From Common Dreams
By Tara Mahtafar

For weeks now the liberal media has been waxing incredulous at John McCain’s stunt of a running mate. Righteously they decry her unpreparedness for potentially holding the most powerful office on earth; aghast, they witness the irony that such a specter should act as a tonic on the Republican ticket.

More astonishing, though, is this incredulity itself.

The good senator’s choice forthrightly assumes what the world already knew about the majority of American hearts and minds — that they are apolitical, uninformed, and all too easily image-driven. A Sarah Palin would never go over in France, Israel, China — or even Pakistan. She wouldn’t be nominated to begin with. Just a few decades ago, she arguably wouldn’t have stood a chance here at home either.

The US presidential race today resembles not so much the nation exercising its constitutional right to elect competent leadership as an arena for Odysseus-like campaign strategists battling to conquer, as an astute comedian recently put it, “The United Stupid of America.” According to The Economist.com’s Global Electoral College, which polls the hypothetical US president if world citizenry were to vote, “Barack Obama would stroll into the White House.” Nearly everywhere on the planet -excepting Georgia, the sole pro-McCain country — the Democratic contender is favored by a landslide. Yet those privileged to actually put their name to the American ballot may very well allow Ms. Palin to wink her way to the doorstep of that White House.

Let’s take a moment to imagine the Palin Presidency scenario: would shortcomings in foreign policy experience truly undermine her capability as Commander-in-Chief? She will be surrounded by an army of advisors and can appoint a foreign-relations-savvy deputy at her side. Foreign policy wasn’t the incumbent president’s strongest suite, and he managed to install two whole new governments in the turbulent Middle East. And to give credit where it’s due, Sarah Palin has shown extraordinary poise in face of the weighty rôle thrust upon her thus far. Who’s to say President Palin can’t just as unblinkingly stare down Putin if he “rears” too close? Zardari already loves her — other pivotal allies will rally around. If anyone is worried about her gift for speech, again, by the benchmark of the last eight years, she will positively breeze through international summits and public addresses.

Read more Confederacy of Dunces

From Think Progress
By Ali

Ever since President Bush confirmed the existence of a National Security Administration wiretapping program in late 2005, he has insisted it is aimed only at terrorists’ calls and protects Americans’ civil liberties:

– If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we’d like to know why. … In the meantime, this program is conscious of people’s civil liberties, as am I. This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America — and I repeat: limited. [1/1/06]

– This is a — I repeat to you, even though you hear words, “domestic spying,” these are not phone calls within the United States. It’s a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States. I’m mindful of your civil liberties. [1/23/06]

– People who analyze the program fully understand that America’s civil liberties are well protected. There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect. [2/28/08]

However, ABC News reports that the NSA frequently listened to and transcribed the private phone calls of Americans abroad, according to two former military intercept operators. These conversations included those of American soldiers stationed in Iraq and American aid workers abroad, such as Doctors Without Borders:

Read more Spying

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

In the most unsurprising revelation imaginable, two former Army Reserve Arab linguists for the National Security Agency have said that they routinely eavesdropped on — “and recorded and transcribed” — the private telephone calls of American citizens who had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. The two former NSA employees, who came forward as part of journalist James Bamford’s forthcoming book on the NSA, intercepted calls as part of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” whereby George Bush ordered the NSA in 2001 to eavesdrop on Americans’ calls in secret, without first obtaining judicial approval as required by the law (FISA). That illegal eavesdropping continued for at least six years — through 2007.

The two NSA whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, were interviewed by ABC News’ Brian Ross. Kinne said that “US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and ‘collected on’ as they called their offices or homes in the United States.” He also said his co-workers “were ordered to transcribe these calls.” Faulk told Ross: ”when one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said: ’but sir, there are personal calls,’ the supervisor said: ‘my orders were to transcribe everything’.” He said that the intercepted calls included highly personal and intimate conversations and even phone sex.

When Ross showed Kinne a video excerpt of George Bush insisting to the nation that only those with links to Al Qaeda were eavesdropped on as part of his illegal spying program, the following exchange occurred:

ROSS: Kinne says she listened to hundreds of Americans simply calling their families …

KINNE: Personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything having anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that nobody else should have been listening to.

Read more Eavesdropping

From The Financial Times
By Demetri Sevastopulo

The Pentagon will not have to release a group of Chinese Uighurs from Guantanámo Bay on Friday after an appeals court blocked an order to bring the men to the US.

The appeals court halted the potentially dramatic scene of Guantanámo detainees arriving on American soil for the first time since the start of the ”war on terror”. The decision followed an emergency US government appeal after a district court on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to bring 17 Uighurs before the court on Friday.

In the landmark district court ruling on Tuesday, Judge Ricardo Urbina said the men – members of the Uighur ethnic group from China’s far-western region of Xinjiang – did not pose a security risk. He said the US constitution barred the indefinite detention of the men, who have languished in the Cuba-based detention camp since 2002.

Pakistan handed the Uighurs over to US forces in 2002 after they fled a camp in Afghanistan following the US invasion of that country. The Pentagon cleared them for release in 2004, but the US has refused to return them to China out of concern they might be tortured.

China on Thursday repeated its demand that they be repatriated to be dealt with ”according to law” as members of terrorist organisations.

Read more Guantanamo

From The Raw Story
By Nick Juliano

The US military was using the same procedures employed at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison at other facilities inside the United States where US citizens and legal residents were detained, according to documents released Wednesday.

At least one Navy officer was concerned that a detainee was being slowly driven insane by the policies, which prohibited detainees from having items such as shoes or socks, according to 91 pages of e-mails between officers at military brigs in Virginia and South Carolina released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we’ve suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States,” Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU’s National Security Project in New York told the Associated Press, using the slang word for the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.

A pdf of the heavily redacted e-mails can be downloaded here. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request along with the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School to obtain the documents.

Read more Gitmo

From In These Times
By Susan J. Douglas

Many of us had been waiting for tougher talk from Barack Obama about John McCain and the Bush presidency. At the Democratic convention, Obama began to deliver — but it wasn’t stark enough.

I recently visited Australia and New Zealand, and it made me realize that we need mythic language — the kind that comes from oral cultures reliant on handed-down legends — to capture what has happened these past eight years. Like the Aborigines’ dreamtime stories, we need something more powerful than “the failed policies of the Bush administration.” I propose “The Stolen Years.”

It began, of course, with the stolen election in 2000. But just think how much has been stolen from us: our morality and, indeed, our sense of humanity.

These are not just policy failures. This has been a spiritual pillaging of any sense that the United States can ever aspire to, or represent, higher principles; that our nation is, or can be, a democracy, however flawed; that the government cares about citizens other than the really rich.

The Bush administration has seized all we hold dear and ground it into the dirt with its boot heels.

Most important has been the nation’s sense of its own morality. Few of us are deluded that the U.S. government was, before the Bush regime, a beacon of moral rectitude and social justice. The United States has overthrown many governments, mostly in secret, and supported repressive rulers. But when have our leaders publicly and adamantly rejected the Geneva Conventions and endorsed torture as a matter of national policy? It’s one thing for there to be a gap between national principles and government practices, and quite another for a president to deride those principles as no longer essential to the nation’s moral compass.

Read more Bush

From TruthDig
By Amy Goodman

A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well.

The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time”—time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment”—armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets.

The Army Times piece includes a correction stating that the forces would not use nonlethal weaponry domestically. I called Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public-affairs officer for Northern Command. She told me that the overall mission was humanitarian, to save lives and help communities recover from catastrophic events. Nevertheless, the military forces would have weapons on-site, “containerized,” she said—that is, stored in containers—including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that any decision to use weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary-of-defense level.

Talk of trouble on U.S. streets is omnipresent now, with the juxtaposition of Wall Street and Main Street. The financial crisis we face remains obscure to most people; titans of business and government officials assure us that the financial system is “on the brink,” that a massive bailout is necessary, immediately, to prevent a disaster. Conservative and progressive members of Congress, at the insistence of constituents, blocked the initial plan. If the economy does collapse, if people can’t go down to the bank to withdraw their savings, or get cash from an ATM, there may be serious “civil unrest,” and the “sea-smurfs” may be called upon sooner than we imagine to assist with “crowd control.”

Read more Invasion

From The Asia Times
By Gareth Porter

New evidence from former United States officials reveals that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were able to skip Afghanistan for Pakistan unimpeded in the first weeks after September 11, 2001, as the George W Bush administration failed to plan to block their retreat.

Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the US military was also forced to turn down an offer from then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to intercept the al-Qaeda leaders.

As Northern Alliance troops marched on Kabul with little resistance in November 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency had intelligence that Bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border.

Read more No Plans

From The Independent UK
By Robert Fisk

Sami al-Haj walks with pain on his steel crutch; almost six years in the nightmare of Guantanamo have taken their toll on the Al Jazeera journalist and, now in the safety of a hotel in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, he is a figure of both dignity and shame. The Americans told him they were sorry when they eventually freed him this year – after the beatings he says he suffered, and the force-feeding, the humiliations and interrogations by British, American and Canadian intelligence officers – and now he hopes one day he’ll be able to walk without his stick.

The TV cameraman, 38, was never charged with any crime, nor was he put on trial; his testimony makes it clear that he was held in three prisons for six-and-a-half years – repeatedly beaten and force-fed – not because he was a suspected “terrorist” but because he refused to become an American spy. From the moment Sami al-Haj arrived at Guantanamo, flown there from the brutal US prison camp at Kandahar, his captors demanded that he work for them. The cruelty visited upon him – constantly interrupted by American admissions of his innocence – seemed designed to turnal-Haj into a US intelligence “asset”.

“We know you are innocent, you are here by mistake,” he says he was told in more than 200 interrogations. “All they wanted was for me to be a spy for them. They said they would give me US citizenship, that my wife and child could live in America, that they would protect me. But I said: ‘I will not do this – first of all because I’m a journalist and this is not my job and because I fear for myself and my family. In war, I can be wounded and I can die or survive. But if I work with you, al-Qa’ida will eliminate me. And if I don’t work with you, you will kill me’.”

The grotesque saga began for al-Haj on 15 December, 2001, when he was on his way from the Pakistani capital Islamabad to Kandahar in Afghanistan with Sadah al-Haq, a fellow correspondent from the Arab satellite TV channel, to cover the new regional government. At least 70 other journalists were on their way through the Pakistani border post at Chaman, but an officer stopped al-Haj. “He told me there was a paper from the Pakistani intelligence service for my arrest. My name was misspelled, my passport number was incorrect, it said I was born in 1964 – the right date is 1969. I said I had renewed my visa in Islamabad and asked why, if I was wanted, they had not arrested me there?”

Read more Guantanamo

From The LA Times
By Andrew J. Bacevich

President Bush will leave office without concluding either of the two wars he initiated after 9/11. Now, in the waning months of his administration, the president seems intent on expanding his “global war on terror” still farther. To the existing fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he is adding a third: Pakistan.

Eclipsed perhaps only by Iraq, Pakistan ranks in the very top tier of the Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders. Even as it vowed following 9/11 to never compromise with evil, the administration wasted no time in forging an alliance with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the army general who seized power in 1999 through a military coup. Although Musharraf was anything but a democrat, Bush proclaimed him a close friend and ally. Washington quickly began funneling military and economic aid toward Islamabad, the total since 2001 exceeding $13 billion.

Unfortunately, Musharraf was not only a dictator, he was incompetent. Two themes defined his presidency: a gradual erosion of domestic legitimacy that paralyzed and then doomed his regime, and a steady erosion of Pakistan’s already shaky control over its frontier provinces bordering Afghanistan. For Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters ousted from their Afghan sanctuaries, the Pakistani Northwest Frontier became a refuge in which to establish training camps and support areas. Although U.S. civilian and military officials pushed and prodded Musharraf to crack down on this Taliban and Al Qaeda presence, little effective action resulted.

As measured by return on investment, Musharraf turned out to be a lousy bet. By the spring of this year, with Musharraf’s days obviously numbered, the Bush administration abandoned its friend and ally. In doing so, it found itself without a policy as far as Pakistan was concerned.

Read more Third War