Kirk Lippold, Gitmo Architect, Still Making Torture Cool

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I previously wrote about Kirk Lippold earlier this month, when the Obama Administration dropped charges against Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the Cole bombing. Just as a Bush Dead-Ender judge was forcing Obama’s hand by refusing to put off al-Nashiri’s trial, Lippold, former Commander of the USS Cole, hit the airwaves, bitching about how Obama was holding up justice for the families of the Cole victims.

Somehow, the news sources quoting Lippold never asked why (with one exception) he hadn’t been bitching for the previous eight years, when Bush and Clinton failed to prosecute any of the Cole bombers.

Nor did the news sources quoting Lippold reveal something just as pertinent to his complaints that Obama was letting a Gitmo detainee free as his role as Cole Commander: Lippold was himself one of the architects of Gitmo policy.

With yesterday’s release of Binyam Mohamed, Lippold is back, attacking Obama for making the country less safe.

This unprecedented release of an enemy combatant, who has already targeted the United States, clearly shows that despite the promises that President Obama made to keep this country safe, he may be putting political promises ahead of our national security. The laundry list of charges against Binyam Mohamed, many of which he has admitted to, makes it blatantly clear that it is not if he will attack the United States, but only when his attack will happen.

And, with the help of Military Families United (which seems to have been set up to push Obama to be belligerent as possible and which seems to have been the catalyst behind Lippold’s new chatty ways), Lippold’s attacks are getting play. 

Kudos to Carol Rosenberg, alone among journalists picking up Lippold’s release, for identifying Lippold with his Gitmo role.

A Bush administration era architect of Guantánamo policy resurrected the dirty bomb allegation and accused Obama of "clearly taking actions that may endanger the United States and our national interests.”

Retired Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, whose destroyer the USS Cole was struck by suicide bombers in October 2000, said in a statement issued by the advocacy group Military Families United: "Americans must now be very watchful of every action the Obama administration takes in war on terror.”

The AP, though, makes no mention of Lippold’s role in designing Gitmo.

Some criticized Mohamed’s release, saying Monday that no detainees should have been freed before their status was reviewed under an executive order Obama issued last month.

Read more →

Condi’s Whole Life, in Three Volumes, Worth Slightly More than David Plouffe’s Two-Year Campaign

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As Lisa is reporting, Condi just signed herself a $2.5 million deal for three books on her life and her tenure as Bush’s foreign policy flunky. She will write one book on her time in the Bush Administration, a memoir of her life, and a kids version of the memoir.

That’s great news for Condi, as others in the Bush Administration are having less success getting book deals. Consider Alberto Gonzales, who doesn’t yet have a publisher for his book, which purportedly sets the record straight on his role in the crimes of the Bush Administration. Laura Bush got a book deal–at a quarter of the price that Hillary got for her First Lady story. Karl Rove, who smartly got an early start on the bidding, had to settle for $1.5 million for his book deal; experts had thought he’d get $3 million. And Bush himself has been advised to wait, as the market for anything he has to say looks like the rest of the economy: non-existent and getting worse.

But the market for books is not all bad. Just by way of perspective, consider David Plouffe’s book deal for the story of managing Obama’s historic campaign. Plouffe got $1.5 to $2 million for his advance.

So in case you were wondering, the market now values Plouffe’s role in Obama’s two-year campaign to have the same value as Karl Rove’s entire life work, Laura Bush’s tenure as First Lady, (for the moment at least) George Bush’s two term Administration, and two out of Condi’s three-volume life.

I think the market’s invisible hand just slapped the Bush Administration upside their head.

The Iseman Cometh, The Iseman Goeth

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BartCop/Political Humor

BartCop/Political Humor

At the end of December last year, Emptywheel reported that noted high powered Washington lobbyist Miss Vicki Iseman had filed a defamation suit against the New York Times. At issue was a February 21, 2008 Times article that Iseman contended lead people to believe that she played hanky blankie with McCain; but, as EW noted at the time:

What was at issue in the article was the appearance of an affair, not an affair itself, and the beliefs of McCain staffers about that appearance of an affair.

That was exactly right then, and it is still right now and ought to be kept in mind in light of the news yesterday that Iseman’s lawsuit was dismissed:

A lobbyist’s lawsuit against The New York Times over the newspaper’s account of her ties to Senator John McCain has been settled, both sides announced on Thursday.

The suit, filed by Vicki L. Iseman, the Washington lobbyist, was settled without payment and The Times did not retract the article. In an unusual agreement, however, The Times is letting Ms. Iseman’s lawyers give their views on the suit on the paper’s Web site.

Their opinion is accompanied by a joint statement from both sides and a note to readers, which is also appearing in Friday’s edition of the newspaper.

Let me boil down to the bone what has been accomplished legally as a result of Iseman’s complaint. Not a damn thing; both parties are sticking to the same exact public positions they maintained before the meritless suit was filed, it is just that for the sake of their pocketbooks they have agreed to take the pissing match back out of the costly court litigation system. And, now that they are back into an ink fight as opposed to boxing with attorneys, let’s take a look at how Times Editor Bill Keller describes the matter in a published statement today:

What the article set out to do, and did, was to establish that Senator McCain — a man whose career was ensnared by scandal and then rebuilt on a reputation for avoiding even the appearance of impropriety — was sometimes careless of that reputation. The story reported that a senator who cast himself as the scourge of lobbyists rode on the private jets of business executives with interests before his committee, and that a senator who disdained the influence of corporate money accepted corporate money to support that very cause.

Read more →

The AP’s Remaining Competitive Function: Litigators for Big Media

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I’m intrigued by this speech the AP CEO made yesterday for several reasons.

The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."

Much like in Vietnam, "civilian policymakers and soldiers alike have cracked down on independent reporting from the battlefield" when the news has been unflattering, Curley said. "Top commanders have told me that if I stood and the AP stood by its journalistic principles, the AP and I would be ruined."

First of all, Curley’s comments seem to echo the report I discussed yesterday, which shows DOD spends more on domestic Psyop than foreign Psyop (thanks to Peregwyn for teaching me how to say it properly). 

Spending on public affairs has more than doubled since 2003. Robert Hastings, acting secretary of defense, says the growth reflects changes in the information market, along with the fact that the U.S. is now fighting two wars.

"The role of public affairs is to provide you the information so that you can make an informed decision yourself," Hastings says. "There is no place for spin at the Department of Defense."

But on Dec. 12, the Pentagon’s inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense "may appear to merge inappropriately" its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.

Either his journalists did a great story and he almost immediately adopted it as his own pet issue. Or, knowing the AP, it just as likely worked the other way around: the AP was fed up with getting harassed by the military, so they allocated an unusual amount of reporting resources (interviews with 100 people and the review of more than 100,000 pages of documents, the article boasted) demonstrating what a problem the military’s new focus on Psyop is. Read more →

Fellatio for Cheney from the Politico

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picture-80.thumbnail.pngI guess it’s no surprise that Dick Cheney chose Pool Boy and his two sidekicks, John Harris and Mike Allen, for his first propaganda piece after stepping down as Vice President. And it was a good choice for Cheney, as they apparently assiduously avoided any of the questions that Cheney ought to be asked.

For example, when Cheney asserted,

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Real journalists might have asked, "then why the fuck didn’t we finish the job in Afghanistan rather than turning our attention to a war of choice in Iraq?"

Similarly, when Cheney said,

*The potential consequences of $1 trillion in deficit stimulus spending: “It’s huge, obviously – potentially huge. You worry about what ultimately happens to inflation. You worry about what’s going to happen to the ability of the government to borrow money. … I’m nervous.”

Real journalists might have asked why Cheney showed no concern when he was racking up $1 trillion (and counting) of deficit spending for the aforementioned war of choice in Iraq. For that matter, real journalists might even have asked what happened to Cheney’s claim that "Reagan proved deficits don’t matter," now that he’s out of office.

But I suppose it would take more than a real journalist–it would take a DFH blogger, most likely–to point out that, in fact, many people did foresee the colossal fuck-up the Bush Administration was making of the economy.

*Whether the Bush administration should have done more about the economy: "We did worry about it, to some extent. … I don’t think anybody actually foresaw something of this size and dimension occurring. It’s also global. We only control part of the world economy – a very important part."  

The article ends by quoting Liz Cheney teasing her dad that he doesn’t need a press aide–he can do it on his own. And I guess, given that he did such a good job of arranging a fluffer designed to attack Obama some more for reversing Dick’s failed policies–Liz Cheney has it about right. 

One Night of Indigestion for Obama

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By now you’ve heard that Obama risked indigestion just days before his inauguration to reach out to the other side.

Barack Obama took the next big step in his Republican charm offensive on Tuesday night, when he dined with several of the nation’s most prominent conservative pundits.

The president-elect arrived at the Chevy Chase, Md., home of syndicated columnist George Will shortly after 6:30 p.m., according to a press pool report. Greeting him at the residence were other luminaries of the conservative commentariat, including the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post.

Just two comments about this. First, remember that two out of three of these men sort-of endorsed Obama as the election came to a close (indeed Brooks was a fan from early on). Here’s Brooks, enthusing over Obama’s self-efficacy in October.

But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.

Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second. He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds.

But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day.

Here’s Will, attacking the Republican ticket’s shared inability to think with complexity, in October.

Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain’s question for his briefer was: "So, who is the villain?"

Read more →

Bill Ford v. Larry King: Village Idiocy about the Auto Industry

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John Cole is right, this Larry King interview of Bill Ford deserves more attention.

Here’s what Cole pointed to: Ford insisting that (contrary to what the plantation caucus believes) the UAW is not the problem.

KING: What about the UAW in all of this?

FORD: Well, the UAW obviously has been our partner through all of this. Have they made mistakes and have we made mistakes? Of course. The UAW has come a long way. I think their leader, Ron Gettelfinger, is an excellent leader and he really understands our business. In this last contract, he gave up a lot. He’s also indicated they’re willing to come to the table to do more. And so for anybody to blame the UAW as the sole reason for this is frankly wrong.

Hey, David Sanger? Your assertion that the problem is distrust between the UAW and the manufacturers? You think maybe Mr. Ford knows something you don’t?

Just as interesting to me are the number of times that Ford had to instruct Larry King on things that–had he been paying attention at all–he would have known.

There are the 3 times that King suggested Ford was in the same boat as GM and Chrysler.

KING: How much danger, frankly, are you in? Can you give us the picture without being too technical?

FORD: Actually, Ford, we were profitable in the first quarter. Our plan is working. Our market share is picking up. I believe we’re headed exactly where the country wants us to go.

[snip]

KING: What was the key turning point for you that sent this downward?

FORD: As I said, we made money in the first quarter, and we were well on our way.

[snip]

KING: Is that a good point, Bill, that your products were behind the times and now you want a bailout through your fault?

FORD: Actually, Larry, we’re not asking for a bailout. Our competitors are.

Here’s Larry King completely missing the fact that most developed nations are backing their auto industries–and so it’s no big surprise that any American car companies might need credit.

KING: Why do you need the line of credit?

FORD: We’re saying we don’t need it now, but we’re saying, if the global economy does not pick up, you know, Read more →

More Narcissistic “Auto” “Reporting” from David Sanger

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picture-69.pngAs I keep saying, the NYT is not an institution to quit while it’s behind. Exactly one week after David Sanger wrote a highly criticized article claiming the nationalization of auto companies would carry ominous risks that the forgotten (by Sanger) nationalization of much more expensive finance companies did not, he’s back, this time applying the lessons of the Middle East peace process to the auto negotiations.

As a sitting president and a president-elect maneuver over how to bail out Detroit – and ultimately how to convince the Big Three to radically change their ways — there may be some instructive lessons in the Middle East peace process.

The Middle East? At first blush it may seem a bit farfetched. But all complex, intractable negotiations – especially those involving ancient, entrenched interests in which sheer survival is at stake – share something in common.

Of course, Sanger’s masturbatory exercise is all premised on his assumption that he knows diddly shit about the auto industry. Which doesn’t seem to be the case. Consider Sanger’s inapt comparison of the absence of trust between the stakeholders in an auto negotiation and between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Again, there is no trust: the unions believe the companies are trying to break them, the retired think their pensions are under assault, the company executives don’t want lectures about prudence and planning for the future from a Congress that has run up trillions in deficits.

Um, no, David. If you haven’t noticed, the union and the companies have displayed a good deal of trust in recent past, as the last union contract shows. It crafted a way for manufacturers to take retiree healthcare off their books and bring wages into line with the transplants. That took a great deal of trust. If you need further proof, though, you might consider all those pictures of Ron Gettelfinger testifying with the CEOs of the Big 2.5 before Congress. Did you notice that the UAW and the Big 2.5 were on the same side of the table, in both a metaphorical and literal sense? The UAW knows well who is trying to break them. It’s not the Big 2.5, it’s the plantation caucus. 

Furthermore, it’s not so much that the Big 2.5 don’t want lectures from a Congress that has run up trillions (besides, I thought it was Bush and his unfunded Iraq War that did that?). Read more →

Three Auto State Senators “Said in a Statement”

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For an example of just how crappy the reporting on a potential auto bridge is, check out this NYT article. Its title announces "Republicans Divided on Aid to Automakers." Yet the part of the article that purportedly tells that story consists solely of statements of the four most invested Republican Senators on the issue.

Kit Bond (who co-sponsored past efforts with Carl Levin):

“I’m glad the Democratic leadership has embraced the principles of the Bond-Levin bill to hold auto companies accountable, protect taxpayers and save millions of American jobs as we head into the holiday season,” Mr. Bond said in a statement.

Bob Corker: 

“Based on the outline we’ve seen so far, we are disappointed,” Mr. Corker said in a statement. He reiterated his demands that the automakers make aggressive efforts to cut labor costs and reduce their overall debt obligations before receiving any aid.

“These are the same types of conditions a bankruptcy judge might require to ensure that these companies become viable and sustainable into the future,” Mr. Corker said. “And if they will agree to these terms, then we have something to talk about.”

Mitch McConnell:

“I look forward to reviewing the legislation being drafted to address the difficulties in our auto markets,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement. “As we consider this legislation, our first priority must be to protect the hard-earned money of the American taxpayer.”

And a gratuitous inclusion of Richard Shelby, though he apparently hasn’t issued any new statement, but somehow gets included, based on no apparently new reporting:

The senior Republican on the banking committee, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, has said he will oppose any taxpayer-financed bailout for the auto industry, and other fiscal hawks are likely to join him in opposing the measure.

This is what counts as reporting these days for the NYT. Three official statements probably gleaned from press releases, thereby letting those most invested in this debate stand in for those who will determine its outcome.

In spite of the fact that every single Republican listed (along with Carl Levin) is an auto state Senator of one sort or another, David Herszenhorn doesn’t apparently consider that information to be noteworthy (indeed, he attributes Shelby’s opposition to any bailout to fiscal conservatism, not anti-union ideology and home state self-interest). Read more →

Girlz Out Loud

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Just so you know, I’m still watching the Sunday show line-ups to see whether all the smart girlz who were on during the election still get invited back.

And FWIW, we’ve got two girlz of significance this week: Laura Bush (well, I’m not going to tune in, but she is a girl and she’ll be on before pickling hour),  and Claire McCaskill. If I’m not mistaken, McCaskill will be the first girl on Fox News Sunday since the election. May she channel her best prosecutor kick-ass when she faces off against Richard Shelby, particularly if and when they talk auto bailout (remember, Missouri has a number of (union) auto plants.