The CIA official in charge of intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of ignoring assessments that sanctions and weapons inspections were the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein, and that an invasion would have a “messy aftermath”.

In an article in the next edition of the bimonthly journal, Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, has become the highest-ranking CIA official from the prewar period to accuse the White House of manipulating the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

…”If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war – or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath.”

Mr Pillar said a CIA assessment of the implications of a US-led occupation had “presented a picture of a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold a long, difficult, and turbulent transition”, including guerrilla attacks and sectarian conflict.
guardian.co.uk

That’s cool…the more turbulent the better.

Rumsfeld cautions Iran and Syria about aiding Iraq insurgency
TAORMINA, Sicily (AP) – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned Iran and Syria against trying to undermine the newly elected government in Iraq, but he also said he understood their determination to resist U.S. efforts to stop them.

“I think they are making a mistake,” Rumsfeld told a news conference Friday in this Sicilian seaside resort after two days of talks with North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers.

…Rumsfeld did not cite specific examples of Iranian and Syrian behavior or detail what the United States was doing about them.

ASADABAD: Roadside bombs killed eight Afghan soldiers on Friday, a provincial governor said. Seven soldiers were wounded in two separate blasts in Kunar province, on the Pakistani border, said the province’s governor, Assadullah Wafa.

“The soldiers were travelling in convoys when the enemies of Afghanistan set off bombs planted on the roads,” Wafa told Reuters. Six soldiers were killed in one of the blasts and two were killed in the other, he said. He did not elaborate on who he thought was responsible but Taliban and allied militants are known to operate in the province.

US forces mounted a major sweep to clear insurgents from Kunar last year and 16 US troops were killed there in June when their helicopter was shot down.

In a separate incident, four Canadian soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb hit their armoured vehicle in the Kandahar province on Thursday, a spokesman for Canadian troops said. A Taliban commander claimed responsibility.
dailytimes.com

The entire northern hemisphere is experiencing a sustained period of warming that is unprecedented in the past millennium, a study has found.

A review of a range of temperature records, from tree rings and ice cores to historical documents, has found that at no time since the 9th century have temperatures been so consistently high. The study, published in the journal Science, found that the late 20th century was the warmest period for the northern hemisphere since at least 800AD, eclipsing the well-known medieval warm period when vines were cultivated successfully in northern Europe and the Vikings exploited the ice-free seas to colonise Greenland.
independent.co.uk

The U.S. trade deficit soared to a record in 2005 for the fourth year in a row, according to a government report released yesterday that provided a reminder of the dangers hovering over a generally robust economy.

The United States imported $725.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported last year, the Commerce Department said. That is up 17.5 percent from last year, and it is an all-time high not only in dollar terms but as a proportion of the economy; the figure is equal to 5.8 percent of gross domestic product.

For December alone, the trade gap increased to $65.7 billion from a revised $64.7 billion in November. That is the third-highest monthly deficit ever.
washingtonpost.com

02/10/06 “ICH” — — The U.S. Department of Labor claims we have an unemployment rate of 4.9% [1]. According to “the Economist, however, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is over 8%, or 12.6 million Americans [2]. The difference is due to the fact that the U.S. Government doesn’t count people as unemployed after six months without a job [3].

I recently joined the ranks of our many unemployed citizens. The termination of my employment as a Vice President at Pfizer was subject to intense media interest [4], partly due to the fact that Pfizer notified the press before they informed me.

…Clearly the system we have today isn’t just broke. The system is utterly and completely sick and our weakest citizens are paying the price, every day. And while I have belatedly been forced to share some of the experiences of our poor, uninsured, and unemployed, my situation doesn’t even start to compare with people with no resources, no voice, nowhere to go and no one who listens to them. For those citizens we have something that’s called the Government; a government that is supposed to look out for the people who can’t look out for themselves, but instead focuses on “pay to play money.

Today’s system is built on greed. Greed is defined as an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than someone needs or deserves. Greed is not a corporate executive who builds an organization such as Microsoft, creates a lot of jobs, and happens to get rich. Greed is to become CEO for a drug company such as Pfizer, be responsible for a stock price drop of 40% over his five year tenure, twice as much as the AMEX Pharmaceutical Index [10], secure a $100 million retirement package [11] while firing 16,385 Pharmacia and Pfizer employees [12], and get a 72% pay increase to $16.6 million as his reward [13].
informationclearinghouse.info

Outraged intelligence professionals say President George W. Bush is “cheapening” and “politicizing” their work with claims the United States foiled a planned terrorist attack against Los Angeles in 2002.

“The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world,” says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. “He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington.”

Within hours of the President’s speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President’s remarks.

“He’s full of shit,” said one sharply-worded email.
capitolhillblue

What’s cooking in New Orleans? “Nothing,” celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse recently told the New York Post’s Cindy Adams. “The mayor’s a clunk. The governor is also a clunk. They don’t know their (derrieres) from a hole in the ground. All my three restaurants got hit. I’ve reopened Emeril’s, but only a few locals come. There’re no tourists. No visitors. No spenders. No money. No future. No people. It’s lost. It’ll never come back.”

Congressman Richard Baker believes New Orleans and its environs can come back if it can rebuild its housing stock and thus begin rehabilitating battered communities. The Baton Rouge Republican’s proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation (LRC) appears to be the only coherent plan for revitalizing the tempest-tossed Bayou State. It deserves the proper hearing it will get before the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 15.

Baker’s bill, H.R. 4100, would issue Treasury bonds to create a $30 billion revolving loan fund. Owners of Louisiana’s 240,000 damaged or destroyed homes and small businesses voluntarily could sell their property to the LRC. It would pay owners 60 percent of their equity and lenders up to 60 percent of their mortgage receivables. The LRC would consolidate these distressed or demolished properties and auction them off to private developers. Sales revenues would repay bondholders. Original owners could ask for first dibs on revitalized properties. The LRC would expire after 10 years.

Also, Baker’s $30 billion revolving loan fund would collect and repay 60 cents on the dollar. Even if it underwrote 40 cents on the dollar, that would involve a $12 billion outlay, not all $30 billion.

“In this case, there is basically no market. As such, people have little or no options,” Baker told BayouBuzz.com. Baker, who launched a still-operating real-estate agency at age 22 and enjoys a 91 percent lifetime American Conservative Union rating, added: “The situation calls for an unprecedented solution, through a corporation that basically remakes the market, reintroduces market forces, gets property back into commerce in a necessarily more comprehensive approach, and then gradually recedes from the marketplace over time.”

As public programs go, Baker’s proposal is a bit like a live-virus vaccine. A limited amount of government now, followed by better health, rather than illness and, eventually, even more government. Baker’s plan should inoculate against the alternative: an epidemic of mortgage foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, bank failures, and an inevitable bailout by federal regulators at greater expense in outlays and litigation.

“I don’t believe in taxing the good people of Kansas, New Hampshire, and California $30 billion on the grounds that otherwise you’ll tax them more later,” responds David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute.

While I usually agree that free markets should solve these things, New Orleans’ markets largely have washed away. Last November, I witnessed moderate to jaw-dropping flood damage from Lake Pontchartrain clear down to Marais Street, just above the French Quarter. Only the roughly 10-block-wide “Sliver by the River” abutting the Mississippi, stood essentially intact.

“The bottom line is this, it is difficult to understand how Louisiana rebuilds if its landscape is littered with the remains of over 200,000 unusable homes and business properties,” former Louisiana governors Mike Foster, Buddy Roemer, and David Treen, all Republicans, wrote President Bush Feb. 1. Without the Baker plan, they fear these deeds will stay “tied up in a legal mess impenetrable to the private market, for years and years to come.”
capitolhillblue.com

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid portrays convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s activities as involving only Republicans. But Abramoff’s billing records and congressional correspondence tell a different story.

They show Abramoff’s lobbying team billed for nearly two dozen contacts with Reid’s office in a single year to mostly discuss Democratic legislation that would have set the minimum hourly wage for the Northern Mariana Islands, an Abramoff client, initially almost $3 lower than other U.S. states and territories.

Reid, D-Nev., also wrote at least four letters to the Bush administration helpful to Indian tribes Abramoff represented, often collecting donations from Abramoff-related sources around the same time.

And in the midst of the contacts, Abramoff’s firm hired one of Reid’s top legislative aides to lobby for the tribal and Marianas clients. The aide then helped throw a fundraiser for Reid at Abramoff’s firm.

The activities _ detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press _ are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff’s firm, lobbying partners and clients.
capitolhillblue.com

(CBS) Former President George H.W. Bush has expressed dismay and anger at attacks on his son, President Bush, at the funeral for Coretta Scott King.

“In terms of the political shots at the president who was sitting there with his wife, I didn’t like it and I thought it was kind of ugly frankly,” the former president said in an exclusive radio interview with CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer.

“Anybody that shoots at the president of the United States at a funeral, I just didn’t appreciate that,” Mr. Bush added.

Former President Carter and the Rev. Joseph Lowery criticized the president during remarks they made at the King funeral in Atlanta.

The Rev. Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., drew a roaring standing ovation when he said: “For war, billions more, but no more for the poor” – a takeoff on a line from a Stevie Wonder song. The comment drew head shakes from Mr. Bush and his father as theysat behind the pulpit.

Former President Carter brought up the government response to Katrina, saying, “We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi” to know that inequality exists. He also noted that the Kings once were “victims of secret government wiretapping” – echoing Mr. Bush’s domestic spying program.

Former President Bush also had praise for his friend, Bill Clinton: “I thought President Clinton was maybe the best. It was his crowd. They talk about Bill Clinton being ‘the first black president,’ well when you walk into that church with 12,000 or whatever it was, I mean it was very clear who that crowd loved and respected.”
cbsnews.com

Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.

Cheney was one of the “superiors” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby said had authorized him to make the disclosures, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Libby’s discussions with reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame.
washingtonpost.com