Waxman: Rice hindering Niger forgeries probe

State Department blocked investigators' access to analyst who had raised alarms about the yellowcake forgeries before the State of the Union in 2003.
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Friday, May 04, 2007

Iraq Intelligence and Nuclear Evidence, Correspondence Regarding the Testimony of Secretary Rice

Committee Seeks Niger Documents and Testimony and Instructs State Department Not to Impede Probe

Today Chairman Waxman sent a letter to Secretary of State Rice (1) informing the Secretary that the legislative affairs officials in the Department should not hinder the Committee’s inquiry into why Secretary Rice and President Bush cited forged evidence to build a case for war against Iraq; (2) advising the Secretary that the Committee will depose a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department; and (3) requesting relevant documents.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Secretary Rice- PDF
  

The pivotal import of Yellowcake, False Flags, & "Big Time" Evil

A reader responds to, "House oversight panel may look past Rice, Tenet in inquiry into uranium".

Seven Star Hand said...

The pivotal import of Yellowcake, False Flags, & "Big Time" Evil

Hello Marc and all,

Looks like things are finally heating up. The endgame will be interesting, to say the least!

The combination of George Tenet's book, At the Center of the Storm, Eisner & Royce's The Italian Letter and the books and research of many others in recent years now provides enough of a foundation for everyone to finally discern that 9:11 was a "false flag" operation against both the American public and the Muslim world. Likewise, the uncanny synchronicity of Al Qaeda's videos and other activities perfectly timed to reinforce and support the Bush/Cheney administration's political needs coupled with the actions of the Bush admin actually serving to strengthen Al Qaeda's position, now makes perfect sense. The apparent mistakes and chaos that have characterized the Iraq war, the easily prevented resurgence of the Taliban, and permitting Bin Laden to escape Tora Bora to a safe haven in Pakistan all fit the same pattern. It's hard to maintain a state of continuous war if you allow your made-to-order enemies to be defeated too early. It is likewise hard to remain a "war president" if your wars end too soon!

The letterhead used to forge the "Yellowcake letter" that was then used to help "sell" the Iraq war was stolen in Rome on 1/1/2001, more than nine months before 9:11 and before Little W. became president. Consequently, the use of the "Yellow-Cake Lie" was obviously discussed and planned before then! The import of this fact is that the Niger embassy in Rome was burglarized, before Bush became president, to lay the groundwork for the web of deception used to sell the Iraq War, after 9:11. More importantly, it is highly unlikely that the Iraq war could ever have been sold to the American public, without something like 9:11 happening first. Any excuses of other uses for the stolen letterhead are laughable since the letterhead burglary would have been pointless, without 9:11. This evidences foreknowledge of those attacks, a full nine months before they occurred, among other things!

Read more...

May 2, 2007 9:59:00 AM MDT

Rice loses another top aide

Rice loses another aide as top Arab-American diplomat resigns

15 minutes ago

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lost yet another senior aide on Wednesday when Dina Habib Powell, the highest-ranking Arab-American in the US government, announced her resignation to join a Wall Street investment bank.

The departure of Powell, key architect of a Rice initiative to improve the United States' image abroad, was the third senior diplomat to quit in the past five days and the sixth so far this year -- an exodus that is expected to continue in the final 20 months of the Bush administration.

Powell, who at 33 is also one of the youngest senior State Department diplomats, is taking up a job at Goldman Sachs Group, department spokesman Tom Casey said. She is due to leave her State Department job in about two months.

Powell, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to Texas when she was a child, followed Rice to the State Department two years ago from the White House, where she directed the presidential personnel office.

As the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, Powell also served as the deputy to Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, President George W. Bush's former media guru who has been leading a "public diplomacy" campaign to counter anti-Americanism in the Arab world since the US invasion of Iraq.

Powell said her decision to leave government at this time was personal.

"It's the right time for me and my family," Powell told The Washington Post.

"I'm really sorry to lose her. She is fantastic," Rice told the Post of Powell's resignation.

"She had so many ideas. There are people who have ideas but can't execute them. She really executed them," Rice said.

Powell was notably instrumental in creating public-private partnerships to help fund relief efforts, notably in Lebanon following the July-August 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah -- a conflict which fuelled anger in the region against the United States for its backing of Israel.

"Dina's really done a remarkable job for us in helping to build and expand our educational and cultural programs, particularly in working on developing public and private sector partnerships," Casey said.

Powell also managed to resurrect people-to-people exchanges with Iran at a time of high tension between the two states due to Tehran's nuclear program and alleged support for militants in Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinian areas.

"She restarted exchanges with Iran in ways that I thought not possible," Rice said, pointing to programs that saw Iranian doctors visit the United States and a US wrestling team travel to Iran.

News of Powell's resignation followed that of Barry Lowenkron, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, who announced on Monday that he was quitting to join a private charitable foundation.

Friday, one of Rice's two deputies, foreign aid director Randall Tobias, quit after being named in the media as a client of a Washington DC call-girl ring.

Since the start of the year, Rice has also lost her private counselor, Philip Zelikow, planning director Stephen Krasner, former UN ambassador John Bolton and non-proliferation chief Bob Joseph.

A senior State Department official indicated that the spate of resignations could continue as Bush nears the end of his mandate in January 2009.

"It's only natural as you get towards the end of the second term that people are going to be moving on," he said. "The secretary understands."

Rice: Imminent Threat Doesn't Mean a Threat That Someone Will Strike Soon

Interview on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Washington, DC
April 29, 2007

QUESTION: Welcome back to This Week.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. Good morning, George.

QUESTION: So I've talked to many Republican and Democrats on Capitol Hill. Here's what the possible compromise looks like: the Democrats drop the deadline timeline for withdrawal, but benchmarks for the Iraqi Government to meet are written into the bill. Can the President accept that?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the President has said that he will not accept anything that constitutes a timeline for American withdrawal. And he certainly, after he gets the bill that's there, he's going to veto it, and then he said that he wants to invite the leadership down to the White House to talk about how we move forward together, because everyone would like to move forward together.

Now, as to benchmarks, let's remember that these are benchmarks that the Iraqi Government set for itself. We are doing everything we can to impress upon the Iraqi Government the importance of getting their national reconciliation --

QUESTION: So you have no objection to them being in the law?

SECRETARY RICE: The problem is that if you try and make consequences about these benchmarks, you're tying the hands of General Petreaus and the hands of Ambassador Crocker. We shouldn't tie our own hands in using the tools that we have to help the Iraqis along with national reconciliation. It's quite possible to send a strong message to the Iraqis, as Secretary Gates did, as the Congress is doing, that the American people do not have limitless patience in this. And the President himself, in every conversation with Iraqis, is telling them exactly that.

QUESTION: Yet it doesn't seem to be working. You say the Iraqis want to meet these benchmarks -- a new oil law, a de-Baathification law, constitutional reforms. But The Washington Post reported this week that little or no progress was being made on these benchmarks. It quotes the Administration's old ally, Ahmed Chalabi. He says, "They're all up in the air. They are certainly not going to be produced in any timetable that is acceptable within the context of the current political climate in the United States."

General Petraeus said we're going to reevaluate everything in September. Must the Iraqis meet the benchmarks by then?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, clearly we're going to be evaluating along the way, but given that this plan is really just underway, the plan that the President launched in January, we believe it prudent and right to take a hard look in September. I don't think we'll wait till September, by the way, to begin to look at how we're doing and how the Iraqis are doing. But I would say this, George: It is not just the American context that's important here; it's the Iraqi context. Iraqis will lose patience with their own government if they can't move forward on reconciliation. This is a point that Ambassador Crocker, that General Petraeus is making to the Iraqis every day. They are making some progress.

QUESTION: So Prime Minister Maliki will lose his job; is that what you're saying?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I'm just saying that the Iraqis themselves -- we support Prime Minister Maliki and I think he is trying to do what is best for his country. But he also needs help. He needs help from Sunni leaders. He needs help from Kurdish leaders. The oil law, for instance, is very close to being completed. They need to complete it. We're making that case. And I think they will finally make progress on that.

QUESTION: This summer? Will they complete it this summer?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think they have to. The --

QUESTION: What happens if they don't?

SECRETARY RICE: If they don't, then they're not going to be making the kind of progress on national reconciliation that gives the Iraqis a view of a future together.

QUESTION: But how about the Americans? How much longer can Americans sacrifice if the Iraqis aren't going to make the decisions they need to make?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, Iraqis are sacrificing, too, George. They're dying in large numbers. Every day, Iraqis get up to face terrible circumstances because groups like al-Qaida continue to blow up innocent people. Members of this Iraqi Government have lost many members of their own families, sacrificing to make a national unity government work. This is very, very difficult.

But you're right; the United States is paying in blood and treasure. Iraqis -- the Iraqi leadership is being told and I think they understand that the kind of Iraq that there is going to be is up to them. We can't give them a united Iraq. Everyone needs to pull together in that country and there are examples where it is happening. In Ramadi, in Anbar, a province that used to mean by its very name that the terrorists were in control, is a province now where the sheikhs, the leadership, the tribal leadership is coming together not just to fight the foreign fighters and the al-Qaida but also to start to rebuild the province.

QUESTION: That may be true, but American casualties are up 53 percent this year over the first quarter of last year and civilian casualties, even though we're not getting the full picture from the Iraqis, are also up this year.

SECRETARY RICE: There's no doubt that the violence post-Samarra bombing of February 2006 has been very dramatic. And frankly, the al-Qaida idea there, the al-Qaida strategy under Zarqawi to set Iraqis against one another was a strategy that had some success. But you're seeing now with the President's plan efforts to give the Iraqis some breathing space using American forces along with their Iraqi counterparts to try to provide population security --

QUESTION: How much time do they have?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, we need to give it some time to work. But the President and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker talk every -- practically every -- certainly every week about how these timelines have to move forward. What we don't want to do, George, is to tie our own hands so that we cannot act creatively and flexibly to support the very policies in Iraq that we're trying to support.

QUESTION: This week you'll be traveling to the Middle East --

SECRETARY RICE: Yes.

QUESTION: -- to Sharm el-Sheikh for an international conference on Iraq. We just learned this morning from the Iraqi Prime Minister that the Iranians, the Iranian Foreign Minister, will attend this meeting. Will you meet directly with the Iranian Foreign Minister?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I wouldn't rule it out because this is not a meeting about the United States and Iran; this is a meeting about Iraq and about what Iraq's neighbors and interested parties can do to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. If indeed everyone at that table believes that a stable Iraq is indeed in their interest, then there are steps that they need to start to take to help stabilize Iraq.

QUESTION: What will you ask the Iranians to do and what can you offer them in return?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, this is not a negotiating session between the United States and Iran. If I have the opportunity, if the opportunity presents itself, then perhaps --

QUESTION: Will you seek it out?

SECRETARY RICE: -- perhaps we'll have a chance. I would --

QUESTION: Well, that's up to you, isn't it?

SECRETARY RICE: I won't -- I won't rule --

QUESTION: You can go up to him and say let's meet.

SECRETARY RICE: I will not rule out that we may encounter one another. But what do we need to do? It's quite obvious: Stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters; stop the flow of foreign fighters across the borders; stop using advanced IED technology to kill American soldiers; stop stirring up trouble among militias that then go and kill innocent Iraqis. It's quite clear what needs to be done.

QUESTION: CIA Director George Tenet -- former CIA Director George Tenet has a book coming out tomorrow called, At the Center of the Storm. A lot of news in that book. Probably the most startling two sentence of the book go like this. He says, "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the Administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat, nor was there ever a significant discussion regarding enhanced sanctions or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change."

Is that true?

SECRETARY RICE: Look, George served very well and we all worked together in very difficult times and I respect him as a colleague. The truth of the matter is the President started a discussion practically on the day that he took power about how to enhance sanctions against Iraq. You may remember that in his first press conference he said the sanctions have become Swiss cheese. We then went through an extended period of what we called smart sanctions review, trying to tighten the sanctions, trying to take off the tables ones that didn't really have to be enforced. We then went -- Colin Powell went to the UN and we had a new committee to try to put together tighter sanctions. We even went so far as to go to certain countries in the neighborhood -- Syria, for instance -- and say tighten down on the illegal oil shipments that are coming in under the sanctions. Don Rumsfeld led a review of trying to tighten the no-fly zones so that we could better police Saddam Hussein's forces.

QUESTION: So it's not true?

SECRETARY RICE: This went on for a very long time. I was very involved in it.

QUESTION: Was there discussions though about whether or not Iraq posed an imminent threat?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, there was certainly a discussion of whether or not the totality of the picture of Iraq -- and yes, the intelligence was very critical here, but it was also that he was challenging us in no-fly zones all the time. It was that we had gone to war against him in 1998 to try to deal with his weapons of mass destruction. It was that the intelligence showed, or it thought, that he had reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons programs and was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program.

The question was how long were you going to wait given that it appeared that the situation was getting worse.

QUESTION: And looking back, do you think Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States?

SECRETARY RICE: I think that -- an imminent threat. Certainly, Iraq posed a threat and the question was was it going to get worse over time or was it going to get better. And our assessment was that it was getting worse because of the way that the intelligence talked about his programs, because he was very aggressive in the no-fly zones, because he continued to talk about Kuwait as a province of Iraq. We had gone to war against him in 1991. We'd gone -- used military force against him in 1998. The idea that somehow Iraq was a benign presence in the Middle East that could continue without weapons inspectors on their territory, just to move along, it seems to me that this makes no sense.

QUESTION: Not an imminent threat?

SECRETARY RICE: George, the question of imminence isn't whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow. It's whether you believe you're in a stronger position today to deal with a threat or whether you're going to be in a stronger position tomorrow. And it was the President's assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse from our point of view, and we do know that of course Saddam Hussein was subverting the sanctions. The Oil-for-Food program had become a scandal. The Iraqi people were living under Draconian sanctions that were making life more difficult even as Saddam Hussein was putting more and more people in mass graves. This was a threat that needed to be dealt with.

But it was the totality of the picture against Saddam Hussein that led the President to the decision that he made, but only after he had gone to the United Nations yet again in September of 2002 to get another resolution to try to compel Saddam Hussein to finally demonstrate to the world that he was complying with the multiple resolutions under which he was acting.

QUESTION: You received a subpoena this week from the House Committee on Government Oversight. They want to look into how the White House -- you were National Security Advisor at the time -- handled prewar intelligence. And Chairman Waxman said at the hearing that one of the things he wants to look at is a statement you made on this program back in June 2003. I had asked you about the famous 16 words in the State of the Union about Iraq trying to get uranium from Africa. Here's what you said:

SECRETARY RICE (from video tape): "We actually do go through the process of asking the intelligence community, 'Can you say this, can you say that, can you say this?' The intelligence community did not know at that time, or at levels that got to us, that this --

QUESTION (from video tape): Well, let me show you something --

SECRETARY RICE (from video tape): -- that there were some serious questions about this report."

QUESTION: That statement wasn't true. You and your Deputy had both received memos in October 2002 from the CIA about this intelligence and they had raised serious questions about it.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, George, I have answered these questions for Congressman Waxman by letter and also in the questions for the record as a part of my own confirmation hearing. The fact of the matter is that we have made very -- we made very clear at the time that the Niger issue was in the National Intelligence Estimate. I've said, and I said in my letter to Chairman Waxman, that I did not remember, didn't recall, that there had been a memorandum from the CIA at the time, three and a half months before the State of the Union, saying that this should be taken out of the Cincinnati speech. And Steve Hadley has attested to the same thing. Maybe we should have remembered. We didn't.

But the fact is that this is one of the most investigated issues that I can remember. It was investigated by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. It was investigated by the bipartisan commission of Larry Silberman and Chuck Robb.

QUESTION: Neither one of those groups looked at how the White House handled the intelligence.

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, indeed, how the intelligence was gotten to policymakers, how it got into the speech -- all of these things have actually been examined by Robb-Silberman, by the Senate Intelligence Committee. We've commented on it on the record. Dan Bartlett and Steve Hadley went through an exhaustive discussion of how it happened.

Look, I was National Security Advisor. I feel responsibility for the fact that something got in the President's speech that in retrospect probably shouldn't have. But the fact of the matter is we all thought at the time that it was in the State of the Union that it was a credible claim. It was in the National Intelligence Estimate. It had been in the British report which the President cited and --

QUESTION: George Tenet writes that it had been taken out not out of one speech, not just the October speech. He writes in this book it had also been taken out by you from a September speech.

SECRETARY RICE: George, this claim has been investigated and investigated and investigated. I would just ask people to go back and read the multiple reports about this particular incident. Go back and read all that is on the public record. Go back and read my answers to --

QUESTION: If that's all true, why not just testify? Why not comply with the subpoena?

SECRETARY RICE: Because, George, there is an important principle here and this is a White House matter now. It is the case that the compellence of White House staff -- it's a separation of powers issue to testify before a congressional committee is an important constitutional issue.

QUESTION: But dozens of White House staffers have testified to Congress, including Admiral Poindexter for President Reagan.

SECRETARY RICE: And many, many, many have not on the same principle. I testified before the 9/11 Commission. At the time, the President made clear that he did not consider that a precedent, but that the overwhelming concerns about 9/11 did make it necessary. We're talking about something here that has been investigated and examined and talked about and where I think if people look at the record they will see that the answers are there.

QUESTION: Chairman Waxman says he's going to move to find you in contempt.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, that's the Chairman's prerogative. I respect the oversight responsibilities of Congress, but I frankly think this one has been looked at and looked at and looked at.

QUESTION: So you're not going to comply.

SECRETARY RICE: And what I'm going to do is to concentrate on what I need to do, which is to prepare for this very important meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh a couple of days from now.

QUESTION: One final question. The front page of The Washington Post this morning: "After Katrina, U.S. Did Not Accept Most Offers of Aid." It said that allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash, but only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction. According to U.S. officials and contractors, most of the aid went uncollected including $400 million worth of oil.

How can that be?

SECRETARY RICE: Look, the fact is that we received a lot of very generous offers from people at the time of Katrina. It was a new circumstance. The United States is, frankly, not accustomed to receiving large-scale foreign assistance offers. We did tell people on a number of occasions that it might be useful to have this assistance go to private concerns like, for instance, the Bush-Clinton effort for Katrina. We thought that that and the Red Cross might be the most efficacious way for people to get their aid there.

But we used a lot of the aid. Some of it couldn't be used. Some of it was in-kind in ways that the United States could not use it. But a lot of it was used and a lot of it is still being used to help the victims. I've been particularly proud of some of the work that's been done with historically black colleges and schools in Louisiana and Mississippi.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, thank you very much.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much.

2007/336

Released on April 29, 2007

Cheney has it exactly backwards; Terror attacks up, Rice considered hiding the data

Related
Terror attacks up, Rice considered hiding the data
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Saturday, April 28, 2007

Saudi Terror Plot Averted
State Dept.: Terrorism up 30%

Condi Rice wanted to delay the news, but it has broken on two fronts.

Warren Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy report that the annual State Department on terrorism will report a nearly 30% rise over the previous year, most of it accounted for by attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words Cheney has it exactly backwards. The US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is feeding terrorism, not preventing or lessening it. "They" won't follow us home if we leave. But they might if we don't.

Twilight Zone: Pass through the portal to the alternate reality of the War Party’s propagandists

April 9, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

by Gregory Cochran

I think almost everybody has wondered what would have happened if they had made a different choice in life, taken a different path. If you didn’t think of it by yourself, seeing “It’s a Wonderful Life” a few hundred times has probably driven the point home by now.

Many authors have applied this idea to big turning points, writing about alternative histories in which Hitler won World War II (Fatherland) or the South won the Civil War (Bring the Jubilee). The notion may not be pure fantasy: the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that these Worlds-of-If may really exist, although forever unreachable.

Or maybe not so unreachable. A very odd pattern of statements by prominent supporters and members of the Bush administration suggests that we may have some truly unusual visitors—literally out-of-this-world.

You see, the president and his associates keep referring to historical events that never happened, at least not as they did in the fields we know. And they keep referring to the same ahistorical events. Over and over, the secretary of state and the (now former) secretary of defense have referred to guerrilla warfare in Germany after the Nazi surrender. But there just wasn’t any. You can’t find it in the history books or in the memories of people who were there at the time. My uncle was in Bavaria in the summer of 1945: no trouble. Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly talked about the similarities between today’s Iraq and America after the Revolutionary War, but again, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any. I don’t believe we found tortured corpses in the streets of Philadelphia every morning back in 1784. And why does President Bush keep saying that Saddam refused to admit those UN arms inspectors back in 2002 and early 2003? Why did Condoleezza Rice, in 2000, say that Iran was probably backing the Taliban, when in fact the two had almost gone to war in 1998?

Now some might say that these statements were just talking points—that is, lies—but I sure wouldn’t want to accuse anyone of lying. More to the point, there have been many ahistorical statements that are just strange and don’t seem to advance any particular political agenda. For example, when President Bush said that the Japanese lost two carriers sunk and one damaged at the Battle of Midway (instead of losing all four, which is what actually happened), who gained? When POTUS said that Sweden has no army (it does), what political argument was advanced?

We’re talking about the rulers of the most powerful nation on earth. It can’t be that they’re just pig-ignorant—of their own history, yet. There has to be a deeper, more subtle explanation.

We can learn more by examining these statements in detail, including those of the administration’s close supporters. They too keep diverging from the history we know. Recently, Rep. Don Young of Alaska quoted Lincoln as saying, “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” Lincoln never said that, of course. Cliff May, at National Review, said “President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.” Pretty fly for a dead guy: FDR passed on just before Germany surrendered, well before the Japanese quit. And anyhow, the first of many Pearl Harbor investigations—the Roberts Commission—started only 11 days after the sneak attack.

More and more, I get the feeling that Bush and his friends come from one of the Worlds-of-If—a sad place, even worse than the one we actually live in, a world in which their odd statements are true.

When tired or stressed, they refer to the history that they lived and learned in school. But their briefing books recount an alternate history in which Iraq in 2002 was not a poor and backward country but the coming threat, as our Germany was in 1938. A history in which America, after the Revolution, was a flaming cesspool like Iraq today, a world in which Lincoln executed unruly legislators. One in which World War II dragged on long after the indecisive Battle of Midway. One in which our occupation of Germany was plagued by guerrilla warfare. One in which we’ve been fighting World War IV with Iran and Syria for 25 years, as Jim Woolsey has repeatedly said. One in which a hostile Islamic Caliphate has bothered to go through the formality of coming into existence.

Close study of such statements might eventually give a rough sketch of that other world’s history. This would be of immense value, for it would allow us to learn much about the inner workings of the historical process, just as the discovery of a different kind of life on Mars would be an epochal event in biology. The fact that a history that diverged from ours at least 200 years ago, judging from the differences in the Revolution, still bears some resemblance to ours—still had a battle of Midway, just not the same battle—suggests that unknown overarching forces constrain the course of events. But the story is never the same in detail.

The casual mention of World War IV strongly implies that these interlopers also had a World War III. They must have suffered greatly—maybe bombed out, likely short on resources such as oil. I would guess that those disasters irretrievably darkened their political perspective, just as our World War I left an entire generation embittered and disaffected. Certainly some kind of civilizational blight is needed to explain Vice President Cheney’s “Dark Lord” shtick.

Somehow they came here, so there must be a gate or portal. Judging from the spatial clustering of identifiable visitors, it’s somewhere in Washington, probably very close to the AEI building. Possibly inside. It may be an accident of nature, or it might be a scientific wonder used for judicial exile, just as bad Kryptonians were sent to the Phantom Zone. You have to wonder about that when you consider the kind of guys they’re sending.

If two-way transfer is possible, there could be vast business opportunities. There are reasons to suspect that science and engineering took a very different path over there: their limited understanding of nuclear weapons—they seem to think that nukes are roughly as easy to build as bottle rockets—suggests that nuclear fission may never have been developed on their timeline. But even if they’re behind us in some areas, they’re likely to be ahead in others. I’d guess that they know far more about torture than we do. Practice makes perfect.

Even if they’ve never split the atom, they have much to offer. The very existence of such a portal is the most significant new scientific result in a century, far more important than any result expected from the most advanced accelerator. The sheer physical presence of Condoleezza Rice on this plane suggests, indeed demands, new physics that may lead to the long-desired marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It’s either this or string theory.

Of course this means that we need to corral some or all of these visitors for study and experimentation. Such experiments would, I suppose, interfere with their civil liberties, if they had any, but they’re obviously not citizens of these United States. Technically they’re illegal aliens. Gitmo’s a-waitin’.

And perhaps we can do more. Obviously this other world is in a sorry state and could stand some saving. They’re our closer-than-brothers—our other selves living in a world gone bad, a world in which the toast always falls butter-side down, a world where Mr. Potter owns the Building and Loan. Undoubtedly an irrepressible desire for freedom burns in every heart there. As soon as possible, we should begin preparing for their liberation.

It will be a cakewalk. .
___________________________________

Gregory Cochran is a physicist and evolutionary biologist.

Ex-AIPAC staffers say Condi leaked them classified info

Friday April 28, 2006

by ron kampeas
jta

alexandria, va. | Two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee say Condoleezza Rice was their informant on sensitive national security matters.

The claim, laid out in a courtroom Friday, April 21, intensified the drama surrounding a trial that could further roil a Washington political establishment already consumed by cases involving “official” and “unofficial” leaks.

The trial date, originally scheduled to begin April 25, has now been set for Aug. 7, even as the judge in the case continues to suggest the case might not go to trial at all.

In last week’s pretrial hearing, lawyers for Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former foreign policy director, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst, persuaded federal Judge T.S. Ellis III to allow a subpoena for the secretary of state and three other current and former Middle East policy officials.

Rosen and Weissman were indicted last August on charges that they relayed classified information to fellow AIPAC staffers, journalists and diplomats at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

The judge continued to express grave doubts about the government’s case, sympathizing with defense claims that it could impinge on free speech rights, and that it lacked precedent.

When Kevin DiGregory, the lead prosecutor, pointed out that the First Amendment had never been cited in a similar case, Ellis chided him, saying: “Well, no case has been like this one.”

Setting out a pretrial schedule, Ellis pointedly would not count out a dismissal before the start of the trial and several times qualified prospective dates, saying “if there is going to be a trial.”

Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said Rice had not merely been Rosen’s interlocutor, but had leaked information identical to and at times more sensitive than examples cited in the indictment.

In addition, Lowell said, the information Rice provided was more “volatile” than the information described in the indictment. Lowell would not elaborate on what information he was referring to.

Lowell asked for an additional meeting with the judge — with no prosecutors present — to further describe the testimony he anticipated from Rice and others. Ellis said he looked forward to “a lot of juicy information.”

Ellis had to rule on the request because the subpoenas fell under special rules of the district court in Alexandria, Va., that require subpoenas for Cabinet members, ambassadors and generals to be approved by the presiding judge.

Lowell said that another six subpoenas had already been sent to prospective witnesses.

Rice’s testimony is not yet guaranteed. The State Department must clear subpoenas to its staff, and witnesses have a right to ask subpoenas to be squashed. But Lowell made it clear he would not let the government off the hook, likening this case to the recent controversy over leaks on the Iraq war President Bush has defended as “authorized” and those he has attacked as illegal.

Also at the hearing, called on a few days’ notice, the judge sided with the defense’s claim that the case is unprecedented.

Government lawyers have striven to show that prosecution under a 1917 statute that criminalizes the receipt of classified information is not unprecedented. Lowell said the government had failed to show true precedent and had instead “cut and pasted” elements of four or five unrelated cases to establish precedent.

Ellis agreed, calling Lowell’s arguments “substantial.”

It was not all good news for the defense. Lowell wanted Ellis to order depositions from three Israeli diplomats who allegedly received information from Rosen and Weissman. The defense has been unable to persuade the diplomats to voluntarily comply.

Ellis refused, saying he did not see the point because his orders carried no weight in Israel, where the diplomats now reside.

Lowell acknowledged as much, but apparently hoped a formal order from the judge would embarrass the Israelis into volunteering; ever since the Jonathan Pollard spy case in the late 1980s, Israeli officials want to be seen as cooperative with American legal cases.

Chairman Waxman Reiterates Request for Testimony from Secretary Rice

Monday, April 09, 2007
Administration Oversight, Iraq Intelligence and Nuclear Evidence

After receiving an insufficient response from the State Department's Legislative Affairs office, Chairman Waxman reiterates his request for Secretary Rice to testify on April 18 regarding President Bush's claims that Iraq attempted to procure uranium from Niger and other subjects.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Secretary Rice
• Response from State Department

PUSH ISRAEL? NOT DUBYA

By ROBERT D. NOVAK

April 5, 2007 -- JERUSALEM

AN overriding melancholy here this Holy Week follows Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's mission to Jerusalem the previous week. To Arabs and Jews seeking meaningful peace negotiations, it confirmed no progress toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians is likely for the remainder of George W. Bush's presidency.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected Rice's offer for her to participate in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a permanent peace treaty. The word in the Olmert government is that President Bush fully shares the prime minister's reluctance even to begin talks at this time.

The Riyadh Declaration indicated willingness of the Arab world to consider a peaceful solution. Now, belief here among peace-seekers is that nothing will happen until a new president enters the Oval Office in 2009.

That was the consensus Tuesday at a conference on Middle East policy held in Jerusalem by the Morley Institute of Washington:A diverse assemblage of Palestinians (Muslim and Christians), Israelis, Americans and other foreigners held little hope for a Bush initiative in the closing months of his regime.

The atmosphere has changed since I was here for Holy Week a year ago. Israeli self-confidence then was at a peak, with the newly installed Olmert avowing the unilateral solution to the Palestinian problem developed by his predecessor, Ariel Sharon.

Behind that posture was confidence in military superiority. Now the unhappy results of the Lebanon incursion have modified Israeli expectations. Olmert publicly indicates a willingness to talk, and the Haaretz newspaper quoted him as saying the Arabs' Riyadh summit "is evidence of a change."

But the moderates at Tuesday's conference viewed this as rhetoric. Olmert told Rice last week that any negotiations must be preceded by the release of the Israeli soldier seized by Hamas fighters last June 25.

The broader pre-conditions for talks are Olmert's refusals to include in negotiations any discussion of a return of Arab refugees to greater Palestine and a withdrawal of Israel to its 1967 borders. Negotiating those points does not mean that they will be conceded. But setting pre-conditions for talks is a classic mechanism for escaping talks altogether.

Indeed, Olmert continues to cite the presence of Hamas in the Palestinian government as justification for the absence of anybody from the negotiating table.

It surely is up to Bush. When Rice made her previous visit to Israel about six weeks ago, the Israeli government announced that Olmert had been on the phone with Bush a day earlier and that they "see eye-to-eye." That insured the three-cornered talks in Jerusalem between Rice, Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would accomplish nothing substantial.

Haaretz political columnist Akiva Eldar, a speaker at Tuesday's conference, wrote in Monday's newspaper: "As a rare and historic opportunity appears on the horizon, a leadership of different dimensions is needed." He was talking about Olmert, but he could have referred to Bush as well.

Nothing could be accomplished now without Bush pressuring Olmert. Bush's original intentions to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace were sidetracked by the 9/11 attack and subsequent U.S. military operations. The question is whether Eldar's "historic opportunity" will be gone when a new American president takes office.

Rice trying to dodge hearing on Iraq-Niger documents

On Iraq, Reporters May Be Missing Their Mark(et)

By Al Kamen
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; A11

The liberal media have been jumping all over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for accusing the press of not reporting all the good news in Iraq. There has been some improvement, McCain told reporters after strolling through the Shorja market in Baghdad. "But the American people are not getting the full picture of what's happening here.

"They are not getting the full picture of the drop in murders, the establishment of security outposts throughout the city, the situation in Anbar province, the deployment of additional Iraqi brigades who are performing well, and other signs of progress that have been made."

Instead, what does the press do? It harps on the hundreds killed around the country in the week before the visit, including at least 152 in Tall Afar, and the six U.S. soldiers killed the day McCain, wearing a flak jacket and surrounded by dozens of troops, was at the market.

We're now in the fifth year of the media's failure to report the good news from Iraq.

There has been much less attention paid to Rep. Mike Pence's assessment. Pence (R-Ind.) seemed most impressed by their shopping outing, saying he was able to "mix and mingle unfettered among ordinary Iraqis." Unfettered even by the troops all around them or the flak jackets the lawmakers wore.

Some nearby shopkeepers recalled that the day before the visit an Iraqi soldier had been shot by a sniper, and the day before that a sniper had killed two more victims.

Pence, however, said he came away from his "day at the market in Baghdad with a new sense of cautious optimism that freedom might just work for these people." The Shorja market, he said, was "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."

Really? Just like the weekend farmers market in the Minnetrista Cultural Center parking lot in Muncie?

Maybe not exactly. "There've been no shootings or car bombings" at that market since it opened a few years ago, said Robin Gibson, assistant metro editor of the Star Press in Muncie. So no dangers there at all? "Maybe some overeager dogs jumping at people," she ventured.

Avon Waters, a former features editor and writer for the Herald Bulletin in Anderson, the other relatively big town in Pence's largely rural congressional district, said he never wore a flak jacket and "never felt afraid" when he spent a couple of recent years covering farmers markets in Madison County, including places such as Elwood and Pendleton.

"No snipers or car bombs," Waters reported.

Well, there weren't any during the lawmakers' visit to the Baghdad market either, which enabled Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to do some excellent shopping. "I bought five rugs for five bucks," he boasted. "People were engaging."

Remember when Mitt Romney's dad went to check things out in Vietnam?

A Purloined Letter?

I did call, I did write, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday in a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman, Loop fans may recall, wrote to Rice last week saying that she had not responded to many of his letters over the years asking about the administration's bogus claims that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from Niger, how it handled classified information and other matters.

Because she hadn't responded, Waxman on Friday sent her an invitation to come up to the Hill for a hearing on April 18.

But yesterday, in a lengthy missive on her behalf by Jeffrey T. Bergner, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, the State Department said she has been quite responsive.

"Our records reflect that you have sent 49 individual letters . . . since 2003, 21 of which" went to Rice, Bergner said, and with the exception of one letter they haven't been able to find and a few recent ones they're working on, she's responded to everything.

"I'm sure that this thorough and comprehensive" response, department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday, will be sufficient to "obviate the need" for a formal hearing.

Stay tuned.

Can't Spell Limbo Without OMB

Susan E. Dudley will get one more hearing.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will, once again, take up her troubled nomination to oversee federal regulatory policy at the Office of Management and Budget.

Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) "is moving forward in the traditional manner with her nomination," committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips told our colleague Stephen Barr.

President Bush named Dudley to the OMB post last August, and her confirmation hearing was held in November. The Senate adjourned without voting on her nomination, which the White House later resubmitted.

While in confirmation limbo, she has been serving as counselor to Clay Johnson III, a presidential buddy and the deputy director for management at the OMB.

Before her first nomination, Dudley wrote about regulation for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and her critics assailed her comments involving air bags, arsenic limits in drinking water and workplace injuries.

Tripp Goes Back to Court

Linda Tripp, erstwhile pal of Monica Lewinsky, is scheduled to appear today in Fauquier General District Court in Warrenton in a dispute with the Pentagon Federal Credit Union over unpaid credit card bills. Tripp now owes $2,822.68, with attorneys' fees and such included, on a consumer loan, according to papers filed with the court.

It's unclear whether Tripp will make it, though. The county sheriff's office, which tried to serve her notice of the court date, says she moved from Marshall and left no forwarding address, though they note that she may be working at a store in Middleburg.

Heading Out . . .

Richard Lawless, the deputy undersecretary of defense for Asia and Pacific affairs and an expert on Korean matters and China policy, is reported to be leaving his job in the next few weeks, apparently for personal reasons. The authoritative Nelson Report has it that Lawless's deputy, Jim Shinn, formerly the CIA's national intelligence officer for Asia, is expected to be nominated assistant secretary of defense for Asia.

The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East

Tomgram: Karon, Why Condi's Diplomacy Should Start with Bush

Ever since September 2001, the President's central operative image has been "war" -- specifically, his "global war on terror" (promptly transformed into the grim acronym GWOT). With it went the fantasy that we had been plunged into the modern equivalent of World War II with -- as George loved to put it -- "theaters" of operation and "fronts" on a global scale. Remember how, as we occupied Baghdad in April 2003, administration pronouncements almost made it seem as though we were occupying Tokyo or Berlin, 1945? And when things went badly in Iraq, that country quickly became "the central front in the war on terror" in the President's speeches. Well, now it may indeed be just that.

In the framework -- essentially a fundamentalist religion -- of global force and "preventive" war adopted by the Bush administration, the only place for diplomats was assumedly on the sidelines, holding the pens, as the enemy surrendered to the military. (Too bad, when we hit Baghdad, there was no one around to surrender, no way to put a John Hancock on our "victory.") Otherwise, as classically happened in Iraq, where the State Department, despite copious planning for the postwar moment, was cut out of the process and left in the Kuwaiti or Washingtonian dust by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, all issues of diplomacy were essentially relegated to Wimp World. After all, as the infamous neocon slogan once went, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." And it was well known that diplomats were not "real men."

Nowhere on the planet was a diplomat worth a sou. Not surprisingly, then, the two central figures in George W. Bush's second-term diplomatic non-endeavors became his two key female enablers, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, and Karen Hughes, now undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Not surprisingly, Rice has managed to do nothing of significance on our planet -- even the great diplomatic "success" of this administration, its shaky deal with North Korea, was basically crafted by the Chinese on terms worse than could have been obtained years earlier -- and Hughes, as diplomacy's spinmeister, has managed to put less than no polish on our globally disastrous image.

By now, of course, we've arrived at a moment in the Middle East so grim, so fraught with dangers, so at the edge of who knows what, with so many disparate crises merging, that it's even occurred to Rice something must be done. As Tony Karon, savvy guy, senior editor at Time.com, and the creator of the ever-thoughtful and provocative blog Rootless Cosmopolitan points out, Rice has so far gotten a free ride here. Her approval ratings, until recently, hovered well above 50%, while the President's were sinking close to 30%. Let Karon now explain to you where we really are in the Middle East, diplomatically speaking. Tom

Condi's Free Ride

The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East
By Tony Karon

They must serve up some pretty powerful Kool Aid in the press room down at Foggy Bottom, judging by U.S. media coverage of Condi Rice's latest "Look Busy" tour of the Middle East.

Secretary of State Rice's comings and goings have long been greeted with a jaded disdain by the Arab and Israeli media. As Gideon Levy wrote plaintively (and typically) in Israel's Haaretz last August,

"Rice has been here six times in the course of a year and a half, and what has come of it? Has anyone asked her about this? Does she ask herself? It is hard to understand how the secretary of state allows herself to be so humiliated. It is even harder to understand how the superpower she represents allows itself to act in such a hollow and useless way. The mystery of America remains unsolved: How is it that the United States is doing nothing to advance a solution to the most dangerous and lengthiest conflict in our world?"

The fact that -- this time -- Rice professes to be advancing just such a solution has hardly convinced Middle Eastern scribes. As Beirut's secular, liberal Daily Star put it in an editorial on Monday, "Already this is Rice's fourth Middle East tour aimed at reactivating a stalled peace process, but so far the only measurable progress she has achieved has been racking up extra mileage on her airplane."

Mainstream U.S. media outlets were alone in their willingness to swallow the preposterous narratives offered by Rice's State Department spinners on the significance of her latest diplomatic efforts. For months, we have been reading a fantasy version of American diplomacy in which Rice was at the center of a realignment of forces in the Middle East, building a united front of Arab moderates to stand alongside the U.S. and Israel against Iran and other "extremist" elements. Last week, we were asked to believe that Rice was now about to head back to the region to choreograph a complex and dramatic diplomatic dance that would include such "challenges" as "trying to get the Saudis to talk to the Israelis." Perhaps none of her aides bothered to let her in on the open secret that the Saudis have been doing that for months -- and not under the tutelage of, or at the prompting of, the Secretary of State either.

On the eve of her departure, the Washington Post informed us, Rice would remake the peace process via a new math: 4+2+4. This was cute jargon for grouping various discussions among the Israelis and Palestinians, the "Quartet" (the U.S., the European Union, the UN, and Russia), and an "Arab Quartet" comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. By Monday, only three days later, however, the new math had mysteriously disappeared -- as if Rice had suddenly entered a world of innumeracy -- replaced by "parallel discussions." With the Israelis unwilling to talk to the Palestinians about the "contours of a Palestinian state," each side was instead to discuss such things separately with Rice in a kind of diplomatic confession booth.

For anyone disappointed by the sudden demise of "4+2+4," Condi assured all involved that "we'll use many different geometries, I'm sure, as we go through this process." A day later, the trip's crowning achievement was reported by the New York Times: "After three days of shuttle diplomacy between Israeli and Arab cities and a late night of haggling, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that she had persuaded Israeli and Palestinian leaders to hold talks twice a month." But not, it turned out, on the "final-status issues" -- the contours of a Palestinian state. They would simply chat to "build confidence," while, presumably, regularly reentering her confession booth.

As Lebanon-based Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri put it,

"To overcome the chronic stalemate of bilateral Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, [Rice] is now expanding this into a trilateral failure, as the principal parties who won't talk to each other only to talk to her. It's hard to decide if this is a comedy or a horror show."

It may be a sign of the contempt with which the Bush administration treats the American media that Condi expects such a Pollyannaish pantomime to be reported as if it were history-in-the-making. And it may be a mark of the naiveté with which much of the U.S. media has, over these last years, chronicled Condi's adventures that, in fact, it is reported as if it were history-in-the-making. The Secretary of State has not only chalked up the miles in the air recently, in media terms here in the U.S., she's invariably been given a free ride.

Whose Diplomacy Is This Anyway?

In reality, if significant diplomatic maneuvering is currently underway in the Middle East, it is the work of the Saudis. The Saudi royals had grown so alarmed by the passivity and incompetence of the Bush administration -- and by the rising influence of Iran as well as Islamist movements in the Arab world (whose popularity and credibility is boosted by their willingness to stand up to Israel and the U.S.) -- that it launched an uncharacteristically robust diplomatic campaign on a number of fronts. The Condi-spun media tends to explain this as the Bush administration coaxing Riyadh's royal wallflowers onto the diplomatic dance floor. The Saudi efforts are, however, so clearly at odds with administration policies and desires on key issues that this characterization is impossible to sustain.

As Washington pressed for the isolation of Iran, Riyadh -- supposedly the leader of a new Axis of Moderation being constructed by Washington -- spent the winter vigorously engaging Tehran at the highest level. The purpose was to begin to calm Shiite-Sunni tensions across the region, aggravated by the catastrophic situation in Iraq, and to bring Lebanon's warring factions back from the brink of confrontation. While the U.S. press was generally reporting that the Saudis were entering a period of muscular confrontation with Iran, that country appeared to be searching for mechanisms to manage Saudi/Iranian differences based on a mutual recognition of each other's regional roles. Not exactly what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Condoleezza Rice seems to have had in mind.

Then came the Saudi attempt to bring the warring Palestinian factions together in the Mecca Agreement. Here, the Saudis brokered negotiations to draw Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party into a unity government with Hamas -- even as Washington continued to warn Abbas against doing so. Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, has rarely exhibited any independence from Washington. His willingness to take this step offered a clear signal that the Saudis were orchestrating things on the Israeli-Palestinian front with little patience for indulging Bush administration fantasies. The U.S. had, of course, been seeking the literal overthrow of Hamas since it won legislative elections in 2006 -- something the Saudis recognized as infeasible, given that Hamas is, at this point, far more representative of Palestinian sentiment than Fatah. Saudi leaders were also aware that Washington's campaign to isolate Hamas in the Arab world left it little option but to seek Iranian patronage.

In reality, the Bush administration seems increasingly at odds with the consensus among the Arab moderates it claims to be leading. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, in particular, appears to have sent a signal of this in cancelling -- with little explanation -– a special state dinner that was to be hosted by President Bush on April 17th. Then, at Wednesday's Arab League Summit in Riyadh, the King followed up by demanding an end to the crippling financial siege of the Palestinian Authority imposed by the U.S. and denouncing the American military presence in Iraq as an "illegitimate foreign occupation." This is strong stuff from the Saudis.

Rather than a patient plan crafted by the U.S. Secretary of State as some miraculous alchemist of grand strategy, the latest flurry of activity reflects the maturing of a range of crises in the Middle East that have festered dangerously, while Condi fiddled. These include:

* The fact that the Bush administration has only exerted itself -- and then just symbolically -- on the Israeli-Palestinian front when it was desperate for favors from allied Arab regimes on other fronts, notably the roiling crises in Iraq and Iran. With the U.S. struggling unsuccessfully on both fronts, its vaunted ability to influence events in the region is in precipitous decline.

* The fact that the Arab regimes most closely allied to the U.S. face mounting crises of legitimacy at home, damned not only by their authoritarianism, but also by their paralysis in the face of U.S. and Israeli violence against Arab populations. Delivering the Palestinians to statehood is now seen by those regimes as essential to their own domestic political survival.

* The fact that an Israeli government, which came to power promising peace through unilateral "disengagement" from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, having fought a disastrous war in Lebanon and facing a never-ending struggle in Gaza, is seemingly disengaged from itself, its policies in tatters. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is drowning in a sea of corruption, scandals, and recriminations over the strategic and tactical incompetence he demonstrated in last summer's Lebanon war. With his own approval ratings at an astonishing 3%, he desperately needs a new idea to persuade Israeli voters that there's any reason to keep him in office.

* The fact that the Palestinians are experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian and political breakdown. All factions of the Palestinian government share an overwhelming incentive to get the financial siege lifted from battered, strife-torn Gaza. President Abbas' political future and legacy rest solely on completing the Oslo peace process; while for Hamas -- at least for its more pragmatic political leadership -- allowing President Abbas to pursue that course (particularly when it carries pan-Arab blessing) makes a certain sense. Hamas's political choices have always reflected a keen sense of Palestinian popular sentiment. By maintaining a distant and ambiguous stance towards Abbas's diplomatic efforts, it can plausibly deny complicity if the outcome proves unpopular on the Palestinian street.

The Failure to "Get There"

It is this combined political weakness, the loss of power among all the main players, that makes a renewed push for peace suddenly so attractive -- and so dubious. In recent weeks, both Rice and Olmert have expressed guarded enthusiasm for the Saudi peace proposals, as if they represented some remarkable new set of suggestions. The plan, which offers Israel recognition for full withdrawal to its 1967 borders, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a solution to the Palestinian refugee question based on a "right of return," was actually adopted by the Arab League five years ago. It was simply ignored by Israeli and American administrations that then felt too powerful to consider it. Their sudden willingness to embrace it, even if on their own terms, underscores the failure of their guiding political strategies.

Secretary of State Rice now treats discussions over the contours of a Palestinian state as if everyone were beginning with a blank slate. This is simply a self-serving evasion -- Israelis and Palestinians are well acquainted with the parameters of a final-status agreement, because they've already negotiated over them at length at Camp David and later at Taba in 2001, where they came pretty close to concluding a final status agreement. Even the "roadmap" adopted by the Bush administration in 2003 (partly as a reward for Arab and British support for the Iraq invasion) calls for a settlement that "will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and end the occupation that began in 1967, based on the foundations of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -- endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit." The basic assumption that emerges through all of those venues, resolutions, and initiatives is that the 1967 borders should be the basis for negotiating a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It's the Bush administration that has failed, or refused, to grasp this. "If we all know what [a political settlement] looks like," Condi said last week, "then why haven't we been able to get there?" That's the right question, of course, although Condi clearly intended it only as a rhetorical conversation-stopper. What she refuses to recognize is that the question has an answer: We haven't gotten there because there are elements on all sides of the conflict who don't want to get there.

Sure, the U.S. mainstream media will tell you all about the Palestinian rejectionists. What American reporting seldom makes clear is that Ariel Sharon was also elected prime minister in February 2001 on a rejectionist platform. He rejected the very idea that the conflict could be resolved through a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Instead, Sharon envisaged a unilateral withdrawal from about half of the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the Palestinians a little over 42% of the territories they occupied in 1967. A "non-belligerency agreement" would then be concluded for a "lengthy and indefinite period." The latter, of course, sounds not dissimilar to the "long-term truce" advocated by Hamas, which shares Sharon's distaste for a final political settlement -- although nobody in our world pilloried the Israeli leader as an extremist for holding exactly that position.

Sharon's position was so important precisely because it was so influential in Washington. Back in 2001, when Secretary of State Colin Powell warned against the consequences of encouraging Sharon to seek a military solution to the Palestinian uprising, President Bush reportedly snapped, "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." That could be an epitaph for the Age of Bush.

Indeed, to the extent that it was to be addressed at all on President Bush's watch, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was framed primarily as a problem of "terrorism." Sharon was encouraged to escalate the war on the West Bank on the basis that Israel had a right to defend itself. Under Sharon's tutelage, the administration put the onus for restarting any peace process purely on the Palestinians. They were not only tasked with preventing any further violence against Israelis, but also with dismantling the military infrastructure of the likes of Hamas and Fatah. The administration did occasionally pay lip service to the idea of Israel freezing settlement activity, but without conviction (or significant effect).

When President Bush courted Arab support on Iraq in 2002, he made a symbolic declaration of support for Palestinian statehood -- but it was promptly hedged with qualifications. Not only would the Palestinians have to fulfill Israel's security demands before there could be any movement towards such statehood, they would also have to thoroughly reform their political system: President Arafat would have to transfer control of Palestinian funds and security forces to the democratically elected legislature and the cabinet and prime minister it appointed. (The irony, to anyone paying attention, was that, after Hamas won last year's election, the Bush administration did a 180-degree turnabout and now insists that funds and security forces be entirely under the control of the politically reliable President Abbas.)

As Rice's erstwhile mentor, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, put it three years ago, "Sharon just has [President Bush] wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized."

In fact, far from being orchestrated or designed by Secretary of State Rice, events currently underway in the Middle East correspond more closely to a prescription outlined by Scowcroft in an explicit rebuke of Rice at the height of last summer's Lebanon crisis. As Scowcroft warned, the grand bargain that would stabilize the region depended, first and foremost, on the U.S. mustering the political will to press the parties to make unpopular choices. For the past six years, such political will has been conspicuously absent in Washington.

Those, Madame Secretary, are some of the reasons why we haven't yet "been able to get there."

As the Daily Star noted in an editorial last Monday, if Condi Rice wants to revive an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, then her powers of persuasion would be more productively deployed not in the Middle East, but in the West Wing.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. At his own blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, he offers a more pugilistic take on the universe.

Copyright 2007 Tony Karon

Yet another brainless NYT editorial

Chris gets a lot of letters printed in Big Media.
---
letters@nytimes.com

30, Smithy Drive,
Ashford, Kent
England TN23 3NS

26th March,2007 01233 500229

Dear Sir,

It is amazing how you keep writing them. It is as if you still believed in fairies and demons, or expected your readers to do so anyway. Your editorial 'The Hamas Conundrum' is classic, containing all the standard NYT racist prejudice, all the NYT contempt for reality and belief in Zionist fabrication.

Many of us would have expected the penny would have dropped by now, through sixty years of Israeli defiance of international law over refugees, settlements and occupation, through desperate efforts by Palestinians, some peaceful and some not, to demand Israeli compliance with the law, through 60 years of international community failure to condemn effectively Israeli non-complaince while condemning Palestinian resistance to Israeli crimes.

Now your editorial blames Hamas refusal to comply with the three absurd "conditions", none of which are required by any law, except the law of the bully.

Grow up.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Leadbeater


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/opinion/26mon1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Editorial

The Hamas Conundrum

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice moves into the final days of her Middle East trip, she still needs to come up with a way to translate the current lull in the violence between Israel and the Palestinians into an opening for genuine peace negotiations.

Breaking barriers to peace

From the Baltimore Sun

By Ori Nir

March 23, 2007

As she makes another effort to create a "political horizon" for Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be well advised to take a good look at their states of mind. The picture that Ms. Rice is trying to draw, illustrating ways to resolve the core points of disagreement between the two peoples, cannot be an abstraction. It must be a vision that would reverse the confrontational dynamic.

Most Israelis and Palestinians have experienced only a relationship of bloody conflict. A majority on both sides has not tasted a different reality.

Consider the following figures, which Americans for Peace Now recently received from Fafo, the Norwegian Institute for Labor and Social Research, widely considered the most credible authority on Palestinian demographics. According to Fafo's most recent polling data, 51.3 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are 20 years or younger. That means that more than half of the Palestinians in these territories were born into a milieu of on-again-off-again warfare with Israel that started with the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987.

An even more striking figure is that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population, 80.3 percent, is less than 40 years old. That means that four out of every five Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have lived their entire lives under Israeli occupation, which began after Israel's victory in the 1967 war with the Arabs.

Israel's population is significantly older. However, more than one-seventh of Israel's population arrived in the country after 1990, mainly because of the large influx of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Accounting for the 1,010,900 immigrants who arrived in the past 17 years, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics data show that 52 percent of Israelis were not around 24 years ago (there are no available data for 1967) and 84 percent were not around 44 years ago.

These figures help explain some long-standing features of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, including the perception, in both societies, that the stalemate is chronic, unavoidable and, worse, irreversible.

Because most on both sides have been socialized within the reality of ongoing armed conflict, they have come to accept an adversarial relationship as normal, as default. They lack the personal frame of reference to imagine any other relationship. Recent polls of Israelis and Palestinians show that although majorities in both societies support a two-state solution, majorities of the same proportions think this desired solution is unattainable.

Both sides demonize the other. Most, on both sides, have never interacted with members of the other community in situations that are not adversarial. Most Palestinians are too young to have ever visited Israel.

Certainly, most Israelis have never seen the Arab towns, villages and refugee camps of the West Bank or Gaza. Indeed, most Israelis don't even know where Israel ends and the West Bank starts. Israel's minister of education is now fighting to have the 1967 "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank marked on maps in schoolbooks.

Scarred by a generation of alienation and violence, both societies are awash with hatred and vengeance. Both are cynical. Many in both societies have despaired of ever living in peace with the other.

It will not be easy to change the mindset of two populations that are to such a large extent a product of occupation and conflict. It will require a reversal in attitudes and values, which means dedication and commitment over time - perhaps over a long period of time.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas consistently say that they have not despaired. And although Israel has refused to deal with the Palestinians' new unity government because of the militant group Hamas' refusal to recognize the Jewish state, Ms. Rice is pushing ahead to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process moving again. She leaves for the Mideast today.

The degenerative nature of the status quo necessitates strong, decisive leadership. The status quo, bleak as it may be, should not suggest, however, that leadership and effort would not pay off. Palestinians and Israelis yearn for hope. And a promising glimmer of hope, resulting from Ms. Rice's trip, could dramatically transform the gloomy atmosphere on both sides.

Ori Nir, former West Bank correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz, is the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, a Zionist organization that promotes Israel's security through peace. His e-mail is onir@peacenow.org.

Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun

The US Weakens - The Danger of Adventurism and the Chance for Peace on the Incre

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Many of us were pleased to see Mustafa Bargouti among the ministers in the new Palestinian government. Mustafa Bargouti is well known to the peace camp in Israel and to the friends of peace in the international community. He appears regularly in the international media as an effective and articulate spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. As a rule, Bargouti supports serious dialog between Palestinians and Israeli groups fighting for a just peace. His frequent appearances in important meetings of the protest movement bear witness to his humanist principles. He was absolutely right when he declared on television this week that if Israel really wants peace, all the issues can be solved peacefully within the framework of the two-state solution. If the people of Israel will find a way to overcome the obstacles raised by the Olmert government, peace can be achieved ushering in a period of prosperity and security.

It has been long clear that the Palestinians and the Arab countries are ready for a far-reaching compromise for peace. If there is a chance at this point for serious negotiations, it stems from the crisis of Bush's policies. The area is in turmoil, and US control of the Middle East is on the downgrade. The entire world keeps telling the US government that the tension surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the US blanket support for Israel is destroying the last vestiges of US prestige in the region. As a result of the US ensnarement in Iraq, the so-called "moderate" Arab countries are demanding some sort of revision in US policy. Rice is trying to pass off a new round of blather and chatter as the restart of the ‘peace process', but more and more nations and countries are losing their patience. Everybody has had enough of the bluff.

Voice out of Zion

The newspaper photo of Tsipi Livni speaking at the recent AIPAC conference was terrible. In the photo you see Livni, as if she were in some sort of virtual cockpit hovering above the audience. Sadly enough, Livni's message was even worse. She personally informed the AIPAC delegates of the call of the Israeli government to the Jews of the US to do everything in their power in order to strengthen the hand of George W. Bush and his dwindling band of followers so they can remain firm and resolute and fight on in Iraq until victory.

It seems, for a change, that in this matter, there is no difference of opinion between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister. Olmert explained (by video) to the same conference that the US must not show any weakness because this would impair stability in the region. Olmert really outdid himself when he attempted to convince a delegation from the Reform movement to support Bush and the continuation of the war. Olmert doesn't know or he just does not care that the Reform movement was the first major religious denomination in the US to come out (by an overwhelming majority at its democratically elected conference) against the war. It is hard to decide if Olmert is that much of a fool, or if he is simply fulfilling a request (more like an order) from the leader of the free world who is competing with him in a tight race to the lowest rungs of unpopularity.

By: Reuven Kaminer [ ::: The Region ::: ]

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Meet Eliot Cohen, Condi's New Deputy: "As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It Gets"

March 6, 2007

By GARY LEUPP

Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden [emphasis added].

The guy who wrote that, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on November 20, 2001, was Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. As the Director of the Strategic Studies department at SAIS, he has been called "the most influential neoconservative in academe."

More recently (April 5, 2006) Prof. Cohen published a prominent op-ed in the Washington Post attacking the scholarship of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago Political Science Professor John J. Mearsheimer and their academic paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

The study, Cohen contended in his "Yes, It's Anti-Semitism" piece, betrayed "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews," accusing Jews of "disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments." It collected "everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group" while ignoring "any exculpatory information." This from a man who almost immediately after 9-11 declared that "the obvious candidate" as a regime to "target" was Iraq, which had "helped al Qaeda"---and thereby unfairly and wrongly, and oblivious to exculpatory information, linked Saddam Hussein to 9-11.

(You can write stuff like that in the Wall Street Journal, and never have to say you're sorry afterwards when sober investigation shows what you'd written was total bullshit. The 9-11 hijackers and Saddam were all Arabs, so what's wrong with connecting them and exploiting ignorance and bigotry to get the war you want against Iraq?)

And now this man who thinks we're in the middle of World War IV (against the Muslim world), and who's written a book entitled The Supreme Command arguing that presidents need to control their sometimes reluctant generals, has been appointed by Condoleezza Rice as the new Counselor of the State Department. The meaning of the move isn't yet clear, given some recent indications that the U.S. might be willing to talk with Iran. But given the military buildup in the Persian Gulf; the appointment of Admiral William Fallon to head Central Command; the intensifying disinformation campaign about Iran conducted by the Bush administration and its embedded reporters and reports of significant opposition within the military towards an attack on Iran; the appointment at least signals the continuing vitality of the neocon movement within the U.S. government whose current urgent project is the Iran attack.

According to the official definition, "The Counselor of the Department is a principal officer who serves the Secretary as a special advisor and consultant on major problems of foreign policy and who provides guidance to the appropriate bureaus with respect to such matters. The Counselor conducts special international negotiations and consultations, and also undertakes special assignments from time to time, as directed by the Secretary." The post was vacant from 2001 to 2005. Cohen was preceded by Philip Zelikow, another academic, who is not considered a neocon but a "realist" occupied with trade matters. On the other hand Salon's Glen Greenwald calls Cohen "as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets."

The man wants the "overthrow" of the Iranian regime. He wants the president to (Churchill-like) force his hesitant generals to do the right thing and attack Iran. (His Supreme Command book is especially significant in light of reports that high-ranking officers have threatened resignations if the U.S. launches an assault on Iran, and that the president has actually read the book.)

So here's a man to watch, as Bush/Cheney policy towards Iran evolves. Others are Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy), and Abram Shulsky (head of the Pentagon's "Iran Directorate"), both students of Leo Strauss and comfortable proponants of using "noble lies" to manipulate public opinion to generate support for more imperialist wars. They may be desperate men at this point, when they read, for example, the recent Washington Post/ABC poll that shows 63% of Americans do not trust the Bush administration "to honestly and accurately report intelligence about possible threats from other countries."

They may well fear that if they can't "take the current when it serves"---by their use of noble lies, their ongoing paid, corrupt, discrete if obvious presence in the mainstream press--they will lose their ventures. Their usefully ignorant, manipulable cruel cowboy has less than two years left in the saddle, and great deeds cry out to be done!

The neocon agenda is plain enough. If only the dissident generals can be silenced! If only the assailants of the Israel Lobby can be quieted by bullying accusations of anti-Semitism! If only the war-weary American people can be made to understand that it's "moral and wise" to attack Iran! Because it's planning genocide! Because it's planning what Hitler couldn't do---wipe out the Jews! Then we can defeat the Evil which is Iran! And Syria! And the Shiite population of southern Lebanon!

The antiwar movement's agenda should be equally plain. Expose this agenda, its sensationalism and illogic, and the key figures working overtime towards its fulfillment. Question all reports by "unnamed government sources" and reporters like the New York Times' Michael R. Gordan (once---as a coauthor with Judith Miller---a vehicle for the dissemination of lies about Iraq) that charge Iran with supporting attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. (47% of Americans polled think the Bush administration has "solid information" the Iranian government is doing so, while 44% disagree. That latter figure needs to grow.) Challenge politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who, bending over backwards to please the Lobby, criticize the Iraq War while competing with Bush to embrace a hawkish stance towards Iran. Having never really challenged the essentialist anti-Muslim straight-of-hand that linked 9-11 to Iraq, they embrace the notion that Muslim Iran constitutes an "existential threat" to Israel (if not to the U.S.) and tell applauding AIPAC audiences that they agree "no option should be off the table" in dealing with Iran.

The neocons determined to reconfigure the "Greater Middle East" through the use of "shock and awe" military force may be down as a result of public revulsion at the results of their initial criminal ventures. But they aren't out, as Cohen's appointment dramatically shows. That's a big problem for the future of this country and the planet.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu