GREAT WORK B…
On a yet, even more ridiculously mad note, Cheney asks Musharraf to fight al-Qaida

Underscoring growing alarm in the West at how militants have regained ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday sought Pakistani aid to help counter al-Qaida’s efforts to regroup, officials said.
However, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insisted his forces have already “done the maximum” possible against extremists in their territory — and insisted that other allies also shoulder responsibility in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

You just have to love the hubris in this request.
The US broke Afghanistan, now Pakistan is supposed to pick up the pieces on its border?
Cheney got a tersely polite “Thanks, but no thanks” from Musharraf.
So what’s the game plan now??
Perhaps, there are some truth to the rumor of the Dick suffering from “pump-head syndrome?” (Medically known as “post-perfusion syndrome”)?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 27 2007 0:15 utc | 3

okay, that’s worthy of an indictment right there

As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role

no. it’s a reference to bushdaddy’s role in iran-contra & the fact that he was able to get away w/ running the parallel govt from the veep’s office. release #41’s papers. bring the whole lot of them into the docks.
and what’s up w/ hersch writing “Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran.” attempted to?
and this caught my eye too: “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions.” typically, this money has been laundered & stashed in offshore havens & unregulated banks. in this age of ‘transnational terrorist networks’, what are the odds of getting non-u.s. prosecutors to start going after these “pots of black money” when it’s used to fund missions that actually terrorize citizenry in pursuit of political/economic objectives?

Posted by: b real | Feb 27 2007 3:09 utc | 5

Juan Cole footnotes the American Enterprise Institute:
We know that Exxon Mobil is a significant funder of the American Enterprise Institute and has used it to attempt to bribe “scientists” to cast doubt on global warming. Lee Raymond, who was CEO of Exxon Mobil until 2005, is the vice-chair of AEI’s board of directors.
We also know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most hawkish of the Washington “think tanks,” and that its staffers were key to thinking up and promoting the Iraq War with lies and propaganda.
A=B, B=C, therefore A=C. Exxon Mobil is a big behind the scenes player in the Iraq War by virtue of its support for AEI. In fact, I think a boycott of its gas stations is in order until the company cuts off AEI and stops promoting the Iraq War and muddying the waters on global warming. (It pledged to do the latter in the past, but obviously was lying).

Posted by: anna missed | Feb 27 2007 3:35 utc | 7

Thanks for posting that (#7) anna missed. I was going to post it yesterday, as it just leaped out at me & I didn’t think I was alone around here in not knowing that…but no one was around so I was afraid it might get lost. BUT you omitted the last part of the paragraph in which he notes the equally impt. point about Jews being used to take the fall, but not driving policy. So, I’ll post his entire paragraph.
77% of American Jews oppose the Iraq war
…
Neoconservative Jews in the US like Richard Perle, Frederick Kagan and Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute who vocally support the Iraq War (and have gotten rich off it) are a minority of a minority, and even are at odds with the Israeli security establishment! Moreover, the American Enterprise Institute, which crafted the Iraq War, gets funding from Exxon Mobil, and last I checked it was run by white Protestants. The vice chair of AEI is Lee Raymond, former CEO of Exxon Mobil and surely Dick Cheney’s old golf partner in the Dallas years. That is, the Kagans and the Rubins, who identify with the Revisionist Zionist movement on the Israeli Right, are useful idiots for Big Oil, not movers and shakers in their own right.
Given the magnitude of old fashioned anti-semitism in this country, this is impt. to note. I mean as in Jews still being viewed by Christians as The Other. Recall Paul Craig Roberts column in June Counterpunch. He began by noting that he attended Stanford graduation for a friend’s child. Notes how few white males are in graduating class. In next sentence you realize that “white males” is a code for him that does not even include Jews.

Posted by: jj | Feb 27 2007 5:15 utc | 9

Badger reports today on what some (sources in European capitals) are saying about the new direction the U.S. is taking in Iraq. This also seems to coincide with what Hersh is saying:

Today the Sadrist news-site Nahrainnet.net reports that sources in a number of European capitals are seeing evidence confirming a US strategy that is quite different from the support-Maliki program that most people seem to believe in. The immediate news-hook for this is the recent arrest, with its humiliating circumstances, of the eldest son of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, head of SCIRI. The strategy the Europeans are said to anticipate is to use the Maliki administration for as long as possible to try for the elimination of the Mahdi Army as a force in the country, and then, depending on the results of that, to attack SCIRI and the Badr Corps. If none of that works, then there would be two alternatives as followup. First would be the creation of the “alternative political base” (talked about in the famous Hadley memo), to set up a “government of national salvation”, and this would include the Iraqi List (Allawi’s group), the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni), and the two big Kurdish parties. And finally, if that doesn’t work, the strategy calls for setting up a military government that would shut down parliament, close newspapers radio and TV, and so on….

Clearly, the U.S. administration cannot leave Iraq with an Iranian advantage the result of their policy. So whats happening with their offensives against both the JAM (Mahdi army) and SCIRI under Maliki’s nose is an effort to strip Iranian influence and replace it with U.S. dependency — all done under the aspices of the anti-militia/extremists rubric. After the Shiite militias are hollowed out of the equation, the Maliki government is likely to just blow away with the next gentle breeze. Making the installment of an Allawi led martial law government ride in on the stallion of a Sunni re-surgency.
And join up with the new anti-Iranian regional rodeo Hersh talks about.

Posted by: anna missed | Feb 27 2007 8:51 utc | 11

mike,
nukes.

Posted by: Hamburger | Feb 27 2007 11:55 utc | 13

re: my #8
By all means, continue reading all five parts of the article too…
here’s a taste:

Some of the money is stolen outright. World Bank-financed roads in Indonesia cost an extra 30 percent to account for corruption. That’s loan money Indonesian citizens must repay. Developing countries owe more than $2 trillion to rich nations and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. The dirty little secret of third world debt is that a substantial part of the money given for political reasons to pro-Western dictators was laundered in offshore centers and funneled back to Western stock markets and real estate. It’s estimated that for every dollar the West “gives,” or more likely, lends the third world, ten dollars in dirty money funnels back to it. This drains hard currency reserves needed to buy imports, takes away funds for investment, and beggars education and health programs.
At the Africa-Europe summit in Cairo in 2000, when the Europeans accused the Africans of corruption, the Africans riposted, “You’re the ones that take the funds; give us our money back!” European banks have fought attempts to retrieve the money stashed by dictators.
Attempts to find laundered funds are usually dismal failures. According to Interpol, $3 billion in dirty money has been seized in twenty years of struggle against money laundering — about the amount laundered in three days. U.S. Treasury officials say 99.9 percent of the foreign criminal and terrorist money presented for deposit in the United States gets into secure accounts. That means anti-money-laundering efforts fail 99.9 percent of the time. A major reason is the offshore bank and corporate secrecy system.
Bank secrecy means that a prosecutor or plaintiff with a court order can’t see the financial records of someone who has just walked off with the company funds, or failed to pay child support, or has been caught divvying a kilo of heroin to a teenage sales force or running a scam that wiped out thousands of people’s savings, or paid no taxes while flying around in a private jet. It means Osama bin Laden can move money through a financial network centered around the Al Taqwa (“Fear of God”) bank, registered in the offshore haven of the Bahamas and operated from the secrecy jurisdiction of Switzerland.
Corporate secrecy is what let Enron set up 780 shell companies in Grand Cayman and another eighty in the Turks & Caicos islands to hide insider trading, stage-manage financial records, deceive investors and creditors, and avoid U.S. taxes. The offshore system let Arthur Andersen do its “creative accounting,” manipulating its client’s books with handy secret companies and accounts.
These beneficiaries want to keep the system. So do the big banks, which make substantial commissions on their offshore services. Offshore is not a fly-by-night operation run by unknown shady dealers. It is a blue chip industry operated by multi-billion dollar international banks and major investment, law, and accountancy firms.

Snip:

When I first started writing on the subject in 1997, most people I spoke to needed an explanation of “offshore.” An assistant opinion-page editor of a major American newspaper asked me, “Just what is a numbered Swiss bank account?” — and then decided the issue was too arcane and complex to present to readers, especially since she didn’t understand it herself. The editor of a major foreign policy organization’s journal asked for an article, then panicked when it turned out to be a call for the end of bank secrecy. Lacking the courage to air a challenge to the status quo (and his organization’s banker and broker members), or even to confront the author, he turned it down through his secretary. No wonder the American public does not understand this issue. The mainstream media refuse to confront it.
It took the discovery that Osama bin Laden used a financial network based offshore and that Enron set up affiliates in secrecy havens to make U.S. political leaders, editors, and the public begin to pay serious attention. Now, the banks are working on damage control, trying to limit the scope of domestic legislation and international agreements. In Europe, citizens groups seeking global economic reform call offshore secrecy pernicious and want to end it. The Tax Justice Network (www.taxjustice.net) was organized in 2003, largely by European NGO’s seeking to end massive tax cheating by corporations and the rich. In America, however, there are only a few groups that lobby to challenge the banks. One is the Nader-connected group Citizen Works (www.citizenworks.org). On neither side of the Atlantic are governments seeking radical reforms. Who are the “moneyed interests” who keep in place the international financial services system for criminals? One might, with the French deputies seventy years ago, cry, “names!”
Today, the names include the corporate and private wealth represented by the Bush administration. Paul O’Neill, then treasury secretary, announced at the February 2001 meeting of the G-7 that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-which had developed an initiative to stop tax havens from hiding the money of tax cheats-shouldn’t be “dictating to any country . . . the appropriate level of tax rates.”

Cookies and milk for the first person to guess where these investigative records were stored…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 27 2007 13:23 utc | 15

uncle, the soloman building, WTC7?

Posted by: annie | Feb 27 2007 16:52 utc | 17

Thanks for the “Strange Maps” Noirette!

Posted by: beq | Feb 27 2007 18:01 utc | 19

b-real- as you noted, journos talk with people who will serve as sources who have access to information that ppl outside a situation do not have. Journalists have to ask if or when they are being used to give disinformation, of course, and what agendas diff. ppl have. However, such a circumstance does not mean that someone is not a reliable source for information about things that have been discussed, etc. because they are inside of a system…how do you think information comes forth in these situations? it’s not going to come from Chris Floyd’s prognostications. He can guess, but he cannot know.
I dont’ think any “objective” source of information exists, anyway. Every bit of information is filtered through existing biases in everyone. Hersh certainly knows this as well. He has years of experience with people who leak information b/c of power struggles, for instance, but that doesn’t mean information isn’t true, just because it may advance one person or group’s cause over anothers.
As Hersh noted earlier, in fact, generals, etc. that are sources will not come forward because they have a few more years before retirement and they have kids and mortgages and all the reasons that ppl in other circumstances in life put up with disgusting situations. With them, however, the stakes are definitely bigger than for most of us who can justify not messing up our careers because of those who rely upon us.
Hersh is also the one who told the world that there were much, much worse torture pictures that documented horrors performed by this nation on other humans…and this information also came from those inside sources.
One interesting thing I remember a decade or so ago was when I met a bunch of academics who had protested in the 60s, etc. who were then taking govt money to work on projects that were most certainly being used by the same govt they couldn’t tolerate to be used for defense, etc…the DoD has long been a huge source of funding for hard sciences, and is one reason they make so much more money than ppl in other areas of academia. They noted this themselves…noted the irony, but didn’t think their actions meant they should stop their jobs or put their families in financial hardship.
I thought your list was interesting too, but for a different reason. Hersh’s information comes from a variety of sources within diff. groups who can and do have competing interests, and sometimes intersecting ones.
Hersh, as well, was the source for the “stovepiping” information about Cheney and Rummy’s “Plan B” troops. This also came from insiders. This information is also now considered part of the record of current history. No one but the neo-cons denies that they were idiots and refused to accept any feedback from anyone else who knew more about the situations than they did.
I think the most important information that Hersh provided was the admission that another Iran-Contra-style operation is ongoing, and Cheney is at the center of it. Someone is giving Congress ammo to get rid of Dick.

Posted by: fauxreal | Feb 28 2007 2:42 utc | 21

Interesting discussion between 43 and 41: any proof at all? Any reference? Or just another fantasy?

Posted by: judith weingarten | Mar 1 2007 19:57 utc | 23

any proof at all? Any reference?
judith, that was addressed at the link, caveats included.

Can this possibly be true?
Cockburn is a good reporter who has covered national security for decades. He wouldn’t make it up. He writes that he got this anecdote from “friends of the family,” which means multiple sources—probably not eyewitnesses, but rather people who heard the story from the elder Bush or (more likely) from Scowcroft. Scowcroft is a very close friend to Bush père, making it plausible that he would have heard about the conversation between father and son. And because Scowcroft is close to Bush père, one can easily imagine that two other people who would have heard the story (third-hand) from Scowcroft would also be friends of the elder Bushes.

just another fantasy?
you mean like all the other unfounded allegations floating around regarding neocons, israel, or the bush family?

Posted by: Anonymous | Mar 1 2007 23:07 utc | 25

The Dark Side of Spun a Lot? Seymour Hersh and Iran

The broad tropes of Hersh’s arguments are correct. The US has indeed abandoned the neoconservative approach to the Middle East (which Hersh so loathed), to return to political “realism” based on imposing a balance of power. Much like the US did during the 1980s when it supported Iraq in its war against Iran, the Bush administration is today using Sunnis against Shiites (though in Iraq it is mainly using Shiites against Sunnis). The policy is risky – fiddling with sectarianism may ultimately backfire – but the problem with Hersh is that he offers little hard evidence for many of his controversial assertions. In fact his discussion of Lebanon in particular and his broader charge that the administration is engaging in clandestine activities without proper legislative approval are ill-informed or partial. The New Yorker has signed off on a piece shoddily constructed, often tendentious, and driven almost entirely by Hersh’s sources (most of the more significant ones left unnamed), rather than his own independent confirmation of the details.
Let’s start with Lebanon, where the American and Saudi effort to counter Iran and its allies is in full swing. …

Posted by: b real | Mar 5 2007 19:40 utc | 27

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