• I am not sure what we did by giving Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson $700 billion to spend. The stock market isn’t happy. The stock market fell approximately 5% today. So far in 2008, the stock market has lost 32% of its value. This is the worst loss in value since 1937. Want more dire warnings?  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has hinted that the Fed may lower interest rates. I thought that low interest rates were one of the reasons we got into this problem!
• Hedge funds, on average, lost over 4% in September. Early trading in Asian markets looks like the bad news is going to continue.
• With the Food and Drug Administration looming over their heads, the pharmaceutical companies that make pediatric cough and cold remedies have voluntarily agreed to want that their products should not be used for children under four. Recent studies have suggested these remedies do not help young children.
• More bad news for the John McCain camp. New intelligence estimates suggest that sectarian violence could break out at any time in Iraq. In spite of John McCain’s proclamation that we have won, the national intelligence estimate states that “victory” is not certain. Of course, this should be obvious to anyone who’s paid any attention over the last five years.
• 17 Chinese born Muslims that have been detained in Guantánamo Bay for over six years have been ordered to be released by a US federal judge.
• One of the best heavyweight bouts is not being shown on HBO.  Wells Fargo and Citibank are battling over Wachovia. Towards the end of last week, Citigroup had stepped in to buy Wachovia Bank. From out of nowhere, Wells Fargo came up with a different and possibly better offer. An announcement was made that Wachovia would be sold to Wells Fargo.  Citibank filed an injunction. The battle is continuing behind closed doors. By the way, did you notice that Bank of America, the bank that bought Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, reported a 68% drop in their revenues compared to last year’s third quarter?

Remember I’m on iTunes and several other podcasting services.

Secondly, so, what happened?  How did this happen?  Didn’t we hear World War III rhetoric just recently?  I find it very interesting that the intelligence community put this report out.  You know that the Bush administration had to have fought to keep it under wraps.

I would like to add since Hillary Clinton was getting beaten up in an NPR debate that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization.  We have known this for more than 10 years (Read Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies.)  So, that isn’t the question.  The question is why do we label this organization now.  It is fact that the IRG has supported several terrorist groups in the region.  Why does the Senate in concert with the White House vote on this now?  If it isn’t to support Bush’s case for “strong, aggressive” action then what was the purpose?

Finally, it is time to pull in the reigns on the Bush administration.   Yes, there are problems in Iran.  Yes, they have a leader who is crazy and playing to his base (the Iranian leader…who did you think that I was talking about).  We, the American people, has an opportunity to get our foreign policy right.  I think that the Intelligence Community has no desire to be the scapegoat again.  This is why they forced the issue and wouldn’t cave under pressure.

Update:  There are those on the other side of the political spectrum who claim that Progressives are dancing in the streets.  Stating that Progressives believe that Iran poses no threat to the region or to anyone.  Wrong.  There are those that hear whatever they want to hear.  The key is we need diplomacy.  Real diplomacy to get Iran to open its borders so that we can see what’s inside.  With the crazy man at the helm we have to assume that he means some of what he is saying.  Hopefully, through engagement we can convince Iran that being a rouge nation is only fun on TV.

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From WaPo:

President Bush asserted today that Iran’s nuclear program remains a danger to international security despite an assessment in a new U.S. intelligence report that the Tehran government stopped work four years ago on a suspected effort to build nuclear weapons.

In a White House news conference, Bush argued that Iran continues to develop the capability to enrich uranium and that this know-how ultimately could be transferred to a new clandestine weapons program.

“Look, Iran was dangerous,” Bush said. “Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”  (more…)

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From Yahoo.com:

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the “war on terror” is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a “fundamental re-think is required” if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

“If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut,” said Paul Rogers, the report’s author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England. (more…)

• Al Qaeda is on the run.
• We have taken away their sanctuary.
• Bin Laden is hiding a cave somewhere
• he has been marginalized.

A sneak peak at the National Intelligence Estimate reveals that Al Qaeda may be stronger than in 2001 and they are alive and well in Pakistan. How many lies has the Bush Administration told? Enough to make me want to spit!!!

I have said this time and time again. I wrote it in my book – A Letter to America. I said that we didn’t finish off Al Qaeda. Give the middle finger to Al Qaeda in Iraq. They don’t matter (at least not now). Bin Laden matters. His structure matters. These guys should either be rotting in a jail somewhere (after a fair American trial) or they should be dead.

The fact that we are still talking about Osama Bin Laden is a failure of leadership. It is a dereliction of duty. It is treason. Now, where is Ann Coulter and that loud mouth from the Weekly Standard, William Kristol? I would love for them to explain this. On second thought, I can’t take any more lies. Send them to Gitmo as enemy combatants.

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From WaPo:

Six years after the Bush administration declared war on al-Qaeda, the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks, according to a new Bush administration intelligence report to be discussed today at a White House meeting.

The report, a five-page threat assessment compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, is titled “Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West,” intelligence officials said. It concludes that the group has significantly rebuilt itself despite concerted U.S. attempts to smash the network. (more…)

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Analysis from NYT:

The release on Friday of portions of a bleak new National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s future left the White House and its opponents vying over whether its findings buttressed their vastly different views about how to arrest the worsening sectarian chaos there.

The assessment, by American intelligence agencies, expressed deep doubts about the abilities of Iraqi politicians to hold together an increasingly balkanized country, and about whether Iraqi troops might be able to confront powerful militias over the next 18 months and assume more responsibility for security.

The analysis, the first such estimate on Iraq in more than two years, described in sober language a rapidly unraveling country in which security has worsened despite four years of efforts by the administration.

President Bush acknowledged last month that his strategy had failed so far.

The estimate suggested that the United States now faced an unpalatable decision in which a rapid withdrawal of American troops would only accelerate momentum toward Iraq’s collapse, and in which Iraq faced long odds of quelling the violence and overcoming hardening sectarian divisions, regardless of how many American troops police Iraq’s streets.

The report was released a week after Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed suggestions that Iraq is in a parlous state, saying, “The reality on the ground is, we’ve made major progress.”

The administration has also intensified its criticism of Iran, accusing it of fueling the sectarian violence in Iraq and providing Shiite militias with material for bombs that the administration says have been used in attacks on American forces. The White House has thus far made little evidence public to support its case.

The intelligence report did conclude that Iran is providing “lethal support” for Shiite groups that is intensifying the violence. But it portrayed the violence as essentially “self-sustaining,” and suggested that the involvement of outsiders, including Iran, was “not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability.”

National Intelligence Estimates provide a consensus of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community.

In choosing to take the rare step of making public three and a half pages of “key judgments” from the classified report, administration officials seized on one conclusion — that American forces remain “an essential stabilizing element in Iraq” — to reinforce their view that more troops are needed to secure Baghdad and give Iraqi leaders breathing room to develop a political settlement, particularly between the warring Sunnis and Shiites.

But top Democratic lawmakers said the estimate’s conclusions supported their view that the best way to combat violence in Baghdad would be through new political and diplomatic programs.

The declassified portions included an assessment that an Iraqi military hampered by sectarian divisions would be “hard pressed” over the next 12 to 18 months to”execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with any success.”

The report also concluded that security in Iraq would continue to deteriorate at current rates unless “measurable progress” can be made in efforts to reverse the conditions that fuel violence.

The full classified report was said by officials to be about 90 pages in length, and was provided to the White House and members of Congress. Top Democrats said the release of the intelligence estimate would strengthen their hand as the Senate prepares for a possible vote next week on a nonbinding resolution opposing President Bush’s new Iraq strategy.

“The estimate reaffirms my belief that the best hope for progress toward stabilizing Iraq lies only with the Iraqi people and their political leaders,” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The steps identified by the intelligence community as having the best chance of reversing the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq are all political developments, not military.”

But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said at the White House that the estimate “gives us some evidence” of why Mr. Bush had concluded that “an American withdrawal or stepping back now would be a prescription for fast failure and a chaos that would envelop not only Iraq, but the region.”

Mr. Hadley said the estimate also bolstered the White House strategy of sending more than 20,000 new troops into Iraq.

The previous National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, in the summer of 2004, detailed three possible outlooks for Iraq over the following 18 months, with the most pessimistic possibility that Iraq would descend into civil war.

By contrast the new report, struggling to describe the nature of the ongoing violence, said that calling it a “civil war” was hardly sufficient.

“The intelligence community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence,” the assessment read.

John E. McLaughlin, who oversaw the previous intelligence estimate when he was acting director of central intelligence, said that he believed that intelligence officials in 2004 had presciently assessed what was to come in Iraq, but that the escalation of sectarian violence over the past year had made the situation even more complex.

“Civil war is checkers,” he said. “This is chess.”

The report also warned that a further sectarian splintering of Iraq could incite other countries in the Middle East to arm and finance various sects in the country: Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt supporting the Sunnis, and Iran coming to the aid of Shiite forces.

A National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that was produced in 2002 in the prelude to the American invasion has become infamous as an example of an intelligence failure, because most of its central assertions about Iraq’s weapons capabilities and ties to terrorism have since been proven to have been mistaken.

Since then, American intelligence officials have made efforts to overhaul the process to produce the reports, in part by giving new emphasis to dissenting views that were once buried in obscure footnotes.

The latest analysis is understood to contain multiple dissents, one of which concerns the role of Syria in supporting Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Intelligence analysts have been divided over whether it is the policy of the government in Damascus to aid the flow of foreign fighters who enter Iraq from Syria, or whether that assistance is the work of lower-level Syrian officials acting on their own.

American intelligence analysts have also disagreed about the extent to which Iranian government officials are aware of the flow of Qaeda operatives between Iran and Iraq.

Beyond the current grim picture, the report described several “triggering events” that could cause the situation to worsen significantly. Among them, it listed the assassination of major religious or political leaders, a complete Sunni defection from the government, and sustained mass sectarian killings that could “shift Iraq’s trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political and security consequences.”

Were the already fragile government to collapse, the report outlined three possible outcomes: the emergence of a Shiite strongman to assert authority over minority sects, an “anarchic” fragmentation that puts power in the hands of hundreds of local potentates, or a period of sustained, bloody fighting leading to partition of Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Collapse of this magnitude would generate fierce violence for at least several years,” the report concluded, “ranging well beyond the time frame of this estimate, before settling into a partially stable end-state.”

Note: Keith interviews Richard Clarke.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — An angry President Bush Tuesday said he would declassify an intelligence document that reportedly finds that the Iraq war increased the terrorist threat to the United States.

The president said the media accounts of the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate were meant to “create confusion in the minds of the American people” and suggested that the report had been leaked for political purposes.

During a joint White House press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Bush said he has ordered Director of National Security John Negroponte to declassify the report’s key findings . (Full story)