The UK Guardian's main intro story on the Palestine Papers paints a bleak picture of a deeply dishonest--as well as misguided--process under Bush that Obama did nothing serious to change. The proper backdrop for all this is the 2002 Arab League Peace Deal, which Secretary of State Colin Powell was initially enthusiastic about. But Bush & the neocons around him saw it as a distraction from the war they wanted to take over Iraq, so it was simply allowed to languish. Not only could that plan have brought about regional peace and security, in doing so it would have dramatically reduced the recruting potential for terrorists. It was exactly the sort of pragmatic solution that rightwing ideologues hate. And because that most promising of all approaches was simply ignored, this is what unfolded instead:
Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process
Massive new leak lifts lid on negotiations
PLO offered up key settlements in East Jerusalem
Concessions made on refugees and Holy sites
Seumas Milne and · Ian Black, · Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 January 2011 20.08 GMT
The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.
The documents - many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days - also reveal:
The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City - the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
The offers were made in 2008-9, in the wake of George Bush's Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as giving Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history" in order to resolve the world's most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.
Intensive efforts to revive talks by the Obama administration foundered last year over Israel's refusal to extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction. Prospects are now uncertain amid increasing speculation that a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict is no longer attainable - and fears of a new war....
The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals; the papers also reveal the unyielding confidence of Israeli negotiators and the often dismissive attitude of US politicians towards Palestinian representatives....
The great tragedy here for America--and for Obama, who never seemed to even know what he was missing--is that failing to pursue the Arab League's offer ensured the ongoing spread of violent conflict and distrust along multiple vectors, that is now turning the neo-con fantasy of an endless "Long War" into a reality that none but the extremist ideologues on all sides get anyting out of.
Shortly after taking office, President Obama announced he'd close CIA prisons and end abusive interrogations of terrorism suspects by U.S. officials. But the Obama administration has notably preserved the right to continue "renditions" - the abduction and transfer of suspects to U.S. allies in its "war on terror," including allies notorious for the use of torture.
Although the Obama Administration in 2009 promised to monitor more closely the treatment of suspects it turned over to foreign prisons, the disturbing case of Gulet Mohamed, an American teenager interrogated under torture in Kuwait, casts doubt on the effectiveness of those so-called "diplomatic assurances." It's also raised questions about whether the "extraordinary rendition" program conducted by the Bush administration has now been transformed into an equally abusive proxy detention program run by its successor.
Note: First an appearance on Lawrence O'Donnell's The Last Word on this topic, below my weekly column at AJE
What does he want? Revenge. For what? Being born.
This is the way famous gunslinger Doc Holliday answers equally famous lawman and good friend Wyatt Earp's inquiry - in their depiction in the movie Tombstone - into why their sworn enemy, Johnny Ringo, is such a misanthrope.
Sadly, this description would be equally accurate in explaining the actions of another Arizona transplant filled with endless rage: Senator John McCain.
I first encountered the seething side of McCain when I was writing my 2008 book, The Real McCain, which was critical of him while pointing out a then-controversial fact, one no longer in dispute among those who lionised him back then. Namely, that the Led Zeppelin-groupie relationship he then enjoyed with many in the media was based on a faulty premise.
John McCain was not a maverick (which he has since admitted after long identifying with the title), but a man driven by a need to fight. To fight for his own redemption, to fight with those who dared disagree with him, and most particularly, to fight with anyone who had delivered him a perceived humiliation of any sort. Think Yosemite Sam on a bender, or Vladamir Putin in those half-naked martial arts pictures.
Sure, McCain was also motivated by the very same political expediency which drives too many politicos, as well as coveting an appearance on the Sunday morning talk circuit the way a twenty-something blonde does meeting Edward Pattinson, or marrying Hugh Hefner.
But the driving force for McCain has been pure vitriol and spite. When I first pointed out this inconvenient truth in my book, that many Republicans, including some willing to go on the record, were sure McCain was motivated by demons and not decency, I was criticised or dismissed in many quarters. Yet, it was obvious to me back then that his battles with fellow Republicans and Democrats had become personal, crusades for the eternally perturbed Abe Simpson stand-in.
I broke two stories in my book that spoke to McCain's temperament, that he had physically assaulted a member of his own party after taunting him (Republican Representative Rick Renzi) and had called his wife a very not-safe-for-work term of non-endearment. In perhaps an emblematic McCain moment, during a policy meeting with a fellow Republican, McCain "called the guy a 'sh-head.' The senator demanded an apology. McCain stood up and said, 'I apologise, but you're still a sh-head.'"
There's a reason the dude was nicknamed "McNasty" in high school.
So, Bush has come out with a new book of lies. Mostly, of course, they're the same old lies, told all over again. Sometimes, though, there's a bit of a special twist that makes one of them stand out. That's how I felt about this one, highlighted by TPM:
Bush: 'I Was A Dissenting Voice' On Iraq War
Rachel Slajda | November 3, 2010, 8:47AM
Former President George W. Bush considers himself "a dissenting voice" in the decision to go to war with Iraq.
In the first interview of the publicity tour for his new book, Decision Points, Bush told Matt Lauer that he didn't want to use force.
"Not everybody thought you should go to war, though," Lauer said. "There were dissenting voices."
"I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force," Bush said. "I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without Saddam in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis."
Well, at least the ones who aren't dead, wounded, widowed or orphaned by the torrent of violence begun by our invasion. Or in exile. Or driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing. Or... well, you get the idea. Read the WikiLeaks Iraq document dump for details.
But that's not the lie I wanted to focus on. It's the whole, "I was the dissenting voice. I didn't want to invade" canard. As if pulling out weapons inspectors so the invasion could begin weren't enough to put the kibosh on that load of crap. As if the Downing Street Memos had never been published. (In English, no less! On the Internets!) Forget all that. Less than two months ago, September 22, there was a new release of incriminating Bush Administration documents, via a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained by The National Security Archives. It showed that the Bush Administration began thinking about invading Iraq from very early on--it has a timeline with six entries in the first six weeks, and concludes, "September 11 was not the motivation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq - it was a distraction from it."
You may have missed it on network news, but Alternet covered the release with a story that began:
MINNEAPOLIS-Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is advising Republican candidates on November's ballots to frame the choice for voters between Democrats as "the party of food stamps" while selling the GOP as "the party of paychecks."
...
"Most Americans would like to get a paycheck," Gingrich said. "Most Americans would not like to be forced to have food stamps handed out by liberal Democrats."
But, as 'twas said back in Truman's day, "To live like a Republican, you need to vote like a Democrat":
The red line is actual job growth under Bush. The blue line is what job growth would have been, at the rate of job growth under Clinton. So, tens of millions more jobs under a Democratic president. But it's not just the number of jobs. It's also the little matter of income, as I pointed out last year in the following chart from "New Census Data--Same Old Bad Bush Economy--Only Moreso":
Those at the top got hurt most in dollar terms. So much for voting their self-interest. Tax cuts really aren't that great when your income is actually declining, as another chart from that same diary showed:
With summer nearly over, the nation's college campuses are bustling once again.
For many students however, the rites of passage associated with higher education won't be rushing a sorority, winning the big game or planning a spring break trip to Florida.
No, looking back, a growing number of students will regale their children with horror stories about being ripped off by a for-profit college.
Of late, the U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee has beeninvestigating the booming multi-billion dollar for-profit college industry -- think Kaplan University or DeVry for example. What it has found thus far is not pretty.
Six years ago the Republican Party ruled American politics. A Republican president had just been re-elected, cementing two decades of Republican dominance (apart from the freak election of one President Bill Clinton). It held solid majorities in the House and Senate. Conservatives controlled the Supreme Court, and most states were governed by Republicans.
Naturally, Republicans were celebrating this state of affairs. A PBS set of interviews provides a very interesting look into Washington's conventional wisdom following President George W. Bush's 2004 triumph. Titled "How Secure Is Republican Dominance?" it constitutes an almost alien contrast to today's narrative of Democratic dominance.
It's nothing like the systematic attack on sound science undertaken by the Bush Administration... or is it?
This weekend, the LA Times ran a broad-scope story on how the Obama Administration has falled far short of the promised sweeping reversal of Bush-era polticization and silencing of government scientists:
Scientists expected Obama administration to be friendlier
A culture of politics trumping science, many say, persists despite the president's promises. The use of potentially toxic dispersants to fight the gulf oil spill is cited as just one example. By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger
When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to "guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch."
Many government scientists hailed the president's pronouncement. But a year and a half later, no such rules have been issued. Now scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.
"We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration," said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers [PEER].
White House officials, however, said they remained committed to protecting science from interference and that proposed guidelines would be forwarded to Obama in the near future.
But interviews with several scientists - most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs - as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:
In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.
In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.
In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land.
In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.
The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.
And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based organization, said it had received complaints from scientists in key agencies about the difficulty of speaking out publicly.
"Many of the frustrations scientists had with the last administration continue currently," said Francesca Grifo, the organization's director of scientific integrity.
On can easily argue that the Obama Administration is just putting its thumbs on the scales in these and other cases, where the Bush Admihnistration used its elbows. But is that supposed to be a good thing?
Speaking of those quidelines that "White House officials" said "would would be forwarded to Obama in the near future," PEER sent out a press release today, calling for the removal of a gag order on scietntists at National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]:
I have been arguing for a long time that progressives need to be aggressively engaged in the deficit cutting debate. I think it is a mistake for us, both policy wise and especially politically, to say that deficits don't matter, or to have an entirely defensive message about the cuts we don't want Congress to make. Voters believe deficits matter, and they want solutions - and while it is currently unpopular to cut Social Security and some other programs (thank goodness), if no alternative to that is presented, too many folks might be convinced to go along.
The progressive message on the deficit has to be very clear: first, don't do anything that will endanger our economic recovery, because the best way to solve the deficit is to improve our economic health (see: the 1990s). Secondly, when you ask for sacrifices, they shouldn't be all or mostly from the middle class and poor. This is a pretty key point, since many of the deficit hawks seem to be zeroing in on cuts in Social Security and a Value Added Tax, both of which overwhelmingly impact the poor and middle class far more than they do the wealthy.
What these proposals are is an attempt to make middle and lower income people pay for the sins of the wealthy who have benefited from the deficit. Middle class incomes have been stagnant over the last decade, while the costs of their groceries, gas, utilities, and college education for their kids has skyrocketed. Middle class housing prices have plummeted the last three years, with foreclosures and bankruptcies increasing exponentially. Middle class folks haven't gotten the big tax cuts the wealthy have over the last 10 years, and when taxes are raised at the local level, its almost always regressive taxes like the sales tax that impact poor and middle class people the most. Meanwhile, public school teachers, social services for the poor, parks, libraries, community colleges, programs to help handicapped kids - all of those programs that matter to working families are the things that get cut.
So now we have this gaping federal deficit. (More in extended entry)
The first is that Democrats are not Republicans. The modern Republican has become a bizarre and twisted hybrid of Ayn "selfishness is a virtue" Rand economic libertarians and Pat Robertson-style pseudo-Christian conservatives. This new hybrid has taken the worst of each of these two kinds of extremists, and made it more dogmatic and more bizarre in its synthesis. Anti-intellectualism has morphed into being opposed to reality-based policy. Morality has become on what people do in their bedrooms, but never about them stealing money from the public or lying about public policy. Support for the free market has become opposition to any kind of regulation or anti-trust laws or civil rights laws. The conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush became the cronyism and twisted extremism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
The other reason I am a Democrat is that a majority of Democrats are reasonably progressive folks- about 75% of House Democrats, about 60% of Senate Democrats. That doesn't give us enough to pass strong progressive legislation, but I'd certainly rather be with a party that's 60-75% pretty good as opposed to the Republican alternative, which is 95-100% pretty awful. Having said all that, which is extremely obvious to any OpenLefters, let me get to my main point: the Democrats in power make me crazier than any woman the Fine Young Cannibals may have been singing about. Both the policy and the politics of this banking issue could not be clearer: take on the power of the big banks and rein them in. It is as simple as it could be. But Chris Dodd is playing footsie with the bankers, Tom Carper is shilling for them on a full-time basis, and the lobbyists are working their magic. The message is getting muddled, the base is getting pissed, and the clear political edge Democrats have had on this issue is being lost.
The last couple of days have been reformers' worst days since this issue first was brought to the floor. The mess yesterday on the cloture vote was a classic episode. Look, I am very sympathetic to Harry Reid. The Senate rules are a mess, his caucus is very divided between progressives who want to do something and the full-time shills for the Wall Street lobby, and there really is other pressing business the Senate needs to take up: a supplemental appropriations bill and the bill to extend COBRA and unemployment insurance need to be taken up sooner rather than later. And there is legitimate danger here: the longer the bank lobby has to work on members out of the public eye, the more dangerous our odds get for good legislation. But the Democratic Senators like Carper who are working with lobbyists and Republicans to mess up this bill are playing with fire, and they should be exposed and excoriated. The Republicans who won't even let a manger's amendment come to the floor without objection should be attacked and taken on. If that means a little more delay while the defenders of the big banks marinate in the sun for a few more days and good amendments are pushed forward, it's worth the extra time.
Democrats need to keep being aggressive on this issue, and not let the Republican/banker delay tactics win the day.
Several days after the 2008 presidential election, the New York Times produced a famous map of voting shifts since 2004. Most politics buffs have seen this map; according to it, Appalachia "voted more Republican, while the rest of the nation shifted more Democratic."
There is something else occurring here, however, which the map hides - and which almost nobody has perceived. This trend goes strongly, strongly against conventional wisdom.
To unearth this trend, let's move back one election - to former Vice President Al Gore's 2000 tie with former President George W. Bush. Before going below the fold, I invite you to guess - which states did Mr. Gore do better than President Barack Obama?
The pressure is growing on the Justice Department to produce supposedly "deleted" e-mails that could reveal whether government lawyers during the Bush administration were instructed to devise legal justifications for torture.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) likes to tout his experience as a former military lawyer. Graham apparently thinks this makes him sound more convincing when he goes around advocating military trials for all suspected terrorists, as he's been doing lately. Graham's now trying to get that idea signed into law in a bill he's introduced in the Senate. A similar provision is likely headed to a vote today in the House of Representatives.
Memory fades quickly in politics; less than a year ago Bush was president, and already the man is halfway forgotten.
Many, though, remember that Bush became distinctly unpopular during his second term. Liberals will explain this as a product of Bush's stance on Iraq, civil liberties, the environment everything. Conservatives will point to his "betrayal of the cause" - the deficits and his moderate stance on immigration.
The average person might, if asked, talk about Bush's poor handling of the Iraq War and the economy's weak performance during his term.
These explanations all ring true enough. But there is a giant element which they do not account for. Nobody talks anymore about this thing - this event. It is only when one reads Bush's wikipedia article, that one goes - "Ah! I remember that. He really failed on that."
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