Right Wing Nut House

It’s times like these I really wish Mike Royko was still alive and writing his columns about Chicago politics.

Royko, with an eye both cynical and sweet, saw politics as something of a patriotic three ring circus with charlatans and crusaders vying with criminals and reformers for money and attention, all hoping the ringmaster in the person of Mayor Richard J. Daley (his son is Richard M.) would cast his baleful, hooded eyes in their direction and thereby bless their efforts. Since the charlatans and criminals were usually pretty well connected, they always seemed to come out on top, leaving the crusaders and reformers to fight another day.

The reason for the reverie about Royko is that he would have had an absolute field day with this bit of nonsense passed by the Chicago City Council:

Chalk up another first for Chicago, which on Wednesday became the nation’s only combined nuclear- and foie gras-free zone.

After passing a sweeping ban on public smoking in December, the City Council has now followed up with a more exclusive bit of lifestyle policing. On a voice vote, aldermen outlawed the sale of the fatty delicacy made from goose or duck liver, settling a months-long culinary battle between goose huggers and gastronomes. (Aldermen declared the city a nuclear-free zone in 1986.)

Foie gras isn’t made in Chicago, only eaten here in a handful of posh restaurants and sold at gourmet food shops. But ban supporters claim its production is barbaric, with tubes jammed down the gullets of ducks and geese to force-feed them until their livers swell to 10 times normal size. At a council committee hearing, actress and animal rights activist Loretta Swit likened force-feeding to the torture of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Swit, you may recall, played Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the Korean War TV series M*A*S*H which I guess makes her an expert on the torture of both POW’s and mass television audiences. Now that she mentions it, I seem to recall those gruesome pictures where we stuck tubes down the throats of those jihadis and force fed them pork and beans. Otherwise, I can’t for the life of me understand what torturing human beings at Abu Ghraib has to do with goose livers.

That is, unless the aldermen are preparing a Manifesto that would free all animals from the drudgery of serving humans. They might want to start by closing the world famous horse racing facility Sportsmen’s Park (not before they give me back all the money I’ve lost there over the years) and then move on to freeing all the exotic beasts trapped behind bars at Lincoln Park Zoo. Freeing them might be a problem because being exotic beasts themselves, the aldermen might not appreciate the competition from other ravenous predators prowling the city.

Or perhaps that as long as we’re equating humans with animals, they may want to emulate the Spanish socialists who are calling on granting human rights to…APES!

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

Talk about socialism appealing to the lowest common denominator…

The socialists see great apes possessing “sufficient mental faculties” only because they follow Lenin’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” although no one has checked recently to see how well the socialists can draw termites from a piece of deadwood using a broken reed or whether they’ve forgotten how to use a rock to crack hazelnuts.

Our simian friends have a lot to teach their socialist brothers. After all, how much worse could being ruled by Chimps and Gorillas be than having socialists run a government? I’d bet there would be a lot more lying around building nests out of grass and a lot fewer executions.

Quite an improvement, no?

UPDATE

Tom Elia had the story before I did and quotes an Agence France-Presse report that refers to Chicago as “hogtown,” referencing the slaughterhouses that haven’t been a large part of the city of more than 40 years. Quoth Tom:

Maybe if the Agence France-Presse reporter expanded his or her reading list beyond, say, books by Upton Sinclair, he/she might know this.

Maybe it’s time for this reporter to try out some Nelson Algren… ya know, stuff like dat…

They probably think Al Capone still runs the liquor business…

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.” (Pearl Buck)

You and I have fallen asleep at the wheel lately. While we were busy making fun of liberals, looking into the McCarthy mess, and wailing about immigration reform, Congress and the giant telecom companies have temporarily put one over on us.

They’re trying to steal the internet right from underneath our noses.

Let me explain. The way our internet currently works is pretty straightforward and, to give you the buzzword of the day, “net neutral.” That is, if you want to visit this site, you click your mouse over a link and presto! You’re magically transferred to my little slice of nuttiness. If you have a broadband connection, you’re whisked here in nothing flat. And with DSL or dial-up, the resources allocated by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find the quickest route to the House and to load this page are exactly the same as those allocated if you are trying to access Daily Kos. In short, your ISP is simply providing access - they don’t have the right to act as a “gatekeeper” by giving priority in the allocation of net resources to one site over another.

That’s not to say the technology that could change net neutrality doesn’t exist because it does. And wouldn’t you know it, the giant telecom companies want to use that technology for what else? To make more money:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

Last night while we were enjoying our dinner, the enemies of a net neutral internet scored a significant victory in the House Energy and Commerce Committee with the passage of a Telecommunications Reform proposal that would allow large corporations to take control of the net in ways that would harm free speech and free commerce:

The bill passed 42-12, but not before AT&T got off its final counterattack, just before passage around 7 p.m. In the empty room, right before final passage, Gonzales, from the home town of AT&T, San Antonio, offered an amendment to require the FCC to make a study “competition in the Internet world,” particularly what he called “special arrangements” between Web sites and other companies. It would be similar, he said, to the type of tie-in arrangements that proponents of Net Neutrality said will exist with telephone companies favoring content. Such arrangements between Web sites and others, Gonzales says, would make it hard for a “garage-bases startup” to make a go of it. Citing an article from Southwest Airlines’ magazine, he noted that Google gets revenue from ads tied to searches and that Yahoo is “fighting for deals.”

Democrats were flabbergasted. Eshoo, who represents Silicon Valley, said she was “baffled by the amendment, because Gonzales, who earlier said he was opposed to regulating the Internet. This, she said, “is about regulating search engines.” Markey said he was preparing an amendment to expand the study to include the top five telephone companies and top five cable operators, but didn’t get to offer it. The Gonzales amendment was defeated 11-43, but Google, and Yahoo! and the others should be on notice. This isn’t over. They are squarely in the gunsights.

We’ve been hearing about the promise of broadband for more than a decade, a potential life altering technology that will integrate our entire homes so that all of our communications will be part of one, seamless whole. Television, phone service, internet access, and anything else we choose to include would be controllable through the magic of a broadband connection. Access to thousands of movies, songs, TV shows, news, and blogs, as well as interactivity on a scale never previously seen will change commerce, culture, and radically affect the everyday lives of citizens.

When I first heard of this vision, I couldn’t imagine it. Growing up in a world with three networks and where newspapers were still an impactful part of society, even the advent of the computer revolution didn’t faze me that much. That is, until I got my broadband connection from Comcast last year. The amount of on demand content on my television is pretty extraordinary - much of it available for no extra charge. And while I am currently resisting switching our phone service to Comcast, it is probably just a matter of time before I give in there as well. It goes without saying that the speed of my internet connection - the ability to download A/V as well as flitting from site to site almost instantaneously, makes me wonder how I ever lived with a dial up connection.

I can now see the vision of those broadband pioneers. The outlines of this brave new world are just starting to take shape. But all of these dreams will be meaningless if we allow the large telecom companies and their toadies in Congress to set themselves up as traffic cops on this information highway, the final arbiters of taste, politics, and perhaps even speech itself. Their brazenness in attempting this coup d’etat has been made possible because people like you and me fell asleep. We forgot that vigilance is the price we pay for living in a democracy. We neglected out duties as citizens and the rich, the powerful, and the greedy took full advantage.

I am sorry to say that most of us on the right either ignored this issue or failed to warn people adequately. This must change. There is a website devoted to defeating this attempt at internet regulation called Save The Internet.Com. I urge you to go to this site and join the coalition to protect the internet from the machinations of giant corporations who wish to impose their own, narrow vision of what the internet should be on the rest of us.

The fight is just beginning. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

No use blaming the Democrats when the backlash comes against this ill-conceived, ill advised Administration “guest worker” program. Whatever credit Bush is going to get from his corporate supporters and the US Chamber of Commerce will be lost in an avalanche of criticism from the center-right.

In short, Republicans who vote for this mess are going to be put on notice: Make sure you have something lined up in the way of another job after November:

President Bush and a group of senators yesterday reached general agreement on an immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for many illegal aliens.
But left out of the closed-door White House meeting were senators who oppose a path to citizenship. The meeting even snubbed two men who had been considered allies of Mr. Bush on immigration — Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and chairman of the immigration subcommittee, and Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.

Mr. Bush in brief remarks to the press said there was agreement to get “a bill that does not grant automatic amnesty to people, but a bill that says, somebody who is working here on a legal basis has the right to get in line to become a citizen.” But senators, speaking afterward, said Mr. Bush was far more specific in the meeting.

“There was a pretty good consensus that what we have put into the Hagel-Martinez proposal here is the right way to go,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, Florida Republican. “I think he was very clear [on] pathway to citizenship, so long as it goes to the back of the line, and he even opened the door here for something we’ve haggled back and forth on, that you can shrink the time for people to become citizens by simply enlarging the number of green cards.”

(HT: Malkin)

It is not an overstatement to say that this is a complete electoral disaster for Republicans. Not only are there sure to be howls of rage from the Republican base, but every single poll on immigration shows that the great political center for which any candidate must depend to put them over the top on election day is dead set against the President’s program.

Americans are a normally fair minded people as a group. And when they see special treatment being doled out to people who break the law, it sticks in their craw and makes them more likely to take out their feelings on the closest available target; in this case, Republican lawmakers.

In an irony of ironies, the President is going to have to rely on Democrats to get this bill through both Houses of Congress. I’m sure the Democrats will be more than willing to oblige the President since they correctly see the immigration issue as a winner. They can criticize the President from the right by attacking his border security measures while continuing to assault from the left by saying that Republicans are racists who want to oppress Hispanics.

Such arguments won’t impress conservatives but they will resonate with their own base as well as peel middle of the road voters away from Republican candidates. This is a recipe for defeat in November and if it occurs, the President and the open borders Republicans will only have themselves to blame.

There’s a chance that opposition can still coalesce in the House and defeat this bill when it comes to a vote. But those Republicans are going to have to be certain that we conservatives have their backs. I suggest sending an email to your Representative urging him to vote against this proposal and making it clear that how he or she votes will be a determining factor in your decision about who to vote for (or whether or not you intend to vote at all) this coming November.

UPDATE

Both Tano in the comments and PJ Media who linked to this piece sound a little skeptical about my analysis. Let’s go to the polls!

From Rasmussen Survey of 4/7/06:

Forty-six percent (46%) of Americans said that they prefer the candidate with the harder line on illegal aliens while 38% opt for the candidate who wants to expand legal opportunities for foreign workers to find jobs.

An earlier survey found that two-thirds of Americans believe it doesn’t make sense to debate new immigration laws until we can first control our borders and enforce existing laws. That same survey found that 40% of Americans favor “forcibly” requiring all 11 million illegal immigrants to leave the United States.

Sixty-seven percent of those who think immigration is an important issue favor a pro-enforcement (anti-amnesty) candidate. And 82% of Americans think the immigration issue either “very important” or “somewhat important.”

Disaster? What disaster?

Oh btw - I’m not one of them but that same poll shows an astonishing 40% of Americans favor “forcibly” requiring all 11 million illegal immigrants to leave the United States.

In short, a politician would have to try pretty hard to get to the right of the American people on this issue. Congratulations to the President and the open borders Republicans who support him in Congress. Not only are we going to be stuck with a nightmare of an immigration law, but you’re making it very difficult for the dwindling number of people who support you to become motivated enought to get up off the couch on election day and go vote for you.

One can usually expect the Washington Post to reflect a liberal point of view in their editorials. After all, Washington, D.C. is the most liberal city in the United States. There are so many moonbats flitting around the halls of Congress and the agencies that you can’t put out a cigarette without burning a hole in someone’s tin foil hat.

That said, there really is no excuse for this:

IF CIA OFFICIALS leaked information about the agency’s secret prisons to The Post’s Dana Priest, then the American public owes them a debt of gratitude. We don’t know who the sources were for Ms. Priest’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, though we assume there were many. (The news and editorial departments here operate separately, and they don’t share such information.) Last week a CIA officer on the verge of retirement, Mary O. McCarthy, was fired for speaking to Ms. Priest and other journalists, though she says she did not provide classified information about the secret prisons. Anyone who talked from inside the CIA violated the agency’s rules, if not the law. But they also upheld the public interest.

The “secret prisons are bad” theme has taken hold and there’s not much one can do at this point to debunk it. The fact is, two separate Commissions of the European Union have been unable to find any human rights violations as a result of the program which means that the only “evidence” we have at this point that the secret prisons carried out violations of human rights and torture is an anonymously sourced article by Dana Priest which was partly based on stories overseas from even more questionable sources (left wing journalist Stephen Grey did much of the original work on the flights of prisoners) but which never offer a shred of proof that any torture took place. (Priest mentions the death of one prisoner of exposure due to his being forced to lie on a cold, prison floor).

I am personally convinced that the prisons, in fact, existed. But as far as what went on there, no one has been able to prove a damn thing.

Are secret prisons in and of themselves, illegal? Well, if you believe captured terrorists have the same constitutional rights as you or I then yes indeed they are. If, however, you believe that we’re at war and that the idea of foreign terrorists being able to game a system they are trying to destroy is utter nonsense then they are not illegal and probably even a good idea.

But for Mary McCarthy (who according to her lawyer did not have access to information about the prisons) and others who had unauthorized contacts with the press on this story, they took it upon themselves to make a moral judgement on a program that foreign governments were desperate to keep secret - and for obvious reasons. If it got out that al Qaeda prisoners were being held in their country, they would present themselves as a terrorist target. But to McCarthy, the Washington Post, and those that agree with them, this vital foreign policy goal should take a back seat to their narrow concept of what is or is not moral.

A close call perhaps? But that’s why we elect Presidents. They are the ones authorized to make the close calls during wartime, not the Mary McCarthys of the world. I can understand if massive violations of human rights were occurring at those prisons then a troubled conscience could be used as a defense for leaking. But since no evidence exists that such horrific practices took place, what possible motivation could there be to make the prison story public?

If you guessed pure partisanship, you win a cookie:

We don’t question the need for intelligence agencies to gather or keep secrets, or to penalize employees who fail to do so. Leaks that compromise national security, such as the deliberate delivery of information to foreign governments, must be aggressively prosecuted. But the history of the past several decades shows that leaks of classified information to the U.S. media have generally benefited the country — whether it was the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam era or the more recent revelations of secret prisons and domestic spying during the war on terrorism. Those who leak to the press often do so for patriotic reasons, not because they wish to damage national security.

How “patriotic” was it to leak a classified analysis (one of dozens of similar analysis about an insurgency most of which contradicted the leak) about post war Iraq three days before the first Presidential debate in 2004?

If this be patriotism, I’d hate to see the Post’s definition of treason.

That’s only one example, of course. But what the hell is the difference between leaking classified information to a newspaper and handing the same information to a foreign government? Either way, our enemies see it. Such parsing is complete nonsense. To try and draw that distinction is idiotic, something the Post has gone overboard to prove themselves to be in this editorial. Anyone who thinks that revealing the existence of the NSA intercept program (erroneously referred to above as “domestic spying) didn’t do damage to our ability to track al Qaeda suspects both overseas and in this country is deluded.

I tried to draw a distinction between “good leaks” and “bad leaks” earlier and I’m afraid I didn’t do the subject justice. I agree that leaking the Pentagon Papers was probably a good thing. But I disagree that most leaks are done by patriots or that there exists some moral justification for leaking out of spite or partisanship as is clearly the case with what the CIA has been doing these last 3 or more years with regards to the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. And if Porter Goss has made getting the leakers a high priority it is only because of the enormous damage they are doing to the effort to defeat the fanatics who, if they get their way, will kill us all.

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg on the WaPo editorial:

I think the Washington Post’s editorials are miles ahead of the Times’ in quality and seriousness — usually. But this self-justifying gas mass of an editorial is just ridiculous. It boils down to: Sure, leaks are bad. Just not the ones we put in our newspaper and get Pulitzers for. I just hope Andy McCarthy wasn’t drinking hot coffee when he read it this morning.

And make sure to read this piece in Opinion Journal.

Confederate Yankee gets it about right:

Today’s Washington Post editorial Bad Targeting was probably left unsigned with the primary goal of protecting the reputation of the wretch assigned to excrete it. You can hardly blame them. If a name were ever assigned to this dunghill of journalistic excuses, the author would forever lose what credibility he or she retains.

The Post sticks with septic certainty to its allegation that the United States has (or had) secret prisons in Europe, even after investigation have found no proof of illegal renditions, and no proof that such prisons ever existed. None.

Actually, the existence of the prisons may be in some dispute but I think that the totality of the evidence points to our ferrying prisoners to at least a safe house type arrangement in a couple of eastern European countries. Whether they could be considered “prisons” or whether torture has been carried out there is still unproven.

He said…she said…they said.

Many are asking this morning about how these two statements can be reconciled:

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said: “The officer was terminated for precisely the reasons we have given: unauthorized contacts with reporters and sharing classified information with reporters. There is no question whatsoever that the officer did both. The officer personally admitted doing both.”

“She did not leak any classified information, and she did not have access to the information apparently attributed to her by some government officials,” Washington lawyer Ty Cobb, who is representing veteran CIA analyst Mary McCarthy, said Monday.

Without putting too fine a point on things - and God, I hate people who use the English language as if it were the carcass of some dead cow, deliberately obscuring the meaning of what they’re trying to say by carving words out of sentences like a butcher carves a choice steak - and assuming both sides are choosing their words very, very carefully, one can immediately see where both statements may, in fact, be true.

Is there a difference between “leaking” classified information and “sharing” it? It would seem to be the case since according to some of her defenders, McCarthy had “permission” to brief reporters (probably on deep background) on some issues:

Associates, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of her sensitive legal situation, say the CIA authorized McCarthy on a number of occasions to talk with reporters. However, the details and timing remain unclear, including whether that was ever true after Goss took over in September 2004.

(HT: AJ)

Leaking would be a crime. But suppose you “shared” more classified information than you were authorized to? The CIA could hardly send you to jail for stepping over some line that’s incredibly vague to begin with. This, and her unauthorized contacts with reporters that, according to the CIA, represented “a pattern of behavior” is why she was able to box up her possessions and walk unescorted out the door at Langley.

Is that the end of it? Not hardly. Mr. Cobb raises the first of what is sure to be many defense strawmen; she didn’t have access to classified information on the prison story. Just because she didn’t have access to the information doesn’t mean that she wasn’t aware of the existence of the prisons and was thus able to confirm part of Priest’s story.

But even if that’s the case, where or where did that part of the original story come from? From someone involved in an investigation of criminal wrongdoing - leaking classified information - at the Department of Justice:

A Justice Department spokesman said “no comment” on the firing. The spokesman also would not say whether the agency was looking into any criminal action against the officer. One law enforcement official said there were dozens of leak investigations under way.

A second law enforcement official confirmed said the CIA officer had provided information that contributed to a Washington Post story last year saying there were secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe.

McCarthy was smart to get a lawyer. If there are “dozens of leak investigations under way,” and she had a “pattern of behavior” of making “unauthorized contact” with “several reporters” she very well may be the focus of a preliminary investigation that DOJ will neither confirm or deny at this point.

Look for your next important series of leaks on this case from the Department of Justice.

UPDATE

The Commissar has an interesting “Matrix” showing the McCarthy connections to various Democrats and far left groups.

Take the red pill, Mary….

If there really is a war going on between the White House and the CIA (and even the Washington Post said exactly that) then the very first salvo of the conflict was fired on March 17, 2003 by one of the most unusual groups ever formed in the history of US intelligence.

Calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), 25 ex-CIA officers threw down the gauntlet by calling on active duty intelligence professionals to damage the Bush Administration (and by extension, the government of the United States) by leaking the “truth” about the Iraq War:

Invoking the name of a Pentagon whistle-blower, a small group of retired, anti-war CIA officers are accusing the Bush administration of manipulating evidence against Iraq in order to push war while burying evidence that could show Iraq’s compliance with U.N demands for disarmament.

The 25-member group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents, is urging employees inside the intelligence agency to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the release of evidence to match its penchant for war.

[...]

The group said officials who act as would-be whistle-blowers can use the same method as those now handing out information — giving it over to members of Congress who can both protect them and show the entire picture.

“They have to basically put conscience before career,” said Patrick Eddington, a VIPS member and former CIA agent who resigned in 1996 to protest what he describes as the agency’s refusal to investigate some of the possible causes of Gulf War veterans’ medical problems.

The question that has always nagged at me is that given the flood of leaks from the intelligence community both in the lead up and the aftermath of the Iraq war, what role (if any) did VIPS members play in facilitating those leaks?

Several VIPS members, including Larry Johnson, Mel Goodman, and Ray McGovern have emerged this past weekend, being quoted extensively in stories about the McCarthy leak case. The fact that they are never, ever identified as belonging to this far left group (their email address is in care of Counterpunch, the notorious left wing rag published by Alexander Cockburn) is almost surreal. Johnson can be safely dismissed as a publicity hound. But McGovern and Goodman have made it abundantly clear that they have it in for the Bush Administration.

Are there any strong connections between VIPS members and reporters? Certainly they appear together at forums like this CIP conference where Dana Priest shared the stage with Mel Goodman. So Goodman is out front defending McCarthy who is accused of leaking to Priest. And there’s proof that Goodman and Priest have at least a passing acquaintance.

Could such an association - casual and innocuous - have any meaning beyond coincidence?

VIPS is a group that has urged their colleagues to leak. Why is it so hard to believe that they would help in accomplishing that fact by acting as a go-between with the press? As a source for a journalist with the reputation of a Dana Priest, a VIPS member would enjoy a certain protection in that Priest would probably go to jail before exposing a source. And as an extra added bonus, the leaker could truthfully say that they never leaked that information to the press.

I want to be as cautious as possible in drawing any kind of conclusions. But here’s New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in promoting the group as pretty much of a non-partisan outfit:

But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney’s resignation.

Here’s what William Sjostrom writing in the Atlantic Monthly wrote about Kristoff’s lack of clarity:

Kristof cites mostly the alleged views of unnamed intelligence officials. So we just have his word for it. Among the only people cited by name are a newly formed outfit, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Kristof treats them as a disinterested group of non-partisan, non-ideological experts. These are not crazed anti-Bush fanatics, like Paul Krugman or ANSWER. Yeah, right.

And Sjostrom fills in some details about some of the ideology behind VIPS members:

VIPS does not seem to have a website, but its email is vips@counterpunch.org, and their open letter appears to have been published at CounterPunch (run by Alexander Cockburn, the Nation columnist), an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler. VIPS also published an open letter in opposition to the war at Common Dreams back in February. The spokesman for VIPS is Raymond McGovern, a retired CIA analyst. McGovern’s email is also at CounterPunch. He is giving a briefing today with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. McGovern has compared the Iraq war to Vietnam, even saying that it could lead to nuclear war. He has charged that if WMDs are found in Iraq, they may well have been planted. He believes Tenet’s job is safe because if Tenet were fired, he would reveal that the White House ignored intelligence warnings pre-9/11. McGovern has urged CIA analysts to illegally release classified documents to show what he believes to be true, specifically citing Daniel Ellsberg.

Another member of the VIPS steering committee is William Christison, who among other things believes that the Bush administration is attempting to colonize the Middle East, jointly with Israel. He believes that the war on terror is being used to turn the US into a military dictatorship. He is also a backer of the left-wing UrgentCall, along with people such as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Kingsolver, Julian Bond, and Jonathan Schell.

This “non-partisan” group also has several members involved with the National Security Whistelblowers, a group of professionals who have suffered persecution at various agencies, some of them for outing what they consider to be malfeasance by leaking to the press. Two names from that group - Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern - are of interest only because neither one of those worthy gentlemen blew the whistle on anybody or anything while they were on active duty. Only when President Bush came to power did they suddenly believe it necessary to support whistleblowers. A question that comes to my mind is what reason would those two gentlemen have in associating with leakers?

When Russ Tice, the self-proclaimed leaker of the NSA intercept program came in from the cold, none other than Ray McGovern was shepherding him around town from interview to interview. Tice may or may not be the ultimate source for the New York Times on the NSA intercept program but it is just a bit odd that he would attach himself to a man who urged people like him to leak secrets to the press.

I will repeat for those of you who may have missed this post: I am not a believer in conspiracy theories as a general rule and especially in this case where much more evidence is required to prove any collusion between VIPS and the media in leaking classified data. Having said that, some enterprising journalist may want to look into this web of innocuous but rather curious connections and see if there’s anything to the notion that members of VIPS may have acted as a conduit to the press in passing along classified information from active duty intelligence personnel.

That thud you heard about halfway through last night’s show was the simultaneous sound of my jaw hitting the floor and the other shoe in this gargantuan plot dropping out of the clear blue sky. The stage is set for a thrilling final 4 hours as we now know that Jack’s ultimate target is not President Logan but rather a shadowy group of men whose power play for oil in Central Asia may or not be their ultimate goal.

And Logan? He’s no more in charge of this conspiracy than my pet cat Aramas. He’s a cutout, a cardboard stick figure being used by the cabal of…what are they? Commodities traders? Stock jobbers? They appear to be a group of GenX business school grads who have somehow convinced the upper echelons of the United States government to go along with their plot. Appearing much too soft to be ex-military or CIA, it could be that the creator of the show Joel Surnow has taken all this talk of “corporate fascism” to heart and is positing a scenario where these guys have wormed their way into government by using Henderson and his contacts at DoD in order to get the ball rolling. When and how Logan came into the plot (their leader Graham mentioned they had been working 18 months on the plan) could mean that even Marwan, last year’s baddie, may be partly their creation and the shootdown of Air Force I that brought Logan to power might be attributed to them.

Even Jack is beginning to suspect the truth when, after Heller falls on his sword, he confronts Henderson asking, “What happened to you?” Jack thinks it’s Henderson’s lust for power but is it?. Whatever it is, Jack thinks it much more than simple, misguided patriotism.

If this is indeed all about oil, I will be very disappointed. Although, by the time the last episode airs it may seem more important what with the cost of gas about to top $3 a gallon on the way up to God knows where. Maybe we’ll feel a little differently then.

SUMMARY

As Jack attends to Audrey’s profusely bleeding arm, the Secretary of Defense calls and wants to know what happened. Jack, much too polite to say “I told you so” to his former boss and father of the love of his life, nevertheless makes it clear that he feels Heller “betrayed” him by locking him in a storeroom to rot. Heller tells Jack that he must get that tape back or all is lost, a sentiment for which Jack is once again too polite to say “duh.” In the end, Jack hangs up on the third most powerful man in government.

Jack then makes a call to Bill and is surprised and delighted to find that Chloe is with him. He tells her that he needs her to hack CTU’s satellite feeds so that they can track Buckaroo Banzai’s car.

After telling Jack that she’ll get right on it, a precious bit of by-play between Chloe and Bill reminds us why we love Chloe to death:

CHLOE: If we’re going to do extensive satellite tracking, I’m going to need more than my laptop. I’m going to have to network onto your computer even though it is kind of pathetic. And I need you to get that screen to work for me.

BILL: Alright.

CHLOE: I hope you don’t mind me bossing you around but technically, I don’t work for you anymore.

BILL: (wearily) It’s alright Chloe.

When Chloe first showed up at Bill’s house, I started to think that maybe the easy-going Bill would be the perfect love match for the manic Chloe. However, after listening to that exchange, the truth began to dawn on me; the only possible love match for Chloe would be Darth Vader. And even old Darth would be left speechless at times.

After hacking into the satellite feed, Chloe finds Buckaroo’s car and tells Jack who has put Audrey into the stolen police car (that no one in the entire state of California seems very interested in finding) and gone in hot pursuit of his former colleague. Audrey worries that Banzai will destroy the tape. Not to worry says a knowing Jack. Henderson will need that tape for insurance.

Indeed he does as Buckaroo’s call to Logan demonstrates. Logan, all oily and smarmy, asks Banzai why he hasn’t destroyed the tape. When Henderson says he needs the tape for insurance, Logan gets all huffy but to no avail. Buckaroo Banzai is the smartest crook on the show and knows exactly what the score is. He realizes that once the op is over, he’s toast, a fact that’s confirmed later when Logan speaks to Mr. Big.

Thanks to Chloe’s superior geek skills, Jack catches up to Banzai and runs him off the road. Henderson takes cover in a barn and after a short firefight, Jack corners the bastard and takes him into custody. Unfortunately, Henderson has outfoxed Jack once again, handing off the tape to a confederate prior to his capture. What follows turns out to be one of the more brutal, wrenching scenes all year.

Henderson informs Jack that unless he’s allowed to leave, he’ll have his men who have been following Secretary Heller in a helicopter make Audrey an orphan. Calling Heller to confirm this, Jack makes it clear that he’s about to let Henderson go when the Secretary, proving our high opinion of his courage, tells Jack that he won’t be a pawn to be used by Logan and Henderson. We’re not quite sure what he means until he asks Jack to tell Audrey that he loves her. Then, not quite believing our eyes, Heller drives his car deliberately over a cliff and into a lake where, upside down, the car begins to sink.

The agony expressed in Audrey’s wailing “Oh no!” and Jack’s rage at Henderson explodes in one of the more dramatic confrontations of the year:

JACK: How could you do this? This isn’t about you doing what is best for the country. This is about your greed for power. You are responsible for killing ex-President David Palmer and the Secretary of Defense, two real patriots. DAMN YOU! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

Almost everyone he loves and respects has been killed. Tony, Michelle, Palmer, Edgar, and now Secretary Heller, all victims of this insane plot. His outburst at Henderson had a flavor of desperation, as if he wouldn’t be able to take much more pain and suffering. His pistol whipping of Banzai was pure emotional release.

Logan calls Graham to update him. Mr. Big is a geeky looking fellow with weird glasses and horrible taste in clothes. The actor who plays him, Paul McCrane, also portrayed the playful astronaut Pete Conrad in HBO’s excellent series From the Earth to the Moon as well as Dr. Romano on ER. And while we really haven’t seen enough of him yet, he doesn’t strike me as much of a heavy (although Romano was a real SOB at times).

Mr. Big plays Logan like a harp. He congratulates him on handling the many crisis that popped up during the day including the news confirming earlier speculation that Walt Cummings did not commit suicide but was murdered. Logan grovels by thanking Mr. Big for recognizing his hard work. Meantime, Mr. Big tells Logan to shut Martha up because she’s getting close to the truth. Logan promises to take care of Martha just like he took care of Aaron Pierce who may have been written out of the show, dead or alive.

This is because we are told, when Martha asks, that Aaron has been “transferred.” Martha ain’t buying it and neither do we. That’s when the antithesis of the heroic Pierce, traitorous Agent Adams, leads Martha to where she thinks her husband is but turns out to be a prison. Adams locks the door, trapping poor Martha and deepening the mystery of Aaron’s disappearance.

Back at the barn, Jack finds out that Buckaroo doesn’t have the tape on him and asks Chloe to look into the possibility of a handoff between Henderson and a confederate. Sure enough, Chloe spots where it occurred and informs Jack that the car with the tape is headed back to Van Nuys, eventually going to the very same airport where Jack had just come from. After telling Chloe to call Curtis to come and take custody of Banzai, Audrey demands that Jack go after that tape else her father would have died in vain. Dubious but left with little choice, Jack once again gets into his invisible police car, leaving Audrey with Buckaroo Banzai and a gun.

At CTU, Miles, puffed up like the bureaucratic peacock that he is, informs Granny Hayes that the transfer of authority to DHS is complete…and it was done with 2 hours to spare! Holy Jesus let us hope that the real bureaucrats at DHS were not used as a model for Miles. Just as Miles is congratulating himself, the security dunces realize (after about 45 minutes) that Chloe has flown the coop. In reviewing the security tape, they discover that Sweet Sherry let Chloe go which results in Sherry being taken into custody. Hearing this, Miles realizes that Chloe will probably try and help Jack which sends him off to a computer to try and track back to where Chloe is obviously hacking into the system.

Granny’s confrontation with Sherry is painful. The obviously disturbed young sweety tells a curious Hayes about Chloe’s revelation that Logan is behind the day’s events. Seeing the wheels spinning in Granny’s head, we begin to root for the woman to put two and two together and come up with the truth.

At the ranch, Martha is starting to go nutzo again until Charles pays her a visit. It is unclear to me whether Logan really loves her or is just manipulating her feelings. Whatever the truth of the matter, Logan spills the whole sordid mess to Martha who recoils in anger and disgust. Once again, Logan trots out that last refuge of scoundrels; patriotism. He committed all these evil deeds “for the country.” Martha is sickened by his faux love for America telling him that she not only can’t forgive his treachery, but that she hates him to boot. Nevertheless, she will keep her mouth shut, a promise that somehow I don’t believe will last beyond the doorway. Watch for Martha and Mike to team up to battle the conspiracy from the inside with Granny Hayes and Chloe running the technical end of things and Jack as the sharp end of the stick.

After getting assurances from Logan that Martha is “taken care of,” Mr. Big gives us a tantalizing two minutes of background, telling us that the plot has been in the works for 18 months and that no “deal” he’s ever been involved in didn’t appear to be going south at the 11th hour. Does this make him an investment banker? A takeover specialist for Bear Stearns? We also find out that he’s doing all this for his kids which again points back to oil but at this point, could mean anything.

Back at the barn, Henderson tries a little psy-ops on Audrey which is not a good idea considering the fact that 1) she’s lost a lot of blood, 2) lost her father, and 3) is losing her mind. Not falling for Banzai’s Jedi mind tricks, Audrey bides her time - something she is running out of. For when Chloe calls Jack and tells him that Henderson’s 4th crew of baddies is on the way to the barn, Jack realizes that he won’t be there to take them out so he calls Audrey and tells her to scram. Watching the helicopter with Banzai’s men in it set down next to the barn, Audrey realizes she’s got to go; but not before she makes an effort to off Henderson herself. This is something she is incapable of doing being a civilized human being.

After being freed by his crew, Buckaroo orders his 3 men to search the barn and kill Audrey. Unable to get out the back door, Audrey starts looking for a hiding place when bless my soul if Curtis isn’t already in perfect position to ambush one more of Henderson’s endless supply of bad guys. The TAC team routinely takes out all three terrorists and takes Henderson into custody. Being informed of this, Jack has Curtis go back to CTU and get Audrey the medical attention she should have had an hour ago and also try and protect Henderson from Logan’s stooges who are certainly firmly embedded at CTU.

Jack tells Curtis this from his perch at the airport where he sees what turns out to be a diplomatic charter about to take off to an unknown destination. He knows the tape is on that plane just as he knows what he has to do to get it. Jack sneaks past the heavy security by hiding on top of a fuel truck. Once again, Jack calls on Chloe to work some geek magic as he desperately needs the passenger manifest in order to figure out who might have the tape. Chloe sounds dubious given that she has to get past a State Department firewall but starts to give it her best shot.

And then things start to go south. Miles has a Eureaka! moment when he finally figures out how Chloe has been accessing the system. He finds out that Chloe has been at Bill’s all this time and a TAC team is dispatched to pick her up.

But Granny Hayes is starting to put it all together and realizes that she can’t trust anyone at CTU which means she may very well need Chloe to help. She calls the surprised Bill and tells him to get Chloe out of there before the TAC team arrives. Chloe refuses realizing how important that passenger list is to Jack.

At the airport, Jack sees his opening and takes it. Pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, he pretends he’s a baggage handler loading the plane. Grabbing two bags from a passing baggage cart (pity the poor owner of those bags who inadvertently is helping to save the American Republic) Jack meanders onto the plane and hides in the unpressurized baggage compartment. Jack will have to get out of there before the plane hits 10,000 feet or he’ll suffocate from lack of oxygen. But he’s not thinking about that now. The important thing is that he’s on the plane and his quarry is in sight.

BODY COUNT

3 more of Henderson’s men bite the dust. Jack was shut out. Is Heller really dead? We’ll give it a week.

JACK: 30

SHOW: 184

SPECULATION

Is Miles a good witch, or a bad witch? Is he more loyal to the bureaucracy or will he turn out to be loyal to Granny Hayes? Miles has been drawn so broadly as a bureaucratic caricature, I don’t think personal loyalty enters into his calculations. He may not be working directly for Logan, but once he sees Granny going off the reservation, he’ll call the President personally in order to get credit for turning Granny in.

UPDATE

Don’t forget to visit Blogs4Bauer for the best 24 summaries and updates around.

The Mary McCarthy story just took a fascinating turn with the revelation that high powered criminal attorney Ty Cobb has taken on McCarthy as a client.

What is significant about Mr. Cobb is that he defended some of the highest profile criminals in the Clinton Administration including cabinet officers, a White House staffer, and a former Senator:

Represents the chief financial officer of major public company in an SEC investigation of significant restatement and alleged misconduct. (Jeff Skilling?)

Represented a former Commerce Department official and Democratic National Committee official, John Huang, in connection with Congressional and DOJ investigations (and related civil actions) involving campaign finance and the Clinton-Gore campaign of 1996.

If someone would fill in those blank names (too busy this AM) I would appreciate it.

The point is, why does little ole whistleblower Mary McCarthy rate such heavy Democratic party artillery? Especially if she’s not under indictment. Especially if the case hasn’t been referred to the Justice Department.

AJ Strata thinks McCarthy is making a mistake by relying on this particular attorney and I agree. It appears that Mr. Cobb was hired by others - not to defend McCarthy so much (defend her from what?) but to manage information coming out of leaks at the CIA on the case. He can deny, deny, and deny again that she leaked but as Mac points out, she signed a statement admitting wrongdoing.

My post last night on McCarthy pointed out that she may have been simply a facilitator for the press, confirming or denying specific information to keep reporters on track with their stories. But even if she leaked like a sieve and sang like a canary, the question you have to ask is: How has a woman who may not be in any danger at all from prosecution been able to procure the services of a $750 per hour attorney like Ty Cobb whose client list reads like the attendees at a Bill Clinton private Sybaris party?

Just wondering…

A story appearing in Newsweek contends that according to Mary McCarthy’s patron at the National Security Council during the Clinton years Rand Beers, McCarthy “categorically denies” leaking classified information on the secret prison story to Dana Priest of the Washington Post. In fact, McCarthy denies leaking classified information at any time to any reporter according to her lawyer:

McCarthy’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternoon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and “didn’t even have access to the information” in The Washington Post story in question.

After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one question during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said.

This is only slightly disingenuous. The way that a reporter like Priest gets a story like the one on secret prisons is by piecing together a hint here, a whisper there usually leaked as office gossip from low level staffers or by some intelligent guesswork using open sources. Then, when they think they have the outlines of a story, they sit down and have a drink with a Mary McCarthy and say something like “This is what the CIA is doing, right?” at which point our leaker will nod their head or shake it vigorously. She reveals no classified information, she simply confirms what the reporter thinks they already have. In short, by confirming or denying information, the leaker keeps the reporter on the right track without technically violating their oath of secrecy.

What McCarthy doesn’t say is whether or not she steered Priest to other sources who were willing to be more forthcoming in their treachery.

Could the Administration be firing McCarthy in order to make an example of her? This is always a possibility, especially since word has leaked out from the CIA (natch!) that the Administration is interested in the political affiliations of some of its top intel people:

The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.

You’d think the White House could find that information out for themselves by using Google or going to Opensecrets.com. Laziness or stupidity? I report, you decide.

Does it matter if someone with access to agency secrets is a Democrat? Plame apologist Larry Johnson (who has been all over the pages of both the Times and the Post) doesn’t think so:

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who got into a dispute with McCarthy in the late l980s when she was his supervisor and remains critical of her management style, nonetheless says that he “never saw her allow her political [views] to cloud her analytical judgment.” Johnson maintains the Bush White House is “really damaging the intelligence community” by sending a message to career officials that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted.” This message, Johnson says, is destroying the intelligence community’s “professional ethos.”

Excuse me, but ever since this doltish braggart left a comment on this site threatening me by saying that he knew the guys who had killed drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and that I better watch what I say about Plame, I haven’t had the friendliest of feelings toward him.

And with that quote, Johnson doesn’t disappoint as far as showing how breathtakingly stupid he is. No one is concerned that her “political views cloud[ed] her judgement.” That aspect of McCarthy’s partisanship has never been brought up by the White House, by any member of Congress, by any conservative columnist, or by any conservative blogger. It is a strawman pure and simple. It’s not her analytical skills that are being questioned, Larry. It’s her loyalty. Not to Republicans but to the agency she served. This, of course, makes your other statement that “unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted,” equally ridiculous.

But Johnson’s ignorance aside, if the McCarthy firing has a chilling effect on agency personnel talking to reporters, I would put that down as a definite plus. So if the Administration is actually trying to dampen the enthusiasm of CIA employees for talking to the press, McCarthy would seem to have been the perfect sacrificial lamb:

McCarthy, 61, a career CIA analyst who was working in the inspector general’s office, was then told on Thursday that she was being fired. She was not escorted out of the CIA building, the source said. She also had been assured that the CIA would protect her privacy–just one day before her name became publicly known as the agency official who had been dismissed for leaking to the press, the source said. Ironically, McCarthy, who previously worked as chief intelligence official for the National Security Council during Bill Clinton’s second term, was planning on retiring from the CIA soon to pursue a new career as a lawyer working on adoption and family cases.

Headed for retirement anyway and someone with several contacts in the news media:

After being told by agency interrogators that she may have been deceptive on one question during a polygraph, McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter, said a source familiar with her account who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. McCarthy has known Priest for some time, the source said.

In other words, McCarthy may have been a kind of confirmation machine for the bevy of national security correspondents who prowl the halls of power in Washington. Need a story confirmed about some CIA secret program? Let’s call Mary and see if she’s free for dinner.

I’m being facetious, of course. But in sacking McCarthy, who even lefties have to admit was an easy target - Porter Goss and the Administration may finally be saying “You’ve been warned. The gloves are off.”

Welcome news, if true.

UP TO 20,000 KNOXVILLE RESIDENTS TURNED OUT TO WELCOME HOME TENNESSEE’S 287TH REGIMENTAL COMBAT TEAM FROM IRAQ

It was almost a year ago that we were subjected by the press to non-stop, wall to wall coverage of the vigil outside of the President’s ranch by that Maven of Peace, that Rosa Parks of the Anti-War Movement, that Mother of Moonbats Cindy Sheehan.

We were told at the time that, like a comet that portends the future, Sheehan’s mass movement would sweep aside George Bush and the Republicans while bringing the troops in Iraq home. This unstoppable mass of humanity would be a powerful force for change that was growing every day and one might as well stand in front of a freight train as try and stop it.

But something strange happened on Mother Sheehan’s ride toward immortality; hardly anyone else got on the train with her:

CINDY SHEEHAN MARCHES TO THE WHITE HOUSE WITH THE REST OF HER MASS PROTEST MOVEMENT

To this day, Sheehan is still a player in search of an audience, still desperately seeking attention as saner liberals tip toe away in embarrassment having once supported her. The fact that her unhinged rhetoric (she once called New Orleans “an occupied city”) has made her a laughingstock on the right still doesn’t seem to stop the media from writing glowing paeans to her and her cause.

I bring this up because yesterday, the residents of Knoxville showed Sheehan and all the other lefties what a real mass movement is: patriotic Americans welcoming home troops and thanking them for a job well done:

Up to 20,000 people turned out Saturday for a parade to welcome home the National Guard’s 278th Regimental Combat Team, providing a big-city atmosphere powered by small-town values.

The rains that had been pelting the region ceased and the clouds gave way to bright sunshine for the two-hour Celebrate Freedom Parade 2006 through downtown Knoxville.

“What a great sight this is on the street today,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen as he reviewed the 2,500 members of the 278th standing in parade formation wearing their camouflage uniforms. As governor, Bredesen is commander of the Tennessee National Guard.

Bredesen said the men and women of the 278th who were deployed to Iraq for a year represent “what is the very best of our state and the very best of our nation.”

“I thank you for your courage and sacrifices,” the governor told the soldiers. “You left as trained citizens and you came back as warriors.”

Kudos to the Governor and the residents of Knoxville for showing the rest of America how to really support the troops.

Hopefully, this will give other cities and towns the idea to show our heroes how much we truly appreciate their sacrifices and respect the job that they and their comrades still in harms way are doing to advance the cause of freedom in Iraq.

And then there is this from a father who lost a son in Iraq who came out to welcome home his dead son’s friends and comrades:

Gary Lee Reese Sr., of Ashland City, Tenn., lost his 22-year-old son Sgt. Gary L. Reese Jr. on Aug. 13, 2005, to a similar [IED] device. Serving in Iraq, Reese said, provided his son a perspective on life he never would have gained otherwise.

“I think the soldiers saw that these people should have the opportunity to have what we have,” Reese said. “He stood up for the right thing, and I’m very proud of that,” Reese said. He added he rarely saw a picture of his son in Iraq without children surrounding the soldier.

“Those little kids who got to know Lee knew he wasn’t there to teach them how to strap bombs on. He was there to help them have what he has.

“I know his life wasn’t wasted because he gave those children an opportunity see who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

We’ll give John Hinderaker the last word:

Amid all of the adoring publicity that is lavished on extremists like Cindy Sheehan, or malcontents like the seven now-famous generals, couldn’t the dominant media find just a moment to take note of Mr. Reese’s inexpressibly noble perspective on his son’s life and death?