Author: Greg Saunders

Well….North Korea tested a nuke. As Josh Marshall says, this is further proof that the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is a complete failure :

President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
. . .
Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.

I wouldn’t use the word “nothing”. At least one member of the Administration has been doing something, though it would probably be described as too much carrot, not enough stick :

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea – a country he now regards as part of the “axis of evil” and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
. . .
Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton’s plans, saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department’s number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser.

One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
. . .
The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as “nuclear bomb factories”.

North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB’s reactor project going.

Give it a second for those last few paragraphs to sink in. One of the biggest enemies of the United States just joined the nuclear club over the weekend and our secretary of defense was involved in selling them the technology to do it. I won’t even bother to speculate about the ulterior motives that have surely shaped our policies towards North Korean non-proliferation, but I’d love to know how much money Donald Rumsfeld has made helping Kim Jong-il make a nuclear bomb. Between Rummy and North Korea, the Bush family’s close ties to the Saudis, and our nuke-selling, Bin Laden-harboring “close allies” Pakistan, I can’t help but look forward to 2008 when our country has another chance to choose a leader who isn’t all chummy with the bad guys.

UPDATE : As commenters and emailers have pointed out, Rumsfeld’s chumminess with the North Koreans is a little more complicated than I let on. The nuclear reactors that Rumsfeld helped sell Kim Jong-il likely weren’t the source of this weekend’s nuclear test. So Rummy isn’t arming rogue leaders, he was just doing business with them. Or as it was put in the Guardian article :

Critics of the administration’s bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not “speak up against it”. “One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation,” said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Sounds like the kinda guy you want running the Pentagon, huh?

Like I said earlier, the Republican leadership is now so politically tone-deaf, they might as well join the Connecticut for Lieberman party.

The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.

“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.

People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
. . .
Capitol Hill sources say Fordham’s resignation was demanded by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, whose job is on the line because of his handling of the page scandal.

Of course he’s being used a scapegoat. That much is obvious. What’s amusing is how this fits into the larger GOP strategy. What Hastert and Reynolds have insisted over the past few days is that they didn’t know enough about Foley to take any action and that there’s nothing wrong with their lack of response to the “sick sick sick sick” emails. In the face of enormous public pressure, they decide the best way to react to a situation in which they haven’t done anything wrong is to fire Reynolds’ chief of staff?! Doesn’t seem like the best way to proclaim your innocence, huh?

The most politically inept part of this latest move is the fact that their sacrificial lamb isn’t likely to look fondly on taking the heat for House Republican’s indifference to Rep. Foley’s sexual harassment. If Hastert and company think this is going to calm down the calls for their resignations, they’re in for a shock. Not only does this serve as a tacit admission that the GOP leadership didn’t do everything in their power to protect House pages, but throwing a well-connected staff member under the bus only serves to further alienate one of the people whose cooperation they need if they ever want to calm this situation down. Don’t piss off they guy who knows where all the bodies are buried.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so callous and disgusting. Rep. Thomas Reynolds gave a press conference today to discuss his role in helping cover up Mark Foley’s lecherous behavior. Afraid of getting stung with embarrassing questions like “When did you find out Foley had a ‘cast fetish’?” , Reynolds decided to take out a little insurance :

To their credit, reporters saw through his transparent attempt to hide behind children. From Firedoglake :

Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it’s an adult topic. It just doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds: I’ll take your questions, but I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

. . .

Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?

Reynolds: Pardon me?

Reporter: Who are these children?

Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the “thirtysomething” set that are here and uh I’ve known them and I’ve known their children as they were born.

Reporter: Do you think it’s appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds: Sir, I’ll be happy to answer your questions, I’m still, uh…

Is every political strategist for the GOP smoking crack this week? I know reporters are usually timid and ineffective, but did they honestly think surrounding Reynolds with children would make people forget that he’s been covering-up for a sexual predator? This whole scandal keeps getting nuttier and nuttier with each passing day….

It’s strange how the recent revelation from Bob Woodward’s book about the July 2001 meeting between CIA director George Tenet and Condolleezza Rice has followed roughly the same script as the House GOP clusterfuck over the Mark Foley matter. At first, everyone involved (in this case, Rice, her staff, and the members of the 9/11 Commission) insisted that the meeting didn’t happen. Then somebody sticks to their guns and insists that there was a meeting. The blanket denials turn into “maybe there was a meeting, I don’t remember”. And now everyone agrees that there was a meeting after all. funny how abeing caught in a lie can jog the memory. The only question is, as TPM Muckraker asks, why weren’t we told about this before?

The meeting was first reported by Time magazine in August 2002, in its mammoth report, “Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?”

The meeting was an opportunity for Tenet and Black to brief Rice on the al Qaeda threat, Time said, something Tenet was reportedly very concerned about. The magazine said the DCI’s message was that he ” couldn’t rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas.”

According to stories which appeared online last night, in January 2004 Tenet re-created the briefing for 9/11 panelist Richard Ben-Veniste, executive director Phil Zelikow, and professional staff for the panel. (Zelikow, who worked with Rice before joining the commission staff, is now a top aide to Rice.)

The meeting was reported again last week, this time by Bob Woodward in his new book, “State of Denial.” In it, he characterized Tenet’s message at the sit-down as: “First, al Qaeda is going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself. . . Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately.”

On the premise that Woodward’s book was the first time the meeting had been mentioned to him, 9/11 panelist Ben-Veniste told the New York Times that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”

“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he told the paper.

When reporters confirmed Tenet’s January 2004 briefing with the 9/11 commission yesterday, the Democratic panelist changed his tune. “Ben-Veniste confirmed. . . that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004,” McClatchy newspapers reported. But he wouldn’t comment further, referring all questions about the content of the report to Philip Zelikow. Zelikow has yet to comment.

It’s clear that the commission knew. Even if they didn’t read Time magazine, even if they didn’t search for news clips before digging in, they received a detailed briefing — staffers as well as Ben-Veniste. To date, no one has explained why the meeting wasn’t mentioned in the final report. Why not?

Well, as Ben-Veniste let slip in a recent interview with Wolf Blitzer, the Republican members of the 9/11 Commission have been covering-up the messy details for the Bush Administration :

BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, “Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?”

Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

BLITZER: What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.

BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don’t see anything and I don’t remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had — we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question.

BLITZER: Why?

BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t have the votes.

BLITZER: Well, was — were the Republican members trying to protect the president and the vice president? Is that what your suspicion is?

BEN-VENISTE: I think the question was that there was a degree of confidentiality associated with that and that we would take from that the output that is reflected in the report, but go no further. And that until some five years’ time after our work, we would keep that confidential. I thought we would be better to make all of the information that we had available to the public and make our report as transparent as possible so that the American public could have that.

So that’s the bipartisan “compromise” of the 9/11 Commission. The full scope of the Bush Administration’s lack of interest in protecting the nation prior to 9/11 wasn’t completely swept under the rug, it was just made “confidential” until Bush is out of office. The remarkable thing about Bob Woodward’s book isn’t just the revelations it contains but the fact that the GOP has done everything in their power to make sure you don’t hear about any of them until 2009. I wonder what other incriminating details the 9/11 Commission has been hiding because Democrats like Ben-Veniste were “outvoted”?

By now, you probably know about Rep Mark Foley stepping down after being revealed to be a sexual predator. Foley wasn’t just caught sending creepy emails to underage boy(s), but some sexually explicit IMs. You’ve also probably heard last night’s revelation that some members of the House leadership were aware of the emails (at least) for almost a year and did nothing about it. But unless you’ve been glued to your computer all day, you may have missed all of the twists and turns the scandal has taken today. It’s every man for himself as the GOP leadership is pointing fingers at each other. Josh Marshall, who’s been leading on this story, sums up things well :

I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.
. . .
These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.

As well they should be. Their careers are probably over at a minimum. There may be legal liability as well. And depending on how deep the cover-up goes, this could very well bring down the entire GOP with them. People who vote on “moral values” probably aren’t going to like the fact that their party leaders have been covering up for a guy who asked an underage boy to “get a ruler and measure it for me”. This is a milder form of the same sickness that brought down Cardinal Bernard Law and it’ll bring down any Republican who sat on this information as well. As it should.