Category Archives: Iraq War

Numbers and Wingnuts

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One of Bill Kristol’s New York Times‘s columns has been republished on the Guardian web site. You can read it if you like, although to be frank I didn’t get past the blurb — “It is beyond Democrats to concede that Bush’s troop surge has been a substantial success.” Of course, it is beyond a neocon to concede that the principal objective of the surge has not been accomplished. The surge was supposed to buy the Iraqi government some time to pull itself together. Instead, the political situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate, surge or no surge.

But what I really want to call your attention to is one of the comments, which doesn’t have a direct link. “Hotbed” writes,

But let’s do the math:

1) The World Health Organization says that in the three years after the invasion 151,000 Iraqis died in random violence.

2) During Saddam’s 24 years in power, he started the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars (in which about one million people died) and exterminated at least 500,000 of his own people.

Let’s work out the annual averages:

62,500 violent deaths per year under Saddam
50,000 violent deaths per year under the occupation.

So the latter figure will have to rise substantially, and continue for another 20 years, for the anti-war lobby to have been “right” about Iraq, Bush etc.

Never mind that Hotbed is using a lowball estimate of deaths per year under the occupation and a high estimate of deaths under Saddam. Never mind 3,923 dead U.S. soldiers as of today. Never mind that over 4 million Iraqis have been displaced. Never mind that the Middle East is now less stable than it was before. Never mind that the cost so far is approaching $486 billion. Never mind that the invasion of Iraq served absolutely no vital interest of the United States. Hotbed has the numbers! We’re a success!

In the recent “Morality and Wingnuts” post, I wrote about right-wing blogger reaction to the New York Times article on violent crimes committed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of expressing sympathy and concern for veterans who lacked support for war trauma, the righties went into big-time defensive mode and accused the New York Times of bashing vets.

I wrote,

This blogger (who tags his post “NY Times liars scoundrels scumbags”) calculates that 121 homicides among the number of returned veterans is actually below the national homicide rate of the general population — “one-half to less than one-third as much.” But the blogger calculates that there are 1.99 million Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, and I don’t believe that’s accurate. (Note to wingnuts: By saying “I don’t believe” I acknowledge that I don’t know what the number is and could be mistaken.) …

… I would like to know how the real homicide rate of the vets compares to non-vets of the same age group, particularly among males, who commit nearly 90 percent of homicides. It’s possible that the rate among the vets is pretty close to average.

Michelle Malkin provides a correction. According to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the actual number of discharged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 749,932, not 1.99 million. If there were 121 homicides among that number of people (the New York Times considers 121 to be a minimum, not the actual total), then the homicide rate would be 16.1 per 100,000. This is lower than the going homicide rate of 20 per 100,000 rate for white males aged 18-24. But some of the vets are older, and some are women, and the 121 is probably a low number. As I said, it’s possible the homicide rate of discharged veterans is pretty close to average for that demographic group.

And numbers don’t show us what individuals are going through. When you look at individual cases as the New York Times did, it does appear that some of those homicides were related to war trauma. The point of the NY Times article was not that veterans by nature are homicidal maniacs, but that there is inadequate screening and support for post-traumatic stress and veterans and their families are suffering for it.

But in Rightie World, pointing out that veterans have all the vulnerabilities normally associated with being human is bashing the troops. Can’t have that.

And if they can produce some numbers to show that there’s no problem, then there’s no problem, never mind the real-world experience of actual flesh-and-blood people. See Malkin’s headline: “Hey, NYT: 99.98 percent of all discharged Iraq and Afghanistan vets have not committed or been charged with homicide!”

From the New York Times story that has Malkin in her usual steaming outrage mode (I swear, that girl is going to wear out her nervous system one of these days) —

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car. …

…The Times’s analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of these young men, unlike most civilian homicide offenders, had no criminal history.

Statistics say these episodes are not a problem, say the wingnuts. Stuff happens.

Update: Enjoy the video —

Messy

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The Obama campaign has released a memo detailing a number of racially charged remarks made by the Clinton campaign. Josh Marshall writes,

We seem to be at the point where there are now two credible possibilities. One is that the Clinton campaign is intentionally pursuing a strategy of using surrogates to hit Obama with racially-charged language or with charges that while not directly tied to race nonetheless play to stereotypes about black men. The other possibility is that the Clinton campaign is extraordinarily unlucky and continually finds its surrogates stumbling on to racially-charged or denigrating language when discussing Obama.

Josh argues that many of the charges from the Obama campaign are based on comments taken out of context. Maybe. But the Clintons have been distorting Obama’s record on opposing the Iraq War. I think the Obamas have put the Clintons on notice that they can play that game, too.

More on war records from Ezra Klein:

The issue isn’t the issue — about which Obama was correct — it’s his consistency on the issue. Barack Obama was right on Iraq, and Hillary Clinton was wrong. Obama could have made a couple more speeches, but there really wasn’t much he could do to divert the course of the war as a lone Senator. By contrast, there was very much Hillary Clinton, and her husband, could have done to divert the war — and all it would have taken was exactly what Obama did. A prescient, fiercely oppositional speech during the run-up to the invasion. Nor has Clinton, who routinely promises to end the war once in office, exercised political leadership in the Senate, using either her media power or parliamentary pull to sustain a brave stand against the conflict. Instead, she has spoken of her desire to end it and, in reality, gone along with the cowed, ineffectual approach of the Senate Democrats: Register opposition, vote against bills, eventually pass spending measures that continue the war. I understand that the narrative she’s trying to push is that real change takes perpetual work, but she’s not been working for this change. That may be because she doesn’t believe in this change, but either way.

Elsewhere: Chicago Dyke on how Republicans tried to buy black clerical leaders. Actually, to a large extent, they succeeded.

Update: Liza Sabater and racial tension headache.

Morality and Wingnuts

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This relates to the last post, on the psychological and neurobiological factors of morality. It’s also about the psychological defenses people use to see the world the way they want to see it.

The New York Times today has an article on violent crimes committed by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It suggests that trauma and stress of war are factors.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. …

…Few of these 121 war veterans received more than a cursory mental health screening at the end of their deployments, according to interviews with the veterans, lawyers, relatives and prosecutors. Many displayed symptoms of combat trauma after their return, those interviews show, but they were not evaluated for or received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder until after they were arrested for homicides.

The writers, Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez, make no personal judgments, but the article overall is sympathetic to the soldiers and suggests that returning veterans could use much more support in their transition back to “normalcy” than they are getting.

Now, let’s look at reactions from some rightie bloggers. Here’s one:

NYT’s Vet Bashing Series (UPDATE)

The New York Times starts a new series, called “War Torn”: “A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.”

The first installment, 6253 words, is a considerable investment of ink, with more to come, by the New York Times to create negative impressions of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and by extension the missions they served.

As related to the last post — obviously, the Sontag-Alvarez article triggered the blogger’s loyalty sphere and elicited an emotional, defensive response. Instead of concluding that more could be done to help vets deal with war trauma, the blogger concluded that the New York Times is disloyal to vets. Also as discussed in the last post, this reaction also may be from a strong “mentality of taboo.” I’ve written in the past that some right-wingers think it is taboo to acknowledge that soldiers are flesh-and-blood human beings and not plastic (or galvanized steel) action heroes.

Perhaps this emotional and illogical overreaction comes from wingers having to deny to themselves that their beloved war in Iraq was a big mistake, and lives are being lost and ruined for nothing. That’s some heavy-duty denial, folks. Yet they’ve kept it up all this time. No wonder they’re twitchy (the wingnuts, I mean).

This blogger (who tags his post “NY Times liars scoundrels scumbags”) calculates that 121 homicides among the number of returned veterans is actually below the national homicide rate of the general population — “one-half to less than one-third as much.” But the blogger calculates that there are 1.99 million Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, and I don’t believe that’s accurate. (Note to wingnuts: By saying “I don’t believe” I acknowledge that I don’t know what the number is and could be mistaken.)

This article from March 2007 says that 690,000 veterans had served in Iraq and Afghanistan combat zones (a lower number than the total number deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m sure). It may be that the higher number represents total deployments, not total individual soldiers. Given the high number of repeat deployments, the deployment number doesn’t tell us how many individual soldiers served.

However, I would like to know how the real homicide rate of the vets compares to non-vets of the same age group, particularly among males, who commit nearly 90 percent of homicides. It’s possible that the rate among the vets is pretty close to average. Even so, that doesn’t mean post-traumatic stress wasn’t a factor in some of the homicides committed by vets. For example, one soldier who killed his two-year-old daughter was recovering from a brain trauma.

The article does not say that all returning veterans are twitching homicidal time bombs. I figured (correctly) that righties would react as if it did.

I’ve noticed over the years that if I make a statement like “some brown dogs have fleas” or even “about half of brown dogs have fleas at some point in their lives,” someone will comment that their brown dog does not have fleas, therefore the statement is wrong. I’ve seen this bit of illogic so many times that I have concluded some people cannot wrap their heads around the concept of some. Some is not all. Some is not necessarily most.

It’s also a common phenomenon for people to hear a couple of sensational news stories about X and extrapolate that X is a new and growing problem, when in fact the rate of X has not increased over the years. I remember after the Andrea Yates episode threw light on infanticide, there was a public perception that the rate of infanticide was growing at the time. But I checked; it was not. If anything, it had gone down slightly.

So, there will be some people who read this article and conclude that all returning vets are twitching homicidal time bombs, which is not true. Still, few is not none. Just because infanticide is rare doesn’t mean it was OK to leave five children alone with a psychotic mother who had just been taken off her meds. Even if the homicide rate among veterans is close to the average for their demographic group doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be better screening and support for the effects of trauma.

And calling attention to the tragic consequences of war trauma is not “bashing vets” to anyone thinking rationally.

Rightie blogger reaction to Friday’s anti-Guantanamo protests was all “loyalty sphere” stuff also. (Malkin called the protesters “unhinged.”) To me, of course, the detention center at Guantanamo is a betrayal to everything this country used to stand for, and opposing it is an act of patriotism. But wingnuts cannot see that; their “loyalty” and “authority” spheres override any other moral senses (including any understanding of the principles of democracy versus totalitarianism) that might yet linger, crushed and ignored, in the depths of their ids.

This confusion of group loyalty and authoritarianism with morality is a big part of why wingnuts are screwing up America. I’m not sure what can be done about that, though.

Contrasts

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Kurt Campbell notes in the New York Times that the “Iraqitects” — “the Bush Administration’s key architects of the Iraq War” — are not a group prone to losing sleep.

Indeed, what’s particularly unique about this group of national security strategists is their sheer ability to keep moving forward and to remain in the game. No public fretting or loss of composure, no signs of a larger remorse for the terrible chain of events they helped set in motion, no sense that history is not going as planned.

Even after offering atrocious advice to President Bush during the 2000 campaign, most of them are back again advising one or more of the prospective Republican candidates, and many continue to offer sage assessments and quick denunciations on Fox news about the recent developments in Iraq. All say that history will redeem them, that democracy will triumph in Iraq, and that Harry Truman has suddenly become their second favorite president of all time (no one could beat out the Gipper).

Iran poses new opportunities for scheming and planning, and Islamofascism is on the march and must be vigorously opposed. For the Iraq architects – or Iraqitects — life goes on and there is very little in the way of public accountability or introspection. Everything remains, well, normal.

Campbell uses the word normal quite a bit. Think Hannah Arendt.

Perhaps part of the curiosity is because this current generation of war planners has conducted themselves so much differently than the Vietnam era Masters of the Universe. Many from the version 1.0 of the best and the brightest – those intrepid Cold Warriors who led the country to a slogging defeat in Vietnam – had to subsequently endure booing on college campuses, shunning from old friends and colleagues, brutal treatment from the commentariat of the time, and the kind of bitter despair that generally accompanies a thoroughgoing battlefield defeat.

As a post graduate fellow at Harvard, I can still recall the lonely, ghostlike figure of Robert McNamara striding around Cambridge, making presentations to a new generation of would-be strategists about how to learn from his mistakes of the past. Others, like Dean Rusk, simply quietly retreated from public view, perhaps hoping history would treat them more gently than some of their contemporaries.

It’s a sad day when we look back at the “Vietnamitects” as role models.

The version 2.0 era of neoconservative advocates of military action to topple Saddam have behaved very differently in the midst of our current quagmire in Iraq. … very few have publicly questioned themselves over their own culpability in the entire mess. And those who have had the courage to do so, like Frank Fukuyama, have been roundly attacked and criticized from within the neocon camp. Indeed, what’s particularly unique about this group of national security strategists is their sheer ability to keep moving forward and to remain in the game. No public fretting or loss of composure, no signs of a larger remorse for the terrible chain of events they helped set in motion, no sense that history is not going as planned.

The Iraqitects remind me of a stock character in old films and television dramas, the aristocratic villain. Aristocratic villains are generally corrupt and incompetent bullies who are rich, titled, and privileged by accident of birth. No matter what messes they make, unless they are convicted of doing something treasonous or felonious (always a satisfying plot resolution) they remain rich, titled, and privileged. And they make life hell for the hero, who is usually a common-born, practical, man-of-action type.

Speaking of which, Barbara Barrett of the Virginia News & Observer writes that life is not so normal for others.

Late at night, after the moon has settled into the swamps and cotton fields surrounding Army Sgt. 1st Class Chad Stephens’ home, the soldier puts down his last drink.

He pulls himself off the sofa, leans over the television to snap quiet his latest war movie and lies in bed next to his wife of 12 years.

The dream never takes long to arrive. Stephens’ platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles is somewhere in Iraq, pinned down by the enemy.

Grenades fly at them. Bullets ding off metal. His troops holler into their radios, and Stephens, the platoon leader, feels the danger.

On this night in his dream, like every night, Stephens will keep a promise — to his soldiers and, in particular, to the mother of a blue-eyed gunner named Danny.

Nearly four years ago, in January 2004, the N.C. National Guard platoon sergeant stood in an Army classroom facing that mother and the families of the 40 men he was about to lead into war.

He stood 6-foot-4 and infantry-lean, and in the confident voice familiar to his men, he made a promise: I’ll bring your sons home.

He had wanted it to be true.

Even then, Stephens knew he was lying.

This is a powerful piece. Be sure to read it.

Smart v. Stupid

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Just to show I’m not against protesting, here are some of my amateur photos of a peace march held recently in New Rochelle, New York. It was a very cold day, which kept the crowd small, but a righteous time was had by all.

On the other hand, some people need to learn the difference between righteous protesting and stupid protesting. From The Olympian:

The United States continues to wage an unwinnable war in Iraq. In a misguided attempt to end that war, protesters have taken to the streets of Olympia this week to block the shipment of military equipment COMING HOME from that war.

See, dears, bringing stuff home is what we want. This is not what you should be protesting.

This newspaper has taken a strong stand against the war in Iraq. On the Fourth of July, we called for an end to the hostilities and an immediate withdrawal of troops. We asked how many more Americans will forfeit their lives on the battlefield and how many more tax dollars will be spent to stall America’s inevitable departure? We said, “It’s time to end the American bloodshed. It’s time to bring the troops home.”

While we are firmly against President Bush’s war and while we fully support protesters’ right to peaceably assemble, we condemn the tactics that have played out on the streets of the capital city this week. When protesters resorted to blocking roads, dragging debris into the middle of downtown streets, breaking windows, destroying public property, damaging police cars and hurling rocks at police, they clearly crossed the line. Their peaceful assembly evolved into lawbreaking and they must be held individually accountable.

This is the kind of crap that helped get Richard Nixon re-elected in 1972.

Proving she’s just as juvenile as the protesters, Little Lulu is shrieking about “sedition” and posting photographs and videos of alleged lawbreakers, no doubt hoping some West Coast wingnut will find them and do them bodily injury.

I realize you can argue that if you’ve touched off Malkin’s ire, you must be doing something right. But Malkin lives in perpetual snit mode, 24/7. She can no doubt be sent into a flying rage over the color of toothpaste. Her opinion is irrelevant.

And, at this point, it appears the opinion of the American people is irrelevant, also. But it wouldn’t hurt for us to reach some of the 40 percent of American citizens who still think victory is possible.

And how would that be done? Here’s a clue: Start by not being stupid.

Would You Pay $1 to Get $30?

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You’d be tempted, wouldn’t you? This is the thinking behind Jim Holt’s It’s the Oil, appearing in the London Review of Books:

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. ….

Read the whole piece, it’s not that long. What’s galling to me is that it’s been obvious from day one that getting the oil was a huge reason behind Operation Iraqi Liberation, and yet this is the elephant in the dining room, that no one dares talk about. As Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir: “I am saddened, that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Arthur Silber writes about the weird unreality of avoiding the elephants in the dining room:

…It is not simply that our national discourse rests on a foundation of evasions, complicated by equivocations, twisted by avoidance, and rendered into meaningless insignificance by an uncountable series of lies. All of that is true, but it fails to capture the quality that is most striking to the perceptive observer. That quality is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are “acceptable” — phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts. It is as if everyone realizes, but will never state, that we are engaged in an elaborate charade, a pageant of gesture and indication, where substance and specific meaning have been banned.

…For this is where we are in the United States, nearing the end of the Year of Our Lord 2007: the truth is not merely unpleasant, an uninvited guest who makes conversation difficult and awkward. Truth is the enemy; truth is to be destroyed. To attempt to speak the truth on any subject of importance requires a deep reserve of determination, for to speak the truth requires that one first sweep away an infinite number of rationalizations, false alternatives, and numerous other failures of logic and the most rudimentary forms of thought — as well as the endless lies. On that single occasion in a thousand or a million when a person overcomes these barriers and speaks the truth, he or she discovers an additional, terrible truth: almost no one wants to hear it. This is how we live today: lies are the staple of our diet. Without them, we would die, certainly in psychological terms.

Until our country can come clean about its shameful acts overseas – and our oil grab in Iraq is only the latest, if most outrageous adventure – we will have squandered in only one administration what good will and high regard America enjoyed that literally took generations to build. The sad thing, is that presented with these unvarnished facts, many of our countrymen would simply shrug and be glad that they can continue their Happy Motoring lifestyle, more or less unabated – Iraqis or whoever, be damned.

Even sadder, is that our inability to talk about what Iraq really is about is only one example of the brokeness of our national discourse. I’m reminded of Thomas Cahill’s wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization. The book opens with a description of the Roman Empire, in its last days, immediately before it fell. Cahill described the art and literature and discourse of that time as being sterile, trite, and derivative of the Empire’s former glory days. In fact, artists and writers were praised for their ability to mimic the styles of yesteryear.

In our time, we still have all the forms of democracy, including a Constitution, checks and balances, elections and an opposition party – all the stuff we took for granted and were bored with during high school civics – and yet the spirit animating these forms is dying, much as it left Rome just before it fell. As often as the winguts fly the flag, and as often as Bush shouts “Freedom” and “Democracy” we know that it’s all a sham, a cruel twisting of what our country once was. And as competent as the leading Democratic candidates are, they don’t dare to speak to what is really going on. The real rulers of this country decided that paying a dollar to get thirty is a good deal, and they don’t care what gets destroyed in the process – in fact it benefits them. Mission Accomplished.

It’s the Propaganda, Stupid

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Joby Warrick reports in the Washington Post:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

Even Captain Ed is dismayed.

The release of the Osama tape turned out to be even less significant than first thought. At the time, the tape clearly intended to coordinate the launch of at least three terrorist attacks in the second week of September. The effort was timed to coincide with September 11th, the sixth anniversary of 9/11. The leaks put the tapes out days earlier, and in the meantime, Western agencies had already rolled up the cells planning the attacks.

The US government insists that the leak did no real damage to their intel capabilities. However, the two independent reports, especially Lake’s, demonstrates at least a temporary setback in acccessing AQ’s Internet activities. If the reports are true, then SITE and the intel agencies will have to rediscover AQ’s network of servers, figure out how to hack back into the networks, and re-establish the identities of those who run them. That could take a very long time, and in the interim, we could be missing some vital information.

Eli Lake of the New York Sun:

… the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. …

… One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”

No one is saying who leaked the video. But according to Warrick of WaPo, SITE founder Katz had decided to offer an advance copy of the video to the White House, free of charge, so that the Bushies would be prepared for its release. Katz spoke first to White House counsel Fred Fielding. At about 10 a.m. on September 7, Katz sent an email to Fielding and to Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center. The email contained a link to the video on a private SITE web page as well as an English translation of the video.

Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz’s e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE’s server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. “This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

The Liberal Avenger notes,

Of course, it goes without saying that the outlet that the Bush administration leaked the video to was Fox News, ensuring that the public’s first impression of the video would be presented by an outlet that would attempt to tie bin Laden to the Democrats (VIDEO).

You don’t have to be a fly on the Oval Office wall to know what happened. September 7 was the Friday before General Petraeus’s testimony to Congress, and conventional wisdom of the moment was that nothing Petraeus would say would change anyone’s minds about the surge, one way or another. Clearly, the White House needed a propaganda tool to amp up the fear factor. And lo, Katz dropped just the thing right in the Bushies’ laps.

Al Qaeda was the main theme for the White House just then. The September 8 radio address was all about al Qaeda. September 11 was, of course, our annual Let’s Be Afraid of al Qaeda Day. On September 13 the President gave one of his rare prime-time addresses to the nation about how we have to stay in Iraq to achieve victory over al Qaeda.

You might ask, what does it profit us to fight al Qaeda in Iraq if we’re going to trash our own intelligence about al Qaeda? Oh, my dears, we must see the big picture. The big picture is not that we support the war to defeat al Qaeda; rather, we use al Qaeda to support the war. Keep it straight.

Update: Will Bunch writes,

In this case, in particular, Bush was clearly eager to use the bin Laden video — just hours after it was leaked to the media — to make political points on the issue that dominated the news that week, the run-up to the report by General David Petraeus, and Bush’s campaign for a long-term troop presence in Iraq. Check out how quickly Bush “seized” on the leaked bin Laden video on Sept. 9 of this year, at the Asian ecomomic summit in Sydney, Australia (from Agence France Presse, via Nexis):

    On his final day here, he seized on a new video from terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who called for escalating the insurgency in Iraq, to argue that if the Al-Qaeda chief thinks Iraq is important, so should the US public.

    “I find it interesting that on the tape, Iraq was mentioned, which is a reminder that Iraq is a part of this war against extremists,” Bush said after the release of the video, bin Laden’s first in three years.

    In the tape the Al-Qaeda chief marks six years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with a pledge “to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you” in Iraq.

This is so wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. As has been well-documented over the last couple months, Bush has shamelessly tried to seed confusion over the role of a newer group called al-Qaeda in Iraq — with no direct link to bin Laden, which didn’t exist in 2003 and would not have if the U.S. hadn’t invaded the country — while downplaying the true nature of the Iraq insurgency, which is largely homegrown or supported by our supposed ally, Saudi Arabia.

That blatant misleading of the American public is bad enough, but now that we learn in trying to salvage his failed Iraq policy and score a few cheap political points, the Bush White House was willing to casually undermine a successful spying operation against the terrorists who really did attack American soil. Some called it betrayal, even treason, when Bush aides outed an covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame, but at first blush it looks like this shameful ploy was 10 times worse — putting many more American lives at risk than just one undercover agent.

As you’ve probably noticed, there’s been a lot of debate about the meaning of the word “betrayal” lately. Let’s be clear what this is. The leak of the bin Laden video wasn’t carelessness. It was a betrayal, a betrayal by the president of the United States and his aides of the worst kind — for politics’ sake.


Update 2: This partisan hack at Newsbusters blames ABC for alerting al Qaeda to the leak in their communications system. I swear, there are days I think you could clear out the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum and re-populate it with the Right Blogosphere, and no one would know the difference.