POIESIS

jbrsh, those 35mm holga's are looking nice... i tried that in the summer and it turned out pretty lousy, looks like you had much better luck. could've been that i used a roll of flim that i found basically jammed in a sewer grill though..

the other day i woke up with the theme song from inspector gadget in my head. just try and get that out of your head. brutal.

^ha.. it's actually pretty disturbing.. little girls being forced into bestiality? wtf? http://citypages.com/databank/26/1300/article13827.asp Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald isn't finished with the Bush White House yet The CIA leak investigation: Bigger fish, deeper water by Steve Perry November 2, 2005 Winston Churchill once said that "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at and missed," and last Friday afternoon a lot of Bush partisans were buoyed by the same sentiment. Writing at Power Line, John Hinderaker mused, "Having now read 15 or 20 news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration...I couldn't help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore's chief of staff was when he was vice-president? My guess is that the large majority of people who read these stories are asking themselves, 'Scooter who?'" He's right. On its own, the public fallout from Libby's indictment on five counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice will be minimal. One could even add that the indictment of Karl Rove would make less difference in the court of popular opinion than most followers of the case think. Poll after poll has shown that only about half of Americans have ever heard of Rove. The gravity of his loss would be strategic: Without him, the great orchestra of White House staffers, congressional GOP foot soldiers, and the Washington press corps would be without a conductor. Meantime, only a very few pundits of the right made mention of the shoe that has not yet dropped. Proving again that crazy is not the same as stupid, Ann Coulter told CNN that the extension of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation "is, like, the worst possible outcome." She is right, too. Advertisement Where is Fitzgerald's case headed now? The arc of Plame leak coverage in the press underscores the futility of reading too much into any particular leak from the grand jury. As recently as last Friday, the New York Times and Washington Post were diametrically opposed on the very basic question of whether the probe would continue. (The Times said yes, the Post no.) The trouble is that all the leaks seem to be coming from defense attorneys close to the case, and criminal lawyers a) don't know Fitzgerald's theory of the case, only what he has said to them regarding their clients; and b) are duty-bound, wherever possible, to spin any disclosures they make so as to aid their clients. But there is one point on which every major news outlet, and presumably every leaker, has fallen into accord in the past week or two. Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal put it concisely: "With the grand jury in the CIA leak case expected to vote as soon as today to bring charges against White House officials, the two-year probe appears to be focused on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects and defenders of the administration's Iraq war policy." The accent belongs on the last clause. Cheney's office is the Pandora's Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up the CIA for its unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented the CIA by setting up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing stooge, Ahmed Chalabi. At this point it's altogether unclear where or when Fitzgerald's investigation will conclude--or simply run into a wall he can't break through. But there's little need to speculate as to how far he's reaching. The investigative reporter Jason Leopold, a former Dow-Jones Newswire reporter who has put the Raw Story website on the map in a new way with his Plame leak reporting, points out that a court filing posted at Fitzgerald's DoJ website refers to subpoenas issued regarding "conversations between [NYT reporter Judith] Miller and a specified government official occurring between on or about July 6, 2003 and on or about July 13, 2003, concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium." [emphasis added] The implication is that Fitzgerald's inquiry is now looking all the way back to the claims about Saddam, uranium, and Niger that were touted in a pair of 2001 forged documents that turned up in Italy. This jibes with a little-noted story filed by veteran UPI editor Martin Walker on October 23. In what may be the first major leak in the case not disseminated by criminal defense lawyers, Walker cited "NATO intelligence sources" as saying, "Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government. Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair.... This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated." All we know for sure now is that, as the dolorous Coulter saw too well, every outcome remains on the table. It's entirely possible that no more indictments in the case will be forthcoming--though unless the leaks last week about conferences between Fitzgerald and Rove attorney Robert Luskin were pure hooey, that seems doubtful. On the other hand, it is also possible that this investigation will dog Cheney from now until 2008 and raise him to the status of unindicted co-conspirator, or beyond. If that is where Fitzgerald means to go, there's every reason to suppose he'll find ample cooperation from the ranks of CIA and State Department officialdom whose advice was spurned or subverted en route to war. The list starts with former CIA director George Tenet, who was first pressured to disregard the word of his own analysts and then made to fall on his sword for having done so, and also includes Colin Powell and a host of folks most of us have never heard of. One of them, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, wrote a fairly breathtaking op-ed titled "The White House Cabal" in the L.A. Times on October 25. I've never read anything remotely like it from a former member of a sitting administration: Â In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security--including vital decisions about postwar Iraq--were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.... I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less.... The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet.... Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White). It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time. Â These are the sorts of folk the Bush White House's pursuit of the Iraq war has left waiting in the wings with scores to settle. Time will tell whether Fitzgerald can work his way to them, but knowing they are out there cannot be good for Dick Cheney's heart, or his sleep.

HAHAHA! oh shit..i wish i could say those were on purpose.

yep, bikes rule. i try to bike everywhere, and fortunately my city is very bikable, which is nice. the scary thing is i'm not so sure there is going to be a backlash. around here the gas prices are equally atrocious, but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on all the hummers and SUV's i see everywhere. i can't fathom how you can own an SUV and throw so much money into your tank every week. it's retarded.

i agree with all that bob, but i'm not analysing panopticons and panoptic theory as a designer. i don't have a lot of time to explain right now...which it will take..maybe later...it's been awhile since i even thought about this shit.... regardless, it's good brain food.

okay, you win isor, you called me remedial. and with caps to boot.

what are you isor, his private dancer?

or..or....maybe i'm the shithead. i just posted that because i thought it was funny. much like your original spelling error. and your reaction and subsequent correction. i actually wasn't trying to clown you about your spellling, i LIKE spellling errors, believe it or not. i'm fully aware that picking apart somebody's spellilng is a cheap tactic in arguments..unless of course your arguments are worse than your spelling. but you're over-reacting like you usually do, so yea, maybe you need to buy a shit cap, diggidy-dawg. go have a kit kat.

well, once again i disagree. we just have fundamentally different views on this shit, although i agree completely with your last sentence. i personally think more troops in iraq would be a total dud move. the real problem in iraq is the US occupation. that's the core of the problem for iraqi's and the region, AND americans. you can't keep a military occupation going in iraq, it's never going to get better, either at current levels(incidentally, i believe levels are the highest yet), or with an increase of troops. the reason is the type of culture in iraq, and the history of western meddling in their country. westerners seem to think that maybe iraqi's don't know their own history acutely or somethin'... we are not talking about some soft assed, couch potato westerners being occupied, we're talking iraq, the place that went through a hellish war with iran, then got smoked by the US, then got it's neck broken by sanctions, then got re-invaded and shit kicked as a laughably meek foe, illegally and based on deceit, whilst the occupying forces engaged in torture, called in airstrikes on villages of innocent people 'by accident', used napalm, and has essentially turned iraq into a collapsed, failed state spiralling out of control at ever increasing momentum. whew, that was a long sentence. more troops, death and destruction is going to bring the war right back to america. unfortunately the other option will leave iraq impoding into a full blown death fest which may become a tornado across the region. what a great situation. i don't really have any idea what the hell is supposed to fix this monumentally fucked war...perhaps the occupying forces should pull back a bit and force the iraqi's to step up and take care of their shit while they have the chance. some other iron-fisted goon will step up and become the new brutal dictator of iraq, but since democracy for iraq was a completely fraudulent war aim to begin with, it will be perfect, as long as western oil giants control the spigot.

i'm all for straight talk.

"assembally". that's the best spelling mistake i've seen on here in awhile.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/arti...ta_talk_collins apparently libby wrote an erotic tale called...'the apprentice'?

that window streak is sweet ass.

yea...rem is so kool. however, production is death.

'do the crime do the time'? gitmo detainees are suspects. it's not a 'baseless' claim..until there are charges laid and they are put before a US court of law, they are not guilty of a damn thing, no matter how much you guys wish they were. torturing them really keeps the US on the moral high ground it works so hard to maintain. i guess the pentagon needs to buck up and send down a few hundred copies of kubark so shit can start getting sorted. btw, nice lapdance.

^you should check foucault's writings on prison and bentham's panopticon. highly nerdtastic.

a major part of the white house covert operation to swindle americans into supporting the invasion was the the claim saddam sought yellowcake from niger. wilson discovered, as did cursory investigatons by western intelligence, that the documents were crude forgeries. however, where those forgeries originated, and how, has never been fully explored and could provide tantalizing complications for bush and his scummy pals. ever-awesome josh marshall lays it out: The Italian Connection, Part I (ed.note: At various points over the last two years, I've discussed here at tpm reporting I've done on the origins of the Niger forgeries. I've never put all the reporting in one place; and until now there was still a good bit of information I wasn't at liberty to report. This is the first of a series of installments I'm going to publish here at TPM in which I will lay out the story as I understand it based on my own reporting and research.) On March 7th, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the UN Security Council that documents purporting to show that Iraq had purchased uranium ore from Niger were in fact forgeries. The documents had been provided to the IAEA by the United States. "Based on thorough analysis," said ElBaradei, "the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic." As the world would soon learn, the documents had first emerged in Rome in October 2002 when an unnamed ‘security consultant’ had tried to sell them to Elisabetta Burba, a journalist working for the Italian magazine Panorama. From there, the documents made their way to the American Embassy in Rome and finally back to Washington. In early 2003, the IAEA had demanded that the US provide whatever evidence it had to support its claims that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And in response the US handed over copies of the documents. Ever since ElBaradei’s revelation, the story had been one that interested me greatly, as it did many others. And my interest only grew that summer when renewed controversy erupted over the claims retired Ambassador Joe Wilson made about his fact-finding trip to Niger. But the following winter, two streams of information opened up to me which suggested that the forgeries story went well beyond this unnamed Italian ‘security consultant’ and that the US government appeared less than interested in discovering the identities of either the forgers or those who had used the documents to deceive the American people. One stream of information came from sources within the US government itself. According to US government sources I spoke to in the course of my reporting, there was far more tying the forgeries to Italy than the mere fact that they had first emerged in Rome in October 2002. Almost a year earlier, US suspicions about an illicit uranium trade between Iraq and Niger had begun with intelligence reports from Italy. Soon after the September 11th attacks, the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI sent its first report to the US government including details of an alleged Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of lightly-processed uranium ore from Niger. Details of this and a subsequent SISMI report formed the basis of a reference to alleged Iraq-Niger uranium sales which was included in a CIA briefing Vice President Cheney received in early 2002. It was that briefing that prompted Cheney's request for more information on the Iraq-Niger sale. And that request led, in turn, to the CIA's decision to dispatch Joe Wilson on his trip to Niger. The Italian reports had set the whole process in motion. But there was another key detail: The reports out of Italy were not a separate source of intelligence from the forgeries. They were the forgeries. To be precise, the intelligence reports from Italy were actually text transcriptions and summaries of the forged documents. The reports from Italy and the forgeries were one and the same. The distinction is rather like saying you haven't seen the PDF of a letter only the text from the letter that someone copied down from the PDF. The fact that the Italian reports came from as-yet-to-be-revealed forgeries of course could not be known at the time. That only became clear to intelligence officials much later when these post-9/11 Italian reports and the forgeries were compared. But looking back in retrospect, it was clear that the whole Niger uranium canard seemed to lead back to those forgeries. Just what that meant for Italy's role wasn’t clear. Indeed, it still isn’t entirely clear. What was quite clear, however, was that the Italian government would be a key place to start to get to the bottom of the forgeries’ mystery. And there was more. I also learned of the existence of a Joint State Department-CIA Inspectors General report on the “16 words� and the Niger forgeries which was produced in the fall of 2003. Much of the report detailed information later revealed in the Senate intelligence committee report. But there were other briefly noted but intriguing details. For instance, the State-CIA IG report briefly noted a murky story about contacts between SISMI and the CIA in the summer of 2002. That summer SISMI had approached the CIA about an operation they intended to run against the Station Chief of Iraqi intelligence in Rome. The plan was to send disinformation about the Iraqi Station Chief back to Baghdad via a third country. And the subject of the disinformation was to be trade between Iraq and Niger. (The Americans did not object but declined to participate.) That was certainly interesting. Later, from other US government sources, I learned another detail. When the forgeries arrived at the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002, the first reaction of the CIA Station chief was to wonder whether this wasn’t the same story the Italians had suggested using against the Iraqi only months before. As you can see, quite a lot of information seemed to suggest that the Italian government played a large role in the story of the Niger forgeries, even if it might be an innocent or unwitting one. Yet neither the CIA nor the FBI, a knowledgeable source told me, seemed intent on getting to the bottom of what had happened. In addition to these clues, there was one more piece of information. And here is where the two streams of information I noted above flowed together. A US government source pointed me toward a series of suspicious points of overlap between the forgeries story and a series of unauthorized meetings between Italian intelligence figures, two Pentagon employees working under Doug Feith, other Americans and the disgraced Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar. These meetings were the subject of an article ("Iran-Contra II?") I published with Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris in the Washington Monthly in early September 2004. Around the same time, another source -- this one outside the US government – told me a murky series of details about the meetings which purported to connect them to the emergence of the forgeries in Rome in October 2002. These were the details -- some quite specific and solidly-sourced, others murky but intriguing -- that led me to start reporting on the Niger forgeries in earnest in early 2004. In the second installment, how the Washington Monthly, Laura Rozen, and finally 60 Minutes came into the picture, and new information pointing toward the role of Italian intelligence. -Josh Marshall http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com

cheney's new chief of staff was in the thick of her outing as well.

well, 'guy', your arguments always hinge on the loosey-goosey notion that everyone in iraq that lifts a finger of opposition, or in detention, MUST be a terrorist, or that the US military, regardless of the tonnage of facts supporting the opposite, is legal and righteous to do whatever the talking heads say is okay. that's killer. i don't really see the grand vision there is in torturing, detaining and generally depriving people of basic rights when absolutely squat has been proven/disproven about their status. jose padilla, a US citizen, has now been detained, without any charges for 3 and a half years now. so, your argument would be, just untie the hands and let the torture run free, then we'll see some charges?

hell yes they were all privy to it. the kicker for libby is he's an old national security type guy, privy to all sorts of classified material...he's going to have to convince the courts that he just didn't know that plame's employment division, the counter proliferation dept., fell under the DO. it's laughable.

true, i think this is different though. a senior senior official just got indicted and his right hand man is still under investigation. shit's hairy.

awesome flix funtimepartay

aha...i dare to say i think you will be proven wrong. i will agree that if it does stop with libby, which i really don't think it will, he will be pardoned when bush shamefully exits. however, i think this is the 'tipping point' we've all been salivating for. if you read the indictment and some of the analysis floating around, it really leaves some nice hints for future indictments. also considering that fitz has extended the investigation says alot. and as the above article by federal prosecutor de la vega points out, it's looking like this may well be only the start. also, i don't think libby is specifically rove's fall guy. or for that matter a fall guy for anyone really. people are already calling for an official explanation from bush, and calling for rove to be fired. how is bush to get out of this? i don't think he can, unless he just completely ignores the intensity of the situation and disregards the pulse of the nation right now.