Hullabaloo

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

 
A Hard-Fought War

Obviously, I believe that the unlawful enemy combatant designation is unconstitutional and unnecessary. I don't happen to think this terrorist threat is really a "war," as the word is commonly defined (outside of marketing circles anyway) so the whole thing is moot in my mind. However, even if I were to stipulate that it is a war then I would argue that we should officially declare it, then hold prisoners under the Geneva conventions and quit this nonsense that we will always be at war with Oceania...err...terrorism. It seems silly to have to point this out, but that is quintessential propaganda in case anybody's forgotten.

Nobody ever knows going in when a war will end, so this idea that this is unprecedented is nonsense. When the government starts using this "open-endedness" to justify circumventing the constitution, one should be just a little bit skeptical of its motives.

And even if I were to agree that we have no choice but to throw out habeus corpus on an ad hoc basis at the discretion of the president, is there any reason to believe that the enemy combatant issue would be handled by this administration with more competence than they handle anything else? (This is the reason, of course, why you don't do this. Sometimes leaders bad and stupid --- not good and smart.)

This article from the April 26th Newsweek gives a little window into the professional approach they take in deciding who is and isn't an "enemy combatant." Let's just say it validates the concerns of Enlightenment thinkers about the rule of men vs the rule of law:

The Yemeni-born men from Lackawanna, N.Y., were accused of training at a camp in Afghanistan, where some had met Osama bin Laden. The president's men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men should be locked up indefinitely as "enemy combatants," and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer. That's what authorities had done with two other Americans, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. "They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashcroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing "material support" to Al Qaeda.

On that day, at least, the attorney general won the debate, and the Lackawanna Six eventually pleaded guilty. It wasn't the first time, or the last, that top Bush officials would spar over such weighty legal issues.

[...]

...the administration hadn't anticipated that U.S. citizens might occasionally turn up in the mix. In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates—and even shouting matches—inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.

On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. "There have been some very intense disagreements," says a senior law-enforcement official. "It has been a hard-fought war."


It's far from over. Officials say they eventually settled on "informal" rules to decide whether a detained American should be thrown into the brig or brought to trial.

So, the policy is carried out by "informally" deciding between Cheney and Rumsfeld's omnicient talents as judge, jury and executioner or John Ashcroft's need to bask in the spotlight. Who needs that old relic, the rule 'o law, when you have a faultless sytem such as this? It's especially edifying that that politics never enter into any of this. It's always about keeping those babies safe:

In a speech earlier this year, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to reassure critics, saying the White House had an "elaborate" and "painstaking" system to identify enemy combatants. But it didn't start out that way. In truth, the enemy combatants policy evolved in fits and starts. In the spring of 2002, U.S. soldiers discovered Hamdi, a Louisiana-born, Saudi-raised U.S. citizen, among the hundreds of ragtag Taliban fighters sent to Guantanamo. They realized they had a problem. The other detainees could be tried before military tribunals. But Bush's order authorizing the tribunals had exempted U.S. citizens a decision intended to disarm critics. Hamdi was flown to a naval brig in Norfolk, Va., while administration lawyers tried to figure out what to do with him. When a local public defender who read about Hamdi in the newspaper petitioned to meet with him, an assistant U.S. attorney made a novel argument in court: Hamdi was an "unlawful enemy combatant," and had no right to counsel.

Administration lawyers concede that there was a seat-of-the-pants quality to the way events unfolded. "There is a sense in which we were making this up as we went along," says one top government attorney. "You have to remember we were dealing with a completely new paradigm: an open-ended conflict, a stateless enemy and a borderless battlefield."

Yes. They were swimming in totally uncharted waters. Americans involved in terrorism was simply unprecedented. Nothing in our legal system could possibly deal with people who were involved in such an operation. (Well, except for the first World Trade Center bombers or Tim McVeigh or the Lackawanna Six or Lind and those guys in Oregon. But still...) If only we had the option of a charge like conspiracy to commit murder carrying life in prison or even the death penalty, maybe we could effectively deal with ruthless potential killers like Padilla. Our only choice was to have Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft hash it out among themselves. Our legal system just can't handle this sort of thing.

Before long, administration officials would extend the battlefield to Chicago's O'Hare airport, where agents picked up Jose Padilla on May 8, 2002. The Muslim convert was arrested while returning home from Pakistan, where he had allegedly met with a top Qaeda operative and planned to set off a dirty bomb in the United States. He was named a material witness and appointed a lawyer. But prosecutors soon realized they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with any crime.

Doesn't that seem odd? The evidence cited today certainly sounds chilling.

To avoid releasing him, Bush decreed on June 9 that Padilla, too, was an enemy combatant. He was sent to a military brig in South Carolina. At first, administration officials saw no problems with Padilla's treatment. But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him indefinitely without counsel.

Again, why? If this guy is a huge danger and these people have all seen the evidence that makes that so, what is the problem? They're all signed on to the program, I assume. No, ACLU sissyboys in this bunch, right?

Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with a little office betting pool. These guys needed to blow off some steam. (Consider how much worse that could have been.) And old Ted would never advise the administration to do anything for purely political reasons. He just doesn't think that way.

But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants—including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.

I know I feel a lot safer. I just worry that Cheney didn't get the last word on that truck driver. He's a man who knows a terrorist when he sees one.






digby 6/01/2004 09:13:00 PM |

 
Turkey In The Straw

I like this article by Dana Milbank about Bush's tendency to make straw man arguments. The problem is that Junior isn't really making straw man arguments. He's spouting lies and half truths that were spoon fed to him by his staff in small bites that he can understand and remember. By saying that Bush has any awareness of the concept of a logical fallacy serves only to make him seem to have some sort of mental agility when, in fact, he is barely sentient. If Laura circled this article in red crayon for him this morning and he had a look at it between counting the box scores on his fingers and toes, I have no doubt that his response was "Ya' mean like a scarecrow?"


digby 6/01/2004 04:38:00 PM |

 
Sacred Cows

I have finally come around to the administration's way of thinking on this unlawful combatant thing. Here we have an American who was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs, but the only way we could get the information that he was trained to blow up apartment buildings and maybe set off dirty bombs was by denying him his right to counsel and holding him until he confessed to those potential crimes --- which means we can't use that "confession" in court. We simply could not take even the smallest chance that an apartment or dirty bomber might not tell all by allowing him due process. Surely, everyone can understand that.

That whole fifth amerndment thing was only put there because back in the olden days we had kings who would falsely imprison people for political reasons. Needless to say, that could never happen now. Great americans like John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney would never take advantage of the American people's fears by saying that they have captured a dangerous terrorist soldier who was trying to kill them unless it were true. And they do not make mistakes about things like that. They are good people. There is no reason to fear the misuse of government power against its citizens so let's take that off the table right now.

All of which makes me wonder how much better off we'd be if we didn't have to deal with those inconvenient legal rights and due process to begin with? I know that potentially blowing up an apartment building is a heinous act of terrorism, but suppose we arrested a member of a criminal gang who was planning to blow up the very same apartment building for the insurance money? That would just be considered plain old murder so we'd have to let the guy speak to a lawyer and face a judge. But, the result would be exactly the same. A bunch of innocent people would potentially be dead and we would not have been able to stop this heinous mass murderer because our stupid constitution forced the government to allow him due process. Not to mention that we couldn't have sufficiently leaned on him to extract a confession in the first place! I'm hard pressed to see how the families of the victims would see the distinction between a normal old "crime" and terrorism.

Why should any potential murderer or informant be allowed to use this excuse of "due process" simply because he hasn't been to Afghanistan? Why should innocent people ever be put at risk?

If there's one thing the Jose Padilla case is teaching us is that it's long past time we started calling all criminal suspects what they really are --- unlawful combatants. All criminals disrupt our way of life and hurt innocent people for their own gain. Is that not the very definition of terrorism?

The founders obviously just didn't comprehend what problems they would cause when they wrote the bill of rights. Of course, they didn't have crime and terrorism in those days to deal with, so they couldn't have known how restrictive their naive little document was going to be on future generations. I'm just glad we finally have a government that's willing to show some moxie for once and ignore these outdated sacred cows in our constitution. I would imagine they'd have the founders deep respect for doing so.





digby 6/01/2004 03:24:00 PM |

 
Omerta

You have to admire the loyalty among Republican hitmen. Even when confronted by a fellow traveller with irrefutable evidence of their pal's depraved thuggery, they simply refuse to acknowledge that it even happened. This is a rare thing. In fact, I think it happens only in the Republican Party and the mafia.

O'REILLY: Now are you buying into the -- this is just a hazing thing at Abu Ghraib?

COULTER: What, the media is hazing the American people by seeing how much we can take?

O'REILLY: Some of the right wing commentators say it's just hazing, what's the big deal? Are you buying into that?

COULTER: No, I don't think anyone is.

O'REILLY: No, they are. You know that. I'm not going to embarrass people but on the radio, talk radio you have right wing commentators say it's just hazing, what's the big deal?

COULTER: If I know what you're referring to, there were two hours and 59 minutes not saying that and at one point making fun of liberals for making fun of -- if you're talking about Rush, but Rush went on...

O'REILLY: ...program and he said it's not a big deal, it's just hazing.

COULTER: If you're talking about Rush, he definitely didn't say that.What other talk radio hosts say...

O'REILLY: I compete against him every day on the radio and I know what he says. He said many, many times and not only him that it wasn't a big deal.

COULTER: No, he didn't say that, but whatever -- no."

Ann, of course, has other ideas about what caused the torture:

I think the other point that no one is making about the abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation.

I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious.

And that makes a certain amount of sense coming from her. Ann probably believes that she is a normal woman rather than the shrill, shrieking succubus that she is. It's an understandable mistake.



digby 6/01/2004 11:44:00 AM |

 
Strictly Business

This must be one of those good news stories the media have overlooked.

Kidnappings Bleed Iraq of Doctors

For two months, someone has been kidnapping the best doctors in Iraq. Health officials and doctors estimate that as many as 100 surgeons, specialists and general physicians have been abducted from their homes and clinics since the beginning of April. Some were beaten and tortured. Most were released after the payment of between $20,000 and $200,000 in ransom.

[...]

The list of kidnapping victims and those who have fled the country is a who's who of Iraq's medical establishment. A pioneer in renal transplants. Saddam Hussein's former plastic surgeon. And Khalily, who was voted Best Arabic Doctor in 1998 by the Pan Arab Medical Union.

The top cataract surgeon at a leading eye hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Jawad Shakarchi, moved to London after being abducted from his garage in April.

"He was a genius," said a hospital manager, Amira Salman. "Now his students are doing his job."

Many of the doctors also taught at Baghdad University's College of Medicine. Officials there said a quarter of the school's surgeons have gone or have requested temporary leaves next year.

"A lot of doctors are planning to quit for a year, and we don't have enough teachers for the clinical studies," said Dr. Hassan Rubaye, deputy dean of the medical school.

Some schools are having to limit enrollment for advanced studies until they can be sure there will be enough doctors to teach.

The good news is that 14 clinics have fresh paint and 8 have new office chairs. The chairs were donated by Halliburton for only $22,000 apiece, which they said only represented their cost.

Mark Kleiman notes that the raid on Chalabi's headquarters was based in part on these charges and wonder whether it was a pure money making scheme or if they were trying to deliberatly create chaos, perhaps even on behalf of Iran.

I wouldn't put it past them but I think it was probably the former. Although they did not see eye to eye on the timetable for invasion, Chalabi and GOP tough guy Dick Armey surely see eye to eye on Armey's view of power --- to the victor shall go the spoils. Ahmad was just taking the taste he deserved. Doctors have money, therefore they are lucrative kidnapping victims. It's not personal. It's not even political. It's strictly business.





digby 6/01/2004 11:21:00 AM |

Monday, May 31, 2004

 
Show Everybody What You Got For Christmas, Junior

As I read this absurd story of the childlike preznit showing everybody Saddam's gun like he'd won first place in the spelling bee (fat chance) I was reminded of another illustration of the lil' guy's statesmanlike maturity, that I posted earlier

President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.

The Joint Chiefs' staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen's mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.

'N he has pitchers 'o the bad guyz in his desk, 'n evertime we killz one of 'em, he crossus out there faces, cuz there ded.



digby 5/31/2004 01:01:00 PM |

 
It's Nightime In America

From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

Amazing, isn't it? And people wonder why Kerry hasn't been surging in the polls as Junior systematically destroys the country. And, it has such a nice salutary effect of making Democrats feel less than passionate about their candidate, too. If it weren't for such a strong and unyielding ABB feeling on our side, I have no doubt that these ads would have worked as effectively to reduce Dem turn-out as on the undecided voters they are supposedly trying to convince. As it is, I think they are succeeding only to the extent that they make it uncomfortable for the politically timid to publicly support Kerry -- e.g. take an unequivocal stand at the water cooler and the supermarket. That is an effect that is fading fast as disillusionment with Junior grows.

Incumbent presidents often prefer to run on their records in office, juxtaposing upbeat messages with negative shots at their opponents, as Bill Clinton did in 1996.

Scott Reed, who ran Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign that year, said the Bush campaign has little choice but to deliver a constant stream of such negative charges. "With low poll numbers and a volatile situation in Iraq, Bush has more hope of tarnishing Kerry's image than promoting his own."

"The Bush campaign is faced with the hard, true fact that they have to keep their boot on his neck and define him on their terms," Reed said. That might risk alienating some moderate voters or depressing turnout, "but they don't have a choice," he said.

(I love it when GOP operatives actively embrace totalitarian imagery. Smells like ... bad apples.)

At this point, the only way that Bush can win is by destroying John Kerry. Even if one of the much discussed "external events" take place, I doubt bush will gain from it. As a result he is forced to run the most negative campaign in modern memory. Unfortunately for the country, if there's one thing the Republicans have perfected, it's negative campaigns and character assassination. The Bush family specializes in it. They are the Borgias of our time.

I know that some believe political advertising has little effect on people, but the studies they cite are based upon respondent's own perceptions. The truth is that people rarely admit to being influenced by ads of any kind, yet their buying habits and perceptions of products prove that they are.

The thing that will change all of this is a critical mass of people using TiVO type technology. Then TV advertising is going to be in a world of hurt. TV ads (political ads especially because they are almost all so bad) work mostly on a subliminal level. People rarely pay active attention after they've seen it the first time. The key is for people to hear and see the key memes often enough for it to be absorbed subconsciously. One thing the Bush campaign has going for it is the money to relentlessly hammer their ads home. This gives them a much greater chance of having their message seep into the collective unconscious over time.

On the other hand, their image of Kerry as a of liberal, French flip-flopper only works well as contrasted with the Omnipotent Steely-Eyed Rocket Man, an image that I'm afraid is no longer operative. They are going to switch gears, I think, although I have no idea what form of destructive lies and images they are going to haul out this time.

It is only June. Bush poll numbers are still plummeting. It is going to get uglier and uglier. It's the only hope they have. And, don't underestimate them. They are very good at just that kind of politics. They're never happier than when personal destruction is job one.






digby 5/31/2004 09:19:00 AM |

Sunday, May 30, 2004

 
The Buck? What Buck?

It really has fallen completely apart. The government, I mean. The CIA and the Pentagon are at each others throats, as we already knew. The State Department and the Pentagon, too. The office of Homeland Security is pissed at the Justice Department. Everybody hates everybody.

Now, according to Laura Rozen the White House is tacitly approving all this infighting as long as nobody directly criticizes Junior Codpiece:

Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice's meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.

That's how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don't say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don't know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won't hold it against him.)

Did Ken Lay go to Harvard Business school too?


digby 5/30/2004 10:02:00 AM |

 
Payback

A new book on the Bush dynasty is set for release just six weeks before November's knife-edge presidential election. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley will have an initial print run of 500,000, and the main source is believed to be Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil, President George W Bush's wayward brother.

Live by character assassination, die by character assassination. It looks like it's going to come out right after Junior makes his triumphant return to Ground Zero.




digby 5/30/2004 09:28:00 AM |

Saturday, May 29, 2004

 
All The News The GOP Sees Fit To Print

Daniel Okrent says the paper failed in its WMD coverage prior to the war. Everybody is at fault and it's wrong to single anybody out in particular and the way to put this behind them is to finally report the truth. Great.

Here's the problem. Like the Bush administration, they seem to think that "taking responsibility" means acting as if it was some vague and ephemeral "somebody" who committed the act and then going on as if nothing happened. These are children's ethics.

The only way journalists will understand that repeatedly publishing and hyping incorrect information (particularly disinformation) is unacceptable is if they will pay a price for doing so. That's what grown-ups expect when they screw up. And the only way the public can be assured that The New York Times cares about its credibility is if it holds the people who made these massive errors responsible.

The New York Times recently fired Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg because they plagiarized and misrepresented the truth. Presumably, the paper did this because its credibility was at stake. They simply could not countenance publishing work that was not truthful because then people would stop believing what they printed and wouldn't buy the paper.

Yet, they have repeatedly allowed themselves to be used by GOP Washington players to further their agenda over the last twelve years and as a result have printed wrong or misleading information hundreds of times. Sometimes, as with the Wen Ho Lee story, they investigated the problems, issued a mea culpa and then moved on. Other times, as with the endless Whitewater and independent counsel stories, they simply never addressed it. The hyped WMD stories are only the latest in a series of politically motivated disinformation campaigns.

And, the problem remains. After twelve years of blown story after blown story, it is time for the press (and not just The NY Times) to either declare that they are extensions of the Republican Party or expose their sources when they've shown themselves to be purposefully passing incorrect information (which Okrent endorses as proper journalistic ethics.)

Judith Miller undoubtedly believes she is being unfairly scapegoated, but she is not. Blair and Bragg were fired for offenses that didn't lead to any real consequences other than a lot of journalistic navel gazing. Yet Miller, more than anyone, was a willing tool for certain political friends and sources and used her prestige and position on the paper of record to further their agenda to take this country into a war. That is inexcusable. However, The New York Times has decided to excuse her and others like Patrick Tyler and Jill Abrahamson and is allowing them to keep their jobs.

Fine. If the paper wishes to hang its credibility on journalists like this then it obviously no longer cares about it. Therefore, the New York Times is collectively guilty and should be held responsible for the actions of these failed journalists.

The paper of record has officially chosen to became just another daily rag. RIP Gray Lady.







digby 5/29/2004 08:13:00 PM |

 
I don't think it's quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up.

Cuba Base Sent Its Interrogators to Iraqi Prison

Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.

The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning "enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. General Miller was sent to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering and detention operations there, a defense official said.

[...]

In interviews, two military intelligence soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib as part of the 205th Brigade described the unit from Guantánamo as having played a notable role in setting up the interrogation unit in Iraq, which they said was modeled closely after the one that General Miller put in place in Cuba.

"They were sent to Iraq to set up a Gitmo-style prison at Abu Ghraib," a military intelligence soldier said of the unit. None of the soldiers knew what military unit the group from Guantánamo had been drawn from, but one of them said he understood that it had also served earlier in a detention facility in Guantánamo.

It wasn't a bunch of bad apples. It was at the explicit instruction of General Geoffrey D Ripper, who sent in his best leg breakers to teach 'em how to get the job done.

And then, as reports of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib were coming to light the Bush administration decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to put in charge the same guy who had recommended and implemented the abuse and torture in the first place.

How long will it take for somebody to ask, considering his history at the prison, why in the world General Ripper was brought in after the scandal broke? I'm just asking. He is, after all, an obviously sadistic freak who is one of the causes of the greatest foreign policy PR disaster in American history.

I have a suggestion as to who might replace him:

The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.

Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.

In one of the general's first interviews since his dismissal, he told the Guardian: "I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally."

[...]

Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, Gen Baccus, 51, and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.

As for Guantanamo, I keep reading this refrain about prisoners with negligible or non-existent ties to al Qaeda or the Taliban having been "sold" for four or five thousand dollars by the Northern Alliance or others. They held the five Britons for more than two years as "unlawful combatants" and then the UK just set them free. How many other "terrorists" like that are there down in Guantanamo?

From the Frontline Documentary Son of Al-Qaeda"

What's your impression of Guantanamo? Do a lot of people belong there? What's your impression of the inmates?

They asked me always this question. I told them in 100 percent there is 80 percent of people that went to Afghanistan, like people that can't do anything. They've had enough. If you put them back in their countries they won't do anything. That's in 80 percent.

Among those 80 percent there is almost 60 in those 80, 60 that are people that haven't done anything. People that worked in a project in Pakistan, an old man that his son brought him, you know, just to sell him for $5,000. Drug dealers, people that didn't have anything to do with Al Qaeda were put there for no reason but because someone brought them there or someone thought of getting thousands for them, whoever captured them that they were Al Qaeda.

The rest, the 20 percent from the whole 100 percent, there's 10 percent of them that should be kept there and 10 percent of them if they go out and they catch up with Al Qaeda again they might go back to being Al Qaeda. But there's only like 10 percent of the people that are really dangerous, that should be there and the rest are people that don't have anything to do with it, don't even, don't even understand what they're doing here.

Just explain the bounty hunting, how people ended up there. That they paid a bounty.

At the very beginning, after Americans took over Afghanistan, they needed to show the American public that you know, we have got people. So there was normal Afghans would catch normal Arabs, normal small Arabs and go to the American base and tell them, you know what, we have a big commander. The American would say yes okay and they would just buy him.

If the Americans were paying large bounties, a large amount of money they would have ended up with a lot of innocent people there, don't you think?

Yes, a lot of innocent people. I told you the one story, I remember two, actually. One is the father that was brought by his own son. The son gave him a gun and took him up to an American base up there and took $5,000 for him. That's one story.

The second story is a drug user, a person that was sitting next to me, not worried about being in jail, not worried about what's going to happen to his family, not worried about what he's going to get. All he's worried about every time he asks the MPs to come around, asking them for a smoke, asking them for some hashish for you know, for marijuana, something like that, you know. Not even, he doesn't even know what he's doing here. Truly a drug addict, not Al Qaeda at all.

Yet, despite the obvious probability of corruption and error in capturing these "dangerous terrorists," the Geneva Conventions were openly discarded because we could not take a chance that these people could be set free on a technicality if they were allowed any kind of due process. Indeed, we couldn't even treat them humanely or eschew torture in interrogations. And when Iraq didn't turn out to be the promised cakewalk, and the damned Iraqis refused to cooperate sufficiently in their foreign occupation, we decided we couldn't take a chance on due process or humane treatment with them either.

And wherever the orders for endless incarceration and torture don't get followed the way they're supposed to, whether from the resistence of a decent, professional soldier or the inattention of a half baked reserve general, the go-to guy is General Geoffrey D. Ripper.





digby 5/29/2004 02:03:00 PM |

 
He Shoulda Known Better

Tristero reminds me of another reason I recoil at the very sight of Crusader Codpiece:

There was not only a new sound,' said Al Gore, speaking about the Beatles to the editor of Rolling Stone. "There was something else that was new with the Beatles. A new sensibility...that incredible gestalt they had." The great exception to all this is George W. Bush. He was at Yale from 1964 to 1968, and liked some of the Beatles first records. 'Then they got a bit weird,' he has said. 'I didn't like all that later stuff when they got strange.

He was too stoned on Jack and coke to unnerstand them big words. Jayzuz...

Tristero also mentions that Paul McCartney (finally) spoke out against the war.

You know, it might have helped just a little bit if Paul and others like him had shown a bit more guts a couple of years ago. I remember writing on this very blog, with a kind of naivete I haven't seen in myself for quite some time, that we could count on the artist community to step up.

Some did. Janeane Garrofolo, Sheryl Crow, the Dixie Chicks and the already politically active lefties like Ed Begley Jr and Ed Asner. The big names played it safe. Pretty much everybody else hemmed and hawed and looked the other way when they had a chance to actually make a difference.

And the last of my ideals shattered like an old 45 record on the asphalt of my dreams....



digby 5/29/2004 12:35:00 PM |

 
Friendly Fire

How depressingly predictable is this?.

Pat Tillman, the former National Football League safety who left the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, was ``probably'' killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army said today.

In a wonderful Memorial Day post, Julia has some important advice to those who might be tempted to lash out at the friends and family who might express some dismay about this --- shut the fuck up.

And she makes a very important point:

Pat Tillman's death seems to me to be tragic because he was willing to give up a great deal to do what he thought was the right thing. The main thing he put on the line was his life. This makes him one of many hundreds of young americans who gave up their lives to do what they believed to be the right thing.

I find it incredibly distasteful when supporters of the current administration try to shove him up on a pedestal because he could have been rich instead. I haven't found any other area of political discourse where you folks think that it's honorable and righteous and patriotic to consider anything over profits. Certainly none of your political heroes have.

If you think it's unamerican to bitch about Halliburton taking a record rakeoff and serving our soldiers rotted food, just leave Pat Tillman's name out of your mouth. He didn't die for your ideology. He died to show it up.

She's right. If there's one thing that Republicans as a rule and the administration in particular do not represent is people who give up their fortunes to fight for what they believe is right. Indeed, they believe that the only right thing is making a fortune.

As Julia says, they need to shut the fuck up about Pat Tillman.



digby 5/29/2004 11:18:00 AM |

 
Look At All That Venison!

Now, this is what I call a photo-op, dammit:

So if I were John Kerry I'd go buy a grandfathered assault rifle at a gun show, then head out to the woods and mow down a few deer with my semi-automatic firing. "Some in my party," Kerry intoned, "say that this is not a legitimate hunting weapon. To them I say: Look at all this venison." Then grill it up, and start talking about Bush's giveaways to the HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry, about how his determination to cram subsidies for coal, oil, and gas companies has prevented the development of alternative fuels that could revitalize the rural economy. Etc. Where there's a will to compromise on guns, there's a way to win.

I've always thought Matt should branch out into some humor writing. He often cracks me up, anyway.

His point is well taken. I think the gun thing is pretty much over as a national issue until we have another assassination or a huge rise in crime, when it will once again rear its head. Until then, the Dems would do well to pander their asses off. It would have the salutary effect of defanging the NRA, which is basically a patronage operation for the RNC. The fewer of those the better.




digby 5/29/2004 10:38:00 AM |

 
Ahmad, We Hardly Knew Ye

The fog is lifting a tiny bit on this story and certain outlines are becoming clearer.

First, despite Matt Yglesias's reasonable belief that the outside-the-government Neo's would listen to any "ix-nay on the Alabi-chay" signals they've been getting from the inside-the-government Neo's, many are following Ahmad off the cliff without hesitation. The exception seems to be The Weakly Standard, which (with the exception of Fred "Nascar" Barnes) is always a bit smarter than the rest of the crew.

So, up to the White House march the perennially wrong Richard Perle, James Woolsey and Newt Gingrich to convince Condi Rice that poor Ahmad is the victim of a smear campaign. Condi is non-committal as is every single neocon in the government who obviously know that Ahmad is a traitor on a particularly egregious scale. (Not to mention that they all may very well be sitting in the same hot seat within a very short period of time.)

Meanwhile, in Jane Meyer's new piece in the best investigative magazine in America, The New Yorker, she relates the inside story of the rise of Chalabi in Washington. He is a clever fellow:

After the fall of Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi—an educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East—capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time, Chalabi made “a deliberate decision to turn to the right,” having realized that conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against Saddam.[read: gullible fools-ed.]

As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”

Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. "He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.[Oh, Jesus - ed]

Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was “naked politics”: the I.N.C.’s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the Republicans. “Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,” Brooke said. “We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President.” The Republican leadership in Congress, he conceded, “didn’t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President.” Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, “were very receptive, right away.”

So basically, Chalabi charmed the starry-eyed neocons with delusions of a Mesopotamian Monticello and handed the craven, GOP powerfucks another weapon to use against Clinton. This guy completely understood the Modern Republican Party, you have to admit.

And then there is this simply mind-blowing story about The NY Times, which they somehow forgot to mention in their "editor's note":

In an unusual arrangement, two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper’s war coverage, hired Chalabi’s niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper’s office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi’s daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father’s efforts while she was working for the Times.

In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq.

Tyler told me that he hadn’t known that Khalil had helped Chalabi get into southern Iraq. He added that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn’t been a factor in the war when he hired her. “We were covering a war, not Chalabi,” he said. The Times dismissed Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached editors in New York. During the five months that Khalil was employed, Tyler published nine pieces that mentioned Chalabi. When asked about Khalil’s rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, “The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds.”

Out of bounds. Goodness gracious, I hope they suspend his milk money for at least a week. But, it begs the question. Was there any reporter on the Iraq story for The NY Times who wasn't in Chalabi's pocket?

Spoonfed journalists and spoonfed presidents alike all got what they wanted. (And the Chayefskys, Hellers and Kubricks of tomorrow have a veritable feast of material to draw from):

Francis Brooke said that nobody had ordered the I.N.C. to focus solely on W.M.D.s. “I’m a smart man,” he said. “I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy.”

[...]

As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign, and the I.N.C. was enlisted to promote the danger posed by Saddam’s regime. Brooke said, “I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, ‘Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on W.M.D., send it!’”

As Chalabi's little scam unravels, the marks are struggling to understand what's happened to them:

Jack Blum, a former lawyer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the Administration compromised its vision from the start, by relying on dubious partners such as Chalabi. He said, “We ruined what could have had some promise by dealing with all the wrong people.”

Hahaha. The "vision" was Chalabi's from the get-go. He just made the neocon fools think it was theirs. As his daughter said:

[her father’s problems could be traced to the fact that] “a foreigner, and an Arab, had beaten the Administration at their own game, in their own back yard.”

digby 5/29/2004 08:40:00 AM |

Friday, May 28, 2004

 
Ooops, He Did It Again

I am reliably informed that Dana Rohrabacher is once more blaming the Clinton administration for the Taliban and al Qaeda, this time on Crossfire. Looks like it's time to dig into the Dana files again:

Hello?

Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a "dual tract" policy with the Taliban.

I mean, this is getting ridiculous. Isn't there any "journalist" in Washington who has the cojones to call this asshole on his little "friendship" with the Taliban? What in Gawd's name is it going to take to get these people to actually, you know, do their jobs? There are pictures, ferchristsake!


Thanks Wendel for the heads up.


digby 5/28/2004 08:14:00 PM |

 
Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean That People Aren't Out To Get You

Rush told his listeners this week, "There's something going on. I mean, every day now somebody is out there trashing me and mentioning my name from someplace.These comments are two weeks old. Now they've even got Gore mouthing these comments

There's something going on, all right, hop-head. You're having to answer for the vomitous lies you've been spewing for the last 10 years. Nobody has to say anything bad about you. All they have to do is wrap your own words around your neck and let them hang you.

Guess what, Rush. You're becoming a liability.




digby 5/28/2004 03:03:00 PM |

 
What Was Your First Clue?

The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn't correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: "Governor, her name's not Alison, it's Melinda."

"I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week," Bush responded. "Your name IS still Melinda, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"You haven't changed it since last week?"

"No."

"OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up."

Hughes persisted, though. "Governor, you were calling her Alison."

"I wasn't calling HER Alison," he said, with apparent conviction. "I was calling YOU Alison."

At the time, I thought this was very funny. But now I'm not so sure. I keep wondering what has become of the "humble" foreign policy Bush talked about during the 2000 campaign. Yes, 9/11 has changed our president's view of the world and given him a new sense of mission, of "crusade" as he once said. Yet it has not altered just-war theory or the rule of law---which in the absence of personal humility, or any doubts about right action, seem particularly useful guideposts.

Ya think?

So, now we find out that the intellectually deficient inbred son has always had a messianic complex, has always believed he's omnipotent and has always insisted that those who surround him maintain his version of reality.

Remind you of anyone?




Another great catch from Kevin at Catch.com



digby 5/28/2004 11:13:00 AM |

 
Classic Charles Pierce:

Yesterday, prior to watching the Sox get vivisected by Oakland at Fenway last night, I was listening to The Radio Factor on my way home from work. Now, I've followed Bill O'Reilly's career since he was just a baby megalomaniac on Boston TV. It would not now surprise me in the least if, one night on TV, right there during The Memo, O'Reilly declared himself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

digby 5/28/2004 09:45:00 AM |

 
Such Total Losers, Dude

If you read this article by Michael Crowley in Slate, you'll soon realize that not only is Kerry a charisma deficient loser, but anyone he could possibly pick as his running mate is even worse.

What's really fun about it is that it contains every single GOP talking point ever devised to insult and demean Democrats. It will make you feel all kewl 'n stuff when you read it because then you'll know what to say to be above it all like the totally, like, smart dudes who write for, like, totally awesome online zines.




digby 5/28/2004 09:18:00 AM |

Thursday, May 27, 2004

 
What's a drunken man like, fool?

Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman. One draught above heat makes him a fool, the seconds mads him, and a third drowns him.


Ezra deconstructs Hitchy's somehow sad little defense of his great friend Ahmad so we don't have to.

I actually thought this was rather poignant:

At our long meeting, Chalabi impressed me for three reasons. The first was that he thought the overthrow of one of the world's foulest-ever despotisms could be accomplished. I knew enough by then to know that any Iraqi taking this position in public was risking his life and the lives of his family. I did not know Iraq very well but had visited the country several times in peace and war and met numerous Iraqis, and the second thing that impressed me was that, whenever I mentioned any name, Chalabi was able to make an exhaustive comment on him or her. (The third thing that impressed me was his astonishingly extensive knowledge of literary and political arcana, but that's irrelevant to our purposes here.)

Isn't that something. Ahmad greatly impressed him by "bravely" saying he thought the US could overthrow a third world dictator, he knew many names of many Iraqis and he dropped lots of political and literary references into the conversation. Imagine that. All those thing in one meeting with the Orwell worshipping, name dropping literary and political snob, Chris Hitchens. Why it was Kismet!

If I were a cynical type, I might just think that old Chris got himself conned.




digby 5/27/2004 06:32:00 PM |

 
Me, Me, Me

In Jack Beatty's scathing takedown of the neocon vision in The Atlantic, the sub-head reads:

In the wake of Iraq, the term "neo-conservative" may come to mean "dangerous innocence about world realities."

Now, I don't mean to toot my own horn, being the incredibly modest and unassuming sort that I am, but I simply must call to everyone's attention the fact that I have been calling the Wolfowitz claque the "starry-eyed neocons" since before I started this blog even, which was way back in oh, 2003.

You can look it up.





digby 5/27/2004 06:02:00 PM |

 
When You're Wrong, You're Wrong

Tristero's in fine form today. Read it all. He takes on the blogospheric navel gazing about whether the war was a good idea but badly executed or whether it was just a bad idea. He's not in the mood to take a bunch of idealistic hawks' discredited views seriously any longer.

I especially like this:

A "great" foreign policy, like a "great" Christianity, can never depend on evangelism. You simply must strive to embody greatness in your own country (and in your soul). You can't ram greatness down someone's throat because, by definition then, it can't be that great.

He seems think you can't create a democracy by invading a country, putting a gun to the people's heads and telling them to be free or else. How odd.

Why, that's like telling a would-be suitor that he can't make the girl love him by throwing her to the ground and screaming "you WILL love me!" in her face.

That always works. Women love it. What's he going on about?






digby 5/27/2004 05:03:00 PM |

 
Showing Up Daddy

In reading this extremely interesting article by Robert Parry in Consortiumnews.com about how Junior should sit down with his father and have a heart to heart with dear old Dad about the real story of Iran, Iraq and Israel (wow, what a story) I was reminded of how often I heard people say in 2000 that Bush would have his father as his closest advisor. I think that this was one thing that settled people's minds a bit about the obvious lack of qualifications and essential knowledge that Lil' George brought to the table. Just the other day, somebody said to me, "but his father must have warned him."

The fact is that Bush is such a callow little ass that he doesn't talk to his father. And he is such an arrogant piece of compost that he actually believes all the Karen Hughes propaganda that's been spewed these last few years about the size of his codpiece:

...the alleged Iranian intelligence trap could only have been sprung because key Bush advisers were inclined to believe the bogus information in the first place, since it fit their own agendas. In addition, Bush lacked the sophistication and the knowledge to bring adequate skepticism to what he was hearing, assuming that he wanted to. Though his father has that depth of understanding, the younger Bush says he hasn't sought out his father's counsel on Iraq. Nor is advice from his father's top confidants welcome.

When the elder Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft weighed in on Aug. 15, 2002, with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece warning against an invasion of Iraq, the younger Bush's NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly gave Scowcroft a tongue-lashing. He subsequently stayed out of the debate. "Neither Scowcroft nor Bush senior wanted to injure the son's self-confidence," wrote Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack.

When questioned about getting his father's advice, the younger George Bush sounds almost petulant. "I can't remember a moment where I said to myself, maybe he can help me make the decision," Bush told Woodward.
Bush said he couldn't remember any specifics about conversations he may have had with his father about the conflict. "I'm not trying to be evasive," Bush said. "I don't remember. I could ask him and see if he remembers something. But how do you ask a person, What does it feel like to send somebody in and them lose life? Remember, I've already done so, for starters, in Afghanistan. "

He's not only an incompetent president. He's an ungrateful, backstabbing son to the man for whom he owes EVERYTHING he ever got. Why anyone would want to have a beer with this supercilious little shit is beyond me.





digby 5/27/2004 03:20:00 PM |

 
Punchin' Judy

USA Today actually names names in this column about the Judith Miller debacle. The thesis of the piece, though, is that when The New York Times runs unskeptical articles on page one, it affects the political process more strongly than if another paper does it. In this case, when they breathlessly reported that Saddam was about to launch a nuclear missile (or close to it) it cowed many Democrats into thinking that the administration might just be right.

I suspect that this is true. And it is another example of liberals internalizing right wing cant. The "liberal" New York Times spent eight years trying to run the Democratic president out of town, both on its news pages and on the editorial pages. They assigned an openly hostile reporter to cover the Gore campaign and sent a fawning acolyte to report on Bush's every manly move. They have been fed all kinds of propaganda and lies by GOP political operatives for years and people knew this early on. Trudy Lieberman wrote an amazing expose in the Columbia Journalism Review of the Whitewater disinformation campaign by David Bossie's Citizens United all the way back in 1994:

Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United's newsletter, ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they've worked with -- "We don't particularly like to pinpoint people" -- but he does say, "We have worked closer with The New York Times than The Washington Times." Jeff Gerth, The New York Times's chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, "If Citizens United has some document that's relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else."

Uh huh. Sometimes I think the Washington Times exists solely to provide a phony kind of balance so that Democrats will find the the NY Times more credible just by the contrast. Besides, The Times is "liberal," right? Everybody knows that. They wouldn't peddle phony stories about Democrats.

From the USA Today article:

Martin Kaplan, dean of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, says that "for people who are serious and thoughtful, the Times is a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what's credible and believable. When it published those pieces, it sent signals which legitimized our going to war and calmed people's fears that we were rushing. It turns out that the Times was hoodwinked just like the rest of the country."

See? "Serious and thoughtful" people know that The Times is credible and believable. This in spite of the fact that they almost single handedly took down a presidency based upon proven false information provided by political operatives and then proceeded to believe many of the same people when they said that the United States was in mortal danger from Saddam Hussein.

But, they are the liberal New York Times! They can't possibly not have our liberal best interests at heart.

Luckily there are some "realists" left:

... for anyone to suggest that the Times reports led us to war is "absurd," says Stephanopoulos. The former Clinton administration communications chief says the newspaper's influence is sometimes exaggerated. "In this Internet age, there is so much information. ... No single newspaper has that much power or influence. People aren't waiting for a single newspaper to hit their doorstep at 6 a.m. to set the agenda."

Quite the little whore isn't he? Setting aside the fact that the New York Times most definitely sets the news agenda and that Democrats are more likely to believe something if it's in the Times, Stephanopoulos of all people knows what the New York Times is capable of unleashing. But, he's now in the full time business of self promotion so he's keeping his options open. Besides, This Weak is a miserable failure so he's probably looking for work. It wouldn't pay to tell the truth.




digby 5/27/2004 02:05:00 PM |

 
Who Fed The Boys?

If anybody wants to catch up the very latest in Chalabi intrigue, Laura Rozen at War and Piece has got it goin' on as usual.

It's creeping closer and closer to the inner circle. According to a UPI report Rozen cites from Tuesday, the FBI is looking at two former CPA officials who are now back in the states --- one still working for the pentagon and one snuggled safely in the arms of AEI.

Rozen says the two are reported to be Michael Rubin and Harold Rhode (although they have denied it.)

Just for kicks, here's what Right Web watch says about Rubin:

Michael Rubin is one of the youngest neoconservative figures to gain prominence within the George W. Bush administration. A Yale graduate whose dissertation focused on modern Iran, Rubin has traveled extensively in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan.

Rubin, an AEI scholar, was involved in several meetings and conferences officiated by Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode at AEI as part of the Bush transition team. One of the objectives of these meetings was to reshape the top leadership at the Pentagon, sidelining or removing those who were regarded as moderates. Out of these discussions came the idea for the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP).

Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff adviser for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Rubin was assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which was fold into the Northern Gulf Affairs Office after the unit was implicated in cooking intelligence information to justify the Iraq war and occupation.

In a National Review article, Rubin discusses sentiments expressed whenever Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Envoy Anthony Zinni would visit Israel.

“While working at Hebrew University this past year, I took the bus to campus each day. Whenever U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell or Special Envoy Anthony Zinni was dispatched to Israel, colleagues would urge me to stay home until after the suicide bombing. Middle Easterners understand the lesson those in the U.S. and Europe are still learning: When governments engage dictators, civilians suffer.” [Yeah. Europe doesn't know anything about that...ed.]

I hadn't heard of Harold Rhode, but waddaya know. It turns out that he is one of Michael Ledeen's intellectual houseboys. And he was involved in that bizarre little bit of deja vu-vu last summer when Ledeen tried to "open up the lines of communication with Iran" by getting in touch with our old friend Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian con artist who arranged the arms for hostages deal for Ollie and the boys.

Pentagon hard-liners pressing for change of government in Iran have held secret, unauthorised meetings in Paris with an arms dealer who was a main figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The officials who disclosed the secret meetings said the talks with Mr Ghorbanifar were not authorised by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting sensitive negotiations with Iran's Government.

A senior Administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorised talks by accident.

The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.

The immediate objective appeared to be to "antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them".

The official confirmed that the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, complained directly to the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, several days ago about Mr Feith conducting missions that went against US policy.

A spokesman for Mr Feith's Near East, South Asia and Special Plans office, which sources said played a key role in contacts with Mr Ghorbanifar contacts, ignored an emailed inquiry about the talks.

The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.

Mr Rhode recently acted as a liaison between Mr Feith's office, which drafted much of the Administration's post-Iraq planning, and Ahmed Chalabi, a former Iraqi exilegroomed for leadership by the Pentagon.

Mr Rhode is a protege of Michael Ledeen, who was a National Security Council consultant in the mid 1980s when he introduced Mr Ghorbanifar to Oliver North, a NSC aide, and others in the opening stages of the Iran-Contra affair.

Rozen says that many of her colleagues have expressed skepticism because these guys couldn't have had access to the kind of sensitive information that's being discussed.

That may be true, but it sure looks like they have easy access to those who do. Particularly Douglas Feith, who is clearly up to his neck in this thing. Ledeen probably is too. He's been playing the Iran angle for years.

Who duped who and how is still up for grabs, but it sure looks like Junior and the Retreads got taken to the cleaners. What a surprise. Them being grown-ups and all.

Update:

Thanks to commenter Vin Carreo, I was reminded of this article by josh Marshall from 2002 in which he dissected the entire "second tier" pentagon neocon crew, (which includes an amazing anecdote about Rhode) describing them as even more nutty than the first tier of Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest:

In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East -- Turkey, Iraq and Iran -- democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn't be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They'd be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.


As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon -- indeed most establishment foreign policy experts -- see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush's hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn't Baghdad, it's Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.






digby 5/27/2004 01:54:00 PM |

 
Consider The Source

Eric Boehlert has an interesting post up in Salon's War Room '04. Discussing the NY Times sorta culpa, he notes the similarities between the paper's Wen Ho Lee apology and the Judy Miller debacle and then asks when it will have to answer for its even more egregious Whitewater coverage. (Never, is my guess.)

But, he says something in passing that is very important:

Of course the most troubling similarity is that in both cases Republican informants, operating with a clear political agenda, took the paper-of-record for a joy ride as they tried first to tar President Clinton with a China spy scandal in the late '90s and then set out to launch an unprecedented U.S. preemptive U.S. war against Iraq.

I would say this is troubling indeed. I have had a number of altercations with journalists over my characterization of them being spoonfed by Republican liars but it is a fact. It has been going on for a long time now and it is unlikely to stop.

Alterman, Conason, Brock and others have written about the SCLM and the echo chamber effect and the Mighty Wurlitzer. The information is out there and available. But, I'm not sure what it's going to take to convince the press that when a GOP operative is offering you a juicy story that is just too good to be true that it probably is.

The list of wrong stories, innuendos, misdirection, disinformation and outright lies that have been printed and broadcast on behalf of the Republican party in the mainstream press is staggering. It runs from bullshit about haircuts to rape accusations to trashing the White House to Bank Fraud to Chinese espionage to phony assertions about nuclear bombs and pending terrorist attacks. It goes on and on and on, escalating exponentially, and yet the media keeps writing up these falsehoods as if these people haven't been proven to be liars time and time again.

Judith Miller is only the most obvious culprit because her false stories have been so blatently exposed. But, it happens every day in the major papers and networks. These journalists have cultivated "sources" who are giving them misinformation. They continue to rely on these "sources" even though they have led them astray time and time again. That these sources are also Republican operatives or GOP power players with an agenda doesn't seem to engender much skepticism, I believe, because these sources always have such an entertaining and interesting "story" to tell.

But, why should an journalist worry much about such things? Getting stories wrong time after time after time doesn't seem to have any impact on your career. Unless you are caught red handed plagiarizing or simply making things up out of whole cloth, if you've got the inside Washiington track you won't be fired no matter how badly you get things wrong. As Judy says:

I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate," Miller told me. "I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn't believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, 'What do you know at the time you are writing it?' We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully."

That seems to be good enough for the New York Times which is why they are constantly being played for stooges by the Republican party. And it's a good part of the reason why our politics are so fucked up.

In any normal organization Judith Miller would be gone. She committed journalistic malpractice of such a magnitude that people have died partially as a result of what she did. But instead, they are protecting her. After all, if she goes she'll take all of those "great sources" with her.






digby 5/27/2004 10:29:00 AM |

 
Sending A Message

I thought it would be nice to hear what our troops are listening to today as they toil in dangerous places, particularly the middle east. This is what they're hearing from home:

Algore, this whole speech, he went nuts. He's flailing around wildly there. Not just me, he's attacking everybody who has led the nation through 9/11, the war on terrorism, and he's making statements that are flat out lies in this speech. For example, the Geneva Conventions. I don't know how many of you know this, the Geneva Conventions do not protect terrorists. They protect soldiers who serve under a nation who wear uniforms who carry their weapons openly, and with the kind of threat that we're facing today with terrorist cells in the U.S. plotting an even bigger attack than 9/11. I mean, it says a lot about Gore. It says he's perverse, that he would be argue to go confer greater rights on those who seek to murder millions of Americans and calling for even tougher actions to seek them out and destroy them before they destroy us, and this is what is truly puzzling to me about the left, and this is what's disarming about these prison photos.

What really troubles me about these photos, above and beyond what's in them, is how they're being used to undermine our war effort. Now we have the former vice president, a man who was thisclose to becoming president of the United States, speak out in this speech. We haven't played you the bites, but he was flailing around on the Geneva Convention. He starts talking about conferring more rights on the kind of people who want to murder tens of thousands more Americans than he does seem interested in dealing with the people who want to commit those murders. He has succeeded in giving our adversaries in Europe and our enemies in the caves of Afghanistan and the allies of Iraq a message that they'll take to heart, and that is that we are not a united nation, that we do not have the will to win this war, and that we are weak and indecisive. That's the message that Gore sends today, and it's the wrong message, because it's a lie, and beyond that it is an outrage.

I don't think anything of this kind has ever been done by a former vice president during a war, but our adversaries and our enemies would be badly mistaken if they actually believe that Gore speaks for this nation, because he doesn't. I speak for more of this nation than Algore does, and I will say it on this program. Otherwise, why is he bothering to mention my name? He speaks for the radical fringe in his party who have become more and more the mainstream of his party. They are the Hate-America First radical left, and I hope the American people get to hear all of this speech. I hope it's played over and over again, for this is how low Gore and his crowd are willing to go to undermine the war effort and our troops and this president to promote themselves and their own agenda and get themselves back into power. Lest we forget, Algore and his boss, Bill Clinton, stood by while the enemy was plotting and planning to murder thousands of Americans.

They did nothing serious to stop bin Laden. They did nothing serious to fight terrorism. They degraded or military. They slashed our troop levels, undermined our intelligence services. Today calls for civil rights for terrorists in his speech while opposing the Patriot Act which helps us find and stop terrorist cells right here in our country, and Gore has said nothing about how he would fight this evil because he's obsessed with hatred not for the enemy but for George W. Bush -- and that's what identifies MoveOn.org. That's what identifies most of the fringe, radical left in this country. They actually think Bush is a greater threat to the people of this world and this country than any thug dictator, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong ll, anybody. They think Bush poses a greater threat, and as misguided as that is, this is what animates them. It is what motivates them and inspires them.

I'm sure glad the boys and girls in uniform are kept up to date on current affairs, aren't you? And I'm sure they heard Gore's entire speech so they could judge for themselves if what Rush says is true. Certainly on All Things Considered or Marketplace they'll be addressing the question of whether the Democrats caused 9/11 and support terrorism. It wouldn't be fair and balanced otherwise.

Rush might be causing just the teeniest, tiniest bit of confusion, though, when the troops in Iraq hear that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to people who aren't in uniform. But, hey , I'm sure Goober and Gomer know that Rush Limbaugh doesn't know what he's talking about. I can't imagine that hearing stuff like this would make some pissed off national guardsman think that his countrymen support his treating Iraqi people like animals.

Thanks to Seeing the Forest for the heads up. Read Dave's entire piece. It's great.




digby 5/27/2004 09:05:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

 
Each In His Own Way

Sometimes I wonder how a Democrat can ever win an election in this country because he's being pulled so hard from all directions that he's likely to go crazy from the pain.

Al Gore gave a great speech today. The wing nuts are all over it, of course. But, it's also an occasion for our side to criticize John Kerry for not giving the same speech. Sigh.

As I said in my earlier post, I think that Al Gore holds a unique position in American politics. He is the man who was elected president who was not allowed to take the office. It's a position that allows him to speak in ways that others, who are within the political system, cannot. It's not because they are cowardly but because they have to actually govern and our system requires that presidential candidates especially, have to run to represent all the people, not just our side.

Al Gore can speak effectively yet with no holds barred because he holds the moral authority of the presidency without actually having to govern. It gives power to his words, particularly abroad. But, it is because of his unique situation that people listen to what he says. Kerry, on the other hand, is trying to get getting elected in what is currently a close election and that takes some --- dare I say it --- nuance.

Firebreathing is a powerful thing. But, it is not in and of itself a good thing. We have to use our hearts and our heads and manange this election intelligently.

For what it's worth, Kerry is on the same page this week as Gore. I don't think this is an accident:

At the same moment Attorney General John Ashcroft was telling reporters in Washington that al-Qaida may be planning an attack on the United States, Sen. John Kerry was in Seattle, arguing that Ashcroft and his Bush administration colleagues have failed to do enough to prepare for such an attack.

Noting that Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that a terrorist attack in the United States is a question of "when, not if," Kerry asked why the administration hasn't moved more decisively to increase the number of cops on the street, to require inspections of cargo container ships, to increase security on trains and to protect nuclear power plants and other potentially vulnerable targets.

"I'm not going to stand in front of you as a potential president and say to you that you can protect every single place and harden every single target in the country -- all Americans know that," Kerry told a few thousand supporters who braved Seattle's drizzle to see the candidate speak on a public pier. "But what we can do is protect against catastrophe. What we can do is protect those places that are most logical places for the largest potential damage or danger. And that is the responsibility of a president."

While Kerry didn't specifically say -- as some of his supporters have -- that Ashcroft's warnings could be a politically motivated ploy to shore up Bush's free-falling approval ratings, he came awfully close to doing so. "We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity and the rhetoric of a campaign," Kerry said. "We deserve a president who makes America safer."

Kerry begins an 11-day "focus" on national security and foreign policy in Seattle Thursday with what aides are billing as a major speech on terrorism and the war on Iraq. Wednesday's speech -- in which Kerry said that Bush had repeatedly misled the country about Iraq -- may have been a preview of things to come.

Invoking his own experience in Vietnam, Kerry said that the ultimate test of a commander-in-chief in wartime comes when he must look the parents of a fallen soldier in the eye. At that moment, Kerry said the president must be able to say of any war: "I tried to do everything in my power to avoid it, but the threat was such that we had no choice." Bush, Kerry said, "failed -- and fails -- that test in Iraq."

digby 5/26/2004 07:40:00 PM |

 
Nothing We Do Can Ever Be Bad

Via Media Matters I read this from Ben Stein:

Media, Congress, get it straight: The U.S. is the main repository of decency on this Earth. The al-Qaida can never defeat us if we are united. But we can defeat ourselves if we begin to think we are the enemy and lose our confidence in our cause. There is no moral equivalency between us and the terrorists. We're the good guys, and if we lose because we didn't play hard enough, it's the end of everything good in our world.

Then, I believe, his head turned five revolutions on top of his shoulders and he projectile vomited several gallons of matzo ball soup.

Update: Mary Matalin was on Rush Limbaugh and said:

[Y]ou inspired me this morning. There's no reason that I have to do that. I'm -- and at least I think I do, but when I listen to you, I get all the information I need, and I -- and I -- it is -- I have a confidence in the President, in the policies, in the goals. I have -- I know his conviction. I know he's right and I know he has the leadership to do it. What I don't have, and what I can only get from you, is the cheerfulness of your confidence --

It's amazing how a fistfull of little blue babies can lift your spirits, Mary. But, I think you know that.

The question I will always have for James Carville is ... how can anything be good enough to make up for all the rest?






digby 5/26/2004 05:39:00 PM |

 
Support The Troops

Salon.com is offering free subscriptions to active duty personnel. Tell your friends and relatives in the service. (It has some good sexy stuff, too, if that's what it takes to get them interested. And I mean normal sexy stuff, not the freak show stuff that Limbaugh quite obviously spends way too much time perusing.)

And, there's a petition circulating to get Limbaugh off of American Forces radio. Personally, I'd rather see them challenged to give Howard Stern the follow-up slot since he's explicitly anti-Bush these days, but this is good, too.

Turning down the volume of the Mighty Wurlitzer is key to ending the reign of the Gingrichian Republicans. If there's one thing we can do on the internet its show what glass jaws these right wing tough guy pundits really have.



digby 5/26/2004 05:04:00 PM |

 
Layers Of Lies On Lies

Bush administration has used 27 rationales for war in Iraq, study says

Only 27?

If it seems that there have been quite a few rationales for going to war in Iraq, that’s because there have been quite a few – 27, in fact, all floated between Sept. 12, 2001, and Oct. 11, 2002, according to a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All but four of the rationales originated with the administration of President George W. Bush.

The study also finds that the Bush administration switched its focus from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein early on – only five months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

[...]

Largio mapped the road to war over three phases: Sept. 12, 2001, to December 2001; January 2002, from Bush’s State of the Union address, to April 2002; and Sept. 12, 2002, to Oct. 11, 2002, the period from Bush’s address to the United Nations to Congress’s approval of the resolution to use force in Iraq.

She drew from statements by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Policy Board member and long-time adviser Richard Perle; by U.S. senators Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, Trent Lott and John McCain; and from stories in the Congressional Record, the New York Times and The Associated Press. She logged 1,500 statements and stories.

The rationales Largio identified include everything from the five front-runners – war on terror, prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, lack of weapons inspections, removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Saddam Hussein is evil, to the also-rans – Sen. Joe Lieberman’s “because Saddam Hussein hates us,” Colin Powell’s “because it’s a violation of international law,” and Richard Perle’s “because we can make Iraq an example and gain favor within the Middle East.”

We knew this because unnamed Bush administration officials said in the fall of 2002 that they were throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. And, of course, there was the infamous George W. Corleone statement, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." Still it is very interesting to see all the various excuses and rationales in one place.

But, here's the interesting part:

Largio also discovered that it was the media that initiated discussions about Iraq, introducing ideas before the administration and congressional leaders did about the intentions of that country and its leader. The media also “brought the idea that Iraq may be connected to the 9-11 incident to the forefront, asking questions of the officials on the topic and printing articles about the possibility.”

The media “seemed to offer a lot of opinion and speculation, as there had been no formal indication that Iraq would be a target in the war on terror,” Largio wrote. Oddly, though, the media didn’t switch its focus to Iraq and Saddam until July of 2002.

Yet, “Overall, the media was in tune with the major arguments of the administration and Congress, but not with every detail that emerged from the official sources.”

So much has happened so quickly that we lose sight of what total war whores the media were in the lead up and initial execution of the invasion. The reason the media "initiated discussions" about Iraq was quite obviously because they were being spoonfed by the administration. And, as they admitted again just today, even SCLM outlets like the NY Times just can 't shake the habit of running like a herd of buffallo over the cliff whenever the Republicans let out a war whoop.


Here's the report's web site.





digby 5/26/2004 04:11:00 PM |

 
The Best Speech Of His Presidency


I urge all of you to read President Gore's speech if you didn't get to see him give it.

Al Gore has a unique position in the eyes of the world, especially in places where Machiavellian vote counting schemes are the norm rather than the exception. He is the shadow president, the man who should be at the helm instead of the man whom they have almost universally come to despise.

His words have particular meaning because they express to many the beliefs of the majority of Americans. He alone has the authority to speak for all of us who were cheated and have been forced to sit by as this usurper, through incompetence, misplaced machismo and --- most of all --- unbelievable hubris, has managed to destroy more than half a century's worth of international goodwill and over two centuries hard won belief by the American people in the rule of law.

The world is watching to see what we do in November. They are counting on us to save this country and them. Al Gore is the single best person to reassure the world that we are serious, we understand the problem and we are going to deal with it.

A few excerpts follow, but I urge you, again, to read the whole speech:

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances.

The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th.

There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation -- because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him.

[...]

President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. [Dick Cheney said, "This war may last the rest of our lives.] The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguable focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks.

[...]

Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America's reputation and America's strategic interests, but also to America's spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize - and to recognize quickly - that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush's belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, "a few bad apples."

But as today's shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today's New York Times reports that an Army survey of prisoner deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanisatan "show a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.'

Nor did these abuses spring from a few twisted minds at the lowest ranks of our military enlisted personnel. No, it came from twisted values and atrocious policies at the highest levels of our government. This was done in our name, by our leaders.

These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America - it is also an illusory goal in its own right.

[...]

A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for Al Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans.

Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to "bring it on."

[...]

They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics. It is that viciousness that led them to attack as unpatriotic, Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat during the Vietnam War.

The president episodically poses as a healer and "uniter". If he president really has any desire to play that role, then I call upon him to condemn Rush Limbaugh - perhaps his strongest political supporter - who said that the torture in Abu Ghraib was a "brilliant maneuver" and that the photos were "good old American pornography," and that the actions portrayed were simply those of "people having a good time and needing to blow off steam."

[...]

But what we do now, in reaction to Abu Ghraib will determine a great deal about who we are at the beginning of the 21st century. It is important to note that just as the abuses of the prisoners flowed directly from the policies of the Bush White House, those policies flowed not only from the instincts of the president and his advisors, but found support in shifting attitudes on the part of some in our country in response to the outrage and fear generated by the attack of September 11th.

The president exploited and fanned those fears, but some otherwise sensible and levelheaded Americans fed them as well. I remember reading genteel-sounding essays asking publicly whether or not the prohibitions against torture were any longer relevant or desirable. The same grotesque misunderstanding of what is really involved was responsible for the tone in the memo from the president's legal advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote on January 25, 2002, that 9/11 "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

[...]

The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration.

[...]

President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world - but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

[...]


In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president.

I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability...

So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands.

I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable - and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, "We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility."

I hope that this speech is covered heavily in the rest of the world. The situation is so dire that it is important that people realize that the duly elected president of the United States stands in stark contrast to the usurper who sits in the White House. These words could go a long way to calm some of the anger overseas by clearly and distinctly separating the hated president from the American people.




digby 5/26/2004 01:59:00 PM |

 
What A Novel Idea

The Bush administration is actually going to work with other nations to solve the global challenge of how to keep nuclear material away from terrorists and dictators. I know it's not quite as efficacious as breast beating about good 'n evul and invading foreign countries to show off our big swinging military prowess, but in a sane world it is the kind of thing one would have expected us to do immediately after 9/11 to great fanfare.

However, as it is a break from the preferred Republican methods of intimidation and "message sending," I'm sure it will be repudiated by Monsieur Delay and Senator Lott as a feminized, sissy-boy program.

The United States, Russia and the U.N. are working to round up nuclear material across the globe to keep it out of the hands of rogue states and militants trying to acquire anything from crude 'dirty bombs' to atomic weapons.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave details of the initiative in a speech on Wednesday to members of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Washington has earmarked more than $450 million for the plan, he said.

Abraham said the initiative addressed 'the threat posed by the entire spectrum of nuclear materials (and) reflects the realities of the 21st century that were so startlingly made clear on a September morning three years ago'.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said the plan was a crucial step in reducing the nuclear threat in light of the recent discovery of a global black market that supplied sensitive atomic technology to countries like Libya, North Korea and Iran.

'We live in an increasingly polarised world,' ElBaradei told reporters. 'If you put these...things together -- a polarised world, the proliferation of (nuclear) technology, the proliferation of terrorism -- you know we will need to adjust, augment, strengthen our defence.'

The initiative includes a plan to repatriate all unused Russian-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel by the end of next year and all spent nuclear fuel by 2010.

It really is a bold move on Bush's part because this kind of thing could actually, you know, solve a probem. And solving problems is not something the Bush administration lowers itself to do. Following their Leader's example, the GOP believes that solutions are for the cleaning crew (the Democrats) to handle after Republicans have worn themselves out raping and pillaging the treasury and the military to such an extent that the American people have to throw them out of office --- after which they will devote their rich, fat lives to criticizing the sexual mores of the dog loving feminazis and counting their ill gotten gains.

This is obviously yet another testament to how much the administration is in disarray. This kind of thing would never have happened if Preznit Cheney wasn't distracted by all the torture, error, lying and mismanagement folderol.





digby 5/26/2004 12:48:00 PM |

 
Close Your Deaf Ear

Via The Poorman, I'm glad to find that not all Republicans are simpleminded fools like their president. Here's one who's talking some sense for a change:

When people are running for cover to avoid contact with powerful, deadly chemicals, there will be little time to say "I told you so" because once a person is exposed to Sarin gas and other deadly gasses, death is imminent and fast. Maybe then, when it is too late, they will wish they had closed a deaf ear to political rhetoric, and united with the ones who really had their best interest uppermost in their minds.. . all along.

There is no way to satisfy liberals. President Bush was unfairly criticized for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks (he knew nothing about), and yet he is criticized for trying to ward off another devastating attack. What do these people want? It's obvious, the White House, the Senate and the House. Never mind the safety of the citizens. I would love to be a fly on the wall, at some of the private meetings of the Democrats. Boy, talk about an ear full!


No one paid attention to "Chicken Little" running around like a chicken with his head cut off, warning the sky was falling, either. Most people want to live in their own little world, and the world be void of problems. Since the threat of terrorist attacks are real, it's time to get out of the mode of fairytales and enter the real world.

The real world hates America, and we were hated long before President Bush came into office. And we'll be hated long after he leaves office. It does not matter to terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who is president in America. The destruction of America has been many years in the making and now it's coming to pass, unless the plan is foiled by logical minds. Senator John Kerry cannot stop terrorists who are determined to destroy America, whether he is president or not.

The only thing I haven't figured out is why the administration didn't send this person to Iraq to run its ministry of science and hang out with Sophie Ledeen and her Neocon Party Posse. She seems to have the required qualifications.

(BTW: Did Chicken Little really run around like a chicken with his head cut off? That seems so wrong.)

For an in-depth analysis, read all about it at The Poor Man.





digby 5/26/2004 10:21:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

 
Moral Relativism

Reading the words in my post below by that glorious symbol of rectituide and traditional American values,Trent Lott, made me think back to a time when the good senator was extremely upset by some bad behavior:

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said yesterday President Clinton has lost credibility, stature and the 'moral dimension' of his presidency, but he withheld judgment on whether the president should resign or be impeached and removed from office.

Lott said his mention months ago of censure as a possible alternative to impeachment was not meant as a suggested course of action and he now appeared cool to the idea. 'That was March. This is the first of September . . . and a lot has happened since then,' Lott said, referring to Clinton's acknowledgment he had an affair with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky after denying it for seven months.

Lott called the president's relationship with Lewinsky 'disgusting.' He added: 'I am very disappointed by what has been coming forward, that apparently these acts did occur in the White House and that he, in effect, lied about it.'

Lott, who has had little to say about Clinton since the president addressed the nation about the issue two weeks ago, volunteered his comments at the start of news conference shortly after the Senate returned from a month-long recess.

'As a husband and father, I am offended by the president's behavior,' Lott said. But as a senator and congressional leader, he added, he must judgment until independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr submits his report to Congress about potentially impeachable offenses, presumably later this month.

Lott's statement was in line with an earlier go-slow signal from House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), indicating a reluctance on the part of the top GOP leadership to appear overly partisan in pursuit of Clinton. It contrasted with a more aggressive approach by other Republican leaders such as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (Tex.), who is pushing for Clinton to resign.

Despite reserving judgment on Clinton's future, Lott left no doubt that he condemned the president's behavior in the strongest possible terms. He said Clinton had set a "tragic example . . . for the young people of this country," and added: "There is a moral dimension to the American presidency, and today that dimension, that power, has been lost in scandal and in deception."

Lott stressed that the scandal would not undermine unity of the government in the face of terrorist or other threats but questioned whether Clinton could provide the leadership to cope with them.

"Can he provide leadership without the necessary respect and with the problems that he has?" Lott asked. "That's what really matters: Will he, can he, provide leadership at a very critical time, internationally and domestically? And I guess only time will answer that question."

Unlike some other Republicans, Lott did not quarrel with Clinton's decision to go to Russia yesterday. "Obviously the timing is not ideal," he said. But "I do think that if he had canceled at this particular time . . . it would have made perhaps a bad situation even worse."

Lott also cautioned Clinton and the Democrats against confrontational tactics to divert attention from the scandal, saying the president has lost the credibility to blame Republicans if a government shutdown results from a standoff over spending bills for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

Can you believe how seriously they took that nonsense? It's almost quaint, isn't it? This was only 6 years ago. It's not ancient history.

Trent Lott and his friends were saying that the moral failing of the president, which consisted of 7 acts of consensual fellatio, was so great that it was questionable whether he could lead the country in the event of a crisis. It now appears that if Clinton had instead tortured or killed an innocent person he would have been in the clear.

What do you suppose Jesus would think of that, Trent?







digby 5/25/2004 10:46:00 PM |

 
Why'd They Bother?

So, the New York Times' faceless editors fall on their swords and accept the blame for not properly questioning the disinformation that the neocon claque fed the country about the Saddam's arsenal of evil. They name no names but are contrite about the mistakes that were made in reporting that helped the president lead this country into an immoral and useless war.

How touching.

Yet, when you read the page in which they link to the actual articles in question, you find that with the exception of two articles in 2001 about the Atta Prague meeting, all the rest of the bogus reporting featured the work of one reporter, Judith Miller, which we all knew already.

Has any person anywhere lost his or her job yet because of this unbelievable series of lies, errors and political misjudgement we call Iraq? What, exactly, is it going to take?

Judith Miller is a neocon hack, not a reliable reporter. She should never have been trusted in this area because she partnered in a book with a known tin foil hat lunatic, Laurie Mylroie, on the subject which should have tipped everyone off that she had no journalistic integrity. I don't expect Republican stooges will pay the price for their crack pot schemes until the American people boot them out of office. But, the New York Times is supposed to be about credibility. Otherwise, they are just another boring piece of fishwrap.





digby 5/25/2004 09:59:00 PM |

 
The Stepford Soldiers

Some of my commenters have expressed surprise that Rush Limbaugh is broadcast to the troops via Armed Forces Radio Networks. In fact, this has been going on for many years and has been a long running bone of contention in the congress. Here's an article from Stars and Stripes in 2000:

One plank to the Democrats’ platform addresses programming on Armed Forces Radio Network radio broadcasts. According to the platform, "AFN has broadcast an overwhelming number of ultraconservative radio programs, such as Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Paul Harvey and news items with commentary from the extreme right-wing USA Radio Network with no programs supporting the Democratic Party as balance."

McQueen said his group has complained about the programming but was told by AFN that National Public Radio programs balance the broadcast.

Thomas Fina, executive director of Democrat Abroad in Alexandria, Va., said in a phone interview that this issue won’t be a big issue at the convention and will be overshadowed by other issues.

Jones agreed. "They won’t do anything about it," he said. "This is a crybaby tactic about Rush Limbaugh’s popularity because [the Democrats] don’t have any commentator as popular as Rush."

Another good argument for liberal radio, I'd say...

Here's the daytime protion of the AFRN radio schedule for May 2004:

0550 Marketplace Morning
0605 Dy Joy Browne
0705 Newswheel
0735 Sports Byline
0805 ESPN: The Herd with Colin Cowherd
0905 Rush Limbaugh
1005 Dr Laura
1048 Paul Harvey News & Comment
1105 Jim Rome Show
1205 Mon-Fri Clark Howard
1305 Newswheel
1405 NPR All Things Considered
1505 NPR All Things Considered
1530 Marketplace
1605 Newswheel
1630 Sports Byline
1705 Newswheel
1730 Mon Face The Nation
Tue ABC World News This Week
Wed This Week on ABC
Thu Field & Stream
Fri Travel Radio
1805 Newswheel
1830 Marketplace

Fair and balanced? You bet. Right wing bombthrowers, Rush, Dr. Laura and Paul Harvey in the morning --- and left-wing fire breathers, All Things Considered and Marketplace in the afternoon.

Our troops are getting the full complement of political and social views while they are away from home. Isn't that nice?

So, as we wonder why some of our troops may believe that it is acceptable behavior to act like a bunch of barbarians with no conscience, this is one place we should probably look. Here's an example of what the troops were hearing from back home one day this month:

LIMBAUGH: All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, "Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

Then, of course, you have Hopalong Codpiece telling the whole world just last night:

... terrorists know that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. And we must understand that as well.

The return of tyranny to Iraq would be an unprecedented terrorist victory and a cause for killers to rejoice. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more murders of the innocent around the world.

The rise of a free and self-governing Iraq will deny terrorists a base of operation, discredit their narrow ideology and give momentum to reformers across the region. This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power, and a victory for the security of America and the civilized world.

The troops in Iraq believe they are saving innocent Americans by fighting terrorists in Iraq. The Preznit told them so. It's hard to tell the terrorists apart from the non-terrorists over there. They don't talk English or anything. So, to be on the safe side we'd better play plenty rough. If they aren't terrorists they shouldn't look and talk like one.

It's pretty clear that the troops are getting the message from certain of their leaders and popular political pundits that they have permission to kick ass against "the enemy," the Iraqis. Just the other day, one of our most powerful Republicans said he thinks that prison is too good em:

"Frankly, to save some American troops' lives or a unit that could be in danger, I think you should get really rough with them," Lott said. "Some of those people should probably not be in prisons in the first place."

When asked about the photo showing a prisoner being threatened with a dog, Lott was unmoved. "Nothing wrong with holding a dog up there unless it ate him," Lott said. "(They just) scared him with the dog."

Lott was reminded that at least one prisoner had died at the hands of his captors after a beating. "This is not Sunday school," he said. "This is interrogation. This is rough stuff."

I wonder when it's going to occur to people that what President Bush is now saying is that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists?




(Thanks to Political Animal for the Lott link)

Update: From the great minds think alike files, Salon posted this story tonight on the same subject.

Melvin Russell, director of American Forces Radio and Television Services, insists that Limbaugh's controversial show is broadcast for only one reason -- it gains big ratings in the United States. "We look at the most popular shows broadcast here in the United States and try to mirror that. [Limbaugh] is the No. 1 talk show host in the States; there's no question about that. Because of that we provide him on our service."

[...]

And if ratings drive the station's programming choices, then why not carry Howard Stern, who draws nearly 8 million listeners a week and who in recent months has emerged as President Bush's most high-profile critic on radio, declaring a "jihad" against the "arrogant bastard" in the White House? Although Stern's often-bawdy show differs from Limbaugh's politically, it fits Russell's criterion of being popular. "Stern today is a mirror reflection of what Americans are listening to," says Athans. In fact, Stern's ratings surged this year after he began leveling his broadsides against the Bush administration. "I strategize more about my radio show than Bush does about the war in Iraq," Stern quipped last month.

"My answer [on Stern]," says Russell, "is we have determined that that show, because of the [sexual] content, was not appropriate for a network that has just one or two stations broadcasting to an audience that ranges from 1-year-olds up to 50-year-olds."

"Rush Limbaugh is appropriate?" says Franken. "Saying the troops at Abu Ghraib were just blowing off steam -- that's more appropriate than what Howard Stern says? It sounds to me like they're rationalizing their decision." Adds Athans: "That sounds like censorship. In one breath, in regard to Limbaugh, they say they don't censor what the military listens to, and in the next breath they say Howard Stern is not appropriate."

"We don't censor, we provide," answers Russell. "Our troops deserve the same information that's available to them in the U.S."

Other critics of the network wonder if it's proper for the Pentagon to broadcast Limbaugh when he's calling John Kerry a skirt chaser, labeling female activists Nazis and telling servicemen and -women "what's good for al-Qaida is good for the Democratic Party in this country today."

I think that a huge number of those in the military overseas would love to hear Howard Stern. If I were Howard, I'd start an on-air campaign to get included and I'd appeal to his fans in the military here in the states. There are millions.







digby 5/25/2004 09:24:00 AM |

Monday, May 24, 2004

 
Thank you, Ezra.

I was beginning to think I was going insane.

The fact that bad men might attend a wedding and, therefore, would present a nice fat target for heat seeking missiles logically should be mitigated by the fact that killing the other attendees --- innocent women and children who have nothin' to do with nothin' --- make the mission, shall we say, counterproductive to our stated goal of bringing freedom and democracy to the heathens.

I won't even bother to mention that as this war is an unprovoked war of aggression on our part, rightwing braying about "self-defense" is just a little bit, shall we say, inappropriate.


digby 5/24/2004 03:34:00 PM |

 
The R Word

This psychiatric report on the torture at Abu Ghraib is partly white wash and partly true, I think. But at least he brings up the big brown-skinned elephant in the room, which I think is long overdue:

Report details root of abuse:

At the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, "the worst human qualities and behaviors came to the fore" in an atmosphere of "danger, promiscuity and negativity" within a closed environment, wrote Nelson, a member of the Army's investigating team. He noted training lapses, as others have, but also said that soldiers' unfamiliarity with Islamic culture, their pervasive sense of danger and the indefinite nature of their tenure were factors that wore them down.

[...]

In highlighting psychological and cultural factors underlying the abuses, Nelson noted that soldiers sent to Iraq were immersed in Islamic culture for the first time and said "there is an association of Muslims with terrorism" that contributed to misperceptions, fear and "a devaluation of a people." He reported that one military police platoon leader was openly hostile to Iraqis, and that a police dog handler was 'disrespectful and racist' -- attributing to his dog a dislike of Iraqi "culture, smell, sound, skin tone (and) hair color."

Gosh, I wonder where they could have gotten these ideas? It's not like anybody was saying Iraq was the central front in the War on Terror or anything. And, it's not as if anybody ever said the War on Terror as nothing less than the battle between Good vs Evil. Where would Goober and Gomer get the idea that the government would sanction them torturing the Iraqi terrorist evildoers in retaliation for 9/11?

The good news is that they pipe in Rush Limbaugh daily so they should be straightened out on all these misconceptions really soon.


digby 5/24/2004 02:26:00 PM |

 
Movement Defectors

Matt Yglesias said that the tide will turn on the Bush debacle when a hard liner turns on him, not some sort of mushy "bipartisan" type like Chuck Hagel. Atrios doesn't think it's possible because the party has morphed into a Crusader Codpiece cult in the last three years.

I agree that it won't happen, but for different reasons. The "movement" is virtually defined by its take no prisoners stance. It's not about philosophy or ideology, although that's how it started out. It's about power. And until the power players like Tom Delay and Grover Norquist are purged from GOP there will be no challenging the party line by anyone who wants to keep their seats.

A case in point is Dick Armey, hardly a goodie-two shoes himself, who has made the mistake of crossing the Nazicans.

And in a symbolic obliteration of Armey's influence, DeLay took over a Web site Armey had used to promote his prized flat-tax proposal when he was in Congress. The URL -- www.freedom.gov -- remains the same. But now the site contains propaganda about the "Victory in Iraq."

Armey opposed the invasion. In August 2002, he met separately with Bush and Vice President Cheney in an attempt to talk them out of it. "I said, 'This has the potential to be an albatross at election time.' I was so desperate that I quoted Shakespeare instead of Jimmy Buffett," he said. "I don't know the exact quote. Something like, 'Our fears betray us,' or 'Our fears make cowards of us all.'"

While he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist organizations, Armey did not agree with the administration's assessment of a dire and imminent threat. He said he told Bush and Cheney that it was "against the character of our nation" to strike a country that had not attacked first. Liberating the Iraqi people was the more resonant argument, Armey said, because it was in keeping with American principles. But that, of course, was not the stated reason for the war; had it been, it's unlikely Americans would have supported the invasion.

Similarly, Armey said Congress probably would not have approved the Medicare bill had all relevant information been known before the vote last fall. Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, revealed after the vote that the Bush administration had threatened to fire him if he informed Congress of his true, higher cost estimate: not $400 billion but as much as $600 billion over 10 years.

If, by speaking out, Armey hopes to embolden his former colleagues to stand up to DeLay's bullying, it's not clear he will succeed. In interviews last week, several of the conservatives who voted against the Medicare bill were reluctant to say anything that might draw DeLay's wrath. And Armey's critiques do not sit well with others among his former Republican colleagues, some of whom view him as a hypocrite. "What did Armey do when he was in office to restrain the growth of government?" asked Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill. "He led the floor debate to create the Department of Homeland Security. I would say he contributed to the growth of government."

Unlike DeLay, Armey, who now demands simon-pure conservatism, voted for final passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush-backed education reform much reviled by many on the right as meddling by the federal government in state and local matters.

To his critics, Armey says that's precisely why he left his job as majority leader. He was having to make even more serious compromises on policy under a Republican president than he did under Clinton, and he no longer wanted to have to take party positions contrary to his philosophy.

The conservative revolution is bigger than George W. Bush. But, the presidency isn't and he's the incumbent so they are stuck with him. They'll do whatever it takes to keep the executive branch in Republican hands including administering a few knuckles de sandwiches to members who stray from the reservation. Since they have held power they have solidified the most important powerbase in Washington, K Street:

For two years, the assistant who answered Rove's phone was a woman who had previously worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist's and a top DeLay fundraiser. One Republican lobbyist, who asked not to be named because DeLay and Rove have the power to ruin his livelihood, said the way Rove's office worked was this: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."

If you don't play ball with Rove, DeLay and Norquist, you don't play.

Grover Norquist is probably the most influential Republican the country has never heard of and he is a true believer in power politics:

"...in the November 1992 American Spectator, he [Norquist] wrote an article titled "The Coming Clinton Dynasty," in which he admitted that "any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step back Leninist march, is a flawed one."

Instead, Norquist explained, the way a party ensures its perpetual dominance is by controlling the levers of power. In 1974, Watergate led to the election of 75 new Democrats in the House. In Norquist's view, "this liberal band of congressmen" was "willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power." Without the benefits of incumbency (bigger staffs, larger budgets, taxpayer-funded mail, pork, and the ability to "extort campaign contributions from industries"), Norquist argued, the Democrats could not have remained in office for the subsequent 18 years. Power perpetuates itself. The correctness of conservative ideas paled before the ruthless "minority ideological cabal" in Congress.

[...]

...these predictions illuminate Norquist's profound respect for the power of the state. (They also show how closely Norquist's politics track with the "paranoid style" described by the historian Richard Hofstadter.) Governments, if they are willing, can maintain themselves in power forever. This reverence for the state's nearly limitless power explains both Norquist's desire to dismantle the state as well as his insistence on using it for propagandistic ends, such as his Soviet-esque obsession with building monuments to the Great Leader (Ronald Reagan—including a campaign to replace Alexander Hamilton with Reagan on the $10 bill).

None of the above sounds that different from this (possibly apocryphal) quote:

"We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle."

If there is anyone left in the GOP (besides the five "moderates" in the Senate) who has even a shred of integrity or independent thought left, I'm unaware of them. When we are hurling insults about the pussy Democrats we might give that some thought. It's not like the other side is overrepresented with courageous, independent warriors for freedom. They are as whipped as whipped can be.









digby 5/24/2004 10:48:00 AM |

Sunday, May 23, 2004

 
Black Widows

The General blows the lid off the greatest threat to family values since Jermaine Jackson tried to hit Michael's high notes on the Motown 45th anniversary show --- "widow on widow" marriage. According to Dr Dobson, this is another in a long line of the horrors that await us at the bottom of that astroglide-drenched slope where the doggies and donkeys line up for dates. The General explains why:

You see, widow women are experienced women. They know what it's like to know a man in a biblical sense. They are also privy to the secret all married women share--sex with a man is never enjoyable. It's true. I've been told this by every woman with whom I've shared my passion--yes, I sinned often in my younger days, but I've asked for and received our Lord's forgiveness.

Widows who marry each other are making a statement. They're exposing the married woman's secret and telling the world that we're just not all that good when it comes to lovemaking. We need to prevent that from happening. Otherwise, we might as well store our essence in mason jars, because that'll be the only place left for us to put it.

Well said. I think we can see the result of this permissiveness in the strange behavior of the 9/11 widows. They have obviously strayed from the true path to salvation by questioning the actions of our Dear Leader, Reverend Codpiece. It's only a matter of time before they reject men altogether.

They must be stopped. Personally, I think the hindu method is a good one. Only instead of throwing themselves on the funeral pyre, they should submit to some good old-fashioned fratboy hazing and then have their frozen bodies photographed to raise funds for the Republican Party. That would be the moral thing to do.





digby 5/23/2004 01:45:00 PM |

 
A Competitive Process

I'm just looking over some stuff that I haven't had time to read thoroughly and I came across this item from last Friday's LA Times,

Officials Say Rumsfeld OKd Harsh Interrogation Methods:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary "nondoctrinal" questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon's Judge Advocate General's office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[...]

The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.

"You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. "It's a competitive process."

[...]


Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a "handful" of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.

I'm just wondering what that "handful of techniques" are. And the article isn't clear, but it sounds as if Rumsfeld also insisted that he approve particular instances of their use. If that's the case, you have to wonder how many cases of torture Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on.

That's the kind of evidence that war crimes trials are made of.



digby 5/23/2004 01:02:00 PM |

 
If You Believe In Fairies, Clap Your Hands!

Ezra Klein agrees with Matt Yglesias that Bush making a speech a week is not exactly an inpired way of pressing his new PR campaign called "Iraq-is-a-quagmire-instead-of-the-cakewalk-I -promised-but-I'm-resolutely-stupid-so-you-should-vote-for-me-anyway," because his speeches only make him look bad.

To me, his speeches have always been laughable --- not for the content, which is quite often very well done, if completely wrong --- but by the overblown and obviously coached delivery combined with the totally blank look in his eye. He's like a Japanese speaking actor playing a role in phonetic English. No matter how passionately he delivers the lines, the inflection and the rhythm are always off because he doesn't understand the language he's speaking.

But as much as I find his speeches to be ridiculous (the one where he evoked the words of Pericles is a particular side splitter) I always remind myself that the bobble-head pundits' favorite description of any speech he has ever delivered is "he hit it out of the park."

The mediatools have been hard on Junior these last couple of weeks. They are sure to feel uncomfortable about that and be overcome with the desire to give him a little love. So, don't be surprised if they blissfully gasp and squirm with heavy lidded Noonanesque pleasure at his masterful masculine prowess tomorrow night.

But, if they do, do not despair. They are mediawhores, after all, and there is so much juicy stuff, from dirty pictures to Iranian spies to Republican civil war going on, that they'll be easily distracted from their codpiece slobbering.

And it's always possible that the fact his face looks like he spent the night in a gutter (again) will make even Nooner see him less as a mythic cowboy and more like the inbred frat boy he really is.



What a fitting illustration of a world leader who has fallen flat on his face.

digby 5/23/2004 11:55:00 AM |

 
Swift and Decisive Action

Via Susan at Suburban Guerrilla I am vastly relieved to learn that when the Bush administration says its going to put an end to the problems in Iraqi prisons and elsewhere, they mean it:

Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

As Susan says, "a few new rules, problem solved!"




digby 5/23/2004 11:01:00 AM |

Saturday, May 22, 2004

 
America's Sweetheart

The chain of command was obvious to Liang, who came home in January after fulfilling her 22-month active-duty contract with the Reserves. MPs were directed by OGAs and military intelligence officers, she said. But orders were couched as repeated suggestions on how to 'break down' prisoners: '[Play] loud music, yell at them, scare them, give them cold showers and don't let them have towels or clothes,' Liang told NEWSWEEK. The OGAs would disappear only to return hours later for a new round of interrogation. 'He's still not talking,' Liang recalls an OGA saying to her. 'Do something more.' This was the drill, day and night.

The bad stuff happened after dusk, she said. While daylight brought a string of visitors --- medics, Red Cross officials, high-ranking officers --- the dogs came out at night. The second-shifters brought in DVD movies to watch on their computers. Liang said she saw an image on the laptop of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. ---one of those awaiting trial after investigators described him as one of the ringleaders in the alleged prisoner abuses. The photograph was of a snarling military dog held inches from a prone Iraqi prisoner's face. At the 4 a.m. shift change, she asked, 'Why dogs?'The prisoner had been handcuffed and scared with the dogs so he'd break, someone told her. It was common to arrive at work and see a prisoner standing on a box, naked, shivering and wearing a hood, she told NEWSWEEK. One morning she came in and saw blood on the walls, although nobody could explain exactly how it got there.

Pummeling and humiliating and photographing Iraqi prisoners, Liang said, was the product of vague guidance, poor discipline, frustration that came with open-ended deployment, and boredom run amok. "I think it was just out of curiosity and boredom and anger," she said. "You're there 12 hours a day, every day, and you're pissed off at everything going on around you. We were told we were going home in September. You want to take out your anger against other people in the unit, but you can't do that. So some people took it out on the prisoners. What they [the MPs] did was wrong, but not everyone realizes that everyone in there attacked the Coalition forces and tried to kill us."

Some abuse photographs lacked context, Liang told NEWSWEEK. Take the widely-published image of a prisoner with his arms pulled behind his back and handcuffed to a bed, women's underwear pulled over his head. He was called "S--tboy," for his habit of smearing excrement on himself and the walls. "People don't know what kind of people were put inside that cellblock," Liang said. "They were crazy people. 'S--tboy' would smear it all over himself. That was the reason he was handcuffed." Liang said he spit on her as she tried to feed him. The underwear? "Just to make a joke," she said, adding that she can't recall who was responsible for it.

Another "crazy" man, in his late 20s, was brought in for allegedly looting. His refusal to eat meant the MPs fed him intravenously. He would babble over and over again: "I refuse to eat! Saddam's going to come back and kill us!" The guards invented nicknames for prisoners based on movie and television characters, Liang said. There was "Gilligan," a tiny, dim guy. There was "The Claw," whose birth defect made one hand resemble a bird claw. There was "Froggy," a man with bulging Marty Feldman eyes. And there was "Mr. Clean," who bathed obsessively. (After Mr. Clean tried to kill a guard with a pistol someone had slipped into his cell, his nickname became "Trigger.")

[...]

"I'm not embarrassed," she said, "but I don't tell people that I'm with the 372nd [MP Company] because people are going to ask questions."

Well, as long as she's not embarrassed. That's all that matters. Because "people don't understand" that those guys like "shitboy" and the mentally ill looter who refused to eat because Saddam was coming to kill him were dangerous terrorists who deserved what they got.

I'm glad she's home now, nice and snug, going to college on the GI bill, looking forward to a long and happy life. Since she's both brainless and soulless, I'm sure she'll make a fine little Republican.






digby 5/22/2004 08:49:00 PM |

 
Was It Real?

Here's a very interesting article on the Berg murder. Forensic experts are skeptical.

So, apparently are intelligence experts:

Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it "very likely" that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi's alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg's death have fueled added speculation.

The story goes on to discuss the various oddities surounding the capture and the video including some I hadn't heard before.

I have a feeling that all the right wing hysteria about this story is going to prove extremely embarrassing to them before too long. There has been something wrong with it from the very beginning.






digby 5/22/2004 11:39:00 AM |

 
Freak Of Nature

The other day I wrote a post about the pathetic Republican psyche and described them as "a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band, so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50's."

It's true:

Remember the other day I told you nerds rule? Now, proof, from no less than the president of the United States, that they're also very influential. You don't believe me? Look where I'm standing!

[. . . ]

I just wish my old pals in high school could see me now: Neil the nerd, now Neil-the-invited-to-the-White-House nerd standing on the same hallowed ground as Fox super cool guys Wendell Goler, Jim Angle and James Rosen.

Take that football team captain. Take that all you cheerleaders who dismissed me as some freak of nature. Still a freak, but now a force of nature freak.

Just ask anyone. Just ask ... the president of the United States.

Geez. That's sad. The Frat Rat in chief would be the first guy in the room to give you an atomic wedgie, Neil.





digby 5/22/2004 10:44:00 AM |

 
Bay Of Goats

Josh and Matt are teasing out the insider take on Chalabi so we don't have to. They seem to agree that there probably isn't anything new but rather that a power shift within the Bush administration that has caused the anti-Chalabi faction to flex its long abused muscles.

Matt Says:

So we have really two possibilities here. One is that some piece of evidence came to light that changed the mind of Chalabi's backers inside the beltway. The other is that there was simply a shift in the correlation of forces inside the government -- no one changes their mind about Chalabi, it's just that the anti-Chalabi forces, formerly weak, became strong. Hence the new policy.

One good piece of evidence for scenario two is the behavior of the out-of-government friends of Ahmed -- David Frum and the AEI crowd. If an influential Chalabi-backer on the inside (call him, "Ronald Dumsfeld") had changed his mind, then you would think Dumsfeld would call his fellow-travelers in the media and make his case. That might not convince all -- or even most -- of the media Chalabistas, but it would surely convince some of them. Instead, all of the nongovernmental Chalabi-fans seem to still be Chalabi fans, indicating that all the anti-Chalabi stuff coming out of the government is coming from traditional anti-Chalabi sources.

That's assuming that there are any sane Chalabi backers in the first place. I think most of them are as blind about him as they are about everything else, so I doubt that they would believe there was anything wrong with their boy even if they saw him french kissing the Ayatollah Khomeni. The ties go way back and undergird the entire neocon movement and its traditional concern with Israeli affairs. After all their guru, Alfred Wohlstetter, is the one who introduced Chalabi to his bitch, Richard Perle:

Almost to a man, Washington's hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. "He's a rare find," says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. "He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West."

In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.

The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best," says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. "He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.

What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me.

Perle said just yesterday,

The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him."

"He has devoted his life to freeing his country," Perle added. "He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous."

I don't think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.





digby 5/22/2004 09:53:00 AM |

 
Good Samaritans

I had wondered about this passage in a May 5th NY Times article when I wrote an earlier post about the prisoner torture:

But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with "Joiner" would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.

In todays edition it comes up again:

Much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents. Records and statements show doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.

Two doctors recognized that a detainee's shoulder was hurt because he had his arms handcuffed over his head for what they said was "a long period." They gave him an injection of painkiller, and sent him to an outside hospital for what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder, but did not report any suspicions of abuse. One medic, Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, told investigators that he had found the detainee handcuffed in the same position on three occasions, despite instructing Specialist Graner to free the man.

"I feel I did the right thing when I told Graner to get the detainee uncuffed from the bed," Sergeant Layton told investigators.

Sergeant Layton also said he saw Specialist Graner hitting a metal baton against the leg wounds of a detainee who had been shot. He did not report that incident.

Sgt. Neil Wallin, another medic, recorded on Nov. 14: "Patient has blood down front of clothes and sandbag over head," noting three wounds requiring 13 stitches, above his eye, on his nose and on his chin.

Sergeant Wallin later told investigators that when he got to the prison: "I observed blood on the wall near a metal weld, which I believed to be the place where the detainee received his injury. I do not know how he was injured or if it was done by himself or another."

He also told investigators that he had seen male detainees forced to wear women's underwear and that he had seen a video in which a prisoner known to smear himself with his own feces repeatedly banged his head against the wall, "very hard."

Helga Margot Aldape-Moreno, a nurse, told investigators that in September she reported to the cell to tend to a prisoner having a panic attack, and that, opening the door, she saw naked Iraqis in a human pyramid, with sandbags over their heads. Military police officers were yelling at the detainees, she said.

Ms. Aldape-Moreno tended to the prisoner, she said, then left the room and did not report what she saw until the investigation began in January.

Not exactly a bunch of Albert Schweitzers, were they?

On the other hand, the beginning of the article is about Joseph Darby, a person who put his humanity above his job.







digby 5/22/2004 12:55:00 AM |

Friday, May 21, 2004

 
One Of The Most Sophisticated And Successful Intelligence Operations In History

Well now. This really is treason.

Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran

BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU

May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.

An administration official confirmed that "highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel."

The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.

Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he said.

He described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history."

"I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.

That this came from the DIA means that Feith is in {big} trouble, I think.

It makes his old law partners words to Salon last week (later retracted) even more interesting:

"Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another."

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

These neocons are even dumber than I realized.


Update: Either somebody didn't get his talking points, or a full fledged knife fight is breaking out in the Pentagon:

Thursday's raid appeared to be a final break between Mr Chalabi and his former US patrons.

But Gen Myers defended the INC, saying its military intelligence had been "useful and accurate" during the year-long occupation.

"The organisation that he is associated with has provided intelligence to our intelligence unit there in Baghdad that has saved soldiers' lives," he told a congressional committee.

Gen Myers' comments reflect the personal support that Mr Chalabi enjoys in some sections of the administration, particularly the Pentagon. However, this support has been overriden by the importance attached to the political process by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy to Iraq. To them, Mr Chalabi has come to be seen as an obstacle to UN plans to form a caretaker government to assume sovereignty.

digby 5/21/2004 10:10:00 PM |

 
The Right Stuff

Here's a wonderful post from &c. on John Kerry.

We are long overdue for some real analyses of Kerry's strengths and weaknesses. So far, he is just being caricatured by the Republicans as a slimy opportunist and by the Democrats as an overqualified stiff. (Is it 2000 again?)

I am thinking that the way to interpret that is that he has the personality of Gore with the political savvy of Clinton, which isn't a bad combo.The country might be ready for a little sober, programmatic seriousness after our little foray into rightwing fantasy. But, the Republicans aren't going to just sit back and allow him to clean up the mess they've made; they are going to do everything they can to destroy him. For that you need good instincts, good timing and the ability to play rough and bounce back.

And, the Democrats definitely need somebody with some healthy self-confidence. If he wins, he's going to need it.





digby 5/21/2004 08:44:00 PM |

 
Internalizing The Right


If you ever wanted to see an article that perfectly captures the fact that Democrats have internalized all the right wing propaganda of the last 20 years, you only have to look at this one By EJ Dionne.

Democratic Détente
The party's 20-year-old fights are -- well, 20 years old. Enough already:

For two decades, the Democratic party has been riven by sharp ideological arguments. Those debates were in some respects necessary and important. But it's obvious that many of those conflicts are irrelevant to our moment, and say far more about the past than the future. The road to nowhere is paved with rote disputes between center and left. Here are 10 tired and useless arguments that progressives ought to stop having, and 10 new ones that they should start making.

I wasn't aware that we were in a deep ideological struggle. I thought we mostly argued about tactics and strategy. But, lay it on me.

1)Big Government Versus Small Government.

What is the point of this argument? Progressives and Democrats clearly favor a rather large government when it comes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education spending, environmental rights, worker rights, civil rights, and consumer protection. There is nothing here that requires apologies. Progressives don't have to defend themselves against charges that they favor the government takeover of private business because they are proposing no such thing. And they have always defended individual liberty against government incursions. The big versus small government argument miscasts what's at stake. There is nothing wrong with favoring a strong and active government that operates within limits. You might even say that this is the American way.

No kidding. But, since when are Democrats arguing among ourselves about this? This frame is a bullshit tactic of the Right designed to make Democrats look like tax and spenders, regulators and gun appropriators. To the extent that we even engage in this discussion it's in response to the Right, not each other. Tell it to Grover, it's his rap.

2)Pro-Business Versus Anti-Business.

Since when have Democrats or liberals been anti-business? Didn't business flourish in the Clinton years -- and in the Kennedy and Johnson years? Democrats want business to prosper, and their actual policies when they held office have favored growth, prosperity, and entrepreneurship. They also want businesses not to cheat. Supporting capitalism means opposing fraud, guaranteeing investors honest information, opposing monopoly and oligopoly, and resisting measures that throw government's power on the side of the most powerful economic actors. Believing in the strength of the capitalist system means countering the idea that regulation destroys business.

Uh, yeah. But, which Democrats disagree with this? Are there really a bunch of them holding forth about their "anti-business" beliefs? I haven't kept up with the latest Internationale, but I don't imagine that there are many Democrats attending these days.

Tell this one to George W. Bush.

3. Populist Versus Mainstream.

Some Democrats think Al Gore went off the rails when he went "populist." What did Gore do? He attacked big oil companies, polluters, HMOs, and big insurance companies. Does anybody think he lost voters by doing this? Gore went up in the polls after his Democratic national convention speech that made these points. On many issues, the "mainstream" is populist. That's why John Edwards' warnings about "two Americas," one for the rich and one for the rest, struck such a chord during the 2004 primaries.

Dionne is right about this. But, it is a tactical not an ideological argument.

I would love to see the Democrats stop arguing about tactics and strategy, but this being politics and all, I think it may actually be part of the process. Why, even the lockstep GOP Borg do it sometimes.

4. New Middle Class Versus Old Working Class.

Democrats are supposed to face a choice between rallying working-class voters or appealing to voters in the new middle class. But they won't win elections unless they get votes from both constituencies. Gore did very well in the new middle class. He fell short among working-class voters, especially in rural areas and the South. George W. Bush appeals to rich business people and lower-middle-class Christian conservatives. Can't Democrats also walk and chew gum at the same time? Democrats need to hold the gains they have made in the professional classes on the issues of social tolerance. They also need to be more respectful toward religious people and more explicit about supporting economic policies that would create opportunities for voters with modest incomes who now vote Republican on cultural issues.

More tactical argument. But, in his explanation he pulls out the right wing (widely internalized) trope that Democrats are hostile to religion, which is not true. They are hostile to the religious Right because the religious Right is wielding its alleged superior morality like a club for partisan political gain. We have a right to fight that on those terms.

But, our political tradition is actually much more religious than the GOP's and our politicians are just as religious as theirs are. The problem is that our northern politicians do not speak "Evangelical" very naturally, which is, again, a tactical not an ideological problem.

As for being more explicit about promoting economic policies that would create opportunities among cultural conservatives -- well, what a good idea. How about being for national health care and school loans and child tax credits and job treaining programs and the minimum wage and...oh that's right. They already are. The cultural conservative don't listen because they have been persuaded that Democrats want to storm into their houses and confiscate their gun and their bible. You can try to argue that they'll get health care, but they just don't hear you.

Just once I'd like for somebody to come up with a REAL solution to that little problem. Droning on about our "Children and Adult learning and healthcare program initiative for college students and seniors" isn't going to do it.

5. Globalist Versus Protectionist.

Democrats are told that they either have to defend the new global economy or fall back on protectionism. It's a no-win choice. The global economy is not going to go away -- and it does create injustices. It also poses challenges to regulations in areas such as labor standards and the environment. Isn't the real issue whether it's possible to create a global New Deal under which the new economy is accepted as inevitable but under rules that make the playing field fair and protect the vulnerable? And don't the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs over the past few years and the flight of both manufacturing and professional jobs overseas suggest a need for new thinking about the impact of free trade and globalization?

Yes. Which is why it isn't an "old tired" argument at all. The world is changing. Dionne doesn't even begin to address the actual issue other than to suggest that both sides might have a point. But it has to be hashed out. It's important and it isn't a result of some sort of political gamesmanship or posturing. There isn't an easy solution.

6. Deficits Versus Balanced Budgets.

This is a real choice. The Bush administration decided to throw balanced budgets overboard. Why is it so hard for Democrats -- and liberals and moderates -- to argue both that the Bush approach is dangerous fiscal policy for the long term and that it threatens government's ability to solve problems in the short term? Where is the money to establish universal health insurance, to help state governments balance their budgets, or to stop tuition increases at public universities? And where will the money come from to pay for the retirement of the baby boomers?

Gosh EJ, I don't know. But, that doesn't sound like something we are arguing about. The last time the Democrats were in power we had a multi trillion dollar surplus.

He asks, "why is it so hard for Democrats to argue both that the Bush approach is dangerous fiscal policy for the long term and that it threatens government's ability to solve problems in the short term?"

It isn't, and they are. They all are. It's a huge issue. But, this is an argument that hinges on tax policy as Dionne well knows. And tax policy is a much stickier wicket for the Democrats because the Republicans have managed to convince a large number of Americans that we want to tax them to pay for cadillacs for terrorists and illegal aliens to get free health care. That was the whole point of the "balanced budget" Dem policy of the 90's, to prove --- again --- that we could be trusted. It might have even worked if Dionne and his ilk didn't help Rove with his talking points by continuing to state, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Democrats can't seem to decide if deficit spending is our official policy or whether we prefer an economy that's healthy and thriving. That is the GOP frame, not ours.

(There is, of course, an ongoing economic argument about deficits and balanced budgets but, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats haven't relegated science to the garbage disposal so they consider whether the country is better served, one way or the other, by certain fiscal policies at certain times. Let's hope actual Democratic policy makers never stop discussing economics in those terms because otherwise there will be nobody left in the country who doesn't view economics as their personal political playground.)

7. Strong on Defense Versus Weak on Defense.

Who, these days, is for a weak defense? The challenge to the Bush administration is whether its unilateral approach protects the United States and strengthens our standing in the world. It's tough, not weak, to insist that Americans will be better protected in a world that does not hate the only remaining superpower. It's tough, not weak, to defend a progressive internationalism that tries to create a more democratic world that will be less hostile to the United States. It's tough, not weak, to think through military commitments in advance and to tell the truth about the costs of these enterprises

.

I know. I just wish the Democratic Party would decide once and for all if it cares more about America or Osama bin laden. Personally, I wish we could persuade all these Democrats not to run on the "weak on Defense" platform of total surrender to our enemies. I don't think it's a winner.

Maybe at the convention we can get them to change their minds.

8. Interest-Group Dependent Versus Independent.

Why does no one talk about Republican special-interest groups -- the wealthy, big business, and Christian conservatives? Here again, Democrats are hopelessly defensive. There is nothing wrong with defending your own, especially when your side is supposed to stand up for the poor, the marginalized, and the minorities. And why are progressives so prone to battles among their own supporters based on race, gender, ethnicity, and interest? Solidarity, a word the left has long prized, is now the characteristic of a conservative movement in which gun owners, abortion opponents, and corporate executives manage to sit down together at the table of political brotherhood. Why should progressives be less than the sum of their parts?

Exactly. We are hopelessly defensive about this and we shouldn't be because there is nothing wrong with defending your own. And we wouldn't have to be so defensive if our damned racial, ethnic, gender and interest groups would just shut up.

Rush undoubtedly has some advice on how we might accomplish that, seeing as how he's been pushing this idea for 15 years.

9. Traditional Versus Permissive.

Who, pray tell, is really "permissive"? Most social liberals have kids, worry about porn on television and the Web, and aspire to a world in which children are raised in strong families. They also aspire to a tolerant world that honors religious liberty and opposes discrimination on the grounds of marital status or sexual preference. Most Americans combine a reverence for tradition with a respect for tolerance. Indeed, by all measures the United States is a more tolerant and open country than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.

I like to define this argument in more simple terms, "good" vs "evil."

At this point, Dionne seems genuinely confused. Does he really think that the Democratic Party is in the grips of this argument? That's the GOP vs Dem frame, not our own. (If it is, then we truly have internalized their central charge against us.) His argument seems to recognise this, so I don't know what he really means.

There is a genuine tension between "civil liberties" and "religious morality" (which has been going on for over 200 years and is not confined to the Democratic party) but I don't think that it will be solved by having Joe Lieberman and Larry Flynt make nice-nice.

Anyway, with the Republicans embracing the "tradition" argument with such phony fervor, while their big money owners make such huge profits on "permissiveness," my inclination is for the Democrats to kick back and wait for them to have their own little political Armageddon. That's an "ideological" smackdown worth watching.

10. Clinton Is the Solution Versus Clinton Is the Problem.

The Clinton obsession is dangerous to Democrats and to the country. Bill Clinton presided over a booming economy and governed effectively. At the same time, he got himself inveigled in a scandal (and made dubious last-minute pardons) that turned off millions of Americans who were not at all opposed to his politics. Why is it so difficult both to embrace the positive parts of Clinton's record and to criticize his foolishness? If Al Gore had figured out how to do that, he'd be president. Most Americans find this distinction an easy one to make.

I hear that this is some sort of parlor game in Washington but I don't think there is a Clinton obsession among Democrats out here in the rest of America. I think he's about as relevant as a Seinfeld re-run. Which is why any more criticism by elected officials of his "foolishness," particularly in light of the, you know, economic and international unravelling that has come since, is simple self flaggelation.

There is one group of Americans, however, who share this desire to keep Bill Clinton at the top of the political agenda. Republicans.


So there you have it. The "10 tired and useless arguments that progressives ought to stop having." I'm sure that the Mighty Wurlitzer is pleased as punch to see us finally admitting that they've been right about us all along.

We are not a perfect party, by any means. We have been very slow to recognise that the modern GOP is a "take no prisoners" (perhaps I should say, "torture prisoners for fun") kind of party. And, we have consistently underestimated the power of the Republican Noise machine on the political subconscious of ordinary Americans, even ourselves.

But no Democrats are actually arguing that we should be the party of permissive, anti-business, deficit-loving, protectionist, weak on defense, interest group dependent Clinton apologists.

The words sure do sound familiar, though, don't they?







digby 5/21/2004 05:17:00 PM |

 
Make Him An Offer He Can't Refuse

I have been remiss for not putting out a special plea to keep our blogospheric treasure, the Mighty Atrios, on line and ongoing.

He's my blogfather. I was a poster on his blog from early on and one whom he gently badgered for months into starting one of my own. I'm not the only one. The blogosphere is littered with Atrios's blogbastards.

He has the best nose for news in the blog business, bar none. I once wrote that he is the Beatles of blogging, riding the zeitgeist, leading us all in the right direction.
This election is the most important in my lifetime, perhaps since 1932. Blogs have a role to play and Atrios is the heart and soul of left blogosphere. We need him.







digby 5/21/2004 12:11:00 PM |

 
Stupid Blog Tricks

Thank you, Gary Farber, for telling me about this neat way to get older NY times articles free of charge.





digby 5/21/2004 12:03:00 PM |

Thursday, May 20, 2004

 
If

Here's what I hated more than anything after 9/11 --- the fact that everybody seemed to lose their frigging minds and turned into complete, blithering idiots. There's not a lot of grace under pressure in the old US of A, I'm afraid.

Do you remember the old Kipling poem, If?

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

[...]

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Remember that? Well, let's just say that the American body politic has a lot to learn about maturity. I'm reminded of this whenever I read something depressing and stupid that people said right after the attacks that has now come back to bite us.

In following this ongoing blogosphere discussion of Jonathan Alter's somewhat relative criticism of Bush, I came across a column of his from November 2001. Honestly, I'm wondering why people were so upset at Ann Coulter's call to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," when "liberal" guys like Alter were blithely writing amoral crap like this:

In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren’t talking at all.


COULDN’T WE AT LEAST subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn’t rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they’re hopelessly “Sept. 10”—living in a country that no longer exists.

[...]

Actually, the world hasn’t changed as much as we have. The Israelis have been wrestling for years with the morality of torture. Until 1999 an interrogation technique called “shaking” was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment. (To avoid lessening the potential impact on terrorists, I won’t specify exactly what kind.) Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for “moderate physical pressure” in what are called “ticking time bomb” cases, where extracting information is essential to saving hundreds of lives. The decision of when to apply it is left in the hands of law-enforcement officials.

[...]

Short of physical torture, there’s always sodium pentothal (“truth serum”). The FBI is eager to try it, and deserves the chance. Unfortunately, truth serum, first used on spies in World War II, makes suspects gabby but not necessarily truthful. The same goes for even the harshest torture. When the subject breaks, he often lies. Prisoners “have only one objective—to end the pain,” says retired Col. Kenneth Allard, who was trained in interrogation. “It’s a huge limitation.”

Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis. Then there’s painful Islamic justice, which has the added benefit of greater acceptance among Muslims.

We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

It's contrary to American values? How fucking touching after that precious little whine about "can't we at least play loud music in their ears or threaten their families?" Is forced sodomy with a glow stick contrary to American values if it doesn't actually, you know, take place here in the United States? Hey, nobody said this was going to be pretty.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

A pundit be not, you're much too wise

The four men who Alter contemplated sending to "the land of beheadings," by the way, were all innocent.


Update: A commenter informs me of this piece by Mark Ames, which makes this point and more.


digby 5/20/2004 11:46:00 PM |

 
Words Don't Do It?

COLLINS: In retrospect, do you believe that you erred in not coming forward, not just to the president and the Congress -- you've made very clear today that you regret not doing that -- but to the world community? Would it have made a difference if it had been the Pentagon itself that had disclosed the full extent of this abuse, whatever you knew, and what actions you were going to take?

RUMSFELD: I think in my statement I responded in full to your question. The -- I would characterize what was done in the Central Command by way of swift, corrective action as being just that -- swift, corrective action.

And second, the -- I don't know quite how to respond to your question. The Department of Defense announced that their abuse was being charged, there were criminal investigations under way. No one had seen the photographs.

They were part of a criminal investigation. And they were in that Central Command -- I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them. And they were part of that investigative process.

It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane -- all of which is true -- that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it and you cannot help but be outraged.

He's a lying bastard. Here are the words and they convey extremely well what kind of sick, sadistic shit was going on in that prison. One after another they tell the same disgusting story over and over again.

He knew very well was going on. At best, he didn't give a damn. At worst, he ordered it.

Here are more awful pictures.




digby 5/20/2004 10:53:00 PM |

 
Forever And Ever Ahmad

Yeah, right. Nobody knows nothing. Rummy says the press should talk to "the Iraqis," because he has no idea what's going on with his erstwhile good friend Chalabi.

There's no need to reiterate everything that's wrong with that crook Ahmad, but it should be remembered that Cheney himself approved Rummy's plan to airlift Chalabi into the country a year ago, after Bush had explictly promised Tony Blair that it would not happen. As ye sow and all that crap...

It's sad that Rummy's lost touch with the fortunes of his former friend because he was once one of his strongest supporters. Those were the days.

I've read the various theories about what is really going on with this, and I have no opinion other than that the official explanation seems fairly believable to me. Not that Chalabi has a history of bank fraud or anything like that, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that he might have been taking just a little taste for himself after all the years of dining on bad hors d'ouvres in Georgetown salons for the good of the cause:

For several months, U.S. officials have been investigating people affiliated with the INC for possible ties to a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency that took place from Oct. 15 last year to Jan. 15, according to a U.S. occupation authority official familiar with the case. The official said the raids were partly related to that investigation.

At the center of the inquiry is Nouri, whom Chalabi picked as the top anti-corruption official in the new Iraqi Finance Ministry. Chalabi heads the Governing Council's finance committee, and has major influence in its staffing and operation.

When auditors early this year began counting the old Iraqi dinars brought in and the new Iraqi dinars given out in return, they discovered a shortfall of more than $22 million. Nouri, a German national, was arrested in April and faces 17 charges including extortion, fraud, embezzlement, theft of government property and abuse of authority. He is being held in a maximum security facility, according to three sources close to the investigation.

In recent weeks, several other Finance Ministry officials have been arrested as part of the investigation. A U.S. official familiar with the case said, "We are cracking down on corruption regardless of names involved."

I won't be surprised if there is more to it. Why, there might even be more embezzlement involved:

BLITZER: They found hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. $100 bills. They found other money. How much money do you suspect is still available to finance this insurgency?

CHALABI: There are hundreds of millions of dollars still unaccounted for from Saddam's loot that he took from the Central Bank of Iraq. He looted the Central Bank. I have the records. He took $920 million in U.S. dollars, cash $100 bills, and he took $90 million euro from -- that's about $100 million now from the Central Bank of Iraq on the 19th of March. He sent a letter signed by him ordering the Central Bank government to give the money to his son from the account of the presidency.

This may be the largest cash withdrawal in history. He took all of this money, put it -- it was already packed in crates of $4 million each, and it took three trucks to load the money in, and he took it. Most of that money is unaccounted for.

According to this post by The Angry Bear, Chalabi says he doesn't need any more money.

Uhm Hmm. Imagine that.

Update: On the other hand ---

Senior U.S. officials told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly-classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.

The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." The evidence is said to be "rock solid."

Sources have told Stahl a high-level investigation is underway into who in the U.S. government gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place.

There is only one degree of separation between Chalabi and the deputy secretary of defense.






digby 5/20/2004 09:07:00 PM |

 
Loosen Your Corsets, Girls

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi lashed out at President Bush on Thursday, saying his Iraq policies show incompetence and the only conclusion to draw is that "the emperor has no clothes.''

"I believe that the president's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience," the California Democrat told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Oh, oh... I think I'm going to faint. This is such... it's such... oh, I have to sit down...

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said the comments "represent a grotesque political attack. They're simply outrageous and the American people will reject that type of blame America first. ... American troops are bravely fighting the terrorist enemy and it is the terrorists who are responsible for the violence, not the president.''

Oh Edward, Edward...please make them stop the horrible hatred...

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie issued the following statement today in response to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's statement that 'Bush is an incompetent leader,' that the President has 'no judgment, no experience and no knowledge' and that he has the deaths of thousands of soldiers 'on his shoulders.'

"To angry Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy, terrorists and militia aren't responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers, their commander-in-chief is. And our servicemen and women, in putting torture chambers 'under U.S. management,' are no different than a regime that systematically tortured, raped and killed its own people. The San Francisco/Boston Democrats led by John Kerry have now adopted Blame America First as their official policy. "

Oh my heavens ... Blame America First! Does anyone have any burning feathers? I think I'm going blind...

Have mercy. Stop these San Francisco liberals from saying that our brave leader is incompetent. It's unbearable to listen to!

This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts... Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.

Dear God. Make them stop!

President Bush's mantra of "stay the course" rings increasingly hollow in the face of abrupt policy reversals that reek of desperation. First the U.S. kept Baathists out of government; now it is inviting them back in. First it dissolved the Iraqi army; now it is re-creating it. First it sidelined the United Nations; now it is counting on the U.N. to form a new government.

Jeeves, my laudenum, poste haste. These Democrats are so evil, so cruel. I can listen no more...

I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it. It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I'm enraged by it, actually.

"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!"





digby 5/20/2004 01:42:00 PM |

 
Chutzpah Award Of The Millenium

Mickey Kaus says that Juan Cole is too "shrill" to be "completely reliable"

I knew there was something about Professor Cole that was shallow and partisan. Perhaps if he spent more time deconstructing the meaning of Ahmad Chalabis hair or skreeching hysterically over Paul Wolfowitz's eyebrows, I might be persuaded to take him seriously.








digby 5/20/2004 12:12:00 PM |

 
Sacrifice This

I'm not a McCain worshipper. He's way too right wing for me and I wouldn't vote for him (unless it was between him and any other Republican.) But like many people, I can't help liking the guy and it's mostly because he seems to be completely unafraid of the GOP bullyboys. But then, he's been tortured at the hands of tough guys that make the likes of Lil' Tommy "isn't that French?" DeLay look like a 6 week old kitten by comparison.

So, it was especially stomach churning to see "Doughboy" Denny Hastert and his posse of Beavis, Butthead, Dilbert and Elmer Fudd laughing and snorting as he lectured McCain about the sacrifices of the men and women at Walter Reed.

As other House GOP members stood behind him laughing, Hastert, R-Illinois, then expressed doubt that McCain was indeed a Republican.

The exchange started when a reporter asked: "Can I combine a two issues, Iraq and taxes? I heard a speech from John McCain the other day..."

Hastert: "Who?"

Reporter: "John McCain."

Hastert: "Where's he from?"

Reporter: "He's a Republican from Arizona."

Hastert: "A Republican?"

Amid nervous laughter, the reporter continued with his question: "Anyway, his observation was never before when we've been at war have we been worrying about cutting taxes and his question was, 'Where's the sacrifice?' "

Hastert: "If you want to see the sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And, at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong."

Hastert, I believe, once sacrificed the two for one special at IHOP in favor of the RazzleDazzle Waffle Slam so he knows what he's talking about.

During Vietnam though, like his owner Dick Cheney, Denny had other priorities. After getting his Masters in Gym in 1967, it was not for the Denster to join either the service or the unwashed war protestors. Denny, a fervent supporter of the war, believed that the best way for him to serve was in the vital national security role of drivers ed teacher. The nation honors his sacrifice.

Meanwhile, glory hog McCain, was sharing a few frat boy pranks with the North Vietnamese:

That is your final answer?" one of his interrogators, nicknamed the "Cat," asked McCain on July 3, 1968 -- not coincidentally the very day McCain's father, John Sidney "Jack" McCain Jr., was named commander of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific.

"That is my final answer," McCain said.

"They taught you too well," said an irate Cat. "They taught you too well."

Added another interrogator, the "Rabbit": "Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you."

And it was. One of his captors, the one they called "Slopehead," told McCain, "You're a black criminal. You must confess your crimes."

McCain demurred. "Fuck you," he said.

"Why do you treat your guards so disrespectfully?" Slopehead asked. "Because they treat me like an animal," McCain replied.

"When I said that," McCain wrote in U.S. News, "the guards, who were all in the room -- about 10 of them -- really laid into me. They bounced me from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching. After a few hours of that, ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes ... For the next four days, I was beaten every two or three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked."

On the third night, as McCain would later write in "Faith of My Fathers," he was beaten so badly he almost committed suicide before "confessing" his war crimes:

I lay in my own blood and waste, so tired and hurt that I could not move. The Prick [another captor] came in with two other guards, lifted me to my feet, and gave me the worst beating I had yet experienced ... Despairing of any relief from pain and further torture, and fearing the close reproach of my moment of dishonor, I tried to take my life. I doubt I really intended to kill myself. But I couldn't fight anymore, and I remember deciding that the last thing I could do to make them believe I was still resisting, that I wouldn't break, was to attempt suicide.

McCain took off his shirt. He turned over the waste bucket and stepped on it. He looped his shirt through a shutter. But before he could act, the Prick ran in and beat him up.

One day later, McCain signed a confession admitting to war crimes. He would remain a POW for almost five more years, until March 15, 1973. His injuries are still with him; he cannot raise his arms above his shoulders; he still has a slight limp.

If visiting Walter Reed doesn't sufficiently remind him of sacrifice maybe he could just try to comb his hair.

I make no excuses for McCain's racist nicknames, but I do cut him some slack for the hatred. It's probably what kept him alive. However, it must also be noted that unlike his immature GOP brethren, he was man enough to put the past behind him and he and John Kerry went on to engineer the rapprochement with Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Denny and the boys, still angry and nursing their wounds from 4th grade dodge ball, are today using young Americans as board pieces in their little game of "I am too a real man!" and it's destroying this country.





digby 5/20/2004 10:10:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

 
Losing Their Religion

Among other wonderful observations in a great post, Josh Marshall notices the Great Wingnut Meltdown and writes:

Let's be a little more clear about what's going on here. Having led the country perilously close to humiliation and defeat, the architects of the war want to shift the blame for what's happened to their opponents who either said the whole thing was a mistake in the first place or criticized the incompetence of its execution as it unfolded. They take the blame, the moral accountability, by 'wishing' for a bad result. That at least is Podhoretz's reasoning.

If ever there was an example of moral up-is-downism, this is it. And claiming that their political opponents -- liberal, in Podhoretz's usage here, is just a catch-all -- want defeat and humiliation for their country is certainly the most gutterish sort of slander there is.

There's something almost uncomfortable about watching the mix of desperation, panicked zeal and projection evidenced in Podhoretz's column. It's like the pornography of watching someone beg for his life or shift the blame onto someone else when they've been caught in the act -- with the added twist of spasms of aggression mixed in. But on a broader level, it's in character. Not for Podhoretz -- this isn't at all directed at him as a person -- but for the movement, the crew, he's part of and is trying to defend.

Smug or rabid. There is no in between.

This is the first time that the "conservative movement" has held the reins of power and they have not done well. Filled with hubris, dazzled by naive Leninist dorm room dreams, these people have proven that they are incapable of leading a great nation responsibly and competently. They are good at money politics, and they could win the next election --- but the "movement" is dead.

The New Left went through something like this back in the 70's. Luckily, we were only in our 20's at the time so it wasn't as ugly and depressing as watching a bunch of flaccid, middle aged adolescents lose their twisted idealism. This isn't natural.

I wonder if they'll be having the Conservative Prom this year or if they will they finally graduate. Let's hope they opt for maturity. It's long overdue.



digby 5/19/2004 09:27:00 PM |

 
Warrior Message

Blumenthal has an interesting update on General Aimee Semple McBoykin in tonight's Salon. I was aware that he was Cambones very own GI Joe, but I didn't know until now that he personally went to Cuba to tell Miller to Gitmo-ize the mud-people over in Eye-Rack.

Saving Gen. William 'Jerry' Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals, preaching that the United States was in a holy war as a 'Christian nation' battling 'Satan,' the furor was quickly calmed.

[...]

Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, in fact, he was at the center of the secret operation to "Gitmo-ize" Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo (known as "Gitmo") in Cuba, where he met with the commandant of Camp X-Ray, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, ordering him to extend his methods to the Iraq prison system, orders that had come from Rumsfeld. While Boykin weathered his public storm, he remained the operational officer overseeing Miller's new assignment.

[...]

Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with a small group known as the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto, "Warrior Message," summons "warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world ... God has given us the stewardship and accountability of FAITH as our strategy for this time to mobilize an exceedingly great army."

As the head of the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C., Boykin invited Southern Baptist ministers for prayer meetings that would be highlighted by demonstrations of Special Forces hand-to-hand combat and guided tours of the "Shoot House" and "Snake Room."

Boykin staged a traveling slide show in which he displayed pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein around the country. "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army," he preached. "Why do they hate us? The answer to that is because we're a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers." They "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus." It was the reportage of his remarks at one such revival in Oregon that made him a subject of brief controversy. But public relations handling rescued him so that he could pursue his job, including turning up the heat at Abu Ghraib.

So, they sent this crazy, fucked-up Christian crusader to whip the Muslim heathens into shape.

Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick must be laughing hysterically right now, wherever they are. It can't get any more absurd than this.

Can it?








digby 5/19/2004 09:23:00 PM |

 
American As Rotten Apple Pie

Following up the story I posted about yesterday, EditorandPublisher has this:

E&P today obtained from Reuters a report submitted to the company's senior editors in mid-January, less than two weeks after the journalists were detained, by Bureau Chief Andrew Marshall, who had interviewed the three staffers separately. The Reuters employees are Salem Ureibi, who has worked for the company since 1991, mainly as a cameraman; Ahmad Mohammad al-Badrani, who has worked with Reuters on a freelance basis since July 2003, shooting video; and Sattar Jabar al-Badrani, a driver.

Marshall observed in his report, 'It should be noted that the bulk of their mistreatment -- including their humiliating interrogations and the mental and physical torment of the first night which all agreed was the worst part of their ordeal -- occurred several hours AFTER I had informed the 82nd Airborne Division that they were Reuters staff. I have e-mail proof of this.'

Reuters also made available to E&P about two dozen pages of transcripts of Marshall's interviews with the three staffers on Jan. 8.

Here are excerpts from Marshall's report:

'When the soldiers approached them they were standing by their car, a blue Opel. Salem Uraiby shouted 'Reuters, Reuters, journalist, journalist.' At least one shot was fired into the ground close to them.

'They were thrown to the ground and soldiers placed guns to their heads. Their car was searched. Soldiers found their camera equipment and press badges and discovered no weapons of any kind. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs and they were thrown roughly into a Humvee where they lay on the floor. ...

'After half an hour to an hour they were transferred to a larger armored vehicle. Ahmad and Sattar (along with NBC stringer Ali who I have yet to formally interview) were thrown on the floor under the seats. ...

"Once they arrived at the U.S. base (this was FOB Volturno near Fallujah) they were kept in a holding area with around 40 other prisoners in a large room with several open windows. It was bitterly cold. They were given one blanket between two. All were interrogated separately at different times and the worst treatment they suffered was on the first night when for several hours (they believe it was from around midnight until dawn) all of them were put in a room together and subjected to hours of abuse.

"Bags were alternately placed on their heads and taken off again. Deafening music was played on loudspeakers directly into their ears and they were told to dance around the room. Sometimes when they were doing this, soldiers would shine very bright torches directly into their eyes and hit them with the torches. They were told to lie on the floor and wiggle their backsides in the air to the music. They were told to do repeated press ups and to repeatedly stand up from a crouching position and then return to the crouching position.

"Soldiers would move between them, whispering things in their ear. Ahmad and Sattar did not understand what was whispered. Salem says they whispered that they wanted to have sex with him and were saying "come on, just for two minutes."T hey also said he should bring his wife so they could have sex with her. ...

"Soldiers would whisper in their ears "One, two, three..." and then shout something loudly right beside their ear. All of this went on all night. ... Ahmad said he collapsed by morning. Sattar said he collapsed after Ahmad and began vomiting. ...

"When they were taken individually for interrogation, they were interrogated by two American soldiers and an Arab interpreter. All three shouted abuse at them. They were accused of shooting down the helicopter. Salem, Ahmad and Sattar all reported that for their first interrogation they were told to kneel on the floor with their feet raised off the floor and with their hands raised in the air.

"If they let their feet or hands drop they were slapped and shouted at. Ahmad said he was forced to insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He was also forced to lick and chew a shoe. For some of the interrogation tissue paper was placed in his mouth and he had difficulty breathing and speaking. Sattar too said he was forced to insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He was then told to insert this finger in his nose during questioning, still kneeling with his feet off the ground and his other arm in the air. The Arab interpreter told him he looked like an elephant. ...

"Ahmad and Sattar both said that they were given badges with the letter 'C' on it. They did not know what the badges meant but whenever they were being taken from one place to another in the base, if any soldier saw their badge they would stop to slap them or hurl abuse.

What was that inspiring saying I heard again?

Oh yes.

"I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help spread that freedom."

After 30 years under Saddam, I just don't know how much more "freedom" these poor bastards can take.

I think the saddest thing about all this is that once again we raised these people's hopes that we were coming to rescue them. That makes us even crueler than Saddam in some ways. Under him they didn't have any dreams. We, on the other hand, encouraged them to dream and then crushed them. Laughing in their faces while we did it.








digby 5/19/2004 05:17:00 PM |

 
Boys Crying Wolf

Atrios has a great post up today, featuring the long lost Mighty Mighty Reason Man, about Instapundit and his gang's early retreat to threats of force when things don't go their way.

Instapundit: (Via alicublog)
Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

Gosh, I don't know. But just as soon as I get over the whiplash, I'll give it some thought. After all, just over a year ago, when the media slobbered like a bunch of 2 dollar hookers over Dear Leader's codpiece on that aircraft carrier, they were being extremely patriotic and trustworthy. I don't know what the hell has happened to them. Maybe we should ask Eliot Abrams if Sy Hersh is the anti-Christ.

Atrios also quotes Newties former flak, and current editorial whore for the Washington Times, Tony Blankley, saying:

It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently — although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)

Isn't that sweet yet sad? It's heartbreaking ... On the other hand, blowjobs were also such threats to the country that we had to use the nuclear constitutional option of impeachment, so there doesn't seem to be much that isn't cause for putting the jackboot on the neck if that's what it takes to make America free. (Certainly, it's nothing that a little harmless forced sex couldn't cure, eh Tony?)

What's happening here is entirely predictable because modern Republicans are demented children. They have two modes --- smug and rabid. When things are going well for them politically, they are unbearably arrogant, shoving it in everyone's faces, ungraciously lording it over all concerned. When things go badly they instantly begin foaming at the mouth and escalate rapidly into a psychotic break.

The thing to remember is that their threats and tantrums are real but usually ineffective in the long run --- but they often have the unfortunate salutary effect of cowing the press, who are a bunch of prissy little sissies.

The Reason Man says:

It's as if I stood on a street corner screaming about the malevolence of the homeless, and then asked a homeless guy how long he thought he would survive if a large mob bent on hanging winos were to suddenly form in the vicinity.

How, then, can this be interpreted as anything other than "how long before the people I represent use their influence to forcibly 'balance' the news"?

It can't, and they know it. They use this intimidation technique all the time.

One perfect of example of this phenomenon is the Florida Recount. Underlying all the legal mumbo jumbo and the behind the scenes maneuvering, lay a palpable nervousness in the media. Their daily refrain was, "hurry, hurry, hurry --- the country is getting impatient," "so far, there are no tanks in the streets, so at least we can be grateful for that," even though polls showed that the people weren't particularly in a hurry and were too riveted to their televisions to contemplate revolution. But the Greenfields's and the Williams's and the Matthews's were constantly referring to some dark possibility of civil insurrection if things didn't wrap up quickly.

They weren't dreaming, they were just taking Republicans at their word. Bush's team was down there in Florida ginning up the emotion, hysterically accusing little old ladies of "diviiiiining the will of the voters," pounding down doors in mock riots, appearing on television shows and ranting delusionally about the Democrats stealing the election. (William Bennett on Capital Gang became so red-faced I thought he was having a heart attack.) The freepers sent in their goons to shout at the VP residence to "get out of Cheney's house!" Tom DeLay said quite openly that he would not allow Al Gore to take the presidency. Justice Scalia hinted darkly at civic upheaval if Bush didn't get his way.

The public, reasonably, were unimpressed. After all, the Republicans had been in high dudgeon over something or other for years. From haircuts to travel agents to Chinese espionage to Lincoln Bedroom to cattle futures to blowjobs and state troopers and wagging the dog, Republicans were always foaming at the mouth. What wasn't a threat to the republic with these people?

But, the press continued to respond as if each GOP meltdown means that there are going to be riots in the streets, apparently led by a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50's.

Whether it will work again is up for grabs. After suffering under more than three years of smarmy, unctuous GOP "success" even the media may have reached a point where they find it preferable to have these people raving from the sidelines. Their impotent threats of revolution are clearly far less harmful than their proven incompetence at governing.






digby 5/19/2004 11:07:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

 
Kenny Boy and Grandma Millie

Before I forget

Enron Corp. employees spoke of "stealing" up to $2 million a day from California during the 2000-01 energy crisis and suggested that their market-gaming ploys would be presented to top management, possibly including Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, according to documents released Monday.

The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash.

[...]

While it has long been established that Enron engaged in market-gaming tactics — two top traders have pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges for manipulating California's energy market and a third awaits trial — the 450 pages of recorded conversations provide another vivid look into the organization's exploitive subculture.

They also suggest that knowledge of alleged wrongdoing may have reached the level of Skilling, Enron's former chief executive, and Lay, the former chairman.

In a Sept. 14, 2000, conversation, an employee named "Sue" from Enron's governmental affairs operation checks in with a trader named "Bob" for information that could be used in an in-house presentation to corporate executives.

"This is the time of year when government affairs has to prove how valuable it is to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling," Sue said, according to the transcript.

The Snohomish utility identified Sue as Susan J. Mara, Enron's California director of regulatory affairs until December 2001, when she and thousands of others lost their jobs as the result of Enron's financial collapse.

In talking with Bob, whose identity couldn't immediately be learned, Mara touts Enron's success in delaying a lowering of energy price caps by state officials.

Then, still seeking helpful material for the planned executive presentation, she asks: "Do you know when you started overscheduling load and making buckets of money on that?"

Overscheduling load — a tactic that Enron traders famously dubbed "Fat Boy" — involved purposely overstating how much electricity would be needed in the future, creating the appearance of power shortages and leading to inflated prices.

Mara, who is now an energy consultant, said Monday that the recorded conversation came about as she gathered information for a budget presentation to be made to executives at corporate headquarters in Houston. "We had to show what our accomplishments were for the year," she said.

Mara said she didn't recall what the final presentation contained or which executives heard it. The presentation was not prepared expressly for Skilling and Lay, she said, even though her statement in the recorded conversation implied that they would hear it.

The trading tactics discussed on the recording weren't considered illegal or manipulative by Enron, Mara added.

[...]

Federal prosecutors in February brought a range of fraud charges against Skilling for his actions when he was at the helm at Enron, but none was related to trading in the California market. Lay has not been charged.

In a different conversation in the transcripts, Enron's West Coast trading chief, Timothy N. Belden, discusses the profitability of the company's strategies in California, particularly those executed by a trading desk led by Jeffrey S. Richter:

"Well he makes … between one and two [million] a day, which never shows up on any curve shift…. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million — "

At this point the other speaker interrupts, asking Belden to rephrase what he just said.

"OK," Belden says. "He, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day."

We were told by President Cheney that the problem was too many environmental regulations. They screwed Grandma Millie and then blamed it on Gray Davis.

Say what you will about Republican competence, but they are really good at screwing people over. I'd go so far as to say they're gifted.




digby 5/18/2004 09:19:00 PM |

 
The Hit Man

When Nixonites go bad.

This guy wrote the book. He will be reprising his role as GOP character assassin in a state near you over the next few months, you can bet on it.






digby 5/18/2004 08:51:00 PM |

 
Zell's Latest Spew:

The two times I think I have been most humiliated in my life was standing in a big room, naked as a jaybird with about fifty others and they were checking us out, now that was humiliating. It was humiliating showering with sixty others in a public shower. It didn't kill us did it? No one ever died from humiliation.

Gee Zell, did they also make you stick your finger in your ass and then taste it? Did they throw a towel over your head and then force you to jerk off in front of the cheerleading squad?

Man, high school was a lot tougher back in the 1800's than when I went to school...




digby 5/18/2004 07:30:00 PM |

 
Insufficient Dedication

That Political Animal (who's celebrating his 13th wedding anniversary today) writes about Wes Clark's interesting article in the Washington Monthly, which I have linked before:

Clark's point is a simple one: Neither Reagan nor any of the seven Cold War presidents before him ever attacked either the Soviet Union or one of its satellites directly. This wasn't because of insufficient dedication to anticommunism, but because it wouldn't have worked. In the end, they knew that democracy couldn't come at the point of a gun; it had to come from within, from the citizens of the countries themselves.

Is this right? To argue otherwise is to suggest that our Cold War strategy was also wrong. Perhaps we should have rolled our tanks across the Iron Curtain after World War II, when the Soviet Union was exhausted and weary. Or attacked China instead of accepting a truce in the Korean War. Or sent NATO troops into Hungary in 1956.

Of course not. Even if we had "won," we wouldn't have won. In the end, the patient strategy of military containment and cultural engagement was the right call, and it's the right call for the war on terror as well. Too bad George Bush doesn't seem to get this.

Too bad George Bush doesn't seem to get how to eat a pretzel without passing out either, but that's just who he is. The problem, of course, is the Republican intelligensia[sic] who wanted to play Risk with real soldiers.

The Neocons have always been wrong about everything. Remember, Paul Wolfowitz wanted to invade Russia after the Berlin Wall came down. They are, and always have been, nuttier than fruitcakes.




digby 5/18/2004 06:53:00 PM |

 
Bad Apples Stinking Up The Whole Country

Reuters Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq

By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Two of the three said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture.

All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse.

The soldiers told them they would be taken to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods.

The U.S. military, in a report issued before the Abu Ghraib abuse became public, said there was no evidence the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a letter received by Reuters Monday but dated March 5 that he was confident the investigation had been "thorough and objective" and its findings were sound.

The Pentagon has yet to respond to a request by Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger to review the military's findings about the incident in light of the scandal over the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

[...]

Schlesinger sent a letter to Sanchez on January 9 demanding an investigation into the treatment of the three Iraqis.

The U.S. army said it was investigating and requested further information. Reuters provided transcripts of initial interviews with the three following their release, and offered to make them available for interview by investigators.

A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January 28 and provided to Reuters, said "no specific incidents of abuse were found." It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed under oath and "none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or torture."

"The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not tortured," it said. The version received Monday used the phrase "sleep management" instead.

The U.S. military never interviewed the three for its investigation.

On February 3 Schlesinger wrote to Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying the investigation was "woefully inadequate" and should be reopened.

"The military's conclusion of its investigation without even interviewing the alleged victims, along with other inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the report, speaks volumes about the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking this issue," he wrote.

This was in Fallujah at some bullshit camp. It wasn't in a high level prison where they supposedly held the "worst of the worst."

It's now an official cover-up all the way to Sanchez at a minimum. The managing editor of one of the two biggest wire services in the world gives them transcripts of his employees' statements and offers them as witnesses all the way back in January. They say that nothing untoward happened. The managing editor of one of the two biggest wire services in the world then writes directly to the Pentagon and complains about the "investigation." This is after the Taguba investigation was underway. He hears nothing further. The managing editor for one of the two biggest wire services in the world then receives a letter on May 17th, dated March 5th from General Ricardo Sanchez saying that he is confident the investigation was sound.


For the first time, I think it may be worse for us to stay than leave. If this sick shit was so widespread it was happening in every detention camp in Iraq, we are lost.








digby 5/18/2004 05:45:00 PM |

 
And George W. Bush Is The Best President We've Ever Had, Too

Michelle Cottle in TNR observes the right wing meltdown, in particular the desperate assertions by the ladies of the Right, (Coulter, Nooner and Chavez) that the fault for Abu Ghraib lies with the "babes in uniform."

... I nonetheless feel a pang of sympathy for all those Bush fans who increasingly find themselves laboring to defend the indefensible (e.g., the continued employment of George "Slam Dunk" Tenet or Donald "Don't Show Me the Torture Pics" Rumsfeld). Whatever outrage-related stress I'm suffering, it's clearly negligible compared with the complete mental meltdown occurring on the right, particularly in regards to the torture of Iraqi internees at Abu Ghraib.

As photos (and maybe even video!) trickle out documenting the misdeeds of American soldiers, conservatives are scrambling to find an acceptable party to blame. A few, like George Will, have risen brilliantly to the occasion, offering the administration a tough-love critique. But most have treated the two most logical candidates--the Pentagon and the White House--as off-limits.

For them, the current unpleasantness must be somehow pinned on a reassuringly liberal villain. You can actually hear the gears whirring in their heads as they cycle through the usual suspects: Bill, Hillary, unions, tree-huggers, taxes, the French--surely some left-wing bogeyman can be found to take the heat off poor Rummy!

Fortunately, a trio of right-wing chicks--Linda Chavez, Peggy Noonan, and the perennially unbalanced Ann Coulter--have leaped into this breach, peddling the ideologically soothing notion that Abu Ghraib is the sad, but predictable, by-product of permitting women in the military.

[...]

Behind all the novel theories is this basic truth: The Bush administration never makes a mistake. Sure, American personnel in Iraq have been stretched dangerously thin thanks to a certain defense secretary's reluctance to call up more troops. It's also true that terrified, inexperienced reservists received virtually no training in preparation for sensitive postings. And military intelligence probably did 'request' that internees be softened up a bit to aid interrogations. But all of this was part of a brilliant plan that would surely have succeeded if not for some misguided lefty notion about gender equality. Which is why the most important task the Pentagon faces these next few months isn't upping our troop count, or investing the international community in Iraq's future, or even ferreting out who ordered the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. It's drumming every coarse, vulgar, uppity, sexually corrupting woman out of the military. And, if that doesn't work, we can always blame the gays.

Let's face it. The feminazis are clearly culpable. But, it's liberals in general who are at fault. They must be. They always are. And something should be done about it. Then, as Rush says, "we should keep just one around in a museum somewhere, so people can see what they looked like."

I know that most readers of this blog never watch Fox, and for good reason. But, it's kind of fun watching Fred Barnes's head explode after trying to resolve its internal contradictions. Give it 5 minutes. You'll enjoy yourself.







digby 5/18/2004 05:31:00 PM |

 
The End Of The Modern Era

Robin Wright is one cool customer. I've been reading her work for many years --- before she went to the Washington Post, she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, my daily paper. She regularly appears on The Newshour and is an acknowledged mid-east expert from whom I have never seen or read any trace of hysteria or even much emotion. She's a real journalist.

Her analysis today of how the Iraq war has changed everything in the region --- for the worse --- and how the consequences are much more serious than anything that's gone before in the region, brought me up short. This is not a writer who is given to hyperbole, yet she writes today:

Over the past quarter-century, I've covered the rage of the Islamic world, witnessing much of it up close, losing friends who became victims to its extremist wings and watching its furies swell. But I've never been scared until now.

The stakes in Iraq -- for which the Abu Ghraib prison has tragically become the metaphor -- are not just the future of a fragile oil-rich country or America's credibility in the world, even among close allies. The issues are not simply whether the Pentagon has systemic problems or whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon brass or even the Bush administration can survive The Pictures. And the costs are not merely the billions from the U.S. Treasury to foot the Iraq bills today or the danger that Mideast oil becomes a political weapon during tumultuous days down the road.

The stakes are instead how the final phase of the Modern Era plays out.

That 500-year period, marked by the age of exploration, the creation of nations and the Enlightenment that unleashed ideologies designed to empower the individual, faces its last great challenge in the 50 disparate countries that constitute the Islamic world -- ruled by the last bloc of authoritarian monarchs, dictators and leaders-for-life. The Iraq war was supposed to produce a new model for democratic transformation, a catalyst after which the United States and its allies could launch an ambitious initiative for regional change.

But now, whatever America's good intentions may have been, that historic moment may be lost for a long time to come.

Funny, that. We find today that the Bush administration is making policy based upon the apocalyptic fantasies of a bunch of crazed American fundamentalists . And on a political level, rejection of the Enlightenment has been in the works in the Republican Party for a long, long time. I doubt they quite had this in mind, however.

Over the past dozen years many factors favored transformation in the world's most volatile region. The buzz among students at Tehran University, editorial writers in Beirut and Amman, the leading human rights activist in Cairo, a feminist leader in Rabat, intellectuals in Lahore and teenage girls in Jakarta has increasingly been about democratic reforms and how to achieve them. New public voices, daring publications, occasionally defiant protests in widely diverse locales gave shape to an energetic, if somewhat disjointed, trend.

Thanks to satellite dishes, shortwave radios and the Internet, Muslims have longingly watched societies from South Africa to Chile to the former Soviet republics shed odious ideologies and repressive regimes. Many haven't wanted to be left behind; they've wanted much of what we've wanted for them.

[...]

The bottom line: The primary battle for the majority of Muslims has not been with us. Their jihad -- or struggle, as the word is accurately translated -- has been against their own autocratic governments. A surprisingly small minority of extremists, from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have gone after us most often because we were seen as the prop for corrupt and immoral regimes, or we deployed troops on their land to achieve suspect objectives.

Yet I am scared because the foundation for the region's democratic transformation has steadily eroded over the past year. Whether the U.S.-led occupation was wise or well-handled, the way it unfolded in Iraq has profoundly disappointed many Muslims both near and far from Iraq's borders. The accumulation of events threatens to undo rather than remake the region, in turn delaying or diverting the course of the Modern Era's final phase.

The occupation of Iraq has affirmed the worst fears of the Islamic world, reinforcing distaste for America and what it represents, and spawning wild conspiracy theories about the motives of the West. Many Muslims now see the American intervention as a devastating betrayal, starkly reflected by the Red Cross's recent conclusion that 70 to 90 percent of all Iraqis who were "deprived of their liberty" -- by the world champion of democracy -- "were arrested by mistake." Others in the region react with fury to the symbolism of a naked Arab male on a concrete floor tethered to a female American soldier looking down with disinterested arrogance on her prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

"Beyond those frolicking soldiers, there is a certain cavalier attitude toward Arabs and Muslims that has created a sense that Arabs are guilty until proven otherwise," reflected Hisham Melham, a Washington correspondent for al-Arabiya television. So while America's ambitious postwar initiative to promote democracy in the "greater Middle East," -- which includes imaginative proposals, such as training 100,000 female teachers to instruct and empower girls by closing the gender gap -- will probably still make its debut at three international summits next month, it's unlikely to generate much traction anytime soon.

This is where George W. Bush and his facile cowboy talk really fomented the hell that is unfolding in Iraq. I hold him (and the speechwriters like David Frum and Mark Gershon, whom everybody extolled for providing the moron with such stirring oratory) responsible. The purposefully and for craven political purposes unleashed the beast.

But what I fear most is that frustration over Iraq and disgust with Abu Ghraib will give common cause and a rallying cry to far-flung Muslim societies. Until now, al Qaeda -- with its global reach -- has been the exception. Most Islamic groups have had local causes and operated at home or very nearby. And they've always been a distinct minority.

The worst-case scenario is that the Cold War of the 20th century is followed in the early 21st century by a very warm one, with no front lines, unpredictable offensives and a type of weaponry from which we're not yet sure how to protect ourselves. This time the majority could become involved, either by empathizing, sympathizing or actively participating in a cause they see as righting a wrong against them.

The unintended consequence of the Iraq experience could well produce a third generation of militants -- a cadre that didn't fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s or train in bin Laden's camps in the 1990s -- who will launch a conflict whose tactics, targets and goals will be even more amorphous. Their conflict will be more than an intensified or expanded war on terrorism. And, I fear, we'll be groping for a long time to figure out how to counter it -- and how to get back to finishing that final chapter of the Modern Era.

I've always maintained that we couldn't have designed a better recruitment plan for bin Laden than invading Iraq. It looks as if it's working. And, like Robin Wright, for the first time I feel truly scared.





digby 5/18/2004 03:31:00 PM |

 
Calling All Ombudsmen

The press in this country is unbelievably bad. So bad that I am tempted to say it is urredeemable.

Everybody is all excited by Newsweek's revelation of the "Gonzales Memo" like they've just uncovered the Rosetta stone. Michael Isikoff claims right there in the article:

The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week's magazine.

In light of all this hoopla, one of my readers wrote me asking who might have leaked this memo. It's an excellent question. Who leaked it and why right now?

Well, I don't know who just recently gave Isikoff the copy of the memo, but the fact is that it was leaked more than two years ago to the Washington Times (likely as a shot at Powell) and was written about in the NY Times by none other than William Safire. Even a googling blogger like me referred to it in a post last week as a "famous early skirmish" in the Bush administration's ongoing civil war because of Colin Powell's vociferous objections to Gonzales's recommendations. The Washington Times story contains the "quaint" quote and everything.

Here's the Washington Times article for January 26, 2002, one day after the memo was written. Powell urges POW status

Here's Safire's column from January 29, 2002.

Jayzuz.




digby 5/18/2004 12:46:00 PM |

 
Housekeeping

Please update your RSS readers with my new site feed, shown at left or here.

Due to popular request, I've changed to Feedburner, which should theoretically provide a feed to the following:

Bloglines/2.0
FeedDemon/1.0
FeedDemon/1.10RC1
FeedonFeeds/0.1
FeedonFeeds/0.1.2
FeedReader
MagpieRSS/0.51
MagpieRSS/0.6a
NetNewsWire/1.0.5
NetNewsWire/1.0.8
NewsGator/2.0
NewsMonster 1.2.2
NewzCrawler 1.5
Oddbot 1.0 (on behalf of Oddpost)
RssReader/1.0.88
RssReader (pre-version 1.0.87)
SharpReader/0.9
Shrook/1.3.3
Shrook/2.0 Preview
Shrook/51
Shrook/53
Xpyder
YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (on behalf of My Yahoo)



Now leave me alone. I'm a techno-phobe and this stuff makes me feel all icky.



digby 5/18/2004 10:42:00 AM |

Monday, May 17, 2004

 
House of Bush, House of Borgia

Fred Kaplan in Slate says:

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it's not clear how.

[...]

Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren't going to stand for it. "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!" one can imagine them shouting in their morning meetings. Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day. [this is key. ed]

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh's story states that Rumsfeld's secret operation stemmed from his "longstanding desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA." Hersh's sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld's secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

Read the whole thing. It features a particularly nice, concise chain of events.

E-mail it to your friends. It makes a lovely graduation gift.



digby 5/17/2004 07:22:00 PM |

 
The War Of The Worlds

The Political Animal brings up a point that I agree should get a full airing before we go any further in our discussion of America's behavior in the GWOT:

Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

This strikes me as an issue that everyone — pro-war and anti-war alike — ought to take a firm stand on: should the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners captured in the war on terror or not?

Gonzales' reasoning is appealing but misguided, I think. After all, every generation believes at one time or another that the enemies they face are so savage, so fundamentally different from any that have come before that old rules of conduct no longer apply. Every generation also turns out to be wrong. The reality is that the Taliban is not more dangerous than the Cold War Soviets, who in turn were not more dangerous than the Nazis. If we were willing to treat prisoners decently in those conflicts, why not now?

The ability to "quickly obtain information" from captured prisoners has been a critical part of every war, but we nonetheless agreed half a century ago to place this under strict limits. This was not because we felt the wars of that era were unimportant, or because we deluded ourselves into believing that our enemies would always follow suit, but because we wanted to set a standard of simple human decency for ourselves and others.

It was also viewed as counter-productive to our own troops when they, inevitably, get captured. It helps to be able to say 'we don't do this and you'd better not do this either." Just ask members of the military these days how happy they are with the prospect of throwing out the Geneva Conventions.

The larger issue is what's important, though. The 9/11 attacks were extremely dramatic and horrifying spectacles. That was, of course, the point. But, Islamic terrorism, per se, is not a threat to the nation on the scale of WWII or the Cold War. Indeed, its greatest threat to our survival is the extent to which we allow our fear to blind us to the possibility of creeping totalitarianism from within. It does not threaten our sovereignty or our way of life as those earlier wars did, despite our very understandable fear of further attacks.

I have thought since the beginning that stoking our bloodlust, while emotionally satisfying, was exactly the wrong thing to do. I thought that the correct response to 9/11 was to observe the appropriate period of mourning for the victims and then quietly, calmly and systematically set about working the problem from a number of different angles --- particularly using the unprecedented outpouring of international support --- to mitigate the threat and secure our own country. It seemed to me that the most powerful statement would be to quickly and cleanly unseat the Taliban and then be menacingly mysterious about what else we were doing behind the scenes. We should have openly and obviously embraced international institutions and foreign countries and touted their cooperation as a way of marginalizing Islamic fundamentalism as much as possible to keep terrorists wondering who was friend or foe.

We instead reared up on our hind legs like a wounded animal and began thrashing about, enraged and unhinged, stoking bloodlust and fear. Rather then dealing with the problem with seriousness of purpose we responded with vomitous bromides about our superior morality and behaved as if 9/11 was s unique threat to our survival instead of an asymmetrical challenge --- the asymmetry of which accrued to our benefit, not theirs. If we had resisted the impulse to demonstrate our power like a Moscow May Day Parade circa 1965 and engaged the world against what should have been conceived as a common enemy, we might have been able to deal with this threat over time without catastrophic results.

But we did exactly the wrong thing. We inflamed the situation with the "bring it on" and "you're with us or agin' us" macho rhetoric and, stunningly, even went so far as to invade an uninvolved Arab country. The president told our troops they were fighting for the survival of the nation in Iraq and encouraged them to believe they were exacting revenge for the acts of 9/11 even though it wasn't true.

We continue to lose hearts and minds everywhere. As Josh Marshall's Iraq correspondent reports today:

Also it is no secret that ON THE STREET the US Army was and remains openly kicking Iraqi asses whenever and wherever they want to.

About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) ... He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are "threats."

I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire ... as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

From the beginning we have behaved as if this was a threat so unprecedented that we didn't have to observe any previous notions of civilized behavior --- as if it were War of The Worlds and aliens were trying to colonize the planet rather than a bunch of clever criminals armed with box-cutters and a suicidal excuse to kill in the name of God. We invaded Iraq with too few trained troops, no help or input from the experts in nation building and peacekeeping and now we find ourselves in the worst possible situation. We are seen as unsympathetic, arrogant, violent and inept. This should be expected when the government and the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who is piped in every day on Armed Forces Radio) encourage our military to act like barbarians by lying to them and the public about the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy.

We may not be facing aliens from a foreign planet, but we have now sown the seeds of an anti-American backlash that encompasses this planet and may well last for generations. And America is demonstrably weaker in the world than we were before this cock-up. For no good reason, we have boldly demonstrated for all to see that our intelligence operations are virtually useless and that we don't even have enough troops to invade and occupy a third rate dictatorship. I know I feel safer knowing that. And I have no doubt that the rest of the world has made a note of it too.

I have long said that these neocon Bushies have always been wrong about everything. But, they have never been as wrong as this.

Nobody should be surprised. They advertised their intentions quite openly. In their Pax Americana Manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses they clearly state that it would probably take a catastrophe on the scale of Pearl Harbor to rally thecountry to their classic comic Imperial wet dream. Despite the fact that they do not understand the concept of terrorism in the least, they nonetheless realized that 9/11 would work very well to advance their plans. All of the breast beating and sabre rattling was ultimately in service of their starry-eyed ivory tower vision of The New American Cakewalk and the triumphant erasure of the asterisk that sits next to George W. Bush's name in the history books.

Since making that first fundamental error, they made every single mistake it is possible to make, starting with pissing off the entire world and ending with Abu Ghraib. Their dream is dead, but we will be paying the price for their arrogance and vanity for decades to come.

If anyone but the airheaded George W. Bush and his terminally incompetent neocon/Team B cabal had been in office, the idea that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was so unprecedented that it meant America must discard all of its values and morals would have been laughed out of the oval office for the absurdity it is. Sadly for America and the world, bin Laden got lucky.




digby 5/17/2004 01:29:00 PM |

Sunday, May 16, 2004

 
Ya Think?

And in other news, the sun came up this morning:

Republicans have adopted a scorched-earth strategy toward Democrats who challenge the wisdom of the way the war in Iraq is being conducted. Such critics, GOP officials say, are not merely misguided but are craven cut-and-runners who help the enemy and put politics ahead of U.S. troops' safety.

Democrats say the Republicans are twisting facts and trying to stifle debate through intimidation. Not so, say the Republicans, who insist they are not questioning Democrats' patriotism, only their judgment and resolve. If accuracy and nuance sometimes fall victim to all this rhetoric, well, there's a war on, folks.

The ruckus began May 6, when Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) -- a hawkish, longtime defender of the Pentagon -- told reporters he believed the war in Iraq could not be won without sending in significantly more troops and equipment, which he advocated. "Our failure to surge in terms of troop level and resources needed to prevail in this war" has resulted in "what appear to be unattainable goals in our current path," Murtha said at the news conference, hosted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

House Republicans responded within minutes. "This morning, in a calculated and craven political stunt, the national Democrat Party declared its surrender in the war on terror," said Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). "Out of sheer, brazen partisanship," House Democrats have "undermined our troops." Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Tex.) said Democrats "are basically giving aid and comfort to our enemies."

Reporters pointed out that Murtha has consistently said the war was unsustainable only under the current policies, and that he urged massive troop buildups as a remedy. DeLay was unmoved. "If you don't give solutions," he said, "that is saying, 'Cut and run.' "

The focus turned to presidential politics Monday, when Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie accused Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) of using the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq -- and a mass e-mail calling for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation -- as a fundraising vehicle.

Kerry campaign spokesmen said the online invitation to donate was a link in virtually all campaign e-mails and similar to one on the "national security" page on President Bush's campaign Web site.

On Wednesday, Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot said Kerry had suggested all U.S. troops in Iraq are "somehow universally responsible" for the Abu Ghraib prisoner mistreatment. Kerry had said essentially the opposite. The reported abuse, Kerry had said, "is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops."

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), noting that DeLay sharply criticized the Clinton administration's military intervention in Kosovo, said Friday: "The hypocritical attacks on legitimate calls for an inquiry [into the prison abuses] and thoughtful critiques of the administration's Iraq policy . . . represent a purely political calculation designed to silence debate and undercut Democrats." Pelosi, picking up the theme, said Republicans "will not silence us with these personal attacks."

Joe Biden said this morning on Meat The Press that we have to "heal Red 'n Blue, man" and everybody's begging Kerry to put McCain on the ticket and golly gosh, can't we all get along?

All I can say is good luck.

There is only one way to heal red 'n blue and that is to so thoroughly repudiate the Republican party at the polls that they will be forced to purge assholes like DeLay from their leadership and start putting their country before their party. Then we can talk. Unless that happens, it's brass knuckles political warfare because when you give these guys an inch they always take a thousand miles and move the destination even farther to the right.

We have to hold the line.

And while I don't think it would be a bad idea to put a Republican or two in the cabinet and to try to reach out to the congress (no matter which party holds the leadership) we'd also better have eyes in the back of our heads because they will slip in the shiv the first chance they get.

We've been down this road before. In the 90's the "third way" experiment was designed to mitigate the polarization of the left and right, both in politics and policy. On a policy level there was some limited success. But it was a political disaster because of the very same scorched earth tactics employed by the noxious Tom DeLay and his Godfather Newt Gingrich. You cannot compromise with people like that. I sincerely hope that we do not have to relearn that lesson.




digby 5/16/2004 10:33:00 AM |

Saturday, May 15, 2004

 
Black Ops

Seymour Hersh's latest reveals the existence of a black operation put into high gear after 9/11 that was stupidly pushed into Iraq due to frustration and impatience at the Pentagon.

First, let me say that I am not all that surprised that such a program existed nor that it was given greater ability to operate independently after 9/11. As Hersh points out, these clandestine operations had been used during the cold war and I certainly assumed that dealing with the assymetrical threat of terrorism would probably require at least some element of high risk spook style activity. It would be naive to think it wouldn't. In the hands of these unbelievable incompetents in the Bush administration it naturally turned into a complete disasater.

Moral questions aside (and there are many), as the article details, the problem is that if you use these techniques in anything but the most secret and rarest of ways and it comes into the hands of regular people instead of highly trained specialists using real intelligence, then it is not only ineffective in obtaining useful information, it is dramatically counterproductive in terms of compromising long term policy goals.

The CIA sources, perhaps covering their asses, tell Hersh that even they backed off of this stuff when it came to using it against regular people in Iraq. Some in the Pentagon apparently maintain that they had been getting good intelligence on the insurgency using these harsh measures until the "hillbillys" got involved and took pictures, which I find hard to believe. If anything the insurgency got stronger over the period they were sweeping innocent people off the streets and then torturing them in prisons so it doesn't track that they were really getting anywhere. In fact, it looks as if it may have contributed to the US military's problems. If they mean that they managed to get Saddam, I hardly think that was such a big coup. After all, he had terrorized the population for over 30 years so it's not unlikely that someone would have dropped a dime on him eventually.

The fact is that these torture techniques in anybody's hands are a terrible way to get information. People will say anything under torture. I suspect that the "historical information" that General Ripper is so proud of obtaining in Gitmo is probably bullshit. Certainly, after being down there for more than 2 years those prisoners don't know shit today. Believing their own hype about Gitmo, these people inexorably came to believe that if they just inflicted a little more pain and humiliation in Iraq they'd get the answers they wanted. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still at large and Iraq has blown up into a nightmare.

So, it is a case of macho overstepping and making things worse than they already were, much as the march to Iraq itself was a case of macho overstepping and making things worse rather than better. Evidently, the events of 9/11 released some testosterone rush in the pinched, unfulfilled systems of the ivory tower neocons and they lost the ability to reason and plan.

Hersh's article pretty much confirms that the person who gave the orders to take off the gloves in Abu Ghraib is Don Rumsfeld gofer, Steven Cambone, the man most uniquely unqualified to hold his office since well...President Bush. Of course, Cambone being the ultimate micromanager's clerk means that Rummy himself was well aware of everything that went on and approved it.

It's becoming more and more obvious that the White House was intimately involved in these issues, regardless of their plausible deniability. As I point out in my post below, one of the main reasons they wanted to create the "unlawful combatant" designation was to allow unfettered interrogations. The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, led that argument. The Newsweek article shows that Cheney and Rumsfeld were deeply involved in the Padilla and Hamdi cases and argued forcefully that they (and any other American they deemed a threat) should be considered unlawful combatants, without the protections of even the constitution, much less the Geneva Conventions. They believe in harsh measures without regard to human rights. They have both shown a remarkable propensity to overlook the long term strategic damage of any given decision in favor of some short term emotional satisfaction or political gain.

They knew.


digby 5/15/2004 01:36:00 PM |

 
He Never Learns

In a bid to get American bloodlust refocused, Crusader Codpiece lied yesterday again about terrorist ties to Iraq prior to the war. Apparently unhappy that the torture at Abu Ghraib has been temporarily halted, the president wants to re-inflame and confuse members of the military and the American public so that they will continue to support the idea that Iraq had something to do with the events of 9/11 and therefore believe killing and torturing Iraqis is an act of revenge (while he spouts sophomoric bromides about peace and freedom.)

President Bush on Friday blamed al Qaeda supporter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for beheading American Nicholas Berg and cited him as an example of Saddam Hussein "terrorist ties" before the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Bush's revival of accusations linking Saddam to terrorism comes as the president faces growing doubts among Americans over his Iraq policy.

At a fund-raising lunch in Bridgeton, Missouri, Bush said Zarqawi was an example of the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi leader. "We knew he (Saddam) had terrorist ties. The person responsible for the Berg death, Zarqawi, was in and out of Baghdad prior to our arrival, for example," Bush said.

It's obvious that Bush doesn't give a shit about this country. At every step of the way he has made this country less safe by his words and actions and he continues to do it without even a second thought. Every time he utters one of these proven lies he prolongs this madness and puts our lives in greater danger.

He is showing unprecedented gall in this case,however, because it has been shown that the only reason he didn't kill Zarqawi when he was holed up in Kurd territory before the war was because it was his only evidence of terrorism in Iraq (even though outside Saddam's control) and his death would have impeded his blind determination to invade at all costs.

To use Berg's murder as an excuse to lie about this once again is obscene.





digby 5/15/2004 09:50:00 AM |

Friday, May 14, 2004

 
And He Wept With Happiness

Kate "yes, I'm really this desperate" O'Beirne defends her Big Boy:

Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the "facts."

Yes. That's what it says. Even the quotes.

We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

That's very special. But, you might want to keep an eye on him when he's around old ladies or a medicine cabinet. Word to the wise.

100=2.5 to 3 days of the little blues[oxycontin] You know how this stuff works...the more you get used to the more it takes. But, I will try and cut down to help out. But remember, this is only for a little over two more weeks. Just two weeks....I understand your challenge and will do all I can to help. But I kind of want to go out with a bang if you get my drift. Hee hee hee.

Yes. He certainly has excellent judgment.

As for his decency, I guess old Kate shares his excitement about "babes and torture" which isn't altogether surprising.

Link via Media Matters




digby 5/14/2004 08:29:00 PM |

 
Taking Off The Gloves

Matt Yglesias points us to law professor Eric Muller's post about the possibility that the Solicitor general lied to the Supreme Court. Matt says:

The subject is Clement's contention in oral arguments on the Padilla and Hamdi cases that the US government doesn't engage in even "mild torture" to try and secure information from detainees. This is going to wind up hinging on whether or not various "stress and duress" interrogation techniques count as torture -- certainly this stuff sounds a lot like torture to me.

I agree that this particular argument is going to rest on whether these techniques are considered "mild torture" but it should be noted that both General Pace and Wolfowitz of Arabia agreed yesterday that these acts are inhumane and they would consider them violations of the Geneva Convention if used against US troops. (Civilians are accorded even greater protections.)

As to whether the solicitor general's office knew about it (however it is defined) it would certainly appear that Ted Olson was brainstorming in the White House about the case, right along with Cheney and Rummy:

The president's men were divided. For Dick Cheney and his ally, Donald Rumsfeld, the answer was simple: the accused men [the Lakawanna Six] should be locked up indefinitely as "enemy combatants," and thrown into a military brig with no right to trial or even to see a lawyer... "They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts...Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country. "There have been some very intense disagreements," says a senior law-enforcement official. "It has been a hard-fought war."

[...]

But as the months wore on, Justice lawyers became increasingly uneasy about holding him [Padilla] indefinitely without counsel. Solicitor General Ted Olson warned that the tough stand would probably be rejected by the courts. Administration lawyers went so far as to predict which Supreme Court justices would ultimately side for and against them.

But the White House, backed strongly by Cheney, refused to budge. Instead, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants including a truck driver from Ohio and a group of men from Portland, Ore.

Did the administration lie to the Court? Ted Olson almost certainly understood the mindset of the administration as it dealt with these "unlawful combatants" which is characterized by a total willingness to throw aside the rule of law. (Cheney is quite obviously out of his mind on these issues. Remember the smallpox freak-out?) Whether the lawyer Paul Clement was aware that the White House had taken a no hold barred approach to the treatment of prisoners is unknown. In any case, as Matt says, if that argument is ever broached it will hinge on the question of whether these admitted techniques, like holding someone under water until they think they're drowning, can be called torture. In the Bizarro World in which we now live, it's entirely possible that Scalia and gang will find it perfectly acceptable.

But, there is another little problem with the legal situation pertaining to prisoner treatment. Rumsfeld effectively locked out the JAG office in making all these decisions and the military lawyers have been complaining about it for months:

A group of senior military lawyers were so concerned about changes in the rules designed to safeguard prisoners during interrogation that they sought help outside the Defense Department, according to a New York lawyer who headed a recent study of how prisoners have been treated in the war on terrorism.

The military lawyers were part of the Army Judge Advocate General's office, which in the past has played a role in ensuring that interrogators did not violate prisoners' rights.

"They were extremely upset. They said they were being shut out of the process, and that the civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement," said Scott Horton, who was chairman of the New York City Bar Assn. committee that filed a report this month on the interrogation of detainees by the U.S.

[...]

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the rules had been examined and approved by lawyers for the administration.

On Tuesday, Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, "issued any number of statements and directives to the effect that detainees in Iraq, civilian or military, were to be treated under the provisions of the Geneva Convention."

[...]

Horton said the military lawyers told him that Feith pressed for looser interrogation rules and won approval for them from the administration's civilian lawyers earlier in the U.S. war on terrorism.

Which lawyers? They don't refer to these decisions as coming from the Justice Department but rather more broadly from "the administration's civilian political lawyers."

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales openly defends the White House's decision to call the Guantanamo prisoners "enemy combatants" largely because the Geneva Convention would limit their ability to interrogate the prisoners.(It's comforting to know that they promise to operate in guantanamo in the "spirit" of the Geneva Conventions, though. Trust Us)

In a famous early skirmish in the Bush administration's ongoing civil war, Gonzales sent around a memo trying to persuade the national security council to reject Colin Powell's request to give the Guantanamo prisoners POW status. (Condi later said it was just a draft...)

It's possible these military lawyers are referring to Justice, but it's just as likely that the rules were debated and decided right in the White House. History suggests that Cheney and Rumsfeld are always in favor of the harshest possible treatment. They gave in only when Ashcroft argued to protect his own turf (and profile) in the US. (That's what passes for compromise in the Bush administration.)

In other words, it is likely that the rules for the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, just as they were in Guantanamo, were not created in some obscure Justice Department or CIA office as is stated in this NY Times article today. The history of this issue leads to the White House Counsel's office and the Office of the Vice President.

As I wrote earlier, they were frantic to get intelligence on the whereabouts of the apparently vaporized WMD. They believed from the beginning that this was such a "different kind of war" that they needn't adhere to the rule of law or war.

Somebody needs to ask which civilian "political" lawyers were making the interrogation rules in the War On Terrorism.



digby 5/14/2004 06:27:00 PM |

 
There Isn't A Big Enough Tent In The World

Ok. Somebody needs to find out what Rove has on Zell. He has now become a serious danger to the Democratic Party because he is either crumbling under the stress of the blackmail or he has gone completely insane

"...I worry that the HWA - the Hand-Wringers of America - will add to their membership and continue to bash our country ad nauseam. And in doing so, hand over more innocent Americans to the enemy on a silver platter.

“So I stand with Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, who stated that he’s “more outraged by the outrage” than by the treatment of those prisoners. More outraged by the outrage. It’s a good way of putting it. That’s exactly how this Senator from Georgia feels.”

Surely, he is not privy to any private Democratic meetings, is he? They don't speak in front of him in the elevator or anything, do they? Might as well hand over their computer passwords to the Republicans.

Oh wait...



digby 5/14/2004 12:50:00 PM |

 
The Big Swinging Dems


Yo Wolfie, you wanna piece 'o me?

Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration's Iraq policies yesterday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon's number two official in personal and bitter terms.

[...]

Warner seemed briefly to lose control of the committee yesterday, faced down by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over whether Wolfowitz could be questioned on broad matters of Iraq policy or only the narrower issue of additional spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are costing about $4.5 billion a month.

When Warner admonished him to keep his questions to the budget issue, Kennedy erupted. "I've been on this committee for 24 years, I've been in the Senate 42 years, and I have never been denied the opportunity to question any person that's come before a committee, on what I wanted to ask," he said. "And I resent it and reject it on a matter of national importance."

Warner persisted, provoking a formal challenge from Kennedy. "Well, Mr. Chairman, then you're going to have to rule me out of order, and I'm going to ask for a roll call of whether the committee is going to rule me out of order," he snapped.

At that point, Warner backed down and said Wolfowitz's preliminary remarks had invited such broad questioning. "You have opened it up in your opening statement," Warner told Wolfowitz.

Hooah!

Then they let the dogs out...

After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, "What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process -- legal process."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."
[...]


Wolfowitz ... told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki's estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he was siding with another senior Army general closer to the action -- Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East.

(This is known in Washington as the "Tommy made me do it defense.")

Wolfowitz did respond directly to Reed's attack, which followed a heated and confusing exchange on whether U.S. commanders permitted military interrogators to violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of military prisoners of war and civilian detainees.

"I'm not dissembling," he said. He tried to weave his way though the hypothetical questions Reed had posed about the rules of engagement for interrogations in Iraq, saying he had not been told that senior commanders in Iraq had approved questioning techniques that violate the Geneva accords.

Cutting him off, Reed said, "Well, I would suggest, Mr. Secretary, that you're not doing your job."

Damn sissies.







digby 5/14/2004 12:19:00 PM |

 
Curiouser and Curiouser

When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father.

Michael Berg said the FBI investigated the matter more than a year ago. He stressed that his son was in no way connected to the terrorists who captured and killed him.

Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

According to Berg, his son was taking a course a few years ago at a remote campus of the University of Oklahoma near an airport. He described how on one particular day, his son met "some terrorist people -- who no one knew were terrorists at the time."

At one point during the bus ride, Berg said, the man sitting next to his son asked if he could use Nick's laptop computer.

'It turned out this guy was a terrorist and that he, you know, used my son's e-mail, amongst many other people's e-mail who he did the same thing to,' Berg said.

Government sources said Berg gave the man his password, which was later used by Moussaoui, the sources said.

"Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions." --Jerry Falwell, 1981



digby 5/14/2004 11:52:00 AM |

 
Memo To Rumsfeld

TBogg has some excellent advice for how to deal with this little sticky wicket you've gotten yourself into:

Henceforth, being strapped to a board and submerged until you think you are drowning will be referred to as Hydro-Therapy. Being forced to simulate sex with fellow prisoners is now called Role Playing. Being made to form a naked pyramid is Job Training for the Upcoming Baghdad Cirque du Soleil. If you are stripped naked and led around on a leash you Living A Day In the Life Of Former Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston. And if you are actually forced to have sex with a slack-jawed, clueless goober, well, now you know how Karen Santorum feels....

Are there any problems that cannot be solved with a little creative message massage? Heavens, no.




digby 5/14/2004 11:34:00 AM |

 
Daddy Dearest

Not that I personally give a damn, nor would I blame the daughters for begging their embarrassing parents to stay away, but I do think this catch by Avedon Carol is too good not to snipe about.

After saying he wouldn't attend his daughters' college graduations because he didn't want people to have to go through security, Junior will be doing at least 3 commencement speeches.

This is a Mean Girl Special if I've ever seen one. Junior goes around every day lecturing people lecturing people about how they should love their children. MoDo, Tina Brown, Lisa DePaulo, Wolf, Shep, Kit --- your table is ready.





digby 5/14/2004 11:17:00 AM |

Thursday, May 13, 2004

 
That's The Way Your Hard Core Terrorist Works

I can no longer sit back and allow terrorist infiltration, terrorist indoctrination, terrorist subversion, and the international terrorist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

General Geoffrey D. Ripper took Guantnamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners:

According to information from a classified interview with the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison, General Miller's recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help gather information about the detainees.

Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners that grew horrifically more serious last fall is now at the center of the widening prison scandal.


[...]


By the time he took over in Cuba, most of the detainees there had been in custody for nearly a year. Still, General Miller was credited by Pentagon officials with using interrogations there to produce a valuable historical account of the workings and financing of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, among other subjects, officials said.

His hard-charging attitude has also raised questions that go beyond interrogation methods. He was the official most responsible for pressing a case last year against a Muslim chaplain at the base, Capt. James J. Yee, that was initially billed as a major episode of espionage. In March, the military announced that it would drop all charges.

Last, and possibly most important, I want all privately owned computers to be immediately impounded. They might be used to issue instructions to saboteurs. As I have previously arranged, Air Police will have lists of all owners and I want every single one of them collected without exception.

Women... women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, but I do deny them my essence

An Army general on Wednesday dismissed the convictions in the case of a Muslim chaplain who was initially suspected of espionage at the Guantánamo Bay prison for terror suspects but was found guilty only on lesser charges of adultery and downloading pornography.

The appellate decision by Gen. James Hill, the Army Southern Command chief who oversees military operations at Guantánamo, wiped the slate clean for Capt. James J. Yee, who ministered for 10 months to foreign terrorism detainees at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"This means there will be no official mention of it in his military record," General Hill said.

The decision ended what one of Captain Yee's lawyers, Eugene Fidell, called a "hoax" case. Mr. Fidell said that Captain Yee was "obviously very pleased" at the decision but that the military owed him an apology.

Captain Yee, 36, was found guilty in March of noncriminal charges of committing adultery and storing pornography on a government computer. He was arrested on suspicion of espionage in September and faced six criminal charges that included mishandling classified information at Guantánamo. Court documents accused him of spying, mutiny, sedition and aiding the enemy, and he was held in solitary confinement in a military brig for 76 days.

The military dropped all the criminal charges in March, citing national security concerns that would arise from the release of evidence against him.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller of the Army, who at the time commanded the task force running the Guantánamo prison, then found Captain Yee, who is married, guilty of administrative charges of committing adultery and storing pornography on a government computer, and issued a written reprimand.

Captain Yee appealed the decision.

God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all.



digby 5/13/2004 10:38:00 PM |

 
Another Normal American

*NOTE: This editorial was delivered by [news anchor] David Wittman after 19 Action News aired a very much edited version of the video showing American Nick Berg being held by his Iraqi captors before he was beheaded.

Well, if there is anything that's going to make us forget those photos from the prison, you just saw it. But it wasn't just what we saw, it's what we heard.

These cowards have the gall to read a political statement before killing one of our kids. The only word I understood: Islam.

As they brought out the knife, they screamed 'Allahu Akbar' -- God is great.

That's not our God.

There has been a lot written and said about our failure to understand the culture of the Middle East. We understand barbarism. We understand evil. We understand a perverted belief system that celebrates death. We can understand an enemy that quite frankly wants to kill us all.

Our God may forgive them. Just now, tonight, I can't. Can you?"

Notice it's no longer "terrorists," or even "Iraqis." It's the "Middle east" and "Islam." A pretty big chunk of the planet is now our enemy.

Then again, it is May Sweeps.


Thanks to Tim Carroll for the link.





digby 5/13/2004 07:25:00 PM |

 
Good News

Election Panel Won't Impose New Spending Limits on Groups

We need al the help we can get. Bush is spending like a sailor and there's always more where that came from. He's a very sound investment for people with money.





digby 5/13/2004 05:55:00 PM |

 
Sowing The Seeds Of Our own Demise

I honestly don't know what to say about this asshole. Media Matters is now transcribing the vitamin hustler Michael Savage's show. Read the whole thing an e-mail it to your relatives who think that the liberal media is biased and that you are exaggerating the level of hate and violence that comes from right wing radio.

Savage is heard by six million people every day:

Savage on what should be done to the Iraqi prisoners:

And I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour -- a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them. It won't happen. It won't happen because of the CBS Communists. It won't happen because of the CNN traitors. I won't happen because of the MSNBC empty heads. And we the people are the ones who are going to suffer today. ...

Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes. How's that? You like that one? Go call somebody that you want to report me to, see if I care. They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail. Thank you CBS. Thank you New Yorker. Thank you Carl Levin. Thank you Ted Kennedy. Thank you Hillary Clinton. I'm sure that Mr. Berg's parents appreciate what you've done for them. I'll be right back.

Six. Million. Listeners. A. Day.


Update:

Via Atrios, I see that Yglesias has posted about one of those six million, apparently, a writer for tech central station:

Many Americans simply wish the Arabs would go away; others wish to blow them away -- and wish to blow them away not because they see this step as inevitable and tragic, but because they rejoice at the prospect of getting them back for what they have done to us. Most normal Americans today just don't care any more about the Arabs and their welfare, or about their humiliation, or about their historical grievances, simply because all the images that come to us from their world horrify and appall us, including the disturbing images of Americans doing things that no normal American would ever dream of doing to other people back at home, if only because they would never be given the opportunity.

This is how most normal Americans now feel, but they dare not express it in public. But make no mistake, this feeling will be expressed -- somehow, somewhere: a fact of which our leaders and the world must be made aware before it occurs.

"The arabs." "Normal people." "Most."

This tracks with one of Limbaugh's recent whines where he claims that everybody in America feels the same way he does but political correctness prevents them from expressing it. There is nobody more ugly than a violent wing nut embracing his victimhood.

Atrios explains the psychology of the "101st Fighting keyboarders:

I'm not sure who "most normal Americans" are supposed to be, presumably that means "most other members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders." But, yes, the transformation from "Saddam is an evil omnipotent overlord who will kill us all" to "we are there to save the poor Iraqi people" to simply "they're the enemy" is all going according to schedule.

The sad thing, of course, is this basic bloodlust is mostly because they invested themselves emotionally in this, somehow feel responsible for it, and all along the MO has been to turn the big guns on anyone who disagreed. Well, now the people they went to liberate disagree, so the guns will be turned on them.

And it certainly helped their delusion to have a cartoon character president who strutted around with a 560 lb codpiece pretending that he could shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips in the name of loving yer neighbor like you'd love to be loved yerself.

Matt concludes:

I'm foreseeing an ugly future. Kerry wins the election and begins the slow, painful process of rebuilding the American military, American alliances, and American global credibility. Meanwhile, on the right a new "stab in the back" theory has already emerged and the forces of resentment are growing. "We came to help them and they turned on us -- now they must pay!"

That will be just one element of the wild-eyed fury on the Right when they lose the election. Their sanity is obviously hanging by a thread as it is. See, that's what Democrats were talking about when they said they were glad Al gore wasn't president on 9/11. Trumped up GOP impeachment hearings would have definitely interfered with the immediate needs of the victims and the response to terrorism. Don't think they won't do it in 2005.






digby 5/13/2004 05:00:00 PM |

 
Wing-Nut Confusion

Oh fer gawd's sake. Roger Ailes reports that the Fighting 101st Keyboarders (thanks TBOGG) have their sans-a-belt-Dockers in a wad because the media refuses to show the entire Berg video on television on a loop.

I'm telling you, this is the sickest damned thing I've ever heard. Maybe people who have sat through The Passion more than 50 times are inured to this kind of thing, but most of us aren't. This is a video of an actual brutal murder in living color. Still pictures don't have 1/100th of the power of these scenes. It is a horrible, horrible sight to see.

The mainstream media aren't showing the pictures of the bloody leg of the prisoner who was tortured with police dogs, nor will they likely show the video of the prisoners being raped when it eventually comes out (and it will.) They should not. Berg's killing is horrible documentary footage that should not be seen by children or anyone else who doesn't make a special effort to see it and who knows what they are going to see. It gave me nightmares and I'm a middle aged cynic. I can't imagine what it would do to a kid who happened to be watching TV unsupervised.

This is not political in any way. I don't think the video should be suppressed. People can access it on the internet and if my "search" traffic stats are any measure, a hell of a lot of people are. It's not being censored.

Jayzuz. These people are very confused. On the radio Rush can talk his eliminationist trash from dawn to dusk, but if Stern talks about sex he's dirty and must be suppressed. The still pictures of sadistic sexual humiliation should have been withheld from the media but an actual filmed death should be widely seen. Pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are wrong only to the extent they are shown on television. In reality they show a needed "emotional release" like hazing initiations at a frat party. Janet Jackson's nipple is cause for outrage.

The vaunted moral clarity of the right wing is looking more and more like presidential pretzel logic every day.

There has always been a unique conflation of sexual and violent imagery among fascists. It would appear that those who lean Right just have some problems in this area.





digby 5/13/2004 03:26:00 PM |

 
The Little Handful

Via wood s lot, from America's greatest writer of all time, Mark Twain:

"I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.

'Still, it is true, lamb,' said Satan. 'Look at you in war, what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!'

'In war? How?'

'There has never been a just one, never an honorable one on the part of the instigator of the war.

I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful as usual will shout for the war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously object at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.' Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers as earlier but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation pulpit and all will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Thanks to Stephen Duncan for the link.


digby 5/13/2004 02:20:00 PM |

 
The Cat Was Already Out Of The Bag

Skeptical Notion makes the important point that despite what the right wing hacks say, the release of the pictures didn't change perceptions among ordiary Iraqis because they already knew:

I often wonder how stupid Kaus really is. Then I read his blog, and I remember: Very.

Today he's joined the Goldberg "Sixty Minutes II should never have printed those pictures, and we should never show any more" bandwagon, using the logic that "Because they showed the pictures, now the Iraqis know -- on a visceral level -- what we were doing, and now they're really pissed." and suggests that they should have done a verbal story (yes, that Red Cross report got so much attention) instead.

I'm still shocked by the unspoken assumption that the Iraqis -- and the rest of the Arab World -- are fundamentally stupid. I'm not sure why, but it appears to be an article of faith that "If you don't speak English, it's because you're retarded" among a great many of the movers and shakers.

News flash for you, Kaus: The Iraqis already knew.

Yes they did.

The 38cm sculpture with the words "We are living American democracy" inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago.




digby 5/13/2004 01:20:00 PM |

 
Berg Central

Susan at Suburban Guerilla has an impressive collection of posts that shed some light on the Nick Berg story. Something is definitely rotten in Baghdad.

First of all, the claim that the US military didn't have him in custody is bullshit:

LIARS

Why Are The Lying?

Also:

Maybe I'm Crazy

Who Was The Real Nick Berg

A Little Extra Something


And while you're over there taking advantage of her editor's eye that cuts through the crap, send a little cash Susan's way so that she can attend the conventions. It will be worth our while, I have no doubt.


Update:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An American who was beheaded by militants had told friends he was arrested by Iraqi police in Mosul because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. The Mosul police chief Thursday denied having arrested him.

The body of Nicholas Berg, 26, was found last weekend in western Baghdad. Three days later, a videotape posted on an al-Qaida-related Web site showed Berg decapitated by hooded, armed men.

Questions about Berg's stay in Iraq remain, including the time and place of his abduction. U.S. and Iraqi officials have offered varying accounts of their contacts with the self-employed telecommunications businessman from West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that Iraqi police arrested Berg in Mosul on March 24 because they believed he may have been involved in "suspicious activities."

U.S. spokesman Dan Senor would not explain those suspicions but insisted that Berg was held by Iraqi -- and not American -- authorities. He said, however, that the FBI visited Berg three times before he was released April 6.

In e-mails released by his family, Berg wrote about his experiences in trying to track down and later meeting an in-law in the Mosul area. Berg also described his work in seeking to repair communications towers in Iraq.

In Mosul, police chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi insisted his department had never arrested Berg and maintained he had no knowledge of the case.

"The Iraqi police never arrested the slain American," al-Barhawi told reporters. "Take it from me ... that such reports are baseless."

[...]

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Berg was detained by Iraqi authorities "for his own protection" because his behavior in Mosul seemed unusual for a Westerner.

He had been seen traveling in taxis and moving about the dangerous city without any escort, the official said. He added that Berg, who was Jewish, had in his possession texts that were "anti-Semitic" in tone, the official said without elaborating.

In his e-mail quoted by the Times, Berg guessed the FBI agents in Mosul had questioned him about Iran because he was carrying some literature in Farsi and a book about Iran.

He also wrote that U.S. military police who were supervising the Iraqi police had heard some of his fellow prisoners referring to him as an Israeli and suggested he be moved to a separate cell.

digby 5/13/2004 12:36:00 PM |

 
Make Your Mark

Please sign this Petition if you are inclined to do such things. It's to tell that drooling vulture they call the Senator from Oklahoma that he doesn't speak for you.

Of course, if you agree that the Iraqi prisoners should be grateful all they got was a little forced sodomy with a chemical light then don't sign. It's not like we are quite as bad as Saddam or anything.

Via the mighty Atrios


digby 5/13/2004 11:57:00 AM |

 
Big Baby

Another round of applause for David Brock's Media Matters. They are now running a TV spot in DC highlighting Limbaugh's putrid statements about the torture scandal.

You really need to check out Limbaugh's latest on MM every day and circulate it widely. I've always known that the best way to expose the right was simply by letting normal people see what they actually say.

He's never had to answer for the nonstop lies and character smears of the last 12 years. He isn't handling the pressure very well. All these tough guys on the right who enjoy seeing a grown man cry must be loving Rush these days:

They can't destroy me, folks. The media didn't make me. The media can't destroy me. The media didn't make me who I am. I did that along with you. So if the media didn't make me, if the media didn't -- if they're not responsible for building me, they can't tear me down. They can try.

And I don't know that that's what they're doing, but nevertheless, don't sweat it. That's -- I just -- I felt compelled to answer this, because there must have been over the last three or four days a whole bunch of e-mails from people who think I ought to be angry about it and want me to fight back and this sort of thing. And I've also learned that over the years, that fighting back is not the right way to handle this. You just keep doing what you're doing. Just be who you are and let that be the fight.

Don't -- if you start responding to these people, that's all you're going to end up doing, which is why I was reluctant to even do this. But I wanted to do it one more time, get it out of the way, get it on the record. And let's just see how much of this, this total explanation, including the context of the Skull and Bones comment, let's see how much of this ever shows up in any of these places which have used that quote as a means to be critical, disparaging, discrediting, whatever.

The context is that a pill popping fascist gasbag who popularized Republican hatespin and character assassination is getting a taste of his own medicine. He's been spewing this stuff for years. Finally somebody is calling him it. Bravo.





digby 5/13/2004 11:44:00 AM |

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

 
Children's Crusade

Maureen Dowd has an unusually good column up in which she reports something I hadn't heard before:

In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.

Can you believe that crap? I realize that we are always calling things "Orwellian" but actually dubbing Afghanistan and Iraq as the Global War On Terrorism makes the slightly Nazi-esque term Homeland Security sound a little bit delicate.

More importantly, this is another one of those never-never land dipshit political moves that piles one disasaterous decision on top of another. In honor of Karen Hughes, we'll call them Catastrophies With Consequences.


Dowd continues:

The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.

That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.

Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a "terrorist"; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or "humanitarian do-gooders," to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.

One of my arguments against the invasion was the entirely predicatable blowback. It seemed to me that after 9/11 and the whole worldwide Jihad thing that we should be a little bit more cunning and wily and a little less full of shit.

I could never see the logic in unnecessarily opening this Iraq front, particularly when it was obvious that it was going to make matters worse without any discernible benefit. We had enemies enough already and smarter and simpler ways to combat terrorism than crashing around the mid-east like an uncontrolled, enraged beast.

And it doesn't take a Phd from the University of Chicago to realize that when you go around making things up--- like we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq "because of terrorism" --- there might be some glitches in the president's crusade for peace, love and understanding. Politicians should remember that children are listening. And I'm talking about fully grown Americans who may be confused by the president's clear message that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists.





digby 5/12/2004 10:25:00 PM |

 
Let's Get One Thing Straight

The wing nut talking points, after an obligatory "yeah, yeah, it's icky yada, yada, yada" is that the victims of the bad apples at Abu Ghraib were the worst of the worst, the terrorists, the murders, the ones who are trying to KILL YOUR BABIES in their sleep, so let's not get our panties in a bunch because this is war, mister!

Inhofe: "The idea that these prisoners -- you know, they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners -- they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

It has been noted elsewhere that the Red Cross report and The Taguba report estimated that somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were innocent.

Inhofe said several times over the last few days that the innocent were processed and let loose immediately but numerous news reports say they were generally held for about three months before they were freed with some cigarettes and $10.00.

Unsurprisingly, Inhofe is full of it. But, like our president, I doubt that he reads anything but his picture Bible and The Moonie Times so he is unaware that there have been a number of news accounts over the past week or so from those who are in the pictures and they are not terrorists, insurgents or murderers. They are poor innocent schmucks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that they are free today should suggest that they were not the "worst of the worst," who, if you believe the president in his State of the Union address are either in custody or "have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

The NY Times had this on May 5:

The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.

"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.

"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.

He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.

"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.

[...]

He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr, near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.

The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, "was very good," adding: "There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people."

After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.

[...]

Finally, after an ordeal of what Mr. Abd believed to be about four hours, it was over.

The soldiers removed the beds from their cells, he said, and threw cold water on the floor. The prisoners were forced to sleep on the ground with their hoods still on, he said.

"I was so exhausted, I fell asleep," Mr. Abd said. "These were the same walls where Saddam Hussein used to interrogate people. We thought we would be executed."

But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with "Joiner" would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.

About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. "Joiner" just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.

It is a horrible story that is well documented in the Taguba report and verified by people who saw it. This innocent man was caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare(or perhaps Saddamesque nightmare is the correct term)

It's interesting that Inhofe and Limbaugh and the rest who are trying to concoct some sort of narrative that their non-sadist base can live with, are unaware that this fellow claims that he was never interrogated, thus supporting the yesterday's fading talking points about "bad apples." Of course, the soldiers involved are now saying that the pictures of the torture were ordered up by their superiors as part of some sort of psy-op interrogation plan, so who knows?

Now, Inhofe and his cronies can say that there is no proof (except for the matching scars and paperwork proving his incarceration at the same time.) But, there is more:

From the Washington Post May 6, 2004:

Hasham Mohsen Lazim traded used tires for a living in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. He had been in trouble only once in his life, he said, a desperate time six years ago when he deserted Saddam Hussein's army to support his wife and four small children.

Then on one warm night in August, a taxi ride home ended in a U.S. Army holding cell, the first stop in what he described as a hellish four-month journey through the U.S. military prison system in Iraq. His experience veered between anguish and confusion, abuse and fury, before culminating in a series of pictures, broadcast worldwide in recent days, that memorialized his 24-day stay in the grimmest precincts of Abu Ghraib prison.

"Something awful happened to me," Lazim said during a two-hour interview broken by long pauses of silent despair. "I will never forget it until the day I die."

The story is very much like the NY Times account. It is hard to see how they could have come up with so much detail that matches the reports, the pictures and the testimony of Americans who were questioned for the investigation.

He too is now free, which puts the lie to this latest attempt to defend the indefensible. If he was a terrorist with American blood on his hands, I don't think it's likely that he'd have been set free to kill some more.

Inhofe and his crew of sadistic freepers had better have a back-up plan.


x-posted on American Street



digby 5/12/2004 06:29:00 PM |

 
Boo Fucking Hoo

Media Matters reports that the poor lil' thin skinned bullyboy doesn't like being monitored.

From Monday's show:

[Feminazi] Limbaugh on prisoners getting "a taste of [their] own medicine"

CALLER: When I saw those pictures -- the Iraqi supposedly torture pictures -- I felt no shame. The only thing I could think is, they're getting a little taste of their own medicine, and those Iraqi women must be cheering.

LIMBAUGH: Made that point last week, but it didn't go over well with Rush Monitors. I did -- that's -- made that point. That point has not been quoted. I said, you know, this might not be bad -- oh, it's gonna happen again -- I said, if you look at the role Iraq -- Arab men make their women play -- the roles they play, the roles they have to live -- to, to, to make American prison guards females and to give those women utter power over Arab men -- some might call that torture, some might call that decent punishment, some might say here's a taste of your own medicine. This is what you've been doing to your women for time immemorial, only now the tables are turned. But all that's been lost because [with a slight lisp] "This is horrible. This is, this is disgusting. This is outrageous. This is mean."

Limbaugh on Democrats and the media

I'm gonna submit here -- and I don't care who quotes me on this, and I don't care where they repeat it -- there's a lot of acting going on here, and there's a lot of false phony concern for these Iraqi detainees. This is not about people genuinely outraged about this. ...

The Democrats and the media don't give a rat's rear end about what happened to those prisoners. All this is, is the latest weapon they can use politically to harm Bush, which is why they're trying to harm me, in fact. It's all political. They don't give a hoot about those prisoners. ...

Limbaugh on Media Matters for America's monitoring

You know, isn't it interesting folks, I've been around here for fifteen and a half years. I've never been so often quoted on a single story. I think what happens is that the media has come across a new website that's supposedly chronicling what I say, and they all go there and they read it and they see and then they take the propaganda of that website and repackage it and call it news. And they leave the context of my remarks out. For example, nowhere where I've been quoted have I been quoted as saying that I think what happened there is not good. I don't support it, and I don't encourage more of it. I have not said that -- or I have said that, they've not quoted me on that. There's a number of things that they've left out, uh, most of it context. Uh, but it's just, it's amazing, all these years they could just tune in to my show and listen, but no, that's too tough. But now there's just a central clearinghouse for out-of-context quotes from this program. They can go there and present as news, even though it's just repackaged propaganda.

Imagine that. Rush says he's being quoted out of context with repackaged propaganda when his words are repeated verbatim. He says that nobody is quoting all the stuff where he condemns the torture. All they do is report stuff like this, taken from the same show yesterday:

Limbaugh on sincerity of public outrage

How many of you went out to social occasions over the weekend and this subject, this story came up? And how many of you wanted to really say, "I don't see the big deal here. This is war. These are people who tried to kill Americans." But you didn't say it or some variation of that because you were afraid because you were with a bunch of people who were start yelling at you that you for being insensitive or coarse or crude or whatever, so you said what you thought you had to say in order to get along during a controversial situation if this conversation came up wherever you were.

How many of you did that? How many of you did that? Admit it to yourself you don't have to raise your hands out there. I'm not, we're not counting hands out there. I want you to think about it because the fact of the matter is I think that's what most people are doing. I think most peo --that's where my optimism and faith in the people of this country remains steadfast. I don't think most people are that outraged by this. I don't thi -- let's put it this way, I don't think the public outrage nowhere near matches what we watched on television on Friday and yesterday exhibited by these holier than thou sanctimonious elected officials who are themselves acting and saying what they think you their voters want them to say and what you their voters expect to hear. ...

Folks, somebody asks what you think of this prisoner thing, just tell them the truth, and I guarantee you more people you tell the truth will say, "Yeah, I agree with you" than you know...

He'll be back on the little blue babies soon if people don't show some compassion and let him off the hook. Rush is not supposed to be called on his outrageous talk. He is supposed to be allowed to brainwash his 20 million dittoheads daily without interference. This is upsetting him.




digby 5/12/2004 03:51:00 PM |

 
More To The Story

I watched the video of Berg's beheading and it literally made me sick to my stomach. Do not watch it. It's a barbaric, horrible display of inhumanity. I wish I hadn't seen it. I'll never forget it.

The story surrounding Berg is getting very strange indeed. I don't know what is wrong, exactly, but something is. The government is not being straighforward about the circumstances and it's very wierd:

An American civilian who was beheaded in a grisly video posted on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims from his family, a coalition spokesman said Wednesday.

[...]

The video posted Tuesday showed a bound Berg in an orange jumpsuit — similar to those issued to prisoners held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was sitting in front of five men, their faces masked, as one read an anti-American text.

[...]

But unanswered questions remained about Berg in the days before he vanished, as well as where and when he was abducted.

Berg, who was Jewish, spoke to his parents March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30, according to his family in suburban Philadelphia.

But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24, was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said. His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.

Senor said that to his knowledge Berg "was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces."

Michael Berg told The Associated Press, however, that U.S. officials were "playing word games."

"The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do. The FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they're kidding?" the elder Berg said.

Calls by the AP to police in Mosul failed to find anyone who could confirm Berg was held there. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority runs Iraq, controlling not only the police, but the military and all government ministries.

FBI agents visited Berg's parents March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son's identity.

On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day, Berg was released. He told his parents he had not been mistreated.

Berg's father blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death, saying if his son had not been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave Iraq before the violence worsened.

[...]

Asked for details about Berg's last weeks in Iraq, Senor replied: "We are obviously trying to piece all this together, and there's a thorough investigation." He said he was reluctant to release details but did not say why.

"The U.S. government is committed to a very thorough and robust investigation to get to the bottom of this," Senor said, adding that "multiple" U.S. agencies would be involved and that the FBI would probably have overall direction.

Senor said that in Iraq, Berg had no affiliation with the U.S. government, the coalition or "to my knowledge" any coalition-affiliated contractor. But Senor would not specify why Iraqi police, who generally take direction from coalition authorities, had arrested him and held him.

Police in Mosul "suspected that he was engaged in suspicious activities," Senor said, refusing to elaborate. Berg was released April 6 and advised to leave the country, Senor added.

Michael Berg said that in early April, his son refused a U.S. offer to board an outbound charter flight because he thought the travel to the airport — through an area where attacks had occurred — was too risky.

State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said that on April 10, Berg told a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad that he wanted instead to travel to Kuwait on his own.

Berg apparently had an Iraqi in-law in the Mosul area, according to emails to his family.

Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg's confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because "he was still an American citizen."

This man was apparently just wandering around Iraq trying to find work on his own, unaffiliated with the US government. I had no idea that Americans could even go to Iraq on their own. If I recall correctly, Democratic lawmakers had a difficult time getting permission to go to Iraq over the last year, but perhaps that was because of security concerns.

I don't know what all this means. It's possible that it's just a strange and bizarre series of events that ended in horror. But you have to wonder why the FBI was supposedly answering to the Iraqi police in Mosul while the US military who supposedly control the country are denying that they had Berg in custody when it is pretty clear that they did. Something isn't right and from the way this AP report reads, this reporter agrees.





digby 5/12/2004 01:16:00 PM |

 
Outrage At The Outrage

Although Inhofe did not directly challenge American policy dictating adherence to the Geneva Convention in Iraq, he did stress the pre-eminence of aggressive intelligence-gathering when confronting terrorism.

"We're in a different kind of world than we've ever been in before,'" he said during the interview. "And I believe that we need to be tougher than we have ever have been before ... and it's imperative that we get intelligence."

At a time when the Bush administration has issued a series of apologies for the mistreatment of Iraqi captives, it might be easy to assume that Inhofe is consciously challenging the White House from its right flank. But the Oklahoma senator insists that he is stoutly supporting the administration and beleaguered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about his inflammatory opening statement to the committee, Inhofe said confidently, "I'm sure that the president was glad that I did it."

I'm sure he was. The man who mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life by pursing his lips and saying "Oh, please don't kill me," is definitely a kindred spirit.



digby 5/12/2004 11:29:00 AM |

 
Where Are They, Damn It!

Following up my post below, in reading today's NY Times description of the disagreement between general Taguba and Stephen Cambone yesterday at the hearings, I was reminded of something. First, here's the relevant excerpt from the Times:

[Taguba] told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it had been against the Army's doctrine for another Army general to recommend last summer that military guards 'set the conditions' to help Army intelligence officers extract information from prisoners. He also said an order last November from the top American officer in Iraq effectively put the prison guards under the command of the intelligence unit there. But the civilian official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, contradicted the general. He said that the military police and the military intelligence unit at the prison needed to work closely to gain as much intelligence as possible from Iraqi prisoners to prevent attacks against American soldiers. Mr. Cambone also said that General Taguba misinterpreted the November order, which he said only put the intelligence unit in charge of the prison facility, not of the military police guards.

Many of you will recall the following passage from Time Magazine last July:

Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, 'Are you in charge of finding WMD?' Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a littleknown deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. 'Who?' Bush asked.

This is pure speculation, but it is worth looking into what those interrogators were after in Abu Ghraib. Cambone framed it yesterday as "trying to prevent attacks against American soldiers.," which, I supose, you could interpret in a number of ways. But, if the focus was finding the non-existent WMD, then you'd have to ask whether the man whose "chief political obsession" was finding them gave the order to take off the gloves.



digby 5/12/2004 10:06:00 AM |

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

 
All The Way To The Top

The lawyer for one of the acused soldiers just said on MSNBC that the military was using the pictures to "break" prisoners who they suspected of knowing where the weapons of mass destruction were.

If that is the case, then I think Rumsfeld and the White House knew about the torture and may have ok'd it directly.

I had thought that the abuse was centered on intelligence about the insurgency, in which case it was feasible that it was something that got out of hand on the ground. But, the lack of WMD is the worst and most embarrassing of the myriad Bush failures, and a particular hobby horse of micro-managers Cheney and Rummy. If that was the focus of the interrogations then I think it goes all the way to the top.





digby 5/11/2004 02:37:00 PM |

 
A Respectful Dissent

I'm going to go out on a limb and disagree a bit with two of my favorite bloggers who also happen to be the most popular bloggers in the blogosphere. Let it never be said that I am a scared bunny Democrat.

First, let me just agree that deep sixing the idea of ideological purity in favor of partisanship is a really good one. We must accept that in order to win the presidency and achieve a majority in the congress the Democratic Party is going to have to welcome all stripes of Democrats, even the hated DLC. It's a fact of life kids.

On the other hand, Kos says:

We have become a party of appeasers, afraid to respond lest the Rove boogeyman jump out of the bushes and bite them in the rump. Dean helped kickstart a change in our party's culture, but it has temporarily receeded as the Kerry people consolidate their victory and take over the party apparatus. Kerry has rightly kept quiet as Bush digs his own grave, but where are our attack dog surrogates? Where are our Democrats being Democrats?

This, I think is unfair. They are out there every day doing exactly what we are exhorting them to do:



Sen. Edward Kennedy launched a blistering election-year attack on the Bush administration's candor and honesty Monday, saying President Bush has created "the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon."

The Massachusetts Democrat said that Iraq was never a threat to the United States and that Bush took the country to war under false pretenses, giving al Qaeda two years to regroup and plant terrorist cells throughout the world.

"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," Kennedy said at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Responding to the criticism, Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt called the veteran lawmaker the "lead political hatchet man" for Sen. John Kerry's campaign, adding that if it had been up to Kennedy, "Saddam Hussein would not be in prison but would still be in power."

[...]

Cong. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), a member of Congress since 1971 and a Korean war combat veteran, today called for the impeachment of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unless he resigns or President Bush removes him from office...


I think America and the world want us to show the outrage not with rhetoric but with action! And, if the President does not fire Secretary Rumsfeld, or if he does not resign, I think it is the responsibility of this Congress to file articles of impeachment and force him to out of office. Then, the whole world will know - not just the military - not just Americans, but the whole world will know what we stand for!"

[...]


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will unleash a broad indictment of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies at a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors today.

Her speech will be a stinging rebuke of the process that led to war, the White House’s immediate reconstruction plans and its schedule and strategy for transferring sovereignty in just 74 days.

[...]


While campaigning for John Kerry in Georgia today, Senator Max Cleland made the following statement in response to the right wing attacks:
For Saxby Chambliss, who got out of going to Vietnam because of a trick knee, to attack John Kerry as weak on the defense of our nation is like a mackerel in the moonlight that both shines and stinks.

[...]

MARGARET WARNER: Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin went to the Senate floor this morning to slam what he called "the Republican attack machine on John Kerry."

[...]

The fact that the media doesn't cover these thing widely (or that the blogosphere doesn't give a shit either) doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

Kos:

And it's not just them. The whole party apparatus, from top to bottom, is afraid. No Democrats talk about taking back the House. "Not until 2012" I'm told. And it's just recently that Democrats have started talking optimistic about the Senate, even though it's been ours to lose for a while.

Republicans are always confident of victory, even when they have little chance in hell. It's a problem when those idiots take us to war based on lies and best-case scenarios and all, but politically, it works. Our side needs a little backbone. It needs a little optimism. It needs to remember that the (D) next to their name means something larger than "little (R)".

This has nothing to do with ideology, whether you are a moderate or progressive or conservative or whatever. It has everything to do with establishing a clear and confident party identity. We still don't have one, and we won't have one so long as the party continues to run scared anytime a Republican says "boo!".

Our entire Party "apparatus," from top to bottom, is afraid. We have no backbone. We have no identity. Other than that, though, we are clearly the best qualified to run the country while the world is blowing up around us.

Why would Americans who are not already partisan Democrats vote for a Party whose rank and file members believe they have no identity and who run scared of Republicans, much less Osama bin laden? I'm not even sure why I would vote for such a party and I'm as partisan as it gets.

But then, I don't actually see the Democratic Party this way. Basically, it is assumed that the Party is a big loser because we are a bunch of sissies when in fact, the Democratic party won the last 3 presidential elections and is out of power in the congress by a mere handful of seats. And the fact that we aren't in the oval office today and aren't in control of the Senate is not because we are cowards.

But, there are reasons, and it behooves us to figure out what they really are.


Here's David Brock from his interview yesterday in Salon:

One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears -- their own leaders -- rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that "failed" diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.

Check out Buzzflash on any given day over the last two years and you will find some kind of nasty, demeaning over-the-top headline about Daschle. When he came out swinging, it was "Finally, Daschle shows some cojones," even though he often came out swinging. And there was almost no understanding of the fact that a legislative Party leader has to be more than just a liberal partisan. His job also requires him to help red state Senators get re-elected. I know that isn't something we liberals are happy about, but it is a reality and Daschle deserved a lot better from the left wing of his own party.

My fellow Democrats, this endless criticism of the Party for being too timid is naively playing into their hands. The problem is not the Democratic Party. It is the Republican Party and the media that serves them. This "Democrats are a buncha pussies" meme comes right out of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The Party's identity is as clear as its ever been. It's the party of fairness, freedom, opportunity and equality for all Americans, not just the few. That this has been distorted by 30 years of highly focused GOP propaganda is not surprising. But, this is what we've stood for since FDR and the only thing that's happened is that the Republicans have managed to convince a whole lot of people that Democrats are too cowardly to keep their towns and country safe, it is in their best interest for rich people not to pay taxes and that they won't be able to practice their religion if civil society doesn't become more religious.

This whole "we have met the enemy and he is us" business is looking inward when the most important thing we can do is start to look outward and deal practically and pragmatically with the real problem we are confronting --- an American public that is incresingly subject to right wing propaganda and a media that is more than happy to give it to them.

I don't have a problem criticizing outrageous examples of appeasement in the Party, like those of Lieberman and Miller. They are what they are and we have nothing to lose by exposing them. Neither do I have a problem criticizing Kerry or his advisors on strategy or policy. That's politics.

But, what I object to is criticizing the character of the Democratic Party in general and insulting the characters of Democrats specifically, who don't need to be called cowards all the time when they are in there fighting the good fight while we sit safely behind our keyboards and monitors dispensing advice.

There are real problems to be solved if we do win this election. And it is going to be very tough to do what needs to be done in the current environment.

As Brock warns in his excerpt:

With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media's wildings of 1993 -- which led to Clinton's impeachment four years later -- will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.

This is the central political problem of our times, not the alleged cowardice of the Democratic Party.

It's not smart to help them spread their memes. Nor is it a good use of our energy and passion to put a reformation of the Democratic Party at the top of the agenda as if we were a hundred votes shy of a majority in the House and under the thumb of a filibuster proof Senate.

We've been out of the White House for only four years and even that was the result of masterful GOP manipulation of the media and their unprecedented willingness to use the levers of power (and the threat of civil insurrection) in Florida and the Supreme Court.

We are not in the wilderness, we are in a death match for the soul of the United States of America at a time of enormous instability in the world (made far, far worse by Republicans) and a usurpation of democracy at home (at the hands of Republicans.) Our character isn't the question in this political battle. Theirs is.

And I would suggest that one of the first things we need to do a lot more of is what Atrios advises instead of calling Democratic politicians cowards all the time:

... the best way to encourage them is to support them when they go out on a limb.

digby 5/11/2004 02:24:00 PM |

 
So It Begins

A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq and said the execution was carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.


The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit — similar to a prisoner's uniform — who identified himself as Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor whose body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.


"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael, my mother's name is Susan," the man said on the video. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in ... Philadelphia."


After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" — "God is great." They then held the head out before the camera.


Berg was a small-business owner from the Philadelphia suburbs, his family said Tuesday.


Berg's family said they knew their son had been decapitated, but didn't know the details of the killing. When told of the video by an Associated Press reporter, Berg's father, Michael, and his two siblings hugged and cried.


"I knew he was decapitated before. That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public," Michael Berg said.


The video tape included a statement by one of the executioners:


"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused."


"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."


The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American." It was unclear whether al-Zarqawi — a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden — was shown in the video, or was claiming responsibility for ordering the execution.

I guess this puts to rest the meme that the torture was a brilliant tactical maneuver that scared the quivering Arabs into compliance.

But, I fear that not only Iraq is going to end up in a civil war from all these mistakes. The US may end up having another one of its own, as well. I think it's fair to say that the sadistic wing nut contingent is going to explode over this.

I continue to be amazed at those starry-eyed neocons like David Brooks who aparently made it through half a century on this planet without realizing that a war of choice is antithetical to the goal of spreading freedom and democracy by virtue of the fact that war itself is defined by violence and inhumanity on a grand scale. Why they didn't see this very elementary contradiction in their grand plan I will never know. (Perhaps it is no accident or conspiracy, after all, that conservative intellectuals aren't successful in academia. Perhaps it's simply because they are not very bright.)

We are now into a cycle of revenge that is unfortunately going to be stoked rather than redirected by the moron in the White House.

Get ready for some Western aphorisms. I can feel them coming on. Ride 'em Cowboy.





digby 5/11/2004 10:31:00 AM |

 
GOP Patsies

"When Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio) went on an inspection trip to several Persian Gulf countries in the summer of 2002, he was dazzled by the state-of-the-art command centers, airstrips and other facilities being built there for the U.S. military."

"But he was also troubled. Some of what he saw or learned from military briefers had not been approved by the House Appropriations Committee panel on military construction, which he then chaired. 'I knew I didn't have that kind of money,' he quipped recently."

"Hobson's inquiries ultimately led to a modest tightening of controls over the Pentagon's ability to move money between military accounts without prior approval from Congress. But the episode has sparked concerns on the part of some lawmakers that the Bush administration largely bypassed Congress as it expanded installations in the Persian Gulf region before the war with Iraq."

"President Bush has acknowledged that months before Congress voted an Iraq war resolution in October 2002, he approved about 30 projects in Kuwait that helped set the stage for war, with 'no real knowledge or involvement' of Congress, according to Plan of Attack, a new book by Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post."

This is the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors, kids. I know there are no blowjobs involved and I know that Hitlery had nothing to do with it, but this is the real deal. When a president spends money explicitly authorized by the congress for something else on a war that the congress and the people of the US have yet to even debate much less authorize, it's a violation of the constitution. When the money is spent on no-bid contracts between the US government and the president's political contributors in secret, it is a crime.

I wonder if the Republicans in congress are ever going to get sick of being Bush's bitches?




digby 5/11/2004 10:19:00 AM |

 
Because We're So Good, Part XXIV

Last week I mentioned the insane James Inhofe's drooling rant on the Chris Matthews show. Today, he showed the whole world that the President of the United States is not the only powerful American politician who has a brain the size of a walnut:

Sen. Inhofe (R-OK): First of all, I regret I wasn't here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it's better that I wasn't because as I watch this outrage that everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners I have to say and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.

The idea that these prisoners, they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

John McCain walked out of the room when Inhofe put on his little show. According to CNN, asked if he agreed with Inhofe's statement McCain said "No way."

FoxNews however is celebrating Inhofe's statement of "outrage at the outrage." The "journalist" Asman, is now screaming at Laurence Korb telling him that his own son guarded "very bad people" who were trying to kill Americans.

Keep it up boys. I don't think it's likely that more than 40% of Americans --- tops --- are sadistic scumbags like the very religious Inhofe and the fair and balanced Asman. And even a large number of them don't like to think of themselves that way.

Over on CNN, Blitzer just announced that Inhofe will be his guest today. He's a new GOP Super Star. Gosh, except for the whole fomenting of rage against Americans all around the planet and making the prospect of Americans being taken captive an invitation to torture thing, I'd say it was a good day.

On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to spending the rest of my life and watching every other American spend the rest of his or her life paying the price for Mr Inhofe's macho posturing. He has the right to free speech, for sure. But, maybe John McCain should give him a little taste of what it's like to be a "guilty" POW.

Quote via Kicking Ass



digby 5/11/2004 09:39:00 AM |

Monday, May 10, 2004

 
I'm Melllllting....

If it is possible for Fred Barnes to be a bigger whore, I don't know know how.

On the "Roundtable" today he actually attempted to pass off the argument that we shouldn't be showing these pictures because it violates the Geneva Convention to show pictures of POWs. And further it is wrong to embarrass these prisoners by putting their pictures on the front page of the NY Times.

I'm not kidding.

Perhaps we should agree to only show the pictures of tortured Iraqis who have hoods on their heads or are dead. That would solve the problems.

Now, I'm listening to Jonah Goldberg say that the media is overreacting and besides they've never shown a partial birth abortion live on television so why are they showing this stuff?

I'm not kidding.

Maybe if they keep throwing ridiculous rationalizations for their Dear Leader's utterly bankrupt Iraq adventure at the wall, there's a possibility that the splatter will start to look like a reasonable excuse. Kind of like that Idaho potato that everybody said looked like the Virgin Mary.




digby 5/10/2004 10:27:00 PM |

 
Contracting Viruses

I've been waiting for someone to report this. (I had an inkling, but it's bigger than I thought.) The private contractor-GOP gravy train (Salon)

Blackwater, the firm that guards Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, and whose men were killed at Fallujah, has hired the well-connected Alexander Strategy Group to guide it through the current publicity storm and help influence Congress on whatever rules are generated to govern private militias in war zones, according to the Hill newspaper.

Alexander may turn out to be a clever choice: Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is Alexander's chairman. Tony Rudy, another former top DeLay operative, and Karl Gallant, who once ran DeLay's leadership PAC, are also onboard.

Blackwater also works other angles. One of the firm's founders is Michigan native Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. His father, Edgar Prince, helped religious right leader Gary Bauer found the Family Research Council in 1988. Erik Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. But Blackwater is a relative newcomer to the Washington influence game, especially compared with CACI and Titan, which have been trailblazers.

DeVos, by the way, is Amway --- and one of the wierdest people on the planet.

This Prince/Bauer/DeVos angle nicely represents the GOP axis of evil. Defense contractors, religious zealots and big wierd money.

digby 5/10/2004 08:18:00 PM |

 
Simply The Best

It's hard to believe, but Julia doesn't agree with Junior and Big Time that Rummy is the bestest darned SecDef the country has ever had:

See, I would have probably gone with George Marshall, who was - when he wasn't busy planning the Meuse-Argonne offensive which caused Germany to give up in World War One, becoming a Brigadier General, being named the Army Chief of Staff and serving in that capacity for the duration of World War Two (he was credited by Winston Churchill with planning the Allied victory) and serving as Secretary of State and subsequently the president of the International Red Cross - the architect of the Marshall Plan, which is considered by many (clearly delusional) people to be the single US initiative most responsible for keeping Europe out of the hands of the Russians after World War Two and preventing the mistakes that were made after World War One from being repeated and possibly setting off World War Three. "

But, did Campbell Brown call him a Rock Star? Did Midge Dector write a gushy semi-erotic paeon to his manliness? Was he hot, hot, hot?

I didn't think so.


digby 5/10/2004 06:59:00 PM |

 
Hoping For Armageddon

Ok. I think it may be time to start thinking outside the box. This can't be just incompetence. Nobody could be this stupid, not even Crusader Codpiece. There must be some underlying reason why they are compelled to do the absolute wrong thing every single time.

Today's little tribute to Rumsfeld was completely inexplicable by ordinary standards. It's bad enough that Bush refused to fire the asshole. But, to go out and make a point of saying that the country "owes him a debt of gratitude" is the equivalent of pouring boric acid into an open wound.

Is Cheney reading the Left Behind series aloud at cabinet meetings or something?

Arab commentators reacted with shock and disbelief on Monday over President Bush's robust backing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld against calls for his resignation.

Critics had called for him to quit after the furor over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners but analysts, editors and ordinary Arabs were united in their condemnation of Bush who said the United States owed Rumsfeld a "debt of gratitude."

"After the torture and vile acts by the American army, President Bush goes out and congratulates Rumsfeld. It's just incredible. I am in total shock," said Omar Belhouchet, editor of the influential Algerian national daily El Watan.

"Bush's praise for Rumsfeld will discredit the United States...and further damage its reputation, which is already at a historic low in the Arab world," he added.

[...]

"After Mr. Bush's decision to keep Rumsfeld, all their apologies seem like lip service," Dubai-based political analyst Jawad al-Anani told Reuters. "Mr. Rumsfeld would have certainly lost his job if the prisoners were American."

"The United States is spending so much money by setting up Alhurra television and Radio Sawa to improve its image in the Arab world...How can it reconcile that with keeping a man who has insulted every Arab through the abuses of Iraqi prisoners," added Anani, a former Jordanian foreign minister.

University of Algiers professor Mahmoud Belhimeur agreed.

"I cannot believe the United States reacts the way an authoritarian regimes would. Bush should have done the honorable thing and fired Rumsfeld," he said.

[...]

A Saudi businessman, who asked not to be named, said keeping Rumsfeld would be seen as Washington's quiet approval of the abuse.

"This just confirms that what is happening in Iraq in general, and especially what is happening in Abu Ghraib is sanctioned by the American administration and that is a hell of a position to be in.

"I see no advantage in keeping Rumsfeld. Bush should be building bridges with the outside world."

digby 5/10/2004 04:44:00 PM |

 
Little Birdies

Howard Kurtz, helpfully giving the wing-nuts a little bucking up during these dark days of dog and reality bites, says that the Democrats are panicking about John Kerrys' campaign. It's not surprising since Democrats in general seem to have a penchant for jumping the gun this year. Jayzuz. Haven't we been down this road already?

To all those nervous nellies, I just have four little words: Shut The Fuck Up.


digby 5/10/2004 04:21:00 PM |

 
Intellectual Tough Guy

Before it disappears into the ether, I'd like to point out that Wesley Clark's appearance on Meat The Press yesterday should put to rest any lingering questions about his political loyalties.

Not only was his analysis right on point, as usual, but he was very tough, saying that it would be patriotic for Rumsfeld to resign and that we should unload (war criminal Ambassador) Negroponte, something that I haven't heard anyone but Harkin even remotely address. He said in no uncertain terms that the responsibility for this debacle goes all the way to the Oval Office.

You can tell he was effective by the blustering he elicited from that mannequin in a suit they call a Senator, John Warner.

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, I'm very encouraged that the Congress is taking a very strong look at this. I think there are systemic failures here. But I think it does come, as Senator Levin says, from a broader perception, an announcement within the administration, really, that international law is not that important. It's legalisms. What counts is American force.

And, you know, those Geneva Conventions were put in place to protect Americans. They were put in place to protect our men and women in case they be taken. And the people who were detained in Iraq, the prisoners there, the detainees, they were all covered under the Geneva Convention--they should have been.

And so there's more than a systemic failure. There's a failure of leadership that goes right to the top. This is a presidential leadership problem. He is the commander in chief. He announces it virtually every day on the campaign trail and he, himself, must take responsibility for this because it reflects his command influence.

SEN. WARNER: Tim, could I just interrupt? We've got to be cautious because I'm convinced that the Department of Defense is doing everything they can to get the facts out in the public. I was assured yesterday that all the new photos are being reviewed by the lawyers and so forth and will be forthcoming to the Congress...[blah, blah, blah]

[...]

MR. RUSSERT: Secretary Rumsfeld has written throughout his career "Rumsfeld's Rules" and this is one of them: "Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance."

General Clark, do you think Secretary Rumsfeld should resign?

GEN. CLARK: Well, I think there's really two issues on this. One is his effectiveness and he said he would resign if he felt he couldn't be effective. But I think it's really a question of the credibility of the U.S. mission and how the United States is perceived in the world. I don't think his effectiveness has been compromised. I think he can still give orders; I think people will still take them. There's no issue with that. The real question is: "How is the United States perceived and how seriously are we perceived to be taking this issue?"

I think it would be very patriotic if Secretary Rumsfeld resigned. But I do think that the issue goes beyond the secretary of defense. I don't think we should indict the men and women in the armed forces. I think 99.9 percent of them are doing a great job over there and I hope the American people will support them. I certainly do. But I do think that when something like this happens that the prima facia notion of this is this goes right to the top. What did the president know? What was the atmosphere that the president created? How hard was he pushing?

We know there was a lot of pressure to get intelligence information from these interrogations. And the Pentagon was the action agency on this working with the Central Intelligence Agency in crafting the rules. But the atmosphere in which the Geneva Conventions were more or less set to one side, apparently, would have come from the top.


[...]

MR. RUSSERT: Let me just turn to the real issue here and that is who is responsible, who's being blamed, who's being court-martialed


GEN. CLARK: Well, there is a systemic problem here, and we do need to get to the bottom of it. We do need intelligence information. Our soldiers have to maintain standards of conduct. And General Taguba's report, I think, got to many of the key issues that are involved; more needs to be done.

But beyond the specific issue that's here involved and who was responsible and how do we prevent this in the future is the larger issue of the success or failure of the mission in Iraq. And that's what this prisoner abuse calls into question.

We know there was no linkage between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11. We know now there was no imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction, the last claim of the administration is to do good in Iraq by providing democracy, an opportunity for democracy and higher standards. And here we are with this compromising the higher standards that we believe in. So it's a very, very significant issue as we try to win the hearts and the minds of the people in Iraq and promote our views of the right way to govern around the world.


[...]

MR. RUSSERT: ... Murtha...expressed serious doubts that those remedies are even faint possibilities, given current military deployments, a lack of support from NATO allies and widespread outrage over the mistreatment of Iraqis prisoners of war."

"Coming from a senior appropriator with close ties to the Pentagon, Murtha's bleak analysis led many colleagues to surmise that he believes a democratic Iraqi is a lost cause."

General Clark, do you share that pessimism?

GEN. CLARK: I think there's a greater than 50/50 chance, let's say a 2:1 chance, of a catastrophic early end to this mission.

MR. RUSSERT: What does that mean?

GEN. CLARK: That means the Iraqi people will simply say, "We want the Americans out of here." You'll see a large outpouring of public animosity in Baghdad and elsewhere, a million Iraqis demonstrating in the streets of Baghdad against us. And, Tim, we're only going to be there and be effective if the majority of the Iraqi people want us there. That's what this mission's success hinges on.

All of the issues, international involvement, more troops and all that--all of it is measured by: Do the Iraqi people believe that we're actually helping and contributing to their betterment or are we causing problems?

And the Iraqi people are, step by step, turning against this mission. What we need to do right now is a major change in policy. We need to unload John Negroponte after the 30th of June. He cannot run that country as the American ambassador.

We've got to have an international assistance organization like we did in the Balkans, where other nations can participate, and the Iraqis will understand that it's the world trying to help them; it's not America telling them what to do.

Update: For anyone who's interested in going deeper into Wes Clark's ideas about how to fix this cock-up in Iraq, read "Broken Engagement" in the May issue of The Washington Monthly.


digby 5/10/2004 01:26:00 PM |

 
Seeds Of The Insurgency

Baghdad's art scene show US abuse :

The alabaster sculpture of a crouching naked man, with his hands tied and his head covered by a hood is on display at a Baghdad gallery.

It bears a striking resemblance to some of the shocking photographs that emerged last week of Iraqi prisoners abused by their American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison.

The 38cm sculpture with the words "We are living American democracy" inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago.

'We knew what went on at Abu Ghraib,' the artist Abdul-Kareem Khalil said on Saturday. "The pictures did not surprise me."

digby 5/10/2004 12:36:00 PM |

 
Bleeding Money

The invasion of Iraq is not only the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory, it is also the most expensive strategic blunder in modern times.

With troop commitments growing, the cost of the war in Iraq could top $150 billion through the next fiscal year — as much as three times what the White House had originally estimated. And, according to congressional researchers and outside budget experts, the war and continuing occupation could total $300 billion over the next decade, making this one of the costliest military campaigns in modern times.

As a measure of the Bush administration’s priorities in the war on terrorism, it has spent about $3 in Iraq for every $1 committed to homeland security, experts say.

That divide may be growing.

The Pentagon says its monthly costs for Operation Iraqi Freedom shot up from $2.7 billion in November to nearly $7 billion in January, the last month for which ithas provided figures. Since then, the number of troops has jumped by 20,000 to 135,000, and the bloody insurgency has grown.

Defense officials initially said the troop increases were temporary, but last week they changed course and said they planned to maintain the higher levels through 2005, along with increased numbers of tanks and other heavy military equipment. The tempo of military operations has increased sharply in response to a wave of lethal attacks, suggesting the costs still may be climbing.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have started to express deep concern over the costs and the way in which the Bush administration is choosing to cover them.

They contend that the White House has been relying on budgeting stratagems to conceal the overall expense, at least until after the election in November. And lawmakers worry that Congress is going to be forced to do something the White House has said until now was not necessary: Chop away at other government programs to cover the costs of an occupation that has no end in sight.

“DOD (Department of Defense) is being more than customarily opaque with us, ” Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in an interview. “We’re trying to pool our efforts and share information and piece something together, which is the only way to figure out what it is really going to cost us. But this is basic information. This is not unorthodox to get these numbers. It’s not asking for somebody to rework the whole books. I think they are embarrassed by the level of the costs.”

By contrast, Operation Desert Storm, begun in 1991 after Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded Kuwait, cost about $84 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. But because the United States was part of a broad coalition of wealthy countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Saudi Arabia, about 90 percent of those costs were paid for by America’s allies.

But you know, Junior, in his ongoing quest to prove to his father that he is a man, decided that it was a good idea to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself and pay for the entire mistake ourselves. Besides, Chalabi and Wolfowitz promised that the war would pay for itself and that made so much sense.


Via catch.com


digby 5/10/2004 12:00:00 PM |

 
Talent On Loan from Stalin

I should have known.

The freeper screed I posted below came directly from GOP cult leader, Rush Limbaugh, on his show last Thursday:

All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, 'Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?' I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver.

[...]


Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

We are at war with Iraq. And the Iraqis are trying to kill us. We are simply teaching them who's in charge ...

...when we aren't liberating them and creating a liberal democracy that will be a model for all the tyrannical regimes in the region, that is.

Rush is not off the reservation. He knows what he's supposed to say to keep his dittoheads in line. I have little doubt that Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, (despite their horror toward Democratic "hate speech") are on the same page. They always are.

Update: Media Matters is keeping the heat on Rush and he doesn't like it.

You want to kill the snake, go for the head.


digby 5/10/2004 10:09:00 AM |

Sunday, May 09, 2004

 
Desert Cakewalk

Sadoun Dulame read the results of his latest poll again and again. He added up percentages, highlighted sections and scribbled notes in the margins.

No matter how he crunched the numbers, however, he found himself in the uncomfortable position this week of having to tell occupation authorities that the report they commissioned paints the bleakest picture yet of the U.S.-led coalition's reputation in Iraq. For the first time, according to Dulame's poll, a majority of Iraqis said they'd feel safer if the U.S. military withdrew immediately.

A year ago, just 17 percent of Iraqis wanted the troops gone, according to Dulame's respected research center in Baghdad. Now, the disturbing new results mirror what most Iraqis and many international observers have said for months: Give it up. Go home. This just isn't working.

The prisoner-abuse scandal is only the latest in a string of serious setbacks to the U.S. administration's ambitions for democracy in Iraq. Before that, one essential political ally was lost - the country's Shiite Muslim majority - and another discredited - Ahmed Chalabi and other members of the U.S.-appointed governing council.

A persistent guerrilla campaign is sending dozens of U.S. troops home in flag-draped coffins, and more than half the country is unemployed. Rebuilding projects the coalition started and then abandoned because the worsening security drove away contractors only add to the country's dismal landscape and dim hopes for the future.

[...]

Outside of officialdom, there is little appetite for allowing Americans to stay. Anyone still talking about liberation is shushed as disingenuous, especially now that the image of a Saddam Hussein statue crashing to the ground is no longer symbolic of the coalition's intentions. Instead, many Iraqis said, today's American presence is best summed up in photos of a laughing female American soldier leading a nude Iraqi prisoner by a dog leash.

Dulame's grim poll doesn't even take in the prisoner scandal's effects. It was conducted in mid-April in seven Iraqi cities. A total of 1,600 people were interviewed, and the margin of error is 3 percentage points. The findings, which must go first to coalition authorities, have not yet been made public.

According to Dulame, director of the independent Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, prisoner abuse and other coalition missteps now are fueling a dangerous blend of Islamism and tribalism. For example, while American officials insist that only fringe elements support the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a majority of Iraqis crossed ethnic and sectarian lines to name him the second most-respected man in Iraq, according to the coalition-funded poll.

Other than that, things are going really well.


Via The Poorman




digby 5/09/2004 06:00:00 PM |

 
Bush's Base

Via reader jh Woodyat I'm informed of some fascinating analysis of the prisoner abuse scandal over in freeperville: Did the Arab "Street" Get a Message We Didn't Mean to Send?

The POW photos are having an unintended effect on the Arab "Street" and the "resistance."

Amidst all the apologies, I want to suggest we all (Hillary Clinton here) take a deep breath and consider something that no one in the administration or Congress has (publicly) considered:

By now, everyone pretty well knows that Arab societies base everything on power and perceptions of power. In part, that is why so many Freepers and conservatives got their panties in a bunch because it appeared in public like "apologizing" was a sign of weakness.

Ah, my friends. You aren't thinking like an Arab. The "street" and, indeed, the leadership doesn't trust much of what we say---they only look at what we do. It would have made no difference if Bush formally apologized and sent each detainee a bouquet of flowers---the "street" would see that as a sham, a pretense, a distraction from the "real" policy.

No, I suggest something else. That the Arab "street" and especially the "resistance" has taken from those photos a message we didn't intend to send, but one that strikes fear into the very heart of them---a message of pure power and dominance. The submissive positions of these "tough" Iraqi men under the heels and attached to the leashes of WOMEN (and relatively small women, at that) sends a very powerful message to the "street."

Don't screw with the Americans. Oh, they'll "apologize," be we know that when the hearings are over, and the attention is off, they can do what they want.

I want to reiterate: this is foreign to our way of thinking. Unless you're a hard-core Democrat, you don't pathologically lie to achieve your objectives. But we must start thinking like the enemy.

Has anyone noticed that we virtually walked into Najaf this week, unopposed? Al-Sadr did nothing. Has anyone noticed that Fallujah is quiet? Very few roadside bombs/suicide bombs in the last couple of days. This could all change, but it is eerie that when a message of power is sent out all over the Middle East---unintentionally on our part---it resonates. Big time.

Yes, yes. Americans have the most humongous, elephantine dicks on the planet. Everybody knows that. Especially freepers. They also have the smallest brains.

In one sense, this person is right. The "Arab street" doesn't believe these half-hearted apologies for one minute. Rummy's still running things, Bush can't spit out the word "sorry" without choking and the plan continues unabated. Whether they are all shaking and weeping like little girls under the shadow of our mighty manhood is another story. I guess this "analyst" forgot that these guys lived under Saddam, who up until about five minutes ago was universally condemned for doing exactly what this fellow now praises the US for doing.

After having to endure the hate-filled rhetoric of Democrats, David "National Greatness" Brooks must be so proud to be politically aligned with fine examples of civil discourse like Rush Limbaugh and these real Americans:

It's like judo. You turn your weaknesses into strength. The scandal is a weakness, and we turn it into a strength. Right now, every would-be terrorist is going to have horrible nightmares of sexual torture before they light off their next bomb.

Sadly, American troops are now having the same nightmares. Which is why they aren't too happy right now. Their jobs just got exponentially more dangerous.

Excellent point. Also note this: the prisoners chose to submit to this humiliation. They could have defied us and chosen their 72 virgins. How strong is their faith? I believe that the Japanese were much more devoted to their faith than the Islamics. God willing, I do not expect to see as many suicide bombers as there were kamakazis back during WWII. Right or wrong, some of the guards called their bluff, and we can learn from that.

It was the prisoners choice to live or die and they chose to live. So it's their fault they were sexually tortured and humiliated. Buncha babies.

You know? You may be on to something. We know we're dealing with cowards. Perhaps alSadr crapped his kaftan when he saw those photos and pictured himself naked... barking like a dog with a chain on his neck... at the end of a leash held by a 90 pound woman sucking on a Pall Mall.

[...]

Can you imagine us apologizing and offering cash reparations to jailed lower-level Nazi crimminals during WW2 for "humiliating" them? The American people would've been horrified by such a suggestion. .....but back then we were made of much sterner stuff.

That's so true. As our National Security Advisor said, "we liberated the German people from Hitler" just as we are liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam. It's just a matter of sorting out who's naughty and nice. Luckily, American troops can automatically tell the good Iraqis we are liberating from the bad Iraqis we are fighting. The prisoners who were being beaten raped and tortured must be guilty of something or they wouldn't be there, right?

The only [thing] that would have made those pictures even worse,to the "Arab Street",would have been if these pictures also showed women rubbing bacon all over those "brave" soldiers for Allah.

Good idea. But, really, why are we playing these silly games. Concentration camps are one proven method to deal with these sub-humans.

On the other hand:

I don't know if this sexual harassment will do the job. Personally I would like us to locate this piss-ant called Al-Sadr and the mosque he is located in. Once located we drop a MOAB (Muslims & Other Arab Bastards) bomb. I figure a few of these, probably less than 10-20 would shut the Arab-Muslim's up.

They don't say Americans are the pargmatists of the world for nothing.

Yeah, you nailed it. This stuff is so lame compared to other wars. I actually thought the pictures were a bit comical. As the poster states, the pictures may have made a very large point to a culture which treats it's women like crap. And guess what? NO ONE GOT HURT! Seeing a human being jump from a burning sky scraper; now that's NOT funny. And guess what? That person died and not one Arab or Muslim leader was asked to apologize, nor did any apologize. In fact, those societies cheered at what happened on 911. I say screw 'em, and I say screw the libs who are demanding this non-stop apology.

Until we get an apology from all the Arabs who had nothing to do with 9/11, we can do whatever we want (and to all those woman hating liberals who support them, too.)

Here's another feminist for Bush:

If I were a Muslim woman and saw that tiny woman pretending she had an AK-14 pointed at their hubby's cajoles, I be saying let me get you a real handheld rocket propeller with an extra round and send him to his 72 Virgins. I'll help pull the trigger!

Muslim women (if they have seen any of these pics) must be grateful that finally the "men" are being abused and not the females in Iraqi.

I don't condone what was done and evidently there is more to come (no pun intended). Geez, these guys were in "prison" and another thought is that maybe a lot of Iraqi's recognized some of their former torturers and were pleased that Allah had sent such "tormentors" to revenge these evil doers.

One last thing! A pair of Hane's women's panties???? Get real, most of the guys in SanFran would have gone for the Victoria Secret thong with matching lace bra.

I hope we get this crap behind us and win the war on terror and have a turnover on June 30th that makes every sacrifice our Country and our Military worthwhile.

The DEMS are fiddling while Rome is burning. Clinton's "I didn't have sex with the woman is more abusive to me as an American than any of the pics I've seen so far!

Well, there you have it.



I think the way to fight off evil is to do some acts of goodness. See, the great strength of the country is the hearts and souls of our fellow Americans. And the best way to declare our position, the best way to make our position known to the world, is through what I like to call the gathering momentum of millions of acts of kindness and compassion and decency; acts of compassion and decency which take place on a daily basis, in all kinds of ways. George W. Bush


Or we could pour buckets of pig blood all over the naked prisoners.

It's all good.




digby 5/09/2004 12:09:00 PM |

 
New Insurgency

Iraqi scholars plan US opposition

The "tough" thing is, their opposition sounds suspiciously like it might end up as some form of pluralistic democracy:

What is becoming increasingly accepted as the inherent inability of the US-led coalition to come to grips with the situation - further exacerbated by the range of opposition forces ranged against it - has left a political vacuum, a vacuum that this initiative hopes to help fill.

The senior Shia cleric behind the initiative, Sheikh Jawad al-Khalisi, brought together some 500 prominent Iraqis - Shia, Sunni, Arab nationalist and Kurdish.

They hope to carve out a path, free from American and other foreign influences, along which the majority of Iraqis could be persuaded to move.

The conference set up a 16-member panel, pledged to boycott any US-sponsored political group, including the Iraqi Governing Council, to re-establish the national army and to restore sovereignty under the auspices of the United Nations.

Sheikh Khalisi's opposition to the US programme seems bound to cause hostility in some quarters.

But the idea of a broad and wholly Iraqi initiative may also win hearts and minds among the local population.

Heavens to Betsy, Donald. Do you think they'll agree to let the US keep its four planned permanent military bases and run their economy like a Cato Institute wet dream? I sure hope so because if not they might find themselves on the receiving end of a little R21.


Link via Common Prejudice



digby 5/09/2004 11:05:00 AM |

 
Time To Move On

Larry Eagleberger is now appearing on national television programs drunk, apparently. He says that this hand-wringing has got to stop. We have 50 years of history showing that we are the good guys and if others in the world don't understand that then there is something wrong with them.





digby 5/09/2004 10:33:00 AM |

Friday, May 07, 2004

 
The Daily Brew:

We Are All Wearing The Blue Dress Now

Whether Republicans like it or not, if George Bush is elected in the fall, the entire world will view the election as American approval of the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. It might not be fair, it might not be reasonable, but it is nevertheless reality. Apologies, prosecutions, firings and courts martial will not be enough to expunge the stain this scandal has placed on the honor of the United States. The pictures are simply too graphic. The abuses are simply too horrible. If George Bush is elected President, the entire world will view the election, at a minimum, as tacit approval of these events.

Read the rest.

Brew is correct. If we do not turn Bush out of office, the American people will no longer have the benefit of the doubt. Up until now, most of the world has realized that Junior got in on a hummer. But, if we legitimately elect this idiot, we will be seen to have validated all the actions of this administration.





digby 5/07/2004 10:22:00 PM |

 
The Method To Their Madness

Keep in mind that General Taguba estimated that more than 60% of those detained at Abu Ghraib are innocent of any crimes:

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation -match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands.

"There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends".

Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture", he said.

Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.

"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," said the former Special Boat Squadron officer, who asked that his identity be withheld for security reasons.

Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques