Archive for the ‘Cheney’ tag
Iraq War Triumphalism Ignores Dead Civilians
David Corn counters the Iraq-War-was-a-Success-Chest-Thumpers who recently have crawled out of the wreckage of the Bush (mal)Administration to blather on the Sunday talk show circuit. By what metric was this voluntary and unnecessary war a successes?
But, of course, the ultimate outcome of the Iraq war — whatever the results of the latest election — remains unknown. And we can continue to debate whether Bush was justified in launching the war, whether he bamboozled the public about the threat Saddam Hussein supposedly posed, and whether Bush’s late surge did help nudge Iraq in a better (or less worse) direction. (It does take chutzpah to hail the Bush administration for the surge, after this crew spent years screwing up in Iraq.) Yet what is galling is the frequent absence from these discussions of a central fact: tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of the war, and millions have been displaced, driven out of their homes and out of their country. …
In the United States, debates about the war often cover the obvious costs: U.S. military casualties (4,380), taxpayer money ($711 billion), and opportunities missed (Afghanistan). What often goes unmentioned is the high cost that was imposed upon the Iraqi people. Have you seen George W. Bush or Dick Cheney ever directly talk about the thousands who died and the millions who had to flee?
There’s no precise number of the Iraqi civilians who lost their lives due to the war. In August 2008, a Congressional Research Service report surveyed the various estimates. It noted that a World Health Organization study covering the first three years of the war had placed the civilian death toll at 151,999. A Brookings Institution study put the number at 113,616 for the first five years. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot — and this doesn’t include Iraqis who were physically or mentally injured and did not die. In per capita terms, the equivalent death figure for the United States would be over a million people. And war-related deaths are far from over in Iraq. Last month, the civilian death toll jumped to 211 people from 135 in January.
[Click to continue reading Iraq War Triumphalism Ignores a Key Matter: Dead Civilians -- Politics Daily]
It isn’t too late to hold war crime trials in the Hague, is it?
Reading Around on September 1st through September 2nd
A few interesting links collected September 1st through September 2nd:
- Will Chicago See a Hotel Strike? – Chicagoist – Chicago's hotel workers are clocking in today without a union contract, as negotiators from UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association has yet to reach an agreement on a new pact. The previous contract expired at last night at midnight. “It’s been a fight to even just get to the table,” a spokeswoman for the hotel workers’ union told Crain's. “We’re not close, and I think we’re looking at the possibility of a major fight.”
- Dithering: Jonny Greenwood: Sasha Frere-Jones : The New Yorker – "Q: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?
JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me"
I would add, they sound fine if they are recorded at a high enough sample rate. - Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch – And if it is indeed the case that the Washington Post is recycling the public views of ideologues, hacks, and torture-tourists like Marc Thiessen as inside scoops, then Finn, Warrick, and Tate granted anonymity to their sources because naming them would by itself discredit the story. There is a place for anonymous quotes in journalism, but this is not it.
Washington Post Loves Em Some Cheney
The Washington Post Loves Em Some Cheney, and will go to no small lengths to demonstrate their non-homosexual love with the Vice President of Torture Is US.
Glenn Greenwald rolls his eyes in exasperation:
Who are the Post’s sources for this full-scale vindication of Dick Cheney’s defense of torture? ”Two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified”; “one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding”; “one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said”; “One former agency official.” It’s unclear how much overlap there is in that orgy of pro-Cheney anonymity, but there is not a single on-the-record source to corroborate the Torture-Saved-Us-From-Mass-Death narrative, nor is there even a shred of information about the motives or views of these “officials.”
What makes the Post’s breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves. Ironically, nobody has done a better job this week of demonstrating how true that is than the Post’s own Greg Sargent — who, in post after post this week1– dissected the IG Report to demonstrate that it provides no evidence for Cheney’s claims that torture helped obtain valuable intelligence.
That the released documents provide no support for Cheney’s claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so. The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” ABC News noted that “the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.” TPM’s Zachary Roth documented that “nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture,” while The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove “that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.” As Sargent reported, even Bush’s loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying
[Click to continue reading The Washington Post's Cheney-ite defense of torture - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]
Mind you, this is not editorial Op-Ed, this is an (alleged) news story. Can Kaplan sell The Washington Post to Rupert Murdoch already, so we can all ignore it more easily?
Footnotes:Cheney Is to Blame for the Next Attack
Frank Rich writes about everybody’s favorite Darth Vader figure, Diamond Dick Cheney
The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch.
[Click to continue reading Frank Rich - Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? - NYTimes.com]
and there is the Fourth Estate, both good and bad, though by volume, more bad journalism than good as is usually the case:
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
KBR Sleazy Until the End
KBR, the Halliburton company who specializes in cutting corners to increase profits, found an easy way to steal more taxpayer money: do a half-assed job and kiss-up to the Pentagon.
Far from suffering for its shoddy military contracting in Iraq, Congressional investigators have found that KBR Inc. was awarded $83 million in performance bonuses. Even worse, more than half came after Pentagon investigators linked faulty KBR wiring to the electrocution of four soldiers intent on relaxation. One soldier died taking a shower and another in a swimming pool.
How such settings became part of harm’s way for the military was the question put to an electrical engineer hired by the Army who reported finding that 90 percent of KBR’s wiring work in Iraq was not done safely. Some 70,000 buildings where troops lived and worked were not up to code, according to the engineer, who told a Congressional hearing of “some of the most hazardous, worst-quality work I have ever inspected.”
Officials of KBR, the offshoot of the Halliburton conglomerate once run so lucratively by former Vice President Dick Cheney, deny responsibility and say the work met the British code used in the war zone. Flat denial is an all-too-familiar refrain from this most favored and most questionable of military contractors. The electrical engineer found most wirers were not experienced in the British code and many were third-country nationals with no electrical training at all.
[Click to continue reading: Editorial - KBR Does It Again - NYTimes.com]
Take away their corporate charter, throw the executives in Supermax prison, KBR will clean up their act.
Reading Around on March 13th through March 16th
A few interesting links collected March 13th through March 16th:
- The NYT should just give Cheney a byline – “Dick Cheney isn’t Vice President any more, but the New York Times is still treating his comments as so newsworthy they must be presented without rebuttal. The Times devotes 558 words to Cheney’s appearance on CNN yesterday – 501 of which are devoted to simply quoting or paraphrasing Cheney. The 57 words that weren’t devoted to amplifying Cheney’s arguments didn’t include even a word of rebuttal:”
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25 Things I Learned at MIT – TrueHoop By Henry Abbott – ESPN – Last Saturday I filled most of a notebook with thoughts from the MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference. It’s all good fodder for TrueHoop. Pieces have made their way onto TrueHoop. More to come.
But it has been a busy week ever since (there is no rest when you’re determined to write about Trevor Ariza every ten minutes!) and I don’t want to let those thoughts slip through the cracks.
Some notes:
Bookmarks for January 17th through January 19th
A few interesting links for January 17th through January 19th:
- MARK BRYAN Dick Cheney – Ode to Dick Cheney: print available (click this link)
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks -
- macosxhints.com – Adjust ‘locked’ volume levels when using optical audo – “When you use optical audio on your Mac, OS X locks the volume level to the highest setting, forcing you to adjust the volume level with your receiver. This “feature” is both annoying and unneeded. To get around this lock, you can simply install a free utility called Soundflower”
Cheney’s Office Thwarts Climate Rules
These bums need to be run out of office sooner than 2009, else our planet will be destroyed. Environmental policy should not be set by oil corporations.
Bush administration officials agreed that greenhouse gases could endanger the public and should be regulated under clean-air laws, but later reversed course amid opposition from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the oil industry, a congressional report said.
The report, by the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, offers a look at the breadth of Bush administration support for regulations before such plans abruptly stopped. The report draws heavily on an interview with a former Environmental Protection Agency official who had told Congress that Mr. Cheney’s office tried to censor federal testimony on the danger of global warming. It is also based on confidential interviews with EPA staff and documents subpoenaed from the EPA.
“This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare,” Chairman Ed Markey (D., Mass.) said in a statement.
[From Cheney's Office Accused Of Thwarting Climate Rules - WSJ.com]
[Non-subscribers use this link to read the entire article]
Cheney Sought to Deny Climate Change
Wouldn’t want to be caught doing anything that might help our planet, would we now, Mr. Cheney?
A disclosure Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office sought to alter a federal official’s prepared testimony about the health consequences of global warming intensified an increasingly open conflict between the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House over how to respond to climate change.
The latest in a series of disclosures about internal disputes within the Bush administration came as President George W. Bush was in Japan with other leaders of the Group of Eight nations to forge an agreement on combating climate change. But back home, Mr. Bush’s critics contend that his aides are working to ensure that any actions his administration takes in response to climate change will have a limited impact.
The disclosure about Vice President Cheney’s role came from Jason Burnett, who until last month was the EPA’s associate deputy administrator
snip
In his letter, Mr. Burnett notes that at the time of Dr. Gerberding’s testimony “there was extensive debate” over how the EPA should respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Mr. Burnett says the White House Council on Environmental Quality suggested to him that he could best serve the EPA “if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony.”
In an interview, he declined to elaborate on the assertions in his letter, but said he left the EPA because “I thought I’d done as much constructive work as could be done under this administration” in response to the Supreme Court ruling.
Administration officials said in March that before declaring greenhouse gases endanger health or welfare, the government should first seek public comment. The EPA has yet to do so, however, largely because of a dispute between EPA officials and a White House office that reviews proposed regulations over how to frame the issue, people familiar with the matter said.
Dick Cheney is a truly horrible, corrupted man, though I guess we’ve known that since 1974.
