12 People Left Behind During America's Recovery
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
James Burke of "Connections"-fame produced an excellent program about 30 years ago called "After The Warming" that you can see online. It's done as if it's 2050 with Burke looking back over the history of the world's climate changes and the effect that cyclical warming and cooling has had on the development of animal, vegetation, and civilization. Up until the industrial revolution, and how what's happening is man-made, how we know that it's man-made, and how fast it's happening. In less than one generation, human civilization on the planet is going to irrevocably break down. Mass die-off of species, specifically humans, from a whole host of assaults (famine, drought, disease, pandemics, wars, etc.).
If every Fox viewer saw it, they might be convinced, but it wouldn't matter; it's too late. Bleak? You bet. But we have to start talking about it and demanding politicians address it. Don't believe it? Then look at this and see how Congress is in fire sale mode, set to have the crash happen all over again.
Watch "After The Warming" with your families and friends. It's somewhere to begin.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Still Suffering the Damage: Iraq 10 Years Later
It's a great example of how once a government gets something, it doesn't easily let it go. Like the Patriot Act.
If the Bush administration really believed that Saddam Hussein still had WMD, they'd have let up on the no-fly zone, to see and/or prove where there were WMD.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
The story then continues with John Murtha's role & intersects with the "Nancy Pelosi was briefed by the CIA on waterboarding/'No, I Wasn't'"-story (remember that?). It appears that Murtha was used by the CIA & BushCo to deceive the 'Gang of 8' and Congress about the waterboarding/torture. With this story, we get some insight into how Cheney got all of his & Bush's crimes past Congressional oversight (through his knowledge of how congressional subcommittees operated, from his earlier stint as a congressmann).
Here is a background clip of the person that Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel references, Greg Sargent, who in this clip is being interviewed by Rachel Maddow about the Pelosi-CIA story.
There's a part 1 to the clip, which is the lead-in where Rachel summarizes the situation before she gets to Greg Sargent.
I wish I could say that it's all in the past, and that we should do as Obama insists, "Look forward, not back", but we can't because it's an ongoing effort. You can't go forward until you've examined what happened and make the changes necessary for it not happening again. One of Cheney's architects for all of this was David Addington. When arch-rightwinger Jim DeMint left the Senate for the rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation, David Addington joined him there.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes
What Cheney also had was a unique knowledge of the inner workings of Congress from his time there. Of how to get legislation through quietly, how to go around committee members, and that's one of the ways that BushCheney got torture past Congress, and how Pelosi could say in all earnestness that she hadn't been informed about waterboarding. The road to to it all, to our neverending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lead right through Murtha's seat in Congress.
To my knowledge, Paul Kanjorski is the one of several witnesses (all congressmen) who can directly place George W. Bush at the scene of the conspiracy to deceive Congress into backing the attack on Iraq with evidence falsified by the CIA.
It's through Kanjorski's account that we learn the Bush-Cheney Administration's scheme, which included the CIA's fabricating photographs for the explicit purpose of deceiving Congress into authorizating the use of military force in Iraq.
http://www.counterpunch.org/brasch09032007.html
After you read that, read this, where Murtha shows up again in this report (this got no reporting in the MSM), where Kanjorski told his constituents in a townhall meeting that he voted to give Bush the authorization to go to war in Iraq based on a briefing he attended with other congressmen at the WhiteHouse (with Bush & CondiRice) in which the CIA presented "smoking gun photos" of Iraq having the ability to fly nuclear/biological weapons to the US mainland.
The photos later turned out to have been faked by the CIA, staged in the southwest US:
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes
GROSS: Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward and revealing things to you about what happened in the Bush administration?
HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. And again, because of the problems this administration’s having filling jobs, a lot of people who served in the Bush Cheney government, particularly even in the White House people on most sophisticated staffs are still there. You simply can’t get rid of everybody, you may not even want to. Some are professional people. But Cheney is, I would never call it admiration, but, you know, formidable, yeah, this guy. This guy is the real McCoy.
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Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes
Transcript:
GROSS: You investigated the Bush administration throughout the Bush administration. Always looking for ways that they may, might have been going beyond executive authority in taking on new powers. And now that the Bush administration is over, you’re still investigating what they did and where they might have violated the law. Is investigating that any different for you as a journalist post-Bush administration than it was during the Bush administration? Are more people coming forward now, now that the president and vice president are no longer in power?KEEP READING
HERSH: You know, that’s a great question because I did think, I had a lot of people that had told me in the last year of Bush, “call me next, next February.” And, so far, even people who are out are still cherry because, you know, not so much Bush, but Cheney really is…he’s really smart. In the article this week, in the New Yorker, that’s coming out this week, I mention that at one point last fall, Mr. Miliband, the young foreign secretary of Britain, unilaterally, without telling the White House made a trip to Syria to see the president, Assad, and his intelligence chief, his MI6 chief went before him. And Bush-Cheney didn’t know about it until actually was, they were actually there. And Cheney at a meeting — and I do have, I can tell you I do have access and have had and I’ve been careful of how I use it, to a lot of stuff from meetings in the White House — and at a meeting he railed on about perfidious Albion, you know, the old Shakespeare term for England and that was used during the Revolutionary war as a pejorative term for England. Perfidious Albion he said. He is, Cheney is really underestimated. It’s easy to make a caricature of him. He’s very very bright. And he’s also in person, a much more open-minded in the sense, I’m talking about not politically. You could go and the most despaired people in the world go and have social evenings with him and his wife and talking about current, as long as you don’t get into politics, movies and stuff like that. It’s, he’s easy to make a caricature, but he’s much more formidable than people think. Got a rap clap memory. Understands bureaucracy much better, he’s been around forever, has had every job.
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