Good evening, remember to check out Elaine at Like Maria Said Paz. We're going to start with two things from Democracy Now! and Elaine's got the same two things.
UN Extends U.S.-led Foreign Troop Presence
In other Iraq news, the UN Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to extend the mandate of U.S.-led military forces by one year. There are nearly 180,000 foreign troops currently in Iraq.
Lott Suspects Fellow Republicans in Prison Disclosure
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports Republican Senator Trent Lott said senators from his own party might be responsible for the leak. Lott said the secret prison facilities were discussed at a Republican luncheon on Capitol Hill -- one day before the Post published its report November 2nd. Vice President Cheney was among those in attendance. Lott said : "Information that was said in there, given out in there, did get into the newspaper. I don't know where else it came from…. It looked to me that at least one of those reports came right out of that room."
Guilty dog barking? That's what my dad asked. Lott's saying the leak came out of a Republican luncheon and Lott was there. Is he worried that people will suspect him? If he is worried, why is he worried? Cause he's feeling guilty?
All I'm saying is that it's awful funny that Lott steps up to blow the whistle on his buddies.
Awful funny.
Delia e-mailed me to ask if Bob Somerby is an idiot or what?
I'll go with idiot.
He trashed and trashed Joe Wilson. Now a lot of stuff that he called "lies" isn't and his new talking point is that Dems saw the same intelligence.
He gets this prissy tone and lectures about how "liberals" should talk.
Sorry, Somersby, I don't need a lecture from someone who's pressed Republican talking points and trashed Joe Wilson.
So if you read the prissy lecture from Bob Somerby today, I have three points.
1) Why are you reading a sell out who doesn't give a damn about anything unless it's kissing Al Gore or Bill Clinton's butt?
2) Why are you reading about intel from an idiot who never wrote one word about Iraq. Oh sure, prissy loves to tell you what got said on those Chat & Chews and praise love of his life Willie Kristol but what has he written about Iraq?
Not one goddamn thing. And that's quoting my ma. When Ma curses, watch out.
Yeah, in March, we'll have been over there for three years and Mr. Brave Voice has not once dealt with reporting from Iraq.
Is it because Hillary supported the war and he wants Hillary in the White House?
You don't know.
You just know he has nothing to say that matters.
But he picks up his dainty tea cup and gets all prissy.
He keeps saying he's changing his focus but then he gets back in the ring to push another GOP talking point.
He claims he's worried about the public debate but what has he said about the Iraq reporting?
Not a damn thing. He's just a prissy little Clintonista who embarrasses himself a little more each day. If he's going to focus on eduction, focus on that.
If he's going to run and hide because he can't handle discussing reality, then do it already.
But quit pushing the damn GOP talking points and injecting yourself into conversations that you've done nothing to advance.
He just shows up to cluck like an old hen.
Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck.
3) Go to Media Matters and you'll find this:
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have repeatedly disputed the claim that members of Congress and the White House have equal access to intelligence information. During a November 4 press conference, Rockefeller and Feinstein directly addressed this issue. Both noted, for example, that committee members are not privy to the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) -- a written summary of intelligence information that the CIA provides to the president. (The White House even withheld from Senate investigators the PDBs on Iraq delivered to the Oval Office prior to the war.):
ROCKEFELLER: I mean, one of things that they -- that Chairman Roberts likes to do is to try to point out that there were a lot of Democrats who voted for the -- going to the United Nations, and if that didn't work, going to the war. And then people say, "Well, you know, you all had the same intelligence that the White House had." And I'm here to tell you that is nowhere near the truth. We not only don't have, nor probably should we have, the Presidential Daily Brief, we don't have the constant people who are working on intelligence who are very close to him. They don't release their -- an administration which tends not to release -- not just the White House, but the CIA, DOD [Department of Defense], others -- they control information. There's a lot of intelligence that we don't get that they have.
[...]
FEINSTEIN: As was said, the president gets intelligence that we do not get. The president is the -- White House is the owner of intelligence. We do not see the Presidential Daily Brief. Therefore, it is conceivable that the president would have had information that was not available to the Senate or to the Congress.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), who served as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also made this point during an appearance on the October 8, 2004, edition of CNN's American Morning:
KERREY: The president has much more access to intelligence than members of Congress does [sic]. Ask any member of Congress. Ask a Republican member of Congress, do you get the same access to intelligence that the president does? Look at these aluminum tube stories that came out the president delivered to the Congress -- "We believe these would be used for centrifuges." -- didn't deliver to Congress the full range of objections from the Department of Energy experts, nuclear weapons experts, that said it's unlikely they were for centrifuges, more likely that they were for rockets, which was a pre-existing use. The president has much more access to intelligence than any member of Congress.
Indeed, the White House's involvement in development of the aluminum tubes allegation provides an example of how the administration's access to intelligence on Iraq differed from that of Congress. In particular, the aluminum tubes story exhibits the "very close" relationship -- which Rockefeller noted -- between the White House and those "working on intelligence."
An October 3, 2004, New York Times article detailed how the unfounded claim that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes designed to enrich uranium became one of the administration's primary pieces of evidence that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute Iraq's nuclear weapons program. According to the Times, while the CIA assessments provided to policy-makers during the buildup to war omitted crucial dissenting views regarding the probable use of the tubes, administration officials "repeatedly" discussed dissenting opinions with the agency:
From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15 reports on the tubes.
[...]
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
[...]
"They never lay out the other case," one Congressional official said of those C.I.A. assessments.
The Senate report provides only a partial picture of the agency's communications with the White House. In an arrangement endorsed by both parties, the Intelligence Committee agreed to delay an examination of whether White House descriptions of Iraq's military capabilities were "substantiated by intelligence information." As a result, Senate investigators were not permitted to interview White House officials about what they knew of the tubes debate and when they knew it.
But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed that the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and telephone calls.
The timing of the statements
The claim that Congress and the White House saw the "same intelligence" also ignores that the Bush administration's public pronouncements concerning Iraq began long before any substantial intelligence analysis arrived on Capitol Hill. According to Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the environment created by these definitive statements may have contributed to the intelligence community's faulty judgments on Iraq. These fundamental analytical flaws were clearly evident in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which -- as Human Events' Jeffrey noted above -- informed lawmakers' positions on the war.
In the "Additional Views" section of the Senate Intelligence Committee's "phase one" report, Sens. Rockefeller, Levin, and Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) provided numerous examples of conclusive public statements made by administration officials in the weeks and months prior to Congress' receipt of the NIE. The report itself concluded that the key judgments contained in the NIE -- which summarized all available intelligence assessments on the threat posed by Iraq -- were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting" and that the intelligence community "did not accurately or adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties behind the judgments" in the document. According to an April 19, 2004, Washington Post report by assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, Stuart A. Cohen, acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the time the NIE was being prepared, admitted seeking to "avoid equivocation" in the document wherever possible so it would not amount to "pablum." Rockefeller, Levin, and Dubin argued that, in public statements made in the summer and fall of 2002, the administration "repeatedly overstated what the Intelligence Community assessed at the time":
These high-profile statements in support of the Administration's policy of regime change were made in advance of any meaningful intelligence analysis and created pressure on the Intelligence Community to conform to the certainty contained in the pronouncements.
The three senators further stated that, by not examining the basis for the administration's statements, the "phase one" report had not adequately addressed the effect they may have had on the intelligence community's assessments:
As a result, the Committee's phase one report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which Intelligence Community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public. As noted above, administration officials were not simply recipients of intelligence. Whereas most members of Congress did not see a full assessment of the Iraqi threat prior to the delivery of the NIE, the president and his aides received daily intelligence briefings on Iraq throughout 2002. And more recent evidence -- such as the Downing Street Memo -- has further suggested that the administration participated actively in the interagency debates concerning what information would be included in the intelligence reports on Iraq.
He just needs to pack it in if he has nothing to contribute.
He's had his little war on Joe Wilson for two years and he's not man enough to admit where he's wrong or tell the whole story. He's a sorry excuse for a "brave voice."
I just think he needs to run to education and shut up already. It's like Betty said to me, "Who is this prissy white man to lecture to blacks about what is and what isn't racism?"
Prissy old white men seem to feel they know it all about racism.
I told Betty she should invent a twist where Betinna ends up with Bob Somerby so she can take on the "brave liberal voice" who thinks he knows more than she what racism is and isn't. That made her laugh. :D
I need to note her thing she put up Monday because I don't think I got around to doing that.
It's called "From buffets to smokes" and here's a taste of it:
I know they're trying hard for business at "Dollar China" but I wonder what happens when Thomas Friedman leaves?I'm thinking they talk about the "fat assed blow hard."
That was what one old lady called Thomas Friedman today as she struck him repeatedly with her handbag.
"'We deserve to lose.' We deserve to! America hater! Move to Russia!" the elderly woman screamed as she swung the handbag over and over.I marveled at her upper body strength as well as her sheer deterimination.
Later, after Thomas Friedman stopped sobbings, he asked me why I did nothing to come to his aid?"Betinna, it's almost as though you enjoyed it!" he whimpered."
There is a lot of truth to that," I said for fun knowing I could get away with it because Thomas Friedman loves to be quoted.
That was the end of that because already Thomas Friedman was recasting the elderly woman who had accosted him into a young teenager from the Bronx in a "Hello Kitty t-shirt" who was taken with his "manly insight."
There's a lot of Thomas Friedman in Bob Somerby.
Beau wrote back and wanted to note that his favorite of everything C.I.'s done is "Reading Press Releases Live From The Green Zone" and to suggest that everybody read that if they haven't already. Sounds good to me.
thomas friedman
the common ills
thomas friedman is a great man
the new york times
like maria said paz
democracy now
