CBS News Says That a Former General that is Against the Iraqi Fandango Cannot be an Expert

Olbermann: General Batiste says he resigned because he couldn't stand what former secretary of defense Rumsfeld was doing to the military, and he is still paying the price. The general, who describes himself as a diehard Republican, has been asked to leave his position as a consultant to CBS News because of that ad. That means he is free to join us tonight for an exclusive interview.

And we're honored to have you with us, General. Thank you for your time.

Batiste: Thanks, Keith. Good to be with you.

Olbermann: From Eric Shinseki, the four-star general who was criticized by, of all people, Paul Wolfowitz when he said at the start that the war would require several hundred thousand troops, do these ads that you and General Eaton and General Clark have done for VoteVets.org, there seemingly has never been this much public friction between the military and the civilian leaders. What moved you to make these ads and moved you to make them now?

Batiste: Keith, it really is quite extraordinary. I was moved to make this ad working with VoteVets because I care about our country, and I care about our soldiers and Marines and their families.

I'm a patriot, as are the rest of us in VoteVets. VoteVets is not an antiwar organization. We're focused on what's best for this country. We're focused on being successful and winning the effort against global terrorism. And we're damn sure focused on doing what's right for our great military, which, by the way, is doing incredible work in Iraq and Afghanistan. God bless them all.

Olbermann: In a piece for MSNBC.com called "America's Angriest General," Mike Hirsch from "Newsweek" says that you wish more generals would speak out. But last year you had said at the end of the day, you either salute and execute, or you make a decision to retire or resign, that's the way it is. Is this what you're trying to change? What are you hearing from the colleagues of yours who are still in uniform?

Batiste: Keith, I'm in a very unique position. I have a platform upon which I can speak. I'm no longer wearing the uniform of our country. I have no ties to the defense industry. I can speak honestly. I have a duty to do so.

And I know there's other generals, both active duty and retired, that are doing all they can within their means. In my case, I'll continue to speak out.

Olbermann: You have said that it could take eight to 10 months to withdraw from Iraq in an orderly way once the president even agrees to that. This evening, the House rejected the plan to withdraw beginning in nine months. The military under such great stress. Is there a point at which any deadline, any time structure for this will be too late?

Batiste: Keith, this is less about deadlines and timelines than it is about coming to grips with the fact that we went to war with a fatally flawed strategy, flawed then in March of 2003, flawed today over four years later. This is all about a president who's relying almost solely on the military component of strategy to accomplish the mission in Iraq.

Sadly, we're missing the diplomatic, the political, and the economic components that are fundamental and required to be successful. We have an interagency process that has been dysfunctional during this administration. There's no unity of effort between the agencies.

It - the bottom line is, we have a failed strategy now, and our president has not mobilized this great nation to accomplish the critical work to defeat global terrorism. And until we get these two things right, we're wasting our time.

Olbermann: General, are you encouraged, are you disinterested in, are you interested in what happened Tuesday at the White House between these 11 moderate Republicans and the president, and this discussion of the political implications of this? Do you see this as some sort of watershed moment?

Batiste: Keith, I think so. Four of the 11 congressman were members that the VoteVets ad is targeting. I think that speaks volumes.

Olbermann: And lastly, sir, the benchmarks, the references continually made by those who went into the White House, that the words about this war have to now come from General Petraeus, that he is the one with the credibility, and the president is not the one with that, give us an honest assessment of his ability to give us an honest assessment of progress there.

Batiste: General David Petraeus is the best we've got. If anybody can pull this off militarily, he can. We have the best military this nation has ever fielded. But the president's strategy relies almost wholly on the military, and ignores the important components of diplomatic, political, and economic hard work.

If we don't get this right, we're going to break our Army and Marine Corps. And at this point in our history, that's the last thing we can do.

Olbermann: Well said, sir. General John Batiste. Great thanks for your time tonight, and, of course, great thanks for your service.

Batiste: Thanks, Keith.

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The Windows Advantage: All that Malware not Availeable to Users of Other Operating Systems

"For some time now, searches have displayed 'this site may harm your computer' when Google has tagged a site as containing malware. Now the search engine giant is is further publicizing the level of infection in a paper titled: The Ghost In The Browser. For good reason, too: the company found that nearly 1 in ten sites (or about 450,000) are loaded with malicious software. Google is now promising to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious - with its powerful crawling abilities & data centers, the company is in an excellent position to do this. 'As well as characterizing the scale of the problem on the net, the Google study analyzed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages. It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets. Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found.'"

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A Brief Review of the Dishonesty and Exceptional Dishonesty of Our Leaders and their Enablers

Number of moderate Republicans who met with the president this week to give him a "blunt warning" about the need to change course in Iraq: 11

Number of those moderate Republicans who voted Thursday in favor of a bill that would require the president to show progress in the war before getting more funding for it: 0.

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He's for it unless and until he's against it -- but if he's been for it and nothing has really changed, how can he be against it? Why it's politics, not principle!

George W. Bush, Jan. 10, 2007: In a speech to the nation, the president declares: "A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."

George W. Bush, Jan. 13, 2007: "America will hold the Iraqi government to benchmarks it has announced ... These are strong commitments. And the Iraqi government knows that it must meet them, or lose the support of the Iraqi and the American people.

Stephen Hadley, Jan. 23, 2007: Asked whether the president will set forth in his State of the Union address the consequences to be suffered if Iraqis don't meet the benchmarks set for them, the national security advisor says: "This has been a topic of conversation for the last two weeks, about linking and consequences for benchmarks. I think the Iraqi political system, the democracy you have on the ground there, as well as the democracy here, demonstrates that there will be consequences if these benchmarks are not met."

Condoleezza Rice, April 29, 2007: Asked whether the president will accept "any kind of conditions" on continued funding for the war in Iraq, the secretary of state says: "Why tie our own hands in using the means that we have to help get the right outcomes in Iraq? And that's the problem with having so-called consequences for missing the benchmarks."

Dick Cheney, May 10, 2007: Asked about the possibility of attaching consequences to benchmarks, the vice president says: "I'm always a little puzzled when we talk about consequences. I mean, these people, you've got to remember the consequences that the Iraqis have been faced with. I mean, in terms of casualties, they've suffered far more than we have ... So when we talk to them about consequences in some kind of bureaucratic sense or threatening them with a cutoff of funds, for example, if they don't do A, B and C, it strikes me as, you know, that's Washington talk but it may not have all that much relevance on the ground out there."

George W. Bush, May 10, 2007: Asked if he's willing to accept any consequences for benchmarks in the war-funding bill, the president says he's in favor of ... benchmarks: "One message I have heard from people from both parties is that the idea of benchmarks makes sense. And I agree. It makes sense to have benchmarks as a part of our discussion on how to go forward."

Tony Snow, May 10, 2007: Asked whether the president believes that there ought to be consequences for failing to meet any benchmarks that might be set, the White House press secretary says: "I'm not even going to bite on that."

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Consistent in hypocritcial inconsistency -- or what you could call, if demonstrated by a Dem instead Our Beloved Resolute Leader:

That meeting in which moderate Republicans told the president this week that he's risking the future of the Republican Party by sticking to his guns on Iraq?

Here's how White House spokeswoman Dana Perino spun it in an interview with CNN's Paula Zahn last night: "They expressed displeasure to the president. They expressed frustration, because of a lack of progress. The president understands that. He's right there with them on that. And I think that, if you look at our party, we are ones that like a frank exchange of views. We have a big tent. And discussions like this are OK. They're good to have. And that's why the president was very happy to have them at the White House."

Yep, he was frickin' overjoyed all right -- and happier still to have word of the meeting leaked to the press. From today's Washington Post: "White House political adviser Karl Rove, furious that Republican moderates had divulged a confrontational meeting they had on Tuesday with Bush on the war, started yesterday with an angry conversation with the meeting's organizer, Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), according to several GOP lawmakers. Dan Meyer, the White House's chief lobbyist, called the other participants to express the administration's unhappiness."

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Link for photo.

Reminder

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Countdown!

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Your National Guard: Protecting You at Home

-- by being deployed in Iraq:

Responding to Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' claim that the war in Iraq has left her state's National Guard underquipped to deal with the aftermath of deadly tornadoes there, White House press secretary Tony Snow is ... blaming Sebelius.

As the Associated Press reports, Snow says that Sebelius didn't follow the proper procedures for identifying National Guard equipment shortages and asking that they be addressed. "If you don't request it, you're not going to get it," he said.

Sebelius says she has, in fact, asked the Pentagon to replace Kansas-based equipment that's now in Iraq -- and that she spoke with the president himself about the issue in January 2006. "What the Defense Department said then and continues to say is that states will get about 90 percent of what they had," Sebelius says. "Meanwhile, it doesn't get any better. I'm at a loss."

A Kansas National Guard official says the state currently has about 40 percent of the equipment it's supposed to have; before the war in Iraq began, it had about 60 percent of its required equipment available.

White House protestations to the contrary, a report commissioned by the Pentagon in the wake of Hurricane Katrina concluded that a "major factor in the delayed response to the hurricane aftermath was that the bulk of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard was deployed in Iraq."

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Quote of the Day

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence. -- Publilius Syrus

George Tenet's Principals

If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 2004. The former CIA director played up the academic image when he kicked off the recent media blitz for his new book by doing an interview for CBS's "60 Minutes" from his spacious, book-lined office at the university. His academic salary, and the reported $4 million advance he received from publisher HarperCollins, should provide the former CIA director with more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days and leave a substantial fortune to his children.

But those monies are hardly Tenet's entire income. While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

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Tenets sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I've done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet's book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.

Tenets sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I've done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet's book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.

***

Last October, Tenet continued to profit from the defense industry by joining the board of directors of QinetiQ Group PLC. QinetiQ, whose name allegedly inspired that of the fictional British spook "Q," the gadget maker in the James Bond movies, moved aggressively into the U.S. market in 2003 after a majority of its voting stock was acquired by the Carlyle Group. (Carlyle sold off its remaining shares in February, making a $470 million profit on its original investment.)


Here, too, Tenet is profiting from involvement in Iraq and the broader war on terror. QinetiQ's recent acquisitions in the U.S. market include defense contractor Foster Miller Inc., which makes the so-called TALON robots used by U.S. forces in Iraq to neutralize IEDs. QinetiQ also controls Analex Corp., an information technology and engineering company that earns 70 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon. Among the clients listed on Analex's Web site are the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation's spy satellites, and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office -- a secretive agency that has been criticized by members of Congress for collecting intelligence on American antiwar activists. According to QinetiQ's Annual Report and Accounts for 2006, non-executive directors like Tenet are paid a minimum of $70,000, with some paid up to more than a quarter-million dollars.

At QinetiQ, Tenet is working with Duane P. Andrews, a former assistant secretary of defense who is QinetiQ's CEO for North America. Prior to coming to QinetiQ, Andrews served for 13 years as a senior executive with Science Applications International Corp. SAIC is one of the largest U.S. intelligence contractors and a major provider of private sector analysts to both the CIA and the National Security Agency. Vanity Fair recently referred to it as a "shadow government."

There is an intriguing detail about SAIC buried in Tenet's acknowledgements in his new book: "Arnold Punaro of SAIC," he writes, "graciously provided me with a secure workspace to review and work with classified material." Punaro is identified on the SAIC Web site as the company's executive vice president for government affairs, communications and support operations, as well as general manager of its Washington operations.


Getting use of such a secure room is no small feat. In the intelligence business, such rooms are known as sensitive, compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs. To prevent eavesdroppers from picking up top-secret conversations, a typical SCIF has film on the windows, walls fitted with soundproof steel plates and white-noise makers embedded in the ceiling. Punaro must have had approval from SAIC and the CIA to allow Tenet such access. Harlow, Tenet's co-author, explained to Salon that Tenet could have used office space at the CIA to work on the book, but that he "believed it would be better not to be producing his memoirs at a government facility." It was "a matter of convenience" to use the room at SAIC, Harlow said.

In 2006, shortly after he joined TAC's advisory board, Tenet joined the board of directors of Guidance Software. One of Guidance's products, EnCase, has been used extensively by U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies to collect evidence in criminal and counterterrorism cases, including the prosecution of Enron executives and the British "shoe bomber," Richard Reid. Tenet's "years of experience fighting terrorism and extensive knowledge of potential and existing threats will expand Guidance's unparalleled expertise in computer forensics and network investigations," the company noted in a press release. According to SEC records, Tenet earned $58,112 in 2006 as a director and holds 9,700 shares of company stock. At its recent price of $12.85 per share, that would make Tenet's stock worth more than $124,000.

In his work at the Analysis Corp., Tenet has been reunited with John O. Brennan, his former chief of staff and, according to the book, one of his "closest advisers." Brennan spent 25 years in the CIA, and was deputy executive director at the time of the 9/11 attacks. In 2003, he was dispatched by Tenet to run the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center. It eventually morphed into the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center, which Brennan ran from December 2004 to August 2005, when he retired from government. (The center, which integrates intelligence from various agencies, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, is staffed primarily by contractors.) In November 2005, Brennan joined TAC, which has contracts with the State Department, Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brennan, the company's CEO, also declined a request from Salon for comment for this report.

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The Goddess of the Web

Link. Note: this is a humor piece and doesn't actually represent Xeni's actual position, I think, I hope.)

The Army's Threat to America: the Media and Knowledge

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Our Leaders, Keeping Us Safe Through Selective Oppression

I’ve been meaning to post about Three Panel Soul, the new comic by Ian and Matt of MacHall fame- unfortunately I’ve got to do so under less-than-wonderful circumstances. I love this new strip because I’m finding it a lot more minimalist and relatable… also ridiculously funny.

Matt was working as a contractor for a branch of the government. He made the mistake of being interested in the hobby of paper target shooting at about the same time as the VA Tech shootings and talking to someone about this hobby at work. Keep in mind he wasn’t even talking about those shootings, in fact he was discussing how he wanted a gun which would make it difficult to kill someone.

He was promptly fired and not allowed back to work because people were scared of him.

To top it all off, he was later visited by police detectives for making a comic about his experience, because it was a “borderline terroristic threat.” (Is “terroristic” even a word? Did they get that from the Colbert report?)

I’m not a lawyer or a reporter or anything, but I would recommend anyone who was one of those things to contact Matt. ( machallboyd ATZORS gmail.com ) If you’re a cartoonist or a webcomics fan, spread his story around. The more people who know about this, the better. He’s a good dude who deserves your support.

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