The irony is, of course, that the debacle in Iraq and the tremendous loss of prestige and credibility the US has suffered under Bush have allowed China to go around the less developed world and try to exert its soft power–cementing trade agreements and alliances, as well as buying up resources. And the destruction of much of our military, and the exposure of its vulnerabilities, again in Iraq, have probably saved China from having to engage in an economically crippling arms race with us, as the Soviets did.

So not only did this preoccupation with China (and state-sponsored terrorism) cause Bush/Cheney to miss the warnings about 9/11, their staggering incompetence in choosing to attack and then occupy Iraq has given a big boost not only to Iran but also to China.

They are so incompetent it is hard to believe that Cheney did not have some other objective entirely, or that he is actually in the pay of the Chinese or the Iranians.

â€Because truth is not trusted, specious propaganda takes over. Because justice is not trusted, whatever is useful is declared to be just.†Dietrich Bonhoeffer

At let us not forget that Cheney’s daughter–who had absolutely no experience in the Middle East– was a deputy in charge of Iraq reconstruction. Her appointment was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Jay Garner–someone with a lot of on-the-ground experience in Iraq from GW1.

Well, part of the story is here: In the beginning,

When, during her senior year of high school, it became desirable for Lynne Ann Vincent to steal her best friend’s boyfriend, she did not hesitate. Lynne was, after all, the Mustang Queen — chosen by the Natrona County High School football players, among others, to reign at homecoming. And her boyfriend had dropped her. Unthinkable that the Queen would not have a date —

and a star, at that, someone worthy of her.

It was 1959 in Casper, Wyo., and none of the three kids in this adolescent triangle had an inkling that their personal history might become a determinant of American history. Not Lynne, a petite blonde. Nor her pal Joan Frandsen, who cannot tell the story 45 years later without biting anger. Nor the halfback on the football team who came between them, the senior-class president, a boy named Dick Cheney.

Yes, and you are also dazzlingly brilliant, like Lynne. But are you truly as ruthless?

Even Vice President Cheney sometimes jokes about his wife’s brains and drive, saying that whomever she married would have ended up in the White House. Until Lynne set her sights on Dick, back in 1959, their friends thought he was a smart guy, kind of quiet, a good athlete, someone with a bright future. What nobody had detected was the kind of ambition that would carry him to that exalted place where, when he and Lynne arrived for their high school reunion this summer, they were surrounded by Secret Service agents.

But if Lynne had betrayed one of her best friends to get her man, the man who was to become the love of her life, as she called him at last month’s Republican convention, it was also true that Dick had caught his first glimpse of a possible future. He grasped hold of the smartest girl in town, and the most flamboyant baton twirler in Wyoming — her batons were set aflame at both ends.

Lady Macbeth, without the guilty conscience. There was a China element to the Iraq invasion though, with the GWOT serving as a convenient proxy. The Cheney types saw Iraq at the first step in American efforts to control the oil and gas resources from Iraq to the Stans (remember, â€real men want to go to Tehranâ€), and therefore staving off Chinese efforts to access Middle East oil. Also, IMHO, the North Korean element of the Axis of Evil was meant to plant an unstable, nuclear-armed regime on China’s doorstep as a perpetual thorn – the threat from Pyonyang was to Beijing, not Washington (and Russia too, as a bonus). More perpetual conflict, right from the neo-con playbook.

BTW Marcy, how did your ultimate game on the 4th go? Did your back make it?

Once one’s knee go and ultimate is out of the question there is always disc golf. The 20 hole course at Sipapu, New Mexioc is truly epic.

mimikatz–thank you for the article and Lynne C. info. I don’t know if it’s the return of the repressed actually, but women who were unable to find a place to ply their talents have often ended up badly–and taken others with them. How often have we said of my mother-in-law: If only she could have been president, our lives would not be this living hell. As a women who went to law school in the seventies (the first female attorney at the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission!), I look back in anger and sadness. If Lynne C. could have gone for it, where would the country be now?

blergh–make that: one of the women who went to law school in the seventies

But, as I said in my forst post, the irony is that it has all had the opposite effect. China is in better shape and we are in much worse shape. If that was their objective, they might as well have been working for the Chinese (or the Iranians).

The Cheneys – chief representatives of America’s indigenous criminal class. â€Rule of Law†you say? Damn right. Rule of the law, rule of the lawless, and rule of everything else too. If they were Catholics, they’d have a cousin installed as Pope. Maybe that’s where Romney comes in.

Ishmael

Thanks for asking. We had to play pickup, on account of low numbers (summer league has been going for weeks, but this is the first game I could make). And I sucked. Badly. It’s been a long time, and the back was just bad enough I had no first step. And I couldnt’ catch. Truly miserable.

mr. emptywheel did better, but then he has played a tournie already this year.

J Thomason

See, in my case, the back went. And the closest best disc golf course (Huron Mills, which has hosted worlds) has a hole called â€The Monster†that is over 1000 feet. So,without a back, I’m not going very far. ALso, I insist on playing with ultimate discs, so that may be part of my problem.

LabDancer – I was thinking of calling the the former Vice President â€The Goreax†for a while now, but it sounds more like a horror movie than a plea for enviromentalism. And isnt’ it great that the concert is going to be on the Washington Mall, despite the Rethugs best efforts!!!!

LabDancer and Ishmael–Do you think there might be a Yertle somewhere in the Bush administration? (One can hope)

From Horton Hears a Who: Bedtime reading for the Blue Dog Democrats!

“This,†cried the Mayor, “is your town’s darkest hour!
The time for all Whos who have blood that is red
To come to the aid of their country!†he said.
“We’ve GOT to make noises in greater amounts!
So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!â€

OK, I’ll stop now, but Dr. Seuss is a true poet!

LabDancer,
We’ve apparently been thinking in parallel on the â€Badministration†thing for some time.

The whole Hart-Rudman story is indeed interesting. I’d known that the Badministration had given the commission’s report very short shrift, either despite or because of the fact that it had been commissioned by Congress, but was unaware that the buzzards had actually refused to meet with it.

The Hart-Rudman report had to go out under consensus. As such, given that the final membership encompassed not just Hart and Rudman, who I can imagine coming jointly to some rational assessment of national security matters, but also James Schlesinger and Newt Gingrich, the full menu of conclusions and recommendations is a mixed bag. However, for sure they didn’t paint any issue regarding China, India, North Korea, and/or Taiwan as a war in the making, and they did make enough of the possibility of terrorism against the U.S. that it should have resonated with the Clinton transition warnings that had also just come in. At least, if the recipients were not operating by remote viewing or whatever the hell it is they do instead of engaging the world they actually are in.

Mighty Mouse – I make that same mistake all the time! My kids always loved the burping part! Here’s a piece of Seussiana that we can all agree is sacrilege: From the February New Yorker profile of Joementum:

â€Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. He is a liberal on social policy and a conservative on defense, in the bygone style of the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. “I’m the Lorax,†he said. “I’m saving that one tree.â€â€

What was Lynne Cheney doing in that bunker so early on the morning of 9/11? (Richard Clarke writes that, when he rushed to the bunker after the second plane hit the WTC, both Cheneys were already there.)

That’s a secure compartmented space, isn’t it? How could Lynne Cheney, not a member of the government, have the necessary clearances? And, even if she does have them, why would she just happen to be there early on what appeared to be an uneventful Tuesday a week after Labor Day?

By the way, I’ve read that Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld opposed our backing down to China over the reconnaissance plane that was forced down in the spring of ’01. But that was one bureaucratic battle where Powell and Rice managed to prevail over them.

It would be interesting to know if this happened around the time the Chinese were holding our navy EP-3E at Hainan Island. That was indeed a tense incident with the Chinese, and they were being very belligerent. That was April 2001, and the story only says â€early 2001â€.

Here is an article that strikes home. I’ve written about similar situations regarding some people I personally am aware of. The game is the same, just different victims. I would urge everyone to do the following:

1.Exert as much effort as possible into getting friends and colleagues to pressure the Senate into passing the whistle blower protection law (S. 274) they are currently letting sit on hold which would grant whistleblower protections to Federal and Defense Dept. employees.

2.Encourage people, who hold information that would be of use in holding the wrongdoers accountable in any of the unethical or illegal activities going in the various government agencies, and within defense contractors, to come forward and report what they know. Reports may be sent to The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and also, I would at this point suggest POGO as POGO is currently working on some serious related cases. It may be possible to tag on and the combined information would probably support everyone’s cases.

3.Help publicize all of this by posting blogs, and leaving comments on other’s blogs to help keep things stirred up (so they can’t just make all the complaints go “gently into the good nightâ€). And write your government officials, such as House and Senate elected representatives; you may not get a response, but keep a record of all such contacts you have made for future reference. If you possess sensitive or classified, information, I don’t recommend you disclose this in a public arena, but write an unleaded version, which shows the corrupt behavior, or cover-up without giving the sensitive details. Let the people you write to know if you have the sensitive/classified details, and that when someone with the proper clearances is put onto your case, you will be happy to cooperate with an official investigation. (If you know material is sensitive or classified, and disclose it, then you will most likely be held accountable, as you signed the standard form 312 briefing that is an agreement between yourself and the government that you will not improperly disclose classified government information. You do not want to end up in Federal Prison, so be careful with this.)

4. As Winston Churchill said…. Never, ever give up!

—————————————————————————————————————

Whistle-Blower’s Fight For Pension Drags On
By Lyndsey Layton
The Washington Post
Saturday 07 July 2007

Former defense official seeks private relief bill. From a cramped motor home in a Montana campground where Internet access is as spotty as the trout, Richard Barlow wakes each morning to battle Washington.

Once a top intelligence officer at the Pentagon who helped uncover Pakistan’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Barlow insisted on telling the truth, and it led to his undoing. He complained in 1989 that top officials in the administration of President George H.W. Bush – including the deputy assistant secretary of defense – were misleading Congress about the Pakistani program. He was fired and stripped of his security clearances. His intelligence career was destroyed; his marriage collapsed.

Federal investigations found Barlow was unfairly fired, winning him sympathy from dozens of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and public interest groups. But for 17 years, he has fought without success to gain a federal pension, blocked at every turn by legal and political obstacles also faced by other federal intelligence whistle- blowers.

â€This case has been put before the Congress to right a wrong, and for various reasons, they’ve failed to do it,†said Robert Gallucci, dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an expert in nonproliferation. â€It’s infuriating.â€

Barlow, 52, and his supporters want funding added to the defense authorization bill to be debated by the Senate when it returns from recess next week. The mechanism Barlow hopes to use – a private relief bill that benefits a specific individual – is increasingly rare and, in his case, still faces hurdles.

Gallucci has known Barlow since the late 1980s, when Barlow was tracking the work of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist amassing materials to produce nuclear weapons. Some of the men setting policy at the Defense Department at the time of Barlow’s firing – Stephen J. Hadley, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney – resurfaced in the current Bush administration, which Democrats and others have accused of shaping intelligence on the Iraq war to fit political goals.

Barlow’s intelligence work began at the CIA, where he analyzed nuclear programs in other countries. He contributed to the National Intelligence Estimates and presented findings to national security agencies, the White House and congressional committees. He received the CIA’s Exceptional Accomplishment Award in 1988.

The next year, he became the first intelligence officer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, charged with analyzing nuclear weapons developments involving foreign governments. He answered to Gerald Brubaker, the acting director of the Office of Non- Proliferation. Supervising Brubaker was Victor Rostow, the principal director. Rostow reported to Deputy Assistant Secretary James Hinds, who reported to Assistant Secretary Stephen J. Hadley.

At the time, the government was poised to sell $1.4 billion worth of new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress, through two laws passed in 1985, had forbidden the sale of any equipment that could be used to deliver nuclear bombs.

Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan’s ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons â€far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan†– something Barlow knew to be untrue.

In the summer of 1989, Barlow told Brubaker, Rostow and Michael MacMurray, the Pakistan desk officer in charge of military sales to Pakistan who prepared Hughes’s testimony, that Congress had been misled. Within days, Barlow was fired. â€They clearly didn’t want the nonproliferation policy to get in the way of their regional policy,†Gallucci said. â€They were worried someone like Rich [Barlow], in his stickler approach, would insist that if there’s going to be testimony on the Hill about the F-16 aircraft, that the answers be full and truthful. He was a thorn in their side, and they went after him. And they did a very good job of screwing up his life.â€

In a 2000 deposition provoked by Barlow’s subsequent lawsuit, Hadley said he remembered underlings proposing to terminate an employee in August 1989 but did not recall â€someone named Richard Barlow.†In a separate deposition, Wolfowitz also testified he could not recall Barlow. But Wolfowitz told Congress in 1990 that the retaliation Barlow faced was wrong and the government was legally obligated to keep Congress informed about Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

â€There have been times on that issue when I specifically sensed that people thought we could somehow construct a policy on a house of cards that the Congress wouldn’t know what the Pakistanis were doing,†Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

After a 1993 joint probe, the inspector general at the State Department concluded that Barlow had been fired as a reprisal, while the inspector generals at the CIA and the Defense Department maintained that the Pentagon was within its rights to fire Barlow. Congress directed the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) to conduct its own investigation, which was completed in 1997 and largely vindicated Barlow.

Barlow’s security clearances were restored, but he was unable to get rehired permanently by the government because of the cloud over his record, he said. Instead, he has worked as a contractor for a range of federal agencies, including the CIA, the State Department, the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories.

That left him without the $89,500 annual pension and health insurance that Barlow believes the government owes him.

He faces no organized opposition now but has so far been stymied by government inertia, the passage of time, congressional procedural errors, and endless debates over how much money he’s due and the proper legislative vehicle for his pension.

Twenty Senators and eight legislative committees have considered his case over the years without resolving it, suggesting a larger dilemma: No process exists to compensate fired whistle-blowers in the intelligence field, and those who retaliate against them face no criminal penalties.

A 1998 law instead allows employees of the CIA, parts of the Defense Department, the FBI and the National Security Agency to notify their agency’s inspector general that they intend to disclose a matter of â€urgent concern†to congressional intelligence committees. But there is no remedy if they suffer retaliation for using this legal channel.

â€There just isn’t a venue for someone like him,†said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization that investigates and exposes corruption. â€He was trying to prevent lies to Congress about something of global importance. And he didn’t even go to Congress – all he did was suggest that Congress not be lied to.â€

Brian and Gallucci believe that had Barlow’s alarms been heeded in 1989, Khan might have been deterred from building the world’s largest atomic black market – a network that has since supplied nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Some Hill staffers say they worry that granting Barlow a pension will cause hundreds of other injured whistle-blowers to demand similar treatment. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a known champion of whistle-blowers who supports Barlow’s quest, is contacted each week by four new whistle-blowers looking for help, said his spokeswoman, Beth Levine. But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is considering sponsoring legislation providing Barlow a pension or a lump-sum payment, a staffer said.

Bingaman attempted to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow once before, in 1998. But another senator persuaded colleagues to refer it to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which hears lawsuits that seek money from the federal government in excess of $10,000. During the case, which lasted four years, the Justice Department invoked a â€state secrets†privilege to block the court from seeing most of Barlow’s evidence, according to Barlow’s pro bono lawyer, Joseph Ostoyich.

In 2002, the court found that Barlow was not entitled to protection under whistle-blower laws. â€It was a galling situation,†Ostoyich said. â€There was plenty of evidence … and all of [it] … was taken out of the court’s hands. I’ve never seen anything like it.†Barlow’s original pro bono attorney, Paul C. Warnke, who was President Jimmy Carter’s chief arms-control negotiator, died in 2001.

An attempt several months ago by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) to sponsor a private relief bill for Barlow encountered resistance from House Armed Services Committee lawyers who said there was no precedent for it, according to her staff. Next, she tried to offer a simple resolution stating that Congress supported Barlow in his efforts, but that was thwarted by the Rules Committee, which was juggling more than 100 other requests deemed more pressing.

Since his most recent employment contract at Sandia ended, Barlow has been living in a motor home that he parks in Montana during the summer and drives to Arizona or California in the winter. Most of his possessions, including 200 pounds of documents related to his fight, are sitting in a storage locker he rents for $100 a month.

Most weekdays, he pushes his cause in cellphone calls and e-mails to Washington from his motor home, dogging Hill staffers with a tenacity that seems bottomless and can be off-putting. â€This is such an extraordinary case,†Brian said. â€He was trying to say ’Wait a minute, Congress needs to be told the truth because they’re making important decisions about nuclear proliferation,’ and the guy is living in a trailer.â€