4/25/06, 3:45 pm EST
Rumsfeld Sued by Teens
Are you among the 12 million high school students whose GPA, Social Security number and other personal information have been Hoovered up into a Pentagon recruitment database? Unhappy about it? Maybe you join this lawsuit, filed by six sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in New York.
-- TD4/25/06, 3:44 pm EST
Thirty-Two Percent
CNN puts the president’s approval rating at thirty-two percent. Worse: He’s got a whopping sixty-percent disapproval.
Good news for Democrats: In the poll’s generic matchup, fifty percent of Americans would cast their ballot for a Democratic congressperson, versus just thirty-eight percent who would vote for the GOP candidate.
-- TD4/25/06, 3:42 pm EST
The New AT&T
Sucks as much as the old SBC. Your friendly neighborhood blogger moved over the weekend. He was promised that his DSL line would go live this morning. And much to his surprise, it went live last night. Hurrah! But then, mysteriously, it conked out after breakfast. Following half an hour on the phone to what is purportedly a “Texas-based” service call center — where all of the service reps have suspiciously lilting Indian accents — I finally got booted over to sales, where a real Texan informed me that my Internet would not and could not go live again until Thursday.
Combine my personal frustrations with the company’s alleged complicity in allowing the feds to spy on its customers, and I’m so ready to pull the plug.
Any San Franciscans know anything about RCN’s all-in-one cable/Internet/phone bundle?
-- TD4/25/06, 3:42 pm EST
Petrol Politicking
Check out the two parties’ proposed solutions to sky-high gas prices. Cutting against type, the Democrats are calling for a sixty-day federal gas-tax holiday, bringing prices down eighteen cents a gallon. Bush and the GOP want to give refiners a holiday from air quality laws. Because, surely, the oil companies can be trusted to pass those savings onto consumers.
-- TD4/24/06, 4:45 pm EST
Single-Source War
The White House’s only response to Drumheller’s whistle-blowing has been that the Iraqi turncoat was a single source and therefore wasn’t reliable. As Drumheller points out, this is a crock.
“They certainly took information that came from single sources on uranium, on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all and so you can’t say you only listen to one source, because on many issues they only listened to one source,” says Drumheller.
“So you’re saying that if there was a single source and that information from that source backed up the case they were trying to build, then that single source was ok, but if it didn’t, then the single source was not ok, because he couldn’t be corroborated,” Bradley asked.
“Unfortunately, that’s what it looks like.”
Let’s remember that the administration’s only source on Iraq’s mobile weapons labs was a defector in the hands of German intelligence — codename Curveball — whom the agency never even interviewed in person. (Read the LA Times‘ definitive and maddening investigation into “The Curveball Saga” here.
Let’s also remember that the allegation that Iraq and al Qaeda were collaborating on chemical weapons training came from a single source: al Qaeda captive Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whom the CIA tortured with a water board until he made up a story that he thought his American captors wanted to hear.
-- TD4/24/06, 4:42 pm EST
The Big Lie
60 Minutes has blown the lid on the administration’s WMD bamboozlement. There can no longer be any doubt: The march to war was a deliberate sham.
The CBS report connects the dots: We knew that the CIA had flipped a member of Saddam’s inner circle, and that he told the agency that the Iraqi dictator had no active WMD programs. What we didn’t know was that, in the fall of 2002 — at least 4 months before the invasion — Bush, Cheney, Condi & Co. were personally briefed. They were told that their casus belli didn’t hold water, but they willfully chose to disregard this highest-level intelligence. In the end, regime change was the policy. The WMD argument was just so much window dressing.
The fact that the White House had in fact been briefed about the CIA’s top turncoat was not a given. Far too much solid intel — including the testimonials of 30 expat Iraqi moles who were sent to infiltrate their former homeland and report back on their discoveries (their reporting was unanimous: No WMD) — stayed bottled up inside the agency.
Not so in this case, Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s top man in Europe at the time, told 60 Minutes. From the transcript:
The CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.
“This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about,” Drumheller says.
“You knew you could trust this guy?” Bradley asked.
“We continued to validate him the whole way through,” Drumheller replied.
According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”
What did this high-level source tell him?
“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.
“So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Bradley asked.
“Yes,” Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.
“It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us,” Bradley remarked.
“The policy was set,” Drumheller says. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested,” Drumheller recalls. “And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.’”
(Watch the video here.)
-- TD4/21/06, 4:24 pm EST
Will Censure for Cash
We know Russ Feingold’s censure resolution made for great political theatre, but how much was the MoveOn-pleasing gambit worth, in dollar terms?
About $175,ooo as measured by the boost to Russ’ Progressive Patriots PAC.
He’s going to have to do better than that if he hopes to challenge Hillary, the Democrats’ queen of cash. Without breaking a sweat — or pandering to DailyKos — Clinton’s PAC still cleared about $100K more than Feingold’s in March.
But not all of Hillary’s numbers are so rosy. A full forty-one percent of America would “definitely vote against her” in a presidential race, compared to a core support that barely registers twenty-five percent.
-- TD4/21/06, 4:23 pm EST
Open Thread, Baby
The Bush administration says that medical-marijuana movement is less about chemo patients and more about stoners who want to get high in peace. Which is it America? (Be honest . . .)
-- TD4/21/06, 4:23 pm EST
Inside the Iranian Police State
The restrictive dress codes come as little surprise. But a $6,000 fine for watching satellite TV? Two months in jail for walking your dog? Ahmad[man]inejad, why must you be such a crazy bastard?
-- TD
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