A local mother who lost their only son in Iraq recently didn't believe that Iraq was a threat to the US, and still doesn't believe they are a threat today. So why are we spending so many of our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters in Iraq? She said her son was the most precious thing she had in this life, and she no longer has any reason to live. Those compassionate conservatives sure knows how to sell lies to the citizens of this country.
Because the Iraqi moms also love their children and were not strong enough to displace the evil that ruled their country. Now it is to keep a new evil from taking over.
McGentrix wrote:Because the Iraqi moms also love their children and were not strong enough to displace the evil that ruled their country. Now it is to keep a new evil from taking over.
Which new evil? the "new evil" of American imperialism seems to be taking over quite well.
Or did you mean the evil of Iraqi self rule?
I would far rather be ignorant than wise in the foreboding of evil."
-- Æschylus
hobitbob wrote:McGentrix wrote:Because the Iraqi moms also love their children and were not strong enough to displace the evil that ruled their country. Now it is to keep a new evil from taking over.
Which new evil? the "new evil" of American imperialism seems to be taking over quite well.
Or did you mean the evil of Iraqi self rule?
No, the "new evil" of religeous repression, restrictions of rights and the fear of continued aggression from terrorists. "American Imperialism" is nothing more than a figment of a fevered imagination, but coming from the left, I am used that kind of thinking from them.
Paul O'Neill did nothing wrong; admitted by his successor
Documents given to O'Neill for book included classified information, Snow says
JEANNINE AVERSA, Associated Press Writer
Friday, February 6, 2004
©2004 Associated Press
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/02/06/financial1747EST0323.DTL
(02-06) 16:35 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --
Documents given to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill for an insider book on his two years in President Bush's Cabinet contained classified information, successor John Snow told Congress in a letter on Friday.
Snow's letter, obtained by The Associated Press, said that a preliminary investigation conducted by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that sensitive information was released in the documents given to O'Neill after he was ousted in late 2002.
The "documents were not properly reviewed before their release," said the letter.
Treasury began an inquiry into the documents last month after a TV segment on CBS' "60 Minutes" during which O'Neill was promoting the book "The Price of Loyalty" showed a document marked "secret."
O'Neill provided some 19,000 documents to former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind for the book, an account of O'Neill's two years in the Bush Cabinet. The former secretary said he basically passed along documents the department sent him after he left. Suskind has posted many of the documents on the Internet.
A memo, also obtained by the AP, from Treasury Inspector General Jeffrey Rush to Snow and dated Feb. 3, said that "at least three documents containing information that should have been classified were released to former secretary O'Neill. None of the documents were properly annotated with the required markings for classified information."
The memo also said that "none of the records" on the two computer discs given to O'Neill "were reviewed by the department to determine whether the information was releasable."
Treasury officials in the Office of Executive Secretary and the Office of General Counsel "failed to follow Treasury's procedures for the release of information to a former Treasury official or the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act," Rush's memo to Snow said.
Neither Snow's letter nor Rush's memo suggests that O'Neill acted improperly.
O'Neill, in previous interviews, denied allegations that classified material had been used in the book and that he received documents that we has legally entitled to have.
Suskind, in an interview Friday, said his lawyers have been in contact with government attorneys to try to understand their concerns.
He declined to describe the documents in question or whether he had been asked to return them. He did say, however, that none of the documents with classified material was "released or revealed in the book or on my Web site."
Suskind said the root of the problem was in the government's release of the documents and not O'Neill.
"Paul O'Neill is not involved in this," he said. "He got the documents in good faith and he turned them over to me. it is very important that people understand that."
Administration officials have expressed strong disagreement with parts of the book, in which O'Neill characterizes Bush as a disengaged chief executive.
In one passage that has received much attention, O'Neill says that from the earliest days of Bush's new administration, the president was planning on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.
O'Neill was fired in a shake-up of Bush's economic team in December 2002.
Snow's letter said, "We have identified a number of documents that contain classified information and we are taking corrective action concerning those documents."
The investigation is still under way, a spokeswoman said.
Snow also said the department was taking steps to prevent sensitive, classified information from being released in the future. He said the department is beginning to provide additional security training, including focusing on the handling of such documents.
The department also is looking into using a third party to review Treasury's policies for handling sensitive information.
The letter was sent to lawmakers, including top members of the appropriations committees in the House and Senate as well as the Senate Banking Committee and committees on government affairs and intelligence.
Ron Suskind posts the evidence online.
Get Your Bush Docs Here!
Ron Suskind posts the evidence online.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Feb. 5, 2004, at 8:55 AM PT
What's at the end of the paper trail?
The various revelations in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty are based largely on a trove of 19,000 documents that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill gave him. Some have criticized Suskind for striking a Faustian bargain in which he accepted at face value O'Neill's often comically outsized self-regard in exchange for the information O'Neill was in a position to provide about the inner workings of the Bush White House (which might be summed up by the formula, "Crude Political Calculation + Discipline = Success"). But whatever his personal failings and shortcomings as Treasury secretary (some of them previously documented in Chatterbox's "O'Neill Death Watch"), O'Neill is a smart and principled man whose blunt storytelling, supplemented by Suskind's independent reporting, provides what is by far the most vivid and valuable accounting of this administration. And unlike the typical White House memoirist, O'Neill made sure the public would have the documents to back up his description of what he saw.
Suskind has now begun the process of putting those documents online. Today he has posted 20 documents touching on some of his book's more striking revelations. He plans to release roughly the same number of documents on a weekly basis for some time to come. Suskind says that this trove?-a sort of "The Smoking Gun" for policy wonks?-will eventually include many newsworthy documents that, due to constraints of time and narrative, he failed to use in his 328-page book. As with these initial 20 documents, they will cover all aspects of government policy, not just economic matters.
One document that seems likely to become news (even though the book's allusions to it have thus far attracted little notice) is a memo by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, excoriating corporate governance in America. (It was written March 4, 2002, in response to the Enron implosion.) Many of Greenspan's complaints?-expressed, for once, in plain English?-would not be out of place in The Nation. To wit:
CEOs, under increasing pressure from the investment community to meet elevated expectations, in too many instances have been drawn to accounting devices whose sole purpose is arguably to obscure potential adverse results.
Greenspan says that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, which Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 1998 praised as "the single most important innovation shaping [America's] capital market," are a sham:
So long as the corporate duty to disclose is viewed as limited to conforming to GAAP, disclosures will remain inadequate.
[A]bsent a fundamental change in the perception of the duty to disclose, firms will have incentives to continue to game the accounting system.
Greenspan also discusses the harmful effects of stock options:
The Federal Reserve staff estimates that the substitution of option grants for cash compensation added about 2-1/2 percentage points to reported annual growth in earnings of our larger corporations between 1995 and 2000. One must assume that this led to some misallocation of the nation's capital assets especially in the high-tech sector.
He concludes:
[C]hanges in critical areas of governance to align CEO interests more closely with those of shareholders in our judgment are essential and, indeed, overdue. The stock market has begun to place a premium on corporate disclosures that inspire trust. Government policy can, and should, reinforce this powerful market incentive.
Judging from Greenspan's tone, the Corporate Fraud Accountability Act of 2002, signed into law a few months after he wrote this memo, does not go nearly as far as he'd like. It established a new accounting oversight board, but did not, for instance, require corporate expensing of stock options.
Other highlights from Suskind's documents:
White House budget director Mitch Daniels stating confidently in a February 2001 memo that "the president's budget is so fiscally conservative that the government will be able to retire all of the roughly $2 trillion in debt that is financially practicable to retire by 2011.
[A]fter 2007, projected surpluses will be larger than the annual amount of maturing debt." The Congressional Budget Office currently puts the federal budget deficit at $375 billion and projects a deficit of $162 billion in 2011.
Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman making a last-ditch plea in March 2001 that Bush "indicate that you are exploring how to reduce U.S. Greenhouse gas emissions internally and will continue to do so no matter what else transpires. Mr. President, this is a credibility issue (global warming) for the U.S. in the international Community." Bush brushed her off, pledged not to regulate carbon emissions, and papered over his inaction with a voluntary greenhouse program that he no longer even bothers trying to tout. (Indeed, his State of the Union didn't mention the words "environment," "pollution," "natural resources," "clean air," or "clean water" at all.)
National Economic Council chairman Larry Lindsay picking a fight with O'Neill (about Treasury estimates on the proposed tax cut) a mere five days after Bush's swearing-in. Both men would be pushed out within two years.
Chatterbox will be returning to the Suskind documents frequently in weeks to come. This fishing expedition's just getting started!
[Update, Feb. 6: Treasury Secretary John Snow informed Congress today that some of the documents in Suskind's possession "contain classified information" and that Treasury shouldn't have cleared these for O'Neill to haul off. (According to Suskind, none of the documents is stamped, "classified.") In the Feb. 7 Washington Post, Dana Milbank and Lucy Shackelford have spokeswoman Anne Kolton saying that no steps will be taken to prevent the documents' publication or to punish O'Neill or Suskind. (Kolton, incidentally, is not the Treasury spokeswoman who in a February 2001 memo urged O'Neill to stay "monotonously on-message." That was Michele Davis.) Suskind told Milbank and Shackelford, "I have no intentions to publish anything that would compromise national security." Apparently none of the classified information to which Snow refers appears in the documents Suskind has posted thus far.]
Did Greenspan use O'Neill to send Bush govt a signal?
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Did Greenspan use O'Neill to send Bush govt a signal?
By Michael Lewis, Bloomberg News
UP until about a month ago, the Bush administration had done an outstanding job of hiding what goes on inside the White House. Its media strategy?-pretend the media don't exist?-had been consistent and effective.
But then we learned that Bush's former Treasury secretary, on a whim, had handed all of his private papers and unhappy memories to a journalist he barely knew.
The journalist, who I'm sure still cannot believe his good luck, used those materials to elicit what clearly was some behind-the-scenes help from the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and a phalanx of staffers at the National Security Council. And just like that?-kaboom!?-the previously discreet Bush administration is an open book.
Bush, too. For the first time since he took office, the president has been described doing his job by people who worked with him closely. The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind about Paul O'Neill's two bizarre years as Bush's Treasury secretary, dwells on the president's incuriosity, but the Bush trait exposed by the book is not incuriosity. It's insecurity.
George W. Bush is the guy who, when he sees you on the street, and before you can quite register his presence, hollers out your nickname, or some witty quip at your expense. The president's social manner, like his foreign policy, is preemptive.
From a distance?-from across the street?-this can come across as social confidence. Upon closer inspection, it looks like something else: a man terrified of complicated social interaction. After all, what would happen if you spoke first? He might lose control of the conversation. He might have to think up a response.
The Price of Loyalty is laced with the president's terror of his own mind. One example: In his two years of weekly private policy meetings with the president, all O'Neill ever got?-after being greeted as "Pablo" or "Big-O"?-was a blank stare.
"I wondered from the first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask, or did he know and just not want to know the answers?" O'Neill says. "Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing what he thought? But you can ask the questions, gather information, and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange."
To review or not review
The reaction to The Price of Loyalty has been almost as interesting as the book itself. There has been a dishonest attempt on the part of Bush supporters to discredit the source.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, trashed O'Neill in a lead editorial for "impugning colleagues and betraying confidences to sell a book," as if he had some commercial motive for cooperating with Suskind.
The White House itself didn't know which way to jump, having, in its response to sunlight, the reflexes of a vampire.
On January 9, when the publisher leaked O'Neill's mystifying line to 60 Minutes that Bush acted "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "You're asking me to do book reviews and I don't do book reviews."
The next day, the publisher leaked O'Neill's contention that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from his first day in office and that there was, so far as O'Neill could see, never any evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Lo and behold, the same Scott McClellan took up book reviewing. "The world according to Mr. O'Neill," McClellan said, "is about trying to justify his own opinion rather than looking at the reality."
Apparently someone inside the White House liked the sound of that line. The following day, when the 60 Minutes interview aired and the press began to attend to the story about Dick Cheney's cynical indifference to huge budget deficits, White House spokesman Ken Lisaius repeated it word for word.
But then ABC News dug out an unidentified official from National Security Council meetings who corroborated O'Neill's account that Bush had been looking to wage war in Iraq well before September 11, 2001. Oops! Since then the Bush spokespeople have retreated to their original chant: As a State Department spokesman asked about O'Neill's book on January 12 put it, "As we so frequently say, we don't do book reviews."
A transparent man
Well, I do. And I don't think O'Neill's motives are all that nefarious. I think he actually means it when he says, seemingly absurdly, that he might still vote for Bush.
O'Neill has his vices. He's vain. He tells too many stories in which he is the hero. He has a knack for thinking he's right and the world's wrong when the world, in fact, has a point. But these vices are small beside his virtues, and one of these is his preference for sunlight to shadow.
Largely, but not solely, for this reason, official Washington treated O'Neill as a crackpot. To me he always seemed more like the sane man in an insane world.
But whatever you think about his approach to political life, he never lied about it. In his interview for the Treasury job, he told Bush and Cheney exactly who he was, and how he intended to operate: openly. Clearly, they didn't believe him. (Do they believe him now?)
The character in this drama with interesting motives isn't O'Neill but his more shadowy friend, Alan Greenspan. It's evident that Greenspan helped with the book; his fingerprints are all over the thing.
Why would the Fed chairman grant an interview, even off the record, to a journalist he knew to be armed and dangerous to the Bush White House? Surely, not out of a sense of loyalty to his old friend Paul O'Neill. If Greenspan had that gene, he wouldn't have lasted as long as he has.
Even more surely, not out of ignorance that he was helping to explode a political bomb. Greenspan doesn't get out of bed before examining the political consequences.
The only good explanation is that he knew exactly what Paul O'Neill's book would say?-that the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush administration had been almost criminal and that the manner in which Bush made decisions was deeply disturbing?-and he was pleased to have it said.
Given, of course, that Greenspan was never explicitly attached to the thing. The subtle impression that he helped to create it Greenspan could deal with in his usual way, by the subtle manipulation of perception.
Denial or Greenspan-speak?
A week after the first sensational tidbits from The Price of Loyalty appeared, Greenspan was asked about the book's contention that he considered Bush's plan for tax cuts irresponsible without triggers to scale them back if budget surpluses evaporated. "It's been rare over the many years of our friendship that Paul and I have different recollections of events, but in this case we do," Greenspan said through a spokesman.
As O'Neill pointed out to me, "If you read what Alan said, he didn't actually deny it."
And it's true. If you read as plain English Greenspan's carefully crafted public response, it sounds like a denial. But when you see it for what it is, Greenspan-speak, it reads as almost a ringing endorsement.
We all know that Paul O'Neill just sent his old friend Dick Cheney a nasty message. It's interesting to think that Alan Greenspan co-signed it, even if he did so in disappearing ink.
