W's 'smoking gun' Curveball comes clean

Lest we forget the deceit and ignominy of the Dubya years...

...Plus a scandalous new revelation about the real reason for Russian spy babe Anna Chapman's deportation from the U.S.!

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion

By Jonathan Owen

April 1, 2012 | The Independent

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999.  His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true.  When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."

Another revelation in the series is the real reason why the FBI swooped on Russian spy Anna Chapman in 2010. Top officials feared the glamorous Russian agent wanted to seduce one of US President Barack Obama's inner circle. Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI's head of counterintelligence, reveals how she got "closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership... she got close enough to disturb us".

The fear that Chapman would compromise a senior US official in a "honey trap" was a key reason for the arrest and deportation of the Russian spy ring of 10 people, of which she was a part, in 2010. "We were becoming very concerned," he says. "They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue." Mr Figliuzzi refuses to name the individual who was being targeted.

Several British spies also feature in the programme, in the first time that serving intelligence officers have been interviewed on television.  In contrast to the US intelligence figures, the British spies are cloaked in darkness, their voices dubbed by actors.  BBC veteran reporter Peter Taylor, who worked for a year putting the documentary together, describes them as "ordinary people who are committed to what they do" and "a million miles" from the spies depicted in film. He adds: "What surprised me was the extent to which they work within a civil service bureaucracy. Everything has to be signed off... you've got to have authorisation signed in triplicate."

Would-be agents should abandon any Hollywood fantasies they may have, says Sonya Holt at the CIA recruitment centre. "They think it's more like the movies, that they are going to be jumping out of cars and that everyone carries a weapon... Yes we're collecting intelligence but we don't all drive fast cars. You're going to be writing reports; you're in meetings so it's not always that glamorous image of what you see in the movies."

Chevy Volt is politically conservative?

"The Chevy Volt by far is the best way to bring all American energy -- not just renewable sources, which is terrific and great for the environment -- but our coal, our nuclear, our natural gas, which we have a prodigious amount of, to our automobiles. There is no other efficient way to do it other than electrifying automobiles," said Texan and "drill baby drill guy" Lee Spieckerman.  

Spieckerman called the Volt "the iPhone of the North American automobile industry;" noted it was the European and N. American car of the year in 2011; and it's the safest car of the road.  Yet there is a "fetish" against the Volt among conservatives because of, as FOX's Steve Doocy called it, "guilt by association" with Obama.

Spieckerman speculated that the price of the Volt has to come down only 20 percent to be comparable with the Chevy Cruz.  

FOX & friends also discussed how the Chevy Volt was in development 2 years before Obama was elected, and has been championed by ex-GM CEO Bob Lutz, who is an outspoken MMGW skeptic.  

In fact, this month Lutz wrote on his Forbes blog about the Volt: "I am, sadly, coming to the conclusion that all the icons of conservatism are (shock, horror!) deliberately not telling the truth!  This saddens me, because, to this writer, conservatism IS fundamental truth.  It only damages its inherent credibility with momentarily convenient fiction."

Can the Chevy Volt help win the War on Terror?

March 26, 2012 | FOXNews

URL:  http://video.foxnews.com/v/1529856944001/

Free markets work: Privatize firefighting!

Thanks to the recession and local budget shortfalls, libertarians' dream of citizens paying for all city services on a per-usage basis is coming true.

In this case, the cost of putting out fires will be borne by insurance companies and passed onto policy holders....  The next step is privatizing the fire department.  The next step is having all fire departments purchased by insurance companies, who will put out fires only if you are a policy-holder... or agree to sign on the dotted line for a policy while your house/car/office is on fire.

That's the free market in action, baby!  No free lunch!

Passaic, N.J. Considers Charging For Emergency Calls

How Does $1,000 For House Fires And $600 For Car Fires Grab You?

March 30, 2012 | CBS 2 New York

URL:  http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/03/30/passaic-considers-charging-for-emergency-calls/

Gated community to blame for Trayvon Martin's death?

Regardless of what you think about the killing of Trayvon Martin, it's certain that if this self-appointed Dudley Doright had not been patrolling his gated community, armed, that Trayvon (who was armed with nothing but some Skittles and iced tea) would still be alive.

I've been waiting for somebody to talk about the growth of gated communities, and here we go, from an Orlando journalist.

She makes some great points. You take a walled-off community of mostly whites, combined with America's car culture and very few pedestrians or sidewalks, Florida's "stand your ground" law and lots of handguns, stir in a little racism -- OK, phobia of young black men, whatever you want to call it -- and it's the perfect recipe for this type of deadly misunderstanding. Frankly I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. With an increase in gated communities and a shrinking and aging white population, I'm sure it will happen more often. Get ready.

Florida's problematic gated communities

By Bonita Burton

March 28, 2012 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/28/opinion/burton-florida-gates/index.html?hpt=op_t1

Krugman: Right-wing paranoia now mainstream

I can confirm that all the mainstream conservatives I know go in for some or all of the crazy conspiracy theories Krugman lists below. What do you call it when otherwise reasonable, highly-functioning people lose their minds, politically? "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It's an old phenomenon, so we're still crazy after all these years. The difference is that paranoia among Republicans has gone mainstream.

Paranoia Strikes Deeper

By Paul Krugman

March 22, 2012 | New York Times

Stop, hey, what's that sound? Actually, it's the noise a great political party makes when it loses what's left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.

This claim isn't just nuts; it's a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It's the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.

Before we get to the larger implications of this endorsement, let's get the facts on gas prices straight.

First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to "skyrocket" — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.

And it's a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn't control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can't move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.

Finally, there's the paranoia, the belief that liberals in general, and Obama administration officials in particular, are trying to make driving unaffordable as part of a nefarious plot against the American way of life. And, no, I'm not exaggerating. This is what you hear even from thoroughly mainstream conservatives.

For example, last year George Will declared that the Obama administration's support for train travel had nothing to do with relieving congestion and reducing environmental impacts. No, he insisted, "the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism." Who knew that Dagny Taggart, the railroad executive heroine of "Atlas Shrugged," was a Commie?

O.K., this is all kind of funny. But it's also deeply scary.

As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it's one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation's political life; it's something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe's paranoia to receive the party's presidential nod.

And it's not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it's hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we're talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà. Meanwhile, others are attributing the recent improvement in economic news to a dastardly plot to withhold stimulus funds, releasing them just before the 2012 election. And let's not even get into health reform.

Why is this happening? At least part of the answer must lie in the way right-wing media create an alternate reality. For example, did you hear about how the cost of Obamacare just doubled? It didn't, but millions of Fox-viewers and Rush-listeners believe that it did. Naturally, people who constantly hear about the evil that liberals do are ready and willing to believe that everything bad is the result of a dastardly liberal plot. And these are the people who vote in Republican primaries.

But what about the broader electorate?

If and when he wins the nomination, Mr. Romney will try, as a hapless adviser put it, to shake his Etch A Sketch — that is, to erase the record of his pandering to the crazy right and convince voters that he's actually a moderate. And maybe he can pull it off.

But let's hope that he can't, because the kind of pandering he has engaged in during his quest for the nomination matters. Whatever Mr. Romney may personally believe, the fact is that by endorsing the right's paranoid fantasies, he is helping to further a dangerous trend in America's political life. And he should be held accountable for his actions.