It isn't like we don't know that Monica was a distraction and Madeleine Albright a less-than-brilliant Secretary of State (how about that late lurch towards North Korea?) John O'Neill was in fact fired; there were warnings that were ignored about the African embassy bombings, and no response followed the Cole attack and the American ambassador to Yemen was an obstruction to that investigation, Massoud was assasinated by al Qaeda. These are not debatable subjects. They are facts.

O'Neill Decides to Retire from FBI

He hears about a job opening as head of security at the World Trade Center. It would mean a significant salary increase, but also it would mean leaving the FBI. By this point, however, O'Neill realizes his chances for a promotion were severely hurt by the briefcase incident. In addition to career problems, entertaining foreign visitors and O'Neill's lifestyle had left him in debt. The job at the World Trade Center would give him a chance to pay off that debt.

"Demofascists."

Insidious pressure -- bet that didn't strike the good Sister as "Republofascist".

European watchdog calls for clampdown on CIA
· UK is urged to take lead in monitoring agents
· Scathing attack on Bush, 'the King John of USA'

The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, said CIA agents operating in Europe should be subject to the same rules as British agents working for MI5 and MI6.

"There is a need to deal with the conduct of allied foreign security services agents active on the territory of a council member state," Terry Davis said. "In the UK there is parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services but there is no parliamentary scrutiny of friendly foreign services. The UK should be in the lead on this issue."

As part of this process, diplomatic immunity should be reviewed. "Immunity should not mean impunity," he said.

Mr Davis also called for a ban on the transport of suspects in military aircraft. At the moment the prohibition applies only to civil aircraft.

The former British Labour MP was scathing about President Bush. "Why does the US need to keep people in secret prisons? I thought that was settled by Magna Carta. But King John is alive and well and running the USA.

"There is a smoking gun. We know where it is - it is in the hands of George Bush. His fingerprints are on the gun."

Mr Davis's remarks came as the man leading the Council of Europe's investigation into the secret CIA prisons dismissed Mr Bush's admission as "just one piece of the truth". In an attempt to step up pressure on the US and European governments to come clean on the prisons, the Swiss senator Dick Marty said: "There is more, much more, to be revealed...."

...Other senior figures in the Council of Europe, who plan to intensify their investigations into allegations that Romania and Poland played host to many of the prisoners, also criticised the US. Rene van der Linden, president of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, said: "Our work has helped to flush out the dirty nature of this secret war which, we learn at last, has been carried out completely beyond any legal framework.

"Kidnapping people and torturing them in secret, however tempting the short-term gain may appear to be, is what criminals do, not democratic governments. In the long term, such practices create more terrorists and undermine the values we are fighting for."

Hamdan "forced our hand," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett, the only administration official who agreed to speak on the record. "We knew there was going to have to be some acknowledgment that they were in our hands." Also, he said, the intelligence value of interrogations had diminished to the point where the administration thought "we could bring them to justice."

After nearly two dozen meetings of senior policymakers on the detainee issue, Bush convened his principal advisers at the end of August to make a final decision.

Several had moved far away from the impassioned defenses of secret prisons that they had mounted a year earlier.

Rice had had a series of conversations with Bush on the detainee issue, but at that National Security Council meeting she made her final pitch for a change in policy.

In front of her colleagues, according to several who attended, she said that it was important for the United States to bring the issue to closure, both on foreign policy grounds and moral grounds. She noted that the secret sites were having a corrosive effect on the nation's ability to win cooperation on a range of intelligence issues. Rice urged the president to resolve the issue rather than hand it off to his successor.

The president agreed.

"This is a paradigm shift for the administration," said one senior official who was involved.

The core of Rice's argument appeared in the penultimate paragraph of the president's speech.

"America is a nation of law," Bush said. He added that he had heard the concerns of other world leaders about the administration's detention policies. "I'll continue to work with the international community to construct a common foundation to defend our nations and protect our freedoms."

The film was tentatively titled "Untitled History Project" and from this came the name of the Production Company, UHP Productions. (you can confirm this via IMDB..)

Obviously even the tentative name given to this film during it's 2+ years of production illustrates that this film was intended to re-write the history of 9/11.

... One of the goals of this Film Institute is to "help filmmakers, actors, technicians, etc. realize their God given potential and purpose in perhaps the most influential sphere of modern culture - film and television."

In a brochure for The Film Institute found on a YWAM members live journal, the organization describes itself as "An Auxiliary organization of University of the Nations, a non-profit entity designed to facilitate and launch University of Nations students into the film and television industry. The Film Institute provides internships, apprenticeships, scholarships, and the production of culturally relevant films that will cause awareness and resources for current issues."

As of 1988, Loren Cunningham (according to Gary North) "began studying Reconstructionist writings…with the intent of incorporating 'dominion' or 'kingdom' [a belief that the Christian Biblical principles] theology into the ideological training given to YWAM missionaries. (page 206)."

As we have looked around, we've noticed a lot of big-mouthed giants running around, but not many young warriors brave enough to stake everything on God.

So that's what we've decided to do. Starting in July, along with our 'normal' discipleship efforts in YWAM, we will officially join The Film Institute - a new auxiliary branch of Youth With A Mission focused on tranforming film and television from the inside out. TFI's first project is a doozy: simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!

Our goal is to help filmmakers, actors, technicians, etc. realize their God given potential and purpose in perhaps the most influential sphere of modern culture - film and television.

Mark Harris spoke following Braulia and showed a DVD clip by film director David L. Cunningham, who together with others has formed a YWAM auxiliary called The Film Institute (TFI). One goal of TFI is to fast-track UofN School of Digital Film interns, placing them within the film industry, not to give them jobs, but so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out.

In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

... Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo -- both friends of Nowrasteh -- announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."

Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)

With the LFF now under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed in late summer as "The Path to 9/11." Horowitz's PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."

Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who'll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats -- despite the fact that we're given little concrete evidence of the president's concern or interest in taking action.

Rice told the commission Thursday that the briefing included mostly "historical information" and that most of the threat information known in the summer of 2001 referred to overseas targets.

Former counterterrorism aide Richard Clarke had testified two weeks before that the White House had ignored warnings about bin Laden's terrorist organization. Clarke said the Bush administration, including Rice, was aware of al Qaeda threats but did not treat them as "urgent."

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a -- -- service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told - - service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that in ---, Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

The briefing item reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s, regarding possible al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States. It referred to uncorroborated reporting that from 1998 that terrorists might attempt to hijack a U.S. aircraft in an attempt to blackmail the government into releasing U.S.-held terrorists who had participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information. And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of the threat information we received was focused overseas, I was concerned about possible threats inside the United States. On July 5, chief of staff Andy Card and I met with Dick Clarke, and I asked Dick to make sure that domestic agencies were aware of the heightened threat period and were taking appropriate steps to respond, even though we did not have specific threats to the homeland.

Later that same day, Clarke convened a special meeting of his CSG, as well as representatives from the FAA, the INS, Customs, and the Coast Guard. At that meeting, these agencies were asked to take additional measures to increase security and surveillance.

Throughout this period of heightened threat information, we worked hard on multiple fronts to detect, protect against, and disrupt any terrorist plans or operations that might lead to an attack. For instance, the Department of Defense issued at least five urgent warnings to U.S. military forces that al Qaeda might be planning a near-term attack, and placed our military forces in certain regions on heightened alert.

The State Department issued at least four urgent security advisories and public worldwide cautions on terrorist threats, enhanced security measures at certain embassies, and warned the Taliban that they would be held responsible for any al Qaeda attack on U.S. interests.

The FBI issued at least three nationwide warnings to Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies, and specifically stated that, although the vast majority of the information indicated overseas targets, attacks against the homeland could not be ruled out.

The FBI also tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known or suspected terrorists and reach out to known informants who might have information on terrorist activities.

The FAA issued at least five Civil Aviation Security Information Circulars to all U.S. airlines and airport security personnel, including specific warnings about the possibility of hijackings.

The CIA worked round the clock to disrupt threats worldwide. Agency officials launched a wide-ranging disruption effort against al Qaeda in more than 20 countries.

Rice, testifying before the Sept. 11 commission Thursday, said that those 70 investigations were mentioned in a CIA briefing to the president and satisfied the White House that the FBI was doing its job in response to dire warnings that attacks were imminent and that the administration felt it had no need to act further.

But the FBI Friday said that those investigations were not limited to al-Qaida and did not focus on al-Qaida cells. FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report.

... [Rice] said the briefing memo disclosed that the FBI had 70 "full-field investigations under way of cells" in the United States. And that, Rice said, explained why "there was no recommendation [coming from the White House] that we do something about" the flurry of threat warnings in the months preceding the attacks.

But Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would "not characterize" the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition to these investigations, Rice told the panel that FBI headquarters, reacting to alarming but vague intelligence in the spring and summer of 2001 that attacks were imminent, "tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists" and to contact informants who might provide leads.

That, too, is news to the field offices. Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer told Rice that the commission had "to date ... found nobody, nobody at the FBI, who knows anything about a tasking of field offices." Even Thomas Pickard, at the time acting FBI director, told the panel that he "did not tell the field offices to do this," Roemer said.

It's a world of terror, a world of fears,
It's a world of death, and a world of tears
There's a reason we care
To make sure you are scared
It's a Bush world after all

[chorus]
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush world after all
It's a Bush, Bush world

There is just one scapegoat for every ill
It's that president whose name was Bill
When the world hates your guts
Blame it all on his putz
It's a Bush world after all

[chorus]

"What goes around apparently comes around," said Captain Paul Watson. "In my opinion that boat was cursed the moment the harpoon left it and entered the body of the whale. There was nothing traditional about that kill."

"We do extend our sympathies to the family of Chief Jerry Jacks," continued Captain Watson. "His death was a tragedy and a loss to his people. Unfortunately, the traditional hunt went hand in hand with the loss of Makah whalers. Both whales and men died in the days when the hunt was a necessity for the Makah. The sea has now claimed a life for the one that the Makah whalers took. The Buddhists would call this karma; the whales would call this justice."

This interpretation does not sit well with most experts on Islam. "Fascism is nationalistic and Islamicism is hostile to nationalism," said Roxanne Euben, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. "Fundamentalism is a transnational movement that is appealing to believers of all nations and races across national boundaries. There is no idea of racial purity as in Nazism. Islamicists have very little idea of the state. It is a religious movement, while Fascism in Europe was a secular movement. So if it's not what we really think of as nationalism, and if it's not really like what we think of as Fascist, why use these terms?"

I suspect that they market tested it and found it worked. But a more sinister thought that has occurred to me is that by using the "F" word to describe the enemy they may be trying to immunize themselves. (But that is a thought only, and I have no evidence -- at this time -- that that is the case.)

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.

"Sure we'll have Fascism here, but it will come as an anti-Fascism movement."

This possibility, actually, is raised by the fact that, as [Robert O.] Paxton describes in detail [in The Anatomy of Fascism], fascism is not so much an ideological "ism" but a constellation of traits that takes on a pathological life of its own. And these traits, as he details, are very much present, historically speaking, in American political life.

In fact, this very mechanism was raised by the one of the significant American fascist "intellectuals" who arose in the 1930s. His name was Lawrence Dennis, and in 1936 -- a year after Lewis' novel -- he wrote an ideological blueprint titled The Coming American Fascism.

Dennis predicted that, eventually, the combination of a dictatorial and bureaucratic government and big business would continue exploiting the working middle class until, in frustration, it would turn to fascism. What's especially noteworthy were the kind of conditions he foresaw for this to happen:

Nothing could be more logical or in the best political tradition than for a type of fascism to be ushered into this country by leaders who are now vigorously denouncing fascism and repudiating all that it is understood to stand for...

And, needless to add, these principles would mean the replacement of the existing organizational pattern of public administration by that of a highly centralized government which would exercise the powers of a truly national State, and which would be manned by a personnel responsible to a political party holding a mandate from the people. This party would be the fascist party of the United States-undoubtedly called, however, by another name...

Yet how infinitely better for the in-elite of the moment to have fascism come through one of the major parties of the moment than to have it fight its way to power as the program of the most embittered leaders of the out-elite. ...

This description has an ominous ring in an era in which the dominant party in power in America is frenziedly declaring war on "Islamofascism" while itself taking on many of the traits of fascism itself. It's unlikely that Dennis' thinking guided any of the intellectuals in today's mainstream conservative movement, though it is worth noting that his work is enjoying a renaissance in the paleo-conservative movement, particularly in such places as The Occidental Review, the far-right publication sponsored by William Regnery.

Rather than being guided consciously (and there certainly is no evidence whatsoever for an ideologically fascist conspiracy), this transformation is occurring almost spontaneously, as the forces that fascism comprises gradually come together under their own gravity.

I just want to add my agreement to what John Dean and others have said about the administration's calling Islamic terrorists "fascists." The first thing I thought of when I read Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion on August 29th, where the phrase was first used, was "John Dean's book has smacked these guys right in (a very vulnerable place)." It is an old technique in propaganda -- going back to the Big Lie in WWI -- that when you are completely and undeniably skewered, you just take everything that people have pointed out about you and say it's your enemies who are like this. You don't even bother to deny anything; you simply go on the offensive and holler as loudly as you can. Conservatives Without Conscience of course says the Bush administration is taking us down the road to fascism, so the administration sticks the fascism label on America's enemy to try to keep it from sticking on them, and make it seem they are our defense against fascism rather than its very carriers. In this case it is an absurd lie, because whatever you want to say about Islamic terrorists, they certainly are not fascists in any of the various ways the word has been distinctly used in history. But that won't matter at all to the choir of high RWAs for whom the administration made up the charge. If they hear later that someone says President Bush is a fascist-like leader, they'll think "Nonsense. The man's defending us against this."

Im not sure I see much in the way of authoritarians wanting to be like others, wanting to fit in. That may be true for some, but there is a contrarian type who fancies himself a victim of liberal culture, and will resist all the more when he perceives that prevailing norms reflect that liberal culture. They turn contrarianism into a "hip" rebellion and latch onto the conservative "counter-culture." For this type especially, things must happen to them and the shell has to be cracked by circumstances that bring forth both a cognitive dissonance and a way out of the dissonance that is different from, and more attractive than, the contrarian default position.

That default position is the positiion that they have cornered the market, so to speak, on morality - and the smartest of these always seem to cite Kant for support. If time permits i will try to get an analysis of Kant up but if anyone has any thoughts on this, id love to see. Kant seems to be the most widely cited philosophical support for the "objective source of morality is eroded by liberal culture" meme. "We have discovered the very structure of human consciousness, you see, which is the source of all objective morality, and liberals pushing moral relativism are the enemies of Western Civilization." On top of this, for those more disposed to fancying themselves victims, being an outsider is a virtue.

Kant needs to be refuted because his thought provides the intellectual excuse to be contrarian in the face of empirical evidence. My sense is that the smarter RWAs can be tricked into empirical thinking once their Kantian rationalistic attachments have been seriously challenged by factual reality.

I've known way more than my share of these guys, since Silicon Valley is one of their primary native habitats. And my take is that they're at least as driven by their burning desire to fit in as any other RWA. In fact, their feelings of victimization may be rooted in the belief that they were promised an acceptance in liberal intellectual circles that they intensely wanted but never really found.??The most extreme ones were frighteningly bright and well-read, and usually also from very religious family backgrounds. Those two qualities alone guaranteed that it was going to be hard to find a niche among the better-rounded, more secular big city liberals. So they decided that, if they were going to be outcasts anyway, they could at least claim moral superiority. I may be a nerd, but I am RIGHT -- the possessor of Ultimate Truth! -- and that's what really matters in the end.

Kant, yeah. And Aristotle. Also Ayn Rand, for the less evolved sorts. I'm no philosopher, but if you can marshal arguments against the nasty intellectual habits Kant justified, I'd love to hear them.

Having actually dated a few of these in my younger years, I speak from experience: Beware the black-and-white thinker with a high IQ. Fortunately, we are talking about a very small (probably >1%) sliver of the RWA population -- a rare but fascinating subspecies.

It's much too flip, but not altogether inaccurate, to say that what these guys (and they were all guys) needed most was the love of a good woman. In almost every case I can recall, the very best and most healing challenge to their Kantian rationalistic attachments turned out to be the factual reality of marriage and parenthood. There's nothing like the day-to-day -- and often irrational and non-linear -- reality of caring for other people to teach you to take life as it is, and not as you think it ought to be.

Is there really nothing that we can do to change authoritarian followers? Well as I said, some things seem to work. I mentioned how high RWAs want to be like everyone else in many regards. Another thing that “works,”–and this truly astounds me–is that authoritarian followers do get affected by their experiences when you’d swear there was not chance. So I have found, both in surveys and in an experiment I ran one time using myself as the “target,” that once high RWAs meet a homosexual or learn that someone they knew was a homosexual, their attitude toward homosexuals becomes more favorable. (I’m not gay, but I told a class of my students one year that I was for the purpose of this experiment.) So despite all their preconceptions, the highs saw reality and changed. Another thing that works is higher education. Students at my large public university drop in RWA scale scores about 10% on the average over the course of a 4-year undergraduate education. But the students who drop the most are the ones who came in being very high. (I don’t think it’s the profs who cause this to happen, but simply the highs meeting a much wider variety of people than ever before.)

But as John Dean mentioned, normal approaches to changing someone’s mind (reason, discourse, exposure to scientific evidence) do not work with authoritarian followers, but instead provoke a dogmatic response. (The comment from the person from Cincinnati who says the conservatives he knows will change slowly, but not if they are treated with disrespect and humiliated) applies here, I think.) The dogmatism goes back to the way the followers have formed their beliefs, which has basically been to copy the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They really don’t know why those are the right ideas; they’re taking other people’s word for it. Most people have done more figuring-things-out-for-themselves, so when they get challenged they can go back to the reasons they believe what they do. And if better reasons leading elsewhere come along, why not follow them? But the high RWA is poorly equipped to handle such a challenge. He can respond with the counter-arguments he has been inoculated with, but if they get swatted aside he is lost. And not only is that particular point lost, but the whole shooting match is now in jeopardy because of the simplistic way (”It’s all right or it’s all wrong”) he thinks. So dogmatism is his best defense, and he’s perfectly willing–as I suspect many of you have found–to end an argument he has lost by saying, “OK, you believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want.”