Obama Expands the American Warfare State

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Sherwood Ross
May 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Although the U.S. is not in imminent danger of attack from any country, President Obama's first budget further expands the Pentagon's already dominant global operations.

Not even the prospect of a $3.1 trillion combined budget deficit for this year and next deters him. Let them chop the budget for black colleges and police officer death benefits, the Pentagon and its contractors continue to feast at the champagne-and-caviar table.

It's not as though for eight years the Bush Pentagon hadn't nearly outspent the rest of the world combined on designing deadlier weapons and employing them in illegal wars.

Obama's new $664 billion Pentagon budget is $21 billion higher (four percent) than the final Bush budget. It includes $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq. Why?

Well, here's what Defense Secy. Robert Gates told the Naval War College April 17th: "The U.S. must not take its current dominance for granted...its battle fleet, by one estimate, is still larger than the next 13 navies combined---and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners."

(Get that? "Larger than the next 13 navies combined." What's more, nearly every world power is our buddy. So where's the urgent need to spend billions on expansion? And notice his use of the word "dominance.")

Gates went on to boast, "In terms of capabilities, the over-match is even greater. No country in the rest of the world has anything close to the reach and firepower to match a carrier strike group. And the U.S. has and will maintain 11 at least until 2040."

Gates seeks an incredible 2,400 new Joint Strike Fighter planes when the U.S. already is undisputed master of the skies. Think of that: 2,400 warplanes in the absence of an enemy!

At 100 million bucks a pop, that air armada will cost taxpayers over $240 billion.

As Sheldon Filger wrote in the May 16 Huffington Post of the Pentagon's fiscal 2009 outlay: "This stratospheric expendure is equivalent to the combined totals for the next 25 largest military budgets on the planet."

The Pentagon claims it needs to be able to fight two wars at once. However, if it did not go around starting wars it would be hard-pressed to find one. From what quarter does Gates expect an attack? Iran, with a puny military budget 1/100th our expenditure? Recall the last successful strike on U.S. soil was achieved not by a great army wielding sophisticated weapons but by a handful of terrorists with box cutters who hijacked airliners and used our own jet fuel for explosives. Yet the Pentagon expands as if gearing up to fight WWII.

"President Obama's budget continues the decade-long uptick in Pentagon spending, which has grown by approximately 40% since 2000," observes military policy analyst Travis Sloan of the Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

He notes the Obama budget "appears surprisingly large at first glance, especially in this economic climate." Yet he sees reason for optimism as he believes Obama "will institute critical foreign and defense reforms that will make us safer and spend our money more wisely." That's his view.

Obama's Pentagon budget, however, is certainly not going to make the people of Afghanistan safer. His buildup there comes as Afghan President Hamid Karzai pleads in the strongest terms "for the U.S. to halt air strikes in his country, following attacks...that Afghan officials said killed 147 people," Reuters reported. "We demand an end to these operations...an end to air strikes," Karzai told CNN. (Demand? Puppets don't pull strings.)

Defense Secretary Gates informed West Point cadets April 21st that Afghanistan is about "striking back at the staging ground of the perpetrators of the September 11th attack," claiming "Afghanistan is widely viewed as a war of necessity."

In fact, USA Today reported just a month earlier that public support for that conflict "has ebbed to a new low," according to a Gallup Poll. Americans who regard the attack on Afghanistan as "a mistake" had increased from 9% in 2001 to 42%, a sea change Gates conveniently chooses not to credit.

Gallup also discovered a shift in public opinion from March, 2007, when it asked if the U.S. was spending too much or too little on defense. Forty-three per cent responded "too much" compared with 20 percent who replied "too little." A decade earlier most Americans didn't think the Pentagon was on a spending binge with their taxes.

It's ironic that to prosecute what is now President Obama's war, the Pentagon is inflicting on Afghan civilians the same cruel deaths terrorists visited on New York City. Human Rights Watch dubbed "inadequate" U.S. military measures to safeguard them.

A like situation afflicts Pakistan, as the U.S.-made Afghan war spills over its borders. According to AP, "Using unmanned aircraft, American forces have carried out dozens of missile attacks in northwestern Pakistan over the last year. U.S. officials rarely confirm the attacks, but say they have killed a string of al-Qaida commanders. Pakistan's government has publicly protested the tactic, arguing that it kills too many civilians and undermines its efforts to turn tribal leaders away from hard-liners." The UN says 1.5 million Pakistanis have fled their homes, a repeat of the Afghan exodus.

America's Afghan war "is not self defense," writes international law authority Francis Boyle in his new book, "Tackling America's Toughest Questions"(Clarity Press). "Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis...(it) constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan."

Boyle recalls that then Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to produce a "white paper" documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda but never did, and that Bush failed to get a UN resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon's aim, he says, is to "direct military control of 50 percent of the world's oil supply" in the Persian Gulf region, which the Fifth Fleet was "set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control."

Can the Department of Defense operations be construed "defensive" when it is operating more than 1,000 bases abroad and those 11 mobile carrier attack fleets? According to author Hugh Gusterson, writing in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists of March 10th: "These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup." (If only the Pentagon spilled just that!)

Few realize the Pentagon's collection of bases makes it the world's biggest landlord, about 30-million acres. Excluding Afghanistan and Iraq, USA spends $102 billion a year just to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Pentagon justifies its appetite for, say, 227 bases in Germany in terms of making the U.S. more secure. In fact, though, "Such forward basing of forces," writes James Carroll in House of War(Houghton Mifflin), "was designed to control, by means of 'regime change' and 'prevention,' emerging political trends around the globe, with the unabashed goal of guaranteeing U.S. dominance everywhere." Indications are the American war machine has triumphed over its closest adversary: the State Department. As Reuters columnist Bernd Debusmann wrote May 14th, "The U.S. armed forces, the world's most powerful, outnumber the country's diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?"

Debusmann goes on to say, "In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison...China's defense budget is $70 billion, Russia's around $50 billion."

The picture emerging is ugly. No "victory" in its spreading wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq ever will begin to compensate for the vast numbers of Middle Eastern folk needlessly maimed, killed, displaced, and pauperized by U.S. military aggression. "Aggression" is the only word for it and the Middle East's oil supply is the only reason for it. The Pentagon is on its way to tighten its control of the world---with the help of our newest imperial president's enabling budget. The American Warfare State marches on!

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Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who has worked for major American newspapers and magazines as well as international wire services.

Our Loss Is BlackRock's Gain

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Robert Scheer
May 20, 2009 - TruthDig

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How much do you know about the BlackRock hedge fund? Better bone up fast, now that the folks at BlackRock are calling the shots in the government's trillion-dollar bailout program. As both The New York Times and The Wall Street journal reported on Tuesday, BlackRock execs are now directing key elements of the government program at a time when they stand to reap great profits from the fallout of a problem they helped create.

The U.S. picked BlackRock to manage the assets once controlled by AIG and Bear Stearns and to analyze the assets of Freddie Mac and Morgan Stanley. And as if that were not enough on its plate, the Treasury Department has just selected BlackRock to be one of the few firms trusted with using U.S. taxpayer dollars to buy toxic assets from the banks and then resell them in a process that presents enormous conflicts of interest with other BlackRock operations.

Bank of America, with a 47% ownership position in BlackRock, is also the owner of what was once Countrywide Financial, which led the pack in selling bad mortgages. The disposition of those failed properties under BlackRock's tutelage will have much to do with BofA's future profitability. As if that were not enough financial incest, the former president and other top executives of Countrywide now run a company created by BlackRock, which is profiting mightily by snapping up the sort of distressed loans that they originally had marketed.

Confused? You're supposed to be. That's the point of a successful hedge fund, a totally unregulated activity in which very rich people pool their money in order to more effectively rip off the rest of us. And BlackRock is at the top of that game, managing $1.3 trillion in assets. But in this round the stakes are far higher because BlackRock, which did a great deal to cause the economic meltdown, has now been put in charge of the government recovery effort.

But don't take my word for it; check out the accounts of BlackRock's leading role in managing the bailout in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

The New York Times: "Can a company that is being paid to price and sell troubled assets for the government buy the same kinds of assets for private clients without showing preference? And should the government seek counsel from a company whose clients stand to make or lose billions if those policies are enacted?"

The Wall Street Journal: "BlackRock helped shape the government's toxic-asset plan, which critics have said helps vulture investors buy assets on the cheap while exposing taxpayers to the bulk of losses if the investments sour."

Leading the pack of vulture capitalists profiting from the misery they inspired is the Private National Acceptance Co. (PennyMac), which BlackRock bankrolled. Stanford L. Kurland, chairman and CEO of PennyMac, is the former president of Countrywide Financial. A New York Times story in March headlined "Ex-Leaders of Countrywide Profit From Bad Loans" noted that Kurland's new outfit was profiting from the misery it had helped cause: "After all, the banking behemoth (Countrywide) made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering."

Countrywide, under Kurland's leadership, specialized in those low "teaser" interest rates that caused people to lose their homes when rates suddenly ballooned. As the Times observed, "Countrywide has become synonymous with the excesses that led to the housing bubble." Now Kurland's new company specializes in buying back those forfeited and at-risk properties for pennies on the dollar and making money off new loans and sales.

"It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and sells it," Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, told the Times.

"Kurland is seeking to capitalize on a situation that was a product of his own creation," noted Blair A. Nicholas, a lawyer representing Arkansas teachers suing Kurland and his fellow Countrywide executives. "It is tragic and ironic. ... But then again, greed is a growth industry."

And once again the greediest will make out like bandits, with only a few of them ever being held accountable. Kurland sold $200 million in Countrywide stock shortly before the meltdown and, in any case, the spectacular failure of his banking experience only made him all that more employable.

Quoting federal banking officials, the Times reported, "They said it was important to do business with experienced mortgage operators like Mr. Kurland, who know how to creatively renegotiate delinquent loans." Has our president never heard of recidivism?

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Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig.

US Army Paid Bonuses to KBR Despite Questions

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Thomas Ferraro
May 20, 2009 - Reuters

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The U.S. Army paid "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses" to KBR Inc, its biggest contractor in Iraq, even after it concluded the firm's electrical work had put U.S. soldiers at risk, according to a source close to a U.S. congressional investigation.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday to examine KBR's operations in Iraq, and question why the Army rewarded the Houston-based company.

The panel says KBR has been linked to at least two, and as many as five, electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers and contractors in Iraq due to "shoddy work."

Investigators believe hundreds of other soldiers may have received electrical shocks, the source added. The Army is investigating.

The company denies responsibility for any of the electrocutions, saying it is proud of its work and that its employees make great sacrifices to get the job done.

KBR was part of Halliburton Co until two years ago. Former Vice President Dick Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000, when he became George Bush's running mate.

During the Bush administration, some critics claimed Cheney's deferred compensation from the company represented a conflict of interest and questioned Halliburton's winning of lucrative government contracts in Iraq.

Military reports have criticized KBR's work in Iraq in recent years. Yet afterward, the company received "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses," said the source, who declined to be identified.

"We want to know why," the source said.

The military was invited to send a witness to testify at Wednesday's hearing, but the committee agreed to let it submit a written statement instead, the source said. Witnesses who are expected to attend include a former KBR electrician.

On Tuesday, the Army had no immediate comment when asked about the bonuses.

THREAT OF FIRE

A September 30, 2008, letter to KBR from an officer in the Defense Department's Defense Contract Management Agency had harsh words for the company.

"We cannot overemphasize the significance of the lack of sustained electrical support services being provided by KBR in Iraq to maintain the minimum life, health and safety standards in support of our warfighters," wrote Captain David Graff, an agency commander.

A February 2007 report by the agency also raised concerns about KBR and its subcontractors in Iraq -- while acknowledging the difficulty of working in a war environment.

"Primary safety threat, theater wide, is fire due to the inferior 220 electrical fixtures found throughout Iraq," it said. "Improper installation, substandard equipment purchases (such as light fixtures) and heavy usage appears to be the three primary causes of these fires."

U.S. lawmakers have raised concerns about the U.S. military's increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and have said KBR and other companies should be held accountable.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said, "KBR remains proud of the work it performs in Iraq."

"We remain committed to engaging in a transparent and more importantly, a fact-based dialogue on this issue while pledging continued full cooperation and support to the military."

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee is the research arm of the Senate Democratic leadership and often conducts investigations of its own.

What Was I Fighting For?

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Rick Reyes
May 18, 2009 - The Nation

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Note The following commentary is based on an interview by Z.P. Heller, editorial director of Brave New Films.

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I was on liberty in Australia, dancing at a club I can't remember sometime around midnight, when it happened. The music shut off and an announcement came on: "America is under attack. Head back to your ships." This was the worst--the impossible. This was September 11, 2001.

I witnessed firsthand the ineffectiveness of US military strategy in Afghanistan. We need a more clearly defined mission, an exit strategy and a commitment to diplomacy rather than a military solution.
..Back at my ship, ambulance sirens blared. Hundreds of Marines stood on deck, anxiously awaiting word. Someone said the Pentagon had been attacked. My platoon sergeant stood up and delivered a fiery speech filled with "No one [expletive] with America!" and "We're going to kick some ass!" Later that night, the same sergeant turned to me asked me if I was ready.

Without giving it a second thought, I replied, "This is what I joined for."

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, as I recalled those words testifying before Senator John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I sat where a young Kerry was once seated as he awoke the nation to the grim realities of war in Vietnam. I explained to the committee that I always desired to serve my country, ensure basic freedoms and fight for justice and the American way. This had been my dream since childhood, a way to honor my Mexican immigrant parents who worked tirelessly to give my family a better life, a way out of an East Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by gang violence. Yet what I witnessed and experienced during a seven-month deployment in Afghanistan followed by another in Iraq has forever shattered this once noble ambition.

As an infantry rifleman in the Marines Corps, I saw so much of these wars through nightly patrols. We were trained to approach a point of interest on foot, coordinating with translators whose sole vested interest in supplying us intelligence was to earn money and aid. We would gather information that often proved faulty, and question locals to the point we felt comfortable conducting a raid. After receiving an order, we would ransack homes, destroying windows and doors, chairs and tables, families and lives--detaining and arresting anyone who seemed suspicious. The problem, of course, was that it was impossible to distinguish militant Taliban members or Al Qaeda from innocent civilians. Everyone became a suspect.

In one instance, my squad leader gave me orders to pursue possible terrorists leaving the scene in which we had established a perimeter. My four-man fire team and I followed these suspects undetected for about 100 yards along an exposed ravine. When we were four feet from them, I drew my M-16 and pointed it directly at their faces, yelling, "Get down on the ground!" We beat them in search of nonexistent weapons, breaking limbs in the process. Later that day, I learned these men were innocent. Another time, my squad and I detained, beat and nearly killed a man, only to realize he was merely trying to deliver milk to his children. These raids compelled me to tell Congress we have been chasing ghosts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Amazingly, these patrols were all the same, whether I was in the desolate desert near Camp Rhino--the US-led coalition's first strategic foothold in Afghanistan--or stationed outside Basra in Iraq. The terrain was different, but what remained the same was the manner in which we carried out missions, the unconscionable acts of violence and collateral damage that followed, and the ever-present paranoia that every Muslim could be a terrorist. These raids even ended the same way. We would compensate the family whose home we had invaded, offering to fix or pay for broken furniture before moving on to the next village, where kids would throw rocks at us and give us the finger. To my knowledge, I never detained or arrested anyone guilty of a crime.

I witnessed firsthand the ineffectiveness of US military strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, I didn't fully grasp the extent of these failed foreign policies or our government's deception until I returned home from war. Realizing there never were weapons of mass destruction, and that we would have difficulty tracking terrorists even if we had committed all the troops in our military, I felt as though my patriotism had been exploited for political gain. A select few were profiting from these wars, while the majority of Americans shouldered the enormous tax burden.

To me, the lesson learned in Afghanistan and Iraq was that the US flexed way too much muscle. We have ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, hovercrafts, trucks, Humvees--everything imaginable. But how effective is such military might against extremists who blend in with innocent civilians and fight guerrilla warfare? Moreover, how effective can it be when we leave civilians little alternative but to support extremists?

That is why the proposed $94.2 billion supplemental war-funding bill will be a complete waste of taxpayer dollars, as we continue to pursue a military solution for a political problem. Similarly, the 21,000 additional more troops will be a "drop in the bucket" in Afghanistan, as my esteemed colleague Andrew Bacevich has said. Bacevich, a retired colonel who served in Vietnam and lost a son in Iraq, sat next to me at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. He urged Congress to question the effectiveness and immense cost of fighting the "Long War" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Congress must hear more voices like ours before escalating the war in Afghanistan any further. More veterans need to speak out, and as a society we must get beyond the public perception that veterans are a product of war. We are not a product. We took an oath to serve and protect, to make sacrifices for the greater good. It's an oath everyone ought to honor, and not just by thanking us for our service. In my mind, we are not seeing more veterans speak out because there is a sense that if they do, they will be letting go of something they truly believe in; they will be going back on their oath and their sacrifices will have been in vain. That is not the case.

A number of veterans and I are forming a group called Vets for Rethinking Afghanistan. We will voice our dissent in Congress, testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and meet with any Representatives willing to listen. We will raise awareness about how our military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq have been counterproductive. We will express the dire need for the Obama administration to provide both an exit strategy and a more clearly defined mission and we will explain how dangerous it is for the US to use humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip to advance a flawed military agenda without giving diplomacy a real chance. Please join me in this cause.

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Rick Reyes, a retired corporal in the US Marine Corps, served in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and is now a businessman in Los Angeles.

Obama said there’d be days like this

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David Goldman
May 19th, 2009 - Asia Times

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The administration has been wise to manage expectations about economic recovery. Obama said there'd be days like this, in which the universal consensus of economic recovery would be confounded by a 46% decline in multi-family housing starts month on month. The Federal Reserve and Treasury have created a bottom of source at the cost of nearly $10 trillion in actual or contingent liabilities of the federal government, but they cannot change the basic problem: the biggest bulge of prospective retirees in American history has the biggest savings gap of any generation in history. That means a vast shift away from consumption and towards saving over at least a decade. Barring a surge in exports (of what? to whom?) that means reduced economic activity. Bottom-feeding (trading in foreclosed houses on Main Street and in distressed securities on Wall Street) keeps the life functions of the economy going at zombie levels, but that's it.

The signs of life in the credit and asset securitization markets have a great deal to do with cheap federal financing. There's a good summary of what TALF does in this regard in the May 18 Fortune (hat tip to the Daily Bail):

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Imagine if you were not really in the market for a house but the government came along and said that it would finance 94% of a home's purchase price with a mortgage rate of less than 3%. Still not interested? Wait, Uncle Sam has some additional sweeteners: if you do the deal and buy the house for only 6% down, you also get the equivalent of rental income every month to the tune of at least an annualized yield of 10% of the purchase price.

But wait there's still more: if, say, after two years, you decide you don't want the house any longer, you can just walk away from it. No need to pay the balance of the mortgage (it won't affect your credit rating), and you can keep the rental income received to date.

That's essentially the deal that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has offered qualified professional investors who participate in the so-called TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). Two months into the program as the first TALF- backed deals hit the market, you can see why the likes of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group are drooling over it. "I'm a big believer in the impact that TALF can and should have," Fortress CEO Wes Edens said on a May 6 investor call, adding that he expects that Fortress will be "a big participant" in the TALF program "three to six months from now."
The first few TALF deals — one for Ford Credit (the financing arm of the automaker), another for American Honda Receivables Corp., a third for the student loan company Sallie Mae and a fourth for motorcycle icon Harley Davidson — shed some light on our tax dollars at work.

"I've had accounts that dropped everything they were doing to take a look at this TALF financing," one Wall Street trader explained. "It was like nothing they had ever seen. It beats any financing that the private sector could ever come up with. I almost want to say it is irresponsible." For instance, Prudential Financial, Inc. (PRU, Fortune 500), the large insurer and investment manager, borrowed $786 million from the TALF as of March 31 and put up only $50 million to do so, some 6.4% of the deals.

In case you're not totally conversant with the alphabet soup of financial remedies emanating from the Obama Administration, here's a brief refresher: Geithner and the Federal Reserve announced the launch of the TALF in March. The TALF is a $200 billion (on its way to $1 trillion) non-recourse lending program to private investors as a way to encourage them to buy newly underwritten securities backed by auto loans, credit-card receivables and student loans, among other asset classes. (The TALF program is set to extend, in June, to the issue of new commercial real-estate mortgage-backed securities.)

These securitizations were once upon a time a key component of the so-called "shadow" financing system that helped raise trillions of dollars of capital worldwide. Of course, the securitization and sale of mortgage-backed securities was one of the leading causes of the current financial crisis as the people who took out the underlying mortgages started to default upon them in unexpected numbers. Still, Geithner has determined, correctly, that getting these securities circulating again is crucial to restoring the health of the credit markets. The Treasury designed the program, but it is the Federal Reserve that provides the government's share of the capital. "The increase in the TALF is expected to help stimulate both new issuances and the removal of assets from bank balance sheets," Credit Suisse wrote to its shareholders on May 8.

Investors interested in borrowing from the TALF program have to be approved by the Treasury and then, once approved, have to set up an account with a broker-dealer that is subject to a variety of the usual terms and conditions. The investor then must indicate a desire to buy, say, at least $10 million of one of the dozen or so deals, worth an aggregate of around $25 billion, which have come to market since the TALF program was set up in March. An early test for TALF was a May 5, $1.5 billion car-receivables securitization for American Honda Receivables Corp. and underwritten by JPMorgan Securities (JPM,Fortune 500) and BNP Paribas Securities. Investor demand for the deals so far is said by one trader to be "strong" and the deals are selling well. The real market test, though, of TALF will come when the first deals involving CMBS (Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities) start coming to market in the next few months.

The way the TALF works in practice is this: The amount of equity an investor has to put up, or the "haircut" as the TALF documents call it, depends upon the assets involved, the term of the loan or lease of the underlying asset (say, a car) and the credit quality of the underlying borrower. A loan to buy a three-year security backed by a group of credit-card receivables from high-quality borrowers would require an investor to put up 6% of the capital — a 6% "haircut" — and then can borrow the rest from the TALF through his brokerage account. To buy a two-year high-quality credit-card receivable security, a borrower would put up 5% of the face amount of the securities purchased. Auto receivables require as 12% equity investment for a three-year security. Small business loans require 5% down. Student loans require 10% down for a three-year deal.

An investor interested in a $10 million slice of three-year credit card receivable would put up 6% of the money — $600,000 — and borrow the balance of $9.4 million from the TALF at a rate of three-year LIBOR plus 100 basis points (Attention K-Mart shoppers, that's 2.85% at this moment.) Depending on all sorts of assumptions, the yields on these investments are said to be in the 11% to 15% range, especially attractive since the TALF loans are non-recourse to the borrowers — you can just walk away and lose only your underlying equity investment and the collateral but you are not held responsible for the unpaid portion of the TALF loan itself.

In addition, the TALF loan is not marked-to-market so if the underlying collateral deteriorates in value, the investor is not required to put up more equity. What's more as the car payments or credit-card payments on the underlying security are made, the payments are distributed to the government and the investor on equal footing — that means the investor starts getting paid back at the same time as the government even though the government is the senior secured creditor and even though an investor has put up only a small fraction of the original money. One private equity investor, who would not normally have looked at investing in such a deal but did, called this particular aspect of the TALF "shockingly good."

But who will the TALF deals be shockingly good for — the players on the field or those of us in the bleachers? If what Geithner calls "our lending facility with the Fed" does its job and jumpstarts the credit markets then the extraordinary concessions the government has made to attract private capital may have been worth it.

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There's no jump starting, just a push, and the push lasts as long as the $200 billion that the government has to push with. It's not a recovery, but a constructed bottom over which risk assets will range trade.

Ex-Bush Henchman Wants to be "CEO of Afghanistan" (Literally)

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Jeremy Scahill
May 19, 2009 - Common Dreams

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This story that is developing with the big oil-Bush buddy Zalmay Khalilzad is amazing in how crude it is. Khalilzad of course was one of Bush's top diplomatic henchmen in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and an original signer of the Project for a New American Century, whose global conquest agenda was adopted as official US policy under Bush. Well, good ol' Zal apparently wants to be president of Afghanistan, but he missed the May 8 deadline to file. So, instead, he is now cooking up a plan with the US-puppet president, Hamid Karzai, to become the "chief executive officer of Afghanistan." That is not a joke. That is exactly how The New York Times described Khalilzad's desired position:

The position would allow Mr. Khalilzad to serve as "a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn't be responsible to a parliamentary system," a senior Obama administration official said. Taking the unelected position would also allow Mr. Khalilzad to keep his American citizenship.

Administration officials insisted that the United States was not behind the idea of enlisting Mr. Khalilzad to serve in the Afghan government, and they gave no further details on what his duties might be.

A plan that puts Mr. Khalilzad near the top of a Karzai government would provide the Obama administration with a strong conduit to push American interests in Afghanistan…

You cannot make this stuff up.

It was bad enough that the US imported Hamid Karzai who would be ripped to shreds in about 2 seconds if the US military pulled out of Afghanistan. Now, the Obama folks want to actually impose tolerate one of Bush's cronies as a non-elected "CEO" of an occupied country where his job is described in corporate terms so that he can "push American interests."

Secret memo reveals Bush was given humane, legal alternative to harsh interrogation

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John Byrne
May 18, 2009 - Raw Story

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The Bush administration was given clear and unequivocal advice encouraging a detainee interrogation system that followed humane practices that adhered to US and international law, a previously secret memo reveals.

A detailed memorandum authored by a counselor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 also reveals that the Bush Administration was offered a comprehensive alternative to its use of torture techniques. The author, Rice deputy Philip Zelikow (along with then-acting deputy secretary of defense Gordon England), asserted that the adoption of a clear and humane approach to interrogation would pay dividends for the US in the years to come.

The memo was published Thursday at Secrecy News, a blog written by secrecy expert Steven Aftergood. It can be read here in PDF form.

Zelikow acknowledged an argument frequently promulgated by former Vice President Dick Cheney — that the interrogation of detainees could save thousands of lives. But he argued that humane treatment was the only right course for the United States.

"Some [terrorist suspects] have information that may save lives, perhaps even thousands of lives," Zelikow wrote. "They do not fit readily into any existing system of criminal or military justice. And, while balancing the danger these individuals may present, they must be treated humanely, consistent with our values and the values of the free world."

Zelikow and England argued — conscious of the techniques that the Bush administration had already adopted and in an apparent snipe at then-approved standards endorsing torture — that such a program must "pass muster for years to come under American law and relevant standards of international law," and "give workable clear and unambiguous guidelines for the professional and humane conduct expected from those who will operate the system."

And, they said, whether a prisoner was caught in any number of countries abroad, "the treatment of a prisoner should be built on a foundation of common values and basic standards - a system that is reasonably interoperable."

Zelikow recently found himself in the news after alleging that the White House sought to round up and destroy all copies of another memo he wrote that year, which argued explicitly that the Bush administration's interrogation techniques were illegal. According to Zelikow, the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo." In a recent article, Zelikow said his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the push.

In the memo released Thursday, the two Bush officials said they believed that the US should effectively give terrorist detainees the rights enumerated under the Geneva Conventions.

In all capital letters, they wrote: "WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT THESE DETAINEES ARE NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO THIS STATUS. TO BE CLEAR: WE ARE GIVING THEM A TEMPORARY STATUS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. BUT WE ARE NOT DOING THIS FOR THEM. WE ARE DOING IT FOR US."

"This interim approach also is one that civilian courts are more likely to understand," they continued. "This interim approach is also one that Americans and the world are more likely to understand and accept as reasonable."

Both also argued for the temporary holding of detainees as opposed to their long-term imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. They proposed an alternative system whereby individuals would be questioned when information is most current.

"In every country, individuals are held temporarily, away from public scrutiny, often just after they are apprehended, in order to conduct human but effective questioning and gather information while it is most current," they wrote.

"As part of this interim system, and as the number of detainees goes down," they continued, "the US will no longer need to maintain a detention facility in Guantanamo. That facility will close and we expect to transfer remaining detainees to a facility in the United States."

Perhaps most telling was a line penned midway through the memo — a prognostication that has proven eerily true.

"If the US acts as if it has something to hide," the officials wrote, "Americans and the world will assume that it does."

Jesse Ventura on The View

Jesse Ventura takes on Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View

Obama's Great Afghanistan Gamble

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Everyone knows 17,000 more troops can't win the war in Afghanistan. So what's the exit strategy?

Robert Dreyfuss
May 19, 2009 - Mother Jones

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If you can't imagine how President Obama intends to win the war in Afghanistan, you're not alone. The challenge is daunting: Along with a handful of war-plagued African states-Somalia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo-Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries. It's been racked by 30 years of war. Millions have fled into Pakistan and Iran; tens of thousands more have been killed since the US-backed jihad in the 1980s. "The reason we don't have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all," Cheryl Benard, Rand Corporation specialist and wife of former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, told me in 2004, during an interview for a book on political Islam. Obama's advisers say that their plan is to surge, then negotiate-that is, beef up the US presence, stabilize the war, and then seek a deal backed by regional diplomacy. But that raises a host of questions, starting with: If negotiations are the
answer, who's at the table?

President Hamid Karzai: His government is, well, mostly nonexistent. "Forty percent of the country is either partly or entirely off-limits to the government and to international aid groups," says Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group. Karzai has been derided as merely the "mayor of Kabul," but it's worse than that: "He doesn't have much influence with parliament, so you can't even say that he controls the capital," says Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence official who advised Obama's campaign. Terrorists strike fortified targets in Kabul, from the Indian Embassy to the Ministry of Justice, with impunity.

Karzai is struggling to regain control. By skillfully appointing governors and mayors, he's built a cadre of officials loyal to the regime. Still, in the provinces, the government's writ is weak. Law enforcement and the courts are virtually absent, leaving the field to criminals and drug traffickers. Corruption poisons everything: Afghanistan is ranked 176 out of 180 countries surveyed by the corruption watchdog group Transparency International; it produces more than nine-tenths of the world's illicit opium; and criminal gangs reach from the most remote districts into Karzai's own family-one of his brothers has been accused of involvement in the heroin trade.

The security forces: The pre-surge force of 13,100 US and 56,420 NATO troops (including 24,900 Americans) has been unable to secure Kabul and its environs, not to mention huge swaths of the south. Some NATO forces do little fighting, and some, like Canada's, are leaving. Afghan public opinion is turning against the coalition, partly because of rising civilian casualties caused by air strikes. Meanwhile the 80,000-strong Afghan National Army can't operate on its own, while the Afghan National Police, also numbering around 80,000, are dysfunctional, corrupt, and infiltrated by Taliban fighters; many are merely militiamen for local warlords.

The Taliban: In the 1990s, they rode to power by mobilizing armies of orphans and refugees brainwashed in Pakistani madrassas; toppled in 2001, they've come roaring back in rural areas where Karzai's feckless governors and crooked cops are viewed with disdain. They use threats, blandishments, and their cultlike ideology to expand their power base, village by village and clan by clan. Yet their hold is not as firm as it might seem. Polls indicate that 9 out of 10 Afghans disapprove of the Taliban. And, notes Seth Jones, an Afghanistan expert at Rand, "Most of the tribal, subtribe, and clan leaders don't particularly care for the central government, and they don't particularly care for the Taliban. They are willing to switch sides." The hardcore Taliban, he estimates, may be as small as just 2,000 to 3,000 fighters. They do, however, have allies-other militant factions, criminal gangs, and, of course, their own brethren beyond Afghanistan's borders. In
Pakistan, the Taliban shura (council) is run by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed true believer who headed Afghanistan until 2001. Farther north, Mullah Omar's allies include the Haqqanis, heirs to one of the more violent jihadist factions from the US-sponsored war in the 1980s, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps that war's most bloodthirsty combatant, both of whom regularly dispatch fighters into contested areas surrounding Kabul. (See Your Tax Dollars at War.)

The new players: With US advice and funding, Karzai is trying to counter the Taliban through a pair of new initiatives. The Afghan Social Outreach Program is quietly building anti-Taliban local councils. A parallel program, the Afghan Public Protection Force, has a pilot project under way in Wardak province to build quasi-official militias not unlike the US-sponsored Sunni Awakening that mobilized Iraqi tribes against Al Qaeda. J Alexander Thier of the US Institute of Peace is hopeful. But, he says, "It scares the bejesus out of people because this would result in the arming of Pashtun militias. It's extremely risky."

Which gets us back to the question: What's the endgame of the surge-and-negotiate strategy? Already there is plenty of negotiating behind the scenes. Karzai has an ongoing dialogue with the Taliban, with former Taliban allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan mediating, and there are reports of talks involving Hekmatyar, too. But Obama's advisers are split on whether those top-down negotiations will work: Some suspect that there can be no deal as long as the Taliban think they're winning.

An alternative approach gaining favor inside the beltway is bottom-up negotiations to mirror the Taliban's village-by-village strategy. "This is a country that historically has had very little central government," General David McKiernan, the US commander, said last November. "But it's a government with a history of local autonomy and local tribal authority systems." Jones, of Rand, says the key is winning the loyalty of rural Afghans. If it's done right-if America maintains a light footprint, if tribal leaders see improvements in security (as well as cold, hard cash), and if Afghanistan's meddling neighbors can be persuaded to help stabilize the country-then the loyalties of the Pashtun tribes may turn. If that happens, Jones says hopefully, "They can tip pretty quickly." Of course, if the surge causes more civilian deaths and further inflames anger at the United States, they could just as easily tip the other way. Therein lies the great risk of Obama's
gamble.

.....

Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam and is a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones.

Colin Powell Got Snookered at CIA

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Ray McGovern
May 19, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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Think back six years. How often did we hear then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tout his intense four-day vigil at CIA headquarters preparing the speech he would give to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003? Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was asked by Powell to herd cats in putting that speech together, recently threw light on why it turned out to be such an acute embarrassment.

Surrogates of Vice President Dick Cheney were insisting on giving prominence to highly dubious reports of operational ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but on this particular issue (unlike the phantom WMD) CIA and State department intelligence analysts had stood firm in the face of heavy pressure. Indeed, the CIA ombudsman saw fit to tell Congress that never in his 32 years as a CIA analyst had he witnessed a more aggressive "hammering" on analysts to change their minds and give credence to reporting that was trash.

How was it, then, that Secretary Powell ended up citing a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network" to depict a relationship that did not exist? Fair labeling: Reading what follows may not make you quite as ill as reading the Department of Justice torture memos, but it may well sicken-and anger-you just the same.

According to Col. Wilkerson, just days before trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, his boss Colin Powell had decided not to regurgitate the dubious allegations about Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda. Just in the nick of time, however, top CIA officials produced a "bombshell" report alleging such ties. The information was more than a year old and apparently extricated via torture, but Powell took the bait.

Wilkerson says the key moment occurred on Feb. 1, 2003, as the two men labored at the CIA over Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council four days later.

"Powell and I had a one-on-one - no one else even in the room - about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa'ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech]," Wilkerson said. "I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.

"Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the director's conference room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons."

Although Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn't give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had been captured 15 months earlier; who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture; and who now seems to be quite dead.

Presumably not realizing that the "new" intelligence was tainted, "Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with more general information from a previous draft about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies," Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson's account provides insight into how the need to justify war gave impetus to the use of torture for extracting information, and how the Bush administration's reliance on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects helped grease the skids to war. Both.

Sealing the Deal

Powell, whose credibility essentially sealed the deal for war as far as millions of Americans were concerned, let himself be manipulated by senior CIA officials who kept him in the dark about crucial details, including the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency had thrown serious doubt on al-Libi's credibility. Wilkerson told me:

"As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet's breathtaking delivery).

"And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) ... All of this was hidden from us - the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service....

"As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi's recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair's probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication - to at least a certain extent - only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the 'fabrication' theme from other examples."

Among those other examples, Wilkerson said, was the case of the Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, who supplied false intelligence about mobile labs for making biological and chemical weapons, and various Iraqi walk-ins who spun bogus stories about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Though some of those sources appear to have concocted their tales after being recruited by the pro-invasion exiles of the Iraqi National Congress, al-Libi told his stories-he later claimed-to avoid or stop torture. This is a central point in the current debate about why torture was used and whether it saved American lives.

Torture Can Produce

For those of you distracted by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) spotlight on "what-did-Pelosi-know-about-torture-and-when-did-she- know-it," please turn off the TV long enough to ponder the case of the recently departed al-Libi. According to a Libyan newspaper, al-Libi has died in a Libyan prison, a purported suicide.

The al-Libi case might help you understand why, even though information from torture is notoriously unreliable, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the me-too officials running U.S. intelligence ordered it anyway.

In short, if it is untruthful information you are after, torture can work just fine! As the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham put it during a Senate hearing on May 13-with a hat-tip to the Inquisition-"One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work."

All you really need to know is what you want the victims to "confess" to and then torture them, or render them abroad to "friendly" intelligence services toward the same end.

Poster Child for Torture

Al-Libi, born in 1963 in Libya, ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought that he might know of, or at least be induced to "confess" to, Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.

The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI's Dan Coleman, who "lost" al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, "Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, says, "A large part of that time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and we were not successful," according to Burney's recent testimony to the Senate. Burney added:

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

CIA interrogators elicited some "cooperation" from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.

By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi's claim was well received even though the DIA was highly suspicious.

Serious Misgivings

"He lacks specific details" about the supposed training, DIA observed. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

Despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from 2004; the year al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda's connections with Iraq, a subject "about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story." (This, despite the limited "success" CIA interrogators claimed to have had on this issue.)

According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and "placed him in a small box" for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to "tell the truth."

When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he "was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back" and then was "punched for 15 minutes."

And, sure enough, as Sen. Lindsay Graham has noted, this stuff really works! For it was then that al-Libi expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq "to learn about nuclear weapons." Al-Libi added that the treatment he received improved after he told that to his interrogators.

In any case, al-Libi's stories apparently were music to the ears of Colin Powell, who was under pressure to establish in his U.N. speech some evidence of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda-the "axis-of-evil" kind of epithet he ended up using to try to justify invading Iraq.

Al-Libi recanted his claims in January 2004. This prompted the CIA, a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. But he was really a big help before he recanted!

Just What the Doctor Ordered

George Bush relied on al-Libi's false confession for his crucial speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

Colin Powell relied on it for his own speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003: "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story."

Bear in mind that before the attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, polls showed that some 70 percent Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had operational ties with al-Qaeda and thus was partly responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Worse still, about half of the American people had been led to believe that Saddam was actually involved in 9/11.

For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, at least until it was learned that he recanted, explaining that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.

In his disingenuous memoir, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet sought to defend the CIA's acceptance of the original claims made by al-Libi in the run-up to the Iraq war. Tenet even suggested that al-Libi may have been right the first time-that it may have been his subsequent recantation that was not genuine.

"He clearly lied," Tenet wrote. "We just don't know when. Did he lie when he first said that Al Qaeda members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true."

I am not making this up. That incisive analysis appears on page 353 of Tenet's book.

Tenet, of course, is hardly a disinterested observer. If there was a CIA plan to extract a false confession, it's likely he was a key participant. After all, he devoted 2002-03 to the mission of manufacturing a "slam-dunk" WMD-case for invading Iraq, in order to please his bosses. He had both the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime and, later, huge incentive to cover it up.

Al-Libi "Commits Suicide"

If al-Libi is now dead - strangely our embassy in Tripoli has been unable to find out for sure - this means the world will never hear his own account of the torture he experienced and the story he made up and then recanted. And we have already been asked to believe he "committed suicide" even though al-Libi apparently was a devout Muslim, and Islam prohibits suicide.

Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya." He added that, throughout Gaddafi's 40-year rule, there have been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that "then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death."

Am I suggesting...?

Anatomy of a Crime

Commenting on what he called the "Cheney interrogation techniques," Col. Wilkerson, writing for The Washington Note on May 13, made the following points:

"...as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 - well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion - its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but on discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq to al-Qaeda.

"So furious was this effort on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee 'was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet.

"As far as al-Libi is concerned, his harsh interrogation ceased after, under waterboarding in Egypt, he 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."

Cheney Family Honor

Stung by Wilkerson's criticism of her father, Liz Cheney, who worked in the State Department during the Bush/Cheney administration, lashed out publicly at Wilkerson on Sunday, charging he has made "a cottage industry out of fantasies" about the former Vice President. All that Ms. Cheney could manage in support of her contention was to point out that al-Libi was not among the three al-Qaeda detainees the CIA has said it waterboarded.

After his article in The Washington Note, I asked Col. Wilkerson for a retrospective look at how it could have been that the torture-derived information from al-Libi was not recognized for what it was and thus kept out of Secretary Powell's speech at the UN.

Since al-Libi had been captured over a year before the speech and had been put at the tender mercies of the Egyptian intelligence service, should he and Powell not have suspected that al-Libi had been tortured?

Wilkerson responded by e-mail with the comments cited above regarding Tenet and McLaughlin interrupting Powell's evaluation of the Iraqi WMD intelligence with their new -just trust us-"bombshell."

I asked Col. Wilkerson: "Were there no others from the State Department with you at CIA headquarters on Feb. 1, 2003. Was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), State's very professional, incorruptible intelligence unit, not represented? He answered:

"When I gathered 'my team' - some were selected for me, such as Will Toby from Bob Joseph's NSC staff and John Hanna from the VP's office - in my office at State to give them an initial briefing and marching orders, I asked Carl [Ford, then head of INR] to attend. I wanted Carl - or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar - to be on 'my team'.

"Carl stayed after the meeting and I asked him straightforwardly to come with me or to send someone from INR. Carl said that he did not need to come or to send anyone because he had the Secretary's ear (he was right on that) and could weigh in at any time he wanted to.

"Moreover, he told me, the Secretary knew very well where INR stood, as did I myself (he was right on that too).

"As I look back, I believe one of my gravest errors was in not insisting that INR send someone with me.

"Fascinating and completely puzzling at first was the total absence of a Department of Defense representative on my team; however, after 3-4 days and nights I figured out ... DoD was covering its own butt, to an extent, by having no direct fingerprints on the affair - and being directly wired into Cheney's office, Rumsfeld's folks knew they were protected by Toby and Hanna.

"When we all arrived at CIA, we were given the NIC [National Intelligence Council] spaces and staff. [But] I could not even get on a computer!! Protests to Tenet and McLaughlin got me perfunctory CIA-blah blah about security clearances, etc. - and me with 7 days and nights to prepare a monumentally important presentation! ...

"[It took] 24 hours before George or John acknowledged I could be on a computer.... From there on, it was a madhouse.

"But at the end of the day, had I had an INR rep, had I had better support, had I been more concerned with WHAT I was assembling rather than HOW on earth I would assemble it and present it on time, I'm not sure at all it would have made any difference in the march to war."

Not the Only Criminal Activity

So there you have it folks, the anatomy of a crime - one of several such already on the record, with some of the same dramatis personae.

Mention of Carl Ford and Tenet and McLaughlin remind me of another episode that has gone down in the annals of intelligence as almost equally contemptible. This one had to do with their furious attempt to prove there were mobile biological weapons labs of the kind Curveball had described.

Remember, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball's wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. But the amateur attempts at deception did not stop there. After the war began, CIA intrepid analysts, still "leaning forward," misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs.

On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof they had been right about Iraq's "bio-weapons labs."

They then performed what in Army parlance is called a "midnight requisition," finding the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position and getting him to provide DIA "coordination," (which was almost immediately withdrawn by DIA).

On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." (For a contemporaneous debunking of the CIA-DIA report, see "America's Matrix," http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/060103a.html)

When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they "went ballistic," according to Carl Ford, who immediately warned Powell there was a very large problem. Tenet, in turn, must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, "That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I've ever read."

What seems clear is that Tenet and McLaughlin learned nothing from their decision just four months earlier to play fast and loose with intelligence-regardless of the risk of heavy embarrassment to the Secretary of State or, in this case, the President.

"They Should Have Been Shot"

This episode-and several like it-are described in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say that Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford told the authors:

"It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the [bio-weapons labs] report. As it turned out, that analysis was unprofessional and even unethical. People did funny thing with the evidence...It wasn't just that it was wrong. They lied...they should have been shot." (Page 229)

Small wonder Ford has remained angry-like Wilkerson. It was all just too much. Ford knew he had made a huge mistake in early Feb. 2003, by assuming that Colin Powell would face down the blandishments of Tenet, McLaughlin, and the White House members of Wilkerson's team.

The way these things normally work, it was not unreasonable for Ford to assume further that he would have the opportunity, in extremis, to trade on his credibility with, and entrée to, Secretary Powell to thwart the CIA seniors, if they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters.

In the end, Powell went along; Col. Wilkerson was left to twist slowly in the wind, so to speak. Bush, Cheney, and their courtiers prevailed and our country embarked on what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal termed the "supreme international crime"-a war of aggression.

Sad. Very sad. Criminal, I would say.

.....

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Sinking incomes

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May 19, 2009 - Richard Daughty

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If you are one of the people who write to me and question my consistent advice to buy gold, silver and oil and who must think that oil will remain low forever, think again: Bloomberg.com reports that "China's passenger-vehicle sales rose 37% last month, the most in three years, as government subsidies spurred demand for minivans and small cars."

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, as I was thinking, "Only a bunch of commie morons would pass out free money so that people could buy cars!"

Well, it turns out that the Chinese can't hold a candle to us
American idiots, as Congress has not only legislated a commie-think US$8,000 tax credit (also known as "actual cash back at tax time!") to "first-time home buyers" but also a tax credit as a rebate for a portion of the price of a new, more fuel-efficient car!

In this regard, Jim B sent a collection of witticisms by Ronald Reagan, one of which goes "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." This is the subsidize part!

In China, the incentives were a success, as total vehicle sales in China, including buses and trucks, "rose 25% to 1.15 million."

Well, I don't really know about China, but if people in America are going to afford cars, they are going to need government assistance, too, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that "Personal income decreased $34.4 billion" in March.

And it is not just oil that is going to go up because of supplying more and more gasoline to more and more cars, but gold and silver will, too, shoot up in the horrific inflation as a result of the eye-popping increases in the money supply as part of the unbelievable stupidity known as Quantitative Easing.

And as for my demand that you buy silver, well, Ted Butler, writing at GoldSeek.com, surprises us with "a statistic that is stunning and troublesome at the same time. In 1959, there were about 5 billion ounces of silver physically held on US soil. This includes the 3.4 billion government holdings plus privately held silver, including hundreds of millions of ounces of silver objects that would be subsequently melted in the early 1980s."

In comparison, "In 1959, there were about 9 billion ounces of silver bullion-equivalent in the world (half of that in the US, both public and private). With a world population of 3 billion, there was a per-capita amount of 3 ounces for each of the world's citizens. Today, 50 years later, there is a per capita amount of silver of 0.15 of an ounce remaining (1 billion ounces divided by a 6.8 billion population)."

In short, "The per-capita amount of silver bullion equivalent in the world has declined by 95% over the past 50 years." Wow!

Contrast that with today, when he figures that there are only about "300 million ounces held on US soil, including all the 118 million ounces in COMEX-approved warehouses and privately held silver."

And as for gold, which historically has always risen with inflation in prices, Andrew Mickey of Q1 Publishing has done some research and finds that "The last few times US government spending reached these levels (as a percentage of GDP), the consequences, which were always the same, followed close behind."

And what happened, you wonder? Well, "In 1861, the Union printed more money, borrowed everything it could, and spent it all to fight back the 'rebels.' Inflation between 1861 and 1865 ended up at 117% for the period. That's 16.7% on an annualized basis.

"In 1917, president Woodrow Wilson aggressively emptied the government coffers in World War I. Prices increased 126% between 1917 and 1918. That's 50.3% annual rate.

"In the 1940s we went through it again. The US involvement in World War II forced another surge in government spending. This time the prices rose 108% between 1941 and 1945. That works out to a 15.7% annual rate of inflation.

"Then in the 1960s, during the quest for the Great Society' amidst the Vietnam War, the US government stepped up spending in a big way. The end result was the 'lost decade' of the 70s and stagflation which followed."

I sum it all up to the Austrian school of economics being Exactly Freaking Correct that inflation in the money supply is Bad, Bad News, as anybody at Mises.org can tell you.

But Mr Mickey thinks he can roughly estimate the inflation we are going to suffer, and says "all the forces are pointing towards a huge wave of inflation coming - an annual rate of 10% to 20% given the historical ranges. And right now, while the inflation/deflation debate rages on, it's giving us a chance to protect ourselves from the coming inflationary wave inexpensively and maybe actually profit as well."

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Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

Mule Diddlers of the World - Unite!

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Jaime O'Neill
May 16, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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There's a guy running to become Governor of Georgia who says he'd sacrifice his livin' breathin' son to help end abortion. There was a time when the irony in that gubernatorial candidate's position might be a mite obvious, but given how dadgum dumb we've gotten as a nation after eight years with the village idiot as our leader, chances are lots of people in Georgia and throughout the land might miss the collision of thought that occurs when people are almost eager to whack an existing kid in order to spare one not yet born.

That guy seeking the gubernatorial office down in Georgia is a true believer named Neal Horsley, a would-be poster boy for some future public service ad trying to convince the public of the need for more mental health treatment facilities in the deep south.

Horsley can be found among that brand of Bible beaters who get real bloody minded when the subject of a woman's right to choose comes up, and he's more than willing to do a homicidal number on people who don't agree with him. On his website, he publishes the names of abortion doctors and the addresses of abortion clinics, along with appeals to his fellow zealots to stop further terminations of pregnancies by any means necessary.

Horsley got his start as a nut job back in his red dirt days as a boy in Georgia, where he admits gaining his first carnal knowledge with mules. "When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule," Horsley said in an interview on Fox News."

In yet another of those closeted ironies, Mr. Horsley's is running for office on the idea that gay marriage is an offense against God.

Some unspecified time after his youthful mule-boy love affairs, Mr. Horsley got religion and, it is assumed, found other more species-appropriate objects of his desire.

We've had some fairly odd governors get elected in this country as part of the ongoing attempt by the voters to discredit the very notion of democracy. There was that wrestler feller up in Minnesota, and a couple of actors in Californ-I-A. And then there's Sarah Palin up in Alaska, and the slick and handsome dimbulb down in Texas who wants to secede from the union so he can become president of his own damn country.

Which is what this guy Horsley, the mule fornicator, wants to do because he figures that his best hope for living in a peckerwood heaven on earth is to secede from a nation ruled by laws like Roe v. Wade, and form a righteous nation where men can lord it over women the way Horsley, God, and the Taliban intended.

Stranger things have happened in Georgia. Older readers might remember Lester Maddox, the guy who became governor of that state after his appetite-whetting stint as a restaurateur who became nationally famous for handing out ax handles to white patrons of his establishment who were encouraged to employ such farm implements in the interest of Negro-free dining environments.

If you were this guy Horsley's kid, you might be getting a tad nervous about now, fretting over how far dear ol' dad might be willing to take this crusade for Christ and the unborn.

And you'd be none too reassured by what your Pop said in a recent interview, quoting the Bible in favor of the kind of family values that place one's family pretty far down the chute, survival-wise. When a reporter repeated the question about Horsley's willingness to sacrifice his son, the would-be Gov replied by citing scripture: "Unless you love me more than you love your father, your son, your wife, your daughter, you're not fit to be my disciple," Horsley said. "That's why there's a real rift of estrangement in my family,"

It appears Horsley's family is a tad peck-ish when it comes to his ideas about showing devotion to Christ with their blood, but the mule-ish balking of his kin hasn't inclined Mr. Horsley to lighten up on the idea of sacrificing any or all of them to a greater good.

"I contend this is really about people's ability to believe in God. When it comes to that place, when you're talking about God's plan to protect Himself, then the lives of people become, really, almost irrelevant... in the degree that they result in Him being glorified."

It remains unclear if Horsley's son will be supporting his dad's run for office. Calls to "Dobbins Horsley" were greeted by a recorded message that said, simply, "hee haw."

Obama Must Cow Netanyahu, Not the Other Way Around

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Far rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is meeting Monday with President Barack Obama in Washington.

Juan Cole
May 18, 2009 - Informed Comment

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It is the most fateful encounter of two world leaders since Kennedy met Khrushchev. And Obama absolutely must not allow himself to be cowed or misunderstood as timid by Netanyahu, who is a notorious bully and warmonger. (Bill Clinton complained that Netanyahu when last prime minister thought that he was the superpower). If Obama can cow Netanyahu, his Middle East policy may have a chance. If Netanyahu comes away thinking he can thumb his nose at Washington, the whole Middle East could be in flames by the end of Obama's first term.

The two come to the encounter with starkly different agendas for the Middle East. Obama wants better relations with Iran (which he needs for a clean withdrawal from Iraq and for success in Afghanistan). And Obama wants to be the president who finally established a Palestinian state, implemented a two-state solution, and resolved the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, which has generated so many wars and so much terrorism and instability. (As I have said before, the key problem in all this is Palestinian statelessness.)

Netanyahu on the other hand wants to attack Iran and attempt to destroy its nuclear enrichment research facilities. And he absolutely does not under any circumstances want a Palestinian state or to be forced to withdraw Israeli squatters from the Palestinian territories that they have been colonizing since 1967 (unlike most of Israel proper, the UN never awarded that territory to Israel, nor has it been recognized implicitly by international treaties, as Egypt's Camp David accords implicitly recognized 1949 Israeli borders.)

Obama, concerned that Israeli sabre-rattling might itself lead to hostilities, sent CIA head Leon Panetta to Israel recently to demand that the Netanyahu government tone down its belligerent rhetoric. Netanyahu maintains that Iran has vowed to destroy Israel, which is not correct. The Iranian government is hostile to Israel and wishes that the Zionist enterprise would collapse the way the Soviet Union or the shah's government did. But it has said that it would accept a two-state solution if that was what the Palestinians wanted. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to 'wipe Israel off the face of the map,' since there is not even such an idiom in Persian. He was talking about an ideological collapse of a Zionist regime and its occupation of Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest city. Iran has not launched an aggressive war possibly since Karim Khan Zand took Basra in the 1780s.

Netanyahu's plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities would fail, and would only cause Iran actually to seek nukes, which it is not presently doing according to US intelligence. I like Israelis, but they are understandably traumatized by all the things that have happened to them since the 1930s and have developed an unhealthy hysteria and tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. They were convinced that a US overthrow of Saddam Hussein would change the Middle East in their favor. It has not (Hizbullah in Lebanon has new friends in Baghdad, as does Tehran). Obama must impress on them that the answer to every problem is not a bombing raid. The good thing about having Rahm Emmanuel in the White House is that he will be able to phrase the instruction colorfully enough for it to be understood unambiguously.

An Israeli attack on Iran might well reactivate the Mahdi Army and Badr Corps as anti-American Shiite militias in Iraq- all hell could break loose in that country, leaving Obama's hopes for a withdrawal in tatters. And Iran has many clients in Afghanistan that could be mobilized against NATO-- in fact it could join an effort to keep military materiel from even getting to Afghanistan, leaving NATO forces vulnerable to being cut off and killed.

Netanyahu's talk of improving the economic lives of Palestinians instead of giving them a state is also nonsense. Statelessness prevents economic security and progress. And people aren't just motivated by material things. Palestinians want a concrete manifestation of their national identity, just as everyone else does.

Only a viable Palestinian state resolves this huge decades-long mess in the short to medium term. I think it may be too late but am willing to see what Obama has in mind.

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Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

The Disease of Permanent War

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Chris Hedges
May 18, 2009 - TruthDig.com

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The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism.

This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls-the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads - personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

"War," Randolf Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."

In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $le1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war-who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution-must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. It comes with guaranteed profits. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junk yards where they rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Mellman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Mellman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in
the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Mellman found that ninety-two were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Senator J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in Notes from the Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to its logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

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Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July

That Didn’t Take Long: Insurance Industry Breaks Promise to President Obama

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Jason Rosenbaum
May 16, 2009 - The Seminal

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Why we can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform.

Just four days after standing next to President Obama and declaring their commitment to control health care costs to the tune of $2 trillion over 10 years, the insurance industry, drug and medical device makers, and hospital groups are backing off their promise:

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies' trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.

Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.

"There's been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members," said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. "I've spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it."

First, these groups are showing their true, dishonest colors. AHIP, the main insurance industry lobby group, sent out this press release from their fake grassroots campaign after the announcement:

By reducing the rate of growth in health care spending by 1.5% each year, the nation can achieve a savings of $2 trillion over the next decade. This effort will have a direct effect on the budgets of individuals and families and will also go a long way in ensuring that every American have access to affordable, high-quality health care. Stay tuned for more information on this important initiative in the weeks and months ahead.

Sounds like they made a commitment, right? Well, that commitment is now pretty soft (emphasis on the softness added):

He and other health care executives said they had agreed to squeeze health spending so the annual rate of growth would eventually be 1.5 percentage points lower.

One of the lobbyists, Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, said the savings would "ramp up" gradually as the growth of health spending slowed.

David H. Nexon, senior executive vice president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a trade group for makers of medical devices, said "there was no specific understanding" of when the lower growth rate would be achieved.

"It's a target over a 10-year period," Mr. Nexon said.

So we've gone from commitments to eventualities, targets, and non-specific understandings.

This just proves what the American people have known all along: You can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform.

Why have these commitments gone soft? It's about profits. Every dollar of health care "waste" in the system, every dollar that goes somewhere other than to your health, that's a dollar more in the pockets of a rich hospital administrator or insurance industry CEO. For health care costs to come down, somebody's profits have to come down as well.

Now, in a good reform plan, every player in the system would be squeezed a little bit to help alleviate the crushing cost on the patient. Doctors, hospitals, and other providers would charge a bit less for care and be paid based on quality, not quantity. Drug and medical device makers would be forced to sell their products at a discount in volume. And the insurance industry would trim overhead and profits to keep costs in line. Then, employers and government would pitch in to cover all individuals. It would be a system of shared responsibility.

Clearly, the insurance industry, hospitals, and drug makers aren't interested in shared responsibility. They don't want to be squeezed a bit. The want to protect their profits so much that they show their two-faced nature: Standing next to the President of the United States, promising responsibility, and then backpeddling as fast as they can four days later.

That's why we need to make them do it. Voluntary agreements are not enough. We need regulation and we need real cost control, and that means a public health insurance option that will force these awful companies to earn their keep through stiff competition, something they've avoided for far too long.

They're liars. They're cheats. They're greedy. They're untrustworthy. They cannot be trusted to come up with a health care reform plan that works for you and me. We must make them do it.

US Stirs a Hornet's Nest in Pakistan

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Eric Margolis
May 17, 2009 - Winnipeg Sun

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PARIS - Pakistan finally bowed to Washington's angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) -- collectively mislabelled "Taliban" in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan's political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan's turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 "terrorists" killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people -- most of Swat's population -- made refugees.

Pakistan's U.S.-rented armed forces have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad they don't do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians, however, is much safer and more profitable.

Unable to pacify Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes (a.k.a. Taliban), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan's media, the rest civilians.

Pashtun, also improperly called Pathan, are the world's largest tribal people. Fifteen million live in Afghanistan, forming half its population. Twenty-six million live right across the border in Pakistan. Britain's imperialists divided Pashtun by an artificial border, the Durand Line (today's Afghan-Pakistan border). Pashtun reject it.

Many Pashtun tribes agreed to join Pakistan in 1947, provided much of their homeland be autonomous and free of government troops. Pashtun Swat only joined Pakistan in 1969.

As Pakistan's Pashtun increasingly aided Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, U.S. drones began attacking them. Washington forced Islamabad to violate its own constitution by sending troops into Pashtun lands. The result was the current explosion of Pashtun anger.

I have been to war with the Pashtun and have seen their legendary courage, strong sense of honour and determination. They are also hugely quarrelsome, feuding and prickly.

One quickly learns never to threaten a Pashtun or give him ultimatums. These are the mountain warriors who defied the U.S. by refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden because he was a hero of the anti-Soviet war and their guest. The ancient code of "Pashtunwali" still guides them: Do not attack Pashtun, do not cheat them, do not cause them dishonour. To Pashtun, revenge is sacred.

HAM-HANDED

Now, Washington's ham-handed policies and last week's Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan's second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan's Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan's other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a "Taliban takeover of Pakistan" are pure propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided.

Nor are Pakistan's well-guarded nukes a danger -- at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan's nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein's bogus weapons.

THE REAL DANGER

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad's military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

If this continues, at some point patriotic Pakistani soldiers may rebel and shoot the corrupt generals and politicians on Washington's payroll.

Equally ominous, a poor people's uprising spreading across Pakistan -- also mislabelled "Taliban" -- threatens a radical national rebellion reminiscent of India's Naxalite rebels.

As in Iraq, profound ignorance and gung ho military arrogance drive U.S. Afghan policy. Obama's people have no understanding what they are getting into in "AfPak." I can tell them: An unholy mess we will long regret.

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Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain's Sky News TV as "the man who got it right" in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim.