Radiation? What radiation?

The government wouldn't lie to their own people in such a dangerous situation, would they? ... Apparently they would, they did, and they will. Fukushima No. 2 Reactor Has '10 Times The Fatal Dose' of Radiation. Meanwhile, Original Contamination Data Was Deleted The whole world was watching, taking aerial samples, checking the seawater, and we knew that it was horribly horribly bad. It's still horribly horribly bad and will remain so forever. Japan just lost a massive chunk of their island because of their nuclear program. How many accidents and disasters do we have to go through before we realize we can't handle nuclear power plant mistakes? How much more of the earth do we have to make uninhabitable?

Lies and cover-ups

Are much easier to do than vetting someone.

emptywheel:

Lies and Cover-Up as Governing Strategy

And so, Palin's selection followed by the cover-up says more than just that McCain will make rash, dangerous decisions because he hasn't done his homework. It also suggests how he would "live with the consequences" of those ill-thought out decisions if he were President. He'd lie and obstruct his way out of them.

I guess that shouldn't be a surprise. That's not much different than the way the Administration has covered for its poor decision to invade Iraq, to make up stories about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, to sponsor whitewash investigations about the intelligence leading to Iraq, to even impede the investigations into the corrupt execution of the Iraq war. And it's similar to the way McCain got out of his own biggest ethical morasse in the Keating scandal--to PR his way out of his own failures.

But the Iraq parallel demonstrates the problem with such a governing strategy: no matter how you try to spin it, such ill thought out decisions can results in thousands of deaths, not to mention the financial bankrupting of the country.

McCain's campaign has just exacerbated their failure to vet, it seems, by embracing a strategy of lies and cover-up.

New Orleans is still in peril

Because of greed and lies. The Bush administration strikes again:

The contract administration has been a travesty - perhaps even criminal - and there appears to have been an active effort to cover that up. MWI was writing change orders - including prices - and the Corps was sending them back to MWI with a bow on them. Duplicate payments have been made to MWI. There appears to be no written justification for most of the payments. There appear to be millions of dollars unaccounted for.

Scout Prime of First Draft has more.

Fix the pumps, you greedy arrogant indifferent bastards.

The most delicious words in the English language....

Karl Rove facing investigation that "could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House"

Rats. You were right. It was too good to be true:

Scott J. Bloch, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, “who says he is investigating Karl Rove for allegations he influenced government activity for partisan purposes is himself facing allegations of similar behavior.” In April 2005, government watchdogs and others complained that “the White House appointee had allowed his office to ’sit on’ a complaint that then-White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice used government funds to travel in support of President Bush’s re-election bid.”

UPDATE: CREW adds: “The fact that OSC has been charged with handling these matters suggests the possibility that the White House is orchestrating a cover-up of its illegal and improper activities.”

Update: David Corn at The Nation:

At the OSC, Bloch is supposed to protect whistleblowers. But he's been charged with reprising against those who challenge his agency and others. Before Bloch was appointed by Bush to take over the OSC, he was a deputy director and counsel at the Justice Department's Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

"By most measures, his tenure has been an absolute failure," says Adam Miles, legislative representative at the Government Accountability Project. "He's been under pressure to start doing something." Miles notes that GAP did not initially expect the complaint it filed against Bloch in 2005 to go anywhere. "It was referred to a federal entity called the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency," Miles recalls, "and we thought it would just rot there." But the case was handed to Pat McFarland, the inspector general for the Office of Personnel Management. McFarland is a former St. Louis detective who spent 22 years as a Secret Service agent before becoming IG at OPM in 1990.

McFarland's investigation of Bloch, Miles says, "hasn't been a totally transparent process but we're hearing it's reaching a conclusion--which could be motivation for Bloch to start this investigation into the White House. If OPM does turn up any adverse information on Bloch, it would be more difficult for the White House to get rid of him while he was actively investigating them." But this could cut the other way. If Bloch is the subject of an investigation, he might be inclined to treat the White House favorably to protect his own position. In either case, there seems to be a conflict of interest. Bloch, Miles says, "may not be the appropriate person to be conducting the investigation" of Rove and the White House.

It is a dizzying situation. The investigator investigating officials who oversee the agency that is investigating the investigator. Forget firewalls. This looks more like a basement flooded with backed-up sewage--with the water rising.

When the wheels came off the bus

The engine fell out, the brakes failed, and the driver tried to run away:

It's true that the claim that the firings were performance related set off a chain reaction of events. Most importantly it pushed some of the US Attorneys to defend their professional reputations.

But this is the classic case of mistaking the symptom for the disease. As McNulty could see, refusing to give any explanation for an unprecedented firing of multiple US Attorneys with active investigations or prosecutions of prominent Republicans simply wasn't tenable. Vague lies about performance problems was the least worst option available.

Frankly, simply reviewing the multiple instances in which Bush Justice Department officials threatened the firees with attacking their reputations if they didn't go quietly, I have real doubts whether any of the performance related line started with McNulty. But it hardly matters. The fuse was lit when the White House ordered the DOJ to fire the list of US Attorneys for hurting Republicans and not damaging Democrats. A really good cover story might have kept the thing hidden but a blanket refusal to discuss the matter -- in a department the Congress oversees -- was never going to cut it.

There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that 'it's not the crime, but the cover-up.'

But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable. Let me repeat that, the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable. Indeed, the cover-ups are usually successful. And that's why they're tried so often. Just look at this administration. They're the ultimate example of this truth.

Update: fixed link.

The story that just won't go away

Try as the Bush administration may...

...with Bush's popularity at a record low, a Zogby poll shows that over 40 percent of Americans now think there has been a "coverup" around 9/11. A more recent poll conducted at the Scripps-Howard/University of Ohio found more than a third of those asked said it was likely that "people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

Read the article for the staggering and buried facts:

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage is a figure bloodied by his work in Iran/Contra. He and then-CIA Director George Tenet had extensive meetings in Pakistan with President Musharraf in the spring of 2001, according to the Asia Times.

Then, Pakistan's top spy, Mahmood Ahmad, visited Washington for a week, taking meetings with top State Department people like Tenet and Mark Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. The Pakistani press reported, "ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood's weeklong presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council." Did they know that Ahmad had wired over $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, through U.K. national Saeed Sheikh in the summer of 2001? (Facts all confirmed, quietly, by the FBI investigation in Pakistan, and, partially, in the Wall Street Journal.)

[snip]

When the critics focus on the wacky theories and not on careful, moderate, serious authors like Lance, it's a strategy to frame the debate. It steers the argument from going after the real meat of 9/11: the history of U.S. foreign policy in strategic alliances with radical Islam.

Specifically, there are a set of troubling connections between the 9/11 terrorists and the U.S. State Department, the Pakistani ISI (old friends of the CIA from working together creating Afghani Mujahadeen during the Russian occupation), the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, the Pentagon, Maxwell Air Force Base and the Muslim Brotherhood.

[snip]

When George W. Bush, and his gang of bloodstained Iran/Contra suspects seized the White House, they ushered in a new era of intimacy between the federal government and international mega-capital. After all, "Dubya" Bush had wasted a good chunk of his life in a cocaine and whiskey stupor, but the other half was spent in bad business deals with people like Saudi heavyweight Khalid bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz, alongside Salem bin Laden (Osama's half-brother), was a 1977 investor in Arbusto Energy, Bush's first oil company. Mahfouz later became the majority shareholder of BCCI. Mahfouz helped broker the deal for Bush when he wanted to unload his Harken energy stock. This same Khalid bin Mahfouz was branded by a report to the UN Security Council as one of the seven top Saudi al Qaeda money men. Shortly after the Bush/Harken deal, Mahfouz donated a quarter of a million dollars to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen in the late 1980s. According to Forbes, he put $30 million into the Muwaffaq Foundation, which the Treasury Department labeled an al Qaeda front. (Mahfouz also legendary for suing anyone who says so, and has terrified and constrained independent publishers in Canada and the UK.) Is it any wonder then, that the heavily compromised, Bush-White House connected 9/11 Commission took a dive to the mat on the "financing of 9/11" question? They said the money behind 9/11 was "of little practical significance" when behind the curtain stood an old friend of Bush, controlling a bogeyman named "al Qaeda." Senator Bob Graham said he was "stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing" the question of foreign financing, and that crucial information had been "overly classified.

9/11, the day that changed everything. Or so the neocons want you to think....