Crooks and Liars

The colossal lies, the intelligence ignored, the ongoing slaughter, the criminally irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars, the countless opportunities lost, the crony profiteers. [snip]...a headline juxtaposition that perfectly reflects the dangerously delusional world of the President of the United States.

A link-rich post on Crooks and Liars.

Beginning To See The Light

It has taken more than three years, the loss of tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and the expenditure of $200 billion -- all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But finally the neoconservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words.

We were wrong.

Interesting article.

The president who claimed he had no idea Katrina would be so bad, despite repeated urgent warnings, must now explain why he also didn't heed the warnings of Middle East experts who warned him about exactly what is unfolding in Iraq.

As ABB says,

It’s like taking a rabid dawg to your neighbor's birthday party, watching it go crazy for two hours and then abruptly leaving while shouting ‘sorry!’ as you rush out the door. The regret is legitimate, but you might want to take that rabid dawg with you. Oh, and help clean up the mess, pay for the medical bills and counseling and so forth. But maybe your neighbor doesn't want to look at your face for...well, ever again?

Y’all feel me?

Another Argument Down The Tubes

As Bush supporters desperately defend his disastrous presidency, they scramble to find scraps from his crumbling regime. Lately they've been charging that Congress was privy to the same intelligence as Bush, and yet the Democrats voted for war. They deny that Bush skewed intelligence to serve his nefarious purposes. Oh yeah?

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

There's so much more detailed in this National Journal article, Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel.

Operation Restore Mojo

James Wolcott dissects the last throes of neocon support for the worst presidency in this country's history in an article entitled "Windbags of War Give It One Last Wheeze". Clever with words, that Wolcott. After citing the same old tired rhetoric of Bush apologists, he comments,

No one better embodies the creamy elitism of the neocons than does [Bill] Kristol, who believes that the American people are a lumpy mass easily manipulated and are incapable of arriving at judgements of their own. But they can, they do, and they have. They have turned against this war and slowly come to the conclusion that they were deliberately misled. Questioning the patriotism of the war's critics isn't going to work because a majority of Americans now share that criticism and don't think of themselves as unpatriotic. Bush's counteroffensives are no longer effective because he's lost the confidence of the American people: they've had it with this guy.

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, sums it up.

"What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man.

[snip]

"In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing into a fierce wind. The judgement of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too."

It's his blogger allies who don't.

The Ship Is Sinking

Two analysts of US national security have concluded that the present troop levels in Iraq are not sustainable for the US:

Unless the Bush administration significantly cuts American troop levels in Iraq next year, the U.S. military's roughly 140,000-strong presence there will become a detriment to America's national security, according to a report released this week.

"It has become clear that if we still have 140,000 ground troops in Iraq a year from now, we will destroy the all-volunteer army," said the report written by the center's Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis. Korb served as assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan.

Hundreds of Thousands Protest the War in Iraq!

REUTERS/Jim Bourg

A large rally of anti-war demonstrators gathers on the Ellipse near the White House, as seen from the top of the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. September 24, 2005. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the nation's capital in support of anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son serving in the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, and demonstrated for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and an end to the war in Iraq.




AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

More than 100,000 protesters flooded Washington on Saturday to stage dual demonstrations against the U.S.-led war in Iraq and economic globalization, before coming together to demand that U.S. President George W. Bush bring troops home.


AFP/Alessandro Abbonizio

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets of London to voice their opposition to military action against Iraq, and in Glasgow and in Belfast. Police said it was the UK's biggest ever demonstration with at least 750,000 taking part, although organisers put the figure closer to two million. Wow!!

Jimmy Carter Finally Speaks Out

Former President Jimmy Carter calls the U.S.-led war in Iraq "unnecessary and unjust" and the detention and treatment of terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base an embarrassment.