White House breakdown: psychological warfare gets ya in trouble; plus things always weird in Damascus

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ABC News: Gore: I Don't Plan to Run for President

Reuters: Judy Miller testifies.

AntiWar.com picked up a couple new columnists. Charles Peña starts up with "A New York State of Mind" pointing out the various fallacies in the GWOT these days.

Rove looking doomed: Is there some kind of rebellion or conflict between Bush's Chief of Staff Andy Card and Karl Rove, as Howard Fineman was speculating on Hardball? Billmon reflects, after meeting Card quite a few times over the years, and finding him dense and basically a patsy, asks if that's not what he's going to be now.

How did we get to this point? Fitzgerald got appointed when some Justice lawyers on the Plame case raised concerns that Rove wasn't being entirely truthful, and they pointed out that Ashcroft and Rove had an old history of helping each other out in politics. They managed to force Ashcroft to appoint Fitz, the special prosecutor. The investigation seems to be going wider into WHIG - the White House Iraq Group, an organization I suppose I've ignored relative to the more attractive Office of Special Plans. Either way... Libby withheld key info from investigators. Some rumors that Fitzgerald is trying to get the Grand Jury extended. Wilson directly accused the WHIG group of being the center of the effort (via Corrente):

Wilson: [The White House Iraq Group] would be the natural group because they were constituted to spin the war, so they would be naturally the ones to try to deflect criticism. Now, some of those people would have very high security clearances.

Naturally word is caroming around the blog world that finally the circle on the war lies might be closed. Digby puts out a timeline of exposures (the late David Kelly in the UK, Wilson here) against the lies of the war's architects, prompting their retaliation. Josh Marshall has done a lot on exposing how the White House propped up the original Niger yellowcake forgeries themselves.

He's added links to ex-military analyst Sam Gardiner's "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management,
Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations
in Gulf II," [PDF parts 1 2 3 4 5 6] essentially making the case that weapons of psychological warfare - information warfare, disinformation etc. - were turned on the American public for the first time in the leadup to this war. And the anthrax stories distorted to amplify fear. Well I think that it's a little bit far to say it was the first time - it seems to happen a lot. Gardiner says that the US and UK fabricated or distorted at least 50 identifiable stories about the war. Yeah. As Digby quotes:

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner's research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a "meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner's final assessment "irresponsible in parts" and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs... [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

Meanwhile on CNN today, they were running the hell out of an Amanpour interview with Bashar Assad, and I found that the excerpts selected from the whole thing were interesting... I had the TV on in the background much of the day, and they changed bits of the excerpts around, but it isn't surprising the stuff they focused on - the direct accusations about loose borders, the Hariri assassination, avoiding any talk about the Palestinians.

Bush keeps threatening Syria over and over. Right after the interview the Syrian interior minister turned up dead in his office with a gunshot to the head. SyriaComment.com by academic Joshua Landis is very much worth looking at. Was it suicide or murder?

Was Ghazi Kanaan setting himself up to be Bashar's alternative? Could he have been the Alawite "Musharrif" that some American's and Volker Perthes suggested would take power from the House of Asad and bring Syria back into America's and the West's good graces. I have heard from several people that "high ranking Syrians" have been complaining to people at the National Security Council and elsewhere that they are very distressed by the mistakes Bashar al-Asad has made and the terrible state of US-Syrian relations.

Could Ghazi have been setting himself up as the alternative to Bashar? Could the Syrian government believe he might have been? We don't know, but here goes the possible speculation. He is known to have had good relations with Washington, when he held the Lebanon portfolio. He visited DC. Two of his four sons went to George Washington University in DC.

Kanaan was reported to have been one of the "Old Guard" who spoke out against the extension of Emile Lahoud's presidency in Lebanon, which set the stage for Lebanon's Cedar revolution and the assassination of P.M. Rafiq Hariri. He had been one of the Syrians responsible for cultivating Hariri and building up his position in Lebanon. He was also accused of having significant business relations in Lebanon which tied him to Hariri. It is unlikely that he was involved in Hariri's murder, having been a Hariri and not Lahoud supporter.

His relations with Lahoud were strained, and Lahoud reportedly was one of the people who insisted that he be removed from the Lebanon file and replaced by Rustum Ghazali. (Told me by Nick Blanford of the Christian Science Monitor, who is writing a book on Hariri.)

Since the June Baath Party Conference, it has been rumored that Ghazi would lose his Cabinet position as Minister of Interior, where he had been causing quite a ruckus.

Kanaan was the most senior Alawi official left in government of the Hafiz's generation. He had served as an intelligence chief and minister of interior giving him influence over and knowledge of all branches of the security forces - intelligence and police. If Washington were to turn to anyone to carry out a coup against Bashar, it would have to place Ghazi Kanaan on the top of its list.

Also there is a very interesting "note from a Syrian dissident" about why a coup in Syria is unlikely. And three interesting views on what the Bush Administration might be plotting, including reports that the Pentagon is secretly planning to bomb Syrian villages along the Euphrates River.

Oil production in Iraq has collapsed to 1.9 million barrels/day, down from 2.6 million before the war. Guess who profits?

Condi gets a GF? There was a weird thing on Fox News where an anchor interviewing Condoleeza Rice encouraged her to check out another anchor (another story here), Lauren Green, who used to be on Channel 5 here in Minnesota, as well as Miss Minnesota. There was a funny story in Radar about "Bush's closet heterosexuals." I didn't realize that Ken Mehlman refused to go on record saying that he liked women. It comes up in the context of California Rep. David Dreier, who was apparently pushed aside from the Republican leadership because people had the perception he was gay, which the major local media in California refuses to address. As the story concludes:

It would be the height of hypocrisy for a conservative to embrace her party’s most extreme views while simultaneously embracing a member of the same sex. The GOP rank and file takes its values seriously. Just imagine the outrage were Rush Limbaugh revealed to be a drug addict, William Bennett a compulsive gambler, Gary Bauer a philanderer, Strom Thurmond the father of a illegitimate black child, or George Bush a coke fiend. They’d never work in this town again.

Former Marine spokesman Josh Rushing, who is getting a reporter gig at the new English Al Jazeera, was labeled "TRAITOR?" by Fox on-screen. Hilarious. Thanks, MediaMatters.

Miss Universe contestants are full of national/ethnic contradictions reflecting our modern globalized world. Huzzah. What did world leaders look like as children (via IranDefence.net, oddly enough)? In your random Internet style humor JeffK's Brand New Hoempage!!! Thanks, SomethingAwful. Also The Onion tells us that 92 Percent of Souls in Hell There on Drug Charges.

Frank Rich: The Faith-Based President Defrocked. At least we can still get NY Times columnists through devious bastards like TruthOut.

TShirtHell announces that if you get kicked off a plane wearing one of their T-Shirts, they'll take care of transporting you! This in response to a woman that was kicked off a plane for wearing an anti-Bush shirt on Southwest Airlines in Reno.