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Where is the Money Coming From?

Merrill Lynch, my former retirement fund manager as of opening bell tomorrow, tops the list of George Bush contributors through September...Bush's number two contribution city (after Wall Street) is Cincinnati, heart of the American Rhineland...Howard Dean's staffers are his sixth biggest doner...Lawyers like Clark, professors prefer Dean. See the Center for Responsive Politics for other amusing details.

posted by Jerry Bowles 4:57 PM

The hidden hand of Halliburton

To back up the Bush administration’s tough talk about trading with the enemy, Elder Aschcroft and “Dial M” for Mueller are going after a few US companies who allegedly sold weapons or “dual-use” technologies to Saddam on the eve of our unilateral action to “democratize” Iraq.

Halliburton isn’t one of them. But maybe the giant defense-technology-oil company should be. They operate with political protection and they operate, in some cases, with impunity.

From time-to-time we’ve dropped in on the little soap opera about the 2500 “bunker buster” missile warheads a Halliburton subsidiary dumped off on “counter terrorism” trainer David Hudak out in, where else, Roswell, New Mexico. The price, $1.34; that‘s less than a Big Mac a piece. Hudak says that Halliburton offered him the missiles, that he wasn’t in the market for them. All his "counterterrorism" students from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere might have been though.

Hudak, a Canadian national and self-described “good guy” was a friend and co-worker of Gerald Bull, who designed Saddam’s “supergun” during the first Iraq go-round. He was operating what he has called a “counter terrorism” school out in the desert on a ranch valued at $7 million not far from a bigger spread owned by former assistant secretary of defense and Bush family retainer Colin McMillan, who committed suicide just days before Hudak’s trial was to begin. McMillan had just been nominated by Shrubby to be the next Secretary of the Navy.

Now, from his visitation room at a “privatized” detention facility in a cow county east of Albuquerque, self-styled patriot Hudak is telling the Albuquerque Tribune that he has been framed. He says that Halliburton classified the warheads as demolition charges and the next thing he knows, the US government shows up at his warehouse with CNN in tow.

Federal prosecutors say that the charges they are bringing against Hudak are for licensing and regulatory violations that have nothing to do with terrorism or homeland security, but they are invoking mandatory sentencing that would put him away, if convicted, forever.

US District Judge John Conway, urged Hudak to do a plea bargain. “He dies in jail if he gets the 50,” Conway said in a hearing. Conway also ruled that Hudak can, in his defense, talk about Halliburton.

Then Judge Conway resigned from the case, slowing down the momentum. Sounds like Lord Cheney and Halliburton want to sweep this one under the rug.

posted by Groom 3:36 PM

Well, That Takes Care of That

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used. Knight-Ridder, October 16, 2003

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:46 AM

Obstruction at Justice

Last week the New York Times was dumping on those who were demanding a special prosecutor for “leakgate.” Just a bunch of nudniks with post-Watergate-era road rage who have lost focus of the national interest was the word from the 10th floor, mas o menos. Now, Elder Ashcroft is under fire from his own people at Justice and in the FBI for doing a go-slow on the investigation, for failing to recuse himself, and, of course, for failing to appoint a special prosecutor. Funny how when a story has real legs it suddenly becomes fit to print. Maybe we'll get to see that photo-op of Karl Rove and Bob Novak playing softball at some cushy Club Fed after all.

posted by Groom 7:39 AM

Truth or Consequences

The law of unintended consequences is one those simple truths that politicians can never seem to master. Not so much a law (in the physics sense) as an old wives tale that happens to be true, it holds simply that actions—especially by governments—always have effects that are unanticipated or "unintended." Whether the individuals involved are as bright as the team LBJ inherited from Kennedy or as dim as the current Pentagon crew doesn’t seem to matter—it is simply not possible to foresee every possible consequence.

Why not? In 1936, the American sociologist Robert K. Merton, wrote an influential article titled "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action," in which he identified five common sources of unanticipated consequences. The first two are fairly obvious: ignorance and error. The action takers were unaware of important information or they fucked up. Numbers four and five are interesting but somewhat esoteric and need not concern us here. (If you’re really curious you can read the Merton article.)

For students of the Bush administration, Merton’s third source of unintended consequences will resonate most persuasively. Merton called it the "imperious immediacy of interest," by which he meant that individuals want the intended consequence of an action so much that they purposefully choose to ignore the possibility of unintended effects. This is not ignorance, but willful ignorance.

There is a long paper trail stretching back to 1992 that links Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others in a conspiracy to preemptively unleash American war power on some deserving patsy in order to demonstrate to the world that we are too tough to be messed with. They believed fervently that the U.S. was seen by the rest of the world as too soft and comfortable with multilateralism to fight real wars with real casualties. Somalia and Beirut and Saudia Arabia had exposed us as paper tigers. They were, obviously, not entirely wrong.

For a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with Israel, Saddam Hussein became the most frequently identified patsy. For this cabal of the self-righteous, the attacks of September 11, 2001 merely confirmed their worst fears about American weakness and brought Saddam squarely under the microscope. Within hours, Rumsfeld had staffers planning a retaliatory strike on Iraq. Forget Osama bin Laden and his small band of religious nuts, for Cheney and Rumsfeld and their right-wing cronies capturing the criminals who did it was not as important as the response. The most urgent thing was to unleash a spectacular military attack on a major Arab state that would “shock and awe” the Islamic world into recognizing that it could not push America (and Israel) around with impunity.

From that moment, the Pentagon gang and the vice president’s office were joined in an "imperious immediacy of interest” in which toppling Saddam Hussein became the intended consequence and nobody worried much about the unintended consequences. For these cold warriors, Afghanistan was merely a sideshow—a necessary diversion to demonstrate that the U.S. was focusing on the actual perpetrators rather then striking a “strategic” Arab target (substitute oil-rich for strategic) like Iraq.

I mention all this because yesterday, a U.S. diplomatic convoy was blown up in the northern Gaza Strip, killing three American security guards and severely injuring a diplomat. This is the first time the Palestinians have targeted Americans and it almost certainly reflects the growing perception that America has declared war on the Islamic world. This is an unintended consequence of the invasion of Iraq and its larger message is this—the day is rapidly approaching when it is not safe for an American to travel in most countries of the world.

And, the International Institute of Strategic Studies released its annual ''Military Balance,'' an authoritative guide to military forces and conflicts around the world, which said the Iraq war had hurt al-Qaida by denying it a potential source of weapons of mass destruction and discouraging states such as Syria and Iran from supporting it, but had also boosted sympathy and support for the group in the Muslim world.

On the minus side, war in Iraq has probably inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased al-Qaida's recruiting power and morale and, at least marginally, its operational capability.

Surely, the Bush administration did not intend to make the world unsafe for Americans or al-Qaida more popular and deadlier than ever. But, it has.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:22 AM

Slate's Saletan on Dean

"All year, Howard Dean has been gaining ground in the Democratic presidential race. And all year, Democratic centrists have been scrambling for a candidate to stop him. He's too liberal, they said. He's soft on defense, a Vermont lefty, an evangelist for expansive programs. To stop him, they turned to Joe Lieberman, then John Kerry, then Wes Clark. But the more Dean's rivals expose his record, the more I suspect that the centrist who's going to spare Democrats this left-wing nightmare isn't any of these guys. It's Howard Dean."

After cataloguing all of the sins of which Dean has been accused by his Democratic rivals, Saletan concludes,

"You can imagine how angry I am, as a swing voter, to find out these horrible things about Dean. My hands are trembling so violently, I can barely write his name on the check."

I'd call that an endorsement. To see the sins, look here.

posted by John 12:20 AM