Hey Scott Walker, You're Lying Again—as Bad as Bush-Cheney

Scott Walker finds utility of neocon lies as he evades law
enforcement probe back home in Wisconsin, one of
numerous scandals and corruptions of Gov. Scott Walker

Updated - Fresh from his PR jaunt to Israel blacked-out from the press (Sommer, Hareetz, Schreckinger, the Politco), Scott Walker comes home and shoots out the story he would not have invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 (Rubin, Washington Post, Sommerhauser, Wisconsin State Journal) knowing what Bush and Cheney knew.

Walker's nonsense comes with a wink to the neocons in the U.S. and the even more war-mongering rightist and militaristic racists in Israel lusting for a US-led war with Iran (this time), should another Republican occupy the White House.

Of course Bush and Cheney knew. But the oh-we-didn't-know-there-were-no-WMDS is the neocon line of the day, and Scott Walker is ever the good solider for lies, no matter the consequences.

One tactical problem with Walker's latest lie is Bush-Cheney's White House Iraq Group's (the Iraq War propaganda group) 2002-03 mission to lie, spin and con America into war with Iraq, and the strutting Bush and assorted chickenhawks created a disaster, arguably the most atrocious human rights crime of the 21st century.

Another problem for Scott Walker is Walker is dumber (and less informed) than Bush, hence media blackouts and press rope lines that come with Walker's public appearances now-a-days, and still not one question-and-answer session with voters.

Walker's—more likely a different GOP nominee for the presidency—lies for an invasion with Iran this next time out won't wash with the American public still recovering from the Bush-Cheney disaster to the world economy, and not so hot on more neocon wars.

For those with short memories, perhaps the best text of Bush-Cheney-neocon lies selling the Iraq invasion is David Corn and Michael Isikoff's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (Crown Publishers, 2006). (See review, (Heilbrunn, NYT)

Notes David Corn two years ago, "Our book ... was the first cut at an important topic: how a president had swindled the nation into war with a deliberate effort to hype the threat." (Corn, MotherJones)

For those contemplating what the neocons did and what the Republicans want to do again, see "Hubris" (Full Film) Iraq War Documentary - The Rachel Maddow Show (02-18-2013).

Bush's Iraq War by the Numbers

Pres. George W. Bush in 2003 aboard the
USS Abraham Lincoln


What sick bunch of callow human beings inflicted upon the world this misery of the Iraq War? Lied to the troops and Marines of Operation Iraqi Freedom who swore the oath and committed their honor, to be betrayed by weak, miserable men and women? We know exactly whom these people are.

By Brad Friedman

War criminal - all

George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman predicted the War in Iraq would be a "cakewalk". As President Barack Obama announced today that all U.S. military troops would finally be leaving the "cakewalk" by year's end after 9 deadly years (and as Fox "News" was busy ignoring the historic announcement), ThinkProgress put together a few numbers from what they describe as "The World's Costliest Cakewalk"... [numbers below vastly understate the damage]:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

Unknown number of contractors working in support of U.S. mission injured

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

Zero weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

Rice and Cheney, People Who Don't Know

Update: "The one trait that defines establishment pundits more than any other is a pathological inability ever to accept blame or admit error. That's because they work in the most accountability-free profession in America, where people like Bill Kristol (with a record like this) and Jeffrey Goldberg (with a record like this) get promoted despite no retractions or remorse, and establishment media stars in general can pretend that they bear no responsibility for enabling the abuses and crimes of the Bush years."
- Glenn Greenwald, Salon

First-rate Sunday morning reads in the New York Times and Washington Post rebutting the always foolish Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

Frank Rich and Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, rip apart the recent Cheney-Rice lies that even now continue apace with the "unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic (Frank Rich)" on the part of the corporate media and Congressional Democrats.

Writes Clarke:

'Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans,' Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. ...

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. ...

I have little sympathy for this argument. ...

Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. ...

Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.

The reaction of thinking journalists when Rice and Cheney began their we know better, you had to be there line should have been extreme skepticism and consider-the-source, there-they-go-again ridicule.

As President Obama is aware, this skepticism resides in the electorate that put him into office and remains impatient for a complete presidential repudiation and reversal of Cheney-Rice disgrace.

Killing for Christ, War Was a "Crusade"

Update: A quick read of CommonDreams presents well the problem Obama faces if he continues down the Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld road. See Changing Obama's Mindset (Howard Zinn), The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War (Joy-Ann Reid), These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban (Patrick Cockburn), The NYT Sums up Obama's Civil Liberties Record in One Paragraph (Glenn Greenwald). As our Cheney once advised: Stick to principle.

Frank Rich in his Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush column points to a must-read by Robert Draper in GQ Magazine on Donald Rumsfeld.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

This is the same Rumsfeld who spoke of the "humanity' with which we invaded Iraq, and along with Cheney ordered that people be tortured to speak of the non-existent Saddam-Al Qaeda connection.

Writes Draper:

Onward Christian Soldiers!
These never-before-seen documents from the Rumsfeld Pentagon mixed religion and war.

In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets—like the ones in this exclusive GQ.com slideshow—began adorning the top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The sheets juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House, where they were read by the man who, just after September 11, referred to America's war on terror [sic] as a 'crusade.'

Let's hope each revelation leads to Obama reversing the wars and crimes against humanity that Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld committed with impunity.

Watching the GQ.com slideshow, a reader laughs, scoffs, and sadly ruminates on the degree to which these depraved lies are going to continue under Obama's administration.

Islam Knows War Is Depraved

Update: Greenwald: We wouldn't want to inflame anti-American sentiment:

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to 'look to the future.'

We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions 'inflame anti-American sentiment' is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would 'inflame anti-American sentiment.' It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face.

---
Do not look at the pictures below - they are disgusting and repulsive to any civilized human being. [ I took them down, they make me feel sick. AfterDowningStreet keeps them to remind people that war is not a video game.]

But they make a point: That War, is awful and depraved.

Understand that President Obama's sub-moronic statement - "(T)he most direct consequence of releasing (the Abu Ghraib photos), I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger" - is ludicrous in the face of the 1,000,000s killed, wounded and traumatized for life in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Who wrote that for Obama?

Put aside the anti-democratic nature of secrecy and domestic government censorship for a moment, the families of the people we killed would gladly be tortured if they could bring back their children, their brothers, their fathers. Hey, these guys are actual human beings.

To reduce it to political terms President Obama, think of war as a bad PR strategy, a rude thing to do to your fellow human beings in other countries and something that inflames anti-American opinion. War supports the message that we don't like you.

What the hell do you think war does for anti-American opinion?

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.

BBC: Shoe-throwing Reporter's Brother Says He Has Been Severely Injured

We savaged a country; perhaps it's fitting that now Iraq savages a protester as we watch.

Juan Cole Hits GOP Hypocrisy

It's not hyperbole to suggest that any political move that today's GOP makes is likely a lie or a rank exercise in hypocrisy. That's what we face today.

From Juan Cole:

You know how the Republicans in the Senate refused to spend $30 billion to bring the US auto industry back from the brink?

It turns out that they were perfectly happy to waste $50 billion in taxpayer money on reconstruction boondoggles in Iraq on explicitly partisan grounds. A veteran Republican lobbyist, says the NYT, explicitly appealed to the then head of the Office of Management and Budget:

To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President . . . His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.

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.

Juan Cole Rips Bush Apart One Last Time

Update: See also J. P. Green's Challenging the 'Bush Kept Us Safe' Meme - "It's reflection time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the inhabitants of the white house and their minions are not milking their fading authority to smash and grab as much as they can, they are busy spinning history to describe their positive accomplishments. All they have is the fact that we have not had a major terrorist incident 'on U.S. soil' since 9-11. For this, they figure, Americans should be expansively grateful to the lamest duck."

In case anyone missed it, Juan Cole tears apart Bush's-impersonation-of-a-Soviet commissar address last week on Bush's Middle East policy at the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C.

Not that anyone with the power of insight exceeding Cokie Roberts takes anything Bush says seriously these days, but Bush's "self-glorifying speech" disrespects the million human beings no longer alive because of his lying foreign policy.

Concludes Cole:

Bush was always all hat and no cattle. Bush turned the United States into an aggressor nation. He kicked off an orgy of violence in Iraq that has probably left a million dead. He destroyed entire cities. He left millions of widows and orphans, and millions more displaced. He lied, he destroyed habeas corpus at home and abroad, he tortured. It is too soon to know if American democracy will ever really recover from lawless regime.

Cole and not the Cokies of the world will show the world how quickly that we can recover by speaking truth to power.

But many would like to see not just a reversal of Bush's anti-Democratic and illegal foreign policy towards Iraq, but a presidential repudiation from Barack Obama of this huge war crime that we by virtue of our citizenship are all guilty.

In Defense of Joe Lieberman

Update: Hartford Courant: Secret Ballot To Decide Lieberman's Fate - "Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators. He didn't support us on military stuff, and he didn't support us on Iraq stuff. But you look at his record, it's pretty good."
- Sen. Harry Reid

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a U.S. Senator.

Lieberman went right along with the obscenity of the Iraq Invasion and the Patriot Act, among other imbecilities.

I don’t care for Joe Lieberman as a public man.

Even among elected officials in Congress, Lieberman stands out as a lying propagandist.

Lieberman used Republican talking points and lies in his failed attempt to prop up John McCain’s candidacy that would have been devastating to a reeling economy and a shredded American Constitution.

And Lieberman veered right up to and past neo-McCarthyism questioning the patriotism of those not sharing his discredited militarism.

But let’s look to history.

Did the Democratic Party attempt to marginalize and punish Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson in 1977, for example, the dedicated militarist of the 1960s-70s who shared with Lieberman the sanctimonious commitment to state violence?

No.

Because to cast out Jackson would have been to indict a whole generation of Democratic leaders without whose dedicated support and lies the Vietnam Invasion would not have been waged.

If we take seriously the arguments to sanitize by sanctioning Lieberman after the Democratic Party’s electoral victories in 2008, more than Joe Lieberman need to stand and account.

The effort to punish Lieberman smells of scapegoating.

We just had an election. What are we going to do, punish Vice-president Biden, Clinton and Kohl for their historically horrendous votes and sometimes unsavory politics?

Of-course not.

Obama has it right. Let’s look to the future.

Wisconsin lawmakers participate in "Bring the Guard Home" campaign

The Iraq Waris largely silent at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

From WIBA Radio (Madison, Wisconsin):

State Rep. Mark Pocan (Madison) drafting a bill to strip the feds of its power to send National Guard troops to Iraq
By The Wheeler News Service

An anti-war group wants state lawmakers around the nation to strip the federal government of its power to send National Guard troops to Iraq. The "Bring the Guard Home campaign" held a news conference in Denver today near the DNC site. Mark Pocan, a state representative from Wisconsin, was one of the speakers. He says Wisconsin is one of eleven states where bills are being drafted aimed at ending the deployment of National Guard troops to Iraq. The bill could be introduced this year.

Lies and Obstruction

It’s no surprise that Bush, Cheney and their supporters are so intent on controlling the images and impressions coming out of their Iraq War catastrophe.

These are the same people who went to war with the swaggering casualness of a young teenager playing a cool video-game system, though teenagers are typically more candid about their rationales and objectives.

Blocking their actions from examination is a full-time job for this administration and its paid liars, who even today are selling the Iraq War alternately as a mistake/unfortunate imperative, and not a colossal lie.

Michael Kamber and Tim Arango’s piece in this morning’s New York Times on the “growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war” makes a reader wonder if somehow all this destruction in Iraq could have been prevented by candid discussion in this democracy of what war is during the 2002-03 roll-out of Bush's Iraq propaganda.

Write Kamber and Arango:

“(O)pponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.”

Good to see the New York Times news columns covering a trusim that has been abundantly obvious to any thinking person from the very beginning of this bullshit war.

The American public was not calling for a war with Iraq in 2002-03 or for that matter never was too keen on the idea, but the truth is they/we let it happen, and the war's continuation today, sustained by ever-changing lies, is as tragic now as it was five years ago.

U.S. Troops Love Barack in Baghdad

Just read a great Kos post. McCain is worried and desperate to change the topic.

Check out the video from ABC News.

Iraq Horror as Usual

McCain and Bush stress the improvements that our illegal invasion and occupation are bringing to Iraq.

But the facts are leaking out, for those who read Robert Fisk and Juan Cole:

Robert Fisk: Snapshots of life in Baghdad

The Real State of Iraq

Four Americans Killed in Baghdad Explosion

Our Children Are Not Cannon Fodder for John McCain

From MoveOn

Bush/Neocons Against Democracy; McCain Admits War Is for Oil

via mal contends

Update: John McCain: "My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East." Said Chris Mattews: "“You know, if somebody else were to say that, they would be accused of being a communist, or radical, or a leftist…for John McCain, a war hero, to say that we’re fighting in the Middle East to protect our oil sources is an astounding development.”

Reading the James Kitfields, neocons, and chickenhawks of the world takes a dose of good humor.

That's because the humanitarian disasters that James Kitfield (along with other neocon cheerleaders, including McCain) excuses and his unseemly enthusiasm for defending the perpetrators tend to grate on the nerves of those for whom tyranny and authoritarianism are repulsive.

Consider James Kitfield in the cover story of the National Journal, Democracy Stalled.

Apparently mystified by the Arab peoples' utter rejection of the American imperial project, Kitfield in his 4,400-word piece references Bush's second Inaugural Address in which Bush, and you can look it up, mentioned "freedom" and "liberty" a whole bunch of times.

Writes Kitfield:

Remarkably, it was just three years ago that President Bush unveiled a new 'freedom' agenda in his second Inaugural Address, rallying the United States and its allies to a generations-spanning effort to transform the Middle East through democracy. In his soaring speech, Bush called the campaign to topple the forces of tyranny and authoritarianism a national security mandate and a moral imperative.
'America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,' Bush proclaimed. 'We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.'

Well, remarkably it was just five years ago that Bush decided to invade Iraq in violation of international law (hey, come along UN if you want to be "relevant"), and proceeded to be forced into accepting direct election of local officials under threat by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Now, as civil war continues, Bush is paying Sunnis millions of American tax dollars not to kill our troops, all the while insisting that we must keep the troops there as an occupation force against whoever Bush decides for the moment is the real threat to America.

Though Bush soared in his rhetoric, a quick examination of Kitfield's piece reveals a couple of deflating facts.

He mentioned the word "oil" not once.

Noam Chomsky cuts through this ideological oil constraint nicely in an interview from 2006.

"Doctrinal managers would like us to believe that the US and UK would have 'liberated' Iraq even if its major exports were lettuce and pickles and the major energy resources of the world were in the South Pacific. It takes really impressive discipline 'not to see' the obvious."

Also, Kitfield mentions "Abu Ghraib prison" not once.

These democratic idealists like Kitfield are just too busy analyzing to be bothered by such fare in their pieces.

As Kitfield delves into what What Went Wrong with Bush's idealistic democracy-promoting enterprise, it's worth noting that Kitfield, one has to believe, deliberately ignores the mission, vision, objectives and goals of Bush and his regime.

That would be controlling oil, not exporting democracy.

Carl Estrabrook sums it up nicely, though not on the pages of the National Journal.

Since the Second World War -- from which the United States emerged as the world's only undamaged major country and proceeded to organize the economy of the world -- a cornerstone of American policy has been control of Middle East energy resources, the greatest geopolitical prize in the modern world.

Kitfield ought to consider that no human blood is justified for American control of oil.

Instead he ponders:

Confronted with mounting internal instability, an ascendant Shiite Iran, and empowered Islamist groups throughout the region, authoritarian Sunni Arab governments allied with the United States have cracked down on opposition groups and the press, reversing their own modest democratic reforms. Each day seems to bring news of more opposition figures or government critics arrested and imprisoned, and more restrictions imposed on the press in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

You mean we're invading these countries next? Democracy-exporting sure can be hard work sometimes.

So it is with good humor that one must say to Kitfield and his ilk: Leave democracy and liberty out of it; you're out of your league. And you may wish to ask your editor for a new headline: Imperialism Stalled.

Anniversary of Lies Leading to the Iraq War

It took a lot of lies to sell this war.

One lie in a civil deposition about consensual sex caused the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton.

Nine-hundred and thirty-five Bush administration lies leading the nation to a terrible war shattering the lives of millions have not even merited a Congressional investigation.

I was disgusted some weeks back when talking head Michel Martin said on the Bill Maher show: "But how do you – why – why is it so invested in the idea that (the Iraq War was based on) a lie, as opposed to a mistake? I guess what I’m just curious about is why."

In truth, there have been ample sources factually contradicting the massive PR campaign that the administration launched to enable its obscenity in Iraq, while the Arab League, Europe, and virtually the rest of the world explicitly denied an Iraqi threat, or watched in silence as the Bush administration began its assualt against humanity.

Martin's statement and those like it are ludicrous.

Simply stated, Bush, Cheney, Rice and the whole sorry bunch of them are liars who set off a catastrophe that Iraqi and American families will be paying for the rest of their lives.

In January the Center for Public Integrity released The War Card, Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, chronicling 935 separate lies by eight top administration officials, including President Bush.

Give the Center for Public Integrity's site (above) a look; the group (with Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith) deserve high praise for doing the job that the U.S. Congress has failed to do.