These People Have An Unlimited Capacity To Make Me Sick

There's no shortage of current and upcoming exposés of President George W. Bush and his accomplices. I don't have the stomach to read them all. However, it looks like political writer & former talk show host Paul Alexander's new book is required reading. It's called Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove.

Salon has this excerpt: "How Karl Rove Played Politics While People Drowned."

Shorter version at First Draft.

-AF

(HT: Crooks and Liars)

How's That Terrorwatch List Working Out?

Not so well.







McClatchy has the bottom line:

The government's terror watchlist includes inaccurate and outdated information, increasing the risk that innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists while terrorists are overlooked, a government audit reported Monday.

Whodda thunk that giving control over this important task to a new unproven FBI department (created by Bush in 2003), The Terrorist Screening Center, would be prove so troublesome? Yes, the FBI's struggles to join the modern computer age have been legion (the $170 million-ish plus six years wasted on SAIC's* VCF software program, its well-documented inability to quickly share & disseminate info before & after 9/11, etc.) Surely they can run Filemaker Pro, right?

I'm being facetious. It's far more complicated. But if there's a special department dedicated to maintaining this list, why are we still having problems five years on? McClatchy offers this clue:

The Terrorist Screening Center oversees the watchlist, while the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI recommend or "nominate" names for it.

Oh boy. We have "nominations" supplied by another new unproven department (also created by Bush in 2003), the NCTC, along with the FBI whose problems managing data I already touched on. To make matters worse, the NCTC falls under the purview of DNI Mike McConnell. Four other separate departments do too including The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, the National Intelligence Council, the DNI Special Security Center and the ungodly named Center for Security Evaluation (CSE)/National Intelligence Emergency Management Activity (NIEMA). The ODNI's organizational chart is so unwieldy that they tout themselves as an Information Sharing Environment -- a positively Orwellian moniker if there ever was one.

Chalk it up as another concept urgently needed to protect the American people completely cocked up by President Bush. Another fiasco to remember the next time Republicans claim theirs is the "security party."

-AF

++Tuesday update: The LA Times sez

"the FBI provided the government-wide terrorism watch list with incomplete, inaccurate and outdated information about suspects for almost three years.

As a result, many innocent people stayed on the terrorism watch list long after they were cleared of any wrongdoing, and real threats to national security were sometimes left off the list or not added in a timely manner..."

It boggles the mind.

*SAIC was allowed to walk away with $170 million even tho' they never provided anything close to a working product. Unsurprisingly, SAIC founder John Robert Beyster is a big time Republican contributor. His company employs an army of lobbyists.

Download Your Very Own...

...Redacted Institute for Defense Analyses Report once and for all exploding the al Qaeda->Saddam Hussein link that our government doesn't want you see here.

The Bush Administration has added a diabolical new info suppressing mechanism to their already overloaded arsenal: Snail Mail only!

Via ABC News:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. Military Study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online. Asked why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."
(emphasis added)

So exactly how long will it take a request to Joint Forces Command to receive, process and post a report the Commander-in-Chief doesn't want us to see? I've seen how long it takes for MRAPs to be ordered. Plus it's not like the military loses things unless you count $12 billion shrink-wrapped and stacked on pallets (you can't tell me the military was not involved in moving that quantity so quickly) or thousands of guns, $1 billion in equipment, etc. The US Postal Service loses millions of pieces of mail each year. And if the mail I received yesterday is any indication, the USPS cracks a few CDs too.

ABC News on the report's methodology:

The report is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

I saved the best for last -- the key graph on conclusion and implications:

Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.

Now that is big.

AF

(h/t TPM Muckraker)

Update: McClatchy pieces on the study here and its canceled release there.