Be Careful 'Bout Cryin' Wolf . . . .

With today's release of 400,000+ Department of Defense documents on the Iraq war by WikiLeaks, once again the MSM is playing the Pentagon's mouthpiece quite well.

Reuters: (Lead paragraph.) The Pentagon said on Friday it does not expect big surprises from an imminent release of up to 500,000 Iraq war files by WikiLeaks, but warned that U.S. troops and Iraqis could be endangered by the file dump.

CBC: (Hillary Clinton) "We should condemn in the most clear terms the disclosure of any classified information by individuals and organizations which puts the lives of United States and partner service members and civilians at risk," she said in Washington, D.C.

CNN: "This is all classified secret information never designed to be exposed to the public," Morrell told CNN. "Our greatest fear is that it puts our troops in even greater danger than they inherently are on these battlefields. "

Hmmmmm.

Didn't we hear the same dire warnings back when Wikileaks released the 70,000+ documents on the Afghan war?

Yes, we did.

How'd that come out, you may ask?

Well, to CNN and FoxNoise's (fer krise sake!) credit, buried down in their stories we read this:

CNN: Friday, Lapan said they know of no case where anyone in Afghanistan had been harmed because their name was in the leaked documents, but he made clear that doesn't mean such people couldn't be killed in the future.

FoxNoise: Lapan said that so far no Afghans have been killed as a direct result of WikiLeaks releasing the same type of information over the summer, but he characterized the leak as deplorable.

The Pentagon and State Department crowd might start stocking up on wolf spray and protective gear. Perhaps one day their dire warnings will go unheeded and ignored.

We'll probably have to clue the MSM in, though. It appears they're still drinking the Kool-aid and asking for refills . . . .

Canada will still be in Afghanistan after 2011

"After 2011, the military mission will end," said Defence Minister Peter MacKay, repeating the Conservative government's well-worn line."What we will do beyond that point in the area of training, will predominantly be in the area of policing. And that is very much a key component part of security for Afghanistan."

Training the Afghan National Police. That was contracted out to DynCorp in 2003, wasn't it?They put together a program for turning illiterate recruits into a police force that was 8 weeks long, then 6 weeks, now down to 3 weeks.
How's that going so far?

Afghan Cops - A $6 Billion Fiasco - excerpted :

More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room.
"It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform."
The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program : "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban."

Since January 2007, upwards of 2,000 Afghan police have been killed in action—more than twice the figure for Afghan Army soldiers. U.S. officers say as many as half the police casualties were a result of firearms accidents and traffic collisions.

Fewer than 12% of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own. Yet of the 170,000 or so Afghans trained under the program since its inception, only about 30,000 remain on the force.

Steve Kraft, who oversees the program for the State Department : "Once they leave the training center, we currently don't know whether they stay with the force or quit," Kraft says. "The bottom line is, we just don't know."

Tracy Jeansonne, a former deputy sheriff from Louisiana who worked for DynCorp from May 2006 to June 2008. "A lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions."

Ann Jones : "In many districts, the police recently supplemented their low pay and demonstrated allegiance to local warlords by stuffing ballot boxes for President Karzai in the presidential election."

The missing and unaccounted for millions of dollars in US government contracts is bad enough, but then there's the contracts we do know about :

AEY Inc., based in Florida, and described by the New York Times as "a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur," dispatched to the Afghan security forces 100 million Chinese cartridges, some 40 years old and in "decomposing packaging," under a $10 million Pentagon contract.

Currently, the Pentagon has given the Space and Missile Defense Command Contracting Office in Huntsville, Alabama, the task of deciding between DynCorp and Blackwater/Xe for the new billion-dollar police training contract. On March 12th, President Obama devoted much of the monthly video conference call between his Washington national security team and his senior commanders in Afghanistan to questions about how the police training problem should be tackled.
I guess that's where we come in.

MacKay, today :

"We will work within the parameters of the parliamentary motion, which states very clearly that the military mission will come to an end in 2011. We will then transition into some of the other important work that we’re doing. That includes a focus on police training. The prime minister has been clear in saying our commitment to Afghanistan is for the long-term."

Training the Afghan police alongside either DynCorp or Xe will be the new parliamentary "parameters" necessary to keep those trucks rolling between Windsor and Detroit .

I say, Mr. Bush, your generals are revolting

On 13 February, this year General Peter Pace tossed cold water on the attempt by the Bush administration to create a casus belli for an attack on Iran. His point that there was no evidence that the Iranian government was implicated directly in the provision of weapons to Iraqi insurgents came as something of a surprize to Bush. It prompted Bush to make this ridiculous statement:

What's worse, that the government knew or that the government didn't know?

Pace's statement was an indication of some serious opposition inside the Pentagon to the Bush/Cheney plans to launch an attack on Iran. And now, we learn that it is probably a lot more serious than originally thought. (Emphasis mine) If any of the Chiefs of Staff of any of the services or any of the commanders of the nine US combatant commands resign over an attack on Iran it would spell disaster for Bush.

SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. [...]

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

They are joined by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. “American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.

The kicker is that this appears to be generals and admirals at the most senior level. Pace's stance on Iran would be difficult to maintain if he didn't have the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The question is, which generals and admirals are prepared to walk if Bush/Cheney just go ahead with their obvious plans?

Perhaps Bush should consider dealing with Iran another way.

Single combat.

Ahmadinejad could send one of his eight vice-presidents and Bush could send his only vice-president.

Shotguns. Two rounds each.

Doug Feith may have screwed Bushco's plans for Iran

If it wasn't so pathetic it might be mildly comedic to read this piece in the Washington Post by Douglas Feith.

The IG, Thomas Gimble, focused on a single Pentagon briefing from 2002 -- a critique of the CIA's work on the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship. His report concluded that the work my office generated was entirely lawful and authorized, and that Sen. Carl Levin was wrong to allege that we misled Congress.

Hold it. That's Feith's interpretation of the way the Pentagon's inspector general stated things. In fact, the report was couched in a highly diplomatic language and Feith, who was largely responsible for "cooking" the intelligence for the Bush administration's march to war with Iraq, is trying, once again to distort the facts.

Gimble made Levin happy, however, by calling the Pentagon briefing "inappropriate," a word the senator has whipped into a political lather. At issue is a simple but critical question: whether policy officials should be free to raise questions about CIA work. In Gimble's opinion, apparently, the answer is no. I disagree.

The CIA has a hard job. Some of its work has been good; some has been famously and disastrously bad, as everyone familiar with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco knows. Intelligence is inherently sketchy and speculative -- and historically often wrong. It is improved when policy officials freely probe and challenge it.

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.) Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. Their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers. Only four top-level government officials received the briefing: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and (together) Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Wow! Talk about a leap around the board.

First, the IG report was critical of Feith's office, not for disagreeing with the CIA, but for developing an alternative analysis which the CIA would not support. Feith manufactured a completely different theory which he then submitted to the Bushies without first having the established intelligence community survey and report back on the information.

The information Feith says the CIA was suppressing is pure fiction. It either didn't exist or the material was completely untrustworthy. It is the untrustworthy information which Feith decided to use as a basis for forming a mythical link between Al Qa'ida and Saddam.

Secondly, Feith, in an attempt to defend his defiance of the CIA position that Al Qa'ida and secular Baathists would not form an alliance, points to a current situation which he seems to feel is valid. What he doesn't tell you, of course, is that there really is no jihadist/baathist alliance today. The insurgency in Iraq, to which we must all assume he is referring, is split along Shi'a/Sunni religious lines and the baathists are almost exclusively Sunni. US intelligence has already discounted any grand alliance between the jihadis and baathists which means Feith is once again manufacturing a condition on absolutely no evidence. Just yesterday he told Wolf Blitzer that he hadn't "been in government for the last year and a half. There may be some more intelligence on that subject."

Right. In other words, he doesn't have a fucking clue. He defends himself by producing his view of a situation today and then defends his wild assumption by saying he's not privy to current intelligence.

That's how he did it when he was running the Office of Special Plans! He invented the scenario, al Qa'ida allied with Saddam, by stating that he had to make that assumption because he believed he wasn't getting the intelligence to support his assumption.

Tommy Franks called Douglas Feith, "The fucking stupidist guy on the face of the earth."

Yeah, he is, but he's also a pathological liar. He is still using the same deceptive methods of his Pentagon days to defend his actions today.

The truth is, Feith is now a fall-guy for the Bush administration. It is nearly impossible to accept that the rest of the cabal wasn't completely involved in the manufacture of intelligence. Cheney and Rumsfeld picked Feith to do the heavy lifting. Bush, too stupid to critically analyse Feith's products, had to be involved in the cookery. Otherwise, he would have sent Feith's briefings to the appropriate intelligence agency for vetting - the CIA.

Feith shouldn't be left holding the bag on his own. The entire Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld operation was in on this. Paul Wolfowitz is deeply involved and the political advisors, Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby promoted the idea of circumventing the inconvenient assessments of the CIA.

There is one truth which is easy to deduce: They all lied and this column by Feith and his interview on CNN support that presumption.

That's why, as the Bush administration tries to lay out a case for attacking Iran, nobody is going to bite. The facts are out and the facts illuminate the outright lies which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Bushco has another problem, however. While I don't believe Bush is beyond defying Congress and the public by attacking Iran anyway, there is a great ugly spear being held to his throat.

It's Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Peter Pace.

Pace has been defying the administration line. There is some serious back-peddling taking place as the White House withdraws from the position it held just this last Sunday, when a field briefing on Iranian supplied weapons was presented. Pace is being allowed to continue his stance that there is no substantive evidence to support the idea that the Iranian government is involved in supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents. And the White House is being forced to admit that Pace is right.

Why would that happen?

Easy.

General Peter Pace has been in possession of the entire Pentagon Inspector General's report since it was delivered. We have only heard of the few recently declassified portions. Pace has had the whole thing for some time and he knows the US military was lied into a war. Further, the Bush administration knows he knows.

Pace has over 3000 dead, tens of thousand of wounded and a force depleted to unacceptable levels because of a lie. He isn't going to let them do it again. He's going to want solid, verifiable, high-quality intelligence. He has the IG report as the ultimate weapon to defend against an illegal move against Iran. He has proof of how Bushco does business.

I do believe George and Dick are fucking with the wrong marine.