WikiLeaks cables and the Iraq War

Yet another accomplishment for the leaker of the cables: preventing an agreement to keep troops in Iraq
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday, Oct 23, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war

From a CNN report on why the Iraqi Government rejected the Obama administration’s conditions for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers.

But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment.

The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks’ release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.

That description from CNN of the cable’s contents is, unsurprisingly, diluted to the point of obfuscation. That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, “provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.” The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions.

In other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h/t Trevor Timm). Moreover, whoever leaked these cables — as even virulent WikiLeaks critic Bill Keller repeatedly acknowledged — likely played some significant in helping spark the Arab Spring protests by documenting just how deeply corrupt those U.S.-supported kleptocrats were. And in general, whoever leaked those cables has done more to publicize the corrupt, illegal and deceitful acts of the world’s most powerful factions — and to educate the world about how they behave — than all “watchdog” media outlets combined (indeed, the amount of news reports on a wide array of topics featuring WikiLeaks cables as the primary source is staggering). In sum, whoever leaked those cables is responsible for one of the most consequential, beneficial and noble acts of this generation.

And yet (or more accurately: therefore) the person accused of accomplishing all of this, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned for more than a year without trial, and, if convicted, is almost certain to remain in prison for many more years (with the possibility, albeit unlikely, of death, and as the Obama administration continues to block an unmonitored visit by the U.N. official investigating what had been the inhumane conditions of his detention). If one believes the authenticity of the chat logs produced by Wired, Manning’s goal in leaking those cables — “hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms . . . i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public” – have been fulfilled beyond what must have been his wildest dreams. Assuming the truth of those chat logs, he was motivated precisely by seeing cables of the sort that detailed this civilian slaughter and subsequent cover-up in Iraq, and the extreme levels of theft and oppression by Arab dictators, and the desire to have the world know about it. Meanwhile, those responsible for the Iraq War, and who suppressed freedom and democracy in the Middle East by propping up those tyrants, and who committed a slew of other illegal and deeply corrupt acts, continue to prosper and wield substantial power.

History is filled with examples of those who most bravely challenged and subverted corrupted power and who sought reforms being rewarded with prison or worse, at the hands of those whose bad actions they exposed. If Bradley Manning did leak these cables, his imprisonment is a prime example of that inverted justice.

Never Forget: Bad Wars Aren't Possible Unless Good People Back Them

Today's OpenMike blog by Michael Moore September 15, 2010

I know we've been "free" of the Iraq War for two weeks now and our minds have turned to the new football season and Fashion Week in New York. And how exciting that the new fall TV season is just days away!

But before we get too far away from something we would all just like to forget, will you please allow me to just say something plain and blunt and necessary:

We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to.

Of course the actual blame for the war goes to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz because they ordered the "precision" bombing, the invasion, the occupation, and the theft of our national treasury. I have no doubt that history will record that they committed the undisputed Crime of the (young) Century.

But how did they get away with it, considering they'd lost the presidential election by 543,895 votes? They also knew that the majority of the country probably wouldn't back them in such a war (a Newsweek poll in October 2002 showed 61% thought it was "very important" for Bush to get formal approval from the United Nations for war -- but that never happened). So how did they pull it off?

They did it by getting liberal voices to support their war. They did it by creating the look of bipartisanship. And they convinced other countries' leaders like Tony Blair to get on board and make it look like it wasn't just our intelligence agencies cooking the evidence.

But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the Vice President's office.

I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times -- and the rest of the press -- was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business -- and then inform the public so we can take action.

Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could -- and did -- say, 'Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!'

With this groundwork laid, the Bush crowd ended up convincing a whopping 70% of the public to support the war -- a public that had given him less than 48% of its vote in 2000.

Early liberal support for this war was the key ingredient in selling it to a majority of the public. I realize this is something that no one in the media -- nor most of us -- really wants to discuss. Who among us wants to feel the pain of having to remember that liberals, by joining with Bush, made this war happen?

Please, before our collective memory fades, I just want us to be honest with ourselves and present an unsanitized version of how they pulled off this war. I can guarantee you the revisionists will make sure the real truth will not enter the history books.

Children born when the war began started second grade this month.

Kids who were eleven in 2003 are now old enough to join up and get killed in Iraq in a "non-combat capacity."

They'll never understand how we got here if we don't.

So let me state this clearly: This war was aided and abetted by a) liberals who were afraid to stick their necks out and thus remained silent; and b) liberals who actually said they believed Colin Powell's cartoon presentation at the U.N. and then went against their better judgment by publicly offering their support for the invasion of Iraq.

First, there were those 29 (turncoat) Democratic senators who voted for the war. Then there was the embarrassing display of reporters who couldn't wait to be "embedded" and go for a joy ride on a Bradley tank.

But my real despair lies with the people I counted on for strong opposition to this madness -- but who left the rest of us alone, out on a limb, as we tried to stop the war.

In March of 2003, to be a public figure speaking out against the war was considered instant career suicide. Take the Dixie Chicks as Exhibit A. Their lead singer, Natalie Maines, uttered just one sentence of criticism -- and their career was effectively dead and buried at that moment. Bruce Springsteen spoke out in their defense, and a Colorado DJ was fired for refusing to not play their songs. That was about it. Crickets everywhere else.

Then MSNBC fired the only nightly critic of the war -- the television legend, Phil Donahue. No one at the network -- or any network -- spoke up on his behalf. There would never again be a Phil Donahue show. (Little did GE know that, when they soon filled that 8pm hour with a sports guy by the name of Keith Olbermann, they would end up with the war's most brilliant and fiercest critic, night after night after night.) There were a few others -- Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, Tim Robbins and Seymour Hersh -- who weren't afraid to speak the truth. But where was everyone else? Where were all those supposed liberal voices in the media?

Instead, this is what we were treated to back in 2003 and 2004:

** Al Franken, who said he "reluctantly" was "a supporter of the war against Saddam." And six months into the war Al was still saying, "There were reasons to go to war against Iraq ... I was very ambivalent about it but I still don't know if it was necessarily wrong (to go to war)."

** Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, who attacked me and wrote a column comparing me to the nutty right-wingers who claimed Hillary had Vince Foster killed. He said people like me were "polarizing the political cesspool," and he chastised anyone who dared call Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq "lies."

** Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of the "liberal" New York Times, who was, according to former Times editor Doug Frantz, "eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington ... He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaeda." The book "Hard News" reported that "according to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs..."

** Bill Keller, at the time a New York Times columnist, who wrote: "We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war -- protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East -- but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. ... we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking."

(The New York Times is so left-wing that when Raines retired, they replaced him with... Keller.)

** The New Yorker, the magazine for really smart liberals, found its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, supporting the war on its pages: "History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them. ... a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all." (To cover its ass, the New Yorker had another editor, Rick Hertzberg, write an anti-war editorial as a rebuttal.)

Some of the above have recanted their early support of the war. The Times fired its WMD correspondent and apologized to its readers. Al Franken has been a great Senator. Kristof now writes nice columns (check out last Sunday's).

But the support of the war by these leading liberals and the majority of the Democrats in the Senate made it safe for the Right to let loose a vicious and unchecked tirade of hate and threats on anyone (including myself) who dared to step out of line. It was not uncommon to hear the media describe me as "un-American," "anti-American," "aiding the terrorists," and being a "traitor."

Here are just a couple of examples of what was said about me over the airwaves by two of the nation's leading conservative commentators:

"Let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my 'What Would Jesus Do' band, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,' and then I'd see the little band: 'What Would Jesus Do?' And then I'd realize, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm not sure." (Glenn Beck)

And:

"Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's just a joke on Moore." (Bill O'Reilly)

(Ironically, O'Reilly made his threat/joke the night after Janet Jackson's breast was bared at the Super Bowl -- which got CBS fined over half a million dollars because, you know, nipples are far more frightening than death threats.)

So that's how I'll personally remember the early war years: living with a real and present danger caused by the hate whipped up by right-wing radio and TV. (I've been advised not to recount certain specific incidents that happened to me, as it would only encourage other crazy people.)

So I dealt with it. And I'm still here. And I know many of you went through your own crap, standing up against the war at school, or work, or at Thanksgiving dinner, taking your own blows for simply saying what was the truth.

But how much easier it would have been for all of us if the liberal establishment had stood with us? We didn't own a daily newspaper, or a magazine with a circulation in the millions. We didn't have our own TV show or network. We weren't invited on shows like "Meet the Press," because they simply could not allow our voice to be heard.

The media watchdog group FAIR reported that in the three weeks after the war started, the CBS Evening News allowed only one anti-war voice on their show -- and that was on one night in one soundbite (and that was four seconds of me in a line from my Oscar speech) -- even though in March of 2003 our anti-war numbers were in the millions (remember the huge demonstrations in hundreds of cities?). We were around 30% of the country according to most polls (that's nearly 100 million Americans!) and yet we had no way to communicate with each other aside from through the Nation and a few websites like CommonDreams.org and Truth-Out.org.

But that was no way to build a huge mass movement of Middle Americans to oppose the war. Unless you had just lucked out and been handed an Oscar on live television in front of a gazillion people where you had 45 seconds to say something before they cut you off and booed you off the stage (hahahaha), you had no public platform. (Jeez, I sure did get booed a lot that year: simply walking through an airport, or eating dinner in a restaurant, or sitting at a Laker game where they suddenly put me up on the Jumbotron and the place went so angry-crazy that Larry David, who was sitting next to me, felt that maybe for his own safety he should perhaps slide a few seats down or go get us a couple of wieners. Instead, he stuck by my side -- and his skillful ninja moves got us out of there alive after the game.)

I know it's hard to remember, but when this war started, there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no way for you to bypass the media lords so you could have your own friggin' say.

Too bad for the bastards, those days are over.

The next time around, it won't be so easy to shut up a country girl band or try to silence someone while he accepts his little gold statue -- or completely ignore the millions of citizens in the streets.

So now we can hope that one of our wars is over. Too bad we lost. I hate to lose, don't you? But the fact is, we lost the very day we invaded a sovereign nation that posed absolutely no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11. We lost lives (over 4,400 of ours, hundreds of thousands of theirs), we lost limbs (a total of 35,000 troops came back with various wounds and disabilities and God knows how many more with mental problems). We lost the money our grandchildren were supposed to live on.

And we lost our soul, who we were, what we stood for as a once-great country -- lost it all. Can we now ask for redemption -- for forgiveness? Can we be... "America" again?

I guess we'll see. The vast majority of the country eventually came around to the Dixie Chicks' position. And we elected an anti-Iraq-war guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

But, please, promise yourselves never to forget how our country went crazy 7 1/2 years ago -- even though, to many people at the time, it seemed completely normal. And I'm here to tell you, no matter how much better it's gotten, no matter how normal you may think things are now, we're still halfway nuts. Just listen to the new batch of "sensible pundits" as they start to beat the drums about what we should do to Iran. One war down, one (or two or three) to go.

C'mon, Mr. President, not one more kid needs to die overseas wearing a uniform with our flag on it. We can't win like this. Let's dig a few thousand wells in Afghanistan, build a few free mosques, leave behind some food and clothing, fix their electrical grid, issue an apology and set up a Facebook page so they can stay in touch with us -- and then let's get the hell out. Your own National Security Advisor and your CIA Director have told you there are less than 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country. 100???

100,000 U.S. troops going after 100 al-Qaeda? Is this a Looney Tunes presentation? "A-ba-dee-a-ba-dee-a-ba-dee -- That's All Folks!" Let's get real. I'm glad one war is "over." But I know how we got there -- and I'm willing now to fight just as hard to stop these other wars if you won't, Mr. Obama.

Your call.

Yours,

Michael Moore
Mike@MichaelMoore.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Just a thought, Mr. President. Can I ask that you go back and watch this movie I made -- "Fahrenheit 9/11." There might be some answers there. I give you my permission to download it for free by going to this site: TorrentHound.com. Don't tell the studio I said it was ok! They've only made a half a billion $$ on it so far.

P.P.S. To everyone on my list: Thanks to your thousands of generous donations, we've raised over $60,000 for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero. This has made news around the world, that there are Americans who believe in our stated American principles.

Give Rove What He Wants: A Chance to Prove Bush Innocent in Court

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Give Rove What He Wants: A Chance to Prove Bush Innocent in Court
By David Swanson

Karl Rove's first mistake in his article about his biggest mistake is this:

"Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush's integrity."

First shot? What do you call this? Rove is pretending that claims Bush lied about Iraq came only after the invasion, which is of course a lie of mammoth proportions.

Rove's supposed greatest mistake was failing to push back against the supposedly absurd claims that Bush had lied us into a war. Marcy Wheeler points out that part of the pushback was the outing of Valerie Plame the very next day after Kennedy's "first shot." (Wasn't one of Kennedy's earlier shots his vote against the war?)

Karl Rove owns million dollar houses in Washington, D.C., and Florida, and works for Fox News, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal when not testifying to congressional committees or federal prosecutors about his numerous unindicted non-war crimes. He served as a member of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) which planned the marketing of an illegal war of aggression on the basis of lies, and took part in exposing an undercover agent as retribution for exposing one of WHIG's lies. Who can remember back to when the Democrats in the House were in the minority and pretending they gave a rat's ass about any of this? They just about launched an investigation of WHIG.

If Rove so deeply regrets having missed his chance to defend Bush's honor, let's give him a stage large enough to overpower all existing knowledge and write history afresh. Let's make it a courtroom trial of Bush and his co-conspirators for fraud. Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega already wrote up the indictment years ago. Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced this and other charges as articles of impeachment. I've been piling up evidence for years, and summarized it in my book Daybreak. Here are some of the basics:

Bush, Cheney, and their associates knew that the claims they were making with great certainty and much repetition were false or highly dubious. This is true of the claims about attempted purchases of uranium, about the aluminum tubes, about the chemical and biological weapons, about the unmanned aerial vehicles, about Iraq's capacity to attack us within forty-five minutes, about the ties to al-Qaeda, about the failures of the inspectors, and about the ludicrous notion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. Many have collected quite voluminous evidence of this. It's also worth noticing that the president's power to classify great quantities of information and the lack of any penalty for his illegally declassifying misleading sections of documents facilitated the fraud. But the whole idea ought never to have looked credible to anyone. (My friend Jonathan Schwarz publicly bet a war supporter $1,000 that no "WMD" would be found in Iraq, and collected.)

It was openly and publicly known that Dick Cheney and several other top members of the Bush administration had wished to invade Iraq for years. (In fact, it was also known that Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had made false claims about Soviet weaponry as part of a CIA project called Team B.) They had made their goals public through a think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). They had stated that their mission would be difficult, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." Making clear that it simply did not care whether Iraq had weapons, that the point of occupying Iraq was something else entirely, PNAC wrote, "Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

On October 27, 2004, Russ Baker reported on an interview he'd conducted with author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz, who had worked with George W. Bush in 1999, having been engaged to write his "autobiography." Baker wrote, "According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House -- ascribed in part to now-Vice President Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. 'Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.'"

While this did not come out until 2004, Bush hadn't exactly kept his views secret. Baker reported,

"In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. "'I'd take 'em out,' [Bush] grinned cavalierly, 'take out the weapons of mass destruction . . . I'm surprised he's still there,' said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s father . . . It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker."

Nine days after the necessary catastrophic event arrived on September 11, 2001, PNAC urged Bush to remove Saddam Hussein from power, even if no evidence could be found to tie him to 9-11. Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were known enemies. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to have worked together. Their closest tie was that they had both worked in the past with the United States. Iraq was known to have destroyed its weapons and to be struggling and suffering under sanctions and bombing raids imposed by the United States.

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN on July 29, 2001, shortly before warning us about "mushroom clouds."

"Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors," said Colin Powell on February 24, 2001, not long before switching his tune and ultimately holding up a vial of anthrax and threatening us with Winnebagos of death. Not only was it very well understood that Iraq had no weapons, but there was no evidence that Iraq had any way of using its alleged weapons in the United States.

And then there was the biggest insanity of the whole pile, namely the notion that Iraq would willingly commit national suicide by attacking the owners of the world's most powerful military. In fact, in October 2002, the CIA told Bush that Saddam Hussein was unlikely to attack the United States unless the United States attacked him first. This was just prior to Bush's speech on October 7th in Cincinnati, Ohio, warning of the dire threat from Iraq. According to news reports, on at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, Bush was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that US intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. US intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate on October 1, 2002, but kept it classified. On October 4, they published an unclassified shortened version often referred to as the "white paper." The longer version, which was eventually declassified, contained all sorts of dissensions and qualifications that were simply omitted from the white paper. Not only were whole paragraphs left out, but single words were carefully changed or deleted to erase all disagreement and uncertainty. Among the bits left out was, of course, the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was unlikely to attack first. Vincent Bugliosi, in his book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, examines in detail the editing job that was done and demonstrates that the only possible purpose was to mislead the nation into war.

Bush even wanted to provoke Saddam Hussein into attacking Americans. On January 31, 2002, prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in March, Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House. After their meeting, they spoke to the media and claimed not to have decided on war, to be working hard to achieve peace, and to be worried about the imminent threat from Iraq to the American people. They claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda, and --Bush implied, but avoided explicitly stating -- to the attacks of September 11, 2001. They also claimed to have UN authorization for launching an attack on Iraq.

Behind closed doors, however, other words were spoken. Blair advisor David Manning took notes that day. The memo is available online. The accuracy of what it says has never been challenged by Bush or Blair. According to Manning, Bush proposed to Blair a number of possible ways in which they might be able to create an excuse to launch a war against Iraq. One of Bush's proposals was "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours [sic]. If Saddam fired on them," Bush argued, "he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. In other words, Bush wanted to falsely paint US planes with UN colors and try to get Iraq to shoot at them. This is what he really thought about the horrible, evil threat of Saddam Hussein: he wanted to provoke him.

Bush understood that the United Nations had not passed a resolution that would have legalized an attack on Iraq. The memo claims, "[Bush said] the US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten.' But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway.'' In other words, going to the United Nations was not actually an attempt to avoid war, but an attempt to gain legal cover for a war that would be launched regardless of whether that project succeeded. And Bush wasn't kidding about twisting arms; that very same day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a plan to bug the phones and e-mails of UN Security Council members.

At this time, a month and a half before the invasion of Iraq, and for months prior, the US military was already engaging in hugely escalated bombing runs over Iraq and redeploying troops, including to newly constructed bases in the Middle East, all in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and all with money that had not been appropriated for these purposes. The reporters who questioned Bush and Blair on January 31, 2002, did not know about or ask about those activities, and since the revelation of this memo, not one reporter who was so blatantly lied to that day has gone back and asked a question or written a single word about it.

That Bush was interested in provoking Iraq is confirmed by extensive covert operations called DB/Anabasis reported by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Hubris":

"Over an intense forty-five day period beginning in late 2001, [two CIA operatives] cooked up an audacious plan. . . . It called for installing a small army of paramilitary CIA officers on the ground inside Iraq; for elaborate schemes to penetrate Saddam's regime; recruiting disgruntled military officers with buckets of cash; for feeding the regime disinformation . . . for disrupting the regime's finances . . . for sabotage that included blowing up railroad lines. . . . It also envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by US fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war. On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees -- including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat -- were briefed. 'The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out' [said CIA operative John McGuire]. If all went as planned, 'you'd have a premise for war: we've been invited in.'"

A similar story came out about Dick Cheney with regard to Iran in 2008. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported at a journalism conference in 2008 that at a 2008 meeting in the vice president's office, soon after an incident in the Strait of Hormuz in which a US carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats, "There were a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don't we build -- we in our shipyard -- build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of -- that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected."

After the invasion of Iraq, with no weapons or ties to 9-11 having been found, Diane Sawyer asked Bush on camera about the claims he had made about "weapons of mass destruction," and he replied: "What's the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger." Yes, what's the difference? No big deal. Just a million human beings killed and four million displaced. When Bush joked about his hunt for "weapons of mass destruction" at the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner, members of the media as well as prominent members of Congress, like Nancy Pelosi, laughed along with him.

In August 2008, journalist Ron Suskind reported that the Iraqi government's intelligence chief had secretly told the British and Americans prior to the invasion that there were no nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in Iraq. National Public Radio (NPR) reported denials from the White House and from then–CIA head George Tenet that failed as denials and actually admitted the truth of the account:

"We have called key players in Ron Suskind's account . . . George Tenet says the Iraqi failed to persuade, and a White House spokesman adds that any information the Iraqi may have provided was, quote, 'immaterial.'"

In 2006, we had learned that in 2002 Iraq's foreign minister had also told the CIA that Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction." Also in 2002, we learned that prior to the war, the CIA had sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq to ask them what WMD Iraq had, and they uniformly reported it had nothing. Of course, it was already, prior to the invasion, public knowledge (for those who cared to look) that Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, had told the British and the Americans the very same thing. It was thus very odd to observe Colin Powell telling the United Nations about all the weapons that Kamel reported Iraq had possessed before destroying them, and neglecting to mention that he'd said they'd destroyed them. This was one of many reasons the world media did not report Powell's little show in the same way the American media did. While American editors saw an upstanding general who would never lie, foreign editors saw the representative of a nation hell-bent on war presenting a combination of obvious lies and fantastic tales that strained the imagination, all meant to suggest that an impoverished war-and-sanctions-damaged nation was creating large supplies of state-of-the-art weaponry.

Later, during the occupation, we were asked to believe that only Iranians, not Iraqis, could produce basic roadside bombs! Powell, or whoever told him what to say, actually went so far as to fabricate dialogue. Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers: "They're inspecting the ammunition you have, yes." "Yes." "For the possibility there are forbidden ammo." "For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?" "Yes." "And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."

The incriminating phrases "clean all of the areas" and "Make sure there is nothing there" simply do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange. Much of the rest of Powell's presentation consisted of claims that his own staff had warned him UN inspectors would not even find plausible. Powell delivered his platter of baloney to the United Nations with CIA director George Tenet seated behind him, but Alan Foley, the head of the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), didn't believe the hype. In their book "The Italian Letter", Peter Eiser and Knut Royce reported on what Foley actually believed and what he instructed analysts to say, which were two very different things. According to Eiser and Royce,

"There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's [2003] State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. 'Not much, if anything,' Goodman recalled that Foley responded."

He told his subordinates something different:

"One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: 'If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.' The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded."

Blogger and reporter Jonathan Schwarz, who has followed these matters as closely as anyone and blogged about them at AfterDowningStreet.org and on his own blog TinyRevolution.com, has pointed out that this incident was reported, although without identifying Foley by name, in at least two other books: "Pretext for War" by James Bamford, and "Blowing My Cover: My Life As a CIA Spy" by Lindsay Moran. Why is it always books doing the news reporting these days?

Of course the most extreme claims about the threat from Iraq, during the lead-up to the war, were made by Dick Cheney, but you've probably heard them. It's important to bear in mind the well-informed and sensible reasons Cheney had provided, on camera, in 1994, for why they had NOT gone into Baghdad during the first Gulf War:

"Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it—eastern Iraq—the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."

Ten years later? They feigned ignorance, pretending none of these concerns expressed by antiwar groups were legitimate.

In August 2008, Ron Suskind reported that in 2003 the White House (quite possibly led by Dick Cheney) had instructed subordinates to forge a letter that might be used to claim there had been some connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Surely that, too, was just an honest mistake. It appears that the United States also paid the same person to forge letters smearing vocal opponents of the invasion. Part of Rove's big mistake of not pushing back?

It's not as if all this fibbing amounted to violating any laws, right? Well, actually . . .

Since 1973, presidents who have launched wars without the authorization of Congress have done so, not just in violation of the Constitution, but also in violation of the War Powers Act, a law written in reaction to President Richard Nixon's abuses of power and passed over his veto. The law allows a president to send armed forces into action abroad only with the authorization of Congress, unless the United States is actually under attack or serious threat. The president is required to notify Congress within forty-eight hours if he commits armed forces to action abroad, and forces cannot be kept in action for more than sixty days without an authorization from Congress. This law is actually weaker than the constitutional requirement and should be strengthened, but it is a law that Bush (and Congress) violated. One way in which Bush Jr. outdid his predecessors in martial criminality was by persuading Congress to issue a vague and general authorization to "use force" at any point in the future when the president believed certain conditions had been met. By so doing the Congress, as well as the president, violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The Iraq War was not launched with any specific and timely authorization from Congress. That is the first of many reasons the war is widely considered illegal.

Congress's authorization allowing the president to determine whether to go to war was an unconstitutional delegation of the power to declare war. My friend John Bonifaz led a legal suit on behalf of soldiers and members of Congress aimed at preventing the war on those grounds, and the courts avoided it rather than ruling on the merits. In defense of Congress, its resolution did require that if the president decided to use force (as if there were any doubt that he would!) he had to submit a report to Congress explaining how this use of force met certain criteria. The explanation was not required to be credible or truthful, of course, and it was neither, asserting as it did familiar claims about "weapons of mass destruction" and ties to al-Qaeda. (In an added bit of arrogance, Bush cited as sources for his claims his own prior speeches and the laughable presentation his own secretary of state had made to the United Nations.) The fact that Bush used Congress's "Authorization to Use Force" without actually complying with its terms is a second reason the Iraq War is illegal.

Of course, Bush signed that authorization and asserted in the accompanying signing statement that he did not actually need any authorization at all. The claims that Bush made in that report to Congress, as well as a long list of claims that he and his subordinates made publicly and directly to Congress, orally and in writing, established a false case for war. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et alia, violated the federal anti-conspiracy statute, 18 USC-371, which makes it a felony "to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose," and the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996 18 USC-1001, which makes it a felony to issue knowingly and willfully false statements to the United States Congress. That the Iraq War was based on lies is a third reason that it is widely deemed illegal.

Bush unsuccessfully sought a resolution from the United Nations to make his war on Iraq legal under international law. The single biggest day of protest around the world in the history of the world, including a massive demonstration in New York City, on February 15, 2003, played a role in persuading the United Nations to refuse to authorize the invasion. On March 6, 2003, this exchange took place between a reporter and President Bush at the White House:

"Q: Thank you, Mr. President. As you said, the Security Council faces a vote next week on a resolution implicitly authorizing an attack on Iraq. Will you call for a vote on that resolution, even if you aren't sure you have the vote?

PRESIDENT: Well, first, I don't think—it basically says that he's in defiance of 1441. That's what the resolution says. And it's hard to believe anybody is saying he isn't in defiance of 1441, because 1441 said he must disarm. And, yes, we'll call for a vote.

Q: No matter what?

PRESIDENT: No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam."

The United States did not call for the vote, because it became clear that it would fail. Under Article VI of the US Constitution, any treaty to which the United States is a party is the law of the land. The United States is a party to the United Nations Charter. Under the UN Charter, any war not fought in actual self-defense and not authorized by the UN Security Council as an exception to that rule is illegal. That the Iraq War is blatantly illegal under the UN Charter is a fourth, and perhaps the most influential, reason that it is considered an illegal war.

It is also illegal, under international treaties to which the United States is party, to invade another nation for the purpose of controlling its resources. That the Iraq War had this basis is a fifth powerful reason that it is considered an illegal war. This issue has been widely misunderstood since 2002, when many of us took to the streets with "No Blood for Oil" posters. An editorial cartoon that came out in June 2008, around the time Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced his articles of impeachment, showed a Democratic donkey shouting before the war that it was just about cheap oil, and complaining years later that there wasn't any cheap oil. But Kucinich was just about the only Democrat in Congress who had joined with peace activists in arguing that the war was for control of the oil, plus profits for oil companies, as well as permanent bases, profit from "reconstruction," and political advantage at home (most of which, above all the profits for oil companies, came to pass). The rest of the Democratic Party had either agreed with Bush, Cheney, and other Republicans, or had taken no clear position on what the war was for, adamantly denouncing in the strongest terms the suggestion that it had anything to do with oil. Nobody at all ever thought the war was for "cheap oil." The notion that corporate thugs like Bush and Cheney would slaughter our young men and women and the people of Iraq in order to save us money at the gas pump is only topped in insanity by the notion that peace activists would have suspected Bush and Cheney of such a thing.

In terms of violations of international law, it doesn't stop there. The Nuremberg tribunal in 1945 concluded that, "To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

The current occupation of Iraq has seen the United States target civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances; use antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas; use white phosphorous as a weapon; use depleted uranium weapons; employ a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs; engage in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations, including by blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing down orchards; detain people without charge or legal process without the rights of prisoners of war; imprison children; torture; and murder. The various war crimes that accumulate into the evil of the whole, including those turned into prominent scandals, such as the Abu Ghraib prison photos or massacres of civilians by Blackwater mercenaries, are a sixth reason that the Iraq War is considered illegal.

The seventh reason to view the Iraq War, along with the now renamed "global war on terror" of which it is supposedly a part, as illegal is the endless plague of crimes and abuses of power that surround the war and are supposedly justified by it. The criminal waste and fraud in contracting is part of this. The planning of the war has gone on in illegal secrecy. The lies used to launch the war involved the illegal selective leaking of classified information; and whistleblowers exposing those lies have been illegally punished, including by exposing the identity of an undercover agent. Investigations of those abuses have been criminally obstructed. Mercenaries and other contractors in Iraq have been permitted to operate in a lawless zone, subject neither to Iraqi law nor to US military justice. People, including children, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world, including in the United States, have been detained without charge or due process, tortured, rendered to other nations to be tortured, imprisoned in secret prisons with no access to legal counsel, and murdered. Bush and Cheney threatened a similar war against Iran, made similar lies about Iran, and funded terrorist activities within Iran. Bush violated the Posse Comitatus Act at home, as well as engaging in warrantless spying and various illegal assertions of power. Bush and Cheney used the war to try to justify all of the above actions.

An eighth reason the ongoing occupation of Iraq is illegal is that, while the United Nations did not and could not have legalized the invasion, it did, after the fact, condone the occupation until December 31, 2008. When that UN fig leaf expired it was replaced with a treaty negotiated by President Bush and Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki. The US Senate was never consulted, and the Iraqi Parliament only approved the treaty on condition that the Iraqi people be permitted to vote it up or down, which did not happen. A treaty authorizing three years of war has dubious legal standing to begin with, and this is aggravated by the unconstitutional failure to gain Senate ratification or hold the Iraqi referendum.

Karl Rove knows a lot more about all of this than the American public, but that would change if we put Bush on trial.
--
David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union"
http://davidswanson.org/
http://warisacrime.org/
http://facebook.com/pages/David-Swanson/297768373319
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'Hurt Locker' is best picture, wins six Oscars

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/07/academy.awards.night/
'Hurt Locker' is best picture, wins six Oscars
Alan Duke, CNN
March 8, 2010
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Hurt Locker" is best picture; Kathryn Bigelow wins best director
"Hurt Locker" wins six Oscars; "Avatar" has three, "Precious" two
Sandra Bullock wins best actress for "The Blind Side," Jeff Bridges is best actor for "Crazy Heart"
"Precious" star Mo'Nique wins supporting actress; "Inglourious Basterds" Christoph Waltz is supporting actor

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- The final score: David 6, Goliath 3.

"The Hurt Locker" earned six Oscars at the 82nd annual Academy Awards Sunday night, taking home the biggest prize -- best picture -- as well as honors for its director, original screenplay, sound editing, sound mixing and film editing.

The small-budget movie, one of the lowest-grossing films to be nominated in the post-"Star Wars" blockbuster era, defeated its primary competition, James Cameron's "Avatar," the big-budget, highest-grossing film of all time. The groundbreaking "Avatar," with its dazzling effects and creative presentation, won three Oscars, for cinematography, visual effects and art direction.

Both films led the pack with nine nominations each.

"The Hurt Locker," a film about a bomb disposal unit in the early part of the Iraq War, developed its momentum slowly, winning notice at festivals in the latter part of 2008 before earning a national release in the summer of 2009. Despite fading quickly at the box office -- to date, it's earned just $21 million worldwide, versus more than $2.6 billion for "Avatar" -- it was remembered by critics and peers at the end of the year, winning several awards.

"Locker" director Kathryn Bigelow made history by becoming the first woman to win the directing prize. Presenter Barbra Streisand opened the envelope with, "Well, the time has come!" as a loud standing ovation and lots of shrieks greeted Bigelow's arrival on the stage.

"There's no other way to describe it -- it's the moment of a lifetime," she said, accepting her directing prize. She dedicated her honor "to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis... may they come home safe."

Earlier, writer and producer Mark Boal, who based the script on his reporting from Iraq, paid tribute to director Bigelow, "all of the soldiers still over there and those who have died" and to his father, who passed away a month ago, he said in his acceptance speech.

The acting awards were divided between old favorites and rising newcomers.

Sandra Bullock won best actress for her performance as a forceful mother who brings a homeless teen into her well-off family in "The Blind Side."

Bullock started her speech with jokes, paying tribute to her "lover, Meryl Streep" -- a fellow nominee -- and asking, "Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down?" But her voice cracked with emotion as she dedicated her award to "the moms that take care of the babies and the children, no matter where they come from," and then turned her attention to her own mother, whom Bullock described as firm but supportive.

Jeff Bridges won the best actor Oscar for his performance as an alcohol-soaked country singer in "Crazy Heart."

"Thank you, Academy members!" he exulted, raising his Oscar high. "Thank you Mom and Dad for turning me on to such a groovy profession. ... They loved showbiz so much, and I feel like an extension of them. This is as much for them as it is for me."

Bridges' father was Lloyd Bridges, star of the TV show "Sea Hunt" and many movies, and his mother was actress Dorothy Bridges.

The nominated song from "Crazy Heart," "The Weary Kind," won best original song.

Get backstage with the Oscars on the Marquee Blog

Mo'Nique won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Mary Jones, an abusive mother in "Precious."

In a fierce and memorable acceptance speech, she thanked the Oscar voters "for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics."

"I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she did so I don't have to," Mo'Nique said.

McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Academy Award when she was given the best supporting actress Oscar for playing Mammy in the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind."

Mo'Nique said before the show that she was wearing a gardenia in her hair in tribute to McDaniel, because she wore one for her acceptance speech 70 years ago.

She also thanked Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey, who helped director Lee Daniels land a distribution deal for the movie.

"Because you touched it, the whole world saw it," Mo'Nique said.

Backstage, Mo'Nique was asked whether she still considered herself a stand-up comedian now that she is an Oscar-winning actress.

"I am a standup comedian who won an Oscar," she said.

The success of her role "was so not about my acting career," she said. "This role was about my life, to teach me not to judge."

The story of a downtrodden inner-city teenager also pulled off a mild upset earlier, winning best adapted screenplay over perceived front-runner "Up in the Air."

"I don't know what to say," said visibly moved writer Geoffrey Fletcher, paying tribute to the filmmakers, his two brothers, his mother and father. "I thank everyone," said Fletcher, gasping emotionally.

Christoph Waltz won the first Oscar of the night, a best supporting actor award for "Inglourious Basterds."

"This is your welcoming embrace, and there's no way I can ever thank you enough," Waltz said. "But I can start right now, thank you."

"Up" won best animated feature, yet another victory for the Pixar studios, which has dominated the category since its introduction for the 2002 awards. Pixar has now won three straight animated feature Oscars and five of the nine overall. Michael Giacchino's music for the film won best score.

Best foreign language film went to "The Secret in Their Eyes," from Argentina. "The Cove" won best documentary feature.

Hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin kept the ceremony moving until the big-award slowdown at the end. The two were lowered from the ceiling after an over-the-top opening number featuring a singing-and-dancing Neil Patrick Harris, and maintained a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby rhythm through much of the festivities, zinging one-liners at all and sundry.

And in a moving tribute, several stars of John Hughes movies -- including Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick, Jon Cryer, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall and Macaulay Culkin -- came out to talk about the director of "The Breakfast Club" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," who died in 2009. Hughes' family, which was sitting in the audience, received an ovation.

CNN's Todd Leopold contributed to this story.

Details of Iraq alleged suicide to be sealed 70 years

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/details-iraq-whistleblowers-alleged-suicide-sealed-70-years/

Details of Iraq whistleblower’s alleged suicide to be sealed 70 years
By Stephen C. Webster
Sunday, January 24th, 2010

By 2080, anyone with a direct interest in learning how Dr. David Kelly died, will themselves be dead.

That's how an Oxford coroner reacted to a recent ruling ordering the details of the former United Nations weapons inspector's death locked away for 70 years.

Kelly's story, however, was gravely important in 2003, just before he was found dead in the woods behind his home in Oxfordshire, U.K. As the BBC revealed in the wake of his passing, he had been the key source behind a story claiming intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was "sexed up."

Hours before his death, he reportedly e-mailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, warning her of "many dark actors playing games," according to the BBC.

Lord Hutton, the British judge who led the state's investigation into Kelly's death, also ordered his written records pertaining to the case sealed for 30 years, according to UK's Morning Star Online.

The report added that Hutton's inquiry "concluded that Dr Kelly had killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector's stated injuries were not serious enough to have killed him."

A paramedic who responded to the scene was quoted by The Guardian, saying: "There just wasn't a lot of blood... When somebody cuts an artery, whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps everywhere. I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw."

The claims eventually led a group of six doctors to bring formal demands for an investigation into Kelly's death. An initial inquiry was headed up by the British Ministry of Defense.

"[Just] how far were the Blair/Bush administrations willing to go in order to fabricate a reason for the Iraq war?" asked RAW STORY's Investigative News Editor Larisa Alexandrovna in a post to her blog, At Largely. "The Bush administration was at the very least willing to out a covert CIA officer, committing treason in the process. What was Tony Blair willing to do?"

Sadly, with the court's inquiry ended, the questions seem doomed to persist.

David Swanson, The More Things Change

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175109

September 01, 2009
Tomgram: David Swanson, The More Things Change

A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the "withdrawal" schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.

That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000 "diplomats," it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department's yearly budget for "running" that embassy -- $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 -- will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of "diplomats," and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region is clearly being created.

What's striking are the continuities in American foreign and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the controversial "missile defense shield" the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration "review." While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere -- in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.

Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of the website AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- and now for bringing them to trial. He gives the term "activist" a good name and he's a prodigious, energetic, thoughtful writer as well. If you're as struck by today's piece as I was, you should consider giving his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, published on this very day, a careful look. He's special. Tom

Bush's Third Term?
You're Living It
By David Swanson

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.

During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities and hopes to see you on the road.

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_hits_Iraq_withdrawal_You_cant_0227.html

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal: 'You can't be in and out'
Stephen C. Webster
Friday February 27, 2009

It wasn't even one year ago when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and members of his political campaign said now-President Barack Obama "seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."

Which is what makes this week's announcement of -- and the fallout from -- President Obama's plan to withdrawal troops from Iraq so surprising. It isn't the opposition party Obama must now win over: It's his own political allies.

Sen. McCain and top Republican leaders actually support the Democratic administration's plan, while some top Democrats have openly criticized it. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), himself a former presidential candidate, hit back Friday against a portion of Obama's plan which would leave 35-50,000 "observer" soldiers in the country.

"You can't be in and out at the same time," said Kucinich in a media advisory.

"America must determine at some point to end the occupation, close the bases and bring the troops home," he said. "We must bring a conclusion to this sorry chapter in American history where war was waged under false pretense against an innocent people. Taking troops out of Iraq should not mean more troops available for deployment in other operations.

"In February of 2007 I presented H.R. 1234, legislation that would end the war in Iraq, and the process I outlined is still necessary. We should immediately bring home American service members and contractors, convene a regional conference to prepare an international peace-keeping force and accelerate Iraq-driven reconstruction."

"As a candidate for President, I made clear my support for a timeline of 16 months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and protect our troops," Obama said on Friday. "Those consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months."

Obama added, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."

Congressman Kucinich has been a leading opponent of the Iraq war policy even well before many of his Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives came to agree with his position.

Obama inauguration got unprecedented coverage

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE50K6E320090121

Obama inauguration got unprecedented news coverage
Wed Jan 21, 2009

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's inauguration generated an unprecedented 35,000 stories in the world's major newspapers, television and radio broadcasts over the past day -- about 35 times more than the last presidential swearing-in -- a monitoring group said on Wednesday.

The Texas-based Global Language Monitor said there had also been 6 million new Obama-related mentions on the Internet since December 31.

By comparison, the last U.S. presidential inauguration, of George W. Bush in January 2005, resulted in about 1,000 stories in major media worldwide, Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor said.

"The Obama numbers are unprecedented and speak volumes to the global fascination with the new American president, his wife and young family," Payack told Reuters. "Obama is the biggest story of the century so far."

U.S. television audience ratings for Tuesday's inauguration ceremony, which was shown live on major broadcast networks and cable news channels, are expected to show record numbers tuning in when they are released later on Wednesday.

Payack said that according to his group's monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

The tallies were calculated using the group's proprietary algorithm which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, the Internet and major databases.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

The New Trough

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24012700/the_new_trough

The New Trough
The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq — a "free-fraud zone" where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create
NAOMI KLEIN
Posted Nov 13, 2008

Editor's note: The online version of this story has been amended to reflect developments since the publication of the print edition.

On October 13th, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of "seasoned financial veterans" that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.

On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated "flexibility" in regulation — a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.

Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating — that's all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the partisan machine that filled the Green Zone with Young Republicans, investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren't a big issue back then, because the staff's main function was to hand over stacks of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as "a free-fraud zone." During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said he thought that contracts should be handed out with more "speed and flexibility" — the same philosophy he cited back when he was in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.

The Bush Administration has since reversed the Jeffery appointment, perhaps thinking better of giving a CPA alum such a central role in the Wall Street bailout. Still the original impulse underscores the many worrying parallels between the administration's approach to the financial crisis and its approach to the Iraq War. Under cover of an emergency, Treasury is rapidly turning into an economic Green Zone, overrun with private companies collecting lucrative contracts. Fittingly, one of the first to line up at the new trough was none other than the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani — yes, that Giuliani. The firm's chairman, Patrick Oxford, could scarcely conceal his glee over the prospect of cashing in on the bailout. "This one," he told reporters, "is very, very big." At least four times bigger, in fact, than the post-9/11 homeland-security bubble, from which Giuliani and his various outfits have profited so extravagantly. Even bigger, potentially, than the price tag for the Iraq War itself.

In Iraq, the contractors were tasked with reconstructing the country from the mess made by U.S. missiles. After years of corruption born of no-bid contracts and paltry oversight, many Iraqis are still waiting for the lights to come back on. Today, a new team of contractors is lining up to reconstruct the U.S. economy — reconstruct it from the mess made by the very banks, brokers and law firms that are now applying for contracts. And it's not at all clear that America can survive their assistance.

See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. Private companies wanting to help manage the bailout were given just two days to apply for massive, multiyear contracts. Since it was such a mad rush — after all, the entire economy was about to implode — there was no time for an open bidding process. Nor was there time to draft rigorous rules to make sure that those applying don't have serious conflicts of interest. Instead, applicants were asked to disclose their conflicts and to explain — and this is not a joke — their "philosophy in fulfilling your duty to the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer in light of your proprietary interests and those of other clients." In other words, an open invitation to bullshit about how much they love their country and how they can be trusted to regulate themselves.

The first major contract to be awarded in the bailout was for legal advice — and the choice Treasury made was Halliburton-esque in its audacity. Six law firms were invited to bid, but four declined, either because they didn't want the contract or because they had too many conflicts of interest. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the fact that so many law firms chose not to bid "shows that the guidelines are sufficiently rigorous."

Or it may just show that the bidder who won the contract — Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — takes a more relaxed approach to conflicts than its colleagues. The law firm is a Wall Street heavy hitter, having brokered some of the biggest bank mergers in recent years. It also provided legal support to companies trading mortgage-backed securities — the "financial weapons of mass destruction," as Warren Buffett called them, that detonated the banking industry. More to the point, it was hired to provide legal services to the Treasury in its negotiations to spend $250 billion of the bailout money purchasing equity in America's banks. The first stage of the plan involves buying stakes in nine of the country's top banks. Incredibly, Simpson Thacher has represented seven of the nine: JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

According to its contract, Simpson Thacher has agreed not to represent any of the banks "against the U.S." when they negotiate with Treasury for the equity money. However, the firm has retained the right to represent banks when they apply for other parts of the $700 billion bailout not covered by its contract. (It has promised to erect a "firewall" to stem the flow of "confidential information" to those clients.) The firm will also continue to work for the banks on a range of other lucrative deals — and that's where the problem lies. Take Lee Meyerson, Simpson Thacher's lead lawyer on the bailout negotiations, who is specifically named in the contract as "essential" to the project. As the company's hotshot attorney, Meyerson has personally represented three of the nine banks that were bailed out in the first round, in addition to many others that will surely apply for cash injections. One of the bailed-out banks is Bank of New York Mellon, whose $29 billion merger Meyerson helped negotiate. Mergers like that can bill in the millions. Is Simpson Thacher able to put aside its loyalties to its biggest clients and negotiate deals for the taxpayer that could exact real costs from those very clients?

It might be possible to set aside concerns about divided loyalties if it were clear that Simpson Thacher is helping Treasury to wrangle the best deals possible for U.S. taxpayers. But the firm's first test — the deal to give $125 billion to the nine big banks to ease the "credit crunch" that is crippling the economy — wasn't exactly reassuring. Secretary Paulson promised that the banks won't just "hoard" the money — they will quickly "deploy it" through the economy in the form of badly needed loans. There is just one hitch: Neither Paulson nor Simpson Thacher got that "deploy" part in writing — nor did they put in place any mechanism to require the banks to spend their taxpayer billions. Apparently, the part about lending the money to homeowners and small businesses was sort of implied.

"There is no obligation for banks to lend the money one way or the other," Jennifer Zuccarelli, a Treasury spokeswoman, tells Rolling Stone. "But the banks have the understanding" that the money is intended for loans. "We're not looking to control their operations."

Unfortunately, many of the banks appear to have no intention of wasting the money on loans. "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion," said John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. Gary Crittenden, chief financial officer of Citigroup, had an even better idea: He hinted that his company would use its share of the cash — $25 billion — to buy up competitors and swell even bigger. The handout, he told analysts, "does present the possibility of taking advantage of opportunities that might otherwise be closed to us."

And the folks at Morgan Stanley? They're planning to pay themselves $10.7 billion this year, much of it in bonuses — almost exactly the amount they are receiving in the first phase of the bailout. "You can imagine the devilish grins on the faces of Morgan Stanley employees," writes Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil. "Not only did we, the taxpayers, save their company...we funded their 2008 bonus pool."

It didn't have to be this way. Five days before Paulson struck his deal with the banks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown negotiated a similar bailout — only he extracted meaningful guarantees for taxpayers: voting rights at the banks, seats on their boards, 12 percent in annual dividend payments to the government, a suspension of dividend payments to shareholders, restrictions on executive bonuses, and a legal requirement that the banks lend money to homeowners and small businesses.

In sharp contrast, this is what U.S. taxpayers received: no controlling interest, no voting rights, no seats on the bank boards and just five percent in dividend payouts to the government, while shareholders continue to collect billions in dividends every quarter. What's more, golden parachutes and bonuses already promised by the banks will still be paid out to executives — all before taxpayers are paid back.

No wonder it took just one hour for Paulson to convince all nine CEOs to accept his offer — less than seven minutes per bank. Not even the firms' own lawyers could have drafted a sweeter deal.

The day after it met with the nation's top banks, Treasury announced that it had selected the firm that would receive the juiciest contract of all: that of "master custodian." The winning company will be to the bailout what Halliburton is to the military: the contractor of contractors. It will purchase toxic debts from Wall Street, service them and auction them off in the future — a so-called "end-to-end process." The contract is for a minimum of three years.

Seventy firms applied for the gig; the winner was Bank of New York Mellon. Describing the scope of the megacontract, bank president Gerald Hassell said, "It's the ultimate outsourcing — because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we're essentially the general contractor across the entire program. It's going to cross our entire company."

This raises an interesting point: Has the Treasury partially nationalized the private banks, as we have been told? Or is it the other way around? Is it Treasury that has been partially privatized by Wall Street, its massive rescue plan now entirely in the hands of a private bank it is directly subsidizing?

Shortly after receiving the contract, Hassell told investors that his institution is now well-positioned to profit from the market meltdown. "There's a lot of new business that's going on even in this chaotic marketplace," he said, "and so some of those things have been very positive to us." Just how positive, we don't know, because Treasury has blacked out the 10 lines of the "master custodian" contract that reveal how much Bank of New York Mellon will be paid. Though Treasury says it will release the information eventually, the secrecy goes beyond anything the Bush administration attempted in Iraq. Even Halliburton's dodgy contracts came with price tags attached.

Still, when the terms of the contract do become public, they may turn out to be surprisingly modest. Goldman Sachs has apparently offered to fulfill at least one bailout contract for free. Altruism may not be their only motivation. The real money at stake in the bailout lies not in payment for the work but in how the work is done. Think about it: If you're the one selling your debts to the government, wouldn't you also want to help decide which debts are eligible and how much they're worth? "The financial firms with assets to sell are in many instances the same firms the Treasury will rely on to value and manage the assets it is buying," The New York Times observed. "That is an invitation for these firms to set the price too high or to indulge in other mischief at the taxpayers' expense."

Bank of New York Mellon has a bad record for mischief. It is embroiled in a $22.5 billion money-laundering lawsuit in Moscow and has been forced to pay out a $14 million settlement in a related case. Though the bank's "master custodian" contract with Treasury prohibits unethical conduct, the arrangement seems rife with opportunities for abuse. According to its most recent earnings report, Bank of New York Mellon holds $1.2 billion in subprime mortgage securities. That means that in addition to the $3 billion it will receive as part of the equity program, it will also be eligible to apply for taxpayer money from the program it is being paid to administer. Neither the bank nor Treasury would comment on this direct conflict of interest.

On the same day that he allocated the first $125 billion to the banks, Secretary Paulson announced the largest federal budget deficit in U.S. history. Buried in his statement was a preview of the next phase of the financial disaster. The deficit numbers, he declared, reinforce the need to "pursue policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform." He was referring to Americans who feel entitled to receive Social Security in their old age and Medicaid when they are sick. Those programs, Paulson implied, might not be able to survive the budget crisis he is currently creating for the next administration.

This is why the stakes of the bailout are so high: Unless we get a good deal, there will be nothing left over after the banks are done feeding to pay for the meager services now provided in exchange for taxation, let alone for the more ambitious initiatives promised on the campaign trail. The spiraling cost of saving Wall Street from its bad bets is already being used as an excuse for why we can't solve our many other crises, from health care to climate change.

There is a better way to fix a broken financial system. Treasury's plan to buy up the toxic debts never made sense and should be immediately scrapped — a move that would also handily get rid of most of the crony contractors. As for purchasing equity in banks, the next round of deals — and there will be more — has to start from the premise that the banks are bankrupt and will therefore accept whatever terms we choose to impose, including real regulatory oversight. The possibilities of what could be done if a chunk of the banking system were genuinely under public control — from a moratorium on home foreclosures to mandatory investment in green community redevelopment — are limitless.

Because here is what George Bush and Henry Paulson are hoping we won't figure out: When a society no longer has enough money to pay for its most pressing needs, there are worse things than discovering you own the banks.

[From Issue 1065 — November 13, 2008]

Obama saw an opportunity

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3092379

Obama saw an opportunity - and positioned himself to take it
By Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers Margaret Talev, Mcclatchy Newspapers
11-4-8

CHICAGO — "You don't need to boo, you just need to vote," Barack Obama told his crowds in the final days of the race when they reacted to his opponent's name.

That line embodied two premises of Obama's presidential campaign, from its unlikely inception in February 2007 to victory Tuesday night.

First: That a backlash against President Bush would be sufficient to drive white swing voters into the arms of a first-term, biracial senator with liberal Chicago roots who promised change, bipartisanship, an end to the Iraq war and an outside- Washington ethic.

Second: That the conventional wisdom that young, minority and poor people can't be counted on to vote was a symptom of previous candidates who didn't try hard enough.

"You don't win presidential elections because you pick the time," Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod said in a wide-ranging interview on the campaign plane three days before election night. "The times pick you," Axelrod said. "He seemed to match the times."

How'd Obama do it?

Charisma, message, organization and timing were crucial. But nothing was more telling than the 90 percent of Americans who told pollsters all year that they thought the country was on the "wrong track." Voters wanted change. Obama made himself an image of change that people thought they could trust.

Obama's kickoff in Springfield, Ill. , drew inevitable comparisons to Abraham Lincoln . Ted and Caroline Kennedy's endorsements set him up as successor to JFK — young, charismatic and different. Arguably, Obama's mixed racial background as the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas also helped him win. While it doubtless cost him some white votes, it appealed to others and energized minority voters as no white nominee could.

In addition, Obama benefited enormously from an innovative and meticulously managed campaign organization led by David Plouffe . It attracted millions of volunteers and may have raised close to $700 million . Plouffe emphasized winning caucuses as well as primaries, and in the general election, he had the resources to run a 50-state campaign.

The campaign even enlisted help from recording artists and a fashion industry that made Obama a pop-culture brand. It drew from new-media gurus who put their careers on hold to help out. They lured millions to an innovative Web site that helped them find their polling places, or campaign events, or buy merchandise, then stored their contact information and barraged them with personalized solicitations for money and help.

They used this network to send volunteers from safe states to Republican areas to build support. They preprinted cards with the telephone numbers of registered voters and asked people who came to Obama rallies to make calls from the stadium while they awaited his arrival.

Another factor, beyond the campaign's control but nonetheless major, was that Obama's opponents' campaigns were flawed.

Democrat Hillary Clinton underestimated the strength of Obama's organizations in Iowa and other caucus states and overestimated her own stature. Her initial message that she was "ready on Day One" also failed to resonate enough with an electorate hungry for change from familiar faces from the past.

In the general election, Republican John McCain's campaign was often at odds internally. His courtship of his party's base, through hardening his stance on immigration and tapping Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, cost him much of his longstanding appeal to independents. His attempts to paint Obama as a socialist or terrorist sympathizer overreached, and even backfired.

In the end, McCain's fumbling during the panic on Wall Street in September may have been his most damaging moment.

"I think the most critical juncture of the general election campaign was between Sept. 15 and Sept. 27 , from the beginning of the financial controversy through the first debate," Axelrod said. "I think the campaign changed there in a way that fundamentally altered the dynamic, and I think that dynamic held from that point forward.

"Obama looked like someone who was grounded, who was focused on the issue, who was thinking about it," Axelrod said. "McCain looked flighty and fickle, and jumping from one position to another. One guy looked like the president and the other guy didn't."

A few tactical decisions along the way were critical. Obama dealt with concerns head-on about how his race shaped his ideas in a nationally televised speech. He dumped his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright , and then his church, after the controversy over some of Wright's sermons blew up in the spring. McCain chose not to re-ignite the divisive issue in the fall, although the Republican Party resurrected Wright in the final days before the election.

Staging a tour this summer to the Middle East and Western Europe , including the Berlin rally where he drew an estimated 200,000 people — his largest crowd before election night — also was a calculation. Obama risked being seen as presumptuous, and indeed, polling immediately after the trip showed the race tightening. But he and his aides also knew that he was considered weak on foreign policy, and if the trip was successful, images of him with foreign leaders and supporters could establish that he was taken seriously globally.

Obama's choice of Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden — while limiting Biden's access to the media to minimize Biden's tendency to talk faster than he thought — also helped. Out of the spotlight, Biden worked his way across Pennsylvania and Ohio , where he was able to relate to the white, working-class voters Obama had difficulty reaching — whether because of his race or his Ivy League education.

Dante Scala , a University of New Hampshire political scientist, said he saw a pattern to Obama's style that helped him win. Scala called it Obama's "coolness under pressure."

"The self-discipline of the campaign, I think, has been remarkable," Scala said. "The unwillingness to panic, the unwillingness to buckle when everyone is saying you're doing the wrong thing. In the primaries everyone was saying he couldn't close the deal, but they stuck to their plan.

"In the general election, he didn't have a very good summer and things were looking perilous, but they stuck with the plan. He had enough ego to say 'I'd rather do it without the Clintons.' His debate performances were steady, and it played well among voters. I think that impressed voters, that they said, 'We can turn things over to this guy.' Obama's in a similar situation to Ronald Reagan in 1980: The country wanted change, but could they trust this person? His performance in the debates aided in that."

When Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham , who raised him for much of his childhood, died on the last day of the campaign, his coolness was tested anew. His announcement of her passing at a rally in Charlotte, N.C. , was tender, but he turned on a dime to critique McCain as too close to President Bush . It was only after the event that most reporters in his traveling press corps learned that, as he was speaking, tears were streaming down his face.