Alan Greenspan:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows:
the Iraq war is largely about oil"

Naomi Kline:

"Are you aware that, according to the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?"

9.30.2007 Pentagon Issues Blackwater New $92 Million Contract

Last Thursday, Gen. Peter Pace told reporters, “Blackwater has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future.” The next day, that future was already here. The Pentagon had issued a new list of contracts, including one worth $92 million to Presidential Airways, the “aviation unit of parent company Blackwater.”
...
"This contract was competitively procured and two timely offers were received. The performance period is from 1 Oct. 2007 to 30 September 2011."

In any case, their ability and willingness to pivot like this and change the entire rationale for their war in Iran ought to be reason enough to oppose the idea. That's true, first of all, because it strongly suggests both rationales were just more manufactured evidence. But also because, as the Iraq war showed us, if we go to war without a clearly defined rationale and goal, we're going to get stuck in yet another desert quagmire.

The gist of Hersh's comments on CNN? That changing the "mission" with regard to Iran makes an attack more palatable to the American public. Instead of the failed smoking gun/mushroom cloud line...

Hersh: You can also sell counter-terror, it’s much more logical. You can say to the American people, we’re only hitting these people that are trying to kill our boys and the coalition forces and so that seems to be more sensible, The White House thinks they can actually pitch this, this would actually work…

9.29.2007 The ‘Restore Patriotism to University Campuses Act’: The name of Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-CA) bill to cut off all federal funds to Columbia University because of the Ahmadinejad speech.

9.29.2007 Things Go Better With Rules NYT Editorial

To hear the nation’s top economic officials tell it, the worst effect of the reckless mortgage lending during the housing bubble is not mass foreclosures, bankruptcies, investor losses or credit seizures. It is the possibility that the turmoil could lead to new regulation.
...
During the bubble, regulators allowed financial market participants to run amok. To help ensure that does not happen again, consumer protections that have languished, like providing loan disclosures in a borrower’s native language, need to be reinvigorated and violators prosecuted. Loan-making standards need to be subject to regulatory scrutiny, both at banks and nonbanks. The system must be rid of perverse incentives that made it profitable for brokers and lenders to make reckless loans.

This isn't meant to be a criticism of Hillary Clinton in particular. But it's going to end up that way, because she's the only one of the sitting Democratic Senators running for president who voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment the other day.
...
But both amendments got votes from Democratic Senators, and both prompted those Democrats to issue statements explaining why they'd vote for such a thing. In the first instance, I looked at Senator Feingold's reasoning. Today it's Clinton's. And here's the thing: in each case, we have a Democratic Senator who feels sure that the resolution does not authorize the use of force against Iran.

But in both cases, we've still got an "administration" that simply doesn't believe it needs Congressional authorization at all.
...
The thing to keep in mind here is that Yoo studiously avoided the use of the word "authorization," even going so far as to refuse to call the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) by that designation, referring to it only as "the Joint Resolution." This is because this "administration" still firmly believes that the president has the "inherent power" to strike any enemy on his own say-so, and that Congress, no matter how it styles its resolutions, can say no different.

The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.
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The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Here’s one insight from Toobin that seems intuitively correct, but I haven’t seen emphasized by anyone else. “Bush had a businessman’s contempt for lawyers generally, and he viewed the process of choosing judges with impatience.” (p. 260) “All of the top officials who were considering Miers’s appointment –Bush, Cheney, Card, Rove, and Miers herself—had relatively little idea what Supreme Court justices actually do all day. . . .Everyone in Bush’s inner circle came out of the corporate world, where they believed that good judgment and instincts mattered more than reflective analysis. The same was true for corporate lawyers. Bush would never have dreamed of asking prospective members of his cabinet for writing samples, and he didn’t require them of Miers either. For the president, it was not a problem that Miers had no writing to offer.” (p. 288) Now think about this in relation to executive power and you have a worthwhile insight into what has been going on at the White House.

Similarly, Blackwater is a private business that has even more of the appurtenances of sovereignty (such as avoiding legitimate taxation, as with the Bank) than the BUS. Blackwater can apparently kill at will, without having to suffer any potential legal consequences from either the decidedly non-sovereign Iraqi government or even the ostensibly sovereign US government.

Blackwater is presumably the beneficiary of a catch-22 feature of the state action doctrine: It is, like the Bank, fundamentally an instrumentality of the US with regard to immunity from prosecution (more immune, apparently, even than the military). On the other hand, we all know that ordinary constitutional limits don't apply to Blackwater because it is a "private" organization. (Query: Will the Bush Administration invoke a "state secret' privilege with regard to any private litigation filed against Blackwater, which will presumably claim full authority to do whatever they've done (save for attempting to set up some individual "rogues" as fall guys).

One presumes that we will see greater privatization of the military, not least because We the People can, though contract, pay the Blackwater employees high salaries, whereas We the Same People, however much we profess to love our heroes in the military, are unwilling in fact to pay them what they deserve, especially with regard to medical services down the pike. An altogether depressing picture. Jack and I have been writing of the rush toward a Surveillance State. Perhaps we should add to this the concomitant rush toward the "mercenary (or Hessian) state," which will have more and more entities with literal life-and-death power not subject in any serious sense to constitutional (or, as with Blackwater, any) legal constraints.

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

In a case brought by a Portland man who was wrongly detained as a terrorism suspect in 2004, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Patriot Act violates the Constitution because it "permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment."

During his appearance before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, Grayson said "Under the False Claims Act, the Attorney General is supposed to join with whistleblowers to prosecute and punish war profiteers. The sad truth is that the Bush Administration has not even tried to do this. On the contrary, it has done all it could to prevent this." The DOJ has not joined a single Iraq contracting fraud case brought by a whistleblower to date.

Under the False Claims Act, established by President Lincoln as a result of fraud and war profiteering during the civil war, any citizen has the ability to sue a company for fraud on behalf of the US government. In what is know as a qui tam action, a whistleblower can recoup legal fees and a percentage of the money the lawsuit recovers for the government. When a qui tam action is brought by a whistleblower, it is placed under seal to allow the government to review the case and to investigate the accused company in secret.

The DOJ has refused to join 12 such cases and an estimated 50-70 cases remain under seal. By delaying their decision on whether or not to join these cases, the DOJ has kept whistleblowers and their lawyers from going public with their fraud accusations and has kept the accused companies out of court.

"I've always thought that they were bad people with evil intent - and all that, it's playing out now," he said. "You can't hardly look at any aspect of the government in the seven years so far that's been run properly."
...
"I can't stand those people - and their incompetence is astounding," he said.

"I always thought you could at least depend on the Republican Party to maintain some semblance of fiscal responsibility.

"But they run up record deficits - taking care of billionaires that they want to take care of. Don't get me started on politics. I could go for a long time."

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
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Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

Rebecca Tushnet says: Actually, "reliable" is a really good word here, because it makes obvious the basic problem with government evaluations of religious texts. Where the approved religious texts "reliably" support the state's view of religious matters, everyone should worry. She quotes Justice Jackson, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is that Mukasey, who would enter an administration that has taken paranoid secrecy to extreme levels, may be a fellow traveler. According to an account in The New Republic about Mukasey’s work on 9/11 cases, the judged sealed “all transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases.” Then “last fall Mukasey’s secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret ‘forever.’” Further, Josh Gerstein says, “What makes this virtual information blackout particularly galling is that it’s far from clear that the law requires the strict secrecy Mukasey has imposed.” Is this really the man we want in charge of wiretapping procedure and Guantanamo Bay?

"America's Grandma," Barbara Bush, is at it again. No, she is no longer advising us that half-drowned African American's who survived Katrina should be comfortable in their distress because they are accustomed to living in squalor, today she is offering up advice on how to raise our children - based I suppose upon her great success in raising hers.
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Momma Bush I fear has more in common with Ma Barker, the notorious mother of a criminal gang of the 1930's than she does with Whistler's mother, or your mother, or mine, assuming that our mother's did not raise a criminal cabal.

"Democrats in Congress have decided to pass a bill they know will be vetoed," Bush said of the measure that draws significant bipartisan support, repeating in his weekly radio address an accusation he made earlier in the week. "Members of Congress are risking health coverage for poor children purely to make a political point."
...
In the Democrat's response, also broadcast Saturday, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell turned the tables on the president, saying that if Bush doesn't sign the bill, 15 states will have no funding left for the program by the end of the month.

At issue is the Children's Health Insurance Program, a state-federal program that subsidizes health coverage for low-income people, mostly children, in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private coverage. It expires Sept. 30.

The Israeli attack came just three days after a North Korean ship docked at the Syrian port of Tartus, carrying a cargo that was officially listed as cement.

Cement? Is that the same as concrete? "South Korea to send rice, concrete to North" Thu Mar 22, 2007 12:22am EDT

Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.
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Pentagon officials did not dispute the seriousness of the problems. However, they took issue with lawmakers’ characterizations of their scope. “I think it’s isolated incidents,” said Thomas F. Gimble, the principal deputy Pentagon inspector general. “The real issue is a lack of control, a lack of integrity and lots of opportunity and lots of money.”
and he ought to know

See also emptywheel who says:

Rather, bmaz is persuasive that there is not direct liability on part of the telecoms (except as it relates to the spying that occurred in the 24 hours when Bush authorized it without DOJ, and therefore AG, approval). But there is a great deal of liability on the part of the government. If the AT&T lawsuit goes forward and a court finds AT&T did improperly share customer call data with the government, then Uncle Sam will end up picking up the tab, not the telecoms.

9.18.2007 Beyond Delay, The 22 most corrupt members of Congress

9.18.2007 Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity

9.18.2007 Waxman: State Dept. Official Thwarted Probes By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer

Howard J. Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, has repeatedly thwarted investigations and censored reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform charged today in a 13-page letter.

LEGAL GREY AREA: "A Blackwater employee is not going to be subject to Iraqi courts," says Scott Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke University. The day before the Coalition Provisional Authority ceased to exist, L. Paul Bremer, the chief American envoy in Iraq, issued CPA Order 17, which "granted American private security contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts." Though "the Iraqi government has contested the continued application of this order," they are restrained from "changing or revoking CPA orders," so the order is still in effect. It is unclear what U.S. laws would govern the actions of private security contractors operating in a foreign country. Though "uniformed military personnel are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and 'persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field' are technically subject as well," the application of the UCMJ to these private contractors would likely face constitutional challenges. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 covers civilians working for the Department of Defense, but even this would be insufficient to cover Blackwater employees involved in Sunday's shootout, since they are actually employed by the State Department.

9.14.2007 More on the Hunt deal, by Paul Krugman:

Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn't all that surprising, given this administration's history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the "axis of evil."

No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi government - which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January - won't get its act together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine informed President Bush this week that New Jersey will not obey federal rules that would make it harder to enroll middle-income kids for a popular government-subsidized health insurance program.
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Among the rules to which Corzine and others object is a requirement that the program be available to children from middle-class families only if they have had no health coverage for at least a year. Another change would prevent the program from being opened to middle-income families unless at least 95 percent of eligible children from families whose earnings are less than double the poverty level ($41,300 for a family of four) are already enrolled in Medicaid or SCHIP. Critics say no state can meet that requirement.
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Some analysts argue that the changes were so substantial that federal law required the administration to go through the formal rule-making process, including soliciting public comments, before implementing them.

For Bush, the eight months since announcing his "new way forward" in Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of delivering what he needs.
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Bush became aggravated by Maliki's inability to forge agreements to address grievances fueling sectarian strife, such as allowing low-level members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party back into government, passing a law governing oil revenue distribution and setting provincial elections.

Bush had been using his biweekly videoconferences with Maliki to shore up the Iraqi leader, but he also used the calls to make clear that U.S. patience had grown short. He pressed Maliki several times on the oil law in particular, irritated that the Iraqis had told him repeatedly that they had a deal, only to see it unravel.

This is from a very fine Wapo article By Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick and Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writers and Researcher Julie Tate.