EFTA00850809.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: [email protected] Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.. 07/19/2015 Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2015 11:39:44 +0000 Attachments: David_Brooks_sickeningiraq_apologia„How_the_New_York_Times_hack_just_rewrote_h istory_SIMON_MALOY_May_19„2015.docx; Bush knew_Saddam_had_no_weapons_of_mass_destructionSidney_Blumenthal_The_Salo _6,2007.docx; Rick_James_bio.docx; Lester_Holt_Reflects_on_Rise_to_NBC's_Anch_=?UTF-8?Q? or_Chair=5FEmily_Steel=5FNYT=5FJune_22„2015.docx?=; It's_official„Latinos_now_outnumber_whites_in_Califomia__JAVIER_PANZAR_LA_Tim es_July_8„2015.docx; Iran Nuclear Deal Concludes In Historic_Announcement_Charlotte_Alfred,_Nick_Robin s-Early,IMMIMIll oom; The Iran Nuclear_Deal_— ANHA_NYT_July_14,_2 015.docx; A_historic_deal_The_Economist_July_14,2015.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png; image(9).png; image(10).png; image(11).png; image(12).png; image(I3).png; image(I4).png; image(I5).png; image(16).png; image(17).png; image(18).png; image(19).png; image(20).png; image(21).png; image(22).png; image(23).png; image(24).png; image(25).png; image(26).png; image(27).png; image(28).png DEAR FRIEND BRAVO.... Team Obama, Allies & Iran Iran Nuclear Deal Concludes In h istoric Announcement EFTA00850809  'aline image 1 After months and months of negotiation and to the cheers and celebrations of millions of revelers in the streets of Iran, the United States, five other world powers and Iran have signed an agreement that will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon -- in exchange for the elimination of international financial sanctions. That deal was possible because of monumental diplomatic effort. It began when the Obama Administration forged a coalition of the world's major powers to invoke the sanctions in the first place. Then the United States persuaded those same powers to stick together until they got deal that actually cuts off all of the major pathways for Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. Altogether an extraordinary achievement. And remember, the agreement was achieved because the administration successfully maintained a truly international sanctions regime that included Russia and China as well as the major European powers. If the United States Congress derails a deal that is considered fair by the other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, those international sanctions will collapse -- the moderate, pro- western forces in Iran will be discredited in Iran -- the hardliners in Iran will be empowered -- and Iran will be free to develop a nuclear weapon. That is exactly the opposite of what opponents of the deal say they want as an outcome. In the event that the U.S. Congress rejects the internationally negotiated agreement, we will not be able to just "toughen our sanctions" and force the Iranians to bend to our will. International sanctions were the vehicle that has brought Iran to the negotiating table. The Iranians faced sanctions from all of the world's major economies. If the Congress stops the deal, the United States will be blamed for its failure -- not Iran -- and those international sanctions will simply disappear. And if international sanctions collapse, so will our leverage with Iran. Again, if this deal is stopped by Congress the moderate Iranians most likely will be marginalized even more than they are today, making any future negotiations more difficult. Whereas, on the other hand, Iran signs the deal and then cheats -- it will be Iran that wears the jacket -- and international action against Iran will once again be possible in order to enforce the deal's terms. There is, of course, one other alternative: another Middle East War. The United States could try to eliminate Iran's nuclear capacity with a military attack. But as many military experts have attested, airstrikes will not be enough. If the United States takes unilateral military action against Iran, it will unify the country behind the hardliners in Iranian politics. What would be necessary would be a full- blown invasion -- regime change. And that is exactly what many of the leading opponents of the nuclear deal really want. EFTA00850810 The same gang -- with the same worldview that brought us the war in Iraq -- are back. They were wrong last time -- and they are just as wrong this time. They were wrong about everything concerning Iraq and the Middle East -- from their claim that Saddam had nuclear weapons -- to their argument that the war would last months and we would be greeted as "liberators." They do not have an ounce of credibility. Why would anyone listen to them? By the way, that includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who actually testified before Congress at the time, pressing the U.S. to invade Iraq. The line that former President Bush famously muffed pertains: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Acting under the misguided leadership of the Neo-Con Republicans in 2003, the United States started a war that kicked over the sectarian hornet's nest that created a fertile field for the Islamic State, killed hundreds of thousands, wounded millions, displaced millions of refugees, and cost America trillions of dollars. And it is still not really over. Just picture a war with Iran. Iraq was a fragile, religiously-divided country of 33.4 million where the majority Shiite population had been oppressed by minority Sunni's for years. Iran is a much more homogeneous country -- and more than twice the size of Iraq - 77.4 million. In 2003 Saddam's Iraq had an army of 375,000 troops. Today Iran has an army of 545,00o well-trained troops and an active reserve of 1,800,00o. No doubt the American military could "defeat" the Iranian army in the short-term military sense. But it could no more subdue Iran militarily than it could prevent an insurrection in Iraq. And the cost in lives and treasure would be enormous. If the United States took unilateral military action against Iran after having rejected a nuclear deal that was negotiated by the leading elements of the entire international community, the U.S. would be completely isolated internationally. And it would throw gasoline on the fire in the already smoldering Middle East. Want a sure way to create a whole new generation of young Islamic terrorists, intent on attacking the United States? Start another unilateral war against a major Muslim nation. Brilliant. And most importantly -- we don't have to. By organizing massive international financial sanctions and then holding a coalition together to negotiate a tough, enforceable agreement, the Obama Administration has prevented Iran from becoming a nuclear power and avoided a War. Of course there are those who say we shouldn't do any agreement with Iran until it stops being what they consider to be a "bad actor" in the region. With all due respect, that is simply a stupid position. Wouldn't you rather have a "bad actor" in the region without nuclear weapons than a "bad actor" with nuclear weapons? We are not doing the Iranians a favor by signing a deal that prevents them from getting nuclear weapons and then eliminates economic sanctions that were put in place to achieve precisely that goal. It is in our interest to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon without the necessity of a war. The deal that the international community has negotiated with Iran achieves the goal we sought out to achieve with the sanctions in the first place. According to the terms of the "Corker bill" passed by Congress several months ago, sometime in the next 6o days, members of Congress will be faced with two of the most critical votes of their careers. First they will be asked whether or not to prevent the President from waiving the economic sanctions on Iran and therefore implementing the terms of the agreement negotiated in Vienna. If Republicans and some Democrats muster a majority of both Houses against implementing the deal, the president EFTA00850811 will then veto that measure. If Congress fails to override that veto, the agreement will go into effect. For Congress to override a veto requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate. So one third of the members of one House of Congress will be what is needed to prevent another horrific "Iraq War" moment. Some Members of Congress may think that it is in their short-term political interest to stop implementation of this agreement. Of course the polling shows that this evaluation is wrong, since most Americans support a negotiated agreement -- and oppose another war in the Middle East. But even if some Members of Congress convince themselves that there are short-term fundraising or political benefits for a vote to stop the deal -- they need to apply another more important test. Years from now, what will their grandkids think of their vote? If history is any guide, it is entirely possible that if somehow the agreement is actually blocked by Congress, the members whose votes are responsible will -- like their predecessors in 2002 -- regret those votes for the rest of their lives. Like most agreements, this one isn't perfect as neither side is getting everything it wants. But what is undeniable, is that it at a minimum execution of the Agreement slows down Iran's nuclear weapon program with the potential upside of thawing hostilities between Iran and the United States. And yes, Iran is supporting hostilities in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, but so are other counties in the Middle East, specifically Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Concurrently, some of the most effective forces fighting against our enemy ISIS, is being funded and supported by Iran. Policy in the Middle East is not black and white — it require nuance. And there is little nuance when countries are perpetually on the verge of war. Most of all, Congress doesn't understand nuance especially in a Presidential election cycle. And for the clowns in Congress who immediately rejected the Agreement before even reading it, to believe that they could do better is ludicrous. Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Here is the full text of the Iran deal Web Link: deal-text.pdf After nearly four decades of hostilities between Iran and the U.S. we should do everything possible to support the success of this agreement because doing what we have been doing hasn't worked and starting a third war in the region would be a colossal mistake. Bravo team Obama, allied partners and Iran for choosing hope over war. ****** The Numbers of Modern Slavery EFTA00850812  feline image 2 In this Nov. 29, 2014 image from video, a former slave from Burma who goes by the name Mozet, center, one of several slaves who escaped or ran away while Thai trawlers were docked at the Benjina port, cuts planks from a tree to earn money for food. Because the men were brought to Indonesia illegally — many after being tricked, sold or kidnapped by Thai brokers — they do not have any official documents and live in constant fear of being arrested. One of the ugliest practices that is still widely used, although rarely mention, is the global slavery of men, women and children around the world. And since it is often hidden or obfuscated from world view little is known since these victims are the poorest of the poor, often with little or no education and few if any resources — hence no voice. In a recent Washing Post article by Glenn Wessler titled - Why you should be wary ofstatistics on `modern slavery' and 'trafficking' - one of the reasons is because this scourge is seriously under-reported. "This report estimates that, based on the information governments have provided, only around 40,000 victims have been identified in the last year. In contrast, social scientists estimate that as many as 27 million men, women, and children are trafficking victims at any given time." —Introduction to the State Department's Trafficking in Persons report, June 2013 "Our work with victims is the key that will open the door to real change —not just on behalf of the more than 44,000 survivors who have been identified in the past year, but also for the more than 20 million victims of trafficking who have not." - Introduction to the State Department's Trafficking in Persons report, June 2014 Imagine that. In the space of one year, the number of victims of trafficking declined by 7 million in an official U.S. government report. EFTA00850813 But not to worry. There's something called the Global Slavery Index (GSI), which received fawning publicity, including in The Washington Post. In 2013, the GSI, sponsored by the Walk Free Foundation, estimated that there were 29.8 million people in "modem slavery" around the world. In November 2014, the GSI unveiled what it described as a more precise estimate: 35.8 million people. And as Wessler asks, "That's an increase of 6 million people! What's going on here?" That's an increase of 6 million people! What's going on here? The Facts Human trafficking — or, as some prefer, "modern slavery" — is a largely hidden crime, so data are relatively scarce. Note that in the State Department reports, there is a large gulf between the estimates of tens of millions of victims and the actual number of identified "survivors" — 44,000 at last count. (This number is also a bit dubious.) Moreover, the numbers can vary dramatically depending on the definition — and increasingly, the definition has been stretched. A M. protocol on trafficldng, adopted in 2000, provided a definition of trafficking that for political reasons was kept deliberately vague: Trafficking must meet three conditions — an act (such as movement), means (coercion) and purpose (exploitation). Then, in what American University law professor Janie A. Chuang calls "exploitation creep," trafficking over time has been recast to include all forced labor, even if a person does not change location, and then has been relabeled as "modern slavery." When the State Department set up its office on trafficking in the early 2000s, the numbers were much more modest. The Department's 2002 report provided an estimate that "at least 700,000, and possibly as many asfour million men, women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions." At the time, the George W. Bush administration was largely focused on highlighting anti-prostitution efforts. The Obama administration broadened the focus on trafficking to include forced labor, including when no movement was involved — and officials began to label all trafficking as "modern slavery." A State Department official, who asked not to be identified, said that the 27 million figure used in the 2013 report came from an estimate by Kevin Bales, a professor at Britain's University of Hull and author of a 2007 book, "Ending Slavery." Then, for the 204 report, State Department officials decided to rely on a 20.9-million estimate issued in 2012 by the International Labor Organization because officials decided it was more reputable. (This figure was a huge increase from a 2005 ILO estimate of 12.3 million.) In an example of how definitions matter, 9.1 million of the estimated victims in the ILO report were moved internally or internationally. "The majority, n.8 million (56 percent), are subjected to forced labor in their place of origin or residence," the report said. "The major problem we have alwaysfaced with human trafficking isfinding good data,"the State Department official said. "For now, this is still a guesstimate, but the best guesstimate there is." The official added: "I noticed that media likes to cite the Global Slavery Index number of35.8 million because it's much larger." EFTA00850814 This brings us to the Global Slavery Index. Bales no longer stands by his estimate of 27 million, saying it dates from the 199os, and points to the GSI as more accurate. (He is the lead author.) But the GSI figure has come under attack from other researchers for having a murky, inconsistent and questionable methodology. The Walk Free Foundation, founded in 2012 by Australian billionaire Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, says it wants to eliminate slavery in a generation. The GSI not only provides a total but purports to show how many "slaves" are in each country. GSI relies on an expansive definition of slavery, but confusingly it relies on primary and secondary data that was collected under different definitions. The data are relatively sparse, but the GSI extrapolates from existing numbers to make calculations in what it deems are similar countries. Essentially, researchers extrapolated from 19 countries to come up with precise statistics for the 167 countries that make up the index. Thus data for the United States is considered relevant to calculate Italy's total of 11,400 slaves, for instance. South Africa's number of slaves — supposedly 106,000 — was derived from the fact that GSI researchers decided the country is 70 percent "Western Europe" and 30 percent "African" (specifically, an amalgam of Ethiopia, Nigeria, Niger and Namibia). In the most recent report, GSI began to introduce Gallup polling in selected countries. This is one reason why it says the number jumped by 6 million in one year: "The increase is due to the improved accuracy and precision of our measures and that we are uncovering modern slavery where it was not seen before." The polling was done face to face in seven countries, and 19 additional polls will be added to next year's index, said Pablo Diego Rosell, a Gallup consultant. "In applicable countries, Gallup uses a network sampling methodology. Network sampling gathers information about an individual's carefully defined family network, including those who may be living elsewhere," he said. "This approach is most efficient in the countries that Walk Free prioritized for survey data collection, where modem slavery is either highly prevalent or has greater visibility." In other countries, where he said slavery is not as visible, the index uses "non-survey methodologies." But Andrew Guth, who wrote critically of GSI's methodology, notes that the Gallup polling, if taken as face value, demonstrated that the index's previous estimates were wildly off course. Ethiopia turned out to have a prevalence level five times lower than the year before — and Nigeria was to times lower, while Russia was deemed to be two times higher. "This simple comparison throws into question the reliability of their estimates and extrapolations of other countries whetherfrom last year or this year,"he said. "Even their own data compared to itself is not reliable." It is beyond the scope of this column to assess the merits of this debate, which largely is between experts such as Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University who advocate for careful studies of local problems and those such as Bales, who press for macro-level estimates. "The challenge is that modern slavery is a hidden crime. Every country has made slavery illegal, so collecting data on this matter has not been easy,"said Sheldon Zhang of San Diego State University, who consults for Walk Free. "We should not abandon macro level estimation just because it isfull ofproblems." EFTA00850815 Weitzer says it is more than a philosophical debate but one with important consequences. "It matters a great deal in terms of (0 whether human trafficking or modern slavery is indeed a huge problem and (2) all the money spentfighting the problem, and the proliferation of more and more laws and creation ofpolice anti-trafficking units,"he said. "The bottom line would be: what is the source of the figures propounded by NGOs, governments, international organizations and some scholars." The Pinocchio Test Clearly there is a problem with the numbers when the U.S. government cites a figure of 20 million and a well-funded, media-savvy organization touts a figure of "slaves" that is almost twice as high. Media organizations are complicit in fostering misperceptions by often citing these figures as established fact, without even an explanation or examination of the methodology. The numbers grow or shrink depending on the definitions that are used, and yet media reports rarely examine that aspect. (A rare exception is a 2007 article by our colleague Jerry Markon, who documented how few actual victims of human trafficking have been found. More recently, the Guardian has published articles critical of GSI.) Advocates want to call attention to a serious problem and big numbers of course attract media attention. But these guesstimates remain too shaky to be cited without a healthy dose of skepticism. The estimates may be done in good faith, so these Pinocchios are for all-too-credulous acceptance of them. With this the Washington Post awarded its most egregious Four Pinocchios. Inline image 1 As Wessler points out: numbers matter. Still this modern slavery does not include the tens of millions of children in poor countries working as much as 12 hours a day six days a week to supplement their family's survival. Or the millions of migrant workers from Indian, Pakistan and elsewhere around the world, living in squalor, often making just several dollars a day which money is then deducted from their salaries to repay the middlemen and loan-sharks in their home towns and villages who arranged their visas and indentured employment. Modern slavery is alive and well. It is a scourge and blight in today's society and like any other disease the world needs to work together to eradicate it numbers of not. ****** New Music Industry Revenue Figures Show an Illusion of Stability EFTA00850816  Inline image to Today's modem technology isn't just changing lives, it's also changing people's entire philosophies and popular culture. For example, it's spawned a distinct difference between the younger generation and "the rest of us": Younger folks aren't as hung up on owning what comedian George Carlin famously dismissed as "stuff" From Zipcar, to Netflix (NFLX), to owning a house, today's "on-demand" culture has made many modern goods and services more convenient and more affordable than buying outright. One area where on-demand is proving increasingly popular is the music industry... The days of spending ages at the local record store and owning a massive music collection are dwindling. A 2012 Nielsen study found that YouTube is the most popular way for the young to listen to and discover music. It's also leading to the rise of streaming, on-demand music services like Pandora (P), Spotify and iHeartRadio. In fact, they're growing faster than popular download sites like Apple's (AAPL) imnes and Amazon (AMZN). Figures from the Recording Industry Association of America support this: Streaming services jumped by 58% last year to over $1 billion in revenue, while music downloads only saw 8.6% growth to $2.9 billion. In the meantime, the number of people buying music in the United States has remained flat for the last three years. In today's mobile age, it's no surprise that smartphones and tablets are the main device for streaming music. And just as streaming music is usurping records and downloads, it's also replacing the car's AM/FM dial. Drivers are streaming music through the auxiliary jack on their phones. In a survey of 13 to 35 year olds who use streaming services, NPD Group found that more than half said they do most of their listening in the car. (Presumably, the ones under 16 weren't driving!) Car companies are taking notice. Thirteen automakers have at least one model that offers streaming music leader, Pandora. It's also in every BMW and Mini. Overall, streaming services now make up 15% of the global music market. But the move to streaming music in the United States has actually been pretty slow, compared to some other countries. Sweden has undergone an extraordinary turnaround in the last decade. Once the home of rampant music piracy, epitomized by its notorious file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, a massive 91% of Sweden's online music consumption now comes from paid subscriptions. The main reason? Sweden's streaming service, Spotify. EFTA00850817 As the company's Chief Product Officer, Gustav Soderstrom, confirms: "Spotify really started to combat online piracy, so IM say we didn't create a behavior that didn't exist, we just transferred it to a legal medium. It offered the same principle that you could get music for free, but all the music was licensed and it was better than piracy because you didn't have to wait for the whole file to download before you could listen to it." The model is hugely popular. Worldwide, Spotify has more than 24 million "active" users — i.e., people who've used the service in the last 3o days. Of those, six million are "premium" customers, who pay $10 a month for ad-free listening. And Spotify continues to grow. It recently announced expansion into Latin America, Asia and Europe. So what do these streaming music fans know that the rest of us don't? If you read the terms and conditions on download music sites like iTunes and Amazon, see what you're actually buying when Apple takes your 99(t. You're not actually "buying" the music at all. You're merely buying the right to "use" a song in your iTunes library. In other words, you can't resell or give away that song to anyone else. That's starting to sink in with consumers (leading to absurd rumors involving film star, Bruce Willis). After all, why buy a song that you don't truly own when streaming music gives you exactly the same thing for much less when amortized over time? The rise of digital media has people asking what it means to "own" something intangible? Current music copyright laws focus tangible goods — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. And the courts seem content to rule in mind-bogglingly nonsensical ways. Take a company called ReDigi, which purports to be a digital marketplace for "secondhand" songs — i.e., music you no longer want. ReDigi's software has a unique way of verifying if a downloaded song was originally obtained legally, and then once re-sold in the secondhand marketplace, it erases all traces of the song on your synced devices and prevents you from reloading it afterwards. Soon after ReDigi launched, Capitol Records promptly sued the company for infringement. The judge in the case ruled that to resell a song, you have to sell the device it's stored on. Needless to say, ReDigi is appealing. So far streaming services have bypass all the legal confusion that plagues many in downloaded music. The RIAA released its annual recorded music revenue figures for 2014. The numbers tell the story of changes in the digital music market that have been familiar for the past few years: on-demand music services up, digital radio up, CD sales even further down, ringtone revenue evaporating. The total revenues are flat, but as we'll see, that doesn't mean the music industry is now stable; not at all. First, there's one surprise in the 2014 figures, at least to those who haven't been paying close attention: the resurgence of vinyl after its near death ten years ago. Vinyl (mostly LP) revenues are the fastest- growing segment of the industry. Revenue from LPs exceeded $300 million and increased 5o% over 2013, which is more than ad-supported on-demand music services such as YouTube and Spotify's free service. And the year-over-year growth of vinyl is increasing too. Vinyl could easily become a half- billion-dollar industry this year (though that's still tiny compared to vinyl's peak of nearly $10 billion in 1978). EFTA00850818 On the other hand, sales of downloads (albums and singles) have shifted into sharp decline, as the figure below shows. Downloads, mainly from Apple's AAPL +0.43% iTunes and Amazon MP3, are down 9%. The trend is clear: a certain segment of the population still likes owning music, but those people are finding that they like owning a physical object more, particularly one available in packaging that acts as a canvas for art, photos, lyrics, and liner notes, and doesn't require a magnifying glass. The market for turntables is growing accordingly, giving rise to two new types of designs that are available at affordable prices: models with built-in analog-to-digital converters and USB output cables for digitizing your vinyl on your PC, and retro-minimalist manual models that could be described as "Warby Parker for LPs." RIAA revenues 2003-2014 Inline image II Selected recorded music revenue streams, 2003-2024, Smillion. Source: RIAA As someone who has own 78s, 45s, LPs, 8-tracks, 4-tracks, cassettes, cds as well as purchasing thousands of songs on iTunes, many of which I previously purchased in other technologies and formats, I have yet to get into music streaming. And sill owning several hundred vinyl's I am glad to hear about their comeback so I guess I better buy another turntable since I gave my last one away in the 1990s. Obviously music does have a second act.... Even The Good Guys Are Rewriting History And they can do so because no one paid for largest foreign policy mistake/disaster in U.S. history. EFTA00850819  Inline image 1 One of my late father's favorite sayings was, "history is always re-written by the winners." No place is this more evident than the current analysis of the War in Iraq which the Bush/Cheney Administration blames on bad intelligence from the CIA and other intelligence Agencies and Barack Obama. The fact that from the day that the Bush/Cheney Administration took office, their number one priority was overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein which they called "Regime Change" and others referred to as "gunboat diplomacy", should make it easy for everyone to understand how we got into the Second War in Iraq. They (the neocons) wanted it and did everything possible to make it happen. From the innuendos suggesting that Saddam Hussein was supporting al Qaeda and thus somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks, to accusations that he was developing a nuclear bomb and was months if not weeks away from developing technology that would allow him to blow up American Cities seven thousand miles away. And when this proved too bizarre the Bush/Cheney came up with the fuzzy moniker "WMD" (Weapons of Mass Destruction) that they somehow linked "mushroom clouds over Washington" and "yellow cake" from Niger which had already been proven false by the time that it was used, it should have been obvious to everyone that facts didn't matter and sooner or later war with Iraq was inevitable. These same people believed "Curveball" (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi) the Iraqi defector and scammer who claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile bio-weapons trucks and secret factories in the Iraqi desert. The fact that the only people who believe Curveball was UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair and the neocons around the Bush/Cheney Administration even though by then he had confessed to German intelligence he had lied, is often glossed over in this current reinterpretation of history. The truth is that on Sept. i8, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Bush dismissed this as worthless because the information came from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister and a member of Saddam's inner circle, which turned out to be accurate in every detail. Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. They wanted him to provide proof that Saddam had a nuclear program and could build a nuclear weapon within two years if were on the way to acquiring fissile material. Sabri told them that he couldn't. Also that EFTA00850820 Saddam didn't have chemical or biological weapons either. Not to disappoint The Noss again, Tenet never brought it up again. As a result, this intelligence was not included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through,"said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence tofit into the policy, to justify the policy." Several former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to journalist Sidney Blumenthal (who wrote great piece in Salon Magazine in September 2007 - Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction) and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert. Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war. Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods. We have to wonder if the country has collective amnesia. I say this because I understand why Dick Cheney, George Bush and the neocons are trying to rewrite history, blaming the single worse foreign policy mistake since the Civil War on intelligence failures by others. But when I see David Brook who is a conservative columnist at the New York Times employ the same excuse I truly get sick. Yes, Brooks was once an enthusiastic backer of George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq. write columns for the Weekly Standard - the official journal of bankrupt neoconservative thought - glorifying Bush for his steely-eyed determination and tartly mocking the pansy liberals and other anti-war types who opposed Bush's righteous exercise in nation- building and freedom-spreading. "History will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which EFTA00850821 institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam," Brooks prophesied in the March 2003 column, "and which were not." As we now know not only did this prediction not pan out, the Iraq war ended up being a disaster. But contrary to Brooks' assurance, the "clear judgments" about who was right and who was wrong about Iraq are still pending, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who got it so terribly wrong haven't faced any real consequences. Let's use Brooks himself as an example. He landed his plum gig on the Times op-ed page a few months after the war started and used his perch to continue singing the praises of Bush and the Iraq experiment, like in this September 2004 column predicting that Iraq's elections would help undermine the insurgency. What judgment did Brooks face for being constantly and consistently wrong about Iraq? Well, he's still writing for the Times op-ed page. But, according to his latest Times column, Brooks claims to have learned from the mistakes he made about Iraq. You can't undo the past, Brooks writes, but you can draw lessons from it: The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There's a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war. That doesn't gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found "a major intelligencefailure": "Thefailure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers." There's so much that's wrong in these two paragraphs. Brooks' argument that the invasion was just one big good-faith "whoopsie" on the part of the Bush White House was demolished just yesterday by his colleague Paul Krugman. The problem with the Iraq intelligence wasn't just a lack of "skepticism" on the part of the people consuming it — there was a concerted effort to twist and manipulate that intelligence to achieve the desired end of invading Iraq. And today the argument that the only reason why the United States and its allies got into the war was because of faulty intelligence is a continuation of the same pattern of lies. And for David Brooks who I respect and for the media to accept is as dishonest as the initial deception that got us into the war in the first place. Today, Brooks now claims that "the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure" is a "fable." This is a dishonest and easily debunked straw man. No one is arguing that all the intelligence was cooked. There were definite failures within the intelligence community. The problem, again, is that those failures were compounded by the Bush administration spin and deception about aluminum tubes and secret Al Qaida connections. But, Brooks counters again, it's just not true that the Bush people cooked some of the Iraq intelligence because the "exhaustive" Robb-Silberman report found that it was all just a series of errors. EFTA00850822 This, again, is false. The Robb-Silberman report was not "exhaustive" - the commission was specifically instructed not to investigate how Iraq intelligence was manipulated by policymakers. That task fell to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which found that George W. Bush and his closest advisers regularly made definitive statements about Iraq's weapons programs and terrorism ties that were either unsubstantiated by available intelligence or didn't reflect disputes within the intelligence community. Having exonerated the architects of the war — and, by extension, himself - of conscious wrongdoing, Brooks explains what he's really learned from this ordeal: military interventionism is only slightly overrated as a policy. And he can say this because "no one" (leadership or supporters) has paid a price for the greatest foreign policy mistake/disaster in the country's history. M Simon Maloy recently wrote in Salon Magazine, we should go back to Brooks' 2003 assurance that history will render its verdicts on those who endorsed the Iraq debacle and those who did not. History hasn't yet allowed "clear judgments" on the backers of the Iraq misadventure because the people who should be feeling the sting of those judgments — like David Brooks - (whom I respect) — are doing their level best to water down and explain away the appalling conduct that led to the actual war. What makes Brooks' column so galling is that he's trying to present his self-serving exculpation of the Iraq war architects as a lesson learned. Brooks pretty clearly hasn't learned a thing, and that's to be expected when you suffer no consequences for being completely and catastrophically wrong. Ultimately, history is always rewritten by the winners. Another Milestone is Broken Inlim. inmgc 1 A major barrier was broken in America and no one seem to notice... This was on the week of the mass shooting by 21-year-old Dylann Roff (an avowed white supremacist) at the Emanuel African EFTA00850823 Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, United States. The church is one of the United States' oldest black churches and has long been a site for community organization around civil rights. Nine people were killed, including the senior pastor and state senator, Clementa C. Pinckney. A tenth person was shot and survived. One day after the tragedy in Charleston this barrier that few people noticed was career journalist Lester Holt was made the permanent anchor of NBC Nightly News, with NBC moving the disgraced Brian Williams to its MSNBC cable network. Having been born the year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Sports when he played his first game as a Brooklyn Dodger and before Chuck Cooper became the first black player to be drafted when he was chosen by Boston; Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton became the first to sign an NBA contract when he signed with New York, and Earl Lloyd became the first to play in an NBA regular-season game because the schedule had his Washington team opening one day before the others, I never imagined the day when a person of color would host the Nightly News for one of the Big 3 Networks. When I was growing up there was an informal "quota" of sorts on how many African-Americans could be on a team at one time... In Basketball it was 4 although most teams only had three or less and in Major League Baseball the "quota" was two and some teams having only one African American player. And although there were many African American medical doctor, dentist, engineers and scientist, I remember when whites didn't think that blacks had the intellect, talent and temperament to be quarterbacks in the NFL, pitchers in Major League Baseball or managers in either in Major League Baseball, Football or Basketball. And although African Americans had been flying for their country since WWII and Tuskegee, the first Black person to travel in space was a Cuban, Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez on Soyuz 38 (September 18, 1980) curtesy of the USSR. Guion Bluford was the First African-American astronaut in space STS-8 (August 3o, 1983). And no one noticed.... But when I remember when the New York Knicks played the Detroit Pistons on October 18, 1979 and everyone Black person I knew was calling friends to watch the game because all of the players on the floor were African Americans. We couldn't believe it... There have been African Americans stars since the days of Benjamin Banneker, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Madame C.J. Walker (thefirst Women millionaire in America), W.E.B. DuBois, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, (Known as "The Father of the Blues."), Benjamin O. Davis Sr. (First AfricanAmerican general in the U.S. Army), Jack Johnson (First black heavyweight boxing champion of the world), Eubie Blake, Mamie Smith (First African American to make vocal blues recordings, in 1920), Marcus Garvey, Bessie Coleman (First black licensed pilot in the world), Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Rosa Parks (Dubbed the "Mother of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement"), Joe Louis, Muddy Waters, Ella Fitzgerald. James Baldwin and Edward Brooke III (First African American elected to the U.S. Senate), Shirley Chisholm (First African- American woman elected to Congress) and Althea Gibson (First African American woman to be a competitor on the world tennis tour). My generation has had Miles Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Ray Charles, Colin Powell, Andy Young, John Coltrane, Jessie Jackson, Arthur Ashe, Wilt Chamberlin, Walter Payton, Stevie Wonder, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Michael Jackson and Oprah. We have seen African Americans become the World's Most Love Athlete (Muhammad Ali), the Number 1 Rock Star in the World (Jimi Hendrix), the Number 1 Pop Start in the World (Michael Jackson), the EFTA00850824 most successful and trusted person in media (Oprah) and the most powerful person in the world (Barrack Hussein Obama our President). So maybe it is understandable that there was little fanfare when Lester Holt took over as the anchor on NBC's Nightly News. This is the chair of the legendary John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Roger Mudd and for the last eleven years Brian Williams. Then after three months as the interim anchor, NBC announced that Lester Holt was made the permanent anchor. This was a position denied to Bryant Gumbel who took the Number 1 position away from Good Morning America when he co-hosted The TODAY'S SHOW on NBC. With this I would like to give a belated congratulations to Lester Holt for breaking this barrier with such ease and grace, that few people noticed. For more about Lester Holt, attached please find Emily Steel's New York Times article — Lester Holt Reflects on Rise to NBC's Anchor Chair. ****** Greece Screwed Again Inline image 1 Already owed 322 billion euros the Euro Zone Partners bullied Greece in accepting a deal that would give them an additional 86 billion euros in return for tougher austerity measures and structural reforms. How stupid is this? Think about it, if someone can't repay 322 billion do you think that by giving 82 billion euros more is a solution? As someone commented, "The Greek debacle reminds me of the doctor who gave a patient six months to live. When he failed to pay the doctor's bill the doctor gave him another six months." Greece's economy has already contracted by more than 25%. So with less money coming in how the hell are they then going to repay a much larger loan? This is truly voodoo economics. And the EU, IMF and Germany should be ashamed. EFTA00850825 One could understand if the money was being provided so that Greece could expand their industrial base, but to give them money to repay non-performing loans is an un