Via the Raw Story, Naomi Klein explains on the Colbert Report that the Wall Street collapse is merely another planned disaster to rob the nation of even more money and resources and enrich Bush’s friends.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Naomi_Klein_Bush_admin_invented_no_1003.html

Via TPM, the Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report on the U.S. Attorneys firing went on the web today, and it is as damning a picture of the Gonzales DOJ and the Bush administration as anyone could imagine. After this report, it is impossible not to conclude that the DOJ under the Bush administration became a branch of the Republican Party. Here is a short sample from the section on David Iglesias, the US Attorney for New Mexico:

Third, we believe a full investigation is necessary to determine whether other federal criminal statutes were violated with regard to the removal of Iglesias. For example, Iglesias and others have alleged that he was removed in retaliation for his failure to accelerate the indictment of a public corruption case and his alleged failure to initiate voter fraud investigations. Iglesias said that Representative Wilson, who was running for reelection in a close race, called him before the 2006 election and asked him about delays in public corruption cases being handled by his office, apparently referring to the courthouse case. In addition, Iglesias believed that Senator Domenici attempted to pressure him to indict the courthouse case before the election in order to benefit Wilson, and when Iglesias declined to do so Domenici engineered his removal. The evidence we have developed so far shows that Wilson and Domenici in fact called Iglesias shortly before the election, and that the substance of the calls led Iglesias to believe he was being pressured to indict the courthouse case before the upcoming election. Moreover, New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists contacted Iglesias, the Department, and the White House to complain about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud investigations and public corruption cases.

It is possible that those seeking Iglesias’s removal did so simply because they believed he was not competently prosecuting worthwhile cases. However, if they attempted to pressure Iglesias to accelerate his charging decision in the courthouse case or to initiate voter fraud investigations to affect the outcome of the upcoming election, their conduct may have been criminal. The obstruction of justice statute makes it a crime for any person who “corruptly . . . influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct or impede, the due administration of justice . . . .” 18 U.S.C. § 1503(a). While we found no case charging a violation of the obstruction of justice statute involving an effort to accelerate a criminal prosecution for partisan political purposes, we believe that pressuring a prosecutor to indict a case more quickly to affect the outcome of an upcoming election could be a corrupt attempt to influence the prosecution in violation of the obstruction of justice statute. The same reasoning could apply to pressuring a prosecutor to take partisan political considerations into account in his charging decisions in voter fraud matters.

Inspector General’s Report, pp. 199-200.

The report calls for further investigation, in large part because so many persons involved in the decisions to fire the attorneys refused to be interviewed. The list of those who refused includes Karl Rove, Harriet Miers. Monica Goodling, and New Mexico Senator Pete Dominici, In addition, the Inspector General’s investigators were refused White House documents that were relevant to the investigation.

It appears that officials in both the White House and the Department of Justice may have committed multiple criminal acts in collaborating with the firing of Iglesias.

Prosecutions here in Mississippi of Paul Minor and Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz by the U.S. Attorney smack of the same partisan flavor, timed as they were to coincide with the gubernatorial race.

Oliver Diaz was appointed by Governor Ronnie Musgrove to the Mississippi Court of Appeals and then to the Mississippi Supreme Court. In the subsequent election he defeated Republican-supported state judge Keith Starrett, a childhood friend of U. S. Attorney Dunn Lampton. Several months before the ensuing gubernatorial election, Lampton had him indicted for bribery. After he was acquitted of all charges, Lampton unsealed a further indictment against him and his wife for tax evasion. He was again acquitted on all charges after the jury had met only 15 minutes, but not until after the Feds intimidated his wife into pleading guilty in return for her promise to cooperate in the prosecution of her husband. (she was never called as a witness.)

The prosecution of Diaz follows the pattern followed in other states by federal prosecutors, targeting popular Democratic officeholders, often on vague and ominous charges shortly before close elections. In Diaz's case, it was loans to his campaign by plaintiff lawyer Paul Minor, that the prosecutors claimed influenced Diaz and gave Minor an advantage when his cases came before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The problem with that theory was that Diaz had recused himself on every single case of Minor's and could not have possibly had anything to do with the outcome of Minor's cases.

The Raw Story recently featured an interview with Justice Diaz telling what happened. Every Mississippian with the slightest interest in what is going on in this state should read it:

Diaz: One of the main reasons that I feel that I as an individual was targeted rather than my conduct was targeted was because there were actually other judges that I served with who also had campaigns loans guaranteed by Paul Minor and these judges were not prosecuted. Specifically, the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Edwin Pittman, also had a campaign loan guaranteed by Paul Minor.

The main difference between me and Pittman was that Pittman voted in all of Minor’s cases and even authored opinions that were favorable to Minor and his clients while I did not participate. Now, I am not saying that Pittman did anything wrong. However, I could never understand, and it has never been explained to me, how his conduct and active participation and favorable rulings were ignored and I was indicted and prosecuted for bribery and I had never been involved in Minor’s cases.

The only reasonable explanation seems to be that prosecutors were more interested in specific individuals and not the conduct of an individual. James Thomas (who has since died) was another judge I served with who had a campaign loan guaranteed by Minor. Judge Thomas also participated in Minor’s cases and was not prosecuted. I do not believe, and do not want to be seen as implying, that Thomas did anything inappropriate, just that under similar circumstances I was prosecuted and others were not. Federal prosecutors were fully aware of these other loans but chose not to prosecute them, even though these judges ruled in Minor’s favor in cases before them. Again, I did not participate in any of Minor’s cases and was indicted and tried for bribery [and eventually exonerated]. The only reasonable explanation is that prosecutors were more interested in prosecuting particular individuals.

There are many facets to the story of the events surrounding the much-publicized trial of Diaz, Minor and state trial judges John Whitfield and Wes Teal, and hopefully someone will eventually write a book that weaves together the numerous threads spun by Karl Rove, the Justice Department, Dunn Lampton, and the FBI. When and if the whole story is told, it will likely be revealed as a part of a nationwide project by the Bush administration to use the justice system—judges, prosecutors, and the FBI—to further its own partisan political ends. It will not reflect well on any of the officials involved in the proceedings, least of all District Judge Henry Wingate, whose rulings on critical issues invariably favored the prosecution.

Steve Clemons features a CNN interview worth reading with free-lance writer, filmmaker and photographer Nir Rosen of the New America Foundation on the situation in Iraq. According to Rosen, who has spent two years in Iraq, the Shiites have ethnically cleansed Baghdad of Sunnis, so that it is no longer a Sunni city. Iraq has been completely remade and it has no central government, only warlords. The picture is grim:

FOREMAN: So Nir, we keep hearing reports, though, nonetheless out of Baghdad. People saying that give us time, we are trying to get this government worked out. We are going to make some progress. Do you see any way that can happen?

ROSEN: No. This has been the case for the past ... two years at least. There is no hope. There is no government. Neither side is interested in compromise and why should they? The Shias control Baghdad. They have removed the Sunnis from Baghdad, from Iraq's political future.

FOREMAN: What's going to change that if anything?

ROSEN: Nothing is going to change that.

It will be interesting to see how General Petraeus manages to spin that reality in the coming weeks.

Yes, I know, this is not exactly hot news. You didn't need me to tell you Gonzales quit, since it was splashed all over the mainstream media and the blogosphere in great detail.

I must eat humble crow as a prognosticator, however, having offered to bet anyone that Gonzales would leave the day that Bush leaves. I was flat wrong. I remained silent until now, because I didn't understand why I was so wrong. I still don't and neither the MSM or the blogosphere has helped to enlighten me.

Greg Palast believes that Karl Rove quit in order to work his dark magic for the next Republican presidential candidate, but I am skeptical of that explanation, since Rove's magic has dramatically faded in the last couple of years. That explanation, even if true for Rove, wouldn't explain Gonzales's exit, since Gonzales has no marketable skills beyond his willingness to betray every principle he swore to uphold if ordered by his boss to do so.

I briefly considered what one might call the Lew Alcindor substitution. As a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill, I watched UCLA, on March 3, 1968, crush UNC for the NCAA Mens Division basketball championship. Most humiliating, though, was Alcindor's being taken out of the game long before it was over. Perhaps Bush is demonstrating that he doesn't need Gonzales any more—that he can act with impunity for the rest of the game without having the nations' chief prosecutor in his hip pocket.

The Alcindor explanation doesn't make much sense, either. Gonzales was Bush's insurance policy that covered his whole administration and he will not get another Gonzales confirmed by the Senate, even with the Democrats as feckless as they have been since returning to majority status.

It is difficult to believe that Gonzales left to avoid impeachment or because he was about to be indicted. He's the attorney general of the United States; without a special prosecutor, there is no way he will be indicted by his own department. The Democrats lack a sufficient majority in the Senate to remove Gonzales even if the House of Representatives voted to impeach.

Sidney Bumenthal, Writing in Salon, contends that Rove was the puppeteer pulling Gonzales's strings:

From the beginning of his rise with George W. Bush until the day of his abrupt resignation, Alberto Gonzales was anointed, directed and protected by Karl Rove. At the Department of Justice, Gonzales served as Rove's figurehead. In the real line of authority, the attorney general, a constitutional officer, reported to the White House political aide. Bush did not nickname Gonzales "Fredo," after the weak brother in "The Godfather," without reason.

As White House counsel and attorney general, Gonzales operated as the rubber stamp of the two great goals of the Bush presidency -- the concentration of unaccountable power in the executive and the subordination of executive departments and agencies to partisan political imperatives. Vice President Cheney directed the project for the imperial presidency, while Rove took charge of the top-down politicization of the federal government. Gonzales dutifully signed memos abrogating the Geneva Conventions against torture, calling them "quaint," and approved the dismissal of U.S. attorneys for insufficient partisan zeal.

Thus when Rove left, goes the argument, Gonzales the puppet collapsed.

There may be some truth in this. Gonzales is clearly not the sharpest tack in the box, and his usefulness to the Bush administration largely rested on his unswerving loyalty and obedience to Bush, Cheney and Rove.

Still, there is something extremely odd about all these people close to the president leaving 17 months before the end of the administration that makes me feel that there is more to these departures than what has been said up to now. Too many dogs are not barking in the night. This blogger is not privy to what Washington whispers, but something tells me that Gonzales's departure is related to Rove's departure and that this is a big deal.

Time will tell.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove is resigning from the Bush Administration to spend more time with his family.

Of course, we all believe what he told Paul Gigot—that he sincerely desires more quality time with his family back in Texas.

We also believe that pigs fly.

Addicts to power don't resign voluntarily, and Mr. Rove certainly qualifies as such an addict, along with nearly everyone of significance in the White House. It therefore goes without saying that Mr. Rove was asked to resign by George W. Bush, and, given Bush's friendship and almost total reliance on Rove for political advice—which in this strange government has come to mean the same as policy advice—Bush's decision to dump Rove portends a political development of tectonic magnitude.

It is unlikely that Rove is being let go for failing to win the 2006 elections, or that his policies might lead the Republican Party to disaster in 2008. Bush is a lame duck president and, besides having nothing to lose in 2008, has shown no dissatisfaction with Rove's shortcomings.

It briefly crossed my mind that Bush, approaching the end of his presidency, is contemplating how to make the transition from controversial and almost universally loathed psychopath into a widely-admired, wise elder statesman, and may have realized that being closely associated with the junkyard dog that is Karl Rove is rapidly becoming a liability. This is unlikely, however, because Bush doesn't operate that way. Rove's strategy was the major reason that Bush became president, and Bush has shown a mafia-like loyalty to his friends and benefactors far beyond what one would reasonably expect from a person with his sense of entitlement. Bush wouldn't have fired Rove unless he absolutely had to.

Besides, Rove knows all the White House dirt, especially since he is responsible for much of it. Given Congress's complacency towards Bush's known impeachable acts, it is difficult to imagine anything that Karl Rove might reveal that would make much difference. Some offenses, however, while not as damaging to the constitutional fabric as Bush's expansion of executive power, have the power, if revealed, to provoke such a degree of popular outrage on the gut level that the resulting outcry would compel Congress to act. Since Rove undoubtedly has knowledge of such behavior on the part of Bush, Cheney and others, Bush would not fire him lightly, irrespective of any feelings of loyalty.

There is a strong possibility that Rove has good reason to know that the Bush administration is about to sink and that he had best jump before he goes under with the rest of the crew. As one of the principal navigators responsible for sailing the ship of state into an iceberg, he stands to shoulder much of the blame when it goes down.

Whatever the reason for Rove's departure, this is a big deal. We just don't know quite yet how big.

The Senate caved, giving our current lying, justice obstructing, lackey of an attorney general even more power than ever to spy on Americans without judicial supervision or even permission. What are our senators scared of that they would allow this, even for six months? Why should this authoritarian administration be given any more power over anything? Should we even be paying our senators' (or representatives') salaries if they jump whenever the president says "frog"? They are rapidly becoming useless parasites.

I am utterly disgusted and pessimistic. This really seemed like a no-brainer.

Update: Democrat Gene Taylor, U. S. Representative from the 4th District of Mississippi (Gulf Coast) voted for this abominable bill, which was passed by the House yesterday. Thanks, Gene, for giving away some more of our freedoms under the pretense of protecting them. You failed us utterly.

Representative Bennie Thompson did the right thing.

Republicans Lott, Cochran, Wicker and Pickering voted like the administration whores they are, which came as no surprise whatever.

House of Representatives Roll Call Vote

Senate vote not available on Thomas

Over the past six months, even the power elite-serving NY Times has come to realize that the attorney general is a liar, an obstructor of justice, and, in general, a knave. To most of us, this was obvious six years ago, but one must make allowances for the politically-challenged.

This week was the last straw. Gonzales gave the finger to the Congress and the rest of the nation and Bush ratified that finger. The president should fire Gonzalez, and if he doesn't the solicitor general should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate him. If that doesn't happen, then Congress should impeach.

As far as we can tell, there are three possible explanations for Mr. Gonzales’s talk about a dispute over other — unspecified — intelligence activities. One, he lied to Congress. Two, he used a bureaucratic dodge to mislead lawmakers and the public: the spying program was modified after Mr. Ashcroft refused to endorse it, which made it “different” from the one Mr. Bush has acknowledged. The third is that there was more wiretapping than has been disclosed, perhaps even purely domestic wiretapping, and Mr. Gonzales is helping Mr. Bush cover it up.

Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by fulfilling that request.

If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.

New York Times: Mr. Gonzales's Never-Ending Story

It has been difficult to write about the crisis in Washington, D.C. these last few days; the possible outcomes are too awful to contemplate.

Bush has finally demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that he is not simply a bad president, but a knave, and that there is nothing he will not do to preserve his power and the power of his close supporters. That much of the mass media have not yet reached this conclusion—at least openly—is testimony to its stupidity and corruption.

For the first time in a political career notable for lack of compassion towards convicts, Bush has commuted Scooter Libby's sentence long before his conviction has been affirmed on appeal, for the obvious reason that that the sound of the cell doors closing behind him might have persuaded Libby to spill the beans on Karl Rove, vice president, Dick "Go fuck yourself" Cheney, or even the president himself.

With a sufficient robo-Republican minority in the Senate Bush can defeat any impeachment proceedings, We hanged Nazis at Nürnberg for doing exactly what Bush has done: attacking a nation that was no threat to either its neighbors or the United States. If he cannot be impeached for lying the nation into an illegal war he is virtually immune from being removed from office, no matter how heinous his crimes

Since the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia is charged with prosecuting contempt of Congress charges, Bush, through his buddy Gonzales, can squech any efforts by Congress to enforce its subpoenas through the judicial system.

That leaves only the inherent contempt power of Congress, which can send its sergeant-at-arms to arrest a recalcitrant official and haul him/her before the appropriate chamber to be held in contempt. Anyone want to make bets on what will happen if the sergeant-at-arms of the house attempts to arrest Karl Rove or Dick Cheney? The thought of such a confrontation is enough to sicken this constitutionalist and small-r republican.

The nation is presently as close to a coup as it has ever been. The institutions of our government are being stressed to the breaking point.

Let us pray that they hold.

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency begins today in the Washington Post. I'll be making comments on this series as I have the opportunity to study it more carefully, but it looks to be very interesting. Cheney is truly unique in the annals of the U.S. presidency; no other VP has exerted the influence over the president and the power over the executive branch as he has. No vice president has been so secretive and gotten away with it.

Remember one caviat: Over the past six years the Washington Post has printed most of its political ink in support of the Bush Administration, including some of its most idiotic and counterproductive policies. The really important information to be conveyed by these articles will be the information that is left out.

We wrote in 2000:

Jungian psychology often refers to the "shadow," meaning that part of the personality that is rejected and repressed but which still exists and exerts a deep influence upon the conscious ego. Likewise, organizations may be usefully imagined as casting a corporate shadow--institutional issues and facts that by tacit agreement don't exist in the corporate consciousness. It's easy to ascertain the shadow of your own organization; make a list of issues, events and things that cannot be mentioned, let alone discussed. Often these unmentionables are extremely important to the life of the organization, and ignoring them can spell institutional disaster, either from within or without. Nevertheless, the organization achieves a stable identity, a corporate ego, by denying and refusing to consider issues, events and things that threaten the corporate identity. Like the human ego, the corporate ego perceives the raising of those issues as a threat to its very existence and reacts in ways that from the outside often seem irrational and self-destructive. What is being preserved is not the organization but its ego, which has identified itself with the whole organization.

Like corporations, like governments.

One of my favorite journalists, Greg Palast, has recently related to Buzzflash how the Republicans stole the 2000 and 2004 elections and how they are planning to steal the election in 2008. He also had some suggestions on how the nation might overcome this vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the votes of millions of Democratic voters. It will take work.

Of course, the Republicans must nominate somebody that's electable, and the present herd of contenders is pitiful at best.

On the other hand, it was obvious in 2000 that George W. Bush had absolutely nothing to bring to the presidency beyond his family name, but, nevertheless, a shade under half the electorate was willing not only to overlook his monumental shortcomings but to invest him with virtues he did not even remotely possess. One can only hope that the electorate is wiser as well as sadder now that it has become impossible to ignore the bitter fruits of its willful foolishness bordering on collective insanity.

Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild in an updated paperback edition. The JP has reviewed the original edition.

Read Palast's interview with Buzzflash.

More Republicans are telling Gonzales that it's time for him to go. Senator Schumer (D-NY) predicts a no-confidence vote, but doesn't say exactly when. The latest Republican senator calling for Gonzales's scalp is that boneless wonder of American politices, chief stealth legislative enabler of the U. S. Attorney firing scandel, whose statesmanlike words and protestations of outrage are belied by his record of voting in lockstep with all that Bush and his minions have decreed, Senator Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania. And Specter is one of the better Republican senators on a scale of integrity and honesty.

You read it here: Gonzales will cease to be the attorney general of the United States on the day that George W. Bush ceases to be president, which is almost certain to be January 20, 2009.

The reason (for the tenth time): Bush, Cheney and Rove are toast if Gonzales goes. A Democratic congress will not confirm another Gonzalez willing to obstruct justice the way Gonzales has. The next attorney general will not have as his raison d'etre the protection at all costs of Bush and Company. So don't look for Gonzales to be replaced.

The media are playing games with the American public over this issue.

I've been following an interesting discussion on TPM Cafe on the growing U. S. Attorney scandal, What Was the U. S. Attorney Purge Meant to Achieve?, and also on FireDogLake: The Math, which correlates the firings with the electoral map.

Everyone has their own theory about why those six were fired, but here are the principal ones:

• 
  
• To make way for administration-favored lawyers to pad their resumes with the prestigious position. This is one of the reasons advanced by the administration;
• 
  
• To eliminate attorneys not willing to bring frivolous voter fraud cases against Democrats shortly before elections. The fact that most of the fired attorneys were located in highly contested states supports this thesis;
• 
  
• To kill investigations and prosecutions of Republicans for corruption and install U. S. Attorneys who would instead prosecute Democrats;
• 
  
• This is related to the previous reason: To stop Carol Lamm, U. S. Attorney in San Diego, from further investigations and prosecutions of Republican corruption. Under this theory, the remaining firings were merely a smokescreen to obscure the real objective of the administration, which feared that Lamm would follow the trail of corruption higher and higher in the administration.
• 
  

One can be sure that all of these reasons played a part in the administration's decision, but the firing of Carol Lamm is the one most directly related to an immediate threat to the Bush regime. Lamm had already put U. S. Representative Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in jail for bribery. She was investigating corruption related to the Cunningham case and in the top levels of the C.I.A. Without a Republican-dominated Congress to ignore or whitewash the Bushites' crimes, the threat posed by Lamm's investigations was simply too dangerous to allow it to continue, irrespective of the political fallout. Apparently Lamm was taking Deep Throat's advice to follow the money, and if this administration and its political party is about anything at all, it's about money. And property. Cunningham attempted to conceal his payoff through a mansion that he sold at an inflated price for considerably more that it was worth.

Corruption on a grand scale cannot be hidden without an infrastructure of corrupt law enforcement that ignores graft and abuses of power and concentrates its resources on red herrings like voter fraud or election fraud. The current federal prosecution of Paul Minor and two judges for bribery here in Jackson is a typical example of what the Bushites like. Minor, a wealthy trial lawyer, has been contributing to Democratic campaigns for many years, so a conviction on just one count would tar the image of the plaintiffs' bar and eliminate Minor's influence in future elections. Since one of the financial mainstays of the Democratic party is plaintiffs' lawyers, anything that reduces their influence or income helps the Republicans. Thus the intense lobbying for tort "reform" designed to eliminate the large judgments that have allowed the trial lawyers to be a political force on behalf of the common man. Interestingly enough, the prosecutors in the Minor trial are from the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. This is an important case for the Bushites.

For that reason, it is highly unlikely that Bush will fire his longtime crony Gonzales, no matter how much heat he takes. Gonzales is the one official that can protect Bush, Cheney, Rove and the rest of the criminal conspiracy from exposure. Gonzales is the one official that can prevent an FBI investigation or kill one that comes too close. Bush will throw all his other minions under the bus before he fires Gonzales, because a Democratic Senate will not confirm another Gonzales. This is so important that it bears repeating:

A Democratic Senate will not confirm another Gonzales.

As long as Bush can control the Justice Department, the only remedy for his crimes is impeachment, and although Bush's crimes might be heinous and proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there are not enough Republicans in the Senate with the integrity, intelligence, or courage to vote for impeachment.

Under those circumstances, Bush would have to be even stupider that I thought to fire Gonzales. I don't think he's that stupid.

By way of Aziz Huq at the Huffington Post, Bush in his speech the other day used the royal pronoun:

Incidentally, in the "is-it-funny or scary" category, I note that President Bush in his address commented that U.S. attorneys are "decent people. They serve at our pleasure."

That says everything, doesn't it?

There is an insurgency. The Sunnis, formerly in power in the Baathist regime, are major players in the campaign against the American occupation. The Shia are more circumspect, mainly because the U.S. is tilting towards them and they are a majority.

The question arises: Why don't the Sunnis and Shiites temporarily make up until the U.S. troops leave, after which they can fight it out or come to terms with each other? Nothing would be more persuasive of withdrawal than a united Iraqi government that pacifies Iraq and gives the Americans no reason to stay. In other words, to get the U.S. forces out of Iraq, the different sides must bury their differences and unite. The logic is impeccable. Iraqis are not so stupid or so blinded by religious prejudice that they don't see this, and it is foolish to think otherwise.

So what's the problem? Why are the Iraqis, especially the Sunnis, so hostile to the U.S. and the Shia when all they have to do is come together and ask the U.S. to leave?

It's because no one in Iraq believes that the U.S. intends to ever leave. Accepting this proposition changes the political equation drastically in terms of how each side calculates the costs and benefits of each course of action.

If the U.S. forces stay in Iraq, the U.S. will not allow a sovereign and strong democratic government to rule Iraq, because the first thing a popular government will do is ask the U.S. to leave. Once the U.S. leaves, it will then do whatever is necessary to appropriate its vast oil resources for the benefit of Iraq and the Iraqi people, not for the benefit of the international oil corporations like ExxonMobil and BP.

Second, the withdrawal of U.S. forces will ultimately lead to Iraqi sovereignty over the oil fields, even if a civil war intervenes. Whoever comes out on top will take over the oil industry in Iraq. This would be true even if another bloodthirsty dictator like Saddam Hussein seizes power.

It is good bet that Bush plans never to leave Iraq. The U.S. is constructing huge bases, which clearly points to a long-term occupation whose object is the control of Iraq's oil, either to assure the U.S. a stable supply of oil (the popular view), or to keep Iraq from driving down the price of oil, which would hurt the oil companies that are the mainstay of the Bush administration.

Under those circumstances, what is the logical strategy for the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds, given the assumption that the Bush administration plans to occupy Iraq indefinitely?

The Kurds, under the present situation, can have their cake and eat it, too. They control the north, which includes the major oil fields around Kirkuk, and they have been left alone by the U.S. for the most part. Their long-term objectives are independence and appropriation of oil revenues from the oil fields in their region. At the moment, they are getting neither, but they can afford to wait. The U.S will not permit exclusive Kurdish control of the oil fields and Turkey will not permit an independent Kurdish state. Having been given a free reign in their area, they can afford to wait and watch what happens in the south. They clearly have no interest in a unified Iraq under the control of any central government. Having been betrayed over and over by every nation around them, including the U.S., they are not inclined to trust anyone for their security.

The Shiites, although they want the U.S. to leave eventually, are politically in a strong position. They form the majority of the population. The U.S. has handed the government over to them, but they are discovering that there is little substance to the government they have been given. At best, this is a relatively quiet interlude in which they can position themselves to suppress the Sunnis and Baathists when the Americans leave. They can afford to bide their time.

The Sunnis, on the other hand, have nothing to gain from any possible scenario that the U.S. would allow in Iraq. They can expect nothing but oppression under the Shiites or the Kurds, whom they oppressed under Saddam. They are being ethnically cleansed from their neighborhoods in Baghdad. They have been all but banned from participation in the puppet government. The only course of action left to them is to drive the U.S. out of Iraq using the resources available to them, and those resources have turned out to be formidable indeed. It is likely that Saddam's general staff is intact, as well as the command structure of his secret police. They would be in a good position to seize power when the U.S. leaves.

This puts the Bushites in an impossible position. There is simply no way to squelch the insurgency short of putting 500,000 troops on the ground, and even that number is probably insufficient. A draft (which isn't going to happen, now that Congress is Democratic) would take years to produce a sufficient number of trained combat troops. The "surge" now being executed by Bush is no more than a stunt and would be almost comical were it not for the extreme gravity of the current situation.

In addition to the four parties mentioned above—U.S. forces, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds—there two other groups that have an interest and an influence on what happens in Iraq: private contractors and the major oil companies.

This is the first war in which practically all support functions have been privatized, to include a sizable contingent of combat personnel--mercenaries, in other words. The largest corporations, such as Halliburton, Dyncorp, and Bechtel are only the visible tip of the iceberg. They are raking in literally billions and tens of billions of dollars on this war and thus they have a strong interest in keeping it going as long as possible with as little oversight over spending as they can arrange. They have influence in Washington, especially in the White House, which has used the contracts as a form of patronage, granting them without bidding and awarding them only to Republicans. They are a strong force pushing the administration to stay the course.

The other party with a stake in the Iraq War is big oil, which has experienced its largest profits in history from the rise in energy prices. They don't need Iraq's oil assets, at least for now. In fact, they want Iraqi oil to stay out of the world market, where it has the potential to cause a collapse in oil prices. Greg Palast has written extensively on this subject and the evidence he brings to the table is persuasive that Iraq's oil has been the subject of a political battle between the neocons, who want to auction off the oil fields to private companies, and the major oil companies, who want a single Iraqi oil company that can control production and play the price game. They don't want the oil so much as they want to control production. They would be happy with a puppet government in Iraq.

There is one more party in this war that I nearly forgot: the American public, which has had quite enough of the war and is finally beginning to see through all the deception and lies used to gain public consent to the invasion. The public now wants the war to be over and no longer believes that the war is worth all the death, suffering and sacrifice that is being asked of it. Barring a meltdown in the Democratic party over the next two years, the public will elect a Democrat for president and a strongly Democratic house and senate that will end the war on whatever terms it can get.

Bush, his administration and his corporate masters will never attain their objective: a puppet government in Iraq able to keep order and which permits the major oil corporations to control its oil fields. Such an outcome would have been difficult to attain under the best of circumstances by a competent, corruption-free American government. Not only has Bush violated international law in attacking a nation that was no threat to the U.S., a crime for which we hanged Nazis after WWII, but in his utter incompetence and his indifference to gross and widespread corruption, he has thrown away any opportunities the invasion might have presented. The American occupation of Iraq is now on course to a catastrophic, costly, and bitter end. An attack on Iran will only hasten the end in Iraq and even in Afghanistan.

A first-class post in the Daily Kos by ordinary expat explains how neocons, Christian fundamentalists and proto-fascists have written our nation's current story to their advantage and to our extreme prejudice.

Our story tells us who we are as a people. It delineates our values. It assigns us a place among the nations of the earth.

It also designates and characterizes our enemies. Whom we call enemies and what we think about the people, groups and nations that we call enemies is part of our story and it defines us just as much as what we call ourselves. It may be even more accurate, since the enemy is as much projection of our own unacknowledged dark side as it is an objective description of the actual enemy.

It's always been the philosophy of the JP that when intelligent people seem to be doing everything wrong and failing egregiously in what they are supposed to be doing, you are probably judging their behavior by the wrong scoring system. Ordinary expat contends that Iraq (and now Iran) are just so much meat thrown to the ignorant masses to distract from their real objective.

We have made it clear that most of us can be entertained forever by a cartoon reality that reduces the real complexity of life to the level of the Simpsons, --or Rush Limbaugh. We’re the market, folks. BCR Inc. just supplies the product.

It worked for a long time- it kept us occupied, and, with well-chosen archetypes as key parts of the story, it provided apparent justification for a raft of moves that consolidated executive power to an unprecedented degree. Now it is failing as a story. Now resistance to further power accumulation is growing. They need a new story. That will be Iran.

The only remedy to this state of affairs is to stop allowing BCR, Inc. (Bush, Cheney and Rove — convenient symbols for the fascist kleptocracy that is in control of the executive branch) to write our story for us. We can do this only by writing our own story, a story based on reality. This is all the more important since members of the power elite (BCR, Inc.) eventually come to believe the story they originally foisted upon us, a story divorced from reality.

Isolated and unable to think out of the box- in a real systems fashion- the theocon and the cynical pol share the huge blind spot of coming to think their own fabricated stories ARE reality, instead of sucker bait. Fortunately for us, there is a wider world, a world where, after enough public catastrophe and elite contempt, Mussolini ends up strung up on a lamppost. A wider world view that makes a fair try at including the complexities of human society works better. It is still very flawed, but the secular, early systems thinking that brought us the US Constitution, quantum theory and the French health care system worked. We need to stop wasting time chewing on the bait BCR inc. throws us.

Read the article and ponder.

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Open Democracy, presents a sad and sobering narrative of the events leading up to Bush's embracing of a "surge," rather than seeking a diplomatic and political solution to the Iraq quagmire. Three facts stand out: 1. Bush is incapable of admitting mistakes, either in strategy or policy, and he is incapable altering his course in response to evidence of failure; 2. Brent Scowcraft, a prominent member of the commission, had pinned his hopes on Condi Rice to talk the president into following the commission's recommendations; and, 3. Cheney and the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute still have the president's ear, along with the major share of influence over Bush's foreign policy.

Blumenthal's description of Rice as an enabler for Bush is an astute characterization of a relationship that is looking more and more like a destructive psychological codependency

Bush is not an unintelligent man, but the incontrovertible evidence before our very eye compels the conclusion that he is a fool at best and a dangerous psychopath at worst. The damage he has done to the nation and the world cannot begun to be repaired until he leaves office.

Sidney Blumenthal: Washington's Political Cleansing

It looks as though George W. Bush and his chickenhawk coterie are determined to fight to our last drop of blood in Iraq (and possibly Iran and other parts further east).

I'm trying to determine just which American values the newly-passed torture bill doesn't offend. Orcinus makes a compelling case that this nation is rapidly sinking into fascism:

The appearance of legal torture as part of the American landscape is a profound change, and certainly signals the approach of the totalitarian state, though it may not herald its actual arrival. And considering that a right-wing regime is involved, discussing the specter of fascism is not only appropriate but necessary.

Even if it does not signal the actual arrival of fascism, it's the clearest warning sign of its approach yet. Torture is a quintessentially fascist act; codifying it means that the massive brick in the wall that it represents has been plunked into place. And it's the kind of brick that can be the cornerstone of a massive national pathology of apocalyptic proportions.

After all, they have always had ways of making us talk. Now they have the legal power to do so too.

It is simply incomprehensible that some right-wing, supposedly "Christian" organizations publicly approve of torture, as long as the persons tortured are "them," and not "us." It all goes to prove the proposition that churches (or any other religious bodies) should never be permitted to have political power; they cannot resist the third temptation of Christ. Mat. 4: 8-10:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
           ‘Worship the Lord your God,
                     and serve only him.’ ” (NRSV)

I am ashamed to say that I have not heard a word about the torture bill from the pulpit of my own mainstream church.

Tags: torture, legislation, fascism, Geneva, Christian

Imagine that the words "terrorism" and "terrorist" were stripped from our language and even our memory and we had only our remaining vocabulary to describe them. What words would we use? Insurgents/insurgency? Guerillas/guerilla warfare? Jihadists/Jihad? Partisans/resistance?

None of the substitutes evokes the same feelings as "terrorism" and "terrorist," although the substitutes might describe them more accurately. It is because the terms insurgent, guerilla, jihadist and partisan are far more concrete and specific. The administration has refused to tell us just what a terrorist is, for two very good reasons:

First, it gives the president the unprecedented and unchecked discretion to label a person a terrorist and deprive him of the protections of the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. That degree of power we usually associate with a dictatorship, not a republic.

Second, and more importantly, terrorism only has power when we give it power—by projecting our own shadow onto an enemy about which we know very little. Terrorism makes us fearful because it resists definition, and that is no accident. It is difficult, if not impossible, to project such evils onto ordinary men and women or even insurgents or jihadists. The target of projection cannot be too familiar, because projection becomes impossible in such a situation. Demonized persons are too likely to turn into real people when we come to know them.

Strictly speaking, a terrorist is one who strikes with the primary purpose of making us fearful. For him, the deaths of the innocent are a secondary consideration. If he fills us with terror, he succeeds, because fearful people are people whose judgment is impaired. Fearful people are easily manipulated by crafty politicians against their own interests.

When we refuse to be afraid of the terrorist, he is utterly defeated. We don't have to lift a finger.

There is no rational reason to be fearful of a terrorist attack. The danger to the average American citizen of a terrorist attack is miniscule. There are too many other things that deserve our attention. Yes, there is a small possibility that one might be killed by a terrorist, but one is far more likely to die in an automobile accident or even from influenza.

So ask yourself, has Bush or his minions even once told the American people not to fear? To be of good courage? To keep a stiff upper lip?

No. At every opportunity he has stoked that fear. He has no interest in defeating the terrorists or wiping out terrorism. It took serious creative work on the part of countless politicians, military officers, right-wing think tanks, television networks, and neocons to create an enemy evil and mysterious enough to replace communism and the Soviet Union, which may be one of the reasons that Bush chose not to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Why kill a perfectly serviceable enemy that can be recycled over and over to scare the American public, whose short and selective memory makes it so susceptible to this kind of repeated demagoguery?

H.L. Mencken said it best:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, also comes to mind.

Tags: terrorism, terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, courage, projection

According to the New York Times, George W. Bush took "full responsibility" for the slow federal response to the Katrina disaster. Apology accepted, Captain Bush.

On a more serious note, Bush's acceptance of responsibility reminds me of Richard Nixon's acceptance of responsibility for the Watergate mess: words meant to sound repentant but spoken with no intention of doing anything different or correcting the behavior that caused the problem.

Acceptance of responsibility means more than merely mouthing words; it means that one willingly bears the just consequences of one's malfeasance or nonfeasance, which in this case ought to be the loss of office and the disgrace that ordinarily accompanies such a breach of trust.

Nixon wouldn't resign until impeachment and loss of office were inevitable. It looks like Bush is following the same philosophy: apologize but stay the course.

Today is the day when the nation's mind turns to Katrina, the lives lost, the inconceivable destruction--not only of people's homes but also their hopes and dreams--and profound disappointment and disgust at the response of the Bush administration before and after the catastrophe. In every single aspect, Bush failed. Even the administration's spinmeisters were incompetent. The usual CYA propaganda from Washington was not on