GWOT report card, summer school edition

Is there a grade worse than “F”?

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

. . . .

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government's payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Except there now won’t be any prosecution. No testimony in open court. No hearing that might shed a little light on how the government chased the presumably wrong lead for five years before a shakeup at the FBI shifted focus to Ivins. Now we are to believe that the case is closed because the alleged suicide is somehow tantamount to a confession.

In Bush-Cheney terms, a dead “culprit” without having to go through open US courts is a BIG win.

* * * *

And then there’s the global part of the Global War on Terror™:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

. . . .

The information linking the ISI to the bombing of the Indian Embassy was described in interviews by several American officials with knowledge of the intelligence. Some of the officials expressed anger that elements of Pakistan’s government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

Well, on its face, this would look like a complete failure for the Bush Administration: With the US no closer to capturing bin Laden or al Zawahiri, one of our chief allies in the hunt seems to be in league with the very folks that helped protect the al Qaeda leadership in the first place. But look at this again. The White House now has brand new excuse for why the US has failed to crush al Qaeda or the Taliban—we’re not just fighting a ragtag band of dead-enders or some such, we have to outwit a nuclear power, a country with a large and sophisticated intelligence apparatus and a well-stocked military (we should know, we stocked it). Why, that might require—wait, what is it? right—“unilateral American action.”

Really, when you’re looking at it through the Bush team’s binoculars, what more could you want?

* * * *

And speaking of unilateral action:

Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

. . . .

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

The team in Veep’s office apparently rejected the plan because “you can’t have Americans killing Americans.” Really? Sorry to sound the cynic here, but I can’t imagine Vice President Cankles getting all that upset about sending American troops to their death in order to accomplish his broader goals—“I mean, come on! This is the War on Terror, people! You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet! You saw Wanted—the ancient order must be preserved!”

Sorry, I got a little too into that. . . .

But, seriously, the team might have rejected that particular casus belli, but I can assure you there are plenty more where that came from. And, with the combination of a presidential directive allowing defensive fire from covert teams of US operatives already inside Iran, and the Congressional authorization that basically declared a large portion of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, the whizzing sound of shots fired in anger is only a heart-clogging breakfast away.

But there are some logistical matters to work out—namely, the US is woefully under-equipped for a third military incursion, the Secretary of Defense is not so hot to start a hot war, and Cheney’s favorite proxy warrior, Ehud Olmert, just had to step down from his PM post because he is an incompetent commander-in-chief and corrupt as the day is long.

Really, it’s like the Patty Duke Show of international affairs. . . .

But as far as a grade on this front in the GWOT™, because no Iranians are yet dying by America’s hand, we’ll have to give them an incomplete.

I know you are as excited as I am for the fall semester.


(cross-posted on The Seminal)

reality bites back

In choosing a retired federal judge to replace disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush got himself more than a good Jewish lawyer and the answer to a trivia question (What do Roy Cohen, Claus von Bulow, and Rudy Giuliani have in common?), he got himself a conundrum.

You see, Michael Mukasey was the presiding judge in the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” when he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. President Bush himself made a big deal of Judge Mukasey’s involvement in that case, but what Bush can’t seem to reconcile, no less grasp, is that America successfully stopped a terrorist plot and locked away its planners by treating the plot as a crime and using the tools afforded under the existing criminal justice system to punish the would-be terrorists.

Back then, there was no USA Patriot Act, there was no Guantanamo, there were no military commissions/star chambers, there was no extraordinary rendition, there was no torture, and, last but not least, there was no “Global War on Terror.” But, the biggest difference, of course, is that the Blind Sheikh rots in a US prison, an historical footnote, at best, while Osama bin Laden is a free man, getting a dye-job somewhere in the northwest of Pakistan, an en ever-greater legend to an ever-growing number of radicalized Muslims.

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, the elevation of Judge Mukasey is a plum example of just how much the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism bites.

no play for mr. gray

Clyde, Keith—you’ve been reeeeeeeee-jected! Meet the new Just For Men spokesman.

Don’t believe me? Let’s ask the ladies:

"I think it works,” says Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors terror messages, “he looks young, he looks healthy.”

Rice eats Bush

A forthcoming biography of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, excerpted in Newsweek (and linked to by Think Progress) includes the following, um, tasty tidbits. . . .

. . . Rice was drawn to Bush. "First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around," she recalled, sitting on the couch in her State Department office. "He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it."

Digging into what? Huh? [cough] Sorry. OK. . . .

Bush was also a bad boy. And Rice, according to friends and family, had a thing for bad boys. . . .

Boy? Bush is a “bad boy” you say? More like a petulant child. . . .

Rice's friends insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her Palo Alto hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. "He fills that need," Hamberry-Green decided. "Bush is her feed.”

Wha-a-a-a. . . I think I just swallowed some of my own vomit. I guess that’s how she keeps her girlish figure (remember: Bush “feed” is part of a balanced lifestyle that includes diet and exercise. . . and lying for your husband boss.)

[Says Rice’s] stepmother Clara Rice: "she just can't say no to that man."

(This) White House sex scandal aside, the issue that has Rice steamed this week concerns the release of a book by former CIA chief George Tenet where he accuses the then-National Security Adviser of dismissing his urgent warnings, back in the Summer of 2001, about an imminent attack on the US by al Qaeda terrorists. Specifically, Tenet says he told Rice, “We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.”

When confronted with that quote this weekend on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rice gets quite hot and bothered, and her response is really something wild:

The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.

So many things to parse, so little time. . . . Last first: What you were supposed to strike? Uh, I think his name sounds something like OSAMA BIN LADEN! Second, Rice seems taken aback by the suggestion that they launch a preemptive strike. . . because she has some sort of deep-seated opposition to preemptive force?

But the thing that really pricks my ears: “this is a new fact.” What a strange construction. Rice doesn’t say, “Tenet is lying,” she doesn’t say, “That’s not true,” or, “That didn’t happen,” she says Tenet’s revelation is a “new fact.” True. . . but new.

New to whom?

Worth “digging into,” don’t you think?


(By the way, Happy “Law Day.”)