Normandy - 65 Years

Update: Obama marks D-Day's 65th anniversary at Omaha Beach, France. "Don't forget ... ."

Today is June 6.

My girlfriend still talks about her late father and his service in World War II to defeat Nazis and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead and had me), we grew up hearing of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like when they were protected by the Bush administration.

Not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people - all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman crowing for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of warmakers and liars, mostly but not exclusively in the Republican Party.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

Bush Used Torture to Support Iraq Lies

Update: Mark Benjamin: Bush officials said they only tortured terrorists after they wouldn't talk. New evidence shows they planned torture soon after 9/11 -- and used it to find links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Mike Madden: Rumsfeld: Architect of torture The secretary of defense began laying the groundwork for detainee abuse years before Abu Ghraib.

Bush and Cheney approved torture to get false information to support their lies to the American people to invade Iraq.

From Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist

Iraqi Artist Unveals Golden Shoe to Disgrace Bush

From the Middle East online:

BAGHDAD – When an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at George W. Bush last month at a Baghdad press conference, the attack spawned a flood of Web quips, political satire and street rallies across the Arab world.

Now it's inspired a work of art. A sofa-sized shoe statue was unveiled Thursday in Tikrit, the hometown of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari described his fiberglass-and copper work as homage to the pride of the Iraqi people.

The statue also has inscribed a poem honoring Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist.

Al-Zeidi was charged with assaulting a foreign leader, but the trial was postponed after his lawyer sought to reduce the charges.

Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

In a typically clear eyed, fact-based assessment by Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch, Cockburn paints a picture of Iraq that whatever the pretend nature of our enterprise, the results are a catastrophe.

This is pretty standard stuff in most of the rest of the world, but one wonders how much of the American populace either knows or cares. Not at all clear.

Cockburn concludes:

Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined country behind them.

Let's hope that most Americans do not ape Rumsfeld and say: Stuff happens.

Public decency in Iraq

Illegally invading Iraq didn't work wonderfully to create an authoritarian client oil state, nor did it work out so very well to make a society recognizing human rights.

A million dead, millions displaced from their homes, millions traumatized, our own military reeling, 10,000s of young men and women injured and traumatized for life, and on and on.

Here's a gem from this morning emblematic of how wonderful Iraq is now:

A freelance journalist imprisoned in northern Iraq for violating a public decency law by writing a story about homosexuality has been pardoned and released, the writer and officials said Wednesday.

Public decency.

That's in the liberal, semi-autonomous part of Iraq. These guys make the Mormons and the religious right look like civil libertarians.

The Iraq Lie

via mal contends

Comes up every once in a while. My girlfriend so proud of her dad talking about what she knew of her late father's service in World War II to defeat some pig NAZIs and fascists.

And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead to have me), we hear of the society-wide, shared sacrifice.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like today when they are protected by the Bush DOJ.

It's not like the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Lieberman-Neocon crowd doing their big con as 1o,000s come home dead, wounded, traumatized - different people, all for the lies of the policymakers; and Lieberman has the gall to crow for years that Iraq is "...the test of our generation." What a lying coward.

Makes one pretty sick.

I post some World War II artifacts above that my girlfriend and her family treasure. Somehow, looking at them brings forth the truth of the World War II sacrifice and honor by mostly scared kids, in opposition to the imbecility and cowardice of the crowd of Bush policymakers that we have today.

No one had the swagger and casualness of George W. Bush when it came time to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of real people and their loved ones.

The Surge and the Bush Lie

by Nir Rosen in Rolling Stone

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence....

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.
"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future." ...

Bush Is a Sad Joke

Update: Barack Obama's video response to Bush.

No one expected George W. Bush to burst forth with a candid speech last night.

And Bush met these low expectations well.

From the Times:

Monday night, after six years of promises unkept or insincerely made and blunders of historic proportions, the United States is now fighting two wars, the economy is veering toward recession and the civilized world still faces horrifying dangers — and it has far less sympathy and respect for the United States. …

Monday night’s address made us think what a different speech it might have been if Mr. Bush had capitalized on the unity that followed the 9/11 attacks to draw the nation together, rather than to arrogate ever more power and launch his misadventure in Iraq. How different it might have been if Mr. Bush meant what he said about compassionate conservatism or even followed the fiscal discipline of old-fashioned conservatism. How different if he had made a real effort to reach for the bipartisanship he promised in 2002 and so many times since.

Then he could have used last night’s speech to celebrate a balanced budget, one in which taxes produce enough money to pay for the nation’s genuine needs, including health care for poor children and a rebuilt New Orleans. Instead, Mr. Bush called — again — for his tax cuts to be permanent and threatened to veto bills that contained excessive pork-barrel spending, an idea absent from his agenda when Republicans held Congress.

Had Mr. Bush been doing his job right just in the last few weeks, he could have used this speech to celebrate a genuinely bipartisan agreement on a sound economic stimulus plan. In addition to the tax rebates agreed on already between the White House and the House, Mr. Bush could have announced sensible proposals for extending unemployment benefits and a temporary increase in food stamps for the most vulnerable citizens. …

If Mr. Bush had let compassion and good sense trump ideology, he would have been able to use last night’s speech to celebrate the expansion of health insurance to tens of millions of children with working parents. Mr. Bush vetoed an expansion of the S-chip program, and he did not even agree to pay for all of the existing coverage because he thought a relative handful of parents might switch from private to public insurance if they were offered government assistance to buy it. …

In the end, when it comes to Iraq, Mr. Bush’s annual addresses will be remembered most for his false claims — the fictitious “axis of evil,” nonexistent aluminum tubes and African uranium, dangerous weapons that did not exist. No president can want that as his legacy.

See also ThinkProgress for more analysis and fact checking.

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State of the Union Tripe

Tonight's final State of the Union address by George W. Bush can be expected to be revealing not of Bush, but of the corporate media.

How credulous is the media?

Will the media greet each assertion and rhetorical flash skeptically, to be put in the context of the lies and broken promises of the most dishonest and political administration in American history?

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The Looting of America

With zero focus on the public good, the Bush band of lying, corrupt Mayberry Machiavellians have left this country with a mess of historic proportions.

See some of the highlights, from the Democratic Caucus.

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Terrorism Act a Path to Destruction of First Amendment

Robert Weitzel's piece on the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 reveals the authoritarian instincts of the American political culture.

The act passed with only six dissenting votes, (AZ-6 Jeff Flake [R]; CA-46 Dana Rohrabacher [R]; HI-1 Neil Abercrombie [D]; IL-12 Jerry Costello [D]; OH-10 Dennis Kucinich [D], and TN-2 John Duncan [R]), in the House last fall.

The Act, if passed, might just pass First Amendment challenges in a Court system stacked with commissar-mined Bushies, though protected political speech is one of the last remaining realms in which America leads the world.

As pointed out by Weitzel, "the Act’s use of the term 'violent radicalization,' which it defines as 'the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence . . .'" could be used to outlaw any civil disobedience against Bush's authoritarian America.

Martin Luther King Jr. surly would have fit the bill of a terrorist facilitator (Hoover thought so), in the minds at Bush's Dept of Justice; one can see a King accused of "promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence".

One can only hope that the U.S. Senate prevents this obscene act was reaching the president's desk. For details on the act, read Weitzel's piece below.

But one must wonder why the hell Tammy Baldwin, John Conyers, Jan Schakowsky and others who know better voted for this anti-American outrage. They must have not read it.
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“Political language has to consist largely of euphemisms . . . and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
- George Orwell -

by Robert Weitzel

H.R 1955: the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 recently passed by the House—a companion bill is in the Senate—is barely one sentence old before its Orwellian moment:

It begins, “AN ACT - To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.”
Those whose pulse did not quicken at “other purposes” have probably not read George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” or they voted for the other George both times.

Orwell’s jeremiad on the corruption of the English language and its corrosive effect on a democracy was written two years before his novel 1984 spelled out in chilling detail the danger of Newspeak, which renders citizens incapable of independent thought by depriving them of the words necessary to form ideas other than those promulgated by the state.

After its opening “tribute” to Orwell, H.R 1955 is strategically peppered with Newspeak regarding the establishment of a National Commission and university-based Centers of Excellence to “examine and report upon the fact and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States” and to make legislative recommendations for combating it.

The “sheer cloudy vagueness” of H.R 1955, as well as its terror factor, may account for its bipartisan 404-6 House vote but how, in an era informed by the Bush-Cheney administration’s egregious assault on the Bill of Rights, can the phrase “other purposes” fail to raise the “National Terror Alert” from its current threat level of “elevated” to “severe.”

Future “other purposes” will undoubtedly be justified by the Act’s use of the term “violent radicalization,” which it defines as “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence . . .” or by the folksy, Lake Wobegonesque “homegrown terrorism,” defined as “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born [or] raised . . . within the United States . . . to intimidate or coerce the United States, the civilian population . . . or any segment thereof . . . [italics added].”

In the service of some self-serving “other purposes,” will “extremist beliefs” become any belief the temporary occupants of the White House consider antithetical and threatening to their political agenda?

Will “ideologically based violence” or the use of “force” become little more than the mayhem resulting after a peaceful protest, daring to move beyond the barbed wire of the free speech zone, is attacked by a truncheon-wielding riot squad armed with tear gas, German Shepard dogs and water cannons?

Will the unarmed, constitutionally protected dissenters who are fending off blows or dog bites, or who are striking back in self-defense become “homegrown terrorists” and suffer draconian sentences for their attempt to “intimidate or coerce” the state with free thought and free speech?

A clue to future “other purposes” may lie in the Act’s parentage. The proud House “mother” of the Patriot Act’s evil twin is Rep. Jane Harmon (D-CA), chair of the Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee. Rep. Harmon has admitted to a long and productive relationship with the RAND Corporation, a California based think-tank with close ties to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. RAND’s 2005 study, “Trends in Terrorism,” contains a chapter titled, “Homegrown Terrorist Threats to the United States.” Is this Act a bastard child?

Keep in mind that the RAND Corporation was set up in 1946 by Army Air Force General Henry “Hap” Arnold as “Project RAND” sponsored by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Keep in mind also that Donald Rumsfeld was its chairman from 1981 to 1986 and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s felonious former chief of staff, and Condoleezza Rice were trustees. Enough said!

RAND maintains that “homegrown terrorism” will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who “challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.”

Further, RAND claims that anti-globalists and radical environmentalists “exist in much the same operational environment as al Qaida” and pose “a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business.” Therein lies the real “other purposes.”

Predictably then, H.R. 1955 is not about protecting homegrown Americans. That protection is only incidental to its “other purposes” of protecting homegrown corporate interest and its unconscionable manipulation of the American political process to fill its coffers. Any thought or speech or action— however protected it might be by the Bill of Rights—that threatens corporate hegemony and profit will no doubt suffer the “other purposes” clause of the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.

Anyone doubting the Orwellian nature of a “bastard child” that equates anti-globalists and environmentalists with al Qaida terrorists will do well to read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and to acquaint themselves with the fate of Winston Smith in 1984.

Biography: Robert Weitzel is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic Magazine, Freethought Today, and on popular liberal websites. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com
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Bush Pocket Veto Outrages Veterans

Update II: Veterans for Common Sense is trying to get Speaker Pelosi to open up the House so that President Bush must formally veto the bill to the House. If the House opens and Bush fails to send a formal veto, then the bill becomes law, according to Paul Sullivan, Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense.

Update: 60 Minutes Story on Bush Blocking Tortured U.S. POWs from Pursuing Money from Iraqi Regime (from Nov. 20, 2003) Bush never tires of shafting our veterans. From 60 Minutes:

“They wanna extinguish the case. I don't know why they would want to just wipe this off the books and say it never happened,” says (Dale) Storr, who was shot down by Iraqi ground fire. ...“Let's just sweep it under the carpet and pretend it never happened.”

“I hope George Bush, the President of the United States, doesn't know about this,” says (Sen. Harry) Reid. “Because if he knows about it, if he knows about it, it's a pox on his house, his White House. This is wrong.”

60 Minutes wanted to ask the administration about all this, but Vice President Dick Cheney declined. His press aide told us he was "too busy" to talk to us. We also asked to speak with Attorney General John Ashcroft, who also declined as did Secretary of State Colin Powell. As for President Bush, in a recent press briefing, his spokesman said that while no amount of money can compensate the POWs, “it was determined earlier this year by Congress and the Administration that those assets were no longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq."

Rebuilding Iraq. Not funny, Bush. You don't have the authority to stand in the same room with these POWs you are shafting.

As if any more evidence were needed that George W. Bush has the knife out for our veterans, a couple of e-mails circulating offers the flavor of veterans' increasingly negative attitude towards the idiot occupying the oval office.

As reported in the LA Times:

President Bush surprised Congress by refusing to sign a Defense Department authorization bill, in part because the legislation could revive a lawsuit brought by American prisoners of war during the 1991 Persian Gulf War who say they were tortured by the Iraqis.

Saddam's regime tortures our troops and Bush blocks the troops' getting deserved money for treatment and suffering.

Said one veteran expressing outrage on the veto and Bush's performance in office generally in protecting veterans: "Wrong on the facts, wrong on the law, and wrong on the policy. Bush Uber Alles."

Writes Paul Sullivan, Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense in a letter to the LA Times reporters who wrote the piece on Bush's outrageous veto.

Dear David and James,

Thank you for your detailed reporting in the Los Angeles Times about President George W. Bush’s rejection of the Defense Bill ...

As a Gulf War veteran I am deeply disappointed by President Bush’s violation of common decency and the law with his dubious ‘pocket veto’ of the Defense bill. America should be outraged that President Bush rejected legislation that would allow our wounded Gulf War veterans to sue Iraq for the torture they suffered while prisoners of war during Desert Shield / Desert Storm in 1990 – 1991.

Here is a detailed review of the Defense Bill disaster created by President Bush posted at Daily Kos:

There is no ‘pocket veto’ because Congress is in session, as Senator Jim Webb and others were shown on TV keeping Congress open:

A spokesman for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters over the weekend that the ‘pocket veto’ is not viable:

This episode brings back memories from 1999, when Gulf War veterans and Congress made it very clear that veterans should have the right to sue Iraq:

Not only does President Bush’s dubious ‘pocket veto’ deny our veterans the right to sue Iraq, it also blocks key reforms passed overwhelmingly by Congress to clean up the Walter Reed scandal caused by President Bush’s failure to plan for the 264,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans already treated at VA hospitals.

Congress must step up to the plate now and declare they are in session and fight for our service members, our veterans, and our ex-prisoners of war abandoned by President Bush.

Please call if you have questions.

Thanks,

Paul Sullivan

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NYT Year-end Editorial on America under Bush

Bush is an illegitimate president who has brought our country to democratic ruin. An excellent editorial below:

NYT Year-end Editorial on America under Bush

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer. ...

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

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NYT: Fear of Exposure to Public Drove Suppression of CIA Torture Tapes

The 2,060 piece in today's New York Times tells the American public the essential story of the truly immoral regime that is the Bush administration.

See SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI's piece that one hopes leads to denunciations across the globe.

Not only did the CIA under Bush torture human beings, but they concealed and destroyed the taped evidence of torture for fear that the American public and Muslims would object. All the time, Bush and his drones blared: "We do not torture."

This contempt for democratic accountability makes the political illegitimacy of the Bush regime plain for all to see. Its contempt for human rights makes the Bush regime war criminals who ought to face trial.

From the Times:

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes. ...

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials. ...

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding.

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Bhutto Assassinated at Political Rally

Multiple attacks at a political rally killed the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto near the capital, Islamabad, the New York Times reports.

George W. Bush has some wild and desperate spinning to do today, and the Neocon project to portray Iran as a dire and grave threat will take another hit.

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The Neocons Meet Their Match in Musharraf the Con Man and Dictator

From Horton at Harper's:

... American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered up year-end remarks in which she congratulates herself on her foreign policy successes in 2007. Rice, of course, hopes that no one examines that claim too closely. In fact the year has marked a series of stunning reversals for her foreign policy stewardship. Nowhere are those set-backs more dramatic than in Pakistan—one country where Rice urged, and the White House rather belatedly adopted, a shift designed finally to try to nudge the country’s leadership out of the grave they’ve been digging themselves. It was, however, a classic case of too little, too late. ...

In sum, the Bush Administration’s Neoconservative team met their match for confidence artistry in a military man named Pervez Musharraf. He presented himself as the only game in town, the man they had to come to love—or else. And in this way, Musharraf was able to get his way on just about everything—picking their pockets as he went along.

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600 Attacks per Week in Iraq

From Juan Cole:

The guerrilla movement in Iraq is generating a steady 600 attacks a week using bombs, small-arms, mortars and sniping. This number has not changed during the past six weeks, and although it is lower than the rate in September, it is a very significant number of attacks. Roadside bomb attacks in specific are down, but there is no change in the number of over-all attacks. The Iraqi government statistics show 600 civilian deaths a month (the US military's statistics are lower).
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White House Reeling from Torture Tape NYT Story

Update: The Hill reports, "Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications for the newspaper, stated that the sub-headline [reading “White House Role Was Wider Than It Said” ] has been changed, adding that a correction would be printed. However, Mathis also pointed out that the White House did not challenge the contents of the article."

The White House is fighting against the latest scandal involving the destruction of the CIA torture tapes and White House lying about its knowledge of the destruction.

The Statement by the Press Secretary says the NYT story is "pernicious and troubling..."

Reads the NYT story:

WASHINGTON — At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

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Andrew Sullivan: The Cost Of Bush Is $32 Trillion and Rising

Via Sullivan's The Daily Dish:

The opinion of another shrill hysteric? Just David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of the GAO:

In a speech today at the National Press Club, he said, "If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and there would be talk about whether the company's management and directors needed a major shake-up." Walker urged greater transparency and accountability over the federal government's operations, financial condition, and fiscal outlook...

"The federal government's fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007, up more than $2 trillion from September 30, 2006, and an increase of more than $32 trillion from about $20 trillion as of September 30, 2000," Walker said. "This translates into a current burden of about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American household."

Full (PDF) report here.
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Fleischer and Romney attacks Huckabee for criticizing Bush.

Ari Fleischer ('Lie-sure') and Mitt Romney dutifully spill the talking points about George W. Bush:

- He keeps us safe,

- And the safe course for Republican presidential candidates is to repeat the above, and not criticize the performance of George W. Bush, endangering his legacy :).

Romney defended Bush Sunday on Meet the Press, blasting break-out candidate Mike Huckabee for branding Bush's foreign policy as arrogant, and demonstrating a "bunker mentality."

"That's an insult to the president, and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the president," Romney said.

And from ThinkProgress:

President Bush’s former spokesman Ari Fleischer today called Mike Huckabee’s Foreign Affairs comments ["... American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude...") “unwarranted and unwise“:

There is much to like about Mike Huckabee. But he will serve Republican primary voters, and our nation, better if he focused his criticisms on the Democrats who will run against our eventual nominee and not on the President who has kept us safe.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney also said that Huckabee “ought to be saying thank you to the president for keeping us safe these last six years.”
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