Hersh Debunks Mehlis Report

Seymour Hersh debunks the much-vaunted United Nations report that fingers Syria as the culprit in the assassination of Lebanese politician-entrepreneur Rafik Hariri:

“Hersh recently got hold of a copy of the United Nations interim report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The document cited “converging evidence” that senior levels of the Syrian government were involved in the murder.

“But according to Hersh, the Mehlis report is built on the same anemic foundations as Powell’s UN presentation in February, 2003. “He is relying on intercepts of an unnamed source inside the Iranian air force, someone without inside stuff. It’s not empirical.” On the basis of this thin evidence, he says, the Bush administration is campaigning at the UN for sanctions on Syria.”

“Regime change” in Syria is proceeding along lines suggested by the Iraqi template. More lies, brought to you by the same neocon fabricators who duped the U.S. into attacking Iraq. What gets me, however, is why a Republican administration is touting the alleged veracity of a report issued by … the UN — and strongly backed by the French!

Republicans + Indictments = civil libertarians

Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s investigation and ongoing legal proceedings are serious, and now the proceedings — the process moves into a new phase. In our system, each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial…..George W. Bush

In our system of government an accused person is presumed innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury after an opportunity to answer the charges and a full airing of the facts. Mr. Libby is entitled to that opportunityDick Cheney

Jpadilla_1



José Padilla was arrested by federal agents at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, and held as material witness on the warrant issued in New York State about the 2001 9/11 attacks. On June 9, 2002, President Bush issued an order to Secretary Rumsfeld to detain Padilla as an “enemy combatant”. He is currently being detained without charge in a South Carolina military prison under orders of President George W. Bush.

Death and Chaos in Iraq

U.S. aircraft bombed a house near the Syrian border before dawn on Monday in what the military said was a precision strike on an al Qaeda leader.

A local hospital doctor in the Iraqi town of Qaim said 40 people were killed and 20 wounded, many of them women and children, and a tribal leader said there were no guerrillas

See Eli on how typically disgusting this bombing and the manner in which the bombing is reported are.

The US has had it’s worst month this year for casualties in Iraq since January:

Seven U.S. troops were killed in three roadside bombings near Baghdad, the military said on Monday…[…]

That made October, which saw Iraqis vote for a constitution and put Saddam Hussein on trial, the worst month the Americans have suffered since January, when violence surged in advance of a parliamentary election.[…]

A week after the U.S. death toll since the 2003 invasion passed the 2,000 mark, it rose to at least 2,025 with the deaths of four soldiers in an attack on a patrol near Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad, and two in a similar incident near Balad, 60 km (40 miles) to the north of the capital.

It brought to 92 the number of Americans to die in October, the same as in August and the highest since 107 died in January.

And in Basra, a huge car bomb has just exploded:
A car bomb exploded Monday night in a commercial district of Iraq’s second-largest city of Basra, and it appeared at least 20 people had been killed and 40 injured, police said.

The blast went off about 8:30 p.m. in an area filled with shops and restaurants, many of them packed with people out for the evening during Ramadan festivities, Lieutenant-Colonel Karim al-Zaidi said.

Cheney replaces Scooter

From Josh Marshall:

The Vice President today appointed David S. Addington of Virginia to be the chief of staff to the Vice President. The Vice President also appointed John P. Hannah of the District of Columbia as the Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs.
Murray Waas beat them to the punch on Addington here.
Addington shares with Cheney and Libby the view of increasing presidential power and authority and setting strict limits on the release of executive branch information to both Congress and the public.

As early as May 2001, Addington was the point person for the White House in deflecting requests by congressional Democrats and later the General Accounting Office (now named the Government Accountability Office) for information about the energy policy task force convened by Cheney’s office.

During confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, it was revealed that Addington helped draft the White House memo that concluded that the Geneva Convention against torture did not apply to prisoners captured in the war on terror. The memo declared that terrorism “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

Berlusconi Bails

The Christian Science Monitor rounds up all the latest on Italy, including this:

    “I have never been convinced war was the best way to succeed in making a country democratic and extract it from [a] … bloody dictatorship,” [Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi] says. “I tried on several occasions to convince the American president not to wage war.”

In other news, the Bush-Berlusconi press conference scheduled for today was cancelled.

Why did Scooter have to lie?

Time asks the question;

Some observers wondered last week why a bright lawyer like Libby bothered with a cover story at all. The indictment offers scant evidence that Libby knew Plame was a covert officer, a key test in the 1982 law barring such disclosures. By that logic, Libby could have told the truth about everything he did and still avoided criminal exposure.

Time notes that Fitzgerald has not revealed everything he knows, and therefore there could be more to this than we can see. Nevertheless, as St. Clair/Cockburn note, Libby could simply have trotted out the reliable ol’ “I have no clear recollection of that, sir”, so beloved of crafty politicos under investigation. St. Clair/Cockburn conclude;

The people in charge of the nation’s destinies these last five years are very, very stupid. Only really stupid people could have thought that outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA employee was a good way of undercutting her husband, Joe Wilson. Cheney is stupid. Rove is stupid. Bush is stupid. Libby, about whom we now have a heap of useful material, is very, very stupid.

Don’t sugarcoat it like that guys. Give it to us straight. The LRC bloggers, particularly William L. Anderson, take a mostly negative view, comparing the investigation and indictment to the Salem-like Martha Stewart investigation. I’m with them. Gary North agrees, claiming Scooter is “ruined”, but on that point, I diverge. Assuming Scooter is convicted and goes to the land of slamming doors for a couple of years, when he gets out, he’ll get his own talk show. Perhaps a guest spot on Crossfire, or a seat on the McLaughlin Group. The real criminals, the ones in charge of the “justice” system, are never prosecuted, and as St. Clair/Cockburn say, Scooter will probably get a big, fat pardon anyway.