I've added new Bush quotes to my Bush quote page, including this progression of gems on leaking confidential information about a covert CIA operative:

"Any sources and methods of intelligence will remain guarded in secret. My administration will not talk about how we gather intelligence, if we gather intelligence, and what the intelligence says. That's for the protection of the American people." — 9/13/01

"We can't have leaks of classified information. It's not in our nation's interest." — 10/9/01

"Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing." — 10/7/03

"I don't know whether we are going to find out the senior administration official." — 10/8/03

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration." — 7/18/05

Lie:

And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.

- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), on CNN Late Edition, 7/24/05

Truth:

There are thousands of undercover CIA employees who drive through the three gates at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia everyday.

- Former CIA intelligence official Larry Johnson, at TPM Cafe, 7/24/05

Thanks to DavidNYC at the KOS for his post about debunking Republican lies.

Guest writer explores the psychiatric nature of Arab Assassins

This is from my union brother Jeff.

Back in the '20's and '30's, Pavlov tortured and maimed dogs to try and prove that they could be conditioned to salivate when he rang a bell. "Uncle Joe" Stalin asked Pavlov to write down everything he had learned with an eye to how it could be used on humans. Thus was born "Russian brain-washing".

The West, in the traditional tit-for-tat vein, the CIA developed Cointelpro, or counter intelligence program some time after WW II. It was a vast black program which further developed "brainwashing" techniques by the use of drugs and deep sleep drug induced comas. People were placed in comas for months at a time and regularly electro-shocked. Canadian and American psychiatrists collaborated in this latter day stepped up version of Pavlovian and dehumanizing and very heartless and cruel program.

Osama's mentor, Ayman al-Zawarhi, an Egyptian rich kid and medical student was involved in the assassination of Abdul Nasser. He got caught and spent seven years in an Egyptian prison. Zawarhi was subjected to cointelpro techniques. He learned to despise America and finally got some measure of revenge on America on 9/11. Osama was a perfect dupe and Zawarhi, being a medical doctor made sure Osama received lots of opiates and heroin and amphetamines and electro shock and cointelpro behavior modification techniques.

Regular folk wonder how anyone could blow themselves up and murder civilians in the process. Well, in addition to being carefully selected beforehand, Suicide bombers are normally very heavily doped up on amphetamines and opiates.

The Arab culture is steeped in the lore of the "assassin". There were "Thugee" cults in India, but the Assassin is the Arab version. The word comes from "user of hashish". An unwitting and somewhat impressionable and imbecilic young man would be selected by agents working for Hashshashin, founder of Serif Arabi Cult of assassins.

This young goober would be slipped a mickey of hashish. He would pass out and be kidnapped and when he woke up, he would be in a harem tent and would be told he was in heaven. A couple of days would pass and this goof-ball would have enjoyed himself immensely. Then his mentor would say that he had been brought to heaven prematurely and that Allah needed just one more small task performed: "Kill so-and-so. And upon your success, you will at once be whisked back up to heaven".

The guy would be slipped another overdose of hashish and pass out and then be dumped back out on the street. The guy would be very highly motivated to kill Sultan so-and-so and with a fervent frenzy, could very well succeed!

Modern day al Qaeda techniques have this tradition. That is why their suicide bombers are so fervent and so dedicated. Intelligent or well schooled or educated or not; they are more or less suggestible to begin with. That is the primary criterion that the suicide bomber scouts look for
-- gullibility.

Add to this months of "brainwashing" and heavy doses of amphetamines and opiates and hallucinogens and voila! Suicide bombers made to order by the gross.

My point is that our psychiatric programs, the misguided and violently misanthropic programs that they are, were exported by the CIA and probably the NSA to various operatives in the field. And the Arab, already familiar with the history of the Assassins readily understood and embraced and combined cointelpro methods with what he knew of his history; the assassins. And thus he has really taken the West by the scrotum.

It is a tragic dilemma and there is no one-shot-cure. Using psychiatric techniques such as post-cointelpro dehumanizing and torture methods at places like Abu-Ghraib are kerosene thrown on the fire.

Jeff

The Real Conspiracy Theories
In Response to New 9-11 Conspiracy Theories

I only worry that by buying into this the Bushies can make us out to look like freakish UFO types.

At the very least, the Bushies IGNORED terrorism. The neo-cons said, in a PNAC report from the late 80's that they needed a "Pearl Harbor type event" in order to speed up American military intervention in the middle east, specifically, Iraq. Remember, these are the guys who wanted Bush Sr. to go all the way to Baghdad.

So, they just did nothing on terror. Richard Clarke was running around with his "hair on fire" trying to get someone in the White House to talk about terrorism and Al Qaeda (which Clinton and Gore had been very hawkish on), but they kept blowing him off.

So, hey, they got what they needed. Coincidence? Probably not? But an active effort from the upper echelons of the White House. I doubt it. After seeing the way they've handled everything else, I don't think they're good enough to pull something like that off.

What they are good at is getting the red-neck agenda front and center, so people won't look at the big picture. They get middle America voting on gay marriage, abortion, Terry Schiavo laws, and then scare the living shit out of them with their "we're strong on terror" lies - because they are actually the opposite. Terror helps them. Terror is the new cold war, vague and threatening, to justify new Viet Nams with new domino theories and new Gulfs of Tonkin.

But were more than just the 19 mostly Saudi hijackers involved? Most definitely. Could there have been other people in high levels of the military (ours or someone else's) actually helping the terrorists? Maybe. Did Bush have something to do with it? Hell, I doubt if he could tie his shoes without all the anti-depressants they're feeding him.

Al-Qaeda has changed; Bush strategy also needs to shift

For those who say Democrats offer no plan of their own, I suggest you follow the link above to a great article by General Wes Clark.

Protect your country from the American Taliban

While the 101st fighting keyboardists who love this war still refuse to sign up to fight it, a real threat to this nation's security has attacked us from the White House. Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent working on ACTUAL WMD PROLIFERATION. She has spent years setting up the cover operation that allowed her, and her operatives, to find out about old soviet nukes, where they were going, and who was trying to get them.

But this petty White House, while trying to justify their geo-political obsession with Iraq, decided to blow her cover, and the cover of all the people working for her, over some vendetta against her Republican husband, Joseph Wilson, who honestly and openly doubted Bush claims (and forged papers from someone) that claimed Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Furthermore, Plame's outfit had established covert ties into the Saudi Royal Family (long time Bush family friends and financiers) and their state run oil company, ARAMCO. All of the decades of work on WMD and ARAMCO are now worthless, the lives of the many operatives have been put at risk, and the US has lost a great source of intelligence into the ACTUAL terrorists trying to threaten us.

At the same time, it seems, the Plame affair prosecutor, Fitzgerald, seems to have stumbled into another National Security breach, perhaps originating in Dick Cheney's office, regarding the fact that someone in the White House gave classified information to Chalabi, the lying Iraqi exile who the administration loved for his bullshit "facts" about Iraqi WMD. This, or these, White House officials told Chalabi that we had broken Iranian codes. Chalabi then told the Iranians, who changed them. This is a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and is punishable by death.

So, while right wing nuts and pseudo moderates rant and rave about taking away your privacy, in the form of their ant-choice, anti-gay-marriage, American Taliban fundamentalism, their beloved hero, GW Bush, is harboring felons in his White House, the very one he and Dick Cheney, in 2000, promised to restore honor and integrity to. These felons have sold out American security for some neo-con dream of Middle East democracy and Israeli dominance of the region. They have made us less safe by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on some insanely illogical "fly-paper strategy" in order to "fight terrorists there instead of here," instead of spending that money on protecting our borders, our ports, our chemical and nuclear plants, and our transportation systems. They have cut money from first responders all over the country, and they lie about that, and then they cut funding for the very veterans they praise as having answered the highest calling (which very few of them did).

And now, as the Turd-Blossom shit has hit the fan, the White House is "restoring honor and integrity to the White House" in a very strange way. In fact, it's very similar to parsing what the definition of is is. They are lying. When they're caught in a lie, the lie that they never lied.

Here's what White House press secretary Scott McClellan had to say about the Valerie Plame felonies two years ago:

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States. If someone leaked classified information, the President wants to know. If someone in this administration leaked classified information, they will no longer be a part of this administration, because that's not the way this White House operates."

Today, it was "Karl who?"

While Rove keeps on weaseling out of the facts, with beyond Clintonian statements like, "I didn't say her name," (no, Karl, you just said Joseph Wilson's wife), and "I didn't tell any reporter that she worked for the CIA," (no, Karl, you said the agency), the right-wingers in this country are going to continue to try to get swing state voters to believe that liberals are going to force you to be gay, force your children to become atheists, force you to give away your guns, force you to die if you don't want to, force you to have abortions, and force you to drive small cars with good gas mileage. These kind of bullshit lies are all they have left, because they've been exposed for what they really are: fascists.

They are the ones who want to restrict liberty in this country. They are the ones who passed the Patriot Act. They are the ones who lied to get us into a war to further the mad privatization schemes on a global scale. They are the ones who want to stop stem cell research because they think zygotes are people. They are the ones who want to stop talking to kids about birth control and safe sex. They are the ones who lie about the science behind global warming, health, pollution, grazing, wetlands, and many more important facts Americans need to protect our liberty from terrorists, whether they be Islamists, Timothy McVeighs, or corporate robber barons. They are the ones who put lobbyists in regulatory positions. They are the ones taking away your hunting and fishing lands for oil and gas wells.

Clear headed people who actually bother to read the news and form their own opinions, as opposed to letting Rupert Murdoch think for them, should look around and realize that even many conservatives are finding the Bush Misadministration too much to stomach. In 2006, the Democratic Party will be running someone in almost every single congressional district. In many of the conservative districts, they will be running pro-gun, pro-liberty candidates who are conservative and libertarian in many ways, but who will work to not only stop the bleeding of lives, limbs, and tax-payer money in Bush's global game, but who will vote to impeach this treasonous cabal, and hopefully bring honor and integrity back to the White House for real.

I urge you all to vote for the Democrat running for congress in your district. You don't have to join the military to protect your country. Protect your country by giving money to the party that will stop these fanatics. Protect your country by volunteering to help the Democrat in your district. Protect your country by putting a sticker on your car or a sign in your yard. Start now and don't stop until November 2006.

Find out more at the DNC web site.

Thank you.
Scott Supak
http://supak.com

Representative John Conyers should be the House Minority leader. He regularly posts brilliant entries in his blog, at the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos. Check out this gem from today.

On Oct. 10, 2003, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was asked whether Rove; Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or National Security Council official Elliott Abrams had told any reporter that Plame was a covert CIA agent. ‘I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,’ McClellan said. ‘And that's where it stands.’ Reporters pressed McClellan to clarify that statement but he held to the words in his first answer until one reporter asked, ‘They were not involved in what?’ To which he replied, ‘The leaking of classified information.’ In the 90’s, there was a media uproar when literally accurate, but misleading, statements were made about a private sexual affair. Today, when such statements are made out a life and death matter -- the decision to go to war -- for a Nixonian purpose -- to smear truth-telling critics -- there is barely a peep from the press corps. In the days since Rove’s role became public, the White House press corps has yet to pose a question to the White House press secretary about it. Not a word about the disgusting hypocrisy of an Administration that came to office promising to “change the tone” in Washington now attacking a critic through his spouse.

Why is he the only Democrat on this talking point today? If every Dem. in the country was on this point all day, then maybe the White House press corps would pose a question to Puffy McMoon Face, er, the Press secretary, about it it.

But this story goes way beyond hypocrisy. This is treason of the highest kind. One very intelligent poster at the dKOS has suggested that the Plame prosecutor Fitzgerald has stumbled into some very serious breaches of national security. Specifically, it seems Fitzgerald may have discovered who leaked information to Chalabi that we had broken Iran's codes, information Chalabi apparently passed to Iran.

If true, that would be a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act, punishable by death.

It's times like these that I lament being against the death penalty.

Fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here

On this horrific day of London terrorism, I would like to hear one Bush voter step forward with a defense of the "we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" theory of global anti-terror.

Doesn't seem to have worked for the British. And a majority of their public has always been against the Iraq war.

How many improvements to homeland security could we have made with the $200 BILLION spent SO FAR in Iraq? How many cops and firemen could we have hired? How many improvements could we have made to first responder infrastructure? How many more containers could we have searched? How many more Arabic speakers could the FBI have hired? How many computer improvements could we have made so law enforcement agencies could better share information on terrorists?

And they have the balls to call me a traitor. They have the balls to say I'm unpatriotic. Patriotism is a lot more than tattered flags on your SUV, a yellow troops ribbon next to your gas cap, or a bunch of fireworks.