Staying a wrong course

If you are hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, using heroin or having unprotected sex with a HIV positive person, my guess is that you, the reader, would believe that staying the course regarding these self-destructive behaviors would be wrong. The same basic argument holds true for our approach to the Iraq War.

The Bush White House and his Republican supporters are urging American citizens to “stay the course” in Iraq. Unfortunately, the course they are advocating is self-destructive to the American nation.

The invasion of Iraq was bad policy from day one. The reasons for the invasion advocated by Bush were mistakes at best, deliberate lies at worst. Iraq had no significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq played no significant role in Islamic terrorism aimed at the United States. Iraq was not a serious threat to neighboring countries when the invasion was launched. Saddam Hussein was certainly not behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Larry Beinhart has documented all these assertions in his new book, Fog Facts.

Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: “During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.”

Race problem?

Peering Under the Plame Outing

Remarks at "Plan B for Baghdad" Event, Denver, Col., October 15, 2005

I wrote these remarks down on Thursday, when a Washington Post columnist was pleading with Patrick Fitzgerald to please just go away, and a New York Times news article was claiming that if Lewis Libby leaked anything, he did so with the best of intentions.  Meanwhile virtually no voices in the corporate media were asking why Joe Wilson had to be attacked, who had made the false claims that Wilson had debunked, and who had forged the documents that the Bush Administration had used to claim that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons – or, in the case of Dick Cheney, that Iraq already had nuclear weapons.

What I think we need, more than anything else, is a broader view of the situation we're in.  Let's look at this war from a thousand miles up. 

US war photos

BANGKOK, Thailand -- US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have posted on Internet "several hundred" photographs of mutilated corpses from "the real war," in exchange for free online pornography, according to the owner of a Web site investigated by the Pentagon.

"This is an uncensored view of the conflict going on in Iraq and Afghanistan," 27-year-old Christopher Wilson, owner of nowthatsfuckedup.com, said in an e-mail interview.

"These pictures are taken directly from the cameras of the soldiers and uploaded to my site.

"Gory photos are not the only ones accepted for free access, and the gory section is clearly labeled so those wishing not to see it aren't tricked into doing so," said Wilson, based in Lakeland, Florida.

"If people don't want to see the REAL war, then they simply don't have to look. I receive an average of three death threats per day, and it makes no sense to me. No one is forcing them to see this stuff".

Who photographed or posted the hundreds of pictures, who killed the unnamed people portrayed, and the photos' authenticity have not been publicly confirmed.

A deep look at corruption culture

Recent events have shown that a corruption culture has taken hold of the dominant corporate business community and their allies in American politics. The corruption culture threatens both our economic way of life and American Democracy.

The criminal charges filed against Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, the insider stock trading investigation of Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist, the huge increases in energy prices as a result of deliberate market manipulation of supply by oil refineries and the White House aides (Karl Rove and Cheney’s Chief of Staff Libby) role in outing a CIA agent for partisan political reasons have it clear that corruption by the powerful is out of control. The intentionally created California electric energy crisis of Bush’s first term, the MCI-Worldcom frauds, the Enron frauds, the charges against Ohio Governor Taft, the criminal trial of former Illinois Governor Ryan, the voter intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party in Ohio and elsewhere are all strong evidence that America is facing a breakdown in business ethics and political commitment to American Democracy.

More from the stormfront gulf central

Slidell, LA -- The residents of Chalmette are glum: three and a half weeks ago, Hurricane Katrina ravaged their coastal community, a suburb east of New Orleans. Chalmette was determined to be “100%”; this damage classification means that all of the homes in the community were badly damaged by the storm, nearly obliterating the small town. Thirty-seven year-old Ben Holder, longtime resident and homeowner, came back Monday to find his two-story home flooded with six feet of brackish water and briny mud. Holder, like many of the residents I spoke with, has an unusually optimistic attitude:

“My grandmother and mother-in-law were both drowned in the flood, and my truck is completely destroyed, my boat is upside-down on the roof of my house, which is also upside down; but somehow, by the grace of God, these two little lizards I was keeping upstairs spent ten days alone without food and water and they both of them survived!”

Neighboring Slidell was only slightly more fortunate: a drive south toward New Orleans along the marshy coast reveals a once-picturesque gulfside community leveled by the hundred-fifty plus mile-per-hour winds

The news media are knocking Bush -- and propping him up

This month we’ve heard a lot of talk about journalists who got tough with President Bush. And it’s true that he has been on the receiving end of some fiercely negative media coverage in the wake of the hurricane. But the mainstream U.S. press is ill-suited to challenging the legitimacy of the Bush administration.

The country’s largest media institutions operate on a basis of enormous respect for presidential power. Major news organizations defer to that power even while venting criticisms. Overall, mass media outlets restrain the momentum of denunciations lest they appear to create instability for the Republic.

Initially, when the lethal character of Bush’s “leadership” became clear in New Orleans, the journalistic focus on federal accountability was quick to bypass the president. For several days, the national political story seemed to mostly revolve around the flak-catching FEMA director, Michael Brown, a cipher who obviously was going to be tossed overboard by the administration.

On Tuesday, the day after Brown resigned, President Bush adjusted the damage-control weaseling. “Katrina exposed serious problems in our response

The occasional media ritual of lamenting the habitual

Dan Rather caused some ripples when he spoke at a law school in New York on Sept. 19 and warned that politicians have been putting effective pressure on the corporate owners of major broadcast outlets. Summarizing his remarks, the Hollywood Reporter said that the former CBS anchor contended “there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.”

When a network TV correspondent makes noises that indicate a possible break with the corporate media establishment, I think of something that Mark Twain said: “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

As a matter of routine, television anchors and their colleagues at the networks avidly go along with the White House and the Pentagon. When there’s a war, with rare exceptions they provide the kind of coverage that Washington officials appreciate. Long afterward, when the mania subsides, a few TV journalists may express some misgivings. But when the next war comes along, it’s back to propaganda business as usual.

Over the course of his career, Rather occasionally voiced alarm

Ayatollahs of the apocalypse

These are triumphant hours for Pat Robertson. His standing as America's senior ayatollah is becoming firmer as Billy Graham and even Jerry Falwell yield the prime-time pulpit to the smooth-tongued maestro of the Christian Coalition.

A decade ago, CNN would sooner have given half an hour's air time to the leader of North Korea, but last week, Wolf Blitzer poked a stick through the bars and nodded respectfully as Robertson raved on about the End Time:

BLITZER: "Welcome to 'LATE EDITION,' Reverend ... "

REV. PAT ROBERTSON: "Thanks, Wolf."

BLITZER: " ... thanks very much for joining us.

"I want to get to Harriet Miers in a moment, but you're a minister. You see what's going on in the world today in Pakistan, in India, Afghanistan, an earthquake, maybe 20,000 people dead, maybe twice that number; we don't have a count. Hurricanes in the United States and around the world, a tsunami a little bit less than a year or so ago in Southeast Asia. What's happening?"

Robertson rose gracefully to the challenge:

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