The seriousness of congress? Here is an excerpt from the latest post at TomDispatch:

“Here, then, is a post-surge formula to keep in mind: "Withdrawal" equals an increase in air power (as long as the commitment to withdraw isn't a total one). This is no less true of the "withdrawal" plans of the major Democratic presidential candidates and the Democratic congressional mainstream as it is of any administration planning for future draw-downs. All of these plans are largely confined to withdrawing or redeploying American "combat brigades," which add up to only something like half of all American forces in Iraq. None of this will necessarily lessen the American war there. As Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Hersh, it may only "change the mix of the forces doing the fighting." A partial withdrawal is actually likely, at least for a time, to increase the destructive brutality of the war on the American side.”

If congress were serious they would have to investigate themselves as well but I guess they are not going to do that are they. All of the recent legislation has been about partial withdrawal. All of the legislation from congress has had exceptions that keep at least half of all U.S. forces in Iraq. And none of it applies at all to the estimated 126,000 mercenaries like those of Blackwater that are now being employed in Iraq.

"Let’s face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."

Why is it surprising that staff level personnel, tasked with wordsmithing a marketing proposal, would in fact create the tasked marketing proposal? Do Phrma minions concern themselves with truth in marketing when preparing talking points and educating congress?

Any serious congressional strategy to end this war would include nationally televised hearings about this and all the other lies that got us into Iraq. The seriousness of the Democrats can be judged by such hearings' non-existence.

Uhuh. WFT? You have the three chimps book on the sidebar by Jeff Cohen. The three chimps not only represent the media, but congress as well. Was congress asleep during the runup? NOT AT ALL. They just thought that it would be a) a cakewalk, and b) counterproductive to hegemonic goals that are good for America, to speak up about peace, love and brotherhood. Peace, love and brotherhood is some idealistic shit that doesn't help the bottom line.

The recent disgust of the American public and the Democrats isn't over the war. It's over the failure -- the abortion -- of the war. It's just soooo fucking amateurish that it's an insult to American efficiency and failure to take advantage of the legendary American lack of attention.

Example: The 2002 Chavez coup attempt where after getting finger caught in cookie jar, Chavez was brought back. WTF, over? Did we hire fucking children to carry out national strategy? Apparently we did. Success would have been Chavez accidentally crashing in his chopper. Or perishing from some bad water. Or succumbing to e-coli or some shit that is endemic to one that flees to the jungle. Yes, there may have been rumors of US involvement. But that would have all just been wild conspiracy talk by America-haters. CNN, MSNBC and FOX (the other three chimps) would have insured that we're informed properly on the facts.

Remember when Arafat died of some natural cause thing a few years back? There were wacko conspiracists talking about how it may not have been that natural. But as a nation, courtesy of some adults explaining it, we understood the bullshit of such talk and moved on. Evident result: we now have peace in the middle east, and fatah is a lot more pliable.

But, this IS what you get when GenY, GenX and Gen Next takes over the reins at operational levels. Gross incompetence in the proper carrying out of hegemony. It's like no-one mentored the kids to the real objectives and they take shit at face value. Egads, but we're fucked.

...is (more or less) irrelevant to the 75% of ALL Americans who say they are "dissatisfied" with this country's "direction"?

Yes.

I think the dissatisfaction stems from a perception of blazing recent incompetence, not from the average American's dissatisfaction that Core American Values are not being carried out over time or that your laundry list is particularly out of character.

Because like you said, that laundry list you cite goes back two generations. We were mostly fine with tragic, pointless wars as long as we didn't have to put up with a daily diet of incompetent wartalk on the telly. If the wartalk was sunny, and shiny, we wouldn't have 75% dissatisfaction. We'd have the appetite to keep exporting war goodness as the first and easiest measure in our toolbox. (It's not a very big toolbox. There's only a hammer in there. We used to have other tools, but we lost them somewhere.)

If we were concerned with values, as a nation, we'd be elsewhere right now -- oh, in the roundabout regions of european social democracies -- (but it's hard as fuck to pick up a nation and move it roughly 3500 miles to the east). Since our national policy was primarily focused on hegemony and satisfying our betters (corporations and the moneyed power elite), and we allowed our betters to drive us, this is where we are.

Two stolen national elections you say? Have you reported them missing yet? Please fill out a police report because we doan cotton to crime in the US and we can build jails as we need -- there's always money to keep the criminals away from us, lest they contaminate us virtuous folk.

Thus the word oversight.(not Congressional oversight,TAXPAYER OVERSIGHT, 'cause Congress don't love us no more.)

Ted: PAINFULLY SPOT ON, Old Man. (I hope you realize you're gouging on a live nerve there,Doc.)

Poignant, bitter, powerful... don't miss Bacevich's piece in the WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052502032_pf.html

Interesting stuff about Foley. I was wondering whether Moran's female colleague could actually have been Valerie Plame? Didn't she work in WINPAC at this time?

Didn't Valarie Plame work on WMD at WINPAC? I wonder if she was at that meeting ? I bet if they ever allow her to talk and if she is so inclined she might be able to shed some interesting light on these matters.

So was Foley interviewed by the SSCI before they put out the '04 report that concluded that the policymakers didn't pressure the CIA? If he wasn't, then that's an egregious oversight by the SSCI. If he was, then presumably he did not testify to any pressure, so he ought to be forced to reconcile these quotes with his testimony.

"But, this IS what you get when GenY, GenX and Gen Next takes over the reins."

Didn't know Bush, Cheney, Feith and Wolfowitz were Gen X'ers and Y'ers. You learn something new every day.

"But, this IS what you get when GenY, GenX and Gen Next takes over the reins."

Didn't know Bush, Cheney, Feith and Wolfowitz were Gen X'ers and Y'ers. You learn something new every day.

Oh, bite me.

It's not the job of those geezers to carry out sh*t at the operational level; after all they're the "planners and leaders" (airquoting there). They need plausible deniability.

What I said was that at the operational level, the young studs never pre-positioned the throwdown weapons so that there'd be there for CNN to run up on them. Just like no big, hungry python in the jungle waiting for Chavez. You expect Wolfowitz to be drag-assing a python? That's young man work...

Remember back during the Kosovo invasion -- BAM! first thing out of the gate -- torture chambers in Pristina with the required hardware (I think they showed CNN a room with baseball bats with nails embedded and pliers, etc). Lowtech throwdown or not, it was properly orchestrated.

And yes, Kosovo was simpler -- it's easier to throwdown bats than WMD, but the definition of WMD was so loose that just about anything would have done. (I think Cohen scared the sh*t out of me with a 5-lb bag of sugar once.)

Bamford's book hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves.

It would be interesting to find out how much of this was a product of the enormous amount of pressure brought to bear on the CIA by the office of the vice president (From The New Republic, 11.20.03):

In mid-2002, Cheney made at least two visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters to talk with the analysts on the intelligence assembly line, who warned that they had no evidence showing that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. These visits have been chewed over in the press, decried by retired Agency officials, and condemned as attempts to pressure the CIA into producing more damning intel. But they only begin to capture the depth of the vice president's personal involvement in shaping Iraq intelligence. In addition to trekking to Langley, his former aides say, Cheney paid calls to analysts at the DIA, the National Security Agency, and even the National Intelligence Mapping Agency. "He visited every element of the intelligence community," says a former Cheney staffer. When he wasn't visiting these agencies, his staff snowed them with questions. According to one former CIA analyst, "The Agency [would write] something on WMD, and it would come back from the vice president with a thousand questions: 'What's this sentence mean?' 'What's your source for this line?' 'Why are you disregarding sources that are saying the opposite?'"

Among Cheney's aides, resentment of the CIA went far beyond a healthy skepticism of fallible intelligence analysts and an Agency with a decidedly mixed record. Whereas Cheney's questioning of intelligence during the Gulf war had been probing but respectful, now his staff belittled the intelligence community's findings, irrespective of their merits. For years, Libby and Hannah in particular had believed the Agency harbored a politically motivated animus against the INC and irresponsibly discounted intelligence reports from defectors the INC had brought forward. "This had been a fight for such a long period of time, where people were so dug in," reflects a friend of one of Cheney's senior staffers. The OVP had been studying issues like Iraq for so many years that it often simply did not accept that contrary information provided by intelligence analysts-- especially CIA analysts--could be correct. As one former colleague of many OVP officials puts it, "They so believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, 'We want to show these f**kers that they are wrong.'"

Intelligence analysts saw little difference between Cheney and his staffers. The vice president's aides may have made more trips to Langley and signed more memoranda asking for further information, but, as the CIA saw it, the OVP was a coordinated machine working for its engineer. "When I heard complaints from people, it was, 'Man, you wouldn't believe this sh*t that Libby and [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J.] Feith and Wolfowitz do to us.' They were all lumped together," says an ex-analyst close to his former colleagues. "I would hear them say, 'Goddamn, that f**king John Hannah, you wouldn't believe.' And the next day it would be, 'That f**king Bill Luti.' For all these guys, they're interchangeable." Adds another, "They had power. Authority. They had the vice president behind them. ... What Scooter did, Cheney made possible. Feith, Wolfowitz--Cheney made it all possible. He's the fulcrum. He's the one."

From the OVP's perspective, the CIA--with its caveat-riddled position on Iraqi WMD and its refusal to connect Saddam and Al Qaeda--was an outright obstacle to the invasion of Iraq.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060212172413/www.howardlabs.com/11-03/WHAT+DICK+CHENEY+REALLY+BELIEVES.htm

More on the office of the vice president:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

And before this, the CIA told them there was no active WMD program:

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/23/60-minutes-cia-official-reveals-bush-cheney-rice-were-personally-told-iraq-had-no-wmd-in-fall-2002

(If they don't give you the intelligence you want, just turn around and cram the CIA's works with product from Feith's BS factory at the Pentagon...)

just turn around and cram the CIA's works with product from Feith's BS factory at the Pentagon

Maybe it's worth reiterating that the mere *existence* of Feith's BS factory was a potent force in getting CIA to roll over ... there was a clear danger that if OSP gave the White House what it wanted, and CIA didn't, then the next budget might reflect that.

To a bureaucracy, there's no deadlier threat than a rival bureaucracy.

The Democratic Congress showed their true stripes a few months ago, when they failed to pass the significant ethics reform they promised before the election. It's been downhill ever since.

While they were in the minority, they voted to give Bush everything he wanted. Now that they're in the majority, they vote to give Bush everything he wants. Big change, huh?

What we really need is impeachment proceedings against the entire Executive Branch, followed by prosecution for multiple felonies including war crimes. What we get is nothing.

It looks like Ralph Nader really was right all along - there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

Feith's office was illegal. Not sure why this isn't being pursued:

“Individuals in that office produced and disseminated intelligence products outside of the regular intelligence channels. These intelligence products were inconsistent with the consensus judgments of the Intelligence Community. This office did this without coordinating with the Intelligence Community and as a result policy makers received distorted intelligence.

“Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947 requires the heads of all departments and agencies of the U.S. government involved in intelligence activities ‘to keep the congressional oversight committees informed.’

“The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities. The Senate Intelligence Committee was never informed of these activities."

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/A_devastating_condemnation_of_OSP_and_0208.html

Ted, what a sad, cynical, unhappy individual you are. So the only thing this administration has done wrong is not prepping the war properly so they could actually find the WMD that didn't exist.

However intelligent you think you are, you display a true lack of humanity.

Ted, what a sad, cynical, unhappy individual you are. So the only thing this administration has done wrong is not prepping the war properly so they could actually find the WMD that didn't exist?

However intelligent you think you are, you display a true lack of humanity.

Ted, what a sad, cynical, unhappy individual you are. So the only thing this administration has done wrong is not prepping the war properly so they could actually find the WMD that didn't exist?

However intelligent you think you are, you display a true lack of humanity.

Ted, what a sad, cynical, unhappy individual you are. So the only thing this administration has done wrong is not prepping the war properly so they could actually find the WMD that didn't exist?

However intelligent you think you are, you display a true lack of humanity.

Jonathan, great post, thax!

33, thanx for the links re: Cheney