Inmigration

Iraq for Sale Banned Excerpts

I Send Letters

I have a plan -- give GW Bush what he wants (no timeline), but put a few even more (from his point of view) odious restrictions, which don't deny the troops money for a fiscal year (and in fact make sure our troops don't go into bankruptcy), but which put him on the spot.

Here's my letter to my Congresscritter and the Dem. Sen. from our state. Those of you who live in localities in which your Representatives and Senators are more likely than mine are to actually care about the Dem. party, the troops or whatever, feel free to use this or some better re-written version thereof:

I fear, either due to the failure of Democrats to stay on message or due to the fact that the media seems to report only what the President is saying (and hence his spin) and not what Democrats are actually saying, that those of us, who are concerned about indefinitely funding the war in Iraq despite a lack of progress, will be seen by too many people as not supporting the troops. Having recently seen the movie "Maxed Out" (the concerns in this movie being those we must address now!), I have an idea that I think might work for an alternate bill.

There are soldiers whose service has led to their bankruptcies, due to the military extending terms of service and otherwise interfering with the financial security of our fighting men and women. That soldiers, who are fighting in Iraq, are entering into bankruptcy because of their service, is deplorable. Yet, too many, including those who oppose Democratic plans to bring our troops home, who claim to be supporting our troops have done nothing about this.

Here's my plan: the Democrats send a bill to the President that funds the war for a fiscal year. No riders, no nothing non-war related. Just fund the war for a fiscal year -- with stringent requirements that the President must report on the war (written such that if the President fails in these requirements, he will be guilty of a high crime and hence y'all should impeach him) at regular intervals, which reports should (1) include a televised "Prime Minister's Questions" style opportunity for even back-benchers to get the President and his associates on the record and (2) include testimoney and or statements made UNDER OATH (thus, if these turn out to be lies, the President should be impeached due to perjury) regarding the progress of the war and answers to questions about the lead up to the war. And here's the kicker -- the bill should include a "shared sacrifice" provision taxing profits from credit card companies who are collecting on our brave fighting men and women due to debts they accrued that they wouldn't have accrued if they weren't overseas.

The President will threaten a veto. Democrats should unanimously respond -- "look we gave you what you wanted, and now you want more? I guess there is no satisfying a bully" and "why are you afraid to talk to us? if you aren't guilty, what do you have to hide? that's what y'all said about wiretapping and such, right?" Through it back in their faces using simple folksy language. And when the credit card companies and their retainers complain about the "shared sacrifice" provision -- make 'em look like evil troop-hating bastards. Don't be afraid to play politics -- that's why we pay you the big bucks ;)

Public debt is a big problem and the pushers are part of that problem. Let's give 'em all a one-two punch. The GOP has played dirty. The economic overclass has played dirty. Let's show them some good ol' fashioned heartland populism. And when they complain about us "starting a class war" -- don't listen to them and don't be cowed. They know who started it -- and the more they complain, the more frightened we know they are.

As Harry Truman could have told us, Democrats only do well when the act as Democrats. The American people gave our party a chance last November. Now we need to show them what we can do in time for the 2008 elections. Right now the President somehow is controlling the message ... so let's send him a bill which goes around his spin and puts him, and his corporate cronies, on the spot.

ADMINISTRATION -- WHITE HOUSE HAS TROUBLE FILLING SENIOR POSITIONS

"The Bush administration is facing growing difficulties in filling a rising number of high-level vacancies following a recent spate of senior departures. In the last 10 days alone Mr Bush has lost four senior officials and more resignations are expected to follow."

Recent administration officials who have left include J.D. Crouch, deputy head of the national security council; Randall Tobias, who left after it was revealed he used call-girl services; Dinah Habib Powell, the administration's senior-most Arab-American; and Timothy Adams, a top Treasury Department official.

Today, Johnnie Burton of the Interior Department, "who was roundly attacked by Democrats and Republicans in Congress for not aggressively pursuing billions of dollars in royalties from oil and gas companies from their operations in the Gulf," also resigned.

The series of resignations is creating problems for the White House in filling these new vacancies, seen, for example, in the difficulty Bush has had in finding a "war czar" to oversee operations in Iraq, spurring questions as to the popularity of his Iraq policies within his own inner circles.

"Republican allies of the president, who are growing increasingly jittery about the rising number of American deaths in Iraq without signs that Washington's 'new way forward' is working, have publicly questioned the rationale for such a job." Privately, President Bush has expressed concerns about the growing number of vacancies.

"The real concern is that the Bush administration is losing its ability to control Iraq policy," said David Frum, a former White House speech writer.

Bush Takes Big Oil Back to the Beach

Last week, officials in the Bush/Cheney Administration announced plans to allow Big Oil to drill in tens of millions of acres of environmentally sensitive waters off the coasts of Virginia, Florida, and Alaska, including Alaska's salmon-rich Bristol Bay, an area closed to drilling after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill.

These waters are home to imperiled whales, sea otters and other wildlife that could be devastated by drilling. Congress has just 60 days to object to this awful plan, so please urge your Senators and Representative to oppose harmful new drilling right now.

ETHICS -- BUSH ADMINISTRATION TARGETED FORMER MINNESOTA U.S. ATTORNEY IN PURGE

McClatchy newspapers reported Thursday that "the Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota, but he left his job voluntarily before the list of attorney to be ousted was completed." Congressional investigators told reporters that they noticed U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger's name "on a version of the list that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, began assembling in early 2005." Heffelfinger, who served as the U.S. attorney for Minnesota from September 2001 to February 2006, resigned more than nine months before the Justice Department finalized their list of prosecutors to purge.

The list with Heffelfinger's name has been examined by congressional investigators, but was not made public in the thousands of pages of documents released by the Justice Department since the investigation into the scandal began. Heffelfinger has previously said that politics were not a factor in his decision to step down, but when asked by McClatchy about the early list, he said he "had no indication whatsoever at any point during my service as U.S. attorney that anybody at Justice was less than fully satisfied with my work."

He met with Sampson "no less than three times," but says if Sampson had concerns about his performance, "they were never raised." "Heffelfinger's case interests congressional investigators because he worked in one of the states that White House political adviser Karl Rove identified as an escalation battleground, and because he was replaced by a 34-year old Bush administration loyalist who'd been a member of Gonzales' inner circle." Rachel Paulose, Heffelfinger's replacement, has caused turmoil in the Minnesota U.S. attorney's office, where four top staffers voluntarily stepped down in protest of her "highly dictatorial style of managing."

The secret White House comunication system

GWB43 is the name of an internet server owned by the Republican National Committee.

The White House has its own internal email system, ending in the .gov suffix, as mandated by the Presidential Records Act. The law requires that public business be conducted on a public server.

Yet documents made public in the course of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal reveal that key Administration figures used such email addresses ending with "gwb43.com."

As Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) notes:

CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.

Karl Rove, we learn, does about 95% of his White House emailing from the RNC-controlled account, even though 100% of his salary is paid for by taxpayers. It is against the law for him to do partisan political work while in the White House. (During the Clinton years, allegations that Al Gore made phone calls to donors from the premises enraged Republican pundits.)

This writer makes the excellent point that the official White House communications channels are "hardened" against interception by foreign intelligence services. Can the same be said about the private RNC servers?

Did prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald know about this bypass when he subpoenaed White House emails pursuant to the Plamegate investigation? If he had, "Scooter" Libby might not have been the only one brought to trial.

We recently learned that Susan Ralston, the former assistant to Karl Rove, used three private e-mail accounts connected to the Republican party to provide "inside White House" information to Abramoff. Would Rove have been implicated in the Abramoff scandal if investigators knew about these "hidden" communications?

After one Abramoff/Ralston communication, a follow-up email to Jack Abramoff clearly states that people in the White House use private servers to conduct business of dubious legality:

Your email to Susan was forwarded to Ruben Barrales and on to Jen Farley, who read it to me last night. I don't know what to think about this, but she said is better not to put this stuff in writing in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc. Who knows?

This story by Joseph Hughes and Melissa McEwan compiles statements by George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, all of whom have claimed that they do not use email for business. Oddly, Rice made this claim at the same time let slip that she had used email to communicate with Richard Clarke.

Dubya's stated reasoning for not entering the computer age is both disconcerting and inarticulate:

"I tend not to e-mail - not only tend not to e-mail, I don't e-mail, uh, because of, uh, the different record requests that could happen to a president. I don't want to receive e-mails, 'cause, you know, there's no telling what somebody would e-mail me and it would show up as, uh, you know, part of some kind of a story that - and I wouldn't be able to say, 'Well, I didn't read the e-mail' - 'But I sent it your address; how can you say you didn't?' So, in other words, I'm very cautious about e-mailing."

All very amusing, but can we really believe that in the modern age these people do not use the most convenient messaging system available?

Or could it be that all these people recall how Ollie North was tripped up by the discovery of certain emails?

If the Bush White House used GWB43 to route around history, we must ask a question straight out of the Parsifal legends: What is GWB43 and who does it serve?

The answer, surprisingly enough, takes us into the dark mysteries of the 2004 election in Ohio.

A list of domains that share mailservers and nameservers with gwb43 reveals numerous sites connected to either powerful Republicans or to the Religious Right. On the mailserver list, we find domains connected to Bush, Newt Gingrich, and ohiogop.org.

Here is the WHOIS info on GWB43:

Domain Name: GWB43.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:

Republican National Committee dns@RNCHQ.ORG

310 First Street SE

Washington, DC 20003

US

999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 16-Jan-2008.

Record created on 16-Jan-2004.

Database last updated on 21-Mar-2007 17:45:46 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET

A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET

"Trespassers-W.net"? This odd name derives, it seems, from a passage in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, in which the characters try to decipher a truncated sign which once read "Trespassers will be prosecuted." The server, in this case, belongs to a web design firm called Coptix, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

(Incidentally, it is against the law to provide a false telephone number in registration information.)

SMARTECHCORP refers to a hosting service named Smartech, also located in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Their web page is here. They offer internet hosting, streaming media and so forth.

In 2000, Smartech merged with a company called NextLec, a telecommunications firm owned by the remarkable Mercer Reynolds, President Bush's close friend and controversial campaign fundraiser. Reynolds, who raised a record amount during the 2004 campaign, has been accused of selling access to the President.

The name Smartech appeared in stories arising out of the disputed 2004 election in Ohio. From a November 7, 2006 article by luaptifer at Daily Kos:

Ohio's election results are hosted on the same servers by the partisan companies that run websites like Georgewbush.com and many of the familiar Republican group sites.

More (also see here):

SOS Blackwell also neglected to inform that he outsourced Election Night hosting services to the provider of Internet operations for the Republican National Committee, SMARTech Corp. It's clear that most of the IP address space allocated to Smartechcorp, if it has a domain name, is operated by the RNC or its functionaries and allies.

The firm handles everything Republican:

On August 22, 2004, SMARTech Corp (smartechcorp.net) announced that it would be "hosting" the Republican National Convention in New York City, providing "convention speeches, video-on-demand 'streams' and live shots of events through powerful Web servers, most of which are at Smartech’s headquarters in downtown Chattanooga." The announcement stated that the "company also hosts the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site, at www.georgewbush.com, and the national committee’s site, www.GOP.com."

Smartech shows up in this interesting information technology story from 2004, which outlines a still-unsolved mystery.

During election season, web surfers from outside the United States were not able to access Bush's Web site, GeorgeWBush.com, even though surfers within U.S. borders had no problem doing so. Why this oddity, and who was responsible? The site used network management technology from Akamai Technologies Inc. to restrict access. An Akamai spokesman referred all questions to the hosting company, Smartech. Yet Smartech's president said "All we do is host the site. I have no control over what's being done outside our servers."

Why would anyone within the party would want to restrict foreigners from looking at GeorgeWBush.com?

One possible answer: The intention was to restrict foreign intelligence services or CIA personnel (who cannot operate domestically) from learning about sensitive White House communications using the GWB43 server.

So, what does it mean that Ken Blackwell used Smartech for Ohio's election night hosting services?

One does not need to exercise much imagination to see how anyone using the net for nefarious purposes would want a "friendly" hosting company handling ultra-sensitive duties. Hosting companies keep records of who does what. If you are using computers to do something you don't want the world to know about, you don't want those records available to just anyone.

As the controversy over the 2004 elections gathered steam, Karl Rove made a joke about fixing the election returns from a computer in the White House basement. This remark struck some observers as the sort of jest that the villain in Rope might have uttered: "Yeah, sure, I strangled my friend for no good reason and hid his body in the cupboard! Now seriously, how about that drink...?"

The vote tabulators -- the "mother machines" as Teresa Kerry once put it -- had an online connection. Anyone using the internet to interfere with the data stream coming from or going to those computers would be fearful of an electronic "trail" tracking his actions.

Similarly, anyone in the White House using an RNC server to avoid incriminating emails entering the historical record would fear that the records would be subject to a subpoena served upon the hosting company.

That's why someone engaged in such activity would -- hypothetically -- want to use a company owned by the President's good friend. A private company can scrub such records whenever it wishes to do so, or it can neglect to keep them in the first place.

Now, I must stress that I have no evidence that Smartech is anything other than an honest, responsibly-run firm.

Michael Collins, a writer and "clean elections" activist, does not accuse Smartech or any other firm of wrongdoing, but he does offer this hypothetical tableau:

You're in the parallel universe in a country almost exactly like ours and you want to steal an election. How do you do it: You look at: what states are really valuable-now and in the past; your resources in those places of value; your logistical plans - can you execute in those states.

Then you take your goals and apply available technology. It's all about machines, which you can have switch votes, and networked tabulators, centralized tabulators. You get the "servicing" personnel to make sure that the pre-programmed vote switching software driven machines are put in place. Then you use a safe haven ISP as an operations base that will allow your mischief to take place without a lot of record keeping that can't be cleansed.

This is the core - the machines do their thing. You've got a safe haven ISP network provider, and you have the traditional techniques: over registering in favorable voting areas, voter suppression, voter disenfranchisement, and all around psy ops to keep the oppositions vote away.

Voila, you win the election. Who knows if this hypothetical applies? But it's fascinating isn't it?

Iran accuses US over seized diplomat

Gunmen wearing Iraqi uniforms seized an Iranian diplomat in central Baghdad at the weekend, the government in Tehran said today, blaming the kidnapping on troops acting on US orders.

Jalal Sharafi, the second secretary at the Iranian embassy, was seized on Sunday by forces operating "under the supervision of the American forces in Iraq", an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran strongly condemns this aggressive act, which is in violation of international law," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted the spokesman as saying.

"Iran holds American forces in Iraq responsible for the safety and life of the Iranian diplomat."

However, a US military spokesman denied that any of the country's troops, or Iraqis reporting to them, had been involved and said he could not even confirm that the incident had taken place.

"We've checked with our units and it was not an MNF-I [Multi-National Forces - Iraq] unit that participated in that event," Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said.

The incident threatens to further escalate tensions between the US and Iran. Washington accuses Tehran of providing significant support to Shia militants fighting US forces in Iraq - an accusation it vehemently denies.

Last month, US forces detained five Iranians in northern Iraq, accusing them of having links to an Iranian military faction blamed for funding and arming Iraqi militants. Iran insisted they were diplomats and should be released.

An official at the Iranian embassy in Baghdad said Mr Sharafi had been travelling to check on the planned opening of an Iranian bank in the central Karradah area of Baghdad when he was seized by men wearing Iraqi army uniforms.

An Iraqi government official said Iraqi soldiers in two vehicles intercepted the diplomat's car, put him in one of their vehicles and drove off.

Iraqi police, apparently suspecting a kidnap attempt, opened fire on the second vehicle and detained the occupants, who were released into Iraqi military custody yesterday.

According to the Iraqi official, the detained troops were part of an army unit that receives direct orders from the US military.

A US embassy spokesman in Baghdad said he could not confirm the reports. "There appear to be conflicting accounts of this alleged incident, and we are in the process of trying to determine the facts," he added.

The White House has also authorised US troops in Iraq to kill or capture Iranian agents deemed to be a threat.

It claimed there was growing evidence that Iran was supporting terrorists inside Iraq and was a major supplier of bombs and other weapons used to target US forces.

Same Shit - Different Asshole