Brad Blog

Last Friday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow proudly, and justifiably, crowed about the ratings success of last Monday new NBC News documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, as narrated by her and based on the 2007 book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

"First I want to say thank you, if you tuned in this past Monday to watch the new MSNBC documentary about how the last administration tricked the U.S. into the Iraq War," she said. The film garnered the highest ratings of any documentary in the history of the channel.

"The success is really exciting. It means there will be more of where that came from in coming months and years," Maddow explained before announcing that the film will re-air on Friday, March 15th at 9pm ET. (You can watch the entire documentary online before that right here, if you like.)

Congratulations are certainly due. While there were several new revelations in the film, much of the story of the string of blatant lies and scams culled together to hoax the country into war had already been known to those of us news geeks who follow this stuff too closely. Nonetheless, it was very helpful, and an excellent reminder, to see the entire case laid out in a single, simple, watchable presentation. We're delighted to hear it was a ratings success.

Revisiting that disaster also helped encourage The BRAD BLOG to examine several still-existing loose ends --- beyond the fact that, shamefully, nobody in the Bush Administration has ever been brought to account in any way for what happened, including what are clearly a series of very serious war crimes. Among the points we've been looking into, in the wake of the Hubris documentary, is the questions of whether or not Colin Powell "knowingly lied" in his presentation of what turned out to be blatantly false evidence for the case against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, when the then-Secretary of State spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003 and helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of an invasion.

Powell's Chief of Staff at the time, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, admits during the film that he and Powell "did participate in a hoax." But, in a statement in response to our request for comment, Wilkerson vigorously denied that either he or his boss knowingly did so. He sent his statement after we'd published anti-war author and activist David Swanson's critique of the Hubris film, on the day after it initially aired. In the critique, Swanson cites his own 2011 essay which offers evidence to argue that Powell "knowingly lied" during his presentation to the U.N. (Both Swanson and 27-year Sr. CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was cited in Wilkerson's response, each replied to him in turn. You can read all of their responses here.)

While Swanson "applauded" the MSNBC documentary for helping to "prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq," he also offered a number of pointed critiques for the cable news channel itself. His observations are on-point in both regards, and help to raise a suggestion for an important and necessary follow-up documentary that, we suspect, would likely garner ratings at least as high as those earned for Hubris.

After all, though Hubris:Selling the Iraq War focused on the lies told by the Bush Administration in the run-up to war, unfortunately, they were not the only ones "selling the Iraq War"...

MSNBC: Selling the Iraq War

"As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help," Swanson alleged in his review last week, highlighting the infamous cancellation of Phil Donahue's show, even though it was said to have had the highest ratings on the nascent cable news channel at the time.

"The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week --- and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world," wrote Swanson.

After his firing, he continued, "MSNBC proceeded to support the war with mild critiques around the edges, and to white-out the idea of impeachment or accountability."

Indeed, Donahue has famously charged (to Sean Hannity of Fox "News", ironically enough, but also to Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and others) that, following 9/11 and during the march to war in Iraq a year and half later, he was forced by the network "to have two conservatives on for every liberal" voice he featured on the show.

An internal memo at the time claimed that Donahue is "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war...he seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

But being "skeptical of the administration's motives" should have earned Donahue a raise, not a pink slip. That was precisely what was lacking in almost every American newsroom at the time. Had there been any such skepticism on our airwaves, it might have helped to avert one of the deadliest and most expensive foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. In short, the corporate media failed what is supposed to be their role.

Of course, NBC and MSNBC were not alone in their lack of skepticism and subsequent failure to accurately report what was known about the fraudulent case for war against Iraq. The administration's persistently false drumbeat was being sold, unskeptically, to the American public with the compliance of nearly the entirety of the U.S. corporate mainstream media.

A March 2003 study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which examined coverage on the evening news broadcasts at ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS one week before and one week after Powell's U.N. presentation, found that "[o]f the U.S. guests" featured on the programs, "a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources --- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) --- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war."

"Of all official sources," the study found, "75 percent (222 of 297) were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that support the Bush administration's position on Iraq; only four out of those 222, or 2 percent, of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war."

This was at the same time as historically large anti-war street protests were taking place in the U.S. and around the world. It was also when, as the report notes, "61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll (2/5-6/03) were saying that they felt the U.S. should 'wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time,' [and] only 16 of the 68 U.S. guests (24 percent) who were not officials represented such views."

"Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were 'persons in the street'; five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization."

In the three weeks after the war was launched, according to a subsequent FAIR study from May of 2003 --- this one including evening news reports from CNN and Fox as well NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS --- the story was almost identical.

"Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1."

In both reports, NBC's record was roughly as dismal as the other network news outlets. Though, FAIR notes, "the largest percentage of U.S. sources who were anti-war" was seen on NBC Nightly News, "despite the network's ownership by General Electric, a significant military contractor."

What was that percentage of U.S. anti-war sources featured on NBC's main evening news program in the three weeks after the launch of a war based on the knowing lies detailed by MSNBC in Hubris? Just 4 percent, according to FAIR.

They gave him a second term

The inaccurate coverage didn't only affect American's beliefs about the war. The wildly imbalanced coverage across all of the major television news outlets played a key roll in the subsequent Presidential election.

In March of 2004, exactly one year after the war was launched, a study [PDF] by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, based on a nationwide sampling of 1,311 respondents, found: "A majority continues to believe that Iraq was giving substantial support to al Qaeda, while nearly half continue to believe that evidence of such support has been found. A majority believes that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them."

None of those things were true.

"The majority of those who have such beliefs," the study notes, "approve of the decision to go to war, while the majority of those who do not have such beliefs disapprove of the war."

While there remain justifiable dispute around the accuracy of the results of the 2004 election, there can be little doubt that the corporate media's inaccuracies and related historic failures in their coverage of the war, both before and after it was launched, helped to inflate support for the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.

But how did a majority of Americans come to believe, a full year after the war began, with no evidence of a WMD program discovered, "that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program for developing them"?

Here, NBC played a key role. It was just one of many aspects of NBC and MSNBC's participation in misinforming America which begs examination in a new, follow-up MSNBC documentary, if we are ever to "come to terms with what happened, and how it happened," as Maddow (who was not at MSNBC at the time the Iraq War began) discussed in the week leading up to last week's documentary.

First, just three days after U.S. troops had begun rolling in to southern Iraq, questions began to arise in regard to the whereabouts of those vaunted WMD we had all been warned about by Powell and the rest of the Bush Administration.

"Bush administration officials were peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government," Washington Post reported on March 23, 2003. "Officials said they are certain such weapons of mass destruction will be located."

"Miraculously," Seth Ackerman wrote in July of 2003 in "The Great WMD Hunt", the weapons in Iraq were "found" by that very night! Or, at least, MSNBC reported as much.

"Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical facility," MSNBC's then anchor, Forrest Sawyer told NBC's White House correspondent Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it sure has gotten spread around fast."

The next day, according to Ackerman, the real facts emerged. "U.S. officials had admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and had been abandoned long ago." But few heard about the quiet correction.

An even worse, and far more damning incident occurred, once again with the help of NBC, just two months later, as Ackerman explains:

Having suffered a series of public humiliations from the conspicuous absence of unconventional weapons, the administration made it known that it was pinning its hopes on two trailers found in northern Iraq, which they termed mobile biological weapons labs. On May 12, NBC News correspondent Jim Avila, reporting from Baghdad, declared that the labs "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Joining him was hawkish former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay (now an "NBC News analyst"), who was flown to Iraq to perform an impromptu inspection for the cameras. Armed with a pointer, he rattled off the trailer 's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." In his report, Avila didn't explain how and why Kay and the NBC crew obtained access to the trailers while the legally mandated U.N. inspection team, UNMOVIC, had been barred from looking at them.

The trailers quickly became the "centerpiece" (New York Times, 5/21/03) of the administration's argument that Iraq was indeed hiding a biowarfare program, and Bush himself used them to proclaim (5/31/03) that "for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." No actual biological agents were found on the trucks, though; nor were any ingredients for biological weapons. In fact, no direct evidence linked the trailers to biological production at all.

It was eventually determined that the trailers in question had been used "to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons." But, again, that "disappointing" news didn't make quite the splash of the original, incorrect NBC News report.

That, of course, is just a tiny sampling of NBC/MSNBC failures and, as mentioned, they were by no means alone among media outlets in those, and similar, failures. But, Maddow's premise for presenting the Hubris documentary, as she offered in the week before its airing, was based on the importance of understanding exactly what happened to bring our nation into an unnecessary war built on lies, and whether the same thing could happen again today.

The answer to that question, at the moment, is an unequivocal, "yes!"

'Coming to terms with what happened'

"Until we come clean about this, until we get honest about it, until we can draw a line under it and say, 'You know what? That was a bad idea.' Until we are able to do that cleanly, this kind of stuff really is gonna drag around behind everybody who wants to be in public office in the future, who was in public office then, or was in a position to comment on it when it was all happening," Maddow, who was hired by MSNBC in 2008, said in promoting the new documentary on the Friday before its initial Monday airing last week.

"The Government perpetrated a massive deception campaign on us," she intoned, while sharing clips of Republicans such as war-supporter John McCain, then and now, attempting to justify the war, along with Mitt Romney and his 2012 senior campaign foreign policy advisers such as Bush Administration National Security Adviser Condoleezza "Mushroom Cloud" Rice and the administration's chief spokesman in Iraq, Dan Senor. Both played key roles in that known 2003 "deception campaign" which Maddow references, and yet they were both welcomed with open arms by the 2012 Romney campaign.

It's ironic to view Maddow's remarks, however, in light of NBC's own failures as highlighted above. And, of course, those examples are just "tip of the iceberg" stuff.

Maddow continued: "As long as those who were wrong about the Iraq War, as long as those who did it can count on us not being blunt about that, as long as we, as a country, avoid coming to terms with what happened then," it will all likely happen again.

Good point. So, let's be "blunt about that". In fact, it is already happening again. And, once again, along with the rest of the corporate media, NBC News is playing its part.

Just one example, once again courtesy of FAIR, where Peter Hart reported earlier this month on the "familiar script" played out briefly late last year concerning reports of chemical weapons being deployed in civil war-torn Syria.

Hart notes that, as in the run-up to the Iraq War, the New York Times once again "drove the initial storyline." But NBC (along with other news outlets) jumped onto the very same bandwagon:

On the NBC Nightly News (12/5/12), anchor Brian Williams led the newscast: "Chemical weapons in Syria. Suddenly, the world has an urgent situation on its hands. The fear is Syria is preparing to use them against its own people." Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski went on: "U.S. officials tell us that the Syrian military is poised tonight to use chemical weapons against its own people. And all it would take is the final order from Syrian President Assad." He added that "this week, U.S. intelligence detected a flurry of activity at chemical weapons sites.... The alarming developments shook the world."

Miklaszewski reported, "Today, while U.S. officials confirm the precursor chemicals are loaded, they must still be mixed together to create the deadly gas." Of course, it is highly unlikely that U.S. officials can "confirm" any such thing.

Did NBC learn anything from what happened ten years ago? It's difficult to say. Though MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell expressed some skepticism that night during her own discussion with Williams, she still managed to defer to what she described, generically, as "specific intelligence" from U.S. officials about the threat of the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

By the following Sunday, 12/9/12, Hart notes, "When NBC's Meet the Press needed a guest to weigh in on Syria's WMDs, it chose Jeffrey Goldberg-the former New Yorker reporter who authored alarmist reports about Iraq's WMDs."

'Ought to scar everybody associated with it'

Though Maddow had noted during her Friday promo that being wrong about Iraq during the run-up to war "ought to scar everybody in American politics associated with it for the rest of their careers," NBC News was more than happy to invite Goldberg, one of the most wrong journalists from the Iraq War period, back on to their premiere Sunday news show to offer analysis about the latest Middle-East dictator said to possess weapons of mass destruction which could ultimately result in the U.S. joining yet another war in the region.

Of course, that was the same NBC news program where, in their exclusive September 8th, 2002 interview with then Vice-President Dick Cheney, he was allowed to trumpet an array of blatantly false information about a 9/11 hijacker having met "in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the the attack on the World Trade Center"; that "we've seen al-Qaeda members operating physically in Iraq"; that the U.S. had intercepted an Iraqi order of "aluminum tubes" said to be for use in enriching uranium; that Saddam Hussein might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks in the U.S.; and the chilling charge that Iraq was "in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

"We do know, with absolute certainty," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert and the world, "that [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."

All of those charges, as aired to the world on NBC's Meet the Press, were false.

During her promo for Hubris, Maddow highlighted the fact that "not everybody was wrong about this." There were, as her footage showed, mass street protests against the war in February of 2003, the very month before the war began. Those anti-war rallies were the largest in the history of the planet, in fact. "We didn't all blunder into this together because 'we all believed what that lousy intelligence turned up'," she said.

She is right again. And yet, a week ago Sunday, in hopes of avoiding yet another catastrophe that many of us can see coming, the largest climate rally in the history of our country took place on the streets of Washington D.C. Although 35,000-50,000 people braved bitter cold to protest against the Keystone XL pipeline and other menacing dangers related to climate change, not one of the Sunday network news shows bothered to even mention the rally. That includes NBC's Meet the Press which, like most of the other Sunday shows, actually broadcasts from the nation's capital, where the protests where ongoing that very day.

As with the massive protests before the Iraq catastrophe, which were all but ignored by the mainstream corporate media at the time, it was as if Sunday's climate rally --- following a year of record heat, record drought and record billion-dollar weather disasters, to boot --- never even occurred on NBC News' long-running Sunday broadcast.

The next night, on NBC Nightly News, the largest climate rally in U.S. history garnered just 63 words. On the bright side, that was more than the protest received on CBS Evening News, which devoted only 49 words, or ABC World News, which managed to cobble together just 43.

'Hubris' in the mirror

And yet, NBC deserves great praise, even ten years late, for daring to begin an examination of how we ended up in one of the --- if not the --- greatest foreign policy disasters in our nation's history.

We were led into an unnecessary war and, as MSNBC's own documentary details, it was done knowingly. It should have never happened. The media's job at the time should have been to warn the public about that threat. Instead, they largely played the role of stenographers for the Bush Administration's con-game about Iraq's non-existent threat. The result: almost 3,500 dead U.S. troops, more than 32,000 of them injured, well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians murdered (the low-ball figured offered by Hubris itself), and some $3 trillion robbed from the coffers of the American people for the effort.

Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, as laudable as it is, ought to be just the beginning of examining and reporting the full story of how the war was really sold to the American people.

"You could not criticize this war four months before the invasion," the fired MSNBC host Phil Donahue said during an interview last year on CNN. "It was not good for business. General Electric [the parent company of NBC and MSNBC at the time] had no interest in featuring an old talk show host who was against the President's war."

"This is what you get with corporate media. It's gonna happen again!," he warned.

If Maddow is serious about her own network's willingness to produce more such important documentaries following on the success of last week's --- and if she's serious about what she said during the promotional run-up to that broadcast about the necessity of understanding what really happened in order to prevent it from happening again --- then a helpful and absolutely necessary place to start would be with the difficult, and undoubtedly incredibly uncomfortable, mea culpa examination of her own network's complicity in that historic and massive failure. It won't be easy. But nothing of this much gravity ever is.

Every corporate media outlet in the nation ought to do the same, of course, as an initial step towards the accountability that never came, for anybody, after the deadly scam perpetrated by the Bush Administration and the huge helping hand it received from NBC and every other major news outlet (with a very few, if notable, exceptions). NBC must set the example for all the others, if Maddow's words are to serve anything more than promotion for the next airing of Hubris.

"If the revisionism that we are experiencing right now, ten years later, is able to succeed," Maddow said a week ago Friday, "then we are doomed to repeat this again as a country some day. If we do not come to terms with what happened, and how it happened, if we do not learn the lessons of that disaster as a country, and how we were duped, how it worked, then history says we are doomed to repeat it."

She's absolutely right. And hopefully she'll consider doing her part to hold her own news organization accountable in a follow-up documentary, to help ensure that they "learn the lessons of that disaster," or else, as she correctly echoes Donahue in her own warning, we are absolutely "doomed to repeat it."

• Watch NBC's entire Hubris: Selling the Iraq War documentary now online here.

TPM has been posting some of the winners from this this year's World Press Photo of the Year contest. This remarkable photo, by Paul Hansen, was awarded the top prize from among more than 100,000 submitted by 5,666 photographers...

Hansen's Nov. 20, 2012 photo was taken in Gaza City, Palestinian Territories, and is described this way: "Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and his older brother Muhammad were killed when their house was destroyed by an Israeli missile strike. Their father, Fouad, was also killed and their mother was put into intensive care. Fouad's brothers carry his children to the mosque for the burial ceremony as his body is carried behind on a stretcher."

Check out TPM's selections of some of the other winners. Some are breathtaking. All represent some tremendous journalism.

We'll have a related-ish story on all of this Monday. But, for the moment --- in the comment thread of our recent story about Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's vehement denial that his old boss "knowingly lied" during his infamous 2/5/03 U.N. Security Council presentation of what turned out to be false evidence of an Saddam Hussein's WMD program, there was a fair bit of vitriol directed at both Powell and Wilkerson.

A number of commenters feel that neither of the two men have yet to come fully clean, and argued as much in pretty harsh terms in their remarks.

Longtime BRAD BLOG commenter David Lasagna offered this observation in the same thread in response to some of those commenters...

I'm uncomfortable with a lot of the Wilkerson bashing in this comment thread.

I would agree that there are gaps in Wilkerson and Powell's narratives. I share the anger and frustration of the continuing themes in this country of no accountability for those in power, whether the issues are war and death, financial collapse and suffering, or the constant lying and gross misrepresentation of history and reality that we're subjected to every day by most politicians and the bulk of the corporate media.

ON THE OTHER HAND, regarding the Iraq War--

Wilkerson, more than any of the other key players, stopped drinking the cool-aid and began copping to the bullshit. Okay, it's not a perfect copping, but it's distressing to see how many commenters here are so focused on what's missing and acknowledge so little the magnitude of what Wilkerson has done by coming forward as he has AND by being available for further discussion as he continues to be.

It sounds to me like his critics here are doing very little imagining of what it was like FOR HIM to be in that treacherous inner circle. The way I see it, it is just this inability to understand, or even bothering TRYING to understand, someone else's experience/worldview that is at the core of so much of what is wrong in this country.

I would offer that the process of vilifying Wilkerson, as demonstrated in comments above, is a process related to the type of vilification of the "enemy" that so tragically confines and distorts the thinking of all our pro-war players whose nightmarish, illegal, immoral decisions resulted in all the death and devastation that we all decry and that fuel the Wilkerson bashing.

I'm saying that we, the critics, need to offer a different way of BEING if we're serious about trying to derail the madness.

I share the pain, distress, and desire for truth of all those critical of Wilkerson and Powell's narratives. It's beyond maddening what continues to be done in our name and the continuing obfuscation and lack of accountability surrounding our continuing unjustified, cruel, murderous policies.

But continuing vilification of Wilkerson, besides being, in my opinion, an unattractive, perhaps less obvious relative of the mindset/process that leads to war in the first place is, I suspect, particularly counterproductive here.

The point is to learn how to get out of the fucking lemming leap of mindless destruction that nations insanely indulge in again and again.

Regarding our current disasters, Wilkerson, more than anyone else, opened the door to the process of how the fuck these things happen. It appears to me that he feels really bad about his part in it all. Wouldn't it be more likely to bear fruit to engage him in creative discussion of how it all happened than demanding more of the truth as WE see it? Why not help him unravel it all as a sympathetic partner in dialogue? Might not a more empathetic method be more likely to further our understanding and reveal more of the unconscious aspects of this dysfunctional process we repeatedly fall into than hammering away at the guy and triggering a natural defensiveness cuz he's being attacked?

I guess it sorta matters what your objectives are. If it's just blowing off steam, go at it. If it's really doing the painful examination of how as individuals and groups we fool ourselves into war again and again; if our purpose is to learn and become more conscious of what these unconscious processes are so that we can stop doing them and start exploring other ways of interacting with the world, I think a more conciliatory attitude might be helpful. To say the least.

Please, do not misinterpret my exhortations here as a cousin to the "coddling terrorists" meme. I'm not excusing or endorsing terrible mistakes. I am very much for a more productive, humane method of examining them.

With another papal election coming up, one might wonder how the papal elections, since 1059 or so, have managed to remain secure and unchallenged?

As security technologist Bruce Schneier details at CNN, the trick is what we have long referred to here as "Democracy's Gold Standard": publicly hand-counted paper ballots.

Here at The BRAD BLOG we've been calling for the same thing for U.S. elections for some time. Granted, it hasn't been 1000 years, it's just beginning to feel like it. We were even recently immortalized for that effort.

Schneier's breakdown of the voting process at papal enclaves is absolutely fascinating, particularly as the process they've developed over centuries mirrors much of what the process would look like if our nation ditched its secret, oft-failed, easily-manipulated, unoverseeable vote-tallying computers and modeled our tabulation process on the open, public, and very rarely challenged process used by the citizens in some 40% of New Hampshire's towns. It's almost identical, in many ways, to the one used to select new popes.

As Schneier notes, when a new pope is elected, "Every step of the election process is observed by everyone."

"The ballot is entirely paper-based," he explains, "and all ballot counting is done by hand. Votes are secret, but everything else is open"

Talk about your "Holy See"?! It's hand-counted PAPAL ballots!...

"Nine election officials are randomly selected from the cardinals: three 'scrutineers,' who count the votes; three 'revisers,' who verify the results of the scrutineers; and three 'infirmarii,' who collect the votes from those too sick to be in the chapel."

If that sounds remarkably familiar, then you may be one of the few who understand how "Democracy's Gold Standard", publicly-overseen precinct-based hand-counting, actually works. While there are different techniques for it, one that is often used includes counting teams of four, with two people both agreeing on which candidate has been selected by the voter on each ballot ("scrutineers", as they are known at the Vatican) and two others who write down the running count, with both agreeing that it has been recorded correctly (the "revisers").

For papal elections, the entire counting process is transparent and happens immediately after all votes are cast, with all of the assembled Cardinals observing and authenticating the tally in the very same place where votes were cast, inside the Sistine Chapel.

In precinct-based hand-counted elections in the U.S., it all happens just after the close of polls at the very same precinct where the votes were cast, with the public, video-cameras and representatives from all political parties observing and authenticating the tally as accurate. The results are publicly posted at the precinct before ballots are moved anywhere. They can also be verified for accuracy again later if there are any questions.

At the Vatican, the ballots are burned right after the vote to make sure they remain secret to the rest of the world for all time. Though not before everyone who took part in the election had been able to oversee its tabulation. In our case, by law, we do not "burn the ballots" until 22 months after federal elections, and often far sooner after non-federal elections. In any case, burning the ballots immediately after they are tabulated is something we are wise to not model after the cardinals.

Their system, however, is far more secure than the one we use in almost every election jurisdiction in our country. As Schneier notes in his assessment of how difficult it would be to hack a papal election: "The system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky."

He says that while it's feasible a "scrutineer" could modify a vote, it would not be easy. "The counting is conducted in public, and there are multiple people checking every step."

And that, of course, is the point, and exactly why a similar process used in the U.S. --- albeit adapted for use in a large, modern election with many precincts --- would be very difficult to game, at least without being detected. Contrast the papal system with the computerized systems we use now in the majority of every state. They are easily gamed by a "conspiracy" as small as one person who can modify the computer-tabulated results in any number of ways, in a matter of seconds, with almost no possibility of detection. Those concerns are precisely what we have been documenting and warning about here at The BRAD BLOG for almost 1000 years.

Remember, as Schneier explains, in papal elections "every step of the election process is observed by everyone." That is the key. And neither touch-screen votes, nor paper ballots tallied secretly by optical-scan computers meet that test.

There are a few places where Schneier sees a possibility for chicanery in the papal system, but it would be difficult. And, if used in the U.S., the same chicanery would have to occur at many different precincts without being detected at any of them before it was likely to have an adverse effect on any particular race or ballot initiative.

But while no system is perfect, publicly hand-counted paper ballots remain "Democracy's Gold Standard". When there is a close election and we really, really, really need to know who won, what do we do? We publicly hand-count the ballots.

We've long argued that in every race, we, the people, deserve to know who really, really, really won. And, in this case, the system worked out by the cardinals seem to have served them pretty well for many centuries.

"When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years," Schneier concludes, "you end up with something surprisingly good."

Imagine that. Please don't make us keep at this for another thousand years. Thanks.

[Mitre-tip to Steve Heller.]

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Secretary of State John Kerry comes out swinging on climate change; BP off the hook again - for $3.4 billion; Genetically modified crops do not produce bigger harvests; PLUS: How secretive rightwing billionaires fund the climate change denial industry --- and get a tax deduction for it! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone; 1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt; Poll: strong support for clean energy, carbon pollution standards; Alaska Senate rolls back cruiseship water pollution standards; Honda to offer rooftop solar systems; Arctic sea ice volume has 'collapsed'; The most terrifying graph you'll see all day; Major methane release is almost inevitable; Mexico's dramatic, rapid recovery from traffic gridlock; US natural gas bubble threatens economy ... PLUS: Unlocking the conspiracy mind-set ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• BP Off the Hook Again for Gulf Oil Spill Disaster:
• BP challenges 'excessive' spill claims (The Hill's E2 Wire):
  BP announced Tuesday that it would defend itself in court against "excessive" claims for civilian penalties and federal gross negligence charges regarding its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
• Justice Dept. Deal Reduces BP's Deepwater Horizon Fine by $3.4B (Guardian UK):
  Court reduces company's maximum fine a week before trial over blowout that dumped millions of gallons of oil into Gulf of Mexico.
• Battle Lines Drawn for BP's Day in Court (NY Times):
  Unless the Justice Department and BP reach a last-minute settlement, the British oil company will return to court on Monday to face tens of billions of dollars in civil claims from the 2010 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that could cripple the company for years to come.
• BP Faces Civil Trial Over Gulf Oil Spill (LA Times)
• NASA Probes Show 'Alarming' Water Loss in Middle East (Climate Central):
  Parts of the Middle East are losing groundwater reserves at "an alarming rate," according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.From the beginning to 2003 to the end of 2009, portions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria that lie within the Tigris and Euphrates river basins shed 117 million acre-feet of water. That's roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.
• Japan Suspends Annual Whale Hunt After Clashes with Activists:
• Japan Halts Whale Hunt After Sea Shepherd Clashes: (Australian Broadcasting Co.):
  Sea Shepherd is claiming victory after Japan temporarily suspended its annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.
• Japanese Whaler Rams Sea Shepherd Ships In Australian Waters: (Environment News Service):
  The Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru has collided with two whale conservation vessels and its own refueling tanker in Australia's Antarctic waters, damaging the other ships. No injuries are reported.
• GMO Seeds: Less Yield, Higher Cost, More Chemicals:
• Do GMO Crops Really Have Higher Yields? (Mother Jones):
  Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook has demonstrated that the net effect of GMOs in the United States has been an increase in use of toxic chemical inputs.
  ...
  And in a new paper (PDF) funded by the US Department of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin researchers have essentially negated the "more food" argument as well.
• GMOs: Nearly Half of All US Farms Now Have Superweeds (Mother Jones):
  Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.
• SCOTUS: Justices Hostile to Farmer's Argument Against Monsanto: (Reuters):
  Supreme Court justices signaled on Tuesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto Co was in a strong position to claim that an Indiana farmer violated its patent for a type of soybean.
• How Rightwing Billionaires Secretly Fund Climate Change Denial Industry
• Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (Guardian UK):
  Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science [And it's all tax-deductible! --- ed.]
• Digging For Dark Money (Columbia Journalism Review) [emphasis added]:
  Exposes by the Guardian and Center for Public Integrity have unravelled parts of a dark network which launders the millions flowing from fossil-fuel interests like the Koch brothers to climate change denial and disinformation outlets. It was documents obtained by scientist Peter Gleick, whose undercover tactics brought criticism from some journalists, that helped bring the story to light.
• Donor's Trust: ATM for Climate Denial (Democracy Now!, via Climate Crock of the Week):






• Sec. of State John Kerry Calls for Action on Climate Change:
• In 1st Big Speech, Kerry Sounds Like A Climate Hawk With The Courage To Reject Keystone XL Pipeline (Climate Progress) [emphasis added]:
  We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.

  And let's face it - we are all in this one together. No nation can stand alone. We share nothing so completely as our planet.

  When we work with others - large and small - to develop and deploy the clean technologies that will power a new world, we're also helping create new markets and new opportunities for America's second-to-none innovators and entrepreneurs to succeed in the next great revolution.

• Kerry comes out swinging on climate change (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• World Bank: 'A 4°C [7°F] World Can, And Must, Be Avoided' To Avert 'Devastating' Impacts (Climate Progress)

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• The virtues of being unreasonable on Keystone (David Roberts, Grist):
  The argument of Keystone protestors is not that there's One True Way, but that eventually there has to be some way. Somebody's got to start taking these dire warnings seriously and do something, something specific and concrete. You can't support Doing Something but oppose Doing This Particular Thing forever. Sooner or later, people have to draw lines and take sides. Progress does not happen without struggle.
• Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set (NYT Green):
  The strongest finding in the survey was that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone's willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research. No great surprise there. It was the secondary findings that set off a brouhaha.
• 1.5C rise in temperature enough to start permafrost melt, scientists warn (Guardian UK):
  Team of scientists use radiometric dating techniques on Russian cave formations to measure historic melting rates
• Polling Finds Strong Support For Clean Energy And Stricter Carbon Pollution Standards (Climate Progress):
  Yesterday, Pew Research released new poll research that re-confirms the trend. When asked to choose between developing "alternative sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen" and expanding "exploration and production of oil, coal and natural" gas as their preferred priority for addressing America's energy needs, 54 percent of Americans went with alternative energy. Only 34 percent chose continued prioritization of fossil fuels. That's a drop from the 63 percent high in 2011, but an uptick over the 52 percent response last year.
• Rollback of Cruiseship Wastewater Rules Approved by Alaska Senate: (Anchorage Daily News):
  The Alaska Senate on Tuesday approved a Parnell administration measure to roll back cruise ship wastewater standards that were approved by voters in 2006. The vote was 14-6.
• Home Solar Systems to Be an Option for Honda Customers (NY Times)
• Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed (Climate Progress)
• The most terrifying graph you'll see all year (Digby's Hullabaloo):
  See that 5 degrees Celsius we're projected to hit by 2050? That's 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
  ...
  Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like...
• Major methane release is almost inevitable (New Scientist):
  For the first time, we have an indication of when this could start happening. Anton Vaks of the University of Oxford in the UK and colleagues have reconstructed the history of the Siberian permafrost going back 500,000 years. We already know how global temperatures have risen and fallen as ice sheets have advanced and retreated, so Vaks's team's record of changing permafrost gives an indication of how sensitive it is to changing temperatures.
• Mexico City Makes Dramatic Recovery From Gridlock: (ClimateWire):
  Little more than a year after making it to the top of IBM's list of worst commuter cities, Mexico City has returned to the urban transit spotlight --- this time at the receiving end of international praise.
• When Natural Gas Bubble Explodes, Economy Could Implode All Over Again (Crooks & Liars) [emphasis in original]:
  It is highly unlikely that market-savvy bankers did not recognize that by overproducing natural gas a glut would occur with a concomitant severe price decline. This price decline, however, opened the door for significant transactional deals worth billions of dollars and thereby secured further large fees for the investment banks involved. In fact, shales became one of the largest profit centers within these banks in their energy M&A portfolios since 2010. The recent natural gas market glut was largely effected through overproduction of natural gas in order to meet financial analyst’s production targets and to provide cash flow to support operators’ imprudent leverage positions.
• Emails: Officials Worried About Water Temps at CT Nuke Plant (AP):
  Emails among federal regulators show that officials running Connecticut's nuclear plant want to use water that's even warmer than the temperature that forced it to shut a unit in August. The emails have been obtained by The Associated Press through an open records request. They show regulators were cool to at least two other suggestions by Millstone Power Station in Waterford to operate with warmer water.
• Fracking: EPA Officials Ignored Engineer's Theory in Range Resources Contamination Case (EnergyWire):
  A former Texas state oil and gas regulator outlined in 2011 how two Range Resources Corp. wells outside Fort Worth could have leaked natural gas into the water supply of nearby homes.
• UK Climate Change Secretary Slams Deniers As 'Dogmatic And Blinkered' (Climate Progress):
  "It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable."
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

[Now UPDATED with a response from 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern at bottom of article.]

In a response to a charge cited by The BRAD BLOG on Tuesday that then Sec. of State Colin Powell "knowingly lied" during his infamous February 5, 2003 presentation of false intelligence to the U.N. Security Council about the need to attack Iraq, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's Chief of Staff at the time, characterizes the allegation as unfair.

He says points made in support of that claim are "misleading and even spurious" and "not supported in the surrounding narrative."

"I have admitted what a hoax we perpetrated," says Wilkerson in his reply today, sent in response to our request for comment. "But it actually spoils or desecrates a fair condemnation of what is already a bad enough set of misstatements, very poor intelligence analysis, and --- I am increasingly convinced, outright lies --- to take the matter to absurdity with one man, in this case Powell."

David Swanson, who authored the charges in question, as cited earlier this week by The BRAD BLOG, disputes Wilkerson's response. The full remarks by both men are posted in full at the end of this article.

On Tuesday, we ran Swanson's critique of Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, a new NBC News documentary based on the book of a similar name by journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff. (You can watch the entire film online here.)

While Swanson lauded the project for helping to "prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq," he offered a number of worthy criticisms as well, including the fact that MSNBC, which aired the documentary, failed to acknowledge its own participation in propagating many of those same lies to the American people.

Featured in the film are several new pieces of information and commentary that have come to light since the original publication of Corn and Isikoff's 2007 book.

Some of those revelations come by way of Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel and, more to the point, Powell's Chief of Staff at the time of his February 5, 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the supposed chemical, biological and nuclear threats posed by Saddam Hussein. That presentation by, perhaps, the most well-respected official in the Bush Administration at the time, is widely credited with turning the tide of public opinion in favor of the invasion of Iraq which would commence just weeks later, ten years ago next month.

Unfortunately, virtually every piece of evidence presented by Powell at the U.N., said to have been culled from various intelligence agencies, turned out to be completely false. Some years later, Powell would describe the speech as a "painful" "blot" on his career. As Hubris details, Powell's evidence was not only wrong, but known to be wrong by many in the intelligence community by the time that it was presented to the public as fact by the well-respected Secretary of State.

"Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied," says Wilkerson in the film, "we did participate in a hoax."

Swanson's critique, however, takes that point further, charging that "The Hubris version of Colin Powell's lies at the United Nations is misleadingly undertold."

"Powell was not a victim. He 'knowingly lied.'," wrote Swanson, including a link to his own 2011 op-ed at Consortium News headlined "Colin Powell's Disgraceful Lies".

Given the serious nature of the charges cited by Swanson, as detailed in his 2011 piece --- all well-documented with direct quotes from the State Department's own January 31, 2003 Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) assessment repeatedly describing most of the claims Powell would offer the following week at the U.N. as "WEAK" at best, and "implausible" in many cases --- it seemed appropriate to given Wilkerson the opportunity to respond to the direct allegation that Powell was outright lying during his U.N. presentation.

In his response, Wilkerson draws a line in the sand, if you will, against the contention that his former boss "knowingly lied"...

He says he believes that Swanson's "use of INR's assessment of 'weak' repeatedly, is weak itself."

"INR was at the time one of 15 intelligence entities in the US intelligence architecture at the federal level. (Add Israel France, the UK, Jordan, Germany, et al, and of course you get even more)," writes Wilkerson. "INR's assessments were often viewed --- indeed still are --- as maverick within that group (and were particularly so viewed by [the CIA's Director of Intelligence] George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Indeed, INR's insistence on putting a footnote in the October 2002 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] with regard to its doubts about Saddam's having an active nuclear weapons program was only grudgingly acknowledged and allowed by Tenet.)"

"In truth," Wilkerson continues, "INR itself concurred in the overall NIE's finding that chems and bios existed (and the NIE was the root document of Powell's 5 Feb presentation)."

Swanson contests Wilkerson's response. He says in reply that "Powell's own staff, the INR...told him the claims were weak and questionable and even implausible."

He notes that Hubris highlights the fact that even claims that had been rejected by Powell and Wilkerson as "bullshit" about flimsy claims of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda "were put back in" to the speech, after insistence from the CIA.

"That is a moment to resign in protest," Swanson notes in his reply, "not to move forward and dismiss the INR, the State Department's own experts, as 'maverick.'"

"When the Pentagon and the White House build a transparently fraudulent case for war, rejected by countless experts, many nations, and much of the public, the State Department's job is to support fact-based analysis regardless of whether it is 'maverick,'" Swanson contends.

In their dueling replies, the two also exchange thoughts on the use of intelligence that came from "Curveball", the code-name given to Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al-Janabi, who later admitted to blatantly lying to Germany's intelligence agency about the existence of mobile bioweapons labs used by Saddam.

Wilkerson says Powell was never warned about the dubious nature of "Curveball" and, "in fact quite the opposite." He says that while the now-discredited anti-Saddam operative was Tenet's "strongest weapon," in pushing the case for war internally, "the title 'Curveball' was never heard until well after the 5 Feb presentation."

Finally, for all his admissions, Wilkerson still seems to allow room for both himself and Powell off the biggest hook. "One must realize that whether Powell had given his presentation or not, the President would have gone to war with Iraq. That doesn't relieve Powell or me or any of us who participated in preparing Powell of responsibility; it simply places the bulk of that responsibility squarely where it should rest."

"I don't believe blame works that way," replies Swanson. "Blaming Bush more doesn't blame Powell or you less. It just blames Bush more."

In his last thought in reply to Swanson, Wilkerson is generous, even while acknowledging that he, Swanson and other anti-war voices like former CIA analyst Ray McGovern "will never reach accord on this I'm certain."

"But I must say that just as I may have biases from my long association with Powell, I believe both of you [Swanson and McGovern] should examine your biases with regard to the man. Just as it was very difficult for me to face the fact I had participated in a hoax, it probably is just as difficult that you two admit you may be too aggressively critical of Powell. Both our conditions are recognizably human and yours more forgiveable than mine to be sure."

* * *

The full responses from both Wilkerson and Swanson follow below. We sought a response from McGovern as well, since he is invoked by Wilkerson, but we have yet to hear back. UPDATE: McGovern's response is now also included below...

Wilkerson's complete Wednesday, 2/20/13 response:

David,

Several misleading and even spurious bullets and headlines that make strong claims that are not supported in the surrounding narrative. For example, no one ever DID warn Powell about Curveball, in fact quite the opposite. This particular source --- billed as an Iraqi engineer who had defected --- was George Tenet's --- the DCI's --- strongest weapon. And incidentally, the title "Curveball" was never heard until well after the 5 Feb presentation.

Your use of INR's assessment of "weak" repeatedly, is weak itself. INR was at the time one of 15 intelligence entities in the US intelligence architecture at the federal level. (Add Israel France, the UK, Jordan, Germany, et al, and of course you get even more). INR's assessments were often viewed --- indeed still are --- as maverick within that group (and were particularly so viewed by George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Indeed, INR's insistence on putting a footnote in the October 2002 NIE with regard to its doubts about Saddam's having an active nuclear weapons program was only grudgingly acknowledged and allowed by Tenet. And in truth, INR itself concurred in the overall NIE's finding that chems and bios existed (and the NIE was the root document of Powell's 5 Feb presentation).

I have admitted what a hoax we perpetrated. But it actually spoils or desecrates a fair condemnation of what is already a bad enough set of misstatements, very poor intelligence analysis, and --- I am increasingly convinced, outright lies --- to take the matter to absurdity with one man, in this case Powell.

To see my point dramatically, one must realize that whether Powell had given his presentation or not, the President would have gone to war with Iraq. That doesn't relieve Powell or me or any of us who participated in preparing Powell of responsibility; it simply places the bulk of that responsibility squarely where it should rest.

You, Ray McGovern, and I will never reach accord on this I'm certain; but I must say that just as I may have biases from my long association with Powell, I believe both of you should examine your biases with regard to the man. Just as it was very difficult for me to face the fact I had participated in a hoax, it probably is just as difficult that you two admit you may be too aggressively critical of Powell. Both our conditions are recognizably human and yours more forgiveable than mine to be sure. lw

Swanson's complete, same-day reply in turn:

Larry,

Thanks for this response. I'm CCing Brad Blog which posted my commentary and might want to post your reply. Here's my reply to your reply (also available to publish)

Whether or not anyone told Powell of Curveball's reputation, Powell's own staff, the INR, told him the claims were weak, the claims that came from Curveball and from numerous other sources. The INR told him the claims were weak and questionable and even implausible.

Powell used fabricated dialogue. He used evidence from a source who had admitted all the weapons had been destroyed years ago, but failed to mention that bit. Again, here is the catalog of bogus claims: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/021811a.html

You yourself in Hubris state that claims you'd rejected were put back in. That is a moment to resign in protest, not to move forward and dismiss the INR, the State Department's own experts, as "maverick."

When the Pentagon and the White House build a transparently fraudulent case for war, rejected by countless experts, many nations, and much of the public, the State Department's job is to support fact-based analysis regardless of whether it is "maverick."

You recently accused Norman Solomon on DemocracyNow! and all other truth tellers of that time of having failed to warn you --- as if we weren't shouting into every available microphone. If word had slipped through to you, it seems you would have rejected it as "maverick."

This is highly discouraging. If analysis within our government consciously engages in groupthink, where will we find the whistleblowers necessary to prevent the next war?

Please do not imagine that any of us suppose the President wasn't intent on going to war at all costs. It was the transparency of that intention that created the largest public protest in world history. But to suggest that Powell and you did no harm by supporting a war that might have gone ahead even if you'd resisted is a complete breakdown in morality.

I don't believe blame works that way. Blaming Bush more doesn't blame Powell or you less. It just blames Bush more. Blame is not a finite quantity born of a drive for vengeance and distributable to a limited number of people. Blame is what we each deserve when we fail to take the best actions available, as explained here.

* * *

UPDATE 8:58pm PT: Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA analyst turned staunch anti-war activist following his years personally delivering the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefings to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, replies to our request for comment in response to Wilkerson's response with the following tonight:

thanks brad ---

There are very few people still around with the kind of integrity that leads me to give them virtually implicit trust (allowing for the fact that all of us are nonetheless human). One such person is Larry Wilkerson.

It seems to me that a lot hinges on whether Powell and Wilkerson could bring themselves to believe that Tenet and McLaughlin would lie to their faces about Curveball. Tenet is the mother of all con men, and one can argue that Powell and Wilkerson should have been quite aware of that.

Still, I can readily believe that Powell and Wilkerson found it difficult to conclude that Tenet was making stuff up on such a critical issue --- that, assured of backing by Cheney, Tenet and McLaughlin would feel free to let Powell dangle softly in the wind....for the greater cause, of course.

Sizing up Powell, Tenet and McLaughlin might well have concluded that, as long as Cheney was around to protect them (and that he would badmouth Powell to the President if Powell stepped out of line), Powell would not dare accuse them of outright lying. If that was part of their calculation, they appear to have been right.

What incredible fear Cheney inspires --- still! Let's see what Powell says if Cheney ever dies!

I looked into all this at some length earlier this month. For what it's worth, this is how I came out: "Colin Powell: Conned or Con-Man?"

feel free to share my comments, if you wish.

Best regards,

ray
raymcgovern.com

• Watch the entire NBC News documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War now online here.

The good folks at Right About Now have decided to immortalize a quote from this September, 2009 op-ed of mine detailing my call for pilot projects around the country to develop much-needed data and benchmarks for what we describe around here as "Democracy's Gold Standard": Hand-marked paper ballots, publicly counted by hand at the precinct on Election Night, with the public, all political parties and even video cameras rolling, and results posted at the precinct before ballots are moved anywhere...

You can click on the cool graphic to enlarge it if you have any trouble reading it. And, about that quote, I totally agree!

Unfortunately, the supposedly "non-partisan" commission being convened [PDF] at the behest of the President --- and being co-chaired by an incredibly partisan former "Swift Boat" GOP operative --- in order to "fix" some of the problems which reared their ugly heads again during the 2012 election, such as long lines, difficulty in registration or casting overseas absentees ballots, is not currently set to review the extraordinary problems (here's just one recent example) that our nation has with vote tabulation in this country, much less explore the need for fully public, fully transparent, fully citizen-overseeable election result tabulation in a nation that supposedly prides itself on government of the people, by the people and for the people.

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

On Monday night, NBC News aired its new documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, based on the book of a similar name by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. The film offered a number of new and disturbing insights since the original 2007 book was published.

While it may be maddening --- particularly for those of us who followed the massive scam as it was ongoing --- the documentary should be mandatory viewing for those who have lost sight of just how each and every single one of the key reasons used to sell the U.S. on war with Iraq was built on known lies. Each and every point --- from Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda, to his alleged mobile chemical labs, to his alleged nuke program, to those aluminum tubes said to have been for use in uranium enrichment, to the "fissile material" (yellowcake) he was said to have been trying to obtain from Niger --- was a lie. And each an every lie was known to be a lie by the scoundrels and war criminals who sold it to the American public and a compliant American media.

Even with its failures, and several of them are identified here, Hubris reminds us of how each and every one of those points was a scam. Period. And, while it's not expressly highlighted (but should be in a follow up!), we are reminded how none of the liars have ever faced any accountability whatsoever, despite nearly 4,500 U.S. troops killed, more than 30,000 of them wounded, well over 100,000 Iraqi citizens murdered and some $3 trillion looted from our nation's coffers. You should take the time to watch it.

The entire documentary, broken into 6 parts, narrated by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and originally aired on 2/18/2013, follows in full below...

...PART 1...


...PART 2...

...PART 3...

...PART 4...

...PART 5...

...PART 6...

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: All hands on deck (if not the corporate media!) for the largest climate rally in U.S. history... but is President Obama all talk and no action?; Secret memo reveals tar sands are poisoning Alberta, Canada; PLUS: Mayor Bloomberg's big plans to greenify NYC ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks; BP challenges ‘excessive’ spill claims; GAO: Climate change poses big financial risk to US government; NASA: ‘Alarming’ water loss in Middle East; Study: Global warming will bring more blizzards, less overall snow; Air pollution causes heart attacks; Canadian enviro-activists 'threat to national security'; Tesla v. NYT, round 3; OH accused of dumping fracking wastewater; Did PA lie about fracking water contamination? ... PLUS: GMOs: Nearly half of all US farms now have superweeds ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

Corporate Media FAIL: Sunday Shows Ignore Massive Climate Rally Nearby::

• Media and the Keystone March: Little coverage of large climate action (FAIR):
  But television newscasts made just passing references to what the activists were calling the biggest climate change action in many years, perhaps ever. It was not mentioned on any of the Sunday chat shows.
• VIDEO: Fox Mocks Climate Protesters For Rallying In Winter (Media Matters)
• Big Oil Mocks Climate Action With Help From Big Media: "We all need to “imagine life without fossil fuels,” since that is where we will are going to end up this century one way or another." (Climate Progress)

'Forward On Climate' Rally, Largest Climate Rally In U.S. History:

• Why Keystone matters. It's not just a pipeline. (Grist):
  It’s a moral referendum on our willingness to do the simplest thing we must do to avert catastrophic climate disruption: Stop making it worse. Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that “locks in” dangerous emission levels for many decades. Keystone is a both a conspicuous example of that kind of investment and a powerful symbol for the whole damned category... [T]o not speak out against this pipeline is to concede defeat.
• A Voice for Climate, 40,000 Strong: Environmentalists take to the National Mall to demand Obama pull the plug on Keystone XL (American Prospect):
  Under the hats were all ages and genders and races and socioeconomic backgrounds, a coalition of the willing that grafts neatly onto the group responsible for Obama's November victory.
• VIDEO: Watch the Forward on Climate Rally LiveStream (EcoWatch):
  Including speakers like Van Jones, Reverend Yearwood, Bill McKibben, Rosario Dawson, First Nations Leaders...
• Thousands at climate rally in Washington call on Obama to reject Keystone pipeline (Reuters):
  "For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work," said McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.org.
• VIDEO: Tens of thousands demand action on climate change (USA Today)
• PHOTOS: March For A Solution To Climate Chaos: Sustainable, Renewable Passion (Climate Progress)

Poll: Majority of Americans Support Action on Climate Change:

• Two-thirds of Americans want Obama to act on climate change, says poll: Two new studies released after president's state-of-the-union promise to act on climate change with or without Congress. (Guardian UK)
• 5 Myths About Keystone XL, Debunked (Media Matters)

Obama: All Talk and No Action?:

• VIDEO: Obama Makes Case For Curbing Carbon Pollution From Existing Power Plants, Also Vows To Use ‘Bully Pulpit’ (Climate Progress):
  “Part of my job is to use the bully pulpit to help raise people’s awareness, because if the public cares about it, eventually Congress acts. If the public doesn’t care about it, it’s very hard to get big stuff done because legislators respond to their constituents sooner or later.”





• Don't Hold Your Breath: Obama's Threat to Act Unilaterally On Climate Looking Empty (Phillip Bump, Grist.org)
• Small Business Groups Praise Obama’s Climate Stance, Call For Regulation Of Existing Power Plants (Climate Progress)

Secret Memo: Tar Sands Development Polluting Alberta, Canada:

• Oilsands tailings leaking into groundwater, Joe Oliver told in memo (Canada.com):
  Tailings ponds from oilsands production are leaking and contaminating Alberta’s groundwater, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was told in an internal memo obtained by Postmedia News... in new research that rejected longstanding claims that toxins in the region of the Athabasca River were coming from natural sources.
• Confirmed: Tar Sands Toxic Liquid Waste Contaminating Local Waterways (EcoWatch)

Bloomberg's Big Plans to Electrify, Greenify NYC:

• AUDIO: Mike Bloomberg on SoundCloud: The 2013 State of the City (Mike Bloomberg.com):
  "To make New York even more environmentally-friendly, during the year ahead we’ll encourage use of electric vehicles by installing curbside battery chargers at sites throughout the city. ... push for a local law banning the Styrofoam food packaging that chokes solid waste landfills...we’ll also begin recycling food waste."

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks: (Guardian UK):
  Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science [And it's all tax-deductible! --- ed.]
• BP challenges ‘excessive’ spill claims (The Hill's E2 Wire):
  BP announced Tuesday that it would defend itself in court against “excessive” claims for civilian penalties and federal gross negligence charges regarding its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
• GAO: Climate change poses big financial risk to US government (NBC News):
  The federal government is facing significant financial risks related to extreme weather events, and states and cities can no longer depend on it for extra help after such events occur, the Republican chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said Friday.
• NASA Probes Show ‘Alarming’ Water Loss in Middle East (Climate Central):
  Parts of the Middle East are losing groundwater reserves at “an alarming rate,” according to a new analysis of NASA satellite data.From the beginning to 2003 to the end of 2009, portions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria that lie within the Tigris and Euphrates river basins shed 117 million acre-feet of water. That’s roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea.
• Experts: Global warming can strangely trigger less yearly snowfall, but more potent blizzards (Washington Post) [emphasis added]:
  [T]he answer lies in atmospheric physics. A warmer atmosphere can hold, and dump, more moisture, snow experts say. And two soon-to-be-published studies demonstrate how there can be more giant blizzards yet less snow overall each year. Projections are that that’s likely to continue with manmade global warming.
• Researchers Link Air Pollution To Heart Attacks (Forbes):
  Air pollution causes heart attacks and death. Especially when the pollutants include ozone and particulate matter. And more often in the summer time, when ozone levels are higher.... Air pollution is of particular concern in Houston, which is home to the nation’s biggest petrochemical refining complex
• GOP bills target ‘overreaching’ EPA (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• Canada's environmental activists seen as 'threat to national security': Police and security agencies describe green groups' protests and petitions as 'forms of attack', documents reveal (Guardian UK)
• Carbon Market’s Fate in Europe Hangs on EU Vote to Fix Surplus: European Union lawmakers may determine the fate of the world’s biggest carbon market when they vote today on a proposal to cut a record surplus of emission permits that has pushed prices to an all-time low. (Bloomberg News)
• UK Climate Change Secretary Slams Deniers As ‘Dogmatic And Blinkered’ (Climate Progress):
  "It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable."
• NYT Public Editor: Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test (NY Times)
• GMOs: Nearly Half of All US Farms Now Have Superweeds (Mother Jones):
  Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.
• Ohio company accused of dumping fracking waste faces federal charges (Cleveland Plain Dealer):
  Federal charges are expected to be filed today against an oil and natural gas drilling company accused of dumping more than 20,000 gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River on Jan. 31, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach.
• A Clash in Pennsylvania Over Fracking and Water Tests (NYT Green) [emphasis added]]:
  [T]he state Department of Health’s Bureau of Laboratories ...[disclosed] last November that department scientists had omitted data on some toxic metals found in water taken from a site in southwestern Pennsylvania.
• Report: Sandy was 2nd-costliest hurricane in US (AP): The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and killed 8,000 to 12,000 people.
• Bloomberg Pushes for Plastic-Foam Ban in ‘State of the City’ (Bloomberg):
  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he intends to use his final year in office to push for more recycling and electric vehicles, a curbside food-composting pilot program and a ban on plastic-foam food packaging.
• New Jersey Water Officials Charged With Poisoning Drinking Water (Environment News Service):
  Two top officials of the East Orange Water Commission have been charged with conspiring to close contaminated wells before monthly water tests so as to falsely report low levels of a regulated contaminant in drinking water supplied to customers, then opening the wells, allowing the chemical back into the water supply.
• What’s at stake in the fight between Tesla and the New York Times (Washington Post)
• Colourful 'solar glass' means entire buildings can generate clean power: British firm develops colourful, transparent solar cells that will add just 10% to glass buildings' cost (Guardian UK)
• Fox Stands In The Way Of Energy Security Progress (Media Matters)
• Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (Guardian UK)
• $188b Price Tag From U.S. Extreme Weather From 2011 To 2012 (Climate Progress)
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.
• VIDEO: Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise (Mother Jones): Glaciologist Jason Box describes a post-warming world that you won't even be able to recognize.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air.

The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week --- and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world --- as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.

From there, MSNBC proceeded to support the war with mild critiques around the edges, and to white-out the idea of impeachment or accountability.

But now MSNBC has seen its way clear to airing a documentary about the fraudulent case it assisted in, a documentary titled Hubris. This short film (which aired between 9 and 10 p.m. ET Monday night, but with roughly half of those minutes occupied by commercials --- watch the entire documentary now online here) pointed out the role of the New York Times in defrauding the public, but not MSNBC's role.

Yet, my primary response to that is joy rather than disgust. It is now cool to acknowledge war lies. Truth-tellers, including truth-tellers rarely presented with a corporate microphone, made that happen...

MSNBC host and Obama promoter Rachel Maddow even introduced Hubris by pointing to another war lie --- the Gulf of Tonkin incident that wasn't --- and a war lie by a Democrat in that case. Similar lies can be found surrounding every war that has ever been, which is why I wrote War Is A Lie. We have to stop imagining that "bad wars" are a subset of wars.

But, of course, using Maddow as the presenter and narrator of a film about Republican war lies during a period of unacknowledged Democratic war lies unavoidably gives the thing a partisan slant. Watching Hubris, I was reminded of something that Michael Moore tweeted last Friday: "Senate Repubs: U started 2 illegal wars that broke the treasury & sacrificed the lives of thousands of our troops & countless civilians."

Of course, the Senate that gave us the two wars in question was in reality controlled by Democrats, and the war lies were pushed hard by Senators Kerry, Clinton, and their comrades. Hubris touches on this reality but not with sufficient clarity for most viewers --- I suspect --- to pick up on it.

The film presents a great deal of good evidence that the war on Iraq was based on lies. Unavoidably, endless terrific bits of such evidence were not included. Less excusably, also left out was an analysis of the evidence that only dishonesty --- not incompetence --- explains the propaganda that was produced.

Hubris is the wrong word for what took the United States into war with Iraq. The forces at work were greed, lust for power, and sadistic vengeance. The word "hubris" suggests the tragic downfall of the guilty party. But the war on Iraq did not destroy the United States; it destroyed Iraq. It damaged the United States, to be sure, but in a manner hardly worthy of mention in comparison to the sociocide committed against Iraq.

Hubris, the film, provides a reprehensibly ludicrous underestimation of Iraqi deaths, and only after listing U.S. casualties.

It was not pride but a disregard for human life that generated mass murder. Congressman Walter Jones (R), who voted for the war, is shown in Hubris saying that he would have voted No if he had bothered to read the National Intelligence Estimate that very few of his colleagues bothered to read.

Another talking head in the film is Lawrence Wilkerson. He is, of course, the former chief of staff of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is shown explaining that the reason not to attack Iraq was that doing so would take a focus away from attacking Afghanistan. Clearly this was not a reason that led to Wilkerson or Powell taking any kind of stand.

Wilkerson says in this film that he and Powell knew the war was based on lies, that the claims were junk, that no WMDs were likely to be found, etc. Yet, when confronted last week by Norman Solomon on Democracy Now! with the question of why he hadn't resigned in protest, Wilkerson claimed that at the time he'd had no idea whatsoever that there were good arguments against the war. In fact, he blamed opponents of the war for not having contacted him to educate him on the matter.

The Hubris version of Colin Powell's lies at the United Nations is misleadingly undertold. Powell was not a victim. He "knowingly lied."

[Ed Note: We have asked Wilkerson for comment on the article linked in the above paragraph, and will update if/when we receive a response. || UPDATE: Wilkerson has responded to our request for comment, and strongly denies that his former boss "knowingly lied" during his U.N. presentation. Read Wilkerson's full response now posted here. - BF]

The same goes for Bush, Cheney, and gang. According to Hubris it may have just been incompetence or hubris. It wasn't. Not only does overwhelming evidence show us that Bush knew his claims about WMDs to be false, but the former president has shown us that he considers the question of truth or falsehood to be laughably irrelevant. When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had claimed with such certainty that there were so many weapons in Iraq, he replied: "What's the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."

What's the difference? In a society based on the rule of law, the difference would be a criminal prosecution. MSNBC and Hubris steer us away from any ideas of accountability. And no connection is drawn to current war lies about Iran or other nations.

But the production of programs like this one that prolong Americans' awareness of the lies that destroyed Iraq are the best hope Iran has right now. MSNBC should be contacted and applauded for airing this and urged to follow up on it.

• Watch the entire documentary now online here.

* * *

Cross-published at WarIsACrime.org...

David Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org and works for RootsAction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

I was on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture last night to discuss the latest proposed GOP scheme, this one out of Pennsylvania, to rig the Electoral College to their advantage...

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

We've long argued that Vote-by-Mail elections are a terrible idea for democracy. You can see our quick list of our reasons right here. Nonetheless, in states like Oregon, which use Vote-by-Mail elections across the entire state, the citizens who don't appreciate the dangers of them, love them.

But once again last week, we were reminded of just one of the reasons they shouldn't love them, when a Bend, OR man was convicted of fraud after taking out a Craigslist ad claiming to offer $20 for blank ballots last November. With all registered voters in the state sent such a ballot, there is a lot of money to potentially be made from these types of crimes.

"All you need to do is bring your UNFILLED clean voting ballot and let us fill it out then you sign, then we hand it to the volunteer in the voting booth," the typo-filled ad promised. "Its that simple! Then you get $20. We'll be there all weekend through tuesday."

The perp, Aaron Hirschman, was convicted of a misdemeanor after offering a "full confession", according to the OR Attorney General's spokesperson, Jeff Manning who said that Hirschman "stated in his interview and at trial that he is an Internet 'troll' and that he posted the ad to 'agitate' and cause a stir."

The incident follows on another exploit of VBM ballots last November, when Deanna Swenson, an election official in Clackamas County, was indicted on 6 felony and 2 misdemeanor counts after being found to have allegedly filled in unvoted races in favor of Republican candidates while processing incoming mailed ballots.

Both Hirschman and Swenson got caught. That's good. The bigger question is how many don't get caught in such cases where the incentive for that kind of fraud --- the ability to change a lot of ballots to affect the results of an election, either by insider fraud or vote buying and selling --- is so high.

But, again, those cases highlight just two of the many reasons why VBM remains a terrible idea for democracy in any state.

Republicans like to pretend that there is a massive epidemic of "voter fraud" being carried out at polling places, despite the complete absence of evidence to demonstrate any such epidemic. They do so in order to push for polling place Photo ID restrictions in hopes of disenfranchising Democratic-leaning voters. Period.

On the other hand, election fraud does exist and "voter fraud" does occur. But, in almost all cases where it's found, it's via some form of mail-in voting, or at the hands of election insiders. Neither of those crimes are deterred by the polling place Photo ID restrictions Republicans continue to push for in state after state in hopes of disenfranchising legal voters for electoral gain.

[Hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter David Werth.]

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

One wonders whether the synapses simply fail to connect in the minds of zealots.

First we get a zealot like Scott Roeder who was so consumed with the "right to life" that he murdered Dr. George Tiller.

Then there’s the more recent case of the infamous ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner, who told his captive, Jim Reynolds, that he had gone on his murderous rampage because he wanted to clear his name.

Now comes the case of 45-year old Everett Basham, who was so upset with the injustice of new gun safety legislation that he allegedly sent an email to California State Senator Leland Yee (D) threatening to kill him unless Yee "stopped pushing legislation to ban so-called 'bullet buttons,' devices that permit swift reloading of military-style assault weapons by allowing for rapid exchange of ammunition magazines."

"The author of the email specifically stated that if I did not cease our legislative efforts to stop gun violence that he would assassinate me in or around the Capitol," Yee said in a statement last week. "He stated that he was a trained sniper and his email detailed certain weapons he possessed."

Then, again, perhaps Basham, the alleged author of the email, will claim that he was simply following the advice of James Yeager, the CEO of Tactical Response, a Tennessee company that specializes in weapons and tactical training. Yeager posted a video on YouTube in January in which he threatened to "start killing people" if President Obama continued to advance a gun safety agenda.

Prosecutors in Santa Clara County have charged Basham with ten felonies, including illegal possession of assault weapons, illegal possession of a destructive device and bomb making materials, criminal threats and the forging and possession of a fake driver's license. There's been no indication, as yet, that Tennessee authorities have undertaken to charge Yeager in connection with his terrorist threat, though his concealed carry permit was quickly suspended following his video-taped threat.

[UPDATE: Watch the entire documentary now online here.]

David Corn at Mother Jones offers a preview of some of the new information coming Monday, in Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, an MSNBC documentary based on the book of a similar name by Corn and Michael Isikoff.

The film, to be narrated by Rachel Maddow, is said, like the book, to detail the inside story of how America and the world were knowingly scammed by the Bush Administration into invading Iraq ten years ago next month, leading to, as Corn describes it, "a nine-year war resulting in 4,486 dead American troops, 32,226 service members wounded, and over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians."

"The tab for the war topped $3 trillion," he adds, even though "it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and no significant operational ties between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda. That is, the two main assertions used by Bush and his crew to justify the war were not true."

The facts of how the nation was conned into going to war, Maddow has argued over the past week while promoting and previewing the new film, are important to understand in order to avoid the same thing happening again. "If what we went through 10 years ago did not change us as a nation --- if we do not understand what happened and adapt to resist it --- then history says we are doomed to repeat it," she says.

Maddow says the documentary will likely ruffle many political feathers, and Corn offers a few of the new nuggets of new information on the scam that have been revealed since the publication of his and Isikoff's 2007 book that will be presented in the MSNBC film on Monday, Presidents Day. Among them...

• Retired General Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief of US Central Command's explains his reaction to then VP Dick Cheney's infamous declaration that "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Zinni, who was sitting on the same stage with Cheney during that 2002 speech to the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention says that "It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn't believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program."

• A November 2001 briefing memo declassified two years ago, used by then Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during a meeting with General Tommy Franks, details how the Administration hoped to trigger a justification for going to war in Iraq. One of those triggers, the memo suggests, was to be a "dispute over WMD inspections," akin to the one which was eventually, and very publicly, manufactured to help fuel the phony case for war.

• According to then Sec. of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell was skeptical of the entire case for war, but hid that from the public, even as he was used by the Administration to sell the war to the UN Security Council and the American public. "Powell walked into my office," on the day Congress passed its resolution giving authority to Bush to attack Iraq, Wilkerson explains in the film, "and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, 'I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?' And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I --- I wrote that down on my calendar --- as close for --- to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff."

Wilkerson goes on to add that, in truth, Powell --- who now regards his U.N. speech now as a "painful" "blot" on his career --- had no clue whether the intelligence he cited to the U.N. was actually legitimate. "Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied," says Wilkerson, "we did participate in a hoax."

[UPDATE: Watch the entire documentary now online here.]

* * *

Maddow's own preview of the film, from her show on Friday 2/15/13 --- and how the fight over the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the Iraq War is still playing out right now in the fight over former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)'s nomination to be the next Sec. of Defense --- follows below...

[UPDATE: Watch the entire documentary now online here.]

At this hour, just after 11pm PT, this story is labeled as "BREAKING NEWS" at Russia's state-owned RT website.

RT is reporting "Up to 100 people sought medical attention as a result of the incident, according to the Russian Interior Ministry. No serious injuries have been reported, with most of the injuries caused by broken glass and minor concussions."

[Update: AP now pegs the number as "more than 400 people" injured, according to a Russian Interior Ministry spokesperson. || Later Update: Washington Post now reports "985 people sought medical help for injuries and 43 were hospitalized."]

But take a look at some of the remarkable video...

Here's the beginning of RT's coverage explaining what seems to be going on...

A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteorite shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones have stopped working.

According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.

A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.

Lifenews tabloid said that at least one piece of the fallen object caused damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk. According to preliminary reports, it crashed into a wall near a zinc factory, disrupting the city's Internet and mobile service.

The Emergency Ministry reported that 20,000 rescue workers are operating in the region. Three aircraft were deployed to survey the area and locate other possible impact locations.

Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.

Police in the Chelyabinsk region are reportedly on high alert, and have begun ‘Operation Fortress’ in order to protect vital infrastructure.

This certainly seems like a hoax, but apparently it is not, as U.S. news sites are now picking this up as well. See RT's page for more details.

Here are a few of the photos they have posted, said to have been published by Twitter users, and one possible explanation for what seems to be going on...

RT goes on to report that "It is believed that the incident may be connected to asteroid 2012 DA14, which measures 45 to 95 meters in diameter and will be passing by Earth tonight at around 19:25 GMT at the record close range of 27,000 kilometers."

They don't specify who "believes" that, but, indeed, 2012 DA14 is set to fly by Earth on Friday in what NASA describes as "a record close approach for a known object of this size."

"Small near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth on February 15," NASA reports, "so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office can accurately predict the asteroid's path with the observations obtained, and it is therefore known that there is no chance that the asteroid might be on a collision course with Earth. Nevertheless, the flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close."

Could be an interesting day...

* * *

UPDATE 10:02am PT, 2/15/2013: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tweets to say that the "Russian meteor appears to be a fireball". They point us to this American Meteor Society FAQ on fireballs, which, among other information, describes a fireball as "another term for a very bright meteor, generally brighter than magnitude -4, which is about the same magnitude of the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky."

The FAQ goes on to say: "Several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth’s atmosphere each day. The vast majority of these, however, occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight. Those that occur at night also stand little chance of being detected due to the relatively low numbers of persons out to notice them. ... Additionally, the brighter the fireball, the more rare is the event."

According to the European Space Agency, the Russian meteor was not related to the asteroid 2012 DA14 which is passing the Earth today in one of the closest near misses on record for an asteroid of this size. You can watch the asteroid pass by Earth, as it happens, via this JPL live video stream.

UPDATE 10:50am PT, 2/15/2013: Dan Vergano at USA Today adds this context to all of the above:

The Russian meteor burst apart in air, creating a pressure wave strong enough to blast out windows across a region of central Russia. [Purdue University asteroid impact expert Jay] Melosh estimates the impact energy of an asteroid the size of 2012 DA14, were it to hit Earth, at about 4 megatons, a bit higher than NASA estimates. Soviet city buster nuclear bombs were about 20 megatons, for context, while the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb that killed about 150,000 people was only about 15 kilotons. (A kiloton has the equivalent explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT. A megaton explodes like 1 million tons of TNT.) NASA's Donald Yeomans compared the blast from such an object to the 1908 Tunguska (tun-GUS-kuh) event in Siberia. "This impact of an asteroid just slightly smaller than 2012 DA14 is believed to have flattened about 750 square miles of forest," Yeomans says.
...
The Russian meteor's damage was from the air pressure wave it created as it zoomed into the atmosphere, says [MIT asteroid expert Richard] Binzel, who estimates the object was likely, "about the size of an SUV." An asteroid the size of 2012 DA14 would break up at about 30,000 feet in altitude if it ran into the Earth, Melosh estimates. Unfortunately this is the "optimal" height in military terms, he says, for delivering the full force of its blast to the surface. "It's tempting to spin out these terrible scenarios where it happens over Moscow or London, which would be devastating, but the truth is that cities are not covering that much of the Earth, and so it is very unlikely that one would be hit," Melosh says. Plus, we would have at least a month to evacuate a city or region that appeared at risk under circumstances similar to 2012 DA14's discovery.

So...rest easy and have a great, non-apocalyptic day!

A few seemingly remarkable items coming in via our Twitter feed today, all fueled by folks on the Right who are hoaxed into giving their hard-earned dollars to con-men...

• The crew at the pretend "news" site, Breitbart.com (specifically, Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro) have successfully pushed a story about "Friends of Hamas" supporting SecDef-nominee, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) somehow into the mainstream Rightwing media. The problem with the story --- which is meant to help target the first Presidential cabinet nominee in history to ever be filibustered (much less by his own party!) --- is that "Friends of Hamas", the "scary-sounding pro-Hagel group", doesn't actually seem to exist, according to Slate's Dave Weigel.

• George Zimmerman, the Florida "hero" who claimed that he was just "standing his ground" after having stalked and shot unarmed African-American teen Trayvon Martin last year has a) Reportedly burned through $300,000 in donated legal defense funds and is now considering asking the court to declare him "indigent", so the state would have to pay for his defense and b) Gained some 105 pounds since his arrest last year, according to ThinkProgress today. (Yes, that is what Zimmerman looks like now, at the top of this article.)

• But the most bizarre story of the day must surely be David Corn's at Mother Jones, where his latest investigative report into the profiteering "non-profit" racket called FreedomWorks (one of the nation's largest and most powerful so-called "Tea Party" groups) documents a video said to have been created by the group, but never shown publicly, which "included a scene in which a female intern wearing a panda suit simulates performing oral sex on Hillary Clinton." As Corn himself felt necessary to mention in an Author's note: "The previous sentence contains no typos."

Keep sending in those bucks to the Rightwing scam-artists, wingnuts! No, you're not being played for suckers in the least!

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Special Coverage: Climate change takes center stage at the State of the Union address (though not in the corporate media) while activists and Senate Democrats turn up the heat ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Fukushima: 3 youth diagnosed with thyroid cancer; GAO warns weather is changing; Superstorm Sandy 2nd costliest; $188b cost for weather disasters in two years; NY to ban Styrofoam cups?; NJ officials charged with poisoning drinking water; Tesla v. NYTimes; Solar 'glass' breakthrough; Fox News 'stands in way of energy security progress'; Refinery fire: Chevron refinery pipes 80% corroded; Industry ousts scientist from EPA panel ... PLUS: Global climate treaties work: Antarctic ozone hole smallest in 10 yrs ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

• VIDEO: Obama's State of the Union 'Seems Like A Lot of Work': (Colbert Report):



The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive




• Washington Post Overlooks Obama’s Extensive Remarks On Climate And Energy: If a tree falls in the forest (because of global warming), but the media doesn’t report on it, does it make a sound? (Climate Progress)
• Climate Change in the State of the Union 2013:
• Extended Transcript: Climate Hawk Obama: ‘If Congress Won’t Act Soon To Protect Future Generations, I Will’
  (Climate Progress):
  But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it's true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it's too late. [Read Obama's extended remarks here]
• VIDEO: Obama on Energy: U.S. Must Combat Climate Change (ABC News)
• Full Transcript: Obama's State Of The Union Address As Prepared For Delivery: (NPR)
• SOTU 2013: Energy & Efficiency:
• State of the Union Hints at Ways to Bridge the Gap Between Old and New Energy (Council on Foreign Relations)
• Obama Clean-Energy Fund Would Gain If Oil Drilling Expanded (Bloomberg News):
  President Barack Obama’s proposal to fund clean-energy research with fees paid by oil and gas producers is renewing a debate over whether the promise of innovation tomorrow is worth expanding drilling today.
• State of the Union address: What is Obama's 'energy security trust'? (CS Monitor)
• Using Federal Oil Revenues to Cut America’s Oil Use (NYT Green)
• Analysis and Response to the Climate SOTU 2013:
• State of the Union Hints at Ways to Bridge the Gap Between Old and New Energy (Council on Foreign Relations)
• Obama’s threat to act unilaterally on climate change? Looking empty (Grist) [emphasis added]:
  Some good news for congressional Republicans: The president’s threat to take unilateral action on climate isn’t looking all that threatening. White House officials are talking about small steps the administration could take, but aren’t currently pushing forward on the big executive action that advocates have wanted to see: EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from existing power plants.
• President Obama Wants to Go All of the Above on Energy. But Will Anyone Join Him? (TIME Eco-Centric):
  there is a problem: “all of the above,” as attractive as it sounds, isn’t really possible. Energy policy may not be a zero-sum game—whenever one side wins, the other must lose—but there are choices that need to be made.
• From Obama’s speech, four ambitious climate and energy proposals (David Roberts, Grist)
• Strangely Anti Climactic? (Climate Crock of the Week)
• Debunking Nature’s arguments for Keystone (Grist)
• Leaders Offer Sweeping Oil Security Policy Essential to Strengthening Economy, Fiscal Outlook (Securing America's Energy Future)
• 5 things the President should do to tackle climate change (CrossCut)
• Republican Rubio's Anti-Science, Strawman Response (GULP!)
• VIDEO: GOP ‘Savior’ Marco Rubio Mocks Climate Change (Climate Progress):
  The Republican Party’s newest champion took the time to shoot down the realities of climate change and the kinds of regulations that he himself once supported as the speaker of the house in Florida.
• VIDEO: GOP’s Future Still Stuck In The Past: Rubio Claims There’s ‘Reasonable Debate’ On Cause Of Climate Change (Climate Progress)
• Poll: Majority of Americans Support Action on Climate Change:
• Two-thirds of Americans want Obama to act on climate change, says poll: Two new studies released after president's state-of-the-union promise to act on climate change with or without Congress. (Guardian UK)
• 65% support 'significant steps' on climate change [pdf] (League of Conservation Voters)
• Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research (Pew Research Center)
• Activists Turn Up the Heat on KXL:
• 48 arrested in civil disobedience at White House to stop Keystone XL pipeline and push Obama on climate action (Climate Science Watch)
• Dozens Arrested at White House Protest of Keystone XL Pipeline (Environment News Service):
  Today, 48 prominent environmental, civil rights, and community leaders from across the country demonstrated at the White House demanding that President Barack Obama reject TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and address the climate crisis.
• 5 Myths About Keystone XL, Debunked (Media Matters)
• RFK Jr. arrested: Celebs, enviros arrested at Keystone pipeline protest: Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune also was arrested — the first time in the group's 120-year history that a club leader was arrested in an act of civil disobedience. (CS Monitor)
• Snowballs in Hell: Sen. Sanders Intros Climate Legislation:
• Sen. Boxer hopes to bring climate legislation to floor by summer (The Hill's E2 Wire)
• The Newly Proposed Carbon Tax Will Fight Global Warming, Protect Low-Income Americans And Reduce The Deficit (Climate Progress):
  A carbon fee is just like any other consumption tax in that it inordinately impacts low- and middle-income families. The Climate Protection Act and Sustainable Energy Act create a rebate program to make sure that these families are not harmed. This is modeled after Alaska’s oil dividend, and will ensure that pollution reduction is not a regressive tax.
  ...
  This package funds the Weatherization Assistance Program, ARPA-E, the production tax credit and investment tax credit, manufacturing for clean energy technologies, worker training, and other programs that will be critical in transitioning to a clean energy future. Finally...The Climate Protection Act and Sustainable Energy Act will reduce the debt by $300 billion over the next ten years.

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

• Global Climate Treaties WORK: The Antarctic Ozone Hole Is the Smallest It's Been in a Decade (Motherboard) [emphasis added]:
  Wonderful news from the European Space Agency's atmospheric monitors: the hole the ozone layer above Antarctica has hit a ten-year low, and it's still shrinking. That means the environmental worry that caused your mom to slather you with sunblock as a kid is now showing positive effects from bans on ozone-killing chlorofluorocarbons in the late 80s.
• Fukushima Fallout: 3 young people have thyroid cancer (Japan Times):
  A Fukushima Prefectural Government panel said Wednesday that two people who were 18 or younger when the triple-meltdown crisis started at the Fukushima No. 1 atomic complex in March 2011 have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, bringing the total cases to three.
• Chevron Refinery Fire: Investigators Find Widespread problems (SF Gate)
• Canada: Scientists say new confidentiality rules on Arctic project are ‘chilling’ (Ottawa Citizen)
• Climate Change: Congress Warned By GAO That Weather Is Changing (Huffington Post):
  The federal government's official watchdog had a message for Congress on Thursday: Hey, Stupid, the climate is changing.
• Report: Sandy was 2nd-costliest hurricane in US (AP): The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and killed 8,000 to 12,000 people.
• Bloomberg Pushes for Plastic-Foam Ban in ‘State of the City’ (Bloomberg):
  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he intends to use his final year in office to push for more recycling and electric vehicles, a curbside food-composting pilot program and a ban on plastic-foam food packaging.
• New Jersey Water Officials Charged With Poisoning Drinking Water (Environment News Service):
  Two top officials of the East Orange Water Commission have been charged with conspiring to close contaminated wells before monthly water tests so as to falsely report low levels of a regulated contaminant in drinking water supplied to customers, then opening the wells, allowing the chemical back into the water supply.
• What’s at stake in the fight between Tesla and the New York Times (Washington Post)
• Colourful 'solar glass' means entire buildings can generate clean power: British firm develops colourful, transparent solar cells that will add just 10% to glass buildings' cost (Guardian UK)
• Fox Stands In The Way Of Energy Security Progress (Media Matters)
• Ouster of Scientist from EPA Panel Shows Industry Clout (PBS Newshour)
• Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks (Guardian UK)
• $188b Price Tag From U.S. Extreme Weather From 2011 To 2012 (Climate Progress)
• The New Sustainable Energy Factbook: A Strong Case for Consistent Policy (Bloomberg New Energy Finance, via Climate Progress.org):
  The report provides a detailed account of the energy market for investors and policymakers making a strong case for the role of stable policies in leveling the playing field for clean energy technologies in the evolving energy landscape.
• VIDEO: Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise (Mother Jones): Glaciologist Jason Box describes a post-warming world that you won't even be able to recognize.

New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:

• COVER STORY: It's Global Warming, Stupid (Businessweek):
  Yes, yes, it's unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us-and they're right-that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.
  ...
  If all that doesn't impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.
• CO2 Emissions Rises Mean Dangerous Climate Change Now Almost Certain (Guardian)
• Study: Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than Projected, Planet Keeps Warming As Expected (Climate Progress)
• Ocean Acidification: Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean (New Scientist)
• Global warming targets further out of reach, UN says (Phys.org):
  Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century --- way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
• Thawing of permafrost to be 'major factor' in global warming, warns UN report (UN News Centre)
• Must-Read: Economist William Nordhaus Slams Global Warming Deniers, Explains Cost of Delay is $4 Trillion (Climate Progress):
  Nordhaus's blunt piece - "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong" - is worth reading because he is no climate hawk.

Essential Climate Science Background:

• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of ALL Climate Science Denier Arguments
• Report: Humans near tipping point that could dramatically change Earth (CS Monitor) [emphasis added]:
  Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.
• VIDEO: James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change (TED Talks):
  Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• VIDEO: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming (NYT Green)
• Thinking Big: NREL Study Shows 80 Percent Renewables Possible By 2050 (Climate Progress)
• Part 1: The brutal logic of climate change (David Roberts, Grist) [emphasis added]:
  It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

  It is unpleasant to talk like this. People don't want to hear it.

• Part 2: The brutal logic of climate change mitigation (David Roberts, Grist)
• How to Buy Time in the Fight against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane: A short list of relatively simple actions taken to reduce greenhouse gases other than CO2 could help put the brakes on global warming--if implemented globally (Scientific American)
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will 'lose for ever' the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels... "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• The Real Global Warming Signal (Tamino)
• No, global warming hasn't stopped (New Scientist)
• VIDEO: Climate Scientists Michael Mann on "A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future" (TEDx, YouTube)
• Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change, Study Finds (NYT Green)
• Heads in the Sand: Warning: "Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment," reports the National Academy of Sciences. As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

"If a tree falls in the forest (because of global warming), but the media doesn’t report on it, does it make a sound?," asks Joe Romm at Climate Progress, along with a pretty incredible observation.

Romm highlighted the Washington Post's front page banner the day after this week's State of the Union speech, during which President Obama spent a rather large chunk of it on issues related to climate change and energy.

Nonetheless, when WaPo summarized the percentage of the speech devoted to each of the various topics mentioned during the address, here was the front page banner used to detail it on Wednesday (click graphic to enlarge):

As Romm notes:

In its quantification of the key elements of the speech, the paper’s editors apparently couldn’t see or hear or speak of the nearly 10% of the State of the Union address devoted to climate and energy. But, hey, Obama devoted 3% of the speech to immigration — that’s news!

Amazing.

But, maybe such things just aren't very important to the "State of the Union" after a year of record drought, record heat, and a record number of global warming-related natural disasters.

On today's KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast we covered the State of the Union Address last night, with extended focus on the President's call for election form and his new "Presidential Commission on Election Administration" [PDF], to be questionably co-chaired by Swift Boat GOP attorney Ben Ginsberg. As we noted yesterday, color us dubious about all of that.

My guest in the first half-hour was Marcia Johnson-Blanco, Co-Director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and we also discussed their recent report on "Our Broken Voting Systems And How to Repair It", as well as the upcoming February 27th U.S. Supreme Court hearing in Shelby County v. Holder, challenging the Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act's Section 5 protection of jurisdictions with a history of discrimination at the voting booth.

Suffice to say, she was more optimistic about all of the above than I was.

In most of the second half of the show, we focused on the many environmental issues raised in Obama's State of the Union with the Green News Report's Desi Doyen. I'm not sure who was more (or less) optimistic in that half of the show.

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...
[See post to listen to audio]

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

Republican House Speaker John Boehner didn't seem to care for President Obama's State of the Union address tonight...

The Speaker "managed not to rise even for a shout-out to 'wounded warriors,' or 102-year-old Desiline Victor, who waited seven hours to vote in Miami on Election Day," notes Joan Walsh in "The night John Boehner just sat there".

But the biggest boner of the night came during Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) official Republican Response. The junior Senator and 2016 hopeful was apparently demonstrating the need for action on climate change, by personally re-enacting the nation's worst drought in fifty years. It all eventually led to what has now become known as the "gulp heard round the world"...

Don't worry, Marco. Nobody noticed. Except for everybody. And, of course, Deadspin, who has the entire moment in excruciating extreme slo-mo.

For more serious concerns about tonight's State of the Union address, see our earlier report.