On Countdown on August 1st, I watched Keith Olbermann interview Gerald Posner, the investigative reporter working on the anthrax case.  This is how that interview concluded:

Olbermann: Do you see a scenario in which simply this government took advantage of this situation, whether or not... let’s assume for a moment that there’s no proactivity, that this was Dr. Ivins flipping out to whatever degree was required to do this, that the government simply took advantage of this to use it as a tool to build up a case to go to war in Iraq?

Posner:  I have absolutely no doubt about that.  From everything that I’ve done on my own investigation following up from 2001, I am now more convinced than ever that there were individuals inside the Bush administration and in the government who wanted the war in Iraq so badly that they decided if there was something that they could use to push it forward, they would. Anthrax fell into their lap. Even if he is a deranged solo killer, they used it in order to scare this country and say Iraq is somebody we have to go after, and we did.

But who were these individuals that wanted the war this badly?

Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, who made the magisterial sum of $200 per month, 34-year-old Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was held years without charges at Guantanamo Naval Base prison, has just been found guilty of lesser charges in the first of a series of planned "military commission" trials by the Bush Administration. Comprehensive news coverage of the Hamdan trial can be found at the Miami Herald.

Hamdan was found not guilty on two counts of conspiracy to foment terrorism in league with Al Qaeda. He was found guilty on five of eight charges of providing material support to terrorists. He has yet to be sentenced, and faces possible life imprisonment. In any case, the Bush Administration has already said that whatever the verdict or sentence, no "enemy combatant" will be released until the "war on terror" is over, i.e., until hell freezes over.

I know a lot of you probably saw Ron Suskind on Countdown, last night.  

I suspect fewer of you saw the Washington Journal appearance, this morning.  

Suskind's new book on the impeachable offense of lying us into the Iraq War is making waves around the world.  His documentation of the Bush Administration's abuse of the CIA, hush money to the Chief Iraqi Intelligence official to keep him quiet about the lack of WMD's in Saddam's arsenal, and manipulation of various insiders such as Colin Powell to promote their deceptions, is also creating a fire storm in DC.

Because he has all of the tapes of all of his interviews, White House attempts to deny, or label him as a sleezy muck raker, will not stand up.

Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for "repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide" and urging future Foreign Service officers to be "guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed."

As I write it is late Tuesday afternoon.  The quote, from which my title is taken, comes from a column by Roger Cohen about which I wrote July 24, in I am so tempted to violate copyright  

Our traditional media has failed miserably in informing the American public about policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience and so such policies have endured.  Today I propose to remind myself, and those who choose to read this diary, of policies fundamentally at odds with our national conscience.  That is, they should be, because if they are not, if they are acceptable, then we are lost already and there is no point in our being here.

The Six Million Dollar Man By Lori Price 06 Aug 2008 According to Ron Suskind in his book, 'The Way of the World,' Iraq Intelligence Director Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti collected a cool $5 million from the CIA for forging a backdated letter for Bush's henchmen. But, if you turn him in through the US 'Rewards for Justice' program, you can collect up to a million bucks!

The big news today ... other than Barack Obama's comment about the GOP's love for ignorance, was Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World, in which Suskind said that the White House ordered forgery of a letter from Iraqi intel director Habbush to now-deposed and deceased dictator Saddam Hussein.

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001.  It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link."

Of course, the White House quickly issued a statement - technically true, but misleading.

"The notion that the White House directed anyone to forge a letter from Habbush to Saddam Hussein is absurd."

Absurd, yes.  But untrue?

[Proudly submitted from the Frog Pond]

Ron Suskind has a new book coming out that reveals, among other things, that the White House authorized the CIA to backdate a forged memo from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein that purported to show that lead-hijacker Mohammed Atta was trained in Iraq in the summer of 2001.  The memo was created by the CIA and leaked to Con Coughlin of the UK Telegraph, who dutifully wrote it up on December 14, 2003, the same day that Saddam Hussein was 'pulled from a spiderhole' near Tikrit.

Hold on to your hats -- according to Ron Suskind's new book, the White House is directly implicated in the plot to forge a document, with the intention to lie us into war with Iraq.  

Six "High-Value" Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus "Ghost Prisoner" Mustafa Setmariam Nasar

The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the "War on Terror," and yesterday’s revelations in TIME -- based on disclosures by a "senior American official" (now retired), who was "a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings" after the 9/11 attacks, and who reported that "a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island" -- will come as no surprise to those who have been studying the story closely

The Word – Honest Belief

copyright © 2008 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Of this, I believe.  I believe in honesty and empathy.  I trust in reports that reveal in 2002, the Department of Justice assured the Central Intelligence Agency interrogators who violated anti-torture laws they would be safe from prosecution. Emissaries only need a sincere "faith they caused no "prolonged mental harm."  I believe that neither branch of government cares for what I hold dear.

In his latest executive order that has not yet been publicly released, President Bush broadens the power of the national intelligence director while curtailing the powers of the CIA, and effectively makes the attorney general the director's right hand man in seeing to it that intelligence is more effectively shared among the various agencies.

The executive order

. . was carried on in secret in the midst of pitched national debate about the appropriate balance between civil liberties and security, spurred by the president's warrantless wiretapping program,

. . .reports the Miami Herald.

Who knows what bizarre combination of political forces drove Nancy Pelosi over the edge, but it isn't pretty:  she's appointed Porter Goss, one of the princes of GOP governmental corruption to co-chair the House ethics committee.

Former congressman Goss was Bush's appointee to "reform" the CIA after George Tenet received the shiv in 2005.  And no, the kind of "reform" he meant wasn't the Teddy Roosevelt kind.  Goss brought in a team of political hacks (one of whom had to step down immediately because of a shoplifting conviction) to do to the CIA what Berto Gonzalez was doing at Justice.

Goss's star appointee, "Dusty Foggo" - a lower-teir hack promoted to Director of Operations - counted among his accomplishments running a "hospitality suite" for GOP AND Dem Congressmen in the Watergate Hotel, complete with hookers bussed in in Homeland Security limousines.  Goss developed an urgent need to spend more time with his family in 2006, right before the scandal hit.

So tell us, Nancy:  why is Goss surfacing in the Ethics Committee?  Who's he got dirt on?+

Evidence the war on terror is a lie from former CIA Station Chief

I know that many Kossacks share my sense that one of the most awful things that the Bush Administration has done has been expanding the use of torture as an open and official part of U.S. policy. And, also like a lot of people around here, I hope that, after Bush departs, the U.S. will move in a significantly different direction, and join most developed democracies in absolutely condemning torture and working for its eradication around the world.

However, unlike many on this list, I don't think that merely electing Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress will get us there.  Turning our country away from torture will be a long and bitter battle, and it will involve more than just turning the clock back to the years before George W. Bush.

I've put "NOT BREAKING" in this diary's title because, as awful and new as the current administration's use of torture has been, our country's reliance on torture goes back decades and involves both Republican and Democratic administrations.  So the real news about torture is that it's not really new. And those of us opposed to torture need to think of how to leverage Democratic victories in November to take steps toward actually eliminating it.

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.

"Any of us could be the man who encounters his double." -- Friedrich Durrenmat (1)

Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (not due out in the bookstores until tomorrow), is already creating headlines and generating controversy. This article will examine the issues around U.S. torture practice, in light of new allegations in the book, and review an email conversation between myself and a prominent nationally-known psychologist whom Mayer says assisted in the planning of U.S. government torture.

Glen L. Carle knows about the threat America faces from Islamic extremism. He should; during his stellar 23-year career as a member of the CIA’s Clandestine Service he’s personally drafted many of the government’s most senior assessments of the threats we’ve faced by al-Qaeda and just about every other Muslim extremist organization in the world over the past two-decades.

Mr. Carle devoted his entire career to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. Perhaps that’s why he's taking such exception to the constant fear mongering promulgated by both the Bush administration and the campaign of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain. He felt the need to speak out now and he has done so in a very heartfelt and eloquent way.

The following info is the first in a series of diaries that contain relationships that are probably mostly coincidence, but...on the slim chance that they aren't they might form an illustration about the attitude and the greed that keep and have kept us at war, or on a war footing:

The WWI war industries board is a good place to start. The chairman was Wall Street investment banker, Bernard Baruch. Assistant Chairman was Clarence Dillon, father of future US Treasury Sect'y and Jupiter Island, Fl, resident, C. Douglas Dillon. Clarence was described by Time, in 1957, as "one of the richest men in the United States". John Foster Dulles, "received an Army commission as Major on the War Industries Board"...and, "Samuel P. Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section, with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with munitions companies....."