THE Question O'The Day: Where's The Outrage?

Q: How does The Dubster lie? A: When his lips are moving.

Wow, the Dumbos spent tens of millions trying to oust The Slickster on a morals charge. Sleazy as it was, The Slickster and The Intern were consenting adults and no one died because of The Slickster's dalliance in the White House. On the other hand, The Dubster has perjured himself tens of millions of times and he will ride off into the sunset so that the village of Crawford, Texas at last will have an idiot on fulltime duty. Where's the outrage over the waste of life and limb in Iraq and Afghanistan where Osama still roams free?

If this is the (fair & balanced) mystery of the day, so be it.

[x LA Fishwrap]
How Does President Bush Lie?
By Cy Bolton

In the face of overwhelming evidence, it’s astounding that people such as James Kirchick, in “,” continue to defend the president against accusations that he intentionally misled and outright lied to the American people in making the case for war with Iraq.

Consider first the implications of the famous Downing Street memo from July 23, 2002. Briefing Tony Blair about his recent talks with Washington, Britain’s top intelligence officer stated that U.S. “military action was now seen as inevitable. … But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

A month later, in August 2002, the administration set up the White House Iraq Group, designed solely to sell the public on the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein. In essence, it was a marketing campaign to sell the war by escalating the rhetoric and misleading the public. And lying.

And boy, did they. Here are statements from the administration in 2002 as they beat the drums for war. Dick Cheney said: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use … against us.” Condoleezza Rice: “We do know that [Hussein] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.” Donald Rumsfeld: “[Hussein’s] regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons.”

These statements were designed to cultivate in Americans fear of Iraq’s imminent threat, the keystone of Bush’s push to war. They were grossly and intentionally misleading, suggesting that the administration possessed incontrovertible facts on which were drawn these definitive conclusions. In reality, the facts were known to be ambiguous at best. Absolutely no intelligence existed at the time that would allow anyone to reach such concrete conclusions.

And Bush advisors aren’t the only ones. His assertion on Oct. 7, 2002, that Iraq posed an imminent threat was beaten into the nation’s psyche: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof.” Yet the president possessed directly opposing information from the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, released days earlier. Prepared by the CIA with input from 16 U.S. intelligence agencies: “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional CBW [chemical and biological weapons] against the United States.”

The declassified summary of the NIE — released by the administration for public and media review shortly after the full report — was another lie in that it was grotesquely altered. The above point was not included. Also missing were several forceful statements from other intelligence agencies disputing the CIA’s horribly overblown and inaccurate assessments. Finally, in at least half a dozen instances, conclusions were altered to make Iraq’s threat more compelling. Language was added or omitted that changed CIA opinions to incontrovertible facts

Conclusion: The public document was rigged to support the push for war. The president intentionally misled the public. The intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy.

Another example is the now infamous nuclear reference from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Not only was this refuted twice in early 2002 — by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and by French intelligence — but the CIA’s National Intelligence Council investigated and told the White House four days before the address that “the Niger [Africa] story is baseless and should be laid to rest.” So the administration knew the claim was false, used it anyway and when caught, issued a collective “oops.” Although these speeches are vetted by Bush staffers, State, Defense, National Security and the CIA, it just slipped through. Riiiiight.

Two weeks before the war, the president echoed statements made in January’s State of the Union: “I’ve got a good evidence to believe that. [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction,” and “Iraqi operatives continue to hide biological and chemical agents to avoid detection by inspectors.” Ah yes, the mobile labs. And your evidence was from whom, sir? Curveball? The now fully discredited Iraqi chemical engineer who defected in 1999 and claimed to have worked in the labs? In 2002, German intelligence — who debriefed Curveball — told the CIA that the guy was “crazy” and “a fabricator.”

Yet in his push for war, Bush chose to voice the Iraqi defector’s claims over proof offered by U.N. weapons inspectors who, with eyes and ears on the ground, represented the best possible intelligence. From November 2002 to March 2003, they were granted unprecedented freedom and conducted more than 700 no-notice inspections all over Iraq and found nothing. No mobile labs, no underground storage facilities, nothing. This should have been great news, but not for a president looking to go to war. Indeed, U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix flat out accused Bush and Blair of lying when he stated: “The Americans and British created facts where there were no facts at all. … The Americans needed [to find] weapons of mass destruction to justify war.” So Bush was creating facts to justify war.

If there remains any equivocation of Bush’s propensity to lie, consider the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting between Bush and Blair. In a summary, Blair foreign policy advisor David Manning wrote that there was tension between the two over finding some justification for the war. In fact, Bush was so concerned about the failure of the weapons inspectors to find WMD that the president floated three possible ways to “provoke a confrontation” with Hussein. So here’s your president very publicly using self-defense to sell a war while quite privately discussing how to provoke one — with an allegedly dangerous foe who poses an imminent threat. Either Bush lied or he put us at grave risk. Or both.

Space constraints don’t allow for a refutation of all the lies the president told about Iraq’s threat, their weapons and their link to Osama bin Laden. However, consider this final point: Our government spent nearly tens of millions of dollars to try to impeach a president for lying about consensual sex between two adults. Compare that to this abomination: George W. Bush knowingly lied to the American people in selling his case for a war that has directly led to the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans. They are deaths brought about by his lies, deceit and deception. It is an American atrocity of monumental proportion, followed closely by the heinous fact that no one has held him accountable. Where is the outrage?

[Cy Bolton is a former news anchor and military affairs reporter. His coverage of defense-related issues and conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East has appeared on NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, CNN and affiliates across the country.]

Copyright © 2008 Los Angeles Times

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Another Pair Of Rats

In the alternate universe that Stephan Pastis, attorney-cum-cartoonist, has created in "Pearls Before Swine," the resident who serves as an attorney (as needed) for the denizens of "Pearls" is Rat. Pastis knows whereof he speaks. Two real-life Rats who think that waterboarding is akin to surfing and that torture is no big deal, are The Dickster's chief aide, David Addington, and a former Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo. This pair could open a partnership specializing in subverting the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding is too good for either of these creeps. If this is (fair & balanced) verminology, so be it.

[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]

Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius

David S. Addington is chief of staff and former legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney. He was appointed to replace I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. as Cheney's chief of staff upon Libby's resignation after being indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice on October 28, 2005. Addington was described by U.S. News and World Report as "the most powerful man you've never heard of."

John Choon Yoo is a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Yoo is known for his work from 2001 to 2003 in the United States Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, assisting Attorney General John Ashcroft in his function as legal advisor to President Bush and all the executive branch agencies. Yoo contributed to the PATRIOT Act and wrote memos in which he advocated the possible legality of torture and that enemy combatants could be denied protection under the Geneva Conventions.]

[John Sherffius has been capturing the issues of the day in pen and ink since his college years at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sherffius has been honored in recent years with national cartooning awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, the National Press Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Scripps Howard Foundation. He is the 2008 winner of the Herblock Award. His home paper is the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado.]

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E.T. Has Outdone Kenny Boy!

Former Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T., Stephen Spielberg's lovable visitor from outer space. The uncanny similarity stops at the heartlight, though, because Senator Gramm doesn't have a heart, let alone one that glows through his chest. Senator Gramm received enormous campaign contributions from Enron while his wife, Wendy Gramm, served on the Enron Board of Directors up to the end of the Enron Corporation. After Enron went belly-up, Senator E.T./Gramm worked in behalf of the sub-prime mortgage industry and gained the loopholes for those sleazeballs that brought about an Enron-like collapse of the home mortgage industry. Now, thanks to Timothy Egan's curiosity about the skyrocketing price of gasoline, we learn that Senator E.T./Gramm was instrumental — before he left office (with the Enron money in his pocket) — in creating the "Enron loophole" that permits speculation in gasoline futures. Surprise, surprise, surprise. On top of that, Senator E.T./Gramm is The Geezer's top advisor on economic policy. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Petro-Manipulators
By Timothy Egan

Anyone who lived on the West Coast during the phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 cannot help thinking of Texas and two of its worst products — Enron and a politician not named George Bush — as gas creeps up toward $5 a gallon this summer.

What happened during the great energy heist at the start of the new century was like an extended bad dream, part “Twilight Zone” and part “Chinatown,” the extraordinary 1974 film about water manipulation and long-buried secrets.

The price of energy spiked — tenfold, a hundredfold — despite low demand. Californians became the most efficient users of power in the nation, and still suffered through dozens of rolling blackouts. None of it added up.

And into the worst energy crisis since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 came Vice President Dick Cheney, blasting conservation as a sissy virtue and saying the nation needed to build a new power plant every week for the next 20 years.

The administration’s neglect was breathtaking, a harbinger of what was to come when a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, would do to Louisiana what a man-made disaster had done to California. We now know, of course, that the problem eight years ago was caused by manipulation by Enron and other speculators who gamed a faulty system, sticking it to Grandma Millie while laughing at how easy it was to rob 40 million people.

Now consider the present dilemma: oil doubling over the last year, gas at $4.50 a gallon in places and the oversized influence of speculators in a market where few used to tread. Big investors are free to run up oil futures contracts thanks in part to former Senator Phil Gramm. He is the Texas Republican who co-sponsored the so-called Enron loophole in 2000 at the behest of what was later found to be one of the nation’s biggest criminal enterprises.

Enron may be gone, but its legacy lingers in the work done by politicians who did its bidding. And Gramm, who once told corporate contributors, “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that’s ready money,” is now the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain.

Gramm’s role in helping to unleash energy speculators has been well-documented in recent months, and Senator Barack Obama has made an issue of it. Both Obama and McCain have called for closing the loophole. But just how big a role that kind of global gambling plays in the overheated commodities market is only now coming to light.

Testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, the ever-knowledgeable Daniel Yergin blamed speculation for part of the run-up. Yergin, an author and the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, pointed to numerous other causes, as have other experts.

But he also noted that 2007 may have been the peak year for oil demand in the United States. In other words, the world’s largest energy consumer has reached the height of its gluttony, and will be using less oil from here on out.

Keep that in mind when thinking of the parallel to California. Less demand from the biggest consumer, yet record high prices. Why? Yes, tight supply during the end stages of the 200-year reign of fossil fuels, higher use by China and India, and global troubles all contribute to the bloat of oil prices.

But market manipulation seems obvious.

Over the last five years, investment in index funds tied to commodities like energy and food has gone from $13 billion to $260 billion. At the same time, the prices of those commodities have risen 200 percent.

Take away the excess speculators who are in the market purely for the ride, and oil prices could drop by half. That’s the view of Michael W. Masters, a hedge fund manager who’s been advising Congress this year.

“There are no lines at the gas pumps and there is plenty of food on the shelves,” said Masters, whose testimony has been widely discussed in financial circles but rarely in the political realm. What has changed, he said, is the presence of big speculators making futures bets.

“If Wall Street concocted a scheme whereby investors bought large amounts of pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices in order to profit from the resulting increase in price, making these essential items unaffordable to sick and dying people, society would be justly outraged,” he said.

This testimony came before a committee chaired by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate who is now one of John McCain’s biggest boosters. If you want to see the effects of McCain’s top financial adviser, look no further than the hearing run by McCain’s top ally in the Senate.

With five months to go, it looks like energy will dominate the presidential campaign. Nutty ideas will abound, from the gas tax holiday to $300 million prizes for wonder batteries.

And just as in California eight years ago, the oil industry’s most devoted politicians will use this troubled time to advance a tired agenda – more drilling for the last of the nation’s oil, in distant, fragile corners of the earth.

If nothing else, we should remember the lesson from that debacle: When something smells this bad, look for rotten fish as well.

[Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest," and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. Timothy Egan lives in Seattle, WA.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Why We're Stupid?

In his riff on "Common Experiences," the late, great Geroge Carlin asked: "Did you ever look at your watch and then forget what time it is?" And, "Did you ever find yourself in a room and couldn't remember why you walked into that room?" Brain science now gives us "source amnesia" as an explanation. We don't remember how or where we learned something but we believe it with all of our little hearts. If this is (fair & balanced) cerebration, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Your Brain Lies To You
By Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt

False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.

[Sam Wang is an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University; he came to Princeton in 2000. Wang received a B.S. with honors in physics and the California Institute of Technology (1986) and a Ph.D.in neurosciences at Stanford University (1993). Sandra Aamodt, Ph.D., is a freelance science writer. From May 2003 to April 2008, she was the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, the leading scientific journal in the field of brain research. Before becoming an editor, she did her graduate work at the University of Rochester and was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Yale University. Wang and Aamodt are the authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life (2008).]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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