This morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (ABC), Condoleezza Rice, interviewed on the violence in the Middle East:

Rice, awkwardly trying to justify the administration’s non-support of a cease-fire, stays with the Bush-Cheney fantasy line that “extremists” facing “a new Middle East” are the cause and source of the violence. (No mention of repressive regimes or the mistreatment of Palestine.)

Her reasoning is the neocon argument that past peace-keeping efforts in the past didn’t “work” –i.e. since no peace lasted forever, lives saved or quality of life improved in the interim don’t matter a whiff.

No time for obvious fallacies right now; this blog just to highlight a statement worthy of thought: Rice, winding up her peroration, asks rhetorically, “Where do we think Hezbollah and Hamas [etc] came from?”

Bingo. Those “extremists” — and this is the point that Bush-Cheney ALWAYS mask — are people, and they come from populations. Populations revolt when life becomes untenable. 

BTW, it is beside the point to accuse Bush-Cheney of being the “extremists,” and false to call them “radical” — a term meaning etymologically rooted, to the root, fundamental. That’s the last thing they are. They’re a cabal. This is the geopolitics of corruption and cabal at work, aggrandizing violence by every feasible means (not too overt) and at every level.

Re that last point: 1) Bill Kristol calls for war with Iran in today’s Weekly Standard, the paid-propaganda organ of the neocons; Fareed Zakharia made a good point dismissing the editorial, and even George F. Will demurred. 2) Weapons used in some horrific shootings in D.C. last week were brought back from Iraq and sold here at home. There will be more of that, to be sure, if this administration has its way.

Right now the president and Mrs. Bush are traveling around the country trying to sound nice. But there is only too much reason to fear that when fall 2006 elections are safely past, the administration will manage to achieve the major it wants against Iran, either directly or through Israel.

Meanwhile, the untruthful Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney have helped to bring about the deaths of thousands of little girls in Iraq. They support a foreign policy that is itself war crime — the immoral, illegal and unconstitutional invasion and occupation of another country.

Aside from other factors, one that surely worked to the advantage of the 9/11 hijackers was that each of the four flights they caught on that fateful day was carrying significantly less than a full passenger load. Again we have what appears to be little short of a miraculous concatenation of timing and other circumstances:

Since the four planes, like the World Trade Center, were mercifully not full to capacity, casualties ultimately proved less than they might otherwise have. On the other hand, the hijackers also had fewer passengers to overpower or keep under control, and there was less passenger weight to use up fuel. Magically, the flight that carried four hijackers rather than five — United Airlines flight 93

Continuing from previous blogs . . . All things considered, the strikes of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of the skyjackers, amount to a miracle of timing. Let

Continuing from previous blogs . . . The current lockstep line from the corporate Right is that

Continuing from previous blogs . . . One thing the 9/11 Commission incontestably got right is that the 9/11 skyjackers were a team comprising more than one tier. The 19 men who hijacked four U.S. jumbo jets in three U.S. airports had varying degrees of expertise and in several instances lacked expertise in, for example, aviation or engineering; they entered the U.S. at several different times; and they showed different degrees of commitment.

They had different degrees of knowledge about the suicide mission they were engaged in. This is the point I keep coming back to, over and over again.

They were also incontestably linked, some entering the country in pairs and several living together or in the same areas

Recent days have brought some drastic weather to the mid-Atlantic. As seen on television, much of the metropolitan Washington, D.C., region has been deluged; mud of biblical quality has invaded basements (including my own basement), walkways and streets; power outages blot the region; transportation, farming, government work and tourism have been impeded; and more rain may be on the way.

The worst harms have been suffered by people evacuated from their houses or trapped in their vehicles or drowned in a current. But even the lesser experiences of my own firsthand observation are indicators to which anyone concerned about public health and public safety should give heed.

On Monday, June 26, I was among thousands of commuters stuck in delayed mass transit for extra hours on the way to work. This wasn

Unfortunately Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer weighed in, on a Sunday head show, on chances of Democrats’ retaking Congress in the fall elections.

I have thought for some time that both Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton have no real political existence except to buffer the Republican Party in NY state, where the GOP is outnumbered 2-1. Schumer’s appearance yesterday (May 28) did nothing to change that impression.

McConnell (R-KY), an old tobacco industry buy-in, asserted that Democrats have a simple agenda: (1) wave the white flag in the “war on terror”; (2) raise taxes; (3) censure the president in the Senate; and (4) impeach the president in the House. I couldn’t help thinking how un-threatening most of that sounded. Presumably the “white flag” is McConnell’s way of referring to getting out of Iraq. I can guess what he’d think of getting the U.S. oil companies out of there, which is a sine qua non for America’s regaining any credibility in the rest of the world.

Schumer then repeated his previous catch phrases of “change” and “a new direction,” claiming that turf for the Dems. Shades of Gary Hart in the Eighties . . . “new ideas” are worse than a shibboleth. Food, water, shelter, education, medicine — which of these is a new idea? Any hack so far gone in hackery, like Schumer (the number-one check kiter in the House, I believe), as to be unable to perceive the real needs of people in this country should not be allowed on television.

Schumer also claimed that there will be no investigating, should Dems win Congress, saying that the American people don’t want investigation. The real name of one 9/11 hijacker, “Majed Moqed,” still has not been released to the public, presumably to protect either his relatives in the old country (which old country? — good question), or the administration insiders/cronies linked with said relatives. — And Schumer says we don’t want investigation? Not only should Mrs. Clinton lose her primary (to anyone running against her), NY State shd explore possibilities of a recall for Schumer. Meanwhile, his saying anything is a waste of air, speaking of precious resources.

Kudos to Wired for publishing the statement of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. Klein worked for AT&T for 22 years. The statement is, to put it mildly, worth reading.

High points:

“In 2002, when I was working in an AT&T office in San Francisco, the site manager told me to expect a visit from a National Security Agency agent, who was to interview a management-level technician for a special job. The agent came, and by chance I met him and directed him to the appropriate people.” [note how EARLY this started]

“In January 2003, I . . . toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco . . . There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public’s phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room. The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.”

“I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco” dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the “splitter” cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.”

“One of the documents listed the equipment installed in the secret room, and this list included a Narus STA 6400, which is a “Semantic Traffic Analyzer”. The Narus STA technology is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.”

“My job required me to connect new circuits to the “splitter” cabinet and get them up and running. While working on a particularly difficult one with a technician back East, I learned that other such “splitter” cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.”

Based on his experience, Klein says that “it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet — whether that be peoples’ e-mail, web surfing or any other data.”

It might be added that Bush insiders including some of the president’s relatives are among business people most closely hooked into the global telecommunications industry.

As many netizens know, Judith Miller recently gave an exclusive interview to AlterNet, the gist of which is that an unnamed source in the Bush administration gave her a tip in summer 2001 about an impending al-Qaida attack on this country: