Well, dear readers, the horrors in Fallujah this past week are a testimony to what the real situation is like, at least in some parts of Iraq. The noose is being tied every so slowly as more and more evidence and testimony is brought forth and reveals the Bush administration for what they really are; mendacious, ridiculous and incompetent. Opec is turning the screws, those freaking Canadians are more depraved than anyone could have thought and Bush uses executive privilege to keep things in the Medicare investigation from nailing him too. And William Safire, is being an idiot like being high all the time?

------------------------------------
Four Dead, It Ain't Ohio

The situation in Iraq is plummeting out of control, at least in the city of Fallujah, a hotbed of anti-Americanism, where 4 US "civilians" were ambushed and then, in a truly grim scene, strung up from a bridge by a maddened Iraqi mob. It turns out that the Americans worked for a DoD contractor, Blackwater, USA and were providing security for supply lines in the area. It would appear old soldiers don't fade away. Rather, they work for Blackwater, make a lot of money and then, possibly, die. Especially in Iraq. Many, if not most, of Blackwater's staff are ex-military and ex-law enforcement people. Three of the four killed were former Navy Seals. As much as the BHC is aghast at the behaviour of the Iraqi mob, the DoD should fess up and admit what these guys really were: mercenaries. What would you call someone hired under contract by the government, making $500/day, to go into a war zone and "provide security." The real question here is why is the DoD contracting companies like Blackwater to do jobs the military, itself, should be doing? Do the US Marines really need private security forces to protect them?

Another disturbing aspect of this debacle is the apparent disconnect commanders have with their environment. Never good in any military situation. The day before this local Iraqi hell broke loose, deputy operations director, General Mark Kimmett, had given an upbeat assessment of Fallujah and surrounding Anbar province:

The Marines are quite pleased with how things are going in Fallujah, and they're looking forward to continuing the progress in establishing a safe and secure environment and rebuilding that province in Iraq.

Even without these four deaths, this is a strange statement considering that when the Marines took over from the 82nd Airborne Division two weeks ago, seven Marines were killed in their first 10 days in charge.
This "pleases" the Marines?



Read it...

------------------------------------
OPEC Plug

OPEC announced this past week that it is going to trim oil production thereby keeping prices jacked. Naturally, this has got the Bushies in a lather. White House mouthpieces came forth and announced that "producers should not take steps that harm American consumers and our economy." Does the White House really think the Saudis give a rat's ass? These are the people who, in large part, have sponsored a world-wide network of terrorism. Perhaps the White House should read this or maybe this. And, apparently, that whole global market thing is a great idea when it is hurting only everyone else. Of course, the real White House concern is the political fallout from high prices at the pump. If there is one thing Americans will not brook in their leaders it is an inability to keep gasoline prices artificially low, forever.


Read it...

------------------------------------
Commie Canucks...Again!

A Canadian Federal Court has ruled that computer users who made music available on the Internet via peer-to-peer file sharing could not be sued for doing so.

Wow. Dope, gay marriage and now this. Canada is clearly devolving into a land of degenerate, communist, dope fiends. Time to invade.


Read of the wretched excesses in a debauched land...

------------------------------------
Scully-duggery

When it was reported that Medicare administrator Thomas Scully threatened to fire his chief actuary, Richard Foster, when Foster wanted to tell Congress how much Bush's new Medicare bill was actually going to cost, rather than tell them what they did, feathers started to fly. Foster's estimate of $511 billion, which is now what everyone else is estimating too, was not a number the Bushies imagined would ever make Congress pass the bill. Now, an investigation by the House Ways and Means Committee is peering into why Congress was not told what the White House knew about the true cost of the bill. House Republicans and Democrats both are furious about the chicanery and now the White House is invoking executive privilege to prevent Bush's health-policy advisor, Douglas Badger, from testifying before the committee.

Now, let us recall that executive privilege was also invoked by Bush to prevent Condolezza Rice from testifying before the 9/11 commission. Then the White House flip-flopped under political pressure (more on that below) and Bush suddenly felt some need to be forthcoming. But not in this case, we'll bet.

After seeing this story, we here at the BHC started to notice that the shear number of simultaneous investigations the White House has managed to conjure is becoming rather impressive. It must be getting upward of record levels. Let us review shall we:

1) 9/11 commission investigation
2) Medicare Bill investigation
3) CIA operative leak investigation
4) Energy Task Force investigation
5) Forged Niger/Iraq Uranium documents investigation
6) Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats' computer files stolen
by Republican Senate staffers...investigation.

There is so much self-investigation going on, it is clearly a full-time job for Bush et al. trying to keep everyone in the dark. Whew, thank heavens for executive privilege.


Read it....

------------------------------------
Fried Rice

After last week's revelatory testimony by Richard Clarke to the 9/11 commission, and after a rather unsuccessful smear campaign against the 30 year White House veteran, it looks like it's Rice for dinner this Thursday. Originally invoking executive privilege to prevent the National Security Advisor from testifying, the White House, or rather, enormous political necessity, has now decided that Rice will testify before the commission. And the heat will be on.

Commission chair Thomas Kean, has stated that he intends to clear up a number of discrepencies in what Rice and other administration officials have said. For example, in a Washington Post op-ed March 22, Rice claimed that Bush had a plan to take military action against Al Qaeda before Sept. 11. But Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, under questioning by the commission, said that a military plan was not put in place until after 9/11. Rice also said Clarke did not turn over a plan to the new administration when it first took office. She later said publicly that Clarke did turn over a plan then she said not only had Clarke turned over a plan but that the Bush administration "acted on those ideas very quickly." BHC readers will be wondering at this point, what in hell actually did happen. Clarke did submit a plan to the White House in January of 2001, shortly after Bush's inaguration. The White House did nothing much, produced some kind of a plan in September, which Clarke says is nearly identical to what he gave them in January.

So, a number of contradictions (see the BHC, Vol 19, for more on this) have been coughed up by Rice, Cheney, etc.. All the while, Rice continued to refuse to testify to the commission while she made the talk show rounds. Everyone, Republicans too, were grumbling that this was a political blunder of the first order. Finally, Bush relented and announced that, indeed, the Rice will go on the burner. Hilariously, after months of stonewalling the commission on every request for documents, after days of invoking executive privilege for Rice, after pounding from his own Republican guard, George bloody Double-U Bush sallies forth and says,

"I've ordered this level of cooperation because I consider it necessary to gaining a complete picture of the months and years that preceded the murder of our fellow citizens on Sept. 11"

Truly Orwellian.

Then, after a solid week of the White House trying to slime Richard Clarke and getting their story confused at every turn, a former top-secret FBI translator came forth and delivered documents to the 9/11 commission which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. This after Rice claimed that no such information existed. The translator, Sibel Edmonds, called that "an outrageous lie". Fortunately for the White House, this story appeared in The Independant and nowhere in the American mainstream media, so far as the BHC can tell.

Now imagine, gentle readers, that you are Condolezza Rice (yeah, yeah, we know, but it won't be for too long). You have succumbed to the pressure. The White House caved and now your ass is on the hot seat. You have decided, ok, this won't be so bad. Go in, lie a bunch and get out. And wait for an end to this hellacious job so you can retire and write a dreadful memoir no one will read. Oh yeah, and pray perjury can never be proved. No problem. Then a story, which clearly reinforces and vindicates everything Richard Clarke has said, hits the front page of the Washington Post. You wilt. This is bad:

WASHINGTON. On September 11, 2001, the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was due to outline a Bush Administration policy that would deal with "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" - but the focus was largely on missile defence, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The speech provides telling insight into the Administration's thinking on the very day that the US suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbour. The address was designed to promote missile defence as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.

Damn this modern world!
Damn it to hell!
Why don't those "delete" keys actually delete anything?!!

There it is folks. Had Rice actually delivered this speech on September 10 or the hijackers done the deed on September 12, there would have been be no need for Richard Clarke to come forth and claim that the White House was not focused on Al-Qaeda. Rice would already have said it.


Read it here....

------------------------------------
Probably Preventable

Well, gentle readers, as though you needed confirmation of the one obvious conclusion to be drawn from the overwhelming evidence being shoveled into steaming heaps around the White House these days, the leaders of the 9/11 commission, chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, agreed, and publicly stated, that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

George Bush's campaign platform comprises a single plank: George W. Bush will keep America safe. It has just been splintered into kindling by the heads of the 9/11 commission.

Bush was in North Carolina Monday, speaking at a local college. Apparently unaware that the 9/11 commission chairs have publicly stated that the WTC attacks were entirely preventable under Bush's watch, the president said in speaking of his record. "I will defend America every time."

Except, of course, when he doesn't.


Read it....

------------------------------------
Hart Attack

The breadth and depth of attacks being launched at the White House right now is reaching truly epic proportions. In an interview with Salon.com today, former senator Gary Hart came out and said, that he, too, warned Rice about an immenent terrorist threat months before 9/11. Hart was co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security which had warned of a terrorist attack on American soil and called for the creation of national security agency. The findings of this commission were delivered to Bush on January 31, 2001, no more than a week after Richard Clarke delivered similar such findings.

There are two paragraphs which crystallise the essence of the feelings expressed by Hart. He is clearly a man frustrated with the nonsense going in Washington and the White House's attempts at covering up their action and inaction:

A bipartisan commission of seven Democrats and seven Republicans who had spent two and a half years studying the problem, a group of Americans with a cumulative 300 years in national security affairs, recommended to the president of the United States on a reasonably urgent basis the creation of a Cabinet-level agency to protect our country -- and the president did nothing!

I had gotten an appointment with Condi Rice the following day and had gone straight from Montreal to Washington to meet with her. And my brief message to her was, "Get going on homeland security, you don't have all the time in the world." This was on Sept. 6, 2001.

In the interview, Rice takes most of the punishing blows. And well she should being Bush's pointman on National Security. That's her job. She ignored everything being sent her way by any number of agencies, advisors and commissions. All said the same thing. All were ignored.

Read the interview, hear the steam coming out of ears....

------------------------------------
Don't Look Back

You may not like what you see.

William Safire must own a Ferrari because he has given in to the Gumball Rally philosophy of "What-sa behind-a me is not important."

The estimable columnist at the NY Times is at it again, attacking the problem of a government gone horribly wrong with his grade school logic. Complaining the "brouhaha" is "engaged in the wrong debate," Safire admonishes those who seek to discover the truth of what happened, how it happened and how to stop it from happening again. Bah! Ancient history, he says. Suddenly, the whole Republican ethos of accountability is just so much unpleasant finger-pointing. At least, when the finger is pointed squarely at them.

As the heat becomes unbearable beneath Condi Rice's ass, Saffi wants us all to ignore the misdirection, mismanagement and wrong-headed transgressions of the White House and look forward, as though any study of what went wrong in the past cannot impart some wisdom about what to do in the future. This is the advocated position of the right wing now, which sees, as does everyone else, that the Bushies ignored everything told to them about the terrorist threat. But to Bush loyalists, this doesn't matter: it's all in the past, can't do anything 'bout that silly ol' mess now, la-de-da, let's move on, be forward looking. This is an odd position, considering all the backward looking they did in justifying invasion of Iraq based on Saddam's heinous behaviour in the past. You know, back when Rumsfeld was shaking Hussein's hand.


Wanker....WANKER!

------------------------------------

Enjoy this week's serving of fried rice!