For the Record

Been there, lied about that

Feast your brains on this awesome compare-and-contrast about the same-old, same-old in re militaristic imperialist justifications for continued slaughter-and-be-slaughtered occupation.   They who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it... where are our society's rememberers?

Notwithstanding the ridiculous headline

this is great news:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - In a major defeat for law enforcement officials, a jury in Florida failed to return guilty verdicts Tuesday on any of 51 criminal counts against a former Florida professor and three co-defendants accused of operating a North American front for Palestinian terrorists.

The former professor, Sami al-Arian, a fiery advocate for Palestinian causes who became a lightning rod for criticism nationwide over his vocal anti-Israeli stances, was found not guilty on eight criminal counts related to terrorist support, perjury and immigration violations.

[...]

"This was a very important case for us in that it tested both the Patriot Act and the right to political activity," Mr. Bedier said. "The jury is sending a statement that even in post-9/11 America, the justice system works, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and political association - while it may be unpopular to associate oneself with controversial views - is still not illegal in this country."

Annual U.N. request of $4.7 billion equal to two days of global military spending

The world has gone terribly wrong.

In particular: Fubar of Needlenose notes that to date, U.S. taxpayers have spend $160 billion  on the so-called "global war on terror", not including so-called "homeland security" or so-called "rebuilding Iraq".  Fubar cites from the General Accounting Office report:

In fiscal years 2004 and 2005, DOD received funding to support GWOT in both its annual appropriation and in supplemental appropriations provided during those years. The military services received about $52.4 billion and about $62.1 billion in fiscal years 2004 and 2005, respectively, in supplemental appropriations for GWOT military personnel and operation and maintenance expenses. At the same time, DOD requested that the Army, Air Force, and Navy receive a combined increase of about $7.9 billion in fiscal year 2004 and a combined increase of about $7.6 billion in fiscal year 2005 in their annual appropriations, which DOD said would be for support of GWOT.
...
In addition to funds DOD received through supplemental appropriations for GWOT, beginning in fiscal year 2003, the administration increased DOD’s annual appropriation request by more than $10 billion per year. DOD described these funds as being intended to support GWOT.

Fubar comments:

Adding all these up, we're looking at around $160 billion already spent for the GWOT. This doesn't even count the funds spent on Department of Homeland Security to fight off the terrorist menace or the cost of crater filling rebuilding Iraq/Afghanistan. The CBO (which tends to guess low) estimates ongoing GWOT costs to be around $55-60 billion per year.

How can any of us not be ashamed of these absurd and tragic figures?

Blair's going down

At least it's a live possibility.  From today's Sunday Herald, Blair faces new inquiry into Iraq War:

MPs organising the campaign to impeach Tony Blair believe they have enough support to force a highly damaging Commons investigation into the Prime Minister’s pre-war conduct.

A renewed attempt to impeach Blair over claims he misled parlia ment in making his case for war against Iraq, will be made in the Commons within the next two weeks.

The impeachment process effectively stalled last year when just 23 MPs signed a Commons motion. But the scale of the government’s defeat on its anti-terror legislation last week – where 49 Labour MPs rebelled – has galvanised the momentum for proceedings to be invoked.

Organisers say they are expecting 200 cross-party signatures, including those of former government ministers, to force the Commons to set up a Privy Council investigation that would examine in detail the case for impeachment against Blair.

The size of the Labour revolt, allied to unified opposition benches, is said to have changed the climate inside the Commons.

As Benj noted, if Blair does go down, this will put quite a crimp in Republicans's ability to forge diplomatic alliances with Brits.  If such an alliance could bring down even Blair...

Of course, Repubs are all about "going it alone", but one shouldn't underestimate the cover it gave Bush and his gang of criminals to have the U.K. on board.  Shame on you, Tony.  Here's hoping you get what you deserve.

In the credit where credit is due dept

Bush praises Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and calls on Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank:

Supporting Abbas, Bush called on Israel to stop constructing settlements on the West Bank. He assured Abbas he shared his vision of two states living side by side in peace and security.

"Israel should not undertake any activity that contravenes its roadmap obligations," Bush said, referring to a blueprint for peacemaking approved by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

 Without elaboration, the president said Israel would be "held to account" for any actions that hamper peacemaking or burden the lives of Palestinians.

I'll believe that when I see it, but I'm grateful to hear Bush say it, anyway.

That would be the military-industrial-oval-office complex

What do you know, ask and ye shall receive (see previous post).  Of course, anyone with a brain long ago put this together, but anyway... Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson speaks out about the Oval Office cabal:

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

[...]

The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, early last year.

Mr Wilkerson said his decision to go public had led to a personal falling out with Mr Powell, whom he served for 16 years at the Pentagon and the State Department.

“He's not happy with my speaking out because, and I admire this in him, he is the world's most loyal soldier."

Loyally following insaniacs -- now that's an admirable trait.  Wilkerson's talk (see the full transcript here) is a good read, and takes on sort of desperate tone at the end.  It  sounds to me as if he's fearing for all of our lives.   You can just hear the astonishment in his voice:

Read George Packer’s book The Assassin’s [UI] if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker, reporter for The New Yorker, has got it right. I just finished it and I usually put marginalia in a book but, let me tell you, I had to get extra pages to write on.

And I wish, I wish I had been able to help George Packer write that book. In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics than he’s got. But if you want to read how the Cheney Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And, of course, there are other names in there, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas [UI], whom most of you probably know Tommy Frank said was stupidest blankety blank man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

And yet, and yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere. That’s not making excuses for the State Department.

That’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book.

Wonderful.  Everyone in the present administration is either dumb as a rock, evil as Satan, or both.  In fact, though the FT presents Wilkerson's criticism as targeted at Bush-Cheney and associates, it's not these dudes in particular that are scaring Wilkerson.  Rather, it's that the Military-Industrial Complex has very effectively taken control of our government:

In so many ways I wanted to believe for 4 years that what I was seeing, as an academic, what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security [UI]. And an extremely powerful Vice President and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him, Secretary of Defense, remember a Vice President who’s been Secretary of Defense, too, and obviously has an inclination that way and also has known the Secretary of Defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower [called] the military industrial complex and don’t you think they aren’t the [UI] today in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled. It all happened because of the end of the Cold War.

[UI] tell you how many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department that we have in 1988 and how many do we have now. And they’re always working together. If one of them is the lead on the satellite program, I hope there’s some Lockheed and Grumman and others here today [UI] if one of them’s a lead on satellites, the others are subs. And they’ve learned their lesson there in every state.

They’ve got every Congressman, every Senator, they got it covered. Now, it’s not to say that they aren’t smart businessmen. They are, and women. They are. But it’s something we should be looking at, something we should be looking at. So you’ve got this collegiality there between the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President. And then you’ve got a President who is not versed in international relations. And not too much interested in them either.

And so it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this, what I call Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you thought were made in the formal process.

Actions have consequences

What a blessed relief to have some U.S. official acknowledge this, for a change:

NEW YORK

A federal judge ruled today that graphic pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison must be released over government claims that they could damage America's image. Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of "rape and murder" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were "blatantly sadistic.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered the release of certain pictures in a 50-page decision that said terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven they "do not need pretexts for their barbarism."

Of course, the Abu Ghraib atrocities are only one of many non-pretexts that are available to inspire those in Iraq and Afghanistan to engage in barbaric acts.  Along any reasonable dimension, U.S. barbarism -- ranging from the outrageous continued military and political support of Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine, through the decades-old anti-democratic manipulation of Middle East affairs and appropriation of Middle East resources (tactics recently extended to Central Asia), to the U.S.'s unjustified brutal and illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq -- is the primary cause of anti-U.S. barbarism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S.   About time people started waking up to this basic fact.

Bait and Switch: "I will build"

Israel's illegal appropriation and occupation of Palestinian land will continue:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon signaled a right turn Sunday, vowing to build inside the West Bank settlement blocs, even as bulldozers began mowing down Gaza's settlements.

"There will be building in the settlement blocs," Sharon said. "Each government since 1967 – right, left and national unity – has seen strategic importance in specific areas [beyond the Green Line]. I will build."

Sharon mentioned specifically that "Ma'ale Adumim will continue to grow and be connected to Jerusalem," and that Ariel and its satellites would be a part of Israel forever. [...] "[T]there will be no second disengagement."

Indeed, he is already building.  Illegality aside, as well as the fact that the construction of settlements and the associated system of checkpoints and building of the Israeli land-grab apartheid "security" wall are decimating Palestinian civil society and destroying future prospects for a unified Palestinian state, further building is in opposition to the so-called "road map" to peace:

Sharon was obviously aware that the road map called for a freeze of all settlement construction, and was cognizant that this construction could put Israel on a collision course with both the US and Europe.

But might continued building disrupt U.S.-taxpayer financing of Israel?   Sharon has no worries:

Relating to reports Sunday that evacuees from Netzarim will be temporarily housed in Ariel, Sharon said he was not worried that this would hurt Israel's request for some $2.2 billion in aid from the US for disengagement-related development in the Negev and Galilee.  "We don't move anyone, people can go wherever they want," Sharon said, adding that Israel had an interest in settling the Negev and Galilee.

Indeed, why should he worry?  After all, notwithstanding the fact that the US Arms Export Control Act (AECA) strictly forbids the government from giving military assistance to  any country that violates internationally recognized human rights, much of the aid to Israel goes towards buying the arms and munitions, helicopters, and bulldozers needed to conduct the brutal miltary occupation of Palestine, and so ends right back in U.S. corporate pockets:

Matti Peled, former Israeli major general and Knesset member, told Zunes that he and most Israeli generals believe this aid is "little more than an American subsidy to U.S. arms manufacturers," considering that the majority of military aid to Israel is used to buy weapons from the U.S.

Moreover, funding Israel's arms buildup escalates Israeli-Arab tensions, and so profits U.S. war corporations in another way:

According to Zunes, "the Israelis announced back in 1991 that they supported the idea of a freeze in Middle East arms transfers, yet it was the United States that rejected it."

In the fall of 1993-when many had high hopes for peace-78 senators wrote to former President Bill Clinton insisting that aid to Israel remain "at current levels." Their "only reason" was the "massive procurement of sophisticated arms by Arab states." The letter neglected to mention that 80 percent of those arms to Arab countries came from the U.S.

Israel probably couldn't stop getting U.S. aid even if it wanted to.

Bad news is no news

So it turns out that the government's top terrorism center, which for 19 years has produced the 'Patterns of Global Terrorism Report', recently concluded that there were more "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004 (625) than in any year since 1985---indeed, over 3 1/2 times as many as last year's record-setting number (175).  (As an astute Daily Kos reader commented, this probably doesn't include Bush's terrorist attack on the people of Iraq --- 100,000 civilians dead and counting.)  The problem with such statistics, of course, is that they contradict Bush admin claims that it is "winning the war on terror".  So, first pass Rice/Bush response?  Demand that the center use alternative methodology that would have reported fewer significant attacks.  And when the center refuses to tweak its stats?  Oh hell, just get rid of the report.

UPDATE: more instances of Bush admin suppression of unfavorable data.

Bush and Blair: twin losers

Bush's approval ratings are at 45%: 11 points lower than the next least popular president ever at this point in their term.

Meanwhile, Brits don't trust Blair farther than they can throw him.

You can fool some of the people some of the time... but sooner or later most of us start to catch on.