Everything's coming up ominious, part the second

8) Larry Wilkerson (former right-hand man to Colin Powell), on a PBS interview:

DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenent, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

9) Lindsey Graham wants the NSA to listen to me and you. Why? Because we are the "fifth column".

10)Election fraud, Florida, 2000.

11) Cronyism does not make us safer:

State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.

The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.

[...]

An inquiry by Knight Ridder has found evidence that the reorganization was highly politicized and devastated morale:

-Thomas Lehrman, a political appointee who heads the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism, advertised outside the State Department to fill jobs in his office. In an e-mail to universities and research centers, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, he listed loyalty to Bush and Rice's priorities as a qualification.

Lehrman reportedly recalled the e-mail after it was pointed out that such loyalty tests are improper.

12) Total Information Awareness: New brand name, same old creepy all-seeing eye.

13) Force-feeding non-hostiles at Gitmo:

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

14) Halliburton contracted to build "immigrant detention centers".

15) Remember when the air force had to tell its chaplains to please not tell non-Christians they are going to hell and must accept Jesus Christ in their hearts? That was a long time ago, way back in August. Times have changed, and now that they've cleared up all their religion problems, it's okay to try to convert the heathens again.

16) Hijacking airplanes with shoe bombs:

The reported West Coast plot had been disclosed before but never in as much detail. The president's speech came on the same day as a Senate hearing into the Bush-ordered warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail by Americans and their contacts overseas, but aides said his comments were not related to the dispute over the program.

Of course not. I doubt the two things have anything to do with each other, but three years from now, 73% of Americans will believe that the NSA spying shut down a plot to hijack airplanes with shoe bombs. Even though:

One intelligence official said nothing has changed to precipitate the release of more information on the case. The official attributed the move to the administration's desire to justify its efforts in the face of criticism of the domestic surveillance program, which has no connection to the incident.

17) Libby claims that Cheney authorized him to leak classified stuff. And hey, if the Veep authorizes it, it must be legal, right?

18) George Deutch, Douchebag, speaks out:

Also Friday, George C. Deutsch, 24, a NASA spokesman who resigned this week after allegations that he had edited scientists' writings to conform to administration views and tried to limit reporters' access to Hansen, e-mailed reporters to say there is a "culture war" in the government over climate change. Deutsch's resignation came after it was learned he had not graduated from Texas A&M University, as he claimed on his résumé.

"There is no pressure or mandate, from the Bush administration or elsewhere, to alter or water down scientific data at NASA, period," Deutsch said, adding that after being tasked to work with Hansen, "I quickly learned one thing: Dr. Hansen and his supporters have a very partisan agenda and ties reaching to the top of the Democratic Party.

"Anyone perceived to be a Republican, a Bush supporter or a Christian is singled out and labeled a threat to their views. I encourage anyone interested in this story to consider the other side, to consider Dr. Hansen' s true motivations and to consider the dangerous implications of only hearing out one side of the global warming debate," Deutsch said.

19) Are these the immigrants we're building the detention centers for?

One is a second grader in Manhattan. Over the protests of his American mother, immigration officials have been trying to deport him ever since he returned from a brief visit to his native Canada without the right visa. Another is an Irish professor of literature invited to teach at the University of Pennsylvania last month. He was handcuffed at the Philadelphia airport, strip-searched, jailed overnight and sent back to Europe to correct an omission in his travel papers.

Then there are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them.

The details in these cases vary, as do the technical visa infractions committed by each of the foreigners. But they all testify to a larger issue looming on the front lines of immigration enforcement: how low-level gatekeepers and prosecutors in the customs and immigration system are using their growing discretionary power over travelers who pose no security risk.

[...]

The Irish professor, John McCourt, 40, said that on Jan. 7, an immigration officer at Philadelphia International Airport initially offered to correct a paperwork omission on the spot if he paid a $265 fine. Professor McCourt said he readily agreed, but five minutes later, the officer returned and said she had changed her mind — "that I was a university professor and should have known better" and would be sent back the same night.

In an e-mail message, Professor McCourt, a James Joyce specialist at the University of Trieste in Italy, wrote: "I was told that if I protested I would simply be deported and never be let back."

At 11 p.m., six hours after his arrival, he was transported in handcuffs to the Montgomery County jail, along with another traveler denied entry, Kerstin Spitzl, a pregnant German woman who says that immigration officers abruptly canceled her visa, insisting that she was planning to violate its terms by working.

Worse than the cold, windowless cells at the jail, they said in separate interviews, was a sense of powerlessness. "You're scared," said Ms. Spitzl from her home in Wuppertal. "You have no rights. You cannot contact nobody, nobody can contact you."

20) "No one could have predicted that the levees would break":

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

Federal officials at the White House and elsewhere learned of the levee break in New Orleans earlier than was first suggested.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

21) Okay, this is not as nefarious as it first seemed, since it resulted from a clerical error, but I still think that a bill should only become a law after it's actually, you know, been voted on:

Morrison said courts would take a dim view of the idea that it is OK for the Speaker of the House - who along with the Senate's President Pro Tempore signed the official copies of bills sent to the president - to endorse a bill that's different from what the House voted on. That could set a precedent that could be abused.

"It's not the mischief in this case that would cause the (Supreme) Court to be worried," Morrison said. "It's the next case or the case after that where there isn't a clerical mistake but there's an effort to deceive or change the result."

Oh well, not to worry then, who would do a thing like that?

Did I mention that everything sucks? Did I?