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Saddam's Dangerous Friends
What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us.
by Stephen F. Hayes
03/24/2008, Volume 013, Issue 27
This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.
The study was commissioned by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, and produced by analysts at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded military think tank. It is entitled "Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents." The study is based on a review of some 600,000 documents captured in postwar Iraq. Those "documents" include letters, memos, computer files, audiotapes, and videotapes produced by Saddam Hussein's regime, especially his intelligence services. The analysis section of the study covers 59 pages. The appendices, which include copies of some of the captured documents and translations, put the entire study at approximately 1,600 pages.
An abstract that describes the study reads, in part:
Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance
of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime."
Among the study's other notable findings:
In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.
For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.
According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."
In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."
In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.
That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.
There is much, much more. Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination. In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as "under the wings of bin Laden." Although the organization "is an offshoot of bin Laden," the fact that it has a different name "can be a way of camouflaging the organization." The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to "priorities previously established."
In describing the relations between the Army of Muhammad and the Iraqi regime, the authors of the Pentagon study come to this conclusion: "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda--as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."
As I said, this ought to be big news. And, in a way, it was. A headline in the New York Times, a cursory item in the Washington Post, and stories on NPR and ABC News reported that the study showed no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism," in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America's most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study's executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.
On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service first reported that the new Pentagon study was coming. "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network." McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves
many of America's largest cities. The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence. Strobel quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the report" who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a "direct operational link" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration's prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism.
With the study not scheduled for release for two more days, this article shaped subsequent coverage, which was no doubt the leaker's purpose. Stories from other media outlets tracked McClatchy very closely but began to incorporate a highly misleading phrase taken from the executive summary: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." This is how the Washington Post wrote it up:
An examination of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records collected by U.S. forces since the March 2003 invasion has concluded that there is 'no smoking gun' supporting the Bush administration's prewar assertion of an 'operational relationship' between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, sources familiar with the study said."
Much of the confusion might have been avoided if the Bush administration had done anything to promote the study. An early version of the Pentagon study was provided to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley more than a year ago, before November 2006. In recent weeks, as the Pentagon handled the rollout of the study, Hadley was tasked with briefing President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It's unclear whether he shared the study with President Bush, and NSC officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But sources close to Cheney say the vice president was blindsided.
After the erroneous report from McClatchy, two officials involved with the study became very concerned about the misreporting of its contents. One of them said in an interview that he found the media coverage of the study "disappointing." Another, James Lacey, expressed his concern in an email to Karen Finn in the Pentagon press office, who was handling the rollout of the study. On Tuesday, the day before it was scheduled for release, Lacey wrote: "1. The story has been leaked. 2. ABC News is doing a story based on the executive summary tonight. 3. The Washington Post is doing a story based on rumors they heard from ABC News. The document is being misrepresented. I recommend we put [it] out and on a website immediately."
Finn declined, saying that members of Congress had not been told the study was coming. "Despite the leak, there are Congressional notifications and then an official public release. This should not be posted on the web until these actions are complete."
Still under the misimpression that the Pentagon study undermined the case for war, McClatchy's Warren Strobel saw this bureaucratic infighting as a conspiracy to suppress the study:
The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network. . . . The reversal highlighted the politically sensitive nature of its conclusions, which were first reported Monday by McClatchy.
In making their case for invading Iraq in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his top national security aides claimed that Saddam's regime had ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
But the study, based on more than 600,000 captured documents, including audio and video files, found that while Saddam sponsored terrorism, particularly against opponents of his regime and against Israel, there was no evidence of an al Qaida link.
An examination of the rest of the study makes the White House decision to ignore the Pentagon study even more curious. The first section explores "Terror as an Instrument of State Power" and describes documents detailing Fedayeen Saddam terrorist training camps in Iraq. Graduates of the terror training camps would be dispatched to sensitive sites to carry out their assassinations and bombings. In May 1999, the regime plotted an operation code named "Blessed July" in which the top graduates of the terrorist training courses would be sent to London, Iran, and Kurdistan to conduct assassinations and bombings.
A separate set of documents presents, according to the Pentagon study, "evidence of logistical preparation for terrorist operations in other nations, including those in the West." In one letter, a director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) responds to a request from Saddam for an inventory of weapons stockpiled in Iraqi embassies throughout the world. The terrorist tools include missile launchers and missiles, "American missile launchers," explosive materials, TNT, plastic explosive charges, Kalashnikov rifles, and "booby-trapped suitcases."
The July 2002 Iraqi memo describes how these weapons were distributed to the operatives in embassies.
Between the year 2000 and 2002 explosive materials were transported to embassies outside Iraq for special work, upon the approval of the Director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The responsibility for these materials is in the hands of heads of stations. Some of these materials were transported in the political mail carriers [Diplomatic Pouch]. Some of these materials were transported by car in booby-trapped briefcases.
Saddam also recruited non-Iraqi jihadists to serve as suicide bombers on behalf of the Iraqi regime. According to the study, captured documents "indicate that as early as January 1998, the scheduling of suicide volunteers was routine enough to warrant not only a national-level policy letter but a formal schedule--during summer vacation--built around maximizing availability of Arab citizens in Iraq on Saddam-funded scholarships."
The second section of the Pentagon study concerns "State Relationships with Terrorist Groups." An IIS document dated March 18, 1993, lists nine terrorist "organizations that our agency [IIS] cooperates with and have relations with various elements in many parts of the Arab world and who also have the expertise to carry out assignments" on behalf of the regime. Several well-known Palestinian terrorist organizations make the list, including Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council and Abu Abbas's Palestinian Liberation Front. Another group, the secret "Renewal and Jihad Organization" is described this way in the Iraqi memo:
It believes in armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests. They also believe our leader [Saddam Hussein], may God protect him, is the true leader in the war against the infidels. The organization's leaders live in Jordan when they visited Iraq two months ago they demonstrated a willingness to carry out operations against American interests at any time."
Other groups listed in the Iraqi memo include the "Islamic Scholars Group" and the "Pakistan Scholars Group. "
There are two terrorist organizations on the Iraqi Intelligence list that deserve special consideration: the Afghani Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad of Ayman al Zawahiri.
This IIS document provides this description of the Afghani Islamic Party:
It was founded in 1974 when its leader [Gulbuddin Hekmatyar] escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan. It is considered one of the extreme political religious movements against the West, and one of the strongest Sunni parties in Afghanistan. The organization relies on financial support from Iraq and we have had good relations with Hikmatyar since 1989.
In his book Holy War, Inc., Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who has long been skeptical of Iraq-al Qaeda connections, describes Hekmatyar as Osama bin Laden's "alter ego." Bergen writes: "Bin Laden and Hekmatyar worked closely together. During the early 1990s al-Qaeda's training camps in the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan were situated in an area controlled by Hekmatyar's party."
It's worth dwelling for a moment on that set of facts. An internal Iraqi Intelligence document reports that Iraqis have "good relations" with Hekmatyar and that his organization "relies on financial support from Iraq." At precisely the same time, Hekmatyar "worked closely" with Osama bin Laden and his Afghani Islamic Party hosted "al Qaeda's terrorist training camps" in eastern Afghanistan.
The IIS document also reveals that Saddam was funding another close ally of bin Laden, the EIJ organization of Ayman al Zawahiri.
In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt. Our information on the group is as follows:
It was established in 1979.
Its goal is to apply the Islamic shari'a law and establish Islamic rule.
It is considered one of the most brutal Egyptian organizations. It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat.
We have previously met with the organization's representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime.
Zawahiri arrived in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, and "from the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden," according to Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower. The leaders of EIJ quickly became leaders of bin Laden's organizations. "He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions around bin Laden," Wright reported in the definitive profile of Zawahiri, published in the New Yorker in September 2002. "According to the Islamist attorney Montasser al-Zayat, 'Zawahiri completely controlled bin Laden. The largest share of bin Laden's financial support went to Zawahiri and the Jihad organization."
Later, Wright describes the founding of al Qaeda.
Toward the end of 1989, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at a mujahideen camp. A Sudanese fighter named Jamal al-Fadl was among the participants, and he later testified about the event in a New York courtroom during one of the trials connected with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in East Africa. According to Fadl, the meeting was attended by ten men--four or five of them Egyptians, including Zawahiri. Fadl told the court that the chairman of the meeting, an Iraqi known as Abu Ayoub, proposed the formation of a new organization that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. There was some dispute about the name, but ultimately the new organization came to be called Al Qaeda--the Base. The alliance was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual mujahideen and established groups, and was dominated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The ultimate boss, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the checkbook.
Once again, it's worth dwelling on these facts for a moment. In 1989, Ayman al Zawahiri attended the founding meeting of al Qaeda. He was literally present at the creation, and his EIJ "dominated" the new organization headed by Osama bin Laden.
In the early 1990s, Zawahiri and bin Laden moved their operations to Sudan. After a fundraising trip to the United States in the spring of 1993, Zawahiri returned to Sudan where, again according to Wright, he "began working more closely with bin Laden, and most of the Egyptian members of Islamic Jihad went on the Al Qaeda payroll." Although some members of EIJ were skeptical of bin Laden and his global aspirations, Zawahiri sought a de facto merger with al Qaeda. One of his top assistants would later say Zawahiri had told him that "joining with bin Laden [was] the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization alive."
Again, at precisely the same time Zawahiri was "joining with bin Laden," the spring of 1993, he was being funded by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As Zawahiri's jihadists trained in al Qaeda camps in Sudan, his representative to Iraq was planning "commando operations" against the Egyptian government with the IIS.
Another captured Iraqi document from early 1993 "reports on contact with a large number of terrorist groups in the region, including those that maintained an office or liaison in Iraq." In the same folder is a memo from Saddam Hussein to a member of his Revolutionary Council ordering the formation of "a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil, especially Somalia." A second memo to the director of the IIS, instructs him to revise the plan for "operations inside Somalia."
More recently, captured "annual reports" of the IIS reveal support for terrorist organizations in the months leading up the U.S. invasion in March 2003. According to the Pentagon study, "the IIS hosted thirteen conferences in 2002 for a number of Palestinian and other organizations, including delegations from the Islamic Jihad Movement and the Director General for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz." The same annual report "also notes that among the 699 passports, renewals and other official documentation that the IIS issued, many were issued to known members of terrorist organizations."
The Pentagon study goes on to describe captured documents that instruct the IIS to maintain contact with all manner of Arab movement and others that "reveal that later IIS activities went beyond just maintaining contact." Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi regime's General Military Intelligence Directorate "was training Sudanese fighters inside Iraq."
The second section of the Pentagon study also discusses captured documents related to the Islamic Resistance organization in Kurdistan from 1998 and 1999. The documents show that the Iraqi regime provided "financial and moral support" to members of the group, which would later become part of the al Qaeda affiliate in the region, Ansar al Islam.
The third section of the Pentagon study is called "Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases." One of the cases is that of the Army of Muhammad, the al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain. A series of memoranda order an Iraqi Intelligence operative in Bahrain to explore a relationship with its leaders. On July 9, 2001, the agent reports back: "Information available to us is that the group is under the wings of bin Laden. They receive their directions from Yemen. Their objectives are the same as bin Laden." Later, he lists the organization's objectives.
Jihad in the name of God
Striking the embassies and other Jewish and American interests anywhere in the world.
Attacking the American and British military bases in the Arab land.
Striking American embassies and interests unless the Americans pull out their forces from the Arab lands and discontinue their support for Israel.
Disrupting oil exports [to] the Americans from Arab countries and threatening tankers carrying oil to them.
A separate memo reveals that the Army of Muhammad has requested assistance from Iraq. The study authors summarize the response by writing, "the local IIS station has been told to deal with them in accordance with priorities previously established. The IIS agent goes on to inform the Director that 'this organization is an offshoot of bin Laden, but that their objectives are similar but with different names that can be a way of camouflaging the organization.'"
We never learn what those "previous priorities" were and thus what, if anything, came of these talks. But it is instructive that the operative in Bahrain understood the importance of disguising relations with al Qaeda and that the director of IIS, knowing that the group was affiliated with bin Laden and sought to attack Americans, seemed more interested in continuing the relationship than in ending it.
The fourth and final section of the Pentagon study is called "The Business of Terror." The authors write: "An example of indirect cooperation is the movement led by Osama bin Laden. During the 1990s, both Saddam and bin Laden wanted the West, particularly the United States, out of Muslim lands (or in the view of Saddam, the "Arab nation"). . . . In pursuit of their own separate but surprisingly 'parallel' visions, Saddam and bin Laden often found a common enemy in the United States."
They further note that Saddam's security organizations and bin Laden's network
were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much of the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historical narrative that promised a return to a glorious past. That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean they saw themselves in that light. Nevertheless, these similarities created more than just the appearance of cooperation. Common interests, even without common cause, increased the aggregate terror threat.
As much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20, or 50 years. The authors themselves acknowledge the limits of their work.
In fact, there are several captured Iraqi documents that have been authenticated by the U.S. government that were not included in the study but add to the picture it sketches. One document, authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and first reported on 60 Minutes, is dated March 28, 1992. It describes Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset "in good contact" with the IIS station in Syria.
Another Iraqi document, this one from the mid-1990s, was first reported in the New York Times on June 25, 2004. Authenticated by a Pentagon and intelligence working group, the document was titled "Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals." The working group concluded that it "corroborates and expands on previous reporting" on contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. It revealed that a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of the IIS in 1994 and reported that bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan. Bin Laden, according to the Iraqi document, was then "approached by our side" after "presidential approval" for the liaison was given. The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995. The document further states that bin Laden "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative"--a comment that suggests the possibility had been discussed.
Bin Laden requested that Iraq's state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this. The al Qaeda leader also proposed "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. There is no Iraqi response provided in the documents. When bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis sought "other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location." The IIS memo directs that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."
In another instance, the new Pentagon study makes reference to captured documents detailing the Iraqi relationship with Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law. But the Pentagon study does not mention the most significant element of those documents, first reported in these pages. In a memo from Ambassador Salah Samarmad to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, we learn that the Iraqi regime had been funding and equipping Abu Sayyaf, which had been responsible for a series of high-profile kidnappings. The Iraqi operative informs Baghdad that such support had been suspended. "The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them." That support would resume soon enough, and shortly before the war a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat named Hisham Hussein would be expelled from the Philippines after his cell phone number appeared on an Abu Sayyaf cell phone used to detonate a bomb.
What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.
Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.
What good is the truth if nobody knows it?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Are you saying you'd feel more confident having Billary or Obama handle a crisis?
McCain warns al Qaeda might try and tilt US election against him
March 14, 2008, 10:22 PM (GMT+02:00)
John McCain worries about al Qaeda on campaign trail
John McCain worries about al Qaeda on campaign trail
Republican presidential candidate John McCain spoke Friday in Philadelphia of his worry that anti-American extremists might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraqi to try and tilt the election against him.
“And I know they pay attention because of intercepts,” said McCain, adding: “We still have the most lethal explosive devices coming across the border form Iran into Iraq. We still have suicide bombers landing at the airport in Damascus and coming into Iraq as we speak. So I would not be surprised if they made an attempt. I believe we can counter most of it as we are countering them,” said the Republican presidential candidate.
I don't know, but it seems as if an attack were to occur it would bolster his chances as he's vastly more experienced in foreign policy
Same as the Bin Laden tapes boosting Bush's profile before the last election
Every comment you make just serves to make you look dumber
The Goreites whole hypnotises is that the carbon in the air form industrial pollution is causing the temps to go up
That means that ONLY recent temp history is relevant because it's only recently that the greenhouse gases have reached very high levels due to industrialization
So, it's only recent trends that matter, not 100 years ago
Thus, this winter being the coldest recently is a big deal. Also given the other data suggesting that we may be entering a cooling period as solar activity slows down
But, it's 68 in your living room, so none of it matters, right?
Climate is a long term trend
translation: Tic will doggedly hold onto his faith in human caused global warming even as he dons his parka in August
LOLOL
Again you give stupid examples of anecdotal evidence to refute a report by a recognized authority- NOAA
NOAA: Coolest Winter Since 2001 for U.S., Globe
March 13, 2008
The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In terms of winter precipitation, Pacific storms, bringing heavy precipitation to large parts of the West, produced high snowpack that will provide welcome runoff this spring.
A complete analysis is available online.
U.S. Winter Temperature Highlights
2007 Statewide temperature chart.
+ High Resolution (Credit: NOAA)
* In the contiguous United States, the average winter temperature was 33.2°F (0.6°C), which was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century average – yet still ranks as the coolest since 2001. It was the 54th coolest winter since national records began in 1895.
* Winter temperatures were warmer than average from Texas to the Southeast and along the Eastern Seaboard, while cooler-than-average temperatures stretched from much of the upper Midwest to the West Coast.
* With higher-than-average temperatures in the Northeast and South, the contiguous U.S. winter temperature-related energy demand was approximately 1.7 percent lower than average, based on NOAA’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index.
Now lets see ya discredit NOAA's credentials
Barack Obama: Crook.
I think we've moved past "the appearance of impropriety."
By Leon H Wolf
It appears that Barack Obama, allegedly decent guy and agent of "change" in Washington, requested an earmark in 2006 for $1 million taxpayer dollars for the hospital where his wife works. Said hospital, by the way, gave Michelle Obama a huge raise (nearly $200,000, more than doubling her salary) in 2005 after Barack got elected to the United States Senate. Now, I know that there are lots of ways to talk about transactions like this involving public officials - quid pro quo, etc., but I prefer to call a crook a crook and just say that we're dealing with good, old fashioned, public corruption here.
I am having an especially hard time distinguishing Obama's actions here from those of, say, Duke Cunningham, who is currently in prison. I suppose you might say that Obama injected some more efficiency into the process by eliminating the middle man, but while I'm a big fan of efficient markets, generally speaking, I happen to think that there should not be any sort of market at all for the votes of public officials.
Perhaps these silly notions of ethical propriety are what Obama intends to "change" if he is elected President. If that's the case, I'll take the status quo, thanks. Without the quid.
Here's an interesting take steph:
"Jeremiah Wright, Steinem & Primacy of Victimhood
Okay, got lots of emails from folks decrying the “racism of Barack Obama’s pastor,” Jeremiah Wright, in this video.
I watched the video twice, and I don’t know if I’m seeing racism. I think I’m seeing anger, some of it reality-based and quite justified, some of it politically expedient for emotional manipulation, and some of it just strange.
“Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and in a culture that was controlled by rich white people [Romans rich and Italian, therefore European/white]”
Well, we can’t really know Jesus’ skin tone, can we? I’d expect it to be rather olive, but who knows? I’d also expect the Roman’s skin tone to be “olive” as well, so this is a strange extrapolation. Wright has to stretch to make his point (Italians=European) so I don’t find it particularly convincing. It’s one of those constructs and connections that you really have to want to make, I guess.
“Barack doesn’t fit the mold…folks are hating on Barack Obama [because] he ain’t white, he ain’t rich and he ain’t privileged.”
Well, rich, white and privileged has been “the mold” for many American presidents, but not all of them. John Adams did not come from wealth nor did Richard Nixon or Harry Truman, or Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton. But they have all been white, and (at least in terms of education) some of them were “privileged.” (And one can argue that there has, historically, been a measure of “privilege” in being white in America, just as there has, historically, been some “privilege” to being Protestant in Northern Ireland; if there were three jobs, and four men looking for them, the Protestants would be hired before the Catholics.)
Obama may only be half “European”, but he is wealthy he and his wife have had the privilege of being educated at ivy-league universities, which open big doors. Hillary is white, and she’s wealthy too, and she’s attended those same schools of privilege, so this seems a wash.
“Hillary fits the mold…Hillary never had a cab whiz past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong color, Hillary never had to worry about being pulled over in her car as a black man driving in the wrong neighborhood…Barack knows what it is like living in a country controlled by rich white people…Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger; Hillary has never had her people defined as non-persons; Hillary ain’t never had to work twice as hard to get accepted by the rich white folk who run everything, or to get a passing grade…”
There is no denying that Wright is describing a shameful truth here, and much of this is sadly a “current” truth in America. Hillary has been called plenty of names, though, and she has seen her sex belittled as inferior to the male sex and women of her era probably felt just as challenged as minorities to be “twice as good” as their bosses and professors. The daily experience of any black American probably is harsher than the experience of a white woman, but I am not really sure why that is supposed to matter, and so this is striking me as less a racist rant than a sort of duel to see who can claim the greatest victimhood.
“I am so glad I have a God who knows what it is to be a poor black man in a country and a culture [controlled by whites etc]. He taught me, Jesus did, how to love my enemies; Jesus taught me how to love the hell out of my enemies and not be reduced to their level of hatred, bigotry and small-mindedness. Hillary ain’t never had her own people say she ain’t white enough…Jesus…never let their hatred dampen his hope…
Well, Hillary has certainly had her enemies say she is not “feminine” enough, but I still don’t know what it has to do with anything. Do I believe that Wright believes Jesus has taught him to love his enemies? Sure. That stuff tends to be pretty complicated and mysterious so I won’t gainsay it.
So, do I think Wright is being racist, here? To be honest, no I really don’t. I think he is highlighting some truly egregious truth in the United States while exploiting some legitimate grievances to encourage a victim’s mindset; he’s playing to the cheap seats with some of this, to be sure, but so did Gloria Steinem when she supported Hillary by writing that if Obama were a woman with his resume, he’d never be where he is.
What is going on here is a profound slight-of-hand, or an illusionist’s expert misdirection. You are being told to think you’re seeing one thing, when you’re actually seeing another. Except for the fact that whoever released these tapes has played it, this sermon would not be an example of a “race card” being thrown. It’s a victim card. This is about the Primacy of Victimhood over all else. And frankly, I think if white America falls for this and starts freaking out over Wright’s “racism” then they will be submitting to a HUGE and insidious manipulation by the Clinton team, who, as Instapundit suggests, may reasonably be assumed to have brought this forward.
Both Democrat candidates have been playing victim cards in their turn, for months. Yesterday Geraldine Ferraro upped the ante by playing the gender and reverse-racism victim card.
These are not “racist” or “sexist” gambits being played by Wright or Steinem, but appeals to emotion, and appeals to emotion are too often used to gloss over a lack of substance, or so I have been told by my correspondents on the left, lo these many years, as they accuse the GOP of governing on “fear,” (because terrorism is not a real threat).
And while the victim card appeals to emotions, it tends to noisily set off rage in those who listen and perceive themselves as being identified as the “enemy.” So everyone gets emotional, everyone starts yelling, and no one is listening or making any sense.
The victim card is an odd card to play in a presidential race; victimhood in and of itself seems like a strange theme for either presidential candidate to embrace. “Vote for me; I’m the bigger victim and this qualifies me to…”what, exactly, lead the wailing?
Maybe if the next president can say to AlQaeda, “don’t fly into our buildings or bomb our subways, because I’ve been ill-treated by the man,” our enemies will put away all their flight manuals and bomb-belts and the world will finally “live as one,” yeah…that’s the ticket!
What a way to run an election, or divide a nation. This is using a massive and annihilating cannon to destroy an opponent when something much less destructive could do the trick."
http://theanchoressonline.com/2008/03/13/jeremiah-wright-gloria-steinem-victimhood/
Soon to be followed by the bursting of the commercial real estate market.
Same scenario on a much grander scale
and never had any reason to do so.
That's flat out silly
The reason is to play to the fears and racism that still exists in many white groups. IT couldn't be more obvious
The charges of racism never came up till Bills racist comments in SC
Ferraros are another example. They know exactly what they are doing and it's all calculated to appeal to white racism. The ironic thing is their previous good standing in the black community
Obama made it a clear point to NOT mention race as he didn't want to be pigeonholed as the black candidate
How could they NOT respond to Ferraro's gutter sniping?
I think the difference is that his attacks are based on legitimate policy or ethical differences
Billary's playing the race card is just the same old dirty politics- though it's usually used by repubs against dems
Carlyle Capital: Collateral Damage
by Jean-Claude Kommer
Lenders are likely to take possession of Carlyle's remaining assets after it was unable to reach a mutually beneficial agreement to stabilize its financing.
The Beeb is not normally my first stop for financial commentary, but Robert Peston has an interesting take on the Carlyle fund and the Fed plan to save the world [again…]:
Well, the point of Tuesday’s dramatic $200bn intervention by the Federal Reserve in mortgage-backed markets was to stabilize the price of US government agency AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed securities and – by implication – to encourage the big banks NOT to seize assets in the way they’ve been doing at Carlyle.
Right now, it’s not clear that the Fed’s medicine has worked.
In fact, it’s arguable that the banks’ seizure of Carlyle’s $20bn-odd in assets has actually been encouraged by the Fed’s mortgages-for-Treasuries offer. Because the Fed’s new lending emergency lending facility allows the banks to swap mortgage-backed debt for Treasury Bills in a way that Carlyle could not do.
So it would be rational for the banks to take Carlyle’s assets and exchange them for top-quality, liquid US government bonds, rather than leave loans in place to a business, Carlyle, whose assets remained highly illiquid.
If that’s the case, there will be some very scared people in hedge-fund land today. Hedge funds that have borrowed from banks against the security of mortgage-backed debt could be about to see their assets sucked into the banking system and their businesses vanish.
It’s a process known as de-leveraging the global financial economy, yet another manifestation of the puncturing of the debt bubble.
Collateral damage. It makes perfect sense.
They're thinking a step ahead to Penn.
They bait Obama into a race fight and he gets pegged as the "black candidate"- a tag he's been very careful about avoiding.
It's cynical politics at it's ugliest
And this all coming from Billary who previously was lauded for his understanding of the black people
Thinking people might question who they aren't willing to throw under the bus to return to power.
I'm sure the dem party is not very happy with her playing the race card either
Reverse Discrimination
By George Neumayr
Published 3/12/2008 12:08:36 AM
Left-wing paternalists regard themselves as architects of racial progress, guarding and guiding blacks along the path of success -- a role in which they assume to stand forever at the head of the march. But what happens when blacks overtake their enlightened white helpers? All hell breaks loose and the mask of progress drops to reveal the stricken faces of the white avant-garde .
Geraldine Ferraro's remarks confirm that beneath left-wing paternalism lurks considerable racism. "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said to the Daily Breeze. "He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."
Since liberalism is not based upon natural justice but willfulness, it never fails to devour its supposed beneficiaries. Ferraro's condescension captures the tone of paternalistic liberalism perfectly. Its "victims" should know their place and plot their ascent according to the progressive charts set up by the white liberal establishment.
We'll let you know, Barack, when it is your time to win -- that's been the tacit theme of the Clinton campaign all along. Such is the generosity of Lady Bountiful she'll even let him serve as her apprentice in the VP chair for eight years.
But chaos has erupted and the plantation progressives don't know what to do, except to blurt out pent-up racial resentments. Then, the victims, whom they spent the last few decades training in hair-trigger racial sensitivity, turn on them in righteous fury, detecting nuances of racism in everything from Andrew Cuomo's description of Obama's press conferences as "shuck and jive" events to Bill Clinton's belittling Jesse Jackson comparison to Ferraro's sniffing at his "luck."
IF, AS FERRARO SAYS, the country is "caught up in the concept" of embracing an unqualified black president, that's because she and her friends propagandized Americans in that notion a long time ago. Ferraro's whining is the grousing of a propagandist whose student has surpassed her.
Obama can throw in the faces of left-wing paternalists all their most cherished claims, starting with the idea, advanced by Sandra Day O'Connor among others, that in America's suffering sweepstakes black males enjoy pride of place over white women. Who should get into Michigan's law school first? A black male? Or a white woman? Well, for the next 25 years or so, spitballed O'Connor, let's give it to the black applicant. Isn't it a little late for Ferraro to be complaining about reverse discrimination?
Hillary's definition of "experience" presupposes a tenet of conservatism, that excellence and merit trump all other considerations. But that's not the definition of experience she normally endorses and for the eight years her husband was in office she treated it as de facto evidence of racism. Equality by any which way is more important than experience, their policies assumed. Where has the Clintons' commitment to a White House that "looked like America" gone?
Under left-wing paternalism until now, race alone conferred important experience on a person -- an argument that Obama has not made but could make to silence his progressive overlords. Who cares, he could say to them, about thin resumes in the age of affirmative action and egalitarianism?
If people are voting for Obama because it allows them to place a halo of goodness over their heads, that too derives from the propaganda of paternalistic liberalism. Ferraro's own entrance into national politics soared then sunk upon such stupidity. Walter Mondale was testing the enlightenment of the American people by placing her on his ticket and in those cold and reactionary Reagan years the people failed his test.
The radical chic of which Tom Wolfe wrote has caught up with the paternalistic left, producing new fodder for farce. As they held Park Avenue parties for black activists and bankrolled their candidacies to safe and obscure posts, they could appear progressive while remaining safely in control. But the role of following blacks rather than leading them is a little too discombobulating for them to handle. And so they are reduced to grumbling like racists at the "luck" of a black candidate winning yet another state in the South.
Hey, even YOUR boy Keith Olberman sees it for what it was:
Olbermann: Ferraro Statement 'Clearly Racist: Are We in South Africa?'
Photo of Mark Finkelstein.
By Mark Finkelstein | March 11, 2008 - 21:40 ET
Forget the popcorn: it could take a case of Cognac and a humidor of good cigars to fully savor the warfare that's breaking out in Dem ranks. Who could have predicted that Keith Olbermann would be accusing a Clinton team member of a "clearly racist" statement evoking the apartheid era in South Africa? And yet . . .
On this evening's Countdown, Olbermann was discussing with Newsweek's Howard Fineman Geraldine Ferraro's remarks about Obama and the way the Clinton campaign, far from denouncing her, sent out campaign manager Maggie Williams to try to turn the tables, accusing Obama of "false, personal and politically calculated attacks" for having the audacity to complain.
View video here.
HOWARD FINEMAN: It's clear to me the Clinton people aren't going to back down. As you saw, they sent Maggie Williams out with a statement to defend Geraldine Ferraro who's defending herself. So this is the fight the Clintons want, the way they want to fight it.
KEITH OLBERMANN: So the senator wants a clearly racist, clearly equal-opportunity-is-not-a-good-thing, that's-the-only-reason-he's-here kind of statement interjected into the campaign? It's not just somebody not judging a negative to something? This right now, this reaction right now is intentional?
And a bit later, discussing the Clinton campaign strategy.
OLBERMANN: Does it not have disaster written all over it, or are we living in South Africa?
Love the smell of MSM napalm in the evening?
[Recommend story on Digg.com]
All these responses are too funny- and typical of liberal hypocrisy
I am not a republican- or Bush fan.
Rather than deal with obvious disgusting nature of Ferraro's race baiting, the libs use their typical tools- oil is $108/gallon- how can we deal with racism?? Well, the discussion was specifically about her racist comments- are we only to discuss topics that the libs feel are worthwhile. Why can't the libs just acknowledge her comments were despicable?
Then, because I'm not a dem I can't even talk about "their" candidates and sleazy backers doing their dirty work
Then, because the dems have more elected blacks, it makes them above criticism for their racist actions
Her actions were clearly meant to stimulate the racism in this country and garner the votes of those backward people
Why not have the integrity to admit that her actions were approved by Billary and meant to encourage racism
Tell y what, just like in SC, blacks know the code words and viewed the racist attack for what it was and voted accordingly. If Billary is able to steal the nomination, they will lose almost the entire black vote
Obabm got almost 100% of the black vote in Miss.. Seems like they are able to understand the politics of sleaze used here and act accordingly- it's pathetic that libs let their hope for winning the white house blind them
Of course both sides do sleazy things- like Rove v McCain in the SC primary- and I criticized that
So you're Ok voting for a candidate that preys on racism of the lowest type to get elected?
I guess integrity and ethics don't enter into your voting equation
You think Spitzer should stay in office then?
No because it's not to Obama's advantage to play the race card.
He made a point of very specifically avoiding his race exactly because he didn't want to be pigeonholed as the "black" candidate.
Please cite an instance of him playing the race card
Meanwhile here's Geraldine:
"Ferraro to Obama: Drop Dead, Racist.
Yes, I'm paraphrasing.
By Moe Lane
But not by that much. (Via Glenn Reynolds)
"I have to tell you that what I find is offensive is that everytime somebody says something about the campaign, you're accused of being racist," Ferraro told Fox News Channel.
" 'Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?' "
Oh, that's just fine, Ms. Ferraro. Keep it up: we've got weeks and weeks to go before Pennsylvania. What? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just going to be over here, watching Democrats scream "racist" at each other while sharpening their knives. You keep on doing what you're doing.
Moe Lane"
The dem party better realize that if Billary gets the nod, they will lose almost the entire black vote. They won't vote for McCain, but they sure as hell won't vote for that bitch either
" 'Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?' "
Obama was only criticizing her racist remarks. HE has successfully refuted almsot every claim against him by using facts. He also did a number on her supposed foreign policy " experience.
Can you not see how her statement is playing to the worst kind of racism?
Susie, given Ferraro's performance do you STILL think that Billary isn't playing the race card??
You're confusing two issues
Lowering taxes ALWAYS results in an INCREASE in tax revenue
The over spending by the Congress is a separate matter
If Billary and Obama get their plans pushed through ( a snowball in hells chance )- raising taxes and increasing spending on health care etc etc you will see the worst possible scenario
A Ferraro flashback
"If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race," she said.
Really. The cite is an April 15, 1988 Washington Post story (byline: Howard Kurtz), available only on Nexis.
Here's the full context:
Placid of demeanor but pointed in his rhetoric, Jackson struck out repeatedly today against those who suggest his race has been an asset in the campaign. President Reagan suggested Tuesday that people don't ask Jackson tough questions because of his race. And former representative Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that because of his "radical" views, "if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."
Asked about this at a campaign stop in Buffalo, Jackson at first seemed ready to pounce fiercely on his critics. But then he stopped, took a breath, and said quietly, "Millions of Americans have a point of view different from" Ferraro's.
Discussing the same point in Washington, Jackson said, "We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got North to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."
Yeah. letting people keep more of their own money is just a horrible idea
Geraldine on Obama
Geraldine Ferraro is in the news. Her statement was not a gaffe. It was very deliberate, based upon a great deal of campaign research. This is part of the Clinton strategy. Clinton, through Ferraro, is once again making Obama's skin color an issue for blue collar voters, this time in Pennsylvania.
It's disgusting and shameful. What's more, there is a great deal known about Obama that actually is troubling. But the Clinton campaign knows that Obama's blackness pulls a greater punch than obscure (to Union Joe Sixpack) stuff. Particularly when their economic "plans" are identical: Free trade bad, raise taxes on the "rich." Obama's skin color is Hillary's weapon, her toadies have free reign to make it an issue while Hillary can play dumb.
It will be very interesting to read the insider accounts of this. The books should be hitting the store shelves just about a year from now.
(Thanks, Glenn.)
posted by Lou Minatti @ 7:16 PM
Washington Prowler
First Spitzer, Now Stryker
By The Prowler
Published 3/11/2008 10:20:16 AM
Lost amid the Eliot Spitzer scandal is a front-page story from the Washington Times that may be just as devastating to Democrats.
According to House Democrat leadership aides, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked advisers to examine FEC and other records to determine if Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers may have steered money from an influential Michigan family to other Democrats. The Stryker family of Kalamazoo, Mich., made its fortune from the company that bears its name, though members of the family are not involved in the day-to-day operations. The Stryker Corp. has had issues with federal authorities, including a possible investigation by the Department of Justice into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Subsidiaries of Stryker cut a deal with a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey that caught the attention of Conyers, as well as several New Jersey House members, who it turned out have received thousands of dollars in political donations from physicians and organizations with ties to Stryker. Now Conyers has opened an investigation into the matter, which includes demanding testimony of former Attorney General John Ashcroft at a Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing.
The Stryker family has, according to FEC records, pushed more than $17 million toward Democrat candidates and causes over the years. "The concern is that if Conyers is involved directly with this investigation, and he was steering money from the Stryker family to colleagues for their campaigns and they are sitting on the same committee that is undertaking the investigation, you have more than an appearance of conflict of interest, you have a conflict of interest," says a leadership aide for Pelosi. "In our current environment, we can't afford to have too many more of these situations."
The aide pointed to the fact that both Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. and Bill Pascrell Jr., who requested that Conyers look into the Stryker Corp. deal with U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, had extensive financial ties to the medical equipment industry and lobby. Combined, the two Jersey boys have raised tens of thousands from the industry. "Both men have put us in an awkward situation, and Conyers' decision to pursue this matter further has put us in deeper," says the aide. "Speaker Pelosi is concerned and has us monitoring the situation."
Team Obama Hits Clinton on Experience Claims
Posted by TOM BEVAN | E-Mail This | Permalink | Email Author
The Obama campaign unloads on Hillary Clinton's "experience" with this memo by Greg Craig offering a point-by-point rebuttal of her claims:
To: Interested Parties
From: Greg Craig, former director, Policy Planning Office, U.S. State Department
RE: Senator Clinton's claim to be experienced in foreign policy: Just words?
DA: March 11, 2008
When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton's argument that she has passed "the Commander- in-Chief test" is simply not supported by her record.
There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton played an important domestic policy role when she was First Lady. It is well known, for example, that she led the failed effort to pass universal health insurance. There is no reason to believe, however, that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration. She did not sit in on National Security Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security staff. She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign governments, whether they were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis. As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue - not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.
When asked to describe her experience, Senator Clinton has cited a handful of international incidents where she says she played a central role. But any fair-minded and objective judge of these claims - i.e., by someone not affiliated with the Clinton campaign - would conclude that Senator Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated.
Northern Ireland:
Senator Clinton has said, "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland." It is a gross overstatement of the facts for her to claim even partial credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland. She did travel to Northern Ireland, it is true. First Ladies often travel to places that are a focus of U.S. foreign policy. But at no time did she play any role in the critical negotiations that ultimately produced the peace. As the Associated Press recently reported, "[S]he was not directly involved in negotiating the Good Friday peace accord." With regard to her main claim that she helped bring women together, she did participate in a meeting with women, but, according to those who know best, she did not play a pivotal role. The person in charge of the negotiations, former Senator George Mitchell, said that "[The First Lady] was one of many people who participated in encouraging women to get involved, not the only one."
News of Senator Clinton's claims has raised eyebrows across the ocean. Her reference to an important meeting at the Belfast town hall was debunked. Her only appearance at the Belfast City Hall was to see Christmas lights turned on. She also attended a 50-minute meeting which, according to the Belfast Daily Telegraph's report at the time, "[was] a little bit stilted, a little prepared at times." Brian Feeney, an Irish author and former politician, sums it up: "The road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn’t on it."
Bosnia:
Senator Clinton has pointed to a March 1996 trip to Bosnia as proof that her foreign travel involved a life-risking mission into a war zone. She has described dodging sniper fire. While she did travel to Bosnia in March 1996, the visit was not a high-stakes mission to a war zone. On March 26, 1996, the New York Times reported that "Hillary Rodham Clinton charmed American troops at a U.S.O. show here, but it didn't hurt that the singer Sheryl Crow and the comedian Sinbad were also on the stage."
Kosovo:
Senator Clinton has said, "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." It is true that, as First Lady, she traveled to Macedonia and visited a Kosovar refugee camp. It is also true that she met with government officials while she was there. First Ladies frequently meet with government officials. Her claim to have "negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo," however, is not true. Her trip to Macedonia took place on May 14, 1999. The borders were opened the day before, on May 13, 1999.
The negotiations that led to the opening of the borders were accomplished by the people who ordinarily conduct negotiations with foreign governments - U.S. diplomats. President Clinton's top envoy to the Balkans, former Ambassador Robert Gelbard, said, "I cannot recall any involvement by Senator Clinton in this issue." Ivo Daalder worked on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council and wrote a definitive history of the Kosovo conflict. He recalls that "she had absolutely no role in the dirty work of negotiations."
Rwanda:
Last year, former President Clinton asserted that his wife pressed him to intervene with U.S. troops to stop the Rwandan genocide. When asked about this assertion, Hillary Clinton said it was true. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that this ever happened. Even those individuals who were advocating a much more robust U.S. effort to stop the genocide did not argue for the use of U.S. troops. No one recalls hearing that Hillary Clinton had any interest in this course of action. Based on a fair and thorough review of National Security Council deliberations during those tragic months, there is no evidence to suggest that U.S. military intervention was ever discussed. Prudence Bushnell, the Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for Africa, has recalled that there was no consideration of U.S. military intervention.
At no time prior to her campaign for the presidency did Senator Clinton ever make the claim that she supported intervening militarily to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is noteworthy that she failed to mention this anecdote - urging President Clinton to intervene militarily in Rwanda - in her memoirs. President Clinton makes no mention of such a conversation with his wife in his memoirs. And Madeline Albright, who was Ambassador to the United Nations at the time, makes no mention of any such event in her memoirs.
Hillary Clinton did visit Rwanda in March 1998 and, during that visit, her husband apologized for America's failure to do more to prevent the genocide.
China:
Senator Clinton also points to a speech that she delivered in Beijing in 1995 as proof of her ability to answer a 3 AM crisis phone call. It is strange that Senator Clinton would base her own foreign policy experience on a speech that she gave over a decade ago, since she so frequently belittles Barack Obama’s speeches opposing the Iraq War six years ago. Let there be no doubt: she gave a good speech in Beijing, and she stood up for women's rights. But Senator Obama's opposition to the War in Iraq in 2002 is relevant to the question of whether he, as Commander-in-Chief, will make wise judgments about the use of military force. Senator Clinton's speech in Beijing is not.
Senator Obama's speech opposing the war in Iraq shows independence and courage as well as good judgment. In the speech that Senator Clinton says does not qualify him to be Commander in Chief, Obama criticized what he called "a rash war . . . a war based not on reason, but on passion, not on principle, but on politics." In that speech, he said prophetically: "[E]ven a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." He predicted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would "fan the flames of the Middle East," and "strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda." He urged the United States first to "finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda."
If the U.S. government had followed Barack Obama's advice in 2002, we would have avoided one of the greatest foreign policy catastrophes in our nation's history. Some of the most "experienced" men in national security affairs - Vice President Cheney and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others - led this nation into that catastrophe. That lesson should teach us something about the value of judgment over experience. Longevity in Washington, D.C. does not guarantee either wisdom of judgment.
Conclusion:
The Clinton campaign's argument is nothing more than mere assertion, dramatized in a scary television commercial with a telephone ringing in the middle of the night. There is no support for or substance in the claim that Senator Clinton has passed "the Commander-in-Chief test." That claim - as the TV ad - consists of nothing more than making the assertion, repeating it frequently to the voters and hoping that they will believe it.
On the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation - the War in Iraq - Senator Clinton voted in support of a resolution entitled "The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of U.S. Military Force Against Iraq." As she cast that vote, she said: "This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make - any vote that may lead to war should be hard - but I cast it with conviction." In this campaign, Senator Clinton has argued - remarkably - that she wasn't actually voting for war, she was voting for diplomacy. That claim is no more credible than her other claims of foreign policy experience. The real tragedy is that we are still living with the terrible consequences of her misjudgment. The Bush Administration continues to cite that resolution as its authorization - like a blank check - to fight on with no end in sight.
Barack Obama has a very simple case. On the most important commander in chief test of our generation, he got it right, and Senator Clinton got it wrong. In truth, Senator Obama has much more foreign policy experience than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan had when they were elected. Senator Obama has worked to confront 21st century challenges like proliferation and genocide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He possesses the personal attributes of a great leader - an even temperament, an open-minded approach to even the most challenging problems, a willingness to listen to all views, clarity of vision, the ability to inspire, conviction and courage.
And Barack Obama does not use false charges and exaggerated claims to play politics with national security.
Ferraro still shocked, shocked! to find identity politics in play
posted at 11:05 am on March 11, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Usually, when a politician sticks a foot in her mouth, she endeavors to remove it as quickly and quietly as possible. Not Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major-party presidential ticket, who rode Walter Mondale’s nomination to a big 1984 win — of one state. A week after asserting that Barack Obama would still be cooling his heels in the Senate if not for his race, she continued to sound that theme on behalf of her candidate, Hillary Clinton:
When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro’s comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.
“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.
“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
Remember this moment when Obama wins the nomination and begins to complain about the criticism from Republicans. The Democrats will accuse John McCain and the GOP of race-baiting, and of trying to stir racial animosity to defeat Obama. Ferraro’s repeated exhortations along these same lines, and Democratic silence on her tactics, will speak volumes when the same people accuse Republicans of crypto-racial attacks. There’s nothing crypto about what Ferraro is doing.
As AP pointed out last month, Ferraro has no problem assuming that Democrats have supported Obama for his race. Why doesn’t Ferraro admit that Hillary’s support comes from the same kind of identity politics? Furthermore, Hillary would not even be in the Senate if not for her being Bill Clinton’s wife. Until he left the White House, Hillary had never run for political office, and without his extensive career and considerable charisma — a quality she notably lacks on the stump — she wouldn’t have won her seat in 2000.
Ferraro and the Democrats can’t make a much better case for Hillary to be President than they can for Obama. That problem will remain with them regardless of which candidate eventually wins the nomination, and despite Ferraro’s protests, neither will win it on the strength of experience or on policy. The Democrats have gone all-in for identity politics at the expense of both, and Ferraro’s complaints ring very hollow indeed.
Blowback
Clinton-backer Ferraro: Obama Where He Is Because He's Black
March 11, 2008 7:30 AM
Clinton campaign finance committee member, former vice presidential candidate, and former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-NY, told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Ca., that, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."
Of Clinton, Ferraro said that the press "has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign."
"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship. Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."
Yikes!
h/t to Mike Allen
Are they putting stupid pills in the Billary campaign office water??
Elliot Spitzer: Progressive Champion
Posted by: Jon Henke
Progressive activists, I give you your Progressive Champion, Elliot Spitzer...
Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.
This is the "visionary politician" who was setting "a moral and spiritual path to getting there". "Eliot Spitzer 2012?" Probably not.
I say that to make two points:
1. Perhaps this would be a good time for people in both parties to reevaluate the counter-productive, anti-freedom laws surrounding prostitution. I'm not sure what Gov. Spitzer was doing, but I would bet he wasn't hurting anybody else. The question of legality should be distinct from the question of propriety.
2. The Great Man Theory of political improvement is bankrupt. The fundamental problems in politics are not resolvable by electing "better" people (though that might help at the margins); the fundamental problems in politics are the structural and systemic perverse incentives to pander, bribe and capture more power, and even the best-intentioned politician cannot escape those problems.
These are the people to whom you want to give more and more monopoly power over your lives. You can trust them about as far as you could trust, say, Governor Spitzer and Senator Vitter. If you seek to replace the politicians, rather than to fundamentally change the incentives and limit their power, you're just not serious about fixing the problems.
UPDATE:
What Radley Balko says...
Sweet, sweet karmic justice. Now, let's all watch as a man who rose to power and fame by railroading people on ridiculous charges himself get tripped up by a dumb, unjust law.
[...]
MORE: To borrow from this Hit & Run comment, I nominate the following for tomorrow's NY Post headline: "Prostitute Admits Link to Elliott Spitzer; Resigns From Escort Service in Disgrace"
I don't like that people are prosecuted for prostitution. However, people do that reciprocal equivalence offers a useful gauge for determining how other people believe they should be treated. In that respect, Governor Spitzer implicitly agreed to the standard by which he is now being judged.
The only problem being is that evolution can't explain how species were created
the real myth is that species developed due to mutations/natural selection
If you had any familiarity with genetics, it would be impossible for that to occur
To believe otherwise is only based on faith- what you mock others for having
Ironic, huh?
Yeah, but Obama's not a liberal, right??
What a horrible idea that bill is
Yep, all THREE were winners. Your average 3rd grader would get that concept, but I guess it's above your head
How exactly did you show the article stating that this winter was among the coldest was not true?
By saying it was warm in Sweden??
By saying it's warm in St Louis??
How does that discount worldwide temperature analysis?
So, your ( grossly flawed ) perception of anecdotal evidence trumps the scientific data collection?
YOU just discount data collection because your tiny part of the world disputes that??
Just like you decide that Arafat didn't win a Nobel because you say so
The fact is that your thought process is really scary
Half truth for a half wit
Either it was the coldest winter in a century or not.
Not hard except for someone who cant' even fathom how Nobel's are awarded
Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens
By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 09/03/2008
Have your say Read comments
Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling "the winter from hell" has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere's greatest snow cover since 1966.
# Read more from Christopher Booker
In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call "the Winter Snow Disaster" has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.
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It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the "consensus" on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called "the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp", the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would "markedly diminish further prosperity" while having "no appreciable impact" on the Earth's warming.
This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced Nasa's Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.
On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the "peak" El Niño year 1998).
But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further "proof" that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that "more CO2 means more warming" is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.
March 10, 2008
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
So it turns out that — in the middle of a desperate primary battle — the Clintons are withholding from the public documents from the William Jefferson Clinton presidential library. This was denied back in December, when our roving national correspondent, Josh Gerstein, reported that about 2,600 pages of documents were being withheld at Mr. Clinton's direction, despite assurances from the former president's office that he "has not blocked the release of a single document from his library." That story was met by derision from the Clinton camp, which claimed that the article contained unspecified errors and misstated how the process of releasing presidential records worked.
The essential accuracy of Mr. Gerstein's dispatch was borne out over the weekend when USA Today reported that the National Archives was withholding all or some of pages of pardon-related records the newspaper requested under the Freedom of Information. USA Today said about 300 of those pages consisted of internal White House documents. The paper did not indicate what portion of the documents were withheld for national security or privacy reasons, which Mr. Clinton has no role in assessing, and what portion were withheld as confidential advice, a designation which Mr. Clinton can waive or assert at will.
The news in the USA Today report is that the pardon-related records were made available to Mr. Clinton's representative, Bruce Lindsey, and that he declined to review them, according to the library's deputy director, Emily Robison. The Clinton camp has maintained that a letter Mr. Clinton wrote to the archives in 2002 would not cause automatic withholding of documents, but rather the referral of those documents to Mr. Lindsey. So it's another debate on what the meaning of "is" is.
Complicating the issue further are statements from the National Archives on Friday that it may have interpreted Mr. Clinton's 2002 letter and an earlier version in 1994 too conservatively. "It is for that reason there was more material withheld in this pardon material than we would have if we had been reviewing this stuff later," an archives spokeswoman, Susan Cooper, told the Associated Press. Yet, when given the chance to look over what the archives had done on pardons, Mr. Clinton's team took a pass.
The Clinton camp is also persisting in its claim that Mr. Clinton has no responsibility for any withholding of records since employees of the National Archives propose the actual deletions from individual records. Last November's version of this argument was a statement from Mr. Lindsey that "Bill Clinton has not blocked the release of a single document from his Library." This is pure sophistry. The Clinton camp's claims that it has nothing to do with withholding orders being carried out at its direction and with its consent are reminiscent of King Henry's musing about Thomas Becket: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
Once Mr. Clinton has given the order, it matters little whether Mr. Lindsey or an anonymous archivist wields the black marker. The secrecy is for Mr. Clinton and, in some instances Mrs. Clinton, to defend. It doesn't matter, as Mr. Clinton and his aides invariably point out, that the ex-president has urged a broader release of his records than has any previous president. Some fans of Mr. Clinton also point out that his administration had a far more pro-disclosure policy on Freedom of Information Act issues than has President Bush's White House. Mr. Clinton also vetoed legislation that would have amounted to an American version of the United Kingdom's Official Secrets Act. None of these things excuses Mr. Clinton from being called on to justify the secrecy enveloping a growing number of his historical records amid an election.
* * *
This is an issue that won't be going away anytime soon. While the pardon records seem to have no direct connection to Senator Clinton, the roughly 11,000 pages of her White House schedules do. They are set to emerge from the archives by March 20. Mr. Lindsey and the archives have already declared that he proposed releasing more information from the schedules than the archivists, acting on Mr. Clinton's orders, initially proposed. However, it was notable that the longtime aide to Mr. Clinton did not say that he waived all of his rights under the Presidential Records Act with respect to the schedules. In November, Mr. Clinton said, "We will do our best to get all information out that's in our documents consistent with the rules of the Archives." As soon as Mrs. Clinton's schedules are out, the Clintons are likely to face another barrage of questions about whether they are offering all the transparency they have claimed.
The Epicycles of Global Warming
By James Lewis
When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.
Today that's happening with the global warming cult.
"Human-caused global warming" has now officially been re-named "climate change" to explain the inconvenient truth that the winter of 2007-8 was the coldest in a century, in spite of all those tons of "greenhouse gas" being spewed into the air from all the new factories in China and India. Worldwide temps dropped 0.6 of a degree C in one year. That may not sound like a lot, but it's more than all the ballyhooed warming in the preceding century.
If you want to see cult therapy at work, read John Tierney in The New York Times. Tierney is a skeptic who now conducts recovery therapy for the faithful on his Tierney Lab page. It looks like someone at the NYT has finally caught on to the hoax but won't admit it. So they hired Tierney to break it to the True Believers as gently as possible. Watch how the readers' blogs are resisting his gentle skepticism; it scares them. They are just Obama suckers who would have fallen for Bill Clinton, when he still had his magic mojo.
In the 1960s social psychologists studied a doomsday cult which made the big mistake of predicting the day of Armageddon. When that day came and went without crisping the world, the cult leaders didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they discovered reasons why doomsday had been postponed. It was a triumph of faith over facts. That's how stock market bubbles and busts work. It's how the jihadi Armageddon cult of Tehran will crumble, if we're all very lucky.
How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.
"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact.
The Polish astronomer Nicholas Koepernick -- called Copernicus -- pointed out that a sun-centered planetary model could get rid of all those epicycles with elegant simplicity. You only had to assume that the planets are going around the sun, not the earth. Suddenly all those cycle-on-cycle orbits simplified into near-circular ellipses. But he only saw the page proofs of his book De Revolutionibus on his death bed. He didn't want to share the fate of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, or Galileo Galilei, who was put under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII and forbidden to publish in the last years of his life. Because mobs of True Believers can get pretty nasty before they give up.
Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.
How good are the assumptions in these models? Well consider the fate of Ferenc M. Miskolczi (pronounced Ferens MISkolshee), a first-rate Hungarian mathematician, who has published a proof that "greenhouse warming" may be mathematically impossible. His proof involves long equations, but the bottom line is that the warming models assume that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. Why? Because it simplifies the math. If on the other hand, you assume the atmosphere is about 100 km thick (about 65 miles) -- which has the big advantage of being true -- the greenhouse effect disappears! No more global warming.
Miskolczi once worked for NASA, but resigned in disgust when they would not allow him to publish his work. (It appeared in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal Weather, and looks legit). So it's the global warming faithful of NASA Goddard Space Center, notably True Believer Godfather James Hansen -- who are always complaining to the media about Bush Administration censorship -- but who have ended up censoring their own scientific skeptic. Cosmic justice for NASA, you might say.
Censoring skeptics is an admission of weakness. That's why Pope had to shut up Galileo -- he couldn't win on the facts. The science establishment is now going after the Galileos of our time for the same reason, because orthodox scientists are pretty frail human beings and don't really like to be wrong. Reasoned skepticism is not something our papacy of politicized science wants to hear. Off with their heads!
That's the real global warming tragedy -- a speculative bubble in science, which happens all the time, has now been protected by the politicians, and allowed into an ugly and expanding volcanic pressure point. It is threatening to erupt and engulf climate modeling around the world. Scientists are pretty ruthless with open failure.
Politicized science is a far bigger disaster than NASA's Challenger tragedy. Americans understood the Challenger tragedy as a technical mistake at the leading edge of space exploration. What we cannot understand or forgive is corruption of scientific inquiry to push a money agenda.
When this farce is finally exposed, heads must roll. Not for being wrong about the global warming hoax, because anybody can be wrong -- but for politicizing normal scientific debate. Politicized science kills science. This is one festering boil that has to be lanced.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/
Yeah, and I guess the holocaust never happened and the rockets raining down on Israel now are just a media fabrication?
IF you watched the video of her on the BBC Hardtalk show, she just got shredded
She was in way over her head and it shows horrible judgement on Obamas part to ahve her in any position in his campaign- and that's besides any anti Israel bias
Don't you realize how dumb your "borrowing money from China" is ( oops, of course you don't, you're just a bot ) ?
The gov't has been funding day to day operations by selling treasury debt to foreign countries for decades?
What exactly do ou mean by "borrowing from China"
TIA
PS
ISn't it the consumer buying goods from China, not the government?
Hillary Clinton has claimed a significant role in the Northern Ireland peace process as part of her “experience” argument against Barack Obama. She wants to show that she can answer that ringing phone at 3 AM because she has had to conduct tough international negotiations during her husband’s administration. Now Lord Trrimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the process, says the best she can do when she answers that phone is to conduct a cheerleading chant into the receiver:
“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”
Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.
“I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.
What a shock! Hillary exaggerates her importance yet again! Of course, what else can she do? She’s had an unremarkable Senate career, whose major accomplishment has been to secure almost a half-billion dollars in pork. She has nothing else on which to run except to steal credit for the palatable actions of her husband’s administration.
This is the reason that Barack Obama has enjoyed the success he has until now. He hasn’t been twenty pounds of manure in a ten-pound bag, as the saying goes. He comes across as genuine and believable; Hillary comes across as a BS-er whom no one can trust.
Trimble may have hit on a rather devastating assessment for Hillary. She was nothing more than a cheerleader for her husband when traveling abroad, not a real player than anyone took seriously. His amused contempt for her claims speaks volumes about how the people actually involved in foreign policy and serious negotiations view her and her “experience”.
Blowback
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"
Michael Asher (Blog) - March 6, 2008 11:02 AM
A graph showing agreement of model predictions with data from both the Earth and Mars
A simplified view of the new equations governing the greenhouse effect
New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible
Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.
That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center.
After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. "I fell in love," he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.
"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.
How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.
Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.
So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.
NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.
Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."
His theory was eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in his home country of Hungary.
The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who gave statistical evidence that the Earth's response to carbon dioxide was grossly overstated. It also helps to explain why current global climate models continually predict more warming than actually measured.
The equations also answer thorny problems raised by current theory, which doesn't explain why "runaway" greenhouse warming hasn't happened in the Earth's past. The new theory predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling -- exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates.
However, not everyone is convinced. Dr. Stephen Garner, with the NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), says such negative feedback effects are "not very plausible". Reto Ruedy of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says greenhouse theory is "200 year old science" and doubts the possibility of dramatic changes to the basic theory.
Miskowlczi has used his theory to model not only Earth, but the Martian atmosphere as well, showing what he claims is an extremely good fit with observational results. For now, the data for Venus is too limited for similar analysis, but Miskolczi hopes it will one day be possible.