Condi Rice continues her neo-Con-Job

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Condi Rice Talks More Shite

In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted with fear-mongering.

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!

What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.

This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.

Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.

If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209

Richard B Cheney: please, go back to your safe-room and await the US Marshalls

Cheney's claim that his policies saved lives and foiled terrorist plots reminds me of that joke about the person shredding newspaper in NYC to keep away the tigers. When told that there are no tigers in NYC, the person rejoins,'See how well it works?'

Although correlation is not proof (as this joke illustrates), the number of plots foiled by Cheney's administration by torture and rendition are few and laughable. The heinous acts that they committed are numerous and vile.

Cheney (and Addington, Rice, Tennant, et al) were caught so flat-footed by 9-11 that they went off the moral and legalistic deep end in a frantic attempt to 1) avoid culpability and 2) make political hay.

In Cheney's own words, they went to the 'dark side' which to me indicates that he was already quite familiar with the territory having been there many times before.

The Question of Torture

Rice, Ashcroft Approved Torture in July 2002

More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.

An Open Letter to Those Who Still Support the Bush Doctrine

I find it truly dismaying that you cling to the belief that George W Bush, Richard Cheney and their administrations have not lead the United States to very dire straits with a growing litany of failures not only of policy but of moral rectitude.

Surely you must admit that considering…

1. the de-valuation of the dollar,
2. the sky-rocketing national debt
3. the worrisome American indebtedness to the PRC,
4. the astronomic rise in oil and food prices,
5. the sub-prime crisis,
6. the housing crisis,
7. rising unemployment,
8. the despicable, loathsome shyster-like lexical dissembling attempted by the Bush administration to justify the torturing of ‘detainees’,
9. the kidnapping and ‘torture-by-proxy’ program of ‘Special Rendition’
10. the waiving of ‘Habeas Corpus’ as a matter of policy
11. the illegal spying on American citizens conducted by the government,
12. the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that continue to devastate those countries and our economy,
13. the horrific loss of life due to those conflicts,
14. the growing clamor for investigation of war profiteering by Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel and other corporations with ties to members of these administrations,
15. the unlawful politicization of the Justice Department,
16. the loss of prestige by America in the international community of nations,
17. and the nose-thumbing at international efforts to address global climate change, have all happened on George W. Bush’s ‘watch’ – surely you must admit that he and his administrations have not exactly been a boon for our nation or the world.

It is sad and dismaying that any of you would prefer to pass off all of the above mentioned catastrophes as partisan smoke-screens set by 'liberals' to salve their sense of pride about not winning the political beauty contests of 2000 and 2004.

It is understandable that you would prefer to do that rather than face the truth about the horrific, disastrous political and economic situation that is the legacy of George W Bush and his administrations, but it is sad.

It is sad and dismaying that you actually believe that there remains the possibility of there being anything remotely close to what might be even loosely construed as a military victory in Iraq - a deplorable military mis-adventure that the Pentagon's premier military educational institute, the National Defense University, called a 'debacle' in its April, 2008 report. (I say 'believe' because it must be faith, there being no logical argument or rational thought or consideration of substantive data involved.)

This deeply felt dismay has been brought on by the lying, conniving, obfuscating, dissembling, misrepresenting, mis-informing, dis-informing clutch of greedy, self-serving ultra-nationalists 'serving' in the US government (such as Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, David Addington, etc) whose actions have resulted in an illegal invasion and violent military occupation of a sovereign nation, the reduction of the 'Cradle of Civilization' to a bombed-out shell of a looted museum ruled by murderous force of arms, the continued occupation of another ruined wreck of a third-world nation, the death of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, an estimated 4.7 million Iraqi refugees, the eviscerating of US banking regulations that took the legal restraints off of ‘predatory lenders’ (aka loan sharks) leaving thousands of Americans bankrupt and homeless.

It is sad and dismaying NOT because the vast majority of Americans who presently disapprove of Bush’s policies hold you personally responsible. It is sad and dismaying that you have swallowed the Neo-Conservative propaganda, hook, party line and sinker.

It is sad and dismaying that many of you continue to denounce as ‘unpatriotic’ those who didn’t take the bait.

It is sad and dismaying that you do not see that the clay feet of your 'heroes' are crumbling in a rising tide of irrefutable evidence of stark criminality and arrogant disregard for the fundamental values of this nation and the expressed will of the people.

No one would expect you to admit publically that the past 7 and a half years have been ruinous to the US, Iraq and Afghanistan. No one would expect an admission by you that you chose badly in placing your trust in Bush and Cheney. No one expects you to change your political stripes.

What is dismaying is that you would choose to place your sanity and your own moral rectitude in peril by not at the least admitting to yourself that the band-wagon you've been riding on in a high dudgeon of patriotic fervor is on fire and headed over the cliff with millions of people, millions of your fellow Americans, in tow.

That is cause for much sadness and dismay.

Sincerely,

DC Rapier

The Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (NDU) Report for April, 2008.

The Never-ending War Story - the Prequel

6 months before the US invaded Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion.

The PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact in June, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/
(Chapter three, ‘Embedded with KBR’; at 5:10)

To repeat:

The decision to invade Iraq had been made and Halliburton had been hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault of Iraq long before the fabricated evidence re: WMDs and Saddam/Al-Qaida connections were presented by the White House to the US people and their greedy, jello-spined representatives.

It might seem beyond credibility, given what we know now, that neither the director, Tim Mangini, nor producers, Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith thought to pursue a line of questioning pertaining to this fact in this ‘hard look at private contractors’. Too off-topic perhaps. (IMHO, the documentary quickly descends into a ‘human interest piece’. Perhaps the tragic story of ex-Navy Seal, Scotty ‘the Bod’ Helvenston and others was too alluring. Helvenston was one of the Blackwater mercenaries killed, burned and strung up from the bridge in Falluja.)

Call me naïve, but I would have thought that drilling to the core of the investigation to fathom the grand reason why we were truly at war in Iraq and in need of all these private contractors would have been the preferred tact to take. (Call it 20/20 hindsight, if you wish.)

If the reporter was correct, sometime in September, 2002, 6 months before the Bush Administration bullied the US into violating international law by invading the sovereign nation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, contracts had been signed and contractors were on the ground building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. This presumably included the ‘permanent bases’, and quite likely improvements on what is to be the largest embassy compound in the World. A ‘Vatican City’ to serve as the base of future operations in the Middle-east. Most certainly, they were busy building some of the more than 60 sites that KBR operated in Iraq at the time of this documentary.

In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as “the dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons” and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. What Dubya didn’t tell us is that his cabal of war-criminals had already bargained away any peaceful, diplomatic solutions in a no-bid contract to Halliburton/KBR, three months earlier.

Lest we forget, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, a 26-year veteran of the agency, revealed to CBS’ Ed Bradley on ‘60-minutes’ which aired on April 23, 2006, that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director, George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States and was reportedly paid more than $100,000 by the CIA — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-09.htm

Mr Drumheller went on to say that the administration didn’t care about this revelation, no matter the source. Of course not, by that time, in September, 2002, the real decisions had been made by the people who truly matter, the high mucky-mucks of corporate America, and the ink was drying on the dotted line. The gravy-train was leaving the station with a full head of steam and no red flag was going to stop it.

You can almost hear an echo from the addled, collective brain-pan of Bush’s Inner Circle, ‘We can’t renege on the deals we’ve made with our friends at Halliburton. That wouldn’t be kosher. A deal is a deal.’ One must suppose that the ‘finder’s fee’ on the estimated umpteen billion dollars in no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton/KBR would be a handsome one. And if one had similar connections with other corporations that supplied materiel and services to Halliburton and KBR at inflated cost, one could wolf down the slop at both ends of the trough. Hog heaven, as they say.

That’s a mighty temptation. Mountains of cash up front and on the back end, lots of powerful friends who’d be happy to give you a corner office, a princely salary and a diamond parachute when you conclude your ‘service’ in the US government.

Beyond the dreams of avarice.

And all you have to do is undermine the Constitution, betray your solemn oath to uphold and defend the precepts of that document, lie to the US citizens you swore to serve, deceive the world with bald-faced falsehoods and steel yourself to live with the fact that the blood of thousands or even tens of thousands of human beings are on your greedy hands.

Such a deal.

So, General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, when can we expect to bring home our troops and our contractors? When will this war end?

The answer is simple.

The war will end when Dubya, Dicky-boy, Donnie the Rum, Condi, Wolfie, and all those of their sickening ilk can force themselves from the slop of the trough.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

Post Script:
I am very sympathetic to Mr Helveston's friends and family members. I also can understand the reasoning revealed by Mrs Katy Helveston, Scotty’s mom when she told PBS,”When you’ve been in Special Forces for 13, 14 years, you’re trained to do one thing. And there’s not a whole lot of jobs out there for people trained to kill.” Being a private contractor seemed to be a solution to the deteriorating US economy for many of the 10,000 who were in Iraq in 2005.