Liveblogging the GOP Debate

I’m live-blogging the Republican debate.

5:12 PM PST — It’s almost 15 minutes into the Republican “debate,” and not one question has been directed at Ron Paul by the two moderators. What’s up with that?

On Iraq: We must “stand up,” say them all (but Ron).

Finally, Ron — looking nervous — is picked on: Why are all the other candidates wrong on Iraq? Ron comes back with the traditionalist position: nonintervention is the historical position of the GOP: “Don’t police the world, that’s the Republican view and the view of the founding fathers.”

Next question is a blockbuster: why not invade Iran? McCain is in favor of it. What is the tripwire, asks Chris Matthews. Iran will give nukes to a terrorist organization, says McCain. If this is a real threat to the state of Israel, he says, we must “ultimately” attack. But there are a lot of intermediary steps.

 Tancredo asked: What if Olmert calls up and says: “We’re going to attack Iran. Will you help us?” Tancredo says: Yes, but there are (undefined) conditions. If Israel is threatened, then we must. Giuliani: nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational man are “not an option.” What worries me is nukes in the hands of some hot-headed paisano.

Question to Gilmore: Romney says it is not worth moving heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden. Gilmore ducks….

Romney: It’s not about OBL, it’s about all Muslims. 

Now come candidates voted on The Politico:

McCain is asked: would you be happy with Tancredo as head of the INS? In a word: No. Then rants about how he’ll follow OBL to the gates of hell.

Should we change our constitution to let the foreign-born run for President:

Romney: Probably not

Five no’s so far: two yes.

McCain: Depends on whether he endorses me or not.

Paul: No, a strong supporter of the original intent

Giuliani: Yes.

Giuliani: dealing with African American community, any regrets? Ducks the question.

Romney: what do you dislike the most about America? Is at a loss for words….

Huckabee: what about global warming? Old Boy Scout aphorism: Leave the campsite in better shape than you found it.  

Tancredo: Organ transplant plan? The President should not be in the forefront of such an effort. Clonging people is ridiculous.

Hunter: Are you a compassionate conservative? Rest of my time on Iran: right now Iran is killing Americans in Iran. Iran has crossed the line. We have a “license” take whatever actions are necessary to stop it.

Paul: would you work to phase out the IRS? Immediately. If you think govt’ should take us from cradle to grave and police the world, then you won’t agree with that. But not if you want to get rid of the cycle of mounting debt and perpetual war.

Roe vs Wade: repeal? Most say repeal, but Giulinani waffles and Gilmore says the first few weeks are an exception. Thompson : leave it up to the states.

McCain looks very nervous: and he is unusually demagogic, attacking “Islamic” this and “Islamic” that, and glowering at the camera. “Faith in government” — “I want to defeat our enemies” — “I want to be president of a proud and strong nation.” Hail to The Leader!

Huckabee, on the other hand, is relaxed, and relatively benevolent. Romney seems like the John Edwards of the GOP: is that a $300 haircut? 

Paul: If goal of govt’ is to police the world, you lose your liberty. Wehn you overdo your aggressiveness, you become weaker. Why are we agonizing over third world countries that don’t have an army or an air force?

Prediction: Ron Paul is going to soar in the polls. Of course, since he’s at 1 percent, that may not amount to a major surge …

Sheesh, Tommy Thompson sure is funny lookin’! He looks like an out-of-work comedian.

A question about Jack Abramoff provokes a response from somebody (who is that guy?) who waffles on about “family values” and winds up in a peroration about “dirty” songs on the radio.

McCain: Spending is out of “control,” and that’s why the GOP lost the last election. (Not the war).  What specific programs would he cut? Cost overruns in purchase of weapons systems. He is the candidate of “honest” militarism. Good luck with that one.

Huckabee: how would you rate the Bush administration on Iraq? Ducks the question….

I note that the moderators keep trying to get the candidates to attack each other, to no avail.

Tommy Thompson: what can a president do about racism? We all have to be like Ronald Reagan…. ok?

Tancredo: besides yourself, who should be the GOP nominee? In other words: admit it, you can’t win. So whom will you be endorsing? Tries to duck it, but then says, basically, anyone who agrees with his immigration position.

McCain: the status quo is not acceptable. We need temporary workers, and the 12 million illegals have to be dealt with. Endorses Bush position.

Paul: President makes decisions in crisis situations, have you ever made such a decision. I’m a doctor, and I’ve made plenty of life and death decisions, but none that affected a lot of other people. Five years ago, however, I made the decision to vote against the war.

There’s a lot of talk about cloning — as if this is the biggest issue around. What kind of “debate” is it that focuses on such marginal issues? The Republicans hate cloning and stem cell research. McCain, however, wants to fund stem cell research. Paul: We either subsidize it, in Washington, or prohibit it. Answer: No. Giuliani: yes, with limitations. Tancredo: no.

A tax you would cut: many endorse a flat tax, or the “fair tax,” except the majors — Romney, McCain, Giuliani: get rid of the death tax, and regularize rates with marginal reductions.  Paul: get rid of the inflation tax, with a foreign policy we can’t afford and an entitlements we can’t afford either. We need sound money.

McCain: a Democrat you’d appoint to your cabinet. Joe Lieberman: and someone named John Chambers (I think) in Silicon Valley. I know how to reach across the aisle.

McCain: do you believe in evolution? Yes. Several candidates don’t, however (turns out the number is three, and I think one of them is Tancredo. Figures…)… and I can see why.

Giiuliani: what is the difference between a shia and sunni Muslim. Giuliani gets it partly right, but says something about how one believes in the importance of “descent” while the other doesn’t. Hmmmmmm….. have to check on that one. (Uh, not quite right).

Paul: do you trust the mainstream media. I trust the internet a lot more. Goes into a riff about freedom of expression, and not regulating the internet.

Brownback: do your personal religious beliefs influence your foreign policy views? In other words: you’re a nutball Christian dispensationalist, so how doe that go down in the foreign policy realm? Brownback confirms this by saying that, yes, he’s in favor of an “aggressive” foreign policy. (Nuke Tehran!)

Huckabee: in light of the corruption and cronyism scandals, what lessons have you learned. Rants on about how we’re shipping jobs overseas. Attacks capitalists who “rob” workers of their rightful due. (Is this guy a commie?)

How many have been injured and killed in Iraq, is the question asked of Tommy Thompson. He doesn’t really know, says over 3,000 killed (correct) but then fumbles it with “several thousand” wounded (it’s over 30,000).

Romney and Giuliani come out with a “tamper-proof” national ID card. Holy moley! Brownback dissents. We have social security. McCain is for it: absolutely! (of course). Paul: I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This absolutely contradicts the real purpose of governmentl, which is to protect people not invade their privacy.

Should Scooter Libby be pardoned? Romney attacks Fitzgerald, but tries to duck anyway. The rest duck — except for Tancredo, who says yes, pardon him. Paul: Scooter was instrumental in getting us into a war that we didn’t need to be in.

Terry Schiavo: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……….

Would it be good to have Bill Clinton back in the White House? The big joke question, naturally asked by Chris Matthews. Giuliani repeats the phrase “Islamic fundamentalist terrorism” no less than three times in his answer.

How will you be different from President Bush: Romney ducks. Says we need 100,000 more troops (in Iraq?) McCain: I would not have mismanaged the war. Ouch! Gilmore: Homeland security is the key. Huckabee: More states rights. (Wow! Good answer!) Honor the tenth amendment (Double-wow!) Hunter: China is cheating on trade laws. What’s his name: divide Iraq, and a political solution as well as a military solution for Iraq. Tancredo: huh? Thompson: bromides. Giuliani: we should remind ourselves that we thought we were going to be hit many times and we weren’t. The decision to go to war was correct. Paul: invokes Robert A. Taft, he would change our foreign policy to non-interventionism, and he would protect the privacy of Americans from the prying eyes of government. Lastly, he would never abuse the right of habeas corpus.

And Ron has the last word!

Whew! My fingers hurt!

Summing up: What a bunch! Ron Paul shines, the others seem as predictable and boring as …. well, as your average “modern” Republican.

Now comes the “spin”:

No mention of the only antiwar Republican candidate, namely Ron Paul, about half an hour into the “spin” on MSNBC. Come on, guys — yeah, I mean you, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Senor Scarborough — let’s get real. It’s all about how McCain is going to “follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell.” Which means, I guess, that Mad John knows where he‘s going to wind up ….

National Review has this to say about Ron Paul: “Sigh, yes, thank you for telling us how a libertarian idealist would do it.” Not that anyone at NR is interested in liberty.

I have to say that, as much as I admire Ron, his presentation was not as good as it might have been. The clear “winner” of the debate was (is?) Romney, at least in beauty-contest terms. And that’s what this was: there were no real ideas here, no contrasting approaches to government, only variations on a theme of militarism and economic nostrums that don’t amount to a coherent phiosophy or even a general approach to government. Ron Paul stood out because he deviated so radically from the rest in that respect.

The three candidates besides Dr.Paul who may have generated the most intellectual excitement — Chuck Hagel, Newt Gingrich, and Fred Thompson — weren’t present. Although then it would’ve been quite a crowd scene, underscoring the complete political and ideological vacuum at the hollow heart of the GOP.

A Wedding Made in Iraq

I don’t think this is the wedding picture this couple had in mind when they were engaged before the young man was sent to Iraq.

One of the Republican presidential candidates said during the debate that a few thousand U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq. The official count is actually almost 25,000. How many more young men have to be disfigured like this before this unnecessary war comes to an end?

Greg Palast

Oilmen and Neocons Agree: Iraq’s total destruction is Mission Accomplished

Greg Palast, investigative reporter for the BBC, Guardian newspapers and Harper’s, and author of Armed Madhouse, discusses GOP efforts to prevent soldiers from voting and the international oil politics surrounding America’s relationships with Venezuela, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

MP3 here. (46:56)

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse (Penguin 2006). His first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers. Author of another New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of election 2004, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields have won him a record six “Project Censored” for reporting the news American media doesn’t want you to hear. He returned to America to report for Harper’s magazine.

Tenet v Perle

Jim Lobe reports for IPS News

Since the publication of Michiko Kakutani’s review of George Tenet’s new book, At the Center of the Storm, in Saturday’s New York Times, neoconservatives have been jumping all over the book’s account of the author’s alleged encounter with Richard Perle on September 12, 2001, as a way to discredit the former CIA chief. Perle, who was then coming out of the White House, according to the book, turned to Tenet at that moment, and said, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.”

“Here’s the problem [with Tenet’s account],” wrote Perle protégé Bill Kristol gleefully in Sunday’s Weekly Standard. “Richard Perle was in France that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State [sic] until September 15,” Kristol noted, concluding his article by asking “How many other facts has George Tenet invented?”

Kristol’s observation has been seized on by a number of prominent neoconservatives as evidence that the book – and presumably its overall thesis that Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives, such as then-Defense Policy Board chairman Perle, who served as their chief aides and advisers, were determined to use 9/11 to take the U.S. to war with Iraq – is deeply flawed and can thus be disregarded. In addition to Kristol’s editorial, the Weekly Standard has published a lengthy article by Thomas Joscelyn debunking Tenet, while the National Review Online has run one editorial, as well as articles by Perle’s colleague at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen, and Andrew McCarthy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) devoted to the same purpose. The Washington Times also published an editorial, as did an unsigned news item posted at the Fox News website. All have cited the alleged Tenet-Perle encounter as evidence that the book is not to be trusted.

Tenet has since conceded that he may have made a chronological error, telling NBC’s ‘Today’ show on Monday, “…I may have gotten the days wrong, but I know I got the substance of that conversation correct. The encounter occurred.”

A review of the record suggests that Tenet’s recollection of the substance – if not the timing – may indeed be correct. In fact, even while the dust from the Twin Towers was still settling in lower Manhattan – thousands of miles from Perle’s summer home in the south of France – he was apparently offering his opinions in a variety of media about Iraq’s possible responsibility and the desirability of striking against it.

Nor was it only he: in the week that followed the attacks, Kristol himself repeatedly made the same case, although no one was more active outside the administration (we know from many accounts that then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was hyper-active on the subject inside the administration) in arguing for going after Saddam than Perle’s neoconservative confrere, James Woolsey. (I cited a few of these in a lengthy July 15, 2003 IPS article on how a relatively small network of hawks in and outside the administration used 9/11 as a pretext for war.)

We can begin on September 12, 2001, the day Tenet apparently mistakenly wrote that the encounter took place. On that date, the Washington Post quoted Perle, who had presumably been interviewed by telephone the previous day, as follows:

“‘I believe this will now be the catalyst that causes a significant change in our policy toward terrorism and that change should be to hold responsible governments that support terrorism,’ said Richard N. Perle, a Reagan Pentagon official and currently chairman of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. ‘It’s been our policy to hold individual terrorists accountable rather than the governments who support them and that policy has failed.’

“‘…This could not have been done without help of one or more governments,” Perle said, citing the need for passports, communications, intelligence and training for pilots for yesterday’s attacks. ‘Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don’t think that can be done without the assistance of large governments. You don’t walk in off the street and learn how to fly a Boeing 767.’ Perle added, ‘We have to make the cost to the governments that support terrorism so high that they stop supporting them.'”

On the same day, the International Herald Tribune, in an article titled “For Washington, a Modern Pearl Harbor; Like the Attack in 1941, Air Terrorism Could Provoke Severe Repercussions,”
quoted Perle as saying:

“We have got to put certain governments on notice that if they’re harboring terrorists they will be held responsible by U.S. power even if Washington does not have the sort of detailed evidence that would be needed to get a conviction in a normal court.”

Three days later, when Perle was back in Washington, he was interviewed by Robert Novak on CNN, saying:

“Even if we cannot prove to the standards that we enjoy in our own civil society that they were involved. We do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden. That can be documented. So, on the theory, which seems to be a valid one, that if you support terrorists and they then commit atrocities against Americans, you are responsible. Unless we hold those countries responsible, we will be chasing terrorists without significant effect.”

Perle, who was taken up with two days’ of highly classified meetings of his Defense Policy Board (DPB) to which he invited Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmad Chalabi, next appears in a September 18th article by Knight-Ridder’s Warren Strobel, who was already ahead of the rest of the mainstream media. In a widely published article, he wrote that Bush’s advisers were divided on how far their new “war on terror” would take them:

“‘This is just an added reason for making life as difficult as we can for Saddam,’ said Richard Perle, an adviser to the Pentagon and leading proponent of vastly increased aid to the opposition Iraqi National Congress. ‘If all we do is go after bin Laden, it’ll make a mockery of all the president had to say about waging a war on terrorism,’ Perle said.”

Meanwhile, Kristol himself was pushing very much the same line. Thus, on a special a special, early-afternoon edition of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” September 12, Kristol opined as follows:

“And then, of course, there needs to be a serious strategy that goes after the terrorist organizations and those states that have either harbored them or assisted them. I think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of elephant in the room today. There’s a fair amount of evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it had associations with the previous effort to destroy the World Trade Center. And the real question that the president and his administration need to face is: Are we willing to go back to war with Saddam Hussein and finish the job his father started in 1990? We may well have to do that.”

On Fox News Sunday September 16, he was at it again:

“If Tuesday was a watershed, and I’m afraid it was, the debates that we were having on Monday will look just ludicrous. Should the defense budget be $328 billion or $326 billion? I think we’ll have a defense budget next year over $400 billion.” Kristol added, “We will increase the size of the armed forces.” Kristol also said, “I think we have to get rid of Osama. I don’t care how difficult the terrain in Afghanistan is. I don’t care whether it takes 200,000 ground troops. You cannot win this war in terrorism without getting rid of the man who, more than any other man, with the possible exception of Saddam, has organized it. And I think Osama and Saddam will be the focus of our efforts.”

On Sep 20, Kristol published a letter signed by Perle and 37 other mainly neo-conservative figures, including Kristol himself, in both the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times in the name of the Project for the New American Century, which made clear that Iraq was in their sites.

“It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”

It sounds like Tenet’s account is pretty plausible, even if he got the date wrong.

Jonathan Schwarz

A Tiny Revolution: Reviews former DCI Tenet’s book

Jonathan Schwarz, author of Our Kampf and the blog A Tiny Revolution, reviews former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s book At the Center of the Storm.

MP3 here. (58:22)

Jonathan Schwarz has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Esquire and Village Voice. He’s also contributed material to Saturday Night Live and National Public Radio.

His website is named after something George Orwell once said: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

Joshua Kors

U.S. to Wounded Soldiers: “You have a ‘personality disorder.’ No benefits.”

Joshua Kors follows up on his Nation article “How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits” about how the U.S. army uses made-up psychological jargon to deny those wounded in their wars the benefits they’ve been promised.

MP3 here. (13:41)

Joshua Kors is a freelance journalist based in New York. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.