While You Were Sleeping

by Peter M. Laffin, February 23, 2007

In the January issue of Vanity Fair, Richard Perle, co-founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, and Kenneth Adelman, longtime neoconservative activist, lamented the incompetence with which the Bush administration executed the war in Iraq, an excursion Perle is often credited with conceiving.

Adelman, who famously described the impending liberation of Iraq as a “cakewalk,” in a Washington Post op-ed piece in February 2002, referred to the Bush Administration as “one of the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.” Despite his initial enthusiasm, Perle now says that he would not advocate the invasion if he could turn back the clock because of the administration’s waste, corruption, and mismanagement. Perle recalled a story he heard from an Iraqi cabinet minister about the American leadership within the Green Zone. Not wanting to store ice in Baghdad’s hot climate, they had it trucked in from Kuwait, 300 miles away, in regular convoys that frequently came under fire. “We were sending American forces in harm’s way, with full combat capability to support them, helicopters overhead, to move goddamn ice from Kuwait to Baghdad,” said Perle.
On November 2, an abridged version of the January article was posted on Vanity Fair’s website because the editors found the comments by Adelman and Perle unexpected and highly significant. Perle claimed that he was misled by the magazine because he believed that his comments wouldn’t be published before the November elections.
Source: Vanity Fair

Prosecutors in Munich have ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents suspected of being involved in the extraordinary rendition of Khaled el-Masri (below), a German citizen who was seized in Macedonia on December 31, 2003, taken to a secret prison in Afghanistan for five months, and dumped in Albania on a deserted road when it was discovered that he was misidentified. The situation has cast light on the US practice of capturing terror suspects abroad and sending them to a third country. El-Masri’s lawyer said the issuing of arrest warrants was the first sign that German authorities were prepared to back his client against the CIA.
Source: Bloomberg.com; Reuters
Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported record annual profits for 2006. Exxon’s reported annual profit of $39.5 billion was its second consecutive annual company record and once again the largest reported by any American company in history. Perhaps sensitive to public perception, Shell did not announce that its annual profit was a company record. The growing profits at Exxon and Shell could make them bigger targets for the Democratically controlled Congress who want oil companies to pay higher taxes and help curb global warming. Since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in early February stressing that the planet is being warmed due to human actions, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank funded by Exxon with close ties to the Bush administration, has offered $10,000 to scientists and economists in exchange for written articles that emphasize the shortcomings of the IPCC’s report. “It’s a desperate attempt by an organization who wants to distort science for their own political aims,” said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Source: Common Dreams