Crooks and Liars

John McCain has flip-flopped on so many subjects that he would feel quite at home in my toddler’s tumbling class. Keith Olbermann recounts McCain’s flip-floppery on Political reform, Immigration, Gay marriage, Abortion, Nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Military actions against rogue states, Negotiating with Kim Jong Il, Negotiating with Castro, Warrantless wiretapping, Torturing Detainees, Indefinitely holding detainees, Iraq War, Tax cuts for the rich, Estate tax, Privatizing Social Security, Balanced budget, Windfall profits tax, Offshore drilling, Bush fundraisers, Jerry Falwell, Pastor John Hagee, MLK Jr. holiday, South Africa divestment, the confederate flag, and alternatives to evolution being taught at school

Negotiating with terrorists (acceptable in 2002 when Powell went to Syria. In 2006, McCain said sooner or later we’ll talk to Hamas, not appropriate now)

Unilateral action against suspected terrorists in Pakistan (Confused leadership with Obama, not with Bush)

Feeling dizzy yet?

Crooks And Liars

It must be nice to retire and finally be free to speak your mind. Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the man who led American ground forces in Iraq from 2003-2004, has released a new book– titled Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story – that takes aim at the Bush administration with some of the strongest criticism to date from a former Iraq commander.

An excerpt from NPR:

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I watched helplessly as the Bush administration led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions. It became painfully obvious that the executive branch of our government did not trust its military. It relied instead on a neoconservative ideology developed by men and women with little, if any, military experience. Some senior military leaders did not challenge civilian decision makers at the appropriate times, and the courageous few who did take a stand were subsequently forced out of the service.

It’s gonna be hard to accuse General Sanchez of hating the troops.

Hopefully the media will give this book the attention it deserves, even in the wake of the bombshell McClellan book.

Johh Nichols, The Nation:

The Bush administration employed propaganda techniques, political spin and deception to promote and then justify a war with Iraq that was unwise and unnecessary.

And a “too-deferential” national press corps allowed the president and his aides to get away with it.

Who makes this devastating, if not entirely new, charge?

The man responsible for spinning the story of the Bush presidency, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

In a memoir that will be published Monday, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, the veteran campaign and White House aide to George W. Bush portrays his former boss and those around him as permanent campaigners who frequently sacrificed the good of the country to achieve dubious political and policy goals.

McClellan is sharply critical of the Bush White House’s handling of definitional domestic policy challenges, particularly Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

But nowhere is the former press aide so devastating in his critique of his former boss as on the issue of how the United States was steered into the quagmire that is Iraq.

Bush, he writes, is guilty of a “failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and (of) rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”
Continue Reading »

Huffington Post:

Washington Post have excerpts from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s scathing book on the Bush Administration.

From The Washington Post:

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president’s intellect — “Bush is plenty smart enough to be president,” he writes — but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

“A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people’s ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change,” he writes.

In another section, McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘How can that be?’ ” he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

“The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office,” he writes. “And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned.”

From The Politico:

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

The Wall Street Journal also has a series of excerpts:

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.

My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here. Many of them, I’m sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved.

Only time will tell. But I’ve become genuinely convinced otherwise.

The book has already hit number 1 on Amazon.

By Karin Zeitvogel, Middle East Online:

Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American U.S. military recruiters love.

“I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school,” the now 24-year-old said.

“I was ‘filet mignon’ for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade,” or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the U.S. army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.

“I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq,” Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

“My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation,” he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of “lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis.”

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had “self-medicated” for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier said he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia — two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq — before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades’ testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking U.S. officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of U.S. contractors.

Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed U.S. troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.

Goldsmith accused U.S. officials of censorship.

“Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or MySpace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission,” Goldsmith said after the hearing.

“You’re almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home.”

Officials take “hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president — and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq,” Goldsmith added.

Chiroux is one of thousands of U.S. soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.

But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight “whatever charges the army levels at me.”

The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.

Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.

“I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem,” he said.

Watch video footage of Matthis Chiroux’s announcement here.

Raw Story:

The White House does not have archival copies of e-mails exchanged between administration officials during the weeks leading up to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq nor for the first two months of the war there, according to a just-released filing concerning millions of e-mails alleged to have gone missing or been deleted.

“A White House declaration filed late last night … makes the stunning admission that the White House failed to preserve ANY backup tapes for the period March 1, 2003 through May 22, 2003, a period of time during which the U.S. went to war in Iraq,” says a release from Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a watchdog group suing for public records concerning the disappearance of internal White House e-mails.

Without computer backup tapes from this critical pre-Iraq war period, future researchers may be deprived a vital resource as the delve into the inner workings of the Bush administration as it decided to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

“The harm is that we’ve lost a huge piece of history,” says Anne Weismann, a lawyer for CREW.

Weismann estimated the total number of missing White House e-mails at “10 million-plus.”

Investigations into the missing White House e-mails already have shown that e-mails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office were not archived on critical dates during the Justice Department’s investigation of the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. The White House already has said it also does not have backup tapes for those dates, Sept. 30, 2003, through Oct. 6, 2003.

“I’m sure there are other holes,” Weismann told RAW STORY Tuesday. “We just can’t get in to have the kind of forensic review that needs to be done” of what the White House has.

E-mails were missing from internal servers on a total of 473 days, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee, including dates around when Saddam Hussein was captured and during a court battle surrounding Cheney’s energy task force.

CREW is joined by the National Security Archive, an open-government group at in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the White House Office of Administration, which maintains internal computer systems and archives.

The White House filing revealed it had 483 backup tapes from May 23, 2003 to Sept. 29, 2003. CREW has posted the court documents here.

Think Progress:

Speaking in Cleveland earlier today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended President Bush, saying he should not be held responsible for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that was visible aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln when Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” on May 1, 2003:

“Do I blame him for that specific banner? I can’t,” McCain said. “But I do say that statements are made, ‘a few dead-enders,’ ‘last throes,’ those are, as opposed to the banner, direct statements which were contradicted by the facts on the ground.”

McCain then said of the banner: “I thought it was wrong at the time.” But while the White House has actually acknowledged making an error, McCain himself used the term “mission accomplished” when talking about the Iraq war on at least two occasions in 2003:

– “Their morale could not be higher. This is a mission accomplished. They know how much influence Saddam Hussein had on the Iraqi people, how much more difficult it made to get their cooperation.” [This Week, ABC, 12/14/03]

– During an appearance on Fox News, host Neil Cavuto said, “many argue the conflict isn’t over.” McCain answered, “Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier? Look, the — I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict — the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished.” [FOX, Your World With Neil Cavuto, 6/11/03]

Watch it:

Because McCain is running for president while an unpopular war –- which he supports — is raging in Iraq, it seems he must both defend Bush on “mission accomplished” and, at same time, distance himself from it. But despite McCain’s similar rhetoric on the war “at the time,” Washington Post reporter Michael Abramowitz seemed happy to help McCain in his effort during a “Post Politics Hour” web chat today on washingtonpost.com:

ABRAMOWITZ: I think McCain will certainly be attacked over the war during the campaign but I doubt that he will be blamed for “Mission Accomplished” because he was always more sober than than the White House about progress in Iraq.

Here are some of McCain’s past assessments of the Iraq war that, according to Abramowitz, have been “more sober” than Bush’s:

– “I believe that this conflict is still going to be relatively short.” [NBC, 3/30/03]

–- “It’s clear that the end is very much in sight.” [ABC, 4/9/03]

–- “I think the situation on the ground is going to improve,” he says. “I do think that progress is being made in a lot of Iraq. Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course. If I thought we weren’t making progress, I’d be despondent.” [The Hill, 12/8/05]

Someday the media will realize that a McCain presidency will actually be a “third Bush term.”

The Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — The White House said Wednesday that President Bush has paid a price for the “Mission Accomplished” banner that was flown in triumph five years ago but later became a symbol of U.S. misjudgments and mistakes in the long and costly war in Iraq.

Thursday is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s dramatic landing in a Navy jet on an aircraft carrier homebound from the war. The USS Abraham Lincoln had launched thousands of airstrikes on Iraq.

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time. “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on.” The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him _ a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy.

After shifting explanations, the White House eventually said the “Mission Accomplished” phrase referred to the carrier’s crew completing its 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq. Bush, in October 2003, disavowed any connection with the “Mission Accomplished” message. He said the White House had nothing to do with the banner; a spokesman later said the ship’s crew asked for the sign and the White House staff had it made by a private vendor.

“President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. “And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”

She said what is important now is “how the president would describe the fight today. It’s been a very tough month in Iraq, but we are taking the fight to the enemy.”

At least 49 U.S. troops died in Iraq in April, making it the deadliest month since September when 65 U.S. troops died.

Now in its sixth year, the war in Iraq has claimed the lives of at least 4,061 members of the U.S. military. Only the Vietnam War (August 1964 to January 1973), the war in Afghanistan (October 2001 to present) and the Revolutionary War (July 1776 to April 1783) have engaged America longer.

Bush, in a speech earlier this month, said that “while this war is difficult, it is not endless.”

Raw Story:

This week’s revelation of another secret Bush administration memo that seemed to eliminate any boundaries on the treatment of detainees added to the already substantial evidence that US military and intelligence interrogators have abused and perhaps even tortured prisoners rounded up during the “war on terror.”Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote in 2003 that Bush’s seemingly supreme authority in wartime trumped federal laws “prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes,” as the Washington Post reported. For constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, the latest memo should be more than enough reason for Congress to begin some serious investigations, but hesitance to really dig into Bush-authorized “war crimes” have precluded them from doing so, he says.

“It is really amazing because Congress — including the Democrats — have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the president ordered war crimes,” Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Thursday night. “But evidence keeps on coming out…. What you get from this is this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program.”

Gitmo commander ’sick of’ torture talk

All this talk about detainee mistreatment and torture has the current commander of US forces at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fed up. Brig. Gen. Gregory J. Zanetti told American Legion members this week that the mission of Gitmo guards is “misunderstood” and called the secluded prison, purposefully established off of US soil, “the most transparent detention facility in the world.”

“Quit talking to me about abuse and torture,” he said. “Frankly, I’m sick of it.”

Zanetti must be hearing quite a lot of complaints, or have a rather short fuse, to grow sick of torture lamentations so quickly. He’s been commanding forces at Guantanamo for just two months (since Feb. 4).

Detainees rounded up as part of the War on Terror, launched just after 9/11, began arriving in Guantanamo Bay in January of 2002. Documents obtained last year by the American Civil Liberties Union “describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ’stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.”

Zanetti told BlogTalkRadio that the only abuse he witnessed is “detainee on the guards.”

Regarding “the charges of mistreatment, abuse, torture,” he said, “I’ll just say this. On my watch, I haven’t seen anything like that, nor would I stand for it. And we’re not going to allow that.”

Gitmo tactics partly inspired Yoo memo

So while two of the last 64 months Guantanamo has been operating may have been torture-free, the Post notes that Yoo’s recently disclosed memo was drafted at least in partly in response to techniques that had been used at the notorious prison camp.

Yoo’s 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to legal action in domestic and international courts. After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner, military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive techniques. Largely because of Yoo’s memo, however, a Pentagon working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo’s March memo and did not know about the group’s final report for more than a year, officials said.

Turley said the memo had little basis in accepted legal theory and was little more than thinly veiled “spin” to cover for the president to do whatever he wants.

“The president and his aides were very, very careful to go to the lawyers first so they could make a claim they were acting under some assumption of actual authority,” he said. “There really is none.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast April 3, 2008.

In a speech last week at George Washington University, former Bush adviser Karl Rove asserted that a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq would positively provide “the projection of American power to maintain stability in a dangerous and difficult part of the world.” In a Washington Post op-ed on the same day, columnist Charles Krauthammer echoed Rove’s point, claiming that “maintaining a U.S. military presence in Iraq would provide regional stability.”

But CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has reported from Iraq since before the U.S. invasion in 2003, disagrees. In an interview yesterday, Ware told ThinkProgress that “there will be very much mixed reaction in Iraq” to a long-term troop presence, but he added, “what’s the point and will it be worth it?’

“A limited American capability” stationed in the country would be exposed, said Ware, “to a whole host of dangers” and “could actually ferment further resentment towards the United States”:

A deeper question, however, is: what would be the point? Why keep say, just one division of combat troops in Iraq? You think that would intimidate Iran? Do you think that would prevent Syria from manipulating Iraqi affairs when 160,000 American troops aren’t able to stop that kind of interference? […] The fact that just such a limited American capability in that country, being stationed there, could actually ferment further resentment towards the United States because such a limited force structure would not be able to actually do anything if a civil war broke out.

Watch it:

Ware added that while “many people could live with” a troop presence “if America stays out of Iraqis business, others will resent their mere presence for the blame that they cast upon America.”

In the same interview, Ware also dispelled the notion — promulgated by AEI’s Frederick Kagan — that sectarian cleansing in Baghdad is a “myth“:

If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.

For more of Ware’s comments about Iraq, visit the Wonk Room.