Reagan yuk!
November 30, 2007
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(1900-1989) (Peggy Noonan pay attention) 1.First to turn America into a DEBTOR nation 62. First to serve as Governor on a ”conservative” platform and INCREASE SPENDING BY 112%. ———————————— THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE——————————————- |
Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties
September 14, 2007
Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties
By DEBORAH HASTINGS 08.24.07, 3:16 PM ET
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.
Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers – all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.
“It was a Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT – news – people ) for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”
So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.
For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.
Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”
Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.
Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.
“If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, `Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.
They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.
“The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ‘Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’
“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”
Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton (nyse: HAL – news – people ) subsidiary KBR (nyse: KBR – news – people ).
Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.
People she has known for years no longer speak to her.
“It’s just amazing how we say we want to remove fraud from our government, then we gag people who are just trying to stand up and do the right thing,” she says.
In her demotion, her supervisors said she was performing poorly. “They just wanted to get rid of me,” she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.
“You just don’t have happy endings,” said Weaver. “She was a wonderful example of a federal employee. They just completely creamed her. In the end, no one followed up, no one cared.”
But Greenhouse regrets nothing. “I have the courage to say what needs to be said. I paid the price,” she says.
Then there is Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company – with which he was briefly associated – bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.
He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.
It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.
But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.
Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.
“It’s a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system,” said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to help the government, and the government didn’t seem to care.”
One way to blow the whistle is to file a “qui tam” lawsuit (taken from the Latin phrase “he who sues for the king, as well as for himself”) under the federal False Claims Act.
Signed by Abraham Lincoln in response to military contractors selling defective products to the Union Army, the act allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf.
The government has the option to sign on, with all plaintiffs receiving a percentage of monetary damages, which are tripled in these suits.
It can be a straightforward and effective way to recoup federal funds lost to fraud. In the past, the Justice Department has joined several such cases and won. They included instances of Medicare and Medicaid overbilling, and padded invoices from domestic contractors.
But the government has not joined a single quit tam suit alleging Iraq reconstruction abuse, estimated in the tens of millions. At least a dozen have been filed since 2004.
“It taints these cases,” said attorney Alan Grayson, who filed the Custer Battles suit and several others like it. “If the government won’t sign on, then it can’t be a very good case – that’s the effect it has on judges.”
The Justice Department declined comment.
Most of the lawsuits are brought by former employees of giant firms. Some plaintiffs have testified before members of Congress, providing examples of fraud they say they witnessed and the retaliation they experienced after speaking up.
Julie McBride testified last year that as a “morale, welfare and recreation coordinator” at Camp Fallujah, she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the number of soldiers who used recreational facilities.
She also said the company took supplies destined for a Super Bowl party for U.S. troops and instead used them to stage a celebration for themselves.
“After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud, Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion,” she told the committee. “My property was searched, and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U.S. military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country.”
Halliburton and KBR denied her testimony.
She also has filed a whistleblower suit. The Justice Department has said it would not join the action. But last month, a federal judge refused a motion by KBR to dismiss the lawsuit.
Donald Vance, the contractor and Navy veteran detained in Iraq after he blew the whistle on his company’s weapons sales, says he has stopped talking to the federal government.
Navy Capt. John Fleming, a spokesman for U.S. detention operations in Iraq, confirmed the detentions but said he could provide no further details because of the lawsuit.
According to their suit, Vance and Ertel gathered photographs and documents, which Vance fed to Chicago FBI agent Travis Carlisle for six months beginning in October 2005. Carlisle, reached by phone at Chicago’s FBI field office, declined comment. An agency spokesman also would not comment.
The Iraqi company has since disbanded, according the suit.
Vance said things went terribly wrong in April 2006, when he and Ertel were stripped of their security passes and confined to the company compound.
Panicking, Vance said, he called the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where hostage experts got on the phone and told him “you’re about to be kidnapped. Lock yourself in a room with all the weapons you can get your hands on.’”
The military sent a Special Forces team to rescue them, Vance said, and the two men showed the soldiers where the weapons caches were stored. At the embassy, the men were debriefed and allowed to sleep for a few hours. “I thought I was among friends,” Vance said.
The men said they were cuffed and hooded and driven to Camp Cropper, where Vance was held for nearly three months and his colleague for a little more than a month. Eventually, their jailers said they were being held as security internees because their employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents, the lawsuit said.
The prisoners said they repeatedly told interrogators to contact Carlisle in Chicago. “One set of interrogators told us that Travis Carlisle doesn’t exist. Then some others would say, ‘He says he doesn’t know who you are,’” Vance said.
Released first was Ertel, who has returned to work in Iraq for a different company. Vance said he has never learned why he was held longer. His own interrogations, he said, seemed focused on why he reported his information to someone outside Iraq.
And then one day, without explanation, he was released.
“They drove me to Baghdad International Airport and dumped me,” he said.
When he got home, he decided to never call the FBI again. He called a lawyer, instead.
“There’s an unspoken rule in Baghdad,” he said. “Don’t snitch on people and don’t burn bridges.”
For doing both, Vance said, he paid with 97 days of his life.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed
Ted Nugent avoided Service in Vietnam
August 30, 2007
Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Ted Nugent
Ted Nugent, The Motor City Madman, is an anomaly of colossal proportions. He’s managed to fuse a 38-year rock‘n’roll career with a zeal for hunting, extreme gun-nuttiness and a good-ol’-boy-on-speed approach to politics, patriotism, and women. The result: A self-righteous right-wing rock star who’s now better known for his dogmatic, offensive, and sometimes plainly comical commentary than for his sporadic success as a musician.
Uncle Ted has put his name on just about every commercial venture a right-wing, hunting-happy, clean and sober, meat-lovin’, red-state-livin’ conservationist rocker could possibly brand. He hosts his own radio show, edits and publishes the “Ted Nugent Adventure Outdoors Magazine,” produced a PBS series, “Ted Nugent’s Spirit of the Wild,” and founded the Ted Nugent United Sportsmen of America.
The Nuge first came into minor rock stardom as the lead guitarist for the psychedelic outfit the Amboy Dukes. From his undeserved soapbox of lifetime sobriety, Nugent swears he had no idea that the band’s hit manifesto on acid tripping, “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” was about being “under the influence.” Apparently this wasn’t the only fact that eluded The Nuge. The band’s name, which he says he had taken from a recently disbanded R&B group, was originally inspired by a novel by Irving Shulman called “The Amboy Dukes” about a 1950s street gang in Perth Amboy New Jersey Band. The novel was controversial for the way in which it dealt with gang rape. Members came and went, but Nugent remained, eventually renaming the band (surprise, surprise) Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes.
Ted and the boys banged out a couple of middling studio recordings before Terrible Ted subtly dropped “the Amboy Dukes” from the band. His first solo release, humbly called Ted Nugent, was a huge hit with the heavy metal community. Just around the time that The Nuge started dressing like a caveman for live shows, he came out with another hit album, Cat Scratch Fever. Exhibiting his talent for clever and subtle lyricism, in the title song, he croons, “Well, I make a pussy purr with the stroke of my hand.” Of course he’s referring to his cat.
In the 1980s, The Nuge released a whole bunch of songs that went generally unnoticed. For approximately three weeks in 1990, The Nuge won the hearts of gushing teens when he came out with High Enough, which he produced during his three-year stint as part of Damn Yankees.
But enough about his sometimes awesome, sometimes middling musical career. As patriotic as Uncle Ted claims to be, he pulled a nasty stunt to evade Uncle Sam during the Vietnam War. In a July 15, 1990, Detroit Free Press interview, Nugent crowed about how he managed to dodge the draft. He claims that 30 days before his draft board physical, he disavowed personal hygiene. The last ten days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and with a week to go until the physical, he stopped using the bathroom altogether. When the big day came, he had been living in excrement-caked and urine-stained pants. Always the hero, however, Nugent reassured the Free Press, “But if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed all the Hippies in the foxholes. I would have killed everybody.”
In the 1990s, Nugent found he could use his effervescent persona and his modicum of fame to articulate his singularly alarming worldview through any medium he could get a hold of. Suddenly, The Whackmaster (named, ahem, for the term Nugent uses to describe what he does to his prey with bow and arrow) found that people would listen to his pro-gun, right-wing, anti-gay, sexist, anti-liberal, meat-eating, bowhunting, nationalistic spoken word rants. Since then, he has authored three books, the titles of which do not leave much to the imagination: “Bloodtrails: The Truth About Bowhunting” (1990), a New York Times Bestseller, “God, Guns & Rock ‘n’ Roll” (2000), and “Kill It and Grill It” (2002). You won’t be surprised to learn that step one of most recipes in this unique cookbook is “Kill something!”
Here’s the quagmire with The Nuge: Sometimes, he’s pretty funny , and sometimes he is a racist, sexist prick, which is not so funny. Appearing on Denver’s 103.5 FM Lewis & Floorwax morning show, The Nuge sounded off on Japanese-made guitars, referring to them as “Japs.” When the hosts of the show objected to the use of the word, Nugent made sure to tell Denver that words such as “Jap” and “Nigger” were only words, man, and shouldn’t offend anyone. Apparently, Ted was shocked to find that people are offended by these words. Still though, The Nuge saw the real victim in all this, explaining that “Political correctness has brought America to its knees.”
It’s not unusual to hear Nugent talk this way – his conversations are riddled with ethnic and racial slurs. He called his tour of Japan the “Jap Whack Tour,” (Detroit Free Press, July 15, 1990), constantly makes obscene and derogatory remarks about women, and drops the F-bomb almost as often as he refers to himself in third person. It doesn’t stop at foul language though; it’s the substance that is most objectionable. Nugent has had to pay $75,000 for shooting off his mouth after a radio interview in 1992, when he referred to Heidi Prescott of The Fund for Animals as a “worthless whore” and a “shallow slut,” asking, “Who needs to club a seal, when you could club Heidi?” (Detroit Free Press, April 5, 1995.) The Nuge has a thing about lumping women into a category with wild animals. He told Salon that he gets a “full predator spiritual erection” from tracking “bear, lions, coons, housecats, escaped chimps, small children, scared women, and everything else that can be chased and/or hunted.” He also has a thing about making sure the world knows whose opinion on matters of choice matters most, explaining on a Detroit radio show that, “Anybody that doesn’t think it is better to blow someone’s brains out than to be raped, deserves to be raped! If you don’t think your life is worth it then please go out there, don’t wear any underpants and get RAPED!! Cuz you deserve it…” (WRIF-FM, Detroit, Nugent as guest D.J., September 23, 1991).
The Nuge’s narrow-minded arrogance colors his ruthless commentary, and he offends just about anyone with whom he doesn’t see eye-to-eye. It’s a wonder he ever tours outside of the U.S., given his feelings about “foreigners.” Just before he toured in Japan, he mindlessly maligned the Japanese in a characteristic xenophobic diatribe on a Detroit radio show: “…Yeah they love me (in Japan) – they’re still assholes. These people they don’t know what life is. I don’t have a following, they need me; they don’t like me they need me… Foreigners are assholes; foreigners are scum; I don’t like ‘em; I don’t want ‘em in this country; I don’t want ‘em selling me doughnuts; I don’t want ‘em pumping my gas; I don’t want ‘em downwind of my life-OK? So anyhow-and I’m dead serious…” (WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., November 19, 1992).
An avid hunter, Nugent was a frequent visitor to Canada until the government of Ontario cancelled the spring black bear hunt in 1999. Irate that he wouldn’t get his shot at shooting at a black bear, Nugent vowed to never set foot again in what he described as “an idiotic country.” An outspoken pro-hunting media crusader, Nugent conducts five to ten media interviews every week. A longtime advocate of gun ownership rights, Nugent has served since 1995 on the Board of Directors of The National Rifle Association (NRA), of which he is a Life Member. Nugent also has been a sworn Michigan Deputy Sheriff since 1980.
Nugent’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is enough to send good citizens of Michigan sprinting across state lines, once saying about an encounter with a Hare Krishna, “… And in my mind, I’m going, why can’t I just shoot this guy in the spine right now; shoot him in the spine, explain the facts of life to him?…” (WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., September 28, 1990).
Terrible Ted, who owns a compound in Waco, TX (no joke) and a “swamp” in Michigan, prides himself on his conservation efforts and his lifelong commitment to what he lovingly refers to as his “environmental orgy.” But The Nuge is no lefty environmentalist. He and the animal rights movement have not always seen eye-to-eye, not surprising given classic Nugent stunts like leading a hunting trip called “The Rape of The Hills 2000.” In 2000, Nugent was jailed briefly following an incident outside a department store in San Francisco in which he allegedly spat on, threatened and physically assaulted several anti-fur demonstrators.
The Nuge continues to rock out, and his fame has allowed him to continue seeping into every corner of the media. In 2004, Nugent hosted a VH1 reality TV show, Surviving Nugent: The Ted Commandments, in which city dwellers moved to Nugent’s Waco compound to compete in such “backwoods” activities as building an outhouse and skinning a boar. During filming, Nugent injured himself with a chainsaw, requiring 44 stitches and a leg brace.
So far, The Nuge hasn’t aspired to public office, though given his wide reach, it can’t be far behind. He was briefly mentioned as a potential Illinois Senatorial candidate for the Republican Party in 2004. Unfortunately, it never came to fruition: if nothing else, a race between the Nuge and Barack Obama would’ve topped Nugent’s past stunts for sheer spectacle.
Recently the Motor City Madman has been in the news quite a bit. A speaker at the NRA’s 2005 National Convention in Houston, he received an enthusiastic reception from the delegates when he told them: “Remember the Alamo! Shoot ‘em! To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want ‘em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot ‘em.” (“Ted Nugent to Fellow NRAers: Get Hardcore,” Associated Press article, April 17, 2005).
At some point, you’d think that the 56-year-old Nuge has got to slow down. But he’s still kickin’ it full Nuge style, taking lucky hunters on hunting trips in Africa (for no small price, of course), coming out with fancy new weapons, like his Gold Tip Ted Nugent Signature Zebra Arrow, and of course is about to set off on a 2005 Summer Tour. Perhaps the most alarmingly Nuge of all the Nuge endeavors he’s got going is his Ted Nugent Gonzo Auction, in which he’s going to auction off relics from his “insane life of over-the-top rock-and-roll wild ground adventure.”
Although there is a certain hilarity to The Nuge’s insane energy, it goes without saying that he’d be a lot funnier if he ditched the sexist, racist and xenophobic remarks.
Campus Progress presents you with some of the best and worst of The Nuge:
“What’s a feminist anyways? A fat pig who doesn’t get it often enough?” Wikipedia
“My being there (South Africa) isn’t going to affect any political structure. Besides, apartheid isn’t that cut-and-dry. All men are not created equal.” Detroit Free Press Magazine, July 15, 1990
“The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man…They still put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands. And when I kill an antelope for ‘em, their preference is the gut pile. That’s what they fucking want to eat, the intestines. These are different people. You give them toothpaste, they fucking eat it.” Detroit Free Press Magazine, July 15, 1990
(About Haiti) “We should put razor wire around our borders and give the finger to any piece of shit who wants to come here.” Westword Newspaper, Denver, Colorado, July 27, 1994
“…Yeah, we want to go to Saudi Arabia, man, and see if we can’t get a four iron and knock people’s laundry off the top of their heads. Wear laundry on your head and die, is the basic theme of the Damn Yankees [Nugent’s 90’s band]” WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., September 25, 1990
“…I met a couple of guys in line yesterday and they say write something to my girlfriend, she won’t let me go hunting. I wrote her something, I wrote Drop dead bitch. What good is she, trade her in, get a Dalmatian, who needs her, the wench.” WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., September 25, 1991
[On Hillary Clinton] “You probably can’t use the term ‘toxic c—-’ in your magazine, but that’s what she is. Her very existence insults the spirit of individualism in this country. This bitch is nothing but a two-bit whore for Fidel Castro.” Westword Newspaper, Denver, Colorado, July 27, 1994
“And if you’re a woman who feels that his lyrics to ditties such as the immortal ‘Wang Dang Sweet Poontang’ are sexist, Nugent says, ‘Fuck you and go to a Garth Brooks show. Kiss my dog’s dead, diseased, rotting ass. If you don’t have a sense of humor, you’re not allowed in Ted’s world. I don’t objectify women. I’d like to think that I’m optimizing their hardware.’” Westword Newspaper, Denver, Colorado, July 27, 1994
“…First thing I slayed…I was nine years old. It was a squirrel, these ladies were feeding it, you know, and I said, ‘excuse me, bam.’ No it wasn’t a pet squirrel. I had it stuffed and petted it for years after that.” WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., September 26, 1991
“…My deer were put here on the earth. God even said, ‘Hey Ted, whack ‘em.’ He said this, right in the bible, Genesis, ‘Dear Ted, whack me a buck …’” WRIF-FM, Detroit, Ted Nugent as guest D.J., Sept. 24, 1991
“I contribute to the dead of winter and the moans of silence, blood trails are music to my ears …I’m a gut pile addict …The pig didn’t know I was there … it’s my kick …I love shafting animals …it’s rock ‘n’ roll power.” Ted Nugent’s World Bowhunters Magazine, Volume 1/Number 4, May 1990, p.12
Photo: Associated Press
Illustrations: August J. Pollak
This is a Public Service Announcement
August 10, 2007
I’ve taken heat in the past from my own readers that sometimes my cursing is too gratuitous, that I’m too angry. So this first paragraph is for those readers. Your thoughtful pleas for more civility and less anger are very often taken under advisement and, when the mood strikes me, I oblige by laying out the facts with my arguments while not resorting to angry rhetoric. Today is different because circumstances compel me to do otherwise. So, to you gentle souls, if you have delicate sensibilities, allow me to warn you right now that what follows will be the vilest, filthiest, most furious post that perhaps I’ve ever written and will act on you like a microwave oven on Dick Cheney. So take this as your final opportunity to allow your mouse to migrate on over to the right side and click on the link of someone more civil and elegant, like Glenn Greenwald, for instance.
The rest of this post is for those readers who love to see me completely lose it when encountered by wingnuts who react to truth like a claustrophobe in a coffin.
I’m referring, of course, to the dead man to whom I’d tried to administer medicine, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, in my post about Ann Coulter’s “victory” over Al Franken. I’d tried letting Coulter’s stupidity speak for itself without resorting to ad hominems. I’d tried being gracious while poking holes in Coulter’s fallacious, dodgy and, frankly, ironic statements to the points that Mr. Franken had brought up.
Alas, logic and civility are not enough when dealing with that “other” ilk. So I shall dispense with one while continuing to avail myself of the other.
Because it seems Gay Conservative Steve has a problem with my pointing out the holes in Ann Coulter’s argument that rival only her FBI-stretched cunt in size. Let’s start with her asking Al Franken, a man who isn’t even a politician (yet) “when the next attack will be.”
This is all too reminiscent of Sen. James Inhofe asking Michael Crichton, a vindictive, overrated and overpaid sci fi novelist, to come to Capitol Hill to pontificate against the existence of global warming or the Christian Science Monitor hiring a standup comedian to do the same thing.
Yeah, Ann. Better to ask a comedian when the next al Qaida attack will be than to ask your hero who’d been posing as the leader of the free world for the last six and a half years.
If you’d done your reading, you’d know that Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine, recently gave an interview when he said (and I paraphrase) that perhaps the reason why we haven’t been hit is because al Qaida has chosen not to hit us. American politicians of all stripes, he added, tend to think only in election cycles. Terrorists think ahead in decades. Just because al Qaida hasn’t flattened the Pentagon again or the Sears Tower should not be construed as proof of the efficacy of Homeland Security or George W. Bush. Hauling in bin Laden’s and al-Zawahiri’s ass would be, however and we’re no fucking closer to doing that now than we were in 2001.
But, of course, as Rumsfeld made plain two and a half years ago, we can’t do that because that would piss off bin Laden’s landlord Pervez Musharraf, George’s bestest, if sometimes exasperating, buddy.
As Bukko in Australia pointed out in the comment section of Steve’s original post, it’s not as if the dry drunk rube whom you generously refer to as your president hasn’t given them ample opportunities. He and the GOP Congress slashed our budget for port security so that only a small fraction of metal containers coming in are actually inspected. Same thing with baggage checked at the airport. We can now take lighters on board aircraft. The NIE says that we’re more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attacks and the State Department’s own report, which we last saw in 2005 and said the same thing, is now no longer available, the ultimate fate of any and all news that could possibly embarrass this Orwellian/Kafka-esque ship of fools that you risibly refer to as an actual administration.
But Bush and his hyper vigilance can’t even protect us from a Chinese terrorist called Contaminated Pet Food and Toothpaste. What has your hero done to protect our food supply? Our water supply? What has he done to strengthen the FDA to protect our food supply? Oh, yes, right. He installed veterinarian Lester Crawford to the top spot and a Bible-thumping rapist/sodomite named Dr. David Hager, who was, incredibly, nominated by Bush to be the head of the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs, an office for which Hager held nothing but contempt, to judge by the advice that he gave women.
This rampant cronyism and systematic contempt for the humanitarian role in government services is merely the tip what is a massive tip of an even more massive iceberg. From the FDA to NASA to the Department of Health and Human Services to FEMA (once a respected and effective Cabinet-level position headed up by James Lee Witt in the Clinton years), the Bush administration has made an invariable, self-destructive habit of electing to key administrative roles the most inept and unqualified buffoons on God’s green earth, as long as they toe the fundie line.
Many of these people are in charge of our national security, including Michael Chertoff, a guy who’d essentially handcuffed Michael Brown when he wasn’t quaffing margaritas and actually trying to do his fucking job after Katrina made landfall.
You prefer to see the glass as half full: We haven’t been attacked because of George W. Bush. I say we haven’t been attacked despite George W. Bush and the murderous clown show that is the GOP. And, after all, why should al Qaida waste money, manpower and resources trying to strike terror into our hearts when we have fear-mongers like George Bush and the Republican party to remind us how vulnerable we are after he’s been on the job going on seven fucking years.
You ask what Bill Clinton had done to fight terrorism. First, let me ask you: What did HW do to fight terrorism because the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was just a couple of months after Clinton took office. But you want to know what Clinton did to fight terrorism? Well, let’s see, now. A helluva lot more, it seems, in the final days of his administration than Georgie’s done in his six and a half year squattage in the Oval Office. President Clinton insisted on defining terrorists and taking them out surgically, from a distance, without risking the lives of troops or killing the people who were merely sheltering them.
So far in Iraq, Bush has killed a million hostages to get at a few hostage takers.
At the very least, Clinton never went on record to say, “I am truly not that concerned about him” less than seven months after the original World Trade Center bombing.
If that conflicts with Cyrus’s version of history from The Path to 9/11, then I apologize.
The scandals involving Republicans since January 2001 are so multitudinous, the principals involved so inextricably and incestuously entwined in cross-scandalous behavior that time and space forbids enumerating all of them unless one were to put them between bound covers. Yet, only a Koolaid-gargling, Jonestown refugee psychopath like yourself could look around at the pigshit stacked up to the ceiling and insist that you’re walking on sunshine, that things are so much better since the grownups took over from that evil Bill Clinton and his surplus and horrid days of abominable peace.
So let’s see what your $300 tax refund has bought you:
A war on science that pervades the HHS, with HW’s godson, whose other sole qualification for the job of the HHS’s Office of Global Health Affairs is a degree in Latin American history, actually telling the Surgeon General what to say (like political statements) and not say in reports about diseases in prison. Shades of George Deutsch, another snot-nosed fraud who told scientists at NASA to stop writing reports about the Big Bang Theory.
We have to borrow two billion dollars a day from the Chinese to float a deficit singlehandedly and immediately created by your hero thanks to unending tax breaks for his bloated Have Mores and a plainly illegal and unnecessary war that they or their relatives don’t have to fight.
The disappearance of a major American city that’s hardly any closer to getting back on its feet than they were when Katrina struck going on two years ago. New Orleans gives us a ringside seat for the grand experiment in a free market economy that Paul Bremer turned Iraq into the minute his Timberland boots touched the sand.
Outsourced incompetence footed by your tax dollars to the tunes of tens of billions a year and much of it under the guise of “Iraqi reconstruction”, from providing our troops with (contaminated) food and water to who (didn’t) deliver the mail to our wounded troops at Walter Reed.
Allies once loyal to America now ranging from skeptical to outright contemptuous because George had to take that detour from fighting terrorism (during which bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora. I suppose that, too, was Clinton’s fault, eh?) to spend what will surely be at least a trillion dollars fighting an easily-smashed nation that had no WMD, no connection to 9/11 or ties (back then) to al Qaida, one that nonetheless has fought us to at least a standstill.
Yet you put on your fucking rose-colored glasses and credit what you perceive as “enormous success” to George Bush and blame Bill Clinton and his cigar for everything that you don’t like (I guess that would be gays in the military, earned income credit counting again, nine figure surpluses, eight years of relative peace while quietly pursuing terrorists so we wouldn’t be disturbed while watching Survivor?).
Because George wears the red jersey. He has the “R” after his name. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, you’re rooting for red laundry and you people are so completely blind to the radioactive faults of these bloated stumblebums at whose cloven hooves you grovel that we actually fear for your sanity.
Liberals and Democrats such as me recognize, acknowledge and condemn when our own leaders betray our principles and their own. When William Jefferson is caught with $90,000 in bribes in his freezer, we condemn him.
When Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff and other Republican scumbags are caught stealing and illegally laundering millions, you look away and whistle and keep bringing up pikers like Jefferson. Because they wear the red jerseys. They’re on your team. And members of a team stick together, right? They watch each other’s backs, right? Like when people such as Ted Haggard are revealed to be hypocrites, they then turn around and treat homosexuality as if it’s a mental disease that has to be either prayed out or requiring psychotherapy.
When Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down, two-legged Cujos such as you thought it was the end of Western Civilization. But when a Republican is busted offering to suck black cock in a bathroom because he feared for his life, I suppose that’s a profile in Republican courage?
And the reason why Republicans prosper is because of two things: One, they have to cheat year after year to win elections that they ordinarily couldn’t win and, Two, they have just enough rubes like you giving them just enough votes so that a nudge from Diebold and ES&S makes a victory plausible.
They appeal to cruel, stupid people such as you by pandering to your own pet prejudices, peeves and phobias which they dress up as legitimate campaign issues, like gay marriage. Like Creationism. Like stem cell research. Because knowledge is power and they fear an electorate that has knowledge.
Thankfully, they have ventriloquist dummies like you, Steve, who gleefully parrot every single talking point that’s somehow replaced an actual fucking national discourse on the salient issues because idiots such as you and your ilk have yet to understand that there is a crucial difference between information and actual fucking knowledge.
And while they whistle through the bank claiming innocence, claiming that those $70,000 golfing junkets to Great Britian paid for by lobbyists didn’t at all influence their legislation, that those Halliburton connections didn’t at all didn’t come into play when your neocon heroes waged, against all earthly reason, a war on Iraq, while they pretended to whore themselves out to canvas tent revivalist gay-baiters whom they then stabbed in the back and screwed them out of literally 90% of the money they were promised…
…while all this and much, much more was going on, even as the World Trade Center twin towers collapsed on your hero’s watch, even while he sat in that little chair like the wart on Bill Clinton’s cock, holding that little book after being told of the second one (yes, Bush knew about the first one before he even walked into that classroom but, as Michael Moore said, George had to have his photo op), even as almost 2000 drowned on the Gulf coast while he flew off in the opposite direction after dodging a grieving war mother to go to GOP fundraisers, play the guitar, squeeze in a round of golf, eat cake with John McCain and compare himself to a better president…
…while all this was going on and much, much more, like the secret wiretapping of your phone calls, the financial datamining, the subversion of your every constitutional right, people like you kept your thumbs up your increasingly distended rectums and never, never noticed that your thumb was getting bloodier and bloodier.
Meanwhile, you stand around, your thumb up your bleeding assholes, with a shit-eating grin on your face marveling at Republican progress while your heroes are furiously hollowing out the National Treasury like a school of piranhas in a buffalo corpse, selling out their legislation to the highest bidder, and ladling out the Koolaid that never seems to run out and, curiously, always makes you thirstier for more.
And, as a personal aside, Clinton derangement syndrome is so gauche.
posted by jurassicpork
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/08/this-is-public-service-announcement.html
Putin and the Geopolitics of the New Cold War: Or what happens when Cowboys don`t shoot straight like they used to …
By F William Engdahl, February 18, 2007
The frank words of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to the assembled participants of the annual Munich Wehrkunde security conference have unleashed a storm of self-righteous protest from Western media and politicians. A visitor from another planet might have the impression that the Russian President had abruptly decided to launch a provocative confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of the 1943-1991 Cold War.
However, the details of the developments in NATO and the United States military policies since 1991 are anything but ‘déjà vu all over again’, to paraphrase the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra.
This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War, which literally threatens the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin’s frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.
Because of the misleading accounts of most of Putin’s remarks in most western media, it’s worth reading in full in English (go to www.securityconference.de for official English translation).
Putin spoke in general terms of Washington’s vision of a ‘unipolar’ world, with ‘one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a ‘world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’
Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: ‘Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.’
Putin continued, ‘We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?’
These direct words begin to touch on what Mr Putin is concerned about in US foreign and military policy since the end of the Cold War some 16 or so years back. But it is further in the text that he gets explicit about what military policies he is reacting to. Here is where the speech is worth clarification. Putin warns of the destabilizing effect of ‘space weapons.’—‘it is impossible to sanction the appearance of new, destabilising high-tech weapons…a new area of confrontation, especially in outer space. Star wars is no longer a fantasy – it is a reality… In Russia’s opinion, the militarization of outer space could have unpredictable consequences for the international community, and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear (arms race – f.w.e.) era.’
He then declares, ‘Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race?’
What does he refer to here? Few are aware that while claiming it is doing so to protect itself against the risk of ‘rogue state’ nuclear missile attack from the likes of North Korea or perhaps one day Iran, the US recently announced it is building massive anti-missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Poland? Missile defense? What’s this all about?
Missile Defense and a US Nuclear First Strike
On January 29 US Army Brigadier General Patrick J. O`Reilly, Deputy Director of the Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency, announced US plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile defense elements in Europe by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at protecting American and NATO installations from enemy threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia. Following Putin’s Munich remarks, the US State Department issued a formal comment noting that the Bush Administration is ‘puzzled by the repeated caustic comments about the envisaged system from Moscow.’
Oops…Better send that press release back to the Pentagon’s Office of Deception Propaganda for rewrite. The Iran missile threat to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn’t quite convincing. Why not ask long-time NATO member Turkey if the US can place its missile shield there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait?
Or Israel?
US policy since 1999 has called for building some form of active missile defense despite the end of the Cold War threat from Soviet ICBM or other missile launch. The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 (Public Law 106-38) says so: ‘It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate) with funding subject to the annual authorization of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for National Missile Defense.’ Missile defense was one of Donald Rumsfeld’s obsessions as Defense Secretary.
Why now?
What is increasingly clear, at least in Moscow and Beijing, is that Washington has a far larger grand strategy behind its seemingly irrational and arbitrary unilateral military moves.
For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of political party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It merely continued in disguised form. This has been the case with Presidents G.H.W. Bush, William Clinton and with George W. Bush.
Missile defense sounded plausible if the United States were vulnerable to attack by a tiny band of dedicated Islamic terrorists able to commandeer a Boeing aircraft with boxcutters. The only problem is missile defense is not aimed at rogue terrorists like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, or states like North Korea or Iran.
From them the threat of a devastating nuclear strike on the territory of the United States is non-existent. The US Navy and Air Force bomber fleet today stands in full preparation to bomb, even nuke Iran back to the stone age only over suspicions she is trying to develop independent nuclear weapon technology. States like Iran have no capability to render America defenceless, without risking nuclear annihilation many times over.
Missile defense came out of the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan proposed developing a system of satellites in space and radar bases around the globe, listening stations and interceptor missiles , to monitor and shoot down nuclear missiles before they hit their intended target.
It was dubbed Star Wars by its critics, but the Pentagon officially has spent more than $130 billion on such a system since 1983. George W. Bush increased that significantly beginning 2002, to $11 billion a year, double the level during the Clinton years. And another $53 billion for the following five years has been budgeted.
Washington’s obsession with Nuclear Primacy
What Washington did not say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is that the US missile defense is not at all defensive. It is offensive, and how.
The possibility of providing a powerful state, one with the world’s most awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it from limited attack, is aimed directly at Russia, the only other nuclear power with anywhere the capacity to launch a credible nuclear counterpunch.
Were the United States able to effectively shield itself from a potential Russian response to a US nuclear First Strike, the US would be able simply to dictate to the entire world on its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what military people term Nuclear Primacy. That is the real meaning of Putin’s unusual speech. He isn’t paranoid. He’s being starkly realistic.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, it’s now clear that the US Government has never for a moment stopped its pursuit of Nuclear Primacy. For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War never ended. They just forgot to tell us all.
The quest for global control of oil and energy pipelines, the quest to establish its military bases across Eurasia, its attempt to modernize and upgrade its nuclear submarine fleet, its Strategic B -52 bomber command, all make sense only when seen through the perspective of the relentless pursuit of US Nuclear Primacy.
The Bush Administration unilaterally abrogated the US-Russian ABM Treaty in December 2001. It’s in a race to complete a global network of missile defense as the key to US nuclear primacy. With even a primitive missile defense shield, the US could attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with no fear of effective retaliation, as the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a convincing response enough to deter a US First Strike.
The ability of both sides—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—during the Cold War, to mutually annihilate one another, led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists, MAD—mutual assured destruction. It was scary but in a bizarre sense, more stable that what we have today with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear primacy. The prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side, led to a world in which nuclear war had been ‘unthinkable.’
Now, the US pursues the possibility of nuclear war as ‘thinkable.’ That’s really mad.
The first nation with a nuclear missile shield would de facto have ‘first strike ability.’ Quite correctly, Lt. Colonel Robert Bowman, Director of the US Air Force missile defense program, recently called missile defense, ‘the missing link to a First Strike.’
More alarming is the fact no one outside a handful of Pentagon planners or senior intelligence officials in Washington discusses the implications of Washington’s pursuit of missile defense in Poland, Czech Republic or its drive for Nuclear Primacy.
It calls to mind ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ the September 2000 report of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, where Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were members. There they declared, ‘The United States must develop and deploy global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world.’ (author’s emphasis).
Before becoming Bush’s Defense Secretary in January 2001, Rumsfeld headed a Presidential Commission advocating the development of missile defense for the United States.
So eager was the Bush-Cheney Administration to advance its missile defense plans, that the President and Defense Secretary ordered waiving usual operational testing requirements essential to determining whether the highly complex system of systems was effective.
The Rumsfeld missile defense program is strongly opposed within the military command. On March 26, 2004 no less than 49 US generals and admirals signed an Open Letter to the President, appealing for missile defense postponement.
Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq.
What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq.
Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was “murky” and now says that weapons of mass destruction weren’t the crucial issue anyway (see the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq (2003.)
For a short biography of Leo Strauss, and a guide to recent commentary on his influence on US neo-conservatism, see the end of this article.
By contrast, Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.
If Shadia Drury is right, then American policy-makers exercise deception with greater coherence than their British allies in Tony Blair’s 10 Downing Street. In the UK, a public inquiry is currently underway into the death of the biological weapons expert David Kelly. A central theme is also whether the government deceived the public, as a BBC reporter suggested.
The inquiry has documented at least some of the ways the prime minister’s entourage ‘sexed up’ the presentation of intelligence on the Iraqi threat. But few doubt that in terms of their philosophy, if they have one, members of Blair’s staff believe they must be trusted as honest. Any apparent deceptions they may be involved in are for them matters of presentation or ‘spin’: attempts to project an honest gloss when surrounded by a dishonest media.
The deep influence of Leo Strauss’s ideas on the current architects of US foreign policy has been referred to, if sporadically, in the press (hence an insider witticism about the influence of “Leo-cons”). Christopher Hitchens, an ardent advocate of the war, wrote unashamedly in November 2002 (in an article felicitously titled Machiavelli in Mesopotamia) that:
“[p]art of the charm of the regime-change argument (from the point of view of its supporters) is that it depends on premises and objectives that cannot, at least by the administration, be publicly avowed. Since Paul Wolfowitz is from the intellectual school of Leo Strauss – and appears in fictional guise as such in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein – one may even suppose that he enjoys this arcane and occluded aspect of the debate.”
Perhaps no scholar has done as much to illuminate the Strauss phenomenon as Shadia Drury. For fifteen years she has been shining a heat lamp on the Straussians with such books as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). She is also the author of Alexandre Kojève: the Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994) and Terror and Civilization (forthcoming).
She argues that the central claims of Straussian thought wield a crucial influence on men of power in the contemporary United States. She elaborates her argument in this interview.
A natural order of inequality
Danny Postel: You’ve argued that there is an important connection between the teachings of Leo Strauss and the Bush administration’s selling of the Iraq war. What is that connection?
Shadia Drury: Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States – the business about weapons of mass destruction and a fictitious alliance between al-Qaida and the Iraqi regime. Now that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the war party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.
So what were the real reasons? Reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of Israel? Expanding American hegemony in the Arab world? Possibly. But these reasons would not have been sufficient in themselves to mobilise American support for the war. And the Straussian cabal in the administration realised that.
Danny Postel: The neo-conservative vision is commonly taken to be about spreading democracy and liberal values globally. And when Strauss is mentioned in the press, he is typically described as a great defender of liberal democracy against totalitarian tyranny. You’ve written, however, that Strauss had a “profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy.”
Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.
How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination – and in Strauss’s estimation they were right in thinking so.
Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. The cover of the book sports the American Declaration of Independence. But the book is a celebration of nature – not the natural rights of man (as the appearance of the book would lead one to believe) but the natural order of domination and subordination.
The necessity of lies
Danny Postel: What is the relevance of Strauss’s interpretation of Plato’s notion of the noble lie?
Shadia Drury: Strauss rarely spoke in his own name. He wrote as a commentator on the classical texts of political theory. But he was an extremely opinionated and dualistic commentator. The fundamental distinction that pervades and informs all of his work is that between the ancients and the moderns. Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients.
In Plato’s dialogues, everyone assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece. But Strauss argues in his book The City and Man (pp. 74-5, 77, 83-4, 97, 100, 111) that Thrasymachus is Plato’s real mouthpiece (on this point, see also M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]). So, we must surmise that Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato (alias Thrasymachus) that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.
Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, for example, his Natural Right and History, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.
A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.
The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law (p. 70).
Now, the ancients were determined to keep this tyrannical teaching secret because the people are not likely to tolerate the fact that they are intended for subordination; indeed, they may very well turn their resentment against the superior few. Lies are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.
The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise.
Strauss justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie. But in truth, Strauss has a very impoverished conception of Plato’s noble lie. Plato thought that the noble lie is a story whose details are fictitious; but at the heart of it is a profound truth.
In the myth of metals, for example, some people have golden souls – meaning that they are more capable of resisting the temptations of power. And these morally trustworthy types are the ones who are most fit to rule. The details are fictitious, but the moral of the story is that not all human beings are morally equal.
In contrast to this reading of Plato, Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one (Natural Right and History, p. 151). For many commentators who (like Karl Popper) have read Plato as a totalitarian, the logical consequence is to doubt that philosophers can be trusted with political power. Those who read him this way invariably reject him. Strauss is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him.
The dialectic of fear and tyranny
Danny Postel: In the Straussian scheme of things, there are the wise few and the vulgar many. But there is also a third group – the gentlemen. Would you explain how they figure?
Shadia Drury: There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.
The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society – that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.
The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.
Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, Plato realised this, and settled for the rule of law. But Strauss did not endorse this solution entirely. Nor did he think that it was Plato’s real solution – Strauss pointed to the “nocturnal council” in Plato’s Laws to illustrate his point.
The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise (see Strauss’s – The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws). This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them. Supposedly, Xenophon makes that clear to us.
For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.
Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into entertainment. This was as terrifying a spectre for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt.
This is made clear in Strauss’s exchange with Kojève (reprinted in Strauss’s On Tyranny), and in his commentary on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (reprinted in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue). Kojève lamented the animalisation of man and Schmitt worried about the trivialisation of life. All three of them were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and “creature comforts.” Life can be politicised once more, and man’s humanity can be restored.
This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.
I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.
Danny Postel: You’ve described Strauss as a nihilist.
Shadia Drury: Strauss is a nihilist in the sense that he believes that there is no rational foundation for morality. He is an atheist, and he believes that in the absence of God, morality has no grounding. It’s all about benefiting others and oneself; there is no objective reason for doing so, only rewards and punishments in this life.
But Strauss is not a nihilist if we mean by the term a denial that there is any truth, a belief that everything is interpretation. He does not deny that there is an independent reality. On the contrary, he thinks that independent reality consists in nature and its “order of rank” – the high and the low, the superior and the inferior. Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilisation has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly.
Danny Postel: This connection is curious, since Strauss is bedevilled by Nietzsche; and one of Strauss’s most famous students, Allan Bloom, fulminates profusely in his book The Closing of the American Mind against the influence of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
Shadia Drury: Strauss’s criticism of the existentialists, especially Heidegger, is that they tried to elicit an ethic out of the abyss. This was the ethic of resoluteness – choose whatever you like and be loyal to it to the death; its content does not matter. But Strauss’s reaction to moral nihilism was different. Nihilistic philosophers, he believes, should reinvent the Judæo-Christian God, but live like pagan gods themselves – taking pleasure in the games they play with each other as well as the games they play on ordinary mortals.
The question of nihilism is complicated, but there is no doubt that Strauss’s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers). They know full well that the line they espouse is mendacious, but they are convinced that theirs are noble lies.
The intoxication of perpetual war
Danny Postel: You characterise the outlook of the Bush administration as a kind of realism, in the spirit of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli. But isn’t the real divide within the administration (and on the American right more generally) more complex: between foreign policy realists, who are pragmatists, and neo-conservatives, who see themselves as idealists – even moralists – on a mission to topple tyrants, and therefore in a struggle against realism?
Shadia Drury: I think that the neo-conservatives are for the most part genuine in wanting to spread the American commercial model of liberal democracy around the globe. They are convinced that it is the best thing, not just for America, but for the world. Naturally, there is a tension between these “idealists” and the more hard-headed realists within the administration.
I contend that the tensions and conflicts within the current administration reflect the differences between the surface teaching, which is appropriate for gentlemen, and the ‘nocturnal’ or covert teaching, which the philosophers alone are privy to. It is very unlikely for an ideology inspired by a secret teaching to be entirely coherent.
The issue of nationalism is an example of this. The philosophers, wanting to secure the nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourage a strong patriotic fervour among the honour-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison.
Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and a Strauss disciple, denounced nationalism in a 1973 essay; but in another essay written in 1983, he declared that the foreign policy of neo-conservatism must reflect its nationalist proclivities. A decade on, in a 1993 essay, he claimed that “religion, nationalism, and economic growth are the pillars of neoconservatism.” (See “The Coming ‘Conservative Century’”, in Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea, p. 365.)
In Reflections of a Neoconservative (p. xiii), Kristol wrote that:
“patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…. Neoconservatives believe… that the goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security’. It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny … not a myopic national security”.
The same sentiment was echoed by the doyen of contemporary Straussianism, Harry Jaffa, when he said that America is the “Zion that will light up all the world.”It is easy to see how this sort of thinking can get out of hand, and why hard-headed realists tend to find it naïve if not dangerous.
But Strauss’s worries about America’s global aspirations are entirely different. Like Heidegger, Schmitt, and Kojève, Strauss would be more concerned that America would succeed in this enterprise than that it would fail. In that case, the “last man” would extinguish all hope for humanity (Nietzsche); the “night of the world” would be at hand (Heidegger); the animalisation of man would be complete (Kojève); and the trivialisation of life would be accomplished (Schmitt). That is what the success of America’s global aspirations meant to them.
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a popularisation of this viewpoint. It sees the coming catastrophe of American global power as inevitable, and seeks to make the best of a bad situation. It is far from a celebration of American dominance.
On this perverse view of the world, if America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.
To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognises that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.
Among the Straussians
Danny Postel: Finally, I’d like to ask about your interesting reception among the Straussians. Many of them dismiss your interpretation of Strauss and denounce your work in the most adamant terms (“bizarre splenetic”). Yet one scholar, Laurence Lampert, has reprehended his fellow Straussians for this, writing in his Leo Strauss and Nietzsche that your book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss “contains many fine skeptical readings of Strauss’s texts and acute insights into Strauss’s real intentions.” Harry Jaffa has even made the provocative suggestion that you might be a “closet Straussian” yourself!
Shadia Drury: I have been publicly denounced and privately adored. Following the publication of my book The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss in 1988, letters and gifts poured in from Straussian graduate students and professors all over North America – books, dissertations, tapes of Strauss’s Hillel House lectures in Chicago, transcripts of every course he ever taught at the university, and even a personally crafted Owl of Minerva with a letter declaring me a goddess of wisdom! They were amazed that an outsider could have penetrated the secret teaching. They sent me unpublished material marked with clear instructions not to distribute to “suspicious persons”.
I received letters from graduate students in Toronto, Chicago, Duke, Boston College, Claremont, Fordham, and other Straussian centres of “learning.” One of the students compared his experience in reading my work with “a person lost in the wilderness who suddenly happens on a map.” Some were led to abandon their schools in favour of fresher air; but others were delighted to discover what it was they were supposed to believe in order to belong to the charmed circle of future philosophers and initiates.
After my first book on Strauss came out, some of the Straussians in Canada dubbed me the “bitch from Calgary.” Of all the titles I hold, that is the one I cherish most. The hostility toward me was understandable. Nothing is more threatening to Strauss and his acolytes than the truth in general and the truth about Strauss in particular. His admirers are determined to conceal the truth about his ideas.
Respond to this article, and debate Strauss, philosophy and politics in our forum.
My intention in writing the book was to express Strauss’s ideas clearly and without obfuscation so that his views could become the subject of philosophical debate and criticism, and not the stuff of feverish conviction. I wanted to smoke the Straussians out of their caves and into the philosophical light of day. But instead of engaging me in philosophical debate, they denied that Strauss stood for any of the ideas I attributed to him.
Laurence Lampert is the only Straussian to declare valiantly that it is time to stop playing games and to admit that Strauss was indeed a Nietzschean thinker – that it is time to stop the denial and start defending Strauss’s ideas.
I suspect that Lampert’s honesty is threatening to those among the Straussians who are interested in philosophy but who seek power. There is no doubt that open and candid debate about Strauss is likely to undermine their prospects in Washington.
Leo Strauss
Who is Leo Strauss?Leo Strauss was born in 1899 in the region of Hessen, Germany, the son of a Jewish small businessman. He went to secondary school in Marburg and served as an interpreter in the German army in the first world war. He was awarded a doctorate at Hamburg University in 1921 for a thesis on philosophy that was supervised by Ernst Cassirer.
Strauss’s post-doctoral work involved study of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and in 1930 he published his first book, on Spinoza’s critique of religion; his second, on the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, was published in 1935. After a research period in London, he published The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes in 1936.
In 1937, he moved to Columbia University, and from 1938 to 1948 taught political science and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. During this period he wrote On Tyranny (1948) and Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952).
In 1949, he became professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and remained there for twenty years. His works of this period include Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What is Political Philosophy? (1959), The City and Man (1964), Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), and Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968).
Between 1968 and 1973, Strauss taught in colleges in California and Maryland, and completed work on Xenophon’s Socratic discourses and Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (1975). After his death in October 1973, the essay collection Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (1983) was published.
Recommended articles on Leo Strauss, neo-conservatism, and Iraq
M.F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret”, New York Review of Books, 30 May 1985 [paid-for only]
Stephen Holmes, “Truths for Philosophers Alone?”, Times Literary Supplement, 1-7 December 1989; reprinted in Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1996)
Robert B. Pippin, “The Modern World of Leo Strauss,” Political Theory Vol. 20 No. 3 (August 1992) [affiliate only]
Gregory Bruce Smith, “Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?”, PS: Political Science & Politics Vol. 30 No. 2 (June 1997) [affiliate only]
Michiko Kakutani, “How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy,” The New York Times, 5 April 2003 [paid-for only]
Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, “The Strategist and the Philosopher”, Le Monde, 15 April 2003
James Atlas, “A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” The New York Times, 4 May 2003 [paid-for only]
Jeet Heer, “The Philosopher,” The Boston Globe, 11 May 2003 [paid-for only]
Jim Lobe, “The Strong Must Rule the Weak: A Philosopher for an Empire,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 12 May 2003
Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, 12 May 2003
William Pfaff, “The long reach of Leo Strauss”, International Herald Tribune, 15 May 2003
Peter Berkowitz, “What Hath Strauss Wrought?”, Weekly Standard, 2 June 2003
“Philosophers and kings,” The Economist, 19 June 2003
Steven Lenzner & William Kristol, “What was Leo Strauss up to?”, The Public Interest, Fall 2003
Laura Rozen “Con Tract: the theory behind neocon self-deception”, Washington Monthly, October 2003
More Bad Intelligence on Iran and Iraq
July 27, 2007
Osama bin Laden (L) and President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
by Robert Baer
You would think by now the Bush Administration would have drained the well of bad intelligence on Iraq and Iran. Apparently not.
This week the White House made a big show of declassifying intelligence alleging that in 2005 al-Qaeda considered using Iraq as a base to launch terrorist attacks on the United States. The White House didn’t bother to mask the reason for the disclosure — to put pressure on the Democrats to stop trying to impose a date for a withdrawal from Iraq. Meanwhile, ABC News reported that the White House recently ordered the CIA to destabilize the Iranian regime.
Both cases show how the Administration is still trying to manipulate intelligence to further its strategic goals. ABC says that Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams is behind the covert action against Iran, which reportedly stems from a “nonlethal presidential finding” signed by Bush to launch a plan that “includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.” But the CIA has consistently told this White House it can’t do anything about the mullahs in Tehran short of strangling the country economically, in particular cutting off finished fuel products. That could take years, which is too long for the Bush Administration. (Both the White House and CIA refused to comment to ABC about the report.)
It’s no surprise that Abrams would be behind this. But of all people he should know better. Abrams was a key player in the Iran-contra fiasco, which was rooted in lousy intelligence. In case you have forgotten, a handful of confidence men convinced the Reagan NSC, along with Abrams, that they were talking to moderate Iranians, who, properly nurtured, would supposedly change the character of the Iranian regime. It was a lie; the NSC was dealing with the most radical, hostile faction in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the same group holding our hostages in Lebanon.
Once again, neo-cons are urging the U.S. to take advantage of Iraq’s long border with Iran and finally do something about the Iranian regime. I even got a call not long after the invasion from a neo-con asking if I wanted to go to Iraq to handle the Mujahideen-e-Khlaq, an Iranian dissident group on the State Department’s terrorist list. The mission was supposedly to collect intelligence on Iranian nuclear facilities. (I declined, and I don’t know where it went from there.) And I still keep hearing rumblings that Elliot Abrams is pressuring our Arab allies and Pakistan to fund and arm Jundallah, a fundamentalist Sunni Iranian Ballouch group, to attack the Iranian government — in other words, an off-the-books covert action. But neither the MEK nor Jundallah has the wherewithal to change the regime in Tehran.
As for the intelligence on al-Qaeda and Iraq, it’s even flimsier. The captured Qaeda member who provided it, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, may have been tortured, either by Pakistan, by the CIA or at Guantanamo. Even if we accept the White House’s euphemism for torture — “enhanced interrogation” techniques — what Libbi has to say about Qaeda can’t be trusted, let alone drive U.S. policy.
Never mind that no one can decide what exact role Libbi played in Qaeda, or whether he was even in a position to know bin Laden’s plans. He was never on the FBI Most Wanted list (as most Qaeda leaders on whom we have sufficient evidence are). Abu Faraj al-Libbi isn’t even his real name (al-Libbi means “the Libyan” in Arabic). Abu Faraj al-Libbi is often confused with Ibn Shaykh al-Libbi, who was captured shortly after 9/11 and reportedly recanted his confession about Saddam having a pre-9/11 connection to al-Qaeda, saying it was coerced. Abu Faraj was also initially confused with Anas al-Liby, who was supposedly involved in the 1998 East Africa bombings and is on the Most Wanted list. Confused? Well, that’s just the way the White House likes it.
Another problem with Abu Faraj al-Libbi’s confession is that it doesn’t make sense. Qaeda knows as well as anyone that Iraq, where the U.S. military could knock down your door at any moment, would be one of the worst places in the world from which to launch or plan a terrorist attack on the United States. The Administration knows that America is much more vulnerable in Europe. A Qaeda terrorist with a European passport can come into this country under the visa waiver program, virtually without scrutiny.
If the Bush Administration continues to feed the American people the same dog’s breakfast of bad intelligence, we’ll be in Iraq until Bush leaves office. And while we’re at it, just maybe in a war with Iran.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East and Time.com’s intelligence columnist, is the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down
Draft College Republicans
July 19, 2007
Generation Chickenhawk: the Unauthorized College Republican Convention Tour
watch the video http://vimeo.com/244640
On July 13, 2007, I visited Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where the bodies of American soldiers killed in Iraq were freshly interred. Afterwards, I headed across the street to the Sheraton National Hotel, owned by right-wing Korean cult leader Sun Myung-Moon, to meet some of the war’s most fervent supporters at the College Republican National Convention.
In conversations with at least twenty College Republicans about the war in Iraq, I listened as they lip-synched discredited cant about “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Many of the young GOP cadres I met described the so-called “war on terror” as nothing less than the cause of their time.
Yet when I asked these College Repulicans why they were not participating in this historical cause, they immediately went into contortions. Asthma. Bad knees from playing catcher in high school. “Medical reasons.” “It’s not for me.” These were some of the excuses College Republicans offered for why they could not fight them “over there.” Like the current Republican leaders who skipped out on Vietnam, the GOP’s next generation would rather cheerlead from the sidelines for the war in Iraq while other, less privileged young men and women fight and die.
Along with videographer Thomas Shomaker, I captured a vivid portrait of the hypocritical mentality of the next generation of Republican leaders. See for yourself.
