Was Accountability For Team Cheney-- A Nest Of War Criminals-- Ever Taken Off The Table?

Darrell Issa's idea of a scandal for his House Oversight Committee to investigate is an entirely partisan witch hunt like "Benghazi!" Though the magnitude around 9-11 was a thousand times greater on any scale, there's never been a peep out of Issa or any of his right-wing colleagues about the dereliction of duty on the part of Cheney and his administration inherent in that catastrophe. In his brilliant book, Angler, Barton Gellman makes it perfectly clear that Cheney aggressively and vehemently dismissed every serious warning that the American security and intelligence agencies flagged regarding al-Qaeda.

When suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole shortly before the 2000 election, killing seventeen sailors and nearly sinking the Navy destroyer, candidate Cheney said, "Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you're going to attack, , you'll be hit very hard and very quick. It's not time for diplomacy and debate. It's time for action. This was an essential point of comparison in the 2000 campaign: the strength and resolve of the Bush-Cheney team in contrast to the ditherings of Clinton and Gore.

At the time, the Cole bombing looked like al Qaeda's doing, but U.S. intelligence lacked proof. Bush and Cheney, on the campaign trail, vowed to retaliate once the perpetrators became clear. Soon after they took office, the facts were in.

Cheney told his authorized biographer, "I don't recall it cropping up." That is surprising. At 4 p.m. on February 9, 2001, less than 3 weeks after arriving in the White House, Cheney received a briefing that featured this slide: "Al Qaeda responsible for Nairobi, Dar el Salaam, Tirana, Kampala, Yemen, WTC, NYC tunnels, Jordan millennium, Boston, LA, Washington State bomb materials, USS Cole." … Six days later, in a memo sent directly to Cheney, a senior director on the National Security Council staff suggested that the CIA should be ready to "definitively conclude that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole. Richard Clarke and others in his counter-terrorism directorate peppered Chaney, Condi Rice, and Steve Hadley with additional evidence-- and recommendations for a military response-- at least 5 more times in writing during the spring.

The vice president, like his colleagues, had other priorities.

Three months before September 11, 2001, when the armed Predator became available, Osama bin Laden had not yet reached the pinnacle of villainy in the American public mind. But he was well known inside the U.S. government. In an annual review of global threats, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said for three years running-- in 1999, 2000 and 2001-- that al Qaeda topped the list of most dangerous and immediate adversaries, at home and abroad. By the summer of 2001, Tenet and Clarke "had their hair on fire' with warnings that a large scale al Qaeda terrorist attack appeared to be imminent. On August 6, Bush and Cheney received the now-famous Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden determined to Strike in US," the thirty-sixth time in less than eight months that the CIA drew their attention to bin Laden. John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy, expressed frustration that "some policy-makers, who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation." An authoritative source said he was referring primarily to Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The CIA responded with a briefing titled "Bin Ladin Threats Are Real." Though far from specific about the time, place, or manner of an attack, the briefing did allude to terrorist discussions of hijacking aircraft and to surveillance of targets in New York City. Cheney later downplayed the summer warnings, describing them as "noise in the system" and saying he was not especially alarmed.

The CIA and Air Force wanted to go after bin Laden with a Predator drone and wanted to take out al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. Cheney showed zero interest and the Predator drone was grounded. Cheney maintained an attitude all summer that all these warnings were on no interest to him, even though Bush had put him in over-all charge of the intelligence and terrorism portfolios at the White House. One participant in the briefings said, "Nobody gave a crap about this. It was theoretical." No resources were assigned to fighting al Qaeda.When the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended putting $600 million more into the military's counter-terrorism priorities Don Rumsfield urged a veto and Bush duly sent out a veto threat-- on September 9.

The ferocity of the response to 9/11 can be directly seen as a reaction by the Bush security team-- particularly Cheney-- to their malfeasance in protecting the country before the fact. We'll deal with Cheney's and his closest aides' enthusiasm for torture and for a dictatorial usurpation of power at another time. I just want to say that at every step of the way, Cheney's team was aware-- and extremely worried-- that they were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and that they could be tried and punished for their actions. From the first moment, Cheney, well aware of his own guilt in allowing 9/11 to happen, over-reacted. He immediately and without legal authority ordered the Air Force to shoot down civilian aircraft. Hours after the World Tours went down he told Rumsfield "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out." He quickly moved to assert dictatorial powers for the White House and to shred as much of the Constitution as he could. He was especially eager to assert the power of ex ante pardons which his team insisted would make all war criminals in the Administration immune from prosecution. There was a constant fear that one day Bush and Cheney themselves would face trial as war criminals.



Yesterday, in her column, A Mad Tea Party, Maureen Dowd invoked Cheney's name in terms of most Americans now considering "the G.O.P.’s imperialistic unilaterists less loco than the narcissistic anarchists."

But before you start thinking Dick Cheney is temperate by comparison, consider the Commentary roast of the former vice president on Monday night at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

Cheney made a joke about waterboarding an antelope that he borrowed from Jay Leno. Donald Rumsfeld quasi-jested that he knew Dick “back when the president of the United States still led our foreign policy, instead of Putin.”

Ben Smith of BuzzFeed reported that the roast sponsored by Rupert Murdoch and others featured Rumsfeld, Joe Lieberman and Scooter Libby, known as “Cheney’s Cheney” until he was convicted of lying during a federal leak probe.

Lieberman, a guest told BuzzFeed, said it was nicer to be at the Plaza than in cages after a war crimes trial. There were pardon jokes about W., whose relationship with Cheney was shattered over not giving Libby one. Libby said W. sent a note: “Pardon me, I can’t make it.”

The acrid legacy of Cheney and Rummy lives on as they carp from the sidelines about the “so-called commander in chief.” In December, The Unknown Known, an Errol Morris documentary about the man who was the youngest and oldest secretary of defense, hits theaters.



Morris won an Oscar in 2004 for Fog of War, his documentary about another dangerous, delusional defense secretary with wire-rimmed glasses, Robert McNamara; in his acceptance speech, Morris warned that, with Iraq, America might be going down another “rabbit hole.”

But the cocky Rummy talked to him for 33 hours anyway. Unlike McNamara, however, Rumsfeld does not admit his historic blunders, but maintains his “Stuff happens” brio.

“You make a movie with the secretary of defense you have,” Morris told me dryly, “not with the secretary of defense you want to have.”

Still, the filmmaker was smart to bookend the men, opposite ends of the same warmongering problem: McNamara was so droning and unemotive that he lulled listeners into thinking that nothing bad could be happening, while Rumsfeld was so energetic and blithe that it was hard to believe that people were dying and the war was being lost. Morris’s wife and collaborator, Julia Sheehan, said that McNamara was “The Flying Dutchman” wandering the earth looking for redemption, while Rumsfeld is the Cheshire cat.

“All we’re left with at the very end is this infernal grin,” Morris said. “Everybody wants this smoking gun. The entire Bush administration is a smoking gun.

“In his memos and homilies, Rumsfeld will say things that are just contradictory, as though by saying everything, you’ve covered all your bases,” Morris continued. “It’s deeply anti-rational, as if there’s no deep reflection or thought. You have no evidence? Well, ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ as Rumsfeld said about W.M.D. in Iraq. Taken to some crazy conclusion, you can justify anything that way.

“At times in his language, he descends into some strange insanity, as though he’s trying to convince himself.”

Asked the lesson of Vietnam-- Rumsfeld was the chief of staff to Gerald Ford when Saigon was evacuated-- Rumsfeld briskly replies: “Some things work out, some things don’t. That didn’t.”

When Morris presses Rumsfeld about the Justice Department’s “torture memos,” the former defense chief said they did not come out of “the Bush administration, per se; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice.” That parsing would be beyond Bill Clinton.

About the memos that led to what Morris considers “one of the great stains in American history,” Rumsfeld says he never read them. When asked why, he replies, “I’m not a lawyer. What would I know?”

When Morris asks Rumsfeld about the “confusion” that linked Saddam to 9/11, he answers brightly, “I don’t think the American people were confused about that,” adding, “I don’t remember anyone in the Bush administration saying anything like that, nor do I recall anyone believing that.”

Holy mushroom cloud.

Rumsfeld doesn’t even seem to understand his signature phrase. Reading from a 2004 memo, he says, “There are known knowns. There are known unknowns. There are unknown unknowns.” He tells Morris that there are also unknown knowns. Things that you possibly may know that you don’t know you know.

Morris challenges him: “But the memo doesn’t say that. It says that we know less, not more, than we think we do."

Rumsfeld finally admits a boo-boo: “Yeah, I think that memo is backwards.” Then he chastises the filmmaker for “chasing the wrong rabbit.”

Right down the rabbit hole.

Reckless, Amateurish... Romney's Foreign Policy Agenda

Glenn Greewald made a valid point in his presidential debate coverage for The Guardian last week by pointing out that the debates give us an illusion of choice. He's determined to expose the hidden consensus behind all they agree on. "Most of what matters in American political life," he asserts, "is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. ...[T]hey have no discernible differences when it comes to any of the underlying policies, including America's relentless fixation on treating drug usage as a criminal, rather than health, problem. The oppressive system that now imprisons 1.8 million Americans, and that will imprison millions more over their lifetime, is therefore completely ignored during the only process when most Americans are politically engaged."

President Obama's dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.

A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department's refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

On still other vital issues, such as America's steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran, the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement "reform," all but the most centrist positions are off limits.

That said, this was the top of the front page of Greenwald's daily paper in the U.K. when I woke up Monday morning, just before Romney's foreign policy speech at (ominously) a military academy in Lexington, Virginia. A lot of saber-rattling and nothing much else... it's a war between freedom and tyranny, that type of crap that the GOP base eats up. He's ready to chaaaaaarge right back into the Bush Doctrine. And Obama isn't "free trade" enough for him. He flat out lied that Obama hadn't signed any free trade agreements. I wish he hadn't but he signed three.

Serious Europeans and Brits-- both conservatives and Conservatives-- have written Romney off as a dilettante and feckless rich boy way out of his depth but brimming over with grand presidential ambitions. Foreign leaders all shudder at the thought of this bungling clown winning next month. Yesterday's speech, in which he declared we should arm the Syrian rebels-- whoever they are (something even McCain admits is a horrible idea)-- didn't help make anyone feel less apprehensive. His foreign policy is, basically, "Obama is bad." Romney said it was, for example, a mistake to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The occupation should have continued. No doubt even Greenwald senses a clear difference between the two parties there. So did Donald Rumsfeld:

And so did former Senator Larry Pressler (R-ND), a Vietnam vet who listened to Romney and immediately endorsed President Obama. "I endorse President Barack Obama for a second term as our Commander-in-Chief," he wrote. "Candidates publicly praise our service members, veterans and their families, but President Obama supports them in word and deed, anywhere and every time... This decision is not easy for any lifelong Republican. In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama, the first time I ever voted for a Democrat, because the Republican Party was drifting toward a dangerous path that put extreme party ideology above national interest. Mitt Romney heads a party remaining on that dangerous path, proving the emptiness of their praise as they abandon our service members, veterans and military families along the way." He said what a lot of mainstream Republicans and independent voters have been thinking as they watch Romney in action.

What really set me off was Romney's reference to 47% of Americans to be written off -- including any veteran collecting disability like myself, as a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) veteran.

Behind closed doors with his donors, Romney made clear he'd write off half of America-- including service members and veterans-- because, as he said "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility for their lives." But there's no greater personal responsibility than to wear your country's uniform and defend the rights we all enjoy as Americans. We don't sow division between "us" versus "them." The Commander-in-Chief sets the bar for all to follow and fight for the entire country. Mitt Romney fails that test. As a veteran I feel written off.

Just as revealing is what Romney actually says publicly. As a former Foreign Service Officer, I find it offensive that Romney, Congressman Paul Ryan and their Republican Party are politicizing the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans who lost their lives in Libya. Being Commander-in-Chief requires a resolve and steadiness that's immune to politics and fear mongering. Mitt Romney fails that test.

And along with high-profile Republican surrogates, Romney and Ryan are pandering to election-year politics rather than focusing on pending cuts to military spending. Strategy should drive our military priorities, not party purity.

...That's the difference in this election. In word and deed anywhere and every time, President Obama never forgets that standing by those who serve is the heart, soul and core value of this country. As a life-long Republican, I stand by him as he stands by all of us, putting national allegiance ahead of party affiliation. I endorse President Obama for reelection in 2012.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright summed up his speech by saying he's a lightweight and his ideas are trivial. "I just find him very shallow in the ideas that he has,” she said. “Shallow. The op-ed that he had in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago? I’m a professor and if one of my students turned it in they’d get a ‘C’ because he gave absolutely no specifics."

Here's a Romney spokesperson on CNN just before Romney made his speech. Soledad O'Brien questioned her about Romney's foreign policy agenda. She completely elucidated what the agenda is: attacking Obama. That's it-- nothing but that-- even if the specifics were 180 degrees away from things he's been saying (privately) to the Republican base.

Did Peggy Noonan REALLY expect her pal Rummy to come clean on his screw-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq?

No doubt about it, Old Rummy's got plenty to answer for, and our Peggy has done a swell job of nailing him to the wall for failing to begin to do so. She's just got a dangerously and delusionally screwy idea of what exactly he has to answer for.

by Ken

A fair amount of attention is being paid to a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan skewering a fellow for whom she begins by professing kindly feelings, former Defense Secretary Donald "Old Rummy" Rumsfeld: "I like Donald Rumsfeld. I've always thought he was a hard-working, intelligent man. I respected his life in public service at the highest and most demanding levels." Of course, as Howie tweeted yesterday, "When Peggy Noonan starts by writing 'I like Donald Rumsfeld,' you can be sure she's going to rip him to shreds."

I doubt that any DWT reader will shed tears over the ensuing shredding job. Of course it's always fun when our friends on the Right are at each other's throats. Naturally, since it's Peggy Noonan, you expect that at the core the piece will be stupid, and our Peggy doesn't disappoint (it fascinates me that you can be as smart as she is and yet have what comes out of your mouth or word processor be so crackers), but let's come back to that.

Old Rummy's recently published memoir, Known and Unknown, says our Peggy, "is so bad it's news even a month after its debut." And a lot of what she has to say seems to me directly to the point.

Now I take with a grain of salt her complaint:

You'd expect such a book (all right -- you'd hope) to be reflective, to be self-questioning and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin of U.S. foreign policy circa 2001-08. He was secretary of defense until 2006, in the innermost councils. He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You'd expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since some of those decisions are in the process of turning out badly, and since he obviously loves his country, you'd expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets and assumptions so that later generations will learn.

You have to think Peggy is being disingenuous here, even with that distinction between what one expects and what one hopes. Really now, on what basis would any reasonable observer of the modern American political scene imagine that any "player," least of all one as shifty and devious and secretive and especially self-serving as Old Rummy, might even consider producing such a book as she describes? And surely nobody understands this better than Peggy, which is why I suspect disingenuousness rather than naiveté.

Nevertheless, on the theory that Old Rummy owes us such an accounting -- and who could disagree? -- her conclusion seems to me on the money:

When he doesn't do this, when he merely asserts, defends and quotes his memos, you feel overwhelmed, again, by the terrible thought that there was no overall, overarching strategic thinking. There were only second-rate minds busily, consequentially at work.

And by now Peggy has already diagnosed the, er, literary technique Old Rummy has brought to bear on what he's instead set out to do with the book:

It takes a long time to read because there are a lot of words, most of them boring. At first I thought this an unfortunate flaw, but I came to see it as strategy. He's going to overwhelm you with wordage, with dates and supposed data, he's going to bore you into submission, and at the end you're going to throw up your hands and shout, "I know Iraq and Afghanistan were not Don Rumsfeld's fault! I know this because I've now read his memos, which explain at great length why nothing is his fault."

Fault of course isn't the point.

Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection. Mr. Rumsfeld didn't ignore the generals, he listened to them too much. Not enough troops in Iraq? That would be Gen. Tommy Franks. Turkey's refusal to allow U.S. troop movements? Secretary of State Colin Powell. America's failure to find weapons of mass destruction? "Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error." Yes, I'd say so. He warned early on in a memo he quotes that the administration was putting too much emphasis on WMD. But put it in context: "Recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning."

"A WORD ON THE USE OF MEMOS IN MEMOIRS"

And then she makes a point that strikes me as brilliant.

A word on the use of memos in memoirs. Everyone in government now knows his memos can serve, years later, to illustrate his farsightedness and defend against charges of blindness, indifference, stupidity. So people in government send a lot of memos! "Memo to self: I'm deeply worried about Mideast crisis. Let's solve West Bank problem immediately." "Memo to Steve: I'm concerned about China. I'd like you to make sure it becomes democratic. Please move on this soonest, before lunch if you can." A man in the Bush administration once told me of a guy who used to change the name on memos when they turned out to be smart. He'd make himself the sender so that when future scholars pored over the presidential library, they'd discover what a genius he was.

Most memos prove nothing. It is disturbing that so many Bush-era memoirs rely so heavily on them.

I'd like to think there are a bunch of political stiffs with book contracts in their rolltops, not to mention the legion planning to unleash their literary agents on an unsuspecting public, who are even now experiencing tightness in the gut if not waves of nausea. Memo-free memoirs? Has the woman gone mad? Does she not understand that the e-memo is Modern Technology's gift to the ancient public arts of self-aggrandizement and butt-covering?

On the contrary, she seems to understand this only too well. And it's hard not to chant "Amen" when she writes, "The terrible thing about the Rumsfeld book, and there is no polite way to say this, is the half-baked nature of the thinking within it. The quality of analysis and understanding of history is so mediocre, so insufficient to the moment."

WHAT DOES OLD RUMMY HAVE TO ANSWER FOR?

The only problem comes when Peggy gets down to cases -- to, as she puts it, "the point at which I tried to break the book's spine."

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys -- to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations. New York at the time of the invasion, October 2001, was still, literally, smoking; the whole town still carried the acrid smell of Ground Zero. The scenes of that day were still vivid and sharp. New York still isn't over it and will never be over it, but what happened on 9/11 was fresh, and we wanted who did it to get caught.

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom. Or, less good but still good, to find him, kill him, put his head in a Tiffany box with a bow, and hand-carry it to the president of the United States.

It wasn't lust for vengeance, it was lust for justice, and for more than justice. Getting Osama would have shown the world what happens when you do a thing like 9/11 to a nation like America. It would have shown al Qaeda and their would-be camp followers what kind of unstoppable ferocity they were up against. It would have reminded the world that we are one great people with one terrible swift sword.

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment -- the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world -- from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused. The administration in Washington, emboldened by what it called its victory over the Taliban, decided to move on Iraq. Its focus shifted, it took its eye off the ball, and Afghanistan is now what it is.

Now this last part is fine, and begins to point toward Old Rummy's really monstrous failures and malfeasances. But the notion that the catastrophe was the failure to find bin Laden may be one of the stupidest things ever written. And it's dangerously, delusionally stupid.

Oh, to be sure, to the extent that the failure to capture bin Laden was Old Rummy's fault, he has something to answer for, and here again Peggy makes a strong case.

Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else—Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet. "Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run" was "worth the risks." Needless to say "there were numerous operational details." And of course, in a typical Rumsfeldian touch, he says he later learned CIA operatives on the ground had asked for help, but "I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had." I can.

No problem here in so far as holding Old Rummy's feet to the fire is concerned. But we don't in fact know that it was ever within our power to capture bin Laden, and there ought to be some lesson to be learned -- a colossally important lesson -- about making out of something that may or may not be in our power something we need, let alone something on which our entire future depends. This is just childish playground whining. We gotta have him, we gotta have him.

And there's no way of measuring the stupidity involved in assuming that we would have been a whit better off if we had captured him. For goodness' sake, we haven't even been able to handle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Can you imagine, has Peggy even begun to imagine, how much worse off we might be if we were sitting on a captive Osama bin Laden?

The notion that some kind of justice might have been served is comical. Does Peggy have no conception of the concept of martyrs? I guess she thinks the world would have been somehow impressed if we had proved we always get our man, even though (1) the nature of reality is such that we can't always assume that we can get our man, and (2) I don't see any indication that the world gives a damn about it, or that we would necessarily be in any way better off if we had. The world has its opinions of the U.S. and of bin Laden, and I don't see any of that changing if Old Rummy had bagged him. Of course normally people over on Peggy's side of the American political spectrum don't give a damn what the world thinks.

If Peggy had focused on the monumental catastrophe of the waste in life, destruction, billions of dollars down the tubes, and a military given over to the principles of totalitarian control (including officially sanctioned torture) involved in immersing the country in two never-ending wars, that would have been fine. If she had charged him with the megalomaniacal compulsion to control the all aspects of U.S. participation in the two invasions, including excluding the State Department or anyone else who might have considered what would happen after the next bombing, great.

Just as she suggests, Old Rummy has more to answer for than any single human being ought ever to have to answer for, and I gather that in his book he hasn't taken so much as the first step toward illuminating what happened for the sake of history, in the hope of sparing us the repetition of those blunders. On all of that, she's nailed the son of a bitch. I just don't think she has a clue what exactly she's nailed him for.

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Torn between political paranoia, criminality, and moral turpitude? Vote "right" and get all three!

Not since the opening of "Al Capone's Vaults" . . . ?

by Ken

Long before there were Teabaggers they were crazy loco over there on the Right, and verminously hypocritical lying scumbaqs . . . they've always had a home there. It's hard to say which of the stories Al Kamen tells in his WaPo "In the Loop" column today is more prize-worthy. But at least one of them is funny. Hilarious, I'd say.


I. A SECRET THAT LINKS DON RUMSFELD, AL HAIG,
J. FRED BUZHARDT & THE SHADES OF WATERGATE?

I'm tempted to call this the most thrilling "secret stash" story since the grand opening of "Al Capone's Vaults," but on checking, I find that that happened in April 1986, while our great adventure took place much earlier, way back in 1974.

As we know, Al can be snarky, and he sets up his first story, the tale of Donald Rumsfeld and What He Found when, as President Jerry Ford's designated chief of staff, he finally moved into the office formerly occupied by "Tricky Dick" Nixon's COS, Gen. "Crazy Al" Haig, by noting that Rummy, notwithstanding his latter-day image as a shoot-from-the-hip and damn-the-consequences kind of guy, was once "a cautious man, much more cautious than people give him credit for, maybe even hyper-cautious." I can't tell the story any better than Al (Al Kamen, that is) does, so let's let him do the honors. I think you're going to love this.

[A] "memorandum for the file" that [Rumsfeld] dictated on Sunday, Sept. 29, 1974, seven weeks after Gerald Ford assumed the presidency following Richard Nixon's resignation, recounts a problem that arose as he prepared to replace Alexander Haig as White House chief of staff.

Rumsfeld, temporarily in an office in the Executive Office Building, noted that he had met the day before "at approximately 5 p.m." with his pal Dick Cheney, then a presidential assistant, and others "to assist me in starting the move into Haig's old office" in the West Wing.

Rumsfeld recalled that the group helped him empty cupboards and closets and "look around the place."

He recalled that he wanted "to make sure that Haig had left nothing that he might want . . . and I wanted to make sure that there was nothing in the place that I didn't want there, such as recording equipment, telephone bugs and the like." Good idea.

"At approximately 5:15, I believe," an aide told him there was "a safe in the cupboard" by the fireplace in the office. At "approximately 7 p.m.," he recalled, he asked Cheney and another aide to get the safe combination "so I could start using it in the event I had classified material."

But an aide said that "there is something you ought to know about the safe." Seems the safe had not been opened during Haig's tenure. "Haig had apparently asked to have it opened" but former White House counsel J. Fred Buzhardt told Haig he didn't want it opened, Rumsfeld recalled being told.

So Rumsfeld told Cheney he "wanted the safe moved out of my office, unopened" and would check with counsel about letting Watergate investigators know it was there and, if possible, what might be in it.

He arranged for a guard at the door when he left his office later that night, he recalled, "to protect it from entry," in case there was "evidence related to the work of the Justice Department" or other Watergate investigators.

"I knew that I had not touched it nor had any of the people who had been in my office," he said, listing Cheney and others who'd been in there.

And no one had touched it the next morning when he called the counsel's office to "develop a procedure for transfer of the safe out of this office," he wrote. Before the safe was carefully put on a dolly to take it across West Executive Drive to a vault in the EOB, Rumsfeld made sure he got a receipt (which is attached to the memo) showing it had been transferred out of his custody.

There is an aide's note in the files - unclear whether Cheney wrote it - that on Tuesday, Oct. 1, word was sent to Rumsfeld "that the aforementioned safe was blown open and discovered to be empty. It was then sent to GSA for repair. Above action was supervised by the Secret Service."

And Rumsfeld's got the receipt to prove it.

I'm sorry, I just love this story. It's got everything: drama, skullduggery, unpredictable plot twists including a who'd-a-thunk-it surprise ending, and also in the end lotsa belly laughs. It's even got two quotes for the ages. First, there's former White House counsel J. Fred Buzhardt, in Rummy's recollection, telling "Crazy Al" Haig that he didn't want the safe opened. And then there's the sound of the Young Rummy already knowing how to cover his behind:

RUMMY: "I knew that I had not touched it nor had any of the people who had been in my office."

II. THE ONLY MYSTERY ABOUT OLD NEWT: HOW
DOES HE STILL DARE SHOW HIS PUSS IN PUBLIC?

Al has some fun with the way previous "caught in the act" pols have tried to talk their way out of their troubles: former SC Gov. Mark Sanford offering the "dreamy 'love' excuse" (with reference to "his famous hike down the Appalachian Trail to Argentina), and Eliot Spitzer earning "kudos for straightforward talk" in chalking his dalliances-for-megadollars misadventure up to "an act of stupid hubris," and Bill Clinton, well, you know all about Bill Clinton's gabalicious attempts to talk his way out of trouble.

And then there's Newt, who seems surprised to find his past amorous adventures a current subject of discussion. So, naturally he's got an answer, and if you haven't heard it, trust me, you're going to want to puke. Especially considering that he's pulled this stunt -- breaking in the next wife, in part at government expense, before the current one knows she's being dumped, including the first wife who was dying of cancer, one of the more repulsive tales of The Things Pols Do that I know of. Again I think the thing to do is to let Al tell the tale.

At a time when the country's facing peril abroad and economic turmoil at home, it might be good to have a leader with creativity - someone who can think outside the box, who can find novel solutions to very difficult problems.

That's why it was quite troubling to see all the derision, the guffawing, that greeted former House speaker and likely presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's explanation Monday about his affair, while he was married to his second wife, with a woman who became his third wife. . . .

He told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, whose viewers vote in primaries and may look particularly askance at sexual waywardness, that he had "felt compelled to seek God's forgiveness" for his behavior.

Interviewed in Iowa, Gingrich said his extramarital activity was "partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."

This is excellent. His passion for America, not another woman, eventually led him on a path to do things that were "not appropriate." It's not easy to wrap yourself in the flag while you're naked. And it's not particularly comfortable. But it's certainly a lot more creative than the usual lame-o excuses.

Please excuse me while I go try to wash my brain out.

#

Well, no wonder Rummy and Big Dick and Chimpy were fooled about the Iraqi WMDs -- this guy's, you know, magic!

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, come on down! Would you buy used WMDs from this man? How about fantastical tales about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret laboratories? Okay, maybe you have to hear him to appreciate how charismatic and gosh-darn, mesmerizingly credible he is. Or maybe just how credulous the saps and sucker who listened to him were>

by Ken

I know we're supposed to be looking forward, always forward, and never backward, which is where we've already been, which couldn't possibly have any interest or importance for us. The past, ble-e-ech!

This charmer, this Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi -- this is the schlub who sold the intelligence, er, masterminds of the Western powers on a whole Iraqi WMD program, or rather a whole Iraqi WMD program made up in his head. I'm sorry the clip can't be embedded, but if you click through to the link (here it is again) you'll get to see and hear for yourself (in German, with subtitles) just what a Macchiavellian genius our Rafid is. Who wouldn't believe anything that came out of his mouth?

What, you say the real question is who would believe anything that came out of his mouth? Maybe that's why you're not working as an intelligence mastermind.

guardian.co.uk

Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war

• Man codenamed Curveball 'invented' tales of bioweapons
• Iraqi told lies to try to bring down Saddam Hussein regime
• Fabrications used by US as justification for invasion

Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd in Karlsruhe
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011 12.58 GMT

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi's claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell's landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi's admission as "fascinating", and said the emergence of the truth "makes me feel better". "I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now," said Drumheller.

In the only other at length interview Janabi has given he denied all knowledge of his supposed role in helping the US build a case for invading Saddam's Iraq.

In a series of meetings with the Guardian in Germany where he has been granted asylum, he said he had told a German official, who he identified as Dr Paul, about mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000. He said the BND had identified him as a Baghdad-trained chemical engineer and approached him shortly after 13 March of that year, looking for inside information about Saddam's Iraq.

"I had a problem with the Saddam regime," he said. "I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance."

He portrays the BND as gullible and so eager to tease details from him that they gave him a Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook to help communicate. He still has the book in his small, rented flat in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany. . .

There's more to the story, not to mention links aplenty, onsite -- for the strong of stomach. It'll all leave you wondering how the guy on 24 -- you know, Donald Sutherland's kid, the worst actor in the Western world -- would handle it.

Say, maybe Rafid could be persuaded to join Rummy on his book tour -- maybe do their version of "Who's on First?"? Or perhaps they could be joined by the trained seal of "presidential historians," Michael Beschloss (see "Should 'presidential historians' 'facilitate' noted war criminals like Donald Rumsfeld?"), and do selected Three Stooges routines, I guess with Rummy as Moe, Michael as Larry, and Rafid as Curly, or Shemp, or maybe Curly Joe.

Thank goodness our intelligence people now consume only the finest Grade A stuff a gullible intelligence operative can buy. Which probably explains our great triumphs in Afghanistan and the rest of the globe's hot spots. Of course if there are any little goofs in our operations there, not to worry -- they'll soon be in the past, and we can forget about them. It's a lovely system, really.

Welcome to this lovely new century of ours, the 21st. You could laugh, or you could cry. Or you could watch another thrill-packed episode of Cupcake Wars.

Do you suppose Rafid does cupcakes? He may have been able to pull the wool over German and American intelligence, but he won't slip any funny business past judge Florian.

#

Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummy-whoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummy-whoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

>Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

#

Should "presidential historians" "facilitate" noted war criminals like Donald Rumsfeld?

Oh no, Rummy's back! And fifteen dollars seems a reasonable price to pay to see the noted war criminal "facilitated" by a certified "presidential historian" -- the kind of guy who's apt to ask erudite questions that begin, like, "Secretary Rumsfeld, as President Millard Filmore used to say . . ."

The "first stop on [Donald Rumsfled] highly anticipated national book tour" will be next Wednesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a center news release tells us. The book "chronicles his long career in public service," from his time in Congress - he was elected 48 years ago - to his work in the Nixon, Ford and Bush II administrations.

"Long career" is a euphemism for very, very long book, and this one weighs in at a hefty 2.6 pounds and 832 exciting pages, all for just $36. The Wednesday launch [that's next Wednesday, February 9 -- Ed.] includes a "conversation" to be "facilitated by presidential historian Michael Beschloss," where Rumsfeld "will discuss previously undisclosed details and insight into the Bush administration." Tickets for that are only $15, and books will be available for purchase (and signing) right there. . . .

-- from the item "The author you have . . .,"
in Al Kamen's WaPo "In the Loop" column

by Ken

Now just a doggone minute there. No, not the part about them charging suckers $15 for the privilege of watching Donnie R's live infomercial -- with the option of shelling out that additional $36 for the damned book. Hey, if they can get away with it, and people want to spend the money to be flimflammed, well, I guess more power to the whole lot of them.

No, I mean the part about the thing being "facilitated" by Michael Beschloss? Presidential historian Michael Beschloss is shilling for noted war criminal Donald Rumsfeld? Er, I mean, facilitating?

Back in the days when Imus was my morning mainstay, when his basic take on matters political was breezy irreverence, he built up a stable of crackerjack guests. Frank Rich was an almost always scintillating regular, for example, and "presidential historians" Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss were also frequent guests -- both really smart folks, who knew that Imus expected them to "bring something to the table" and usually did.

A QUICK NOTE ON "PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIANS"

I'm sorry to keep putting "presidential historian" in quotes, by the way. It just always seems to an odd job description, even though I understand the logic of it. History is too vast a field for any particular historian to attempt to encompass whole, and so specialization is inescapable, and I suppose that, especially for historians attached to the "great man" view of the subject, it seems reasonable to focus on presidents. I just can't ever help thinking that a calling that commits you to the study of, say, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Calvin Coolidge is kind of a peculiar career choice. But then, who am I to talk about peculiar career choices?

I confess that I probably haven't read more than one or two of Doris KG's books, though probably a lot more articles, but she's always seemed pretty solid to me. I haven't kept up, but I assume she eventually finished that Lincoln book she seemed to be working on forever (working title: Yet Another Lincoln Book), and has moved on to Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes, or Calvin Coolidge -- if not all three. (Presumably, the way it works is that the Presidential Historians Association, the industry trade group, serves as some sort of clearinghouse for divvying the available presidents up among its members, with the proviso that any fully-paid-up member can write a book about Washington or Lincoln, on the theory that somebody's got to keep those bookstore remainder tables overflowing.)

I'm not sure I've ever read anything by Michael Beschloss, but he seemed okay too. Only now he's fronting for (shudder) Donald Rumsfeld? I shudder to think how much he's being paid for his "facilitation." Even if by chance Michael B is doing this for nothing -- "pro bono," as it were -- it doesn't wash; what "good" can there be in helping a monster sell books? What our "presdential historian" is facilitating, of course, is the Rumster passing himself off as a respectable citizen, worthy of being listened to to the tune of those "hefty 2.6 pounds and 832 exciting pages," when he ought to have been shuffled off to the Hague for prosecution.

The title of the book, Known and Unknown, by the way, says Al, "echoes Rumsfeld's famous observations about 'known knowns' and 'unknown unknowns' and so on."

Unclear whether there will be questions from the audience, but you should have some ready. For example, you might ask what caused the Army chief of staff at the time, Gen. Eric Shinseki -- now secretary of veterans affairs -- to be so completely wrong when he said the United States would need a few hundred thousand troops in Iraq.

Rumsfeld might also explain how the prediction that the war would pay for itself was pretty much on target, or perhaps how the post-invasion Iraqi turmoil was just like Germany in 1945-47, or how those weapons of mass destruction may yet be found -- okay, maybe in Iran, but that's not all that far away and, after all, they are spelled similarly.

Say, if it turns out that "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss is too immersed in, say, the administration of Benjamin Harrison to fulfill his facilitating commitments, I'll bet our pal Al would make a jim-dandy facilitator. Here's his parting thought on the even:

Washington memoirs are famous for settling scores, so if you're lucky enough to get a seat, buy the book , go immediately to the index and look for Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice . . .

Not to be missed. Reservations can be made online at www.constitutioncenter.org.

The event again is next Wednesday, February 9, in the Grand Hall Overlook of the National Constitution Center in Independence Mall, Philadelphia. Don't forget that Valentine's Day is coming up. Wouldn't this make a sweetheart of a gift for the One You Love?


TOMORROW: AL HAS AN UPDATE ON FLYING ACE
"CRAZY JIM" INHOFE'S RUN-IN WITH THE FAA

Remember the story Al reported in October about Sen. "Crazy Jim" Inhofe's airport-landing misadventure? (I passed it on as Crazy Jim Inhofe flies planes???) In today's column, Al has an update, straight from the Crazyman's mouth. I tried to squeeze it in tacked on to the above item, but that didn't seem to me to do justice to either. So we'll pick up Crazy Jim's story tomorrow.

#

Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummywhoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummywhoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

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Inside The Sick And Demented Mind Of A Republican Grappling For Answers To Why His Party Was Routed-- But Unable To Face The Truth

Yesterday Fred Kaplan warned us about war criminal Don Rumsfeld's revisionist memoirs. They're not written yet put Kaplan is interpolating from the revisionist Op-Ed Rumsfeld did a few days ago for the NY Times. Rumsfeld hasn't been hauled before any war crimes tribunals yet and it's not likely he ever will be. Instead, he's busy with self-serving re-writes of history. His motivation is writ large.

Robert Hardaway is a law professor at the University of Denver and his motivations are less obvious-- but even more crackpot and delusional than Rummy's. Reading his poisonous screed in today's Rocky Mountain News I imagined what I would have done had I ever walked into a classroom and found as reactionary a jackass as Hardaway spouting off.

If you think that all the willful ignorance and bigotry from the far, far right comes from toothless rednecks running around in Klan robes in the hill country of Georgia and Tennessee and in Mormon cult centers, you haven't read anything from neo-fascist polemicist Robert Hardaway. And, yes, there are imbeciles are other law schools besides Regent and Liberty. Hardaway is like a walking, talking, barking personification of exactly why the American people have rejected the GOP. In Colorado, McCain was supported by 45% of voters while lunatic fringe Senate candidate Robert Schaffer got 42% and extremist nut incumbent Marilyn Musgrave was supported by 44% of her constituents. Let the professor speak for himself:

It should have been a slam-dunk for the Republicans in the 2008 presidential election. After all, the Democrats had inexplicably chosen as their nominee the least-qualified candidate in American history. Indeed, the only other candidate in American history to go directly from the Senate to the White House with neither gubernatorial nor military executive experience was Warren G. Harding, by consensus the worst president in American history. Moreover, Obama's voting record in the Senate has also been rated as the most hard-left voting record in American history.

To lose to such a candidate required more than simple ineptitude. It required an almost pathological determination to lose.

And yet, it may yet prove of value to the Republican Party if it can learn the following lessons from its defeat:

First, if you are going to go against an obviously unqualified candidate, choose a candidate with substantial executive experience. Only a handful of candidates in American history have ever succeeded to the office of the presidency without at least some gubernatorial executive experience. The Republicans had their chance to choose Mitt Romney, who not only had experience as a governor, but also experience as a business leader and organizer of the Olympics. Romney also "walked the walk" on universal health care in Massachusetts, unlike Democrats who have traditionally only talked the talk.

Second, don't reject a candidate because of his religion. Polls of Republicans expressed greater reservations over a Mormon candidate than an Islamic one.

Third, don't choose a man in his 70s to go up against a candidate of youth, vigor, and charisma, especially when your own candidate also has no executive experience.

Fourth, don't assume that independent voters will vote for the candidate who best upholds such traditional values as fiscal responsibility, strong national security, protection of our borders, and limited government. We should know by now that swing voters vote on the basis of personality and television persona. Thus, Obama's impending victory no more reflects the electorate's turn to the hard left, than Reagan's 49-state electoral victory in 1980 reflected a turn to the right.

Fifth, don't insult the intelligence of the voters with simplistic characterizations of the opponent's positions. Those only fuel counterattacks by a sympathetic media eager to show that 30-second ads do not completely set forth the complexities of the opponent's agenda. Rather, Republican ads need only have shown, without commentary, actual videos of Obama refusing to put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem, his statement that he had visited "57 states" and the town hall video in which he talked about the need for asthma suffers to get "breathalyzers"-- followed by the simple question: "Ready to lead? You decide."

Sixth, ask voters whether the old American adage still holds true-- namely that one's character is evaluated in large part by the company he keeps. And leave it at that. No need to name names.

Seventh, don't let your party be outspent by such business tycoons as George Soros.

Eighth, and perhaps hardest of all, set aside social issues and concentrate on fiscal responsibility, national security, border protection, and fairness to the teeming millions of those seeking legal immigration. You don't have to give up your principles on social issues, but, absent a Reagan-quality communicator as your nominee, you're not going to win on them.

Ninth, decide whether public displays of support for such issues are worth losing an election.

And finally-- at number ten-- get some members of your party to audition for Saturday Night Live. There should be ample material (see No. 5 above).

So if you have a kid thinking of the University of Denver...