Gordon's Notes

Saturday, September 04, 2004

Who is/are Putin's "They"?

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Excerpts from Putin's address

We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them.

They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world's major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed.

Ooookaaay. So who is "they"? The US? Europe? China? Chile?

Putin is moving into increasingly nasty territory.

Not surprising. 9/11 has put the US into a persistent psychotic state (how else to explain Bush up 11% over Kerry?) -- and, as fragile as we are, Russia is much worse off.

These terrorists may be well on the way to taking the world back to the 14th century.

Friday, September 03, 2004

Kerry in Vietnam, Bush debauches in Alabama

Salon.com News | George W. Bush's missing year

"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."

Linda Allison's story, never before published, contradicts the Bush campaign's assertion that George W. Bush transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama National Guard in 1972 because he received an irresistible offer to gain high-level experience on the campaign of Bush family friend Winton "Red" Blount. In fact, according to what Allison says her late husband told her, the younger Bush had become a political liability for his father, who was then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and the family wanted him out of Texas. "I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him," Linda Allison said.

... Personal history aside, Allison's recollections of the young George Bush in Alabama in 1972 are relevant as a contrast to the medals for valor and bravery that Kerry won in Vietnam in the same era. An apparent front group for the Bush campaign, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has attacked Kerry in television ads as a liar and traitor to veterans for later opposing a war that cost 58,000 American lives. Bush, who has resisted calls from former Vietnam War POW John McCain, R-Ariz., to repudiate the Swift Boat ads, has said he served honorably in the National Guard.

Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before.

GWB escaped Vietnam through his family connections, didn't fulfill his Guard application, and was hidden from public view because of his multiple substance abuse problems. Nothing new or surprising here. His experiences could have given him wisdom. They didn't.

Google Search: "zell miller" "barking mad"

There are only 16 hits for Zell Miller and "barking mad". I guess Google hasn't run its index today.

Zel is a great poster child from the new Fasc... Republican party.

Monday, August 30, 2004

Iowa Republicans are changing the name of their party to 'Hezbollah'

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Republicans Change Name to 'Hezbollah'

Amy Sullivan reports in the Washington Monthly that the Iowa Republicans are changing the name of their party to 'Hezbollah':

The Washington Monthly: Guest: Amy Sullivan:

'God's Official Party'?....That's what the good souls in the G.O.P. are apparently calling themselves these days, according to Mike Crowley's report from a morning meeting of the Iowa Republican delegation in New York. Ah, humility...

A lovely translation by DeLong.

Saturday, August 28, 2004

The demise of the Falluja Brigade and the rise of Zarqawi

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Insurgency: In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay

INSURGENCY
In Western Iraq, Fundamentalists Hold U.S. at Bay
By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIK ECKHOLM

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 28 - While American troops have been battling Islamic militants to an uncertain outcome in Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.

Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts - officials of Saddam Hussein's army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States - have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.

In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the American-trained Iraqi National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor was forced to resign after his three sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by American marines after three assassination attempts led him to secretly defect to the rebel cause.

The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja marketplace for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recorded Koranic chants ordaining death for those who "make war upon Allah." The governor is shown with a photograph of himself with an American officer, sobbing as he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.

In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids. The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.

The situation across Anbar represents the latest reversal for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which sought to assert control with a spring offensive in Falluja and Ramadi that incurred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war, and a far heavier toll, in the hundreds, among Falluja's resistance fighters and civilians. The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the marines, in a decision to pull back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists.

The American rationale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in handing important government positions to former loyalists of the ousted government, who would work, over time, to wrest control from the Islamic militants who had emerged from the shadows to build strongholds there. The culmination of that approach came with the recruitment of the so-called Falluja Brigade, led by a former Army general under Mr. Hussein, and composed of a motley assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents, who marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi military uniforms, backed with American-supplied weapons and money.

But the Falluja Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented checkpoints on roads into the city with the militants, its headquarters in Falluja abandoned, like the buildings assigned to the national guard. Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard battalions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Falluja say, taking their families with them, and handing their weapons to the militants.

The militants' principal power center is a mosque in Falluja led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has instituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding up people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to publicly administered lashes, and, in some cases, beheading. But Mr. Janabi appears to have been working in alliance with an Islamic militant group, Unity and Holy War, that American intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to Al Qaeda whom the Americans have blamed for many of the suicide bombings in Baghdad, which is just 35 miles from Falluja, and in other Iraqi cities.

The videotapes showing the killing of the guard commander, the humiliation of the governor, and the beheading of the Egyptian all display the black-and-yellow flag of the Zarqawi group as a backdrop, and the passages of the Koran chanted as an accompaniment to the killings are drawn from passages of the Muslim holy book that have accompanied some of the videotaped pronouncements by Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden. Iraqis who have watched the Falluja tapes say the Egyptian's executioner speaks in a cultured Arabic that is foreign, possibly Jordanian or Palestinian.

A Severe Blow in Falluja

Perhaps the harshest blow to the American position in Falluja came with the Aug. 13 execution of the national guard commander, Suleiman Mar'awi, a former officer in Mr. Hussein's army with family roots in Falluja. In the tape of his killing, he is seen in his camouflaged national guard uniform, with an Iraqi flag at his shoulder, confessing to his leadership of a plot to stage an uprising in the city on Aug. 20 that was to have been coordinated with an American offensive. For that purpose, he says, he recruited defectors among the militants' ranks and met frequently with Marine commanders outside the city to settle details of the attack.

American commanders in Baghdad acknowledged ruefully that Mr. Mar'awi had been killed, but they denied that there was any plan for an offensive. Still, Marine commanders at Camp Falluja, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States. Eventually, the Marine officers have said, American hopes of creating stability in Iraq will necessitate a new attack on the city, this time one that will not be halted before it can succeed.

Some of those officers have also acknowledged that Iraqi "scouts" working for the Americans, some disguised as militants, others working for the national guard and police, have been a source of intelligence on militant activities in Falluja, and on the location of bombing targets. The American command says it has carried out many bombing raids since the Marine pullback from the city in May, killing scores of militants. One such raid that was reported this week in a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al-Adala, said that 13 Yemenis had been killed in an air raid in Falluja as they prepared to carry out suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad, and that the Yemeni government was negotiating to bring the bodies home.

Among militants in Falluja, there has been one point of agreement with the Americans - that many of the bombing raids have hit militant safe houses, and with pinpoint accuracy. A clue as to how this has been possible is given in the tapes of the beheadings of Mr. Mar'awi, the national guard commander, and of the Egyptian, a man in his mid-30's who identifies himself on the tape as Muhammad Fawazi. Both men confess to having planted electronic homing "chips" for the Americans. As they speak, the tapes show a man wearing a red-checkered kaffiyeh headdress holding a rectangular device, colored green and encased in clear plastic, about the size of a matchbox....

... American commanders confess they have no answers in Anbar, and say their strategy is to curb the militants' ability to project their violence farther afield, especially in Baghdad. A recent meeting between Iraq's interim prime minister, Dr. Allawi, and a delegation of tribal sheiks from Falluja who have pledged fealty to Mr. Janabi is said to have reached a standstill accord, with Dr. Allawi promising not to sanction large-scale American attacks on the Anbar cities, and the sheiks conveying Mr. Janabi's pledge to halt militant attacks on the Americans...

I remember when snuff films were a rumor of extreme perversity. Now they sell for 50 cents in Iraqi markets. The march of progress.

In these cities the Sunni fundamentalists are popular. Removing these men would mean killing most of the inhabitants.

Ok George, what now?

The Fall of Robert Dole (from a Nixon Republican)

When Bob Dole Said No (washingtonpost.com)

Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time he did spend, he lay on his back for years, recovering, and helping others to recover.

I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My brother served two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts (and was hospitalized, and does draw disability -- weird yardsticks used to measure John Kerry's alleged shortfall), and yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his first 'tour' lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in the midst of the U.S. Marines' first amphibious assault in Vietnam.

Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he shed when he was wounded -- it is hurtful that those who served in Vietnam are being split in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds of that war are reopened at the instigation of people who avoided serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of Bob Dole's stature should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow American veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.

There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.

Bob Dole was a man of conscience. Until he Fell.

The Bush administration has this effect on good people. Colin Powell, of course, is exhibit A. Some men, such as O'Neill, save their souls. Most lose them. What is it about that man?

Maybe all those Christian Fundamentalists campaigning for Bush should reread their Apocrypha. Perhaps Clinton wasn't holding the place they assigned to him ..

Backstory to the latest scandal: Salon.com | The new Pentagon papers

Salon.com | The new Pentagon papers

A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war.

I missed this in March. It's important back story now that the 9/11 committee has delivered and the Feith/Franklin story is breaking.

The mainstream media needs to revisit this. How deep does the rot go?

The National Scream: 9/2/04 @ 9:58 pm ET - "Fuggedaboutit".

Boing Boing: Nationwide scream when W speaks at the RNC

On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.

Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, 'fuggedaboudit!'

This will be a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. We will stop yelling before the president starts speaking. Our goal is not to drown him out, but to communicate. (And vent.)

The post omits the key factor -- the timezone of the speech. Maybe we could make this a neighborhood event. We need a more precise start time however. Maybe a counter running on a web site could coordinate everyone.

Inside scoop on the Rumsfeld/Feith/Israel spy scandal

The Agonist | thoughtful, global, timely

For months, I have been working with my colleagues Paul Glastris and Josh Marshall on a story for the Washington Monthly about US policy towards Iran. In particular, it involves a particular series of meetings involving officials from the office of the undersecretary of defense for Policy Doug Feith and Iranian dissidents. To that end, we have pursued and cultivated numerous sources with knowledge of those officials, those meetings, and more broadly, Feith's office's seeming attempts to forge a rogue US foreign policy to Iran out of the Pentagon.

As part of our reporting, I have come into possession of information that points to an official who is the most likely target of the FBI investigation into who allegedly passed intelligence on deliberations on US foreign policy to Iran to officials with the pro-Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, and to the Israelis, as alleged by the CBS report. That individual is Larry Franklin, a veteran DIA Iran analyst seconded to Feith's office.

First, this is an amazing story. The reason it's so interesting is because Feith/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld led a rogue intelligence op prior to the Iraq invasion. Lately, they've seemed to be doing the same with respect to Iran.

Now we discover that one of the actors deeply involved in that effort may be spy for Israel. (Or a double-triple-quardruple agent -- or nothing -- these spy guys seem to love bizarre games.)

I wonder how this will play in the middle east. Probably pretty much what they'd expect.

In terms of Israel, they're just doing their job. Congratulations are deserved. The Israelis and Iranians are two of the best intel orgs in the business. Maybe we could outsource our Intel to Israel and Iran.

Hmmm.

On second thought, maybe we did outsource our decision making to Israel and Iran. Both Israel and Iran wanted the US to conquer Iraq -- each for their own reasons. Both appear to have substantially penetrated the Pentagon and Rumsfeld's organization; Iran via Chalabi and, if one believes the FBI, Israel via ? Franklin.

Rumsfeld shouldn't resign. He should remain in office forever, as a living reminder of the risks of arrogance, ignorance, and the perils of a Bush presidency.

Friday, August 27, 2004

The PRKA Manifesto -- yet another extremist group

Manifesto - Saunders

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Eliot Spitzer wins again

The New York Times > Business > Maker of Paxil to Release All Trial Results

In a settlement that the New York State attorney general said would transform the drug industry, GlaxoSmithKline agreed today to post on its Web site the results of all clinical trials involving its drugs.

'This settlement is transformational in that it will provide doctors and patients access to the clinical testing data necessary to make informed judgments,' the attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said.

Spitzer has reformed an industry out of control, and righted a wrong that the medical establishment accepted far, far, too long.

Imagine.

John Ashcroft -> Eliot Spitzer.

Yet Another Rlfeport Supports Kerry's Account

The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Navy Report Supports Kerry's Account

A Navy report filed five days after a disputed mission in Vietnam supports Senator John Kerry's version of the incident and contradicts critics who say he never came under enemy gunfire when he won two medals.

A weekly report from the Navy task force overseeing Mr. Kerry's Swift boat squadron reported that his group of boats was fired on in the March 13, 1969, mission. Some of Mr. Kerry's critics, including several men who were on other boats that day, say there was no enemy gunfire in the incident, for which Mr. Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart.

The March 18, 1969, report from Task Force 115, which was located by The Associated Press in a search of Navy archives, is the latest document to surface that supports Mr. Kerry's description of the event. Crew members on Mr. Kerry's boat and a Special Forces soldier Mr. Kerry pulled from the water that day insist there was enemy fire. The task force report twice mentions the incident and both times calls it 'an enemy-initiated firefight' that included automatic weapons fire and underwater mines.

Task Force 115 was commanded at the time by Roy Hoffmann, the founder of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been running advertisements challenging Mr. Kerry's account of the episode.

A member of the group, Larry Thurlow, said he stood by his assertion that there was no enemy fire that day. Mr. Thurlow, the commander of another boat who also won a Bronze Star, said task force commanders probably relied on the initial report of the incident. Mr. Thurlow says Mr. Kerry wrote that report.

The anti-Kerry group has not produced any official Navy documents supporting its claim.

The SVBT guys have about as much credibility now as George Bush himself. None.

US bounty hunter had contact with Rumsfeld's office

BBC NEWS | South Asia | US admits 'bounty hunter' contact

When Jonathan Idema, also known as Jack, first appeared in court in Kabul last month, he was asked to prove his claims to have had links with the US Department of Defense.

One name he mentioned was Heather Anderson, the Pentagon's Acting Director of Security, who answers to the chief official responsible for intelligence matters in the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary.

This is interesting. Anderson admits contact, but says she turned him down. In a normal administration I'd be inclined to believe her. In this administration, and especially when it involves Rumsfeld ....

Rumsfeld may have read too many Clancy novels.

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

SVBT: O'Neill changes yet another story