor to Bush’s presidential campaigns. He also serves on the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, putting him close to the latest information developed by the nation’s intelligence agencies.

If Hunt is signing regional oil deals in Iraq, critics ask, what does he know about the prospects for a long-stalled national oil law that others don’t? [complete article]

OPINION: Cost of war in Iraq

What it may cost to stay in Iraq
By David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, September 24, 2007

The latest estimates of the cost of the Iraq war by Steven Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, puts the cost of the Iraq war so far (measured by congressional appropriations) at $450 billion, and that of the Afghanistan operation at $127 billion. By the end of fiscal year 2008, about a year away, the combined bill will be $808 billion.

“The war in Iraq, alone,” notes Mr. Kosiak, “has already cost the US more in real [inflation-adjusted dollars] than the 1991 Gulf War and the Korean War, and it will almost certainly surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by the end of next year.”

If the two military operations drag on for a decade, the cost could amount to between $1.09 trillion and $1.62 trillion, he speculates, depending partly on what level of military forces are left in the two nations.

Those numbers, admits Kosiak, don’t include the cost of the extra debt piled up by Washington to pay for the operations. Those would add “several hundred million” more to the bill in the next decade. He says the Bush administration has put the cost of the operations “on the national credit card.” [complete article]

NEWS: Criticism for AG nominee

Post-9/11 cases fuel criticism for nominee
By Philip Shenon, New York Times, September 24, 2007

The 21-year-old Jordanian immigrant was in shackles when he was brought into the courtroom of Judge Michael B. Mukasey in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

It was Oct. 2, 2001, and the prisoner, Osama Awadallah, then a college student in San Diego with no criminal record, was one of dozens of Arab men detained around the country in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks as potential witnesses in the terrorism investigation.

Before the hearing, Mr. Awadallah told his lawyer that he had been beaten in the federal detention center in Manhattan, producing bruises that were hidden beneath his orange prison jumpsuit. But when his lawyer told this to Judge Mukasey, the judge seemed little concerned.

“As far as the claim that he was beaten, I will tell you that he looks fine to me,” said Judge Mukasey, who was nominated by President Bush last week to be his third attorney general and is now facing Senate confirmation hearings. “You want to have him examined, you can make an application. If you want to file a lawsuit, you can file a civil lawsuit.”

Even though Mr. Awadallah was not charged at the time with any crime and had friends and family in San Diego who would vouch that he had no terrorist ties, Judge Mukasey ordered that he be held indefinitely, a ruling he made in the cases of several other so-called material witnesses in the Sept. 11 investigations. A prison medical examination later identified the bruises across his body. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear

Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 23, 2007

“Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid,” blares the headline in The Sunday Times. After two weeks of furious speculation about the purpose and significance of Israel’s September 6 attack on a target in eastern Syria, we finally know that this really was something really big that went down: it was nuclear! The Syrians had “nuclear materials” that have been traced to North Korea. Except… “nuclear materials” turns out to be a headline (and first paragraph) paraphrase. “Nuclear materials” turns out to be short for “nuclear-related” material — almost certainly no fissile material, nor even anything radioactive. And no one has forgotten that the most famous example of nuclear-related material turned out to be no such thing. Continue reading →

NEWS: Big Brother is watching

Collecting of details on travelers documented
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, September 22, 2007

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative

Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 21, 2007

Why can the neocons never get their story straight?

Because they’ve figured out the ending but they’re still working on the plot.

The end is the end of the Islamic State of Iran, but the first draft of the narrative that was supposed to lead there — through Baghdad — took a major detour, providing Iran with the opportunity to become more powerful than ever.

Even so, a few lessons have been learned from the atrociously written Iraq story.

Don’t talk about “WMD,” is one such lesson. The only weapons worth talking about (as frequently as possible) are nuclear. Fortunately (if you’re a neocon) the press continues to be as obliging as ever in repeating whatever you say. Continue reading →

OPINION: The international community can do business with Hamas

Hamas is the key
By Ahmed Yousef, Haaretz, September 21, 2007

While largely unnoticed in American discourse on the topic, much has been said and written to debunk the sanctions regime imposed on Hamas government administrations since its resounding victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 2006. These calls and reports show with compelling logic that the sanctions regime is wrong and misguided and, equally important, that it is a reaction to the excessively intense pressure that the U.S. administration has exercised over other nations to induce them to boycott and besiege a government democratically elected by the people and to punish the Palestinians for their democratic choice. The Quartet has been spearheading this campaign of isolation against Hamas, and in the process is advancing a U.S.-Israeli agenda whose goal is to delegitimize Hamas and prevent it from exercising its right to lead the Palestinian people, even though the latter have elected it in a transparent, internationally monitored electoral process. A variety of underhanded methods, both internal and external, have been used to undermine the Hamas-led government, including destabilization from within the fragile Palestinian political system. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — According to the “West Bank first” fable, Israeli and Western support for the “moderate” Abbas regime would pave the way for peace and something vaguely resembling a Palestinian state. But even while Condoleezza Rice endeavors to add delicate strokes to her picture of a political horizon, the Israelis, rather than dismantling roadblocks — one of the specified gestures intended to serve as a sign post pointing to that political horizon — have instead been busy constructing dozens of new roadblocks.

NEWS: Will the dollar collapse?

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, September 21, 2007

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

“Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States,” he said. [complete article]

See also, Has the repudiation of the dollar begun? (Naked Capitalism).

OPINION: Tall tales from the annals of the Bush administration

Glued to our seats in the Theater of War
By Ira Chernus, TomDispatch, September 20, 2007

Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle — the more mythic the better. It’s no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a “theater.”

Political “battles” are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist “drawdown” — how many troops should leave and how soon — is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives. [complete article]

NEWS: Lawless contractors

Where military rules don’t apply
By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post, September 20, 2007

Blackwater USA, the private security company involved in a Baghdad shootout last weekend, operated under State Department authority that exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives.

In recent months, the State Department’s oversight of Blackwater became a central issue as Iraqi authorities repeatedly clashed with the company over its aggressive street tactics. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives said they came to see Blackwater as untouchable, protected by State Department officials who defended the company at every turn. Blackwater employees protect the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in Iraq.

Blackwater “has a client who will support them no matter what they do,” said H.C. Lawrence Smith, deputy director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, an advocacy organization in Baghdad that is funded by security firms, including Blackwater. [complete article]

NEWS: U.S. builds up pressure on Iran; Bolton backs Israeli strike; ElBaradei’s inconvenient deal

U.S. ramps up pressure on Iran
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy, September 19, 2007

One year after the United States launched an intensified global economic campaign against Iran with the stated aim of halting Tehran’s nuclear work, the Bush administration is counting its successes — and calling for still more pressure.

In recent months, once-reluctant European countries have joined the effort, which some are calling a financial war, with more vigor.

Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank AG, said recently that it would stop doing business in Iran. France has trimmed export credits that encourage business in Iran and advised French firms, including the oil and gas giant Total S.A., not to start new investments there. Even Japan, heavily dependent on Persian Gulf oil, has pulled back from energy projects in Iran. [complete article]

Bolton: US would support preemptive Israeli strike on Iran
By John Byrne, Raw Story, September 18, 2007

President Bush’s former United Nations ambassador John Bolton said the United States would stand behind a pre-emptive strike by Israel against countries developing “WMD facilities.”

In his remark, printed in Tuesday’s edition of the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, Bolton directly referenced Iran.

“The greatest concern is to prevent Iran and other countries in the region from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Bolton said, according to JTA.org, a Jewish news service. “We’re talking about a clear message to Iran — Israel has the right to self-defense –and that includes offensive operations against WMD facilities that pose a threat to Israel. The United States would justify such attacks.” [complete article]

Iran’s pact threatens to wrongfoot the West
By Roula Khalaf and James Blitz, Financial Times, September 20, 2007

Diplomats from the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council and from Germany are to discuss Iran tomorrow, amid disagreement over whether to impose a new round of UN sanctions.

Although the US, UK and France are determined to renew pressure on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme, this new drive in Washington for UN sanctions is unlikely to get far, as it will be blocked by Russia and China.

At the heart of the dispute is an accord between Iran and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency – the UN nuclear watchdog. [complete article]

NEWS: Surveillance dragnet

U.S. airport screeners are watching what you read
By Ryan Singel, Wired, September 20, 2007

International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years.

Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore’s choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he’d packed for the trip.

The breadth of the information obtained by the Gilmore-funded Identity Project (using a Privacy Act request) shows the government’s screening program at the border is actually a “surveillance dragnet,” according to the group’s spokesman Bill Scannell. [complete article]

FEATURE: Bush’s choice for attorney general

Big terror trial shaped views of Justice Pick
By Adam Liptak, New York Times, September 20, 2007

On Jan. 17, 1996, after a nine-month terrorism trial and a rambling 100-minute lecture from a blind sheik found guilty of conspiring to wage war against the United States, Judge Michael B. Mukasey had had enough.

With a few terse, stern and prescient remarks, he sentenced the sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, to life in prison. Judge Mukasey said he feared the plot could have produced devastation on “a scale unknown in this country since the Civil War” that would make the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which had left six people dead, “almost insignificant by comparison.”

Long before most Americans had given deep consideration to the terrorist threat from radical Islam or to whether the criminal justice system is the right forum for trying people accused of terrorism, Judge Mukasey received an intensive education on those topics.

The vivid lessons Judge Mukasey took away from the trial — notably that the urgency of the threat requires tilting toward protecting national security even at some cost to civil liberties — have echoed through his speeches and writings. Now, as President Bush’s choice for attorney general, he is poised to put those lessons into practice. [complete article]

NEWS: The secret lobbying campaign your phone company doesn’t want you to know about

Case dismissed?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, September 20, 2007

The nation’s biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the U.S. intelligence community’s warrantless surveillance programs.

The campaign — which involves some of Washington’s most prominent lobbying and law firms — has taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a U.S. appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed.

If that happens, the telecom companies say, they may be forced to terminate their cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community — or risk potentially crippling damage awards for allegedly turning over personal information about their customers to the government without a judicial warrant. [complete article]

NEWS: Iran will retaliate against attack

In case of war, Iran has plans for airstrikes on Israel, general says
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2007

A senior Iranian military official said today that his country had drawn up plans to launch airstrikes against Israel in case of war between the two countries, according to an interview published by an Iranian news agency.

Gen. Mohammed Alavi, a deputy commander in the Iranian air force, told the semi-official Fars News Agency that his country could attack Israel with long-range missiles as well as fighter planes in case of war between the two countries.

Israeli and U.S. officials have threatened the possibility of preemptive attacks on Iran to block it from obtaining advanced nuclear technology that could be used to build atomic weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is meant to augment civilian energy needs.

Military analysts say Iran could retaliate against any U.S. or Israeli air raids by hitting targets in the Persian Gulf, disrupting oil flows or launching attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — When for weeks the Bush administration has been doing nothing to dampen speculation that Iran has been targeted for bombing, and after Israel’s recent mysterious attack on facilities in eastern Syria, it is completely disingenuous for the White House to claim that Iran’s comments on retaliation were “totally unprovoked.”

Israel itself has downplayed the Iranian threat:

Israeli officials are treating Iran’s latest claims that it has 600 Shihab-3 missiles aimed at targets throughout the country the same way it treated Teheran’s claims last month to have crossed a key nuclear threshold: by listening carefully, but not believing everything they hear.

Is this the response we would expect from a nation that supposedly lives in the shadow of an existential threat?

OPINION: Who will start the war on Iran?

Why Bush won’t attack Iran
By Steven Clemons, Salon, September 19, 2007

During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush’s team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski’s or Scowcroft’s position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski’s fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Here’s the inside story from someone who knows more than the insiders. Steve Clemons always comes up with interesting stuff. He is of course far too modest to divulge whether he was one of the high-powered people at the dinner party he describes, but he was obviously there in spirit if not body, casting his vote with Scowcroft. By the end of the piece though, the insider’s insight — that Bush won’t initiate an attack on Iran — becomes what Clemons should concede: a moot point.

Clemons says that “a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.” He nevertheless concedes that we should be worried about an “accidental war” — one not preceded by a classic buildup. This sounds like a distinction that probably concerns high-powered dinner-party pundits more than anyone else.

What should concern us all is whether those who are trying to build up the momentum for war can effectively be disempowered. In that regard, the role of the press is crucial and just as happened in the buildup to the war in Iraq, with all too much frequency the press is letting us down by parroting unsubstantiated accusations and failing to challenge their precious political sources.

NEWS: The coming war with Iran

Bush setting America up for war with Iran
By Philip Sherwell and Tim Shipman, The Sunday Telegraph, September 16, 2007

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Back on July 13, the New York Sun reported:

President Bush is set to instruct the Treasury Department to block assets associated with Iran’s revolutionary guard corps in a new executive order declaring financial war on foreign saboteurs of the Iraqi government.

The paperwork to designate Iran’s revolutionary guard corps, or IRGC, and Quds Force is now on the president’s desk awaiting his signature, according to three administration officials who requested anonymity. The designation of the IRGC and Quds Force would mark the first time the finance related executive order process, reserved usually for foreign terrorist organizations, would be used against a branch of a foreign military.

On August 15, a month later, the Washington Post reported:

The United States has decided to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a “specially designated global terrorist,” according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group’s business operations and finances.

Today, in an article that refers to the “intensifying the debate over the Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the New York Times reports:

While some White House officials and some members of the vice president’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the entire Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, or perhaps, only companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.

If either the Quds Force or the entire Revolutionary Guard fits the legal criteria for a “specially designated global terrorist,” why would President Bush have waited two months to sign the order? What the debate and the delay makes clear is that if and when this designation is made it will be done so for purely political reasons. Indeed, if the Iranians were guilty of everything about which they are being accused, the question would not be about when it becomes expedient to apply the force of the US Treasury Department; it would be how the United States is going to respond to acts of war.

We’ve been here before. Whenever this administration is bobbing and diving in the process of shaping its legal arguments, the political thrust is already evident. George Bush’s gut is telling him, it’s time to hit Iran. The legal, strategic, political, and purely rational arguments are being constructed after the fact.

And where in this is it possible to imagine that lessons learned from Iraq are being applied?

Inside Cheney’s brain, I imagine it runs something like this: Shock-and-awe works — it brought down Saddam; reconstruction doesn’t. So long as we don’t send in the army, the air force and the navy can take care of Iran.

And now that the British poodle is no longer available to provide Bush with some sycophantic “international support,” a French poodle has happily taken his place. The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner today said, “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.”

EDITORIAL: From yellow cake to cement

From yellow cake to cement
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 15, 2007

The Israeli government has learned that Bashar Al-Assad recently bought significant quantities of cement from North Korea.”

OK. Maybe this line won’t make it into the president’s next State of the Union speech, but we should be in no doubt that once again the neocons are on the loose and in response the Washington Post and New York Times have dutifully put on their dunce caps. Continue reading →