Saturday, September 30, 2006
The Idealist in Chief
Oh Nelly! Mark Foley, Republican Congressman from Florida, resigns over a scandal involving him in sexually explicit instant messaging conversations with pages. Apparently one or two of them felt like they were being harassed and so came forward, although the situation isn’t entirely clear right now.
I’m not big on guilt by association, but it’s hardly an anomaly that Karl Rove was buddy buddy with Jack Abramoff. Nor is it an anomaly that the Administration lied about how many meetings Abramoff had with White House staff: Scott McClellan said three meetings. There were really 13. This is not shocking seeing as the administration repeatedly intervened on behalf of Abramoff’s clients.
It makes financial sense for GM to hire Sean Hannity as a spokesman for a new ad campaign they’re coming out with, as he’s the second-biggest radio talk show personality in the country and has 13 million listeners. Morally, however, it’s the equivalent of hiring Joe McCarthy.
More on the cover-up at HUD about illegally giving contracts to political supporters.
Bob Woodward dishes the dirt on the Drinky Administration’s lack of effort in prosecuting terrorists before 9/11.
The President of Kazakhstan is meeting with the White House today. He is a dictator who has recently crushed the democracy movement in his country, which has led our idealistic president to strengthen ties to the autocracy as part of his never-ending quest to spread democracy around the world. In Iraq, his personal democracy project, the Iraqi government has seen fit to crush free speech in an effort to strengthen the democracy.
But our idealistic president won’t stop there. In his quest to save people from brutal tyrannies he has decided that tough language will suffice to stop the genocide in Sudan.
It’s hard to be idealistic and to fight a War on Terra. That’s why the president needs the right to torture indefinitely-detained suspects. Thank God the Congress helped out and passed the recent detainee act.
The Administration’s idealistic quest is also made more difficult by the left-leaning mainstream media. Katie Couric interviewed Condi Rice recently and harassed her with such hardball questions as “Is it hard for you to have a social life?” and “How does one go about asking the Secretary of State out on a date?” This is important because one of the burning questions on all our minds is “How much action has Condi Rice been getting lately?”
More sexism from Michael Savage. There’s a healthy dollop of raging, unconcealed xenophobia in the same fricking paragraph. I would like to remind the world that MSNBC recently hired Savage despite his long history of mind-bogglingly unambiguous bigotry, only to have to fire him when (shock!) he unloaded on a gay caller with epithets.
The Darkest Blot
It’s rare for the mainstream media to seriously investigate a politician who isn’t either,
- a well known criminal or
- someone who’s already been indicted
I have never seen an organ of the mainstream media personally and directly challenge a member of Congress on an issue that doesn’t involve corruption like CNN has done recently when, rhetorically, in got in James Inhofe’s (R-OK) face and called him a fraud. This was a royal beat down.
Inhofe is, indeed, an anomaly. I have excoriated him on this website more than once before. In a party of propagandists, war criminals, and moral inbreds he actually stands out, which is quite an incredible feat. I would, once again, like to take this time to thank the voters of Oklahoma for sending this unregenerate idiot to the U.S. Senate.
Jim Jeffords is leaving the U.S. Senate after a remarkable 32 year career. I never agreed with a lot, if not most, of what Jeffords had to say, but he cast some truly courageous votes in his time and is leaving the Senate with class.
The New York Times recently came out with an editorial castigating the “compromise” military commissions legislation, saying it “will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts,” an analysis I agree with and have offered before. This legislation has passed the House and a nearly identical looks to pass the Senate. Harry Reid asserted that he might want some small changes to be made to the bill but that, in general, “we want to do this.” Way to take a principled stand, Harry. He did assert he would filibuster the FISA bill being bounced around the Senate, but for the love of God, the “opposition” party in Congress is set to OK “our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.” While Senate democrats are so terrified of being painted as soft on terror many of them cave to pressure from the united republican front and this bill looks to be enacted. As I wrote before, this is a national disgrace, or, as Patrick Leahy said, “the darkest blot on the conscience of the nation.” “Chickenshit,” in the words of one of my favorite authors, Jane Smiley. “Off the deep end,” in the words of David Corn. “The soul of our nation is in jeopardy,” in the words of Art Levine.
Meanwhile, how does Iraq look? Not so good, as usual.
Orifice and other right-wingers have been touting the high DOW Jones as proof that Drinky’s tax cuts are working, despite the facts. This kind of magical thinking is right in line with assertions that Drinky’s foreign policy is making America safer, despite record number of attacks on our troops abroad and an increase in terror attacks around the world every year he has been in office.
A tip o’ the hat to right-wing lunatic Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO), who asserted that gay marriage “is the most important issue that we face today.” I would like to take this time to thank the voters from her district in Colorado for sending a politician with a diagnosable mental illness to the U.S. House.
One small but extraordinary example of the self-censorship of the mainstream media, and another example of extraordinary media control.
Authoritarians Losing Control
Dissent endangers our troops. This has been a recurring theme in the GOP’s message, from the president counseling us against the dangers of “irresponsible debate” to Representative J.D. Hayworth on Monday telling us that things like the New York Times’ story and the public discussion are “putting lives in danger.” The Paper of Record is a favorite target of the right, and their antics are nothing new. Nixon famously threatened the New York Times, and Reagan threatened to prosecute any paper that published “national security information,” whatever that means. Don Rumsfeld has recently said that terrorists are “manipulating” the media.
You will find this language bouncing all around the right wing, and it’s difficult not to broad-brush them as all saying the same things. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called the torture at Abu Ghraib “hazing” and maintained that Iraq was safer than Washington, D.C.
Tony Snow continues to try and put a happy face on the NIE, but it is not very convincing. He is joined by the entire phalanx of right-wing commentators on the radio, who uniformly defended the NIE on their radio shows with a typical display of selective quotations and amazing mischaracterizations. Michael Medved had to stop himself as he almost said that there’s nothing in the NIE that indicates the terrorists in Iraq are gaining strength, instead pulling back and retreating into generalized talking points lacking in concrete references to the NIE. The actual text of the NIE put the lie to several statements the administration has issued recently, and the tone of the text was pessimistic regarding how quickly terrorism is spreading and how Iraq has become a “cause” for jihadists. Some have pointed out that Iraq has made our war against terrorism harder, including Larry Johnson, who cites the State Department’s statistics in pointing out the exponential increase in terror attacks after the invasion of Iraq.
The latest NIE on Iraq was completed long ago, but it seems (according to White House advisor Fran Townsend) that it won’t be declassified until well after the elections, in January of next year, of course.
All the debate about the NIE passes over the fact that Iraqis have wanted us out of their country for over a year now. Yet another poll of Iraqis has been released, the third in the last year or so. It says what the other two also said: over 70% of Iraqis want the US out within a year, and 79% maintain that US forces are having a negative influence in Iraq. This poll, of course, will be ignored like the previous two.
Another reason why the improving US economy isn’t benefiting a lot of workers.
Philip Slater has a good article at the Huffington Post. So does Cliff Schecter, who surveys some of the evidence of just how committed republicans were to fighting terrorism when Bill Clinton was in office.
Sadly enough, many democrats seem to support the “compromise” bill that will rewrite the War Crimes Act. This is disgraceful.
Catfight
Catfight! President Clinton gets combative with Mike Wallace, and Condi Rice strikes back by saying, contrary to Clinton’s remarks, "What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," and "We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.”
This has gotten a lot of buzz on Youtube and the internet in general, unfortunately. It’s a tempest in a teacup. All the pundits taking sides and snickering and saying petty things about Wallace or Clinton remind me of 18th century French courtiers gossiping about how the king threw a plate at a servant or something.
Of course, there is some dispute over how important terrorism was to the administration before 9/11, and Clinton was right in saying that he was criticized by many prominent republicans who speculated that Clinton’s actions against al Qaeda were motivated by a desire to distract the country from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And Richard Clarke did leave a strategy to fight al Qaeda for the Bush Administration.
Reverend Sheldon, previously discussed on this blog, bothers me because he and others of ilk are enmeshed with the republican power structure from top to bottom, regularly meeting and speaking with the likes of Tony Snow and Sean Hannity.
Thank God. There’s been a lot of speculation about what the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says. Mercifully, our president has decided to selectively declassify parts of it to end all the “speculation.” That should clear the whole thing up, with the president declassifying carefully selected parts of it. I’m sure his employees at the CIA have produced a sterling intelligence analysis that is in no way influenced by what their bosses want to hear.
John Bolton’s nomination to be the US ambassador to the UN is dead.
Here is some interesting accounting about the cost of rebuilding Iraq.
Swift Boat Veterans for Lies are campaigning hard to punish Jack Murtha for daring to suggest a withdrawal from Iraq and for daring to echo the opinions of his sources who told him the Haditha Incident looked like a senseless slaughter of unarmed civilians.
Alec Baldwin has a good article on the Huffington Post.
The torture issue isn’t going away, and many commentators have echoed my position, despite the continued defense of it by war criminals like John Yoo, who suddenly discovered new powers in the presidency once a republican occupied the office. This has been supported by a vast network of CIA prisons.
Disgrace
Disgrace.
Congress writes a “compromise” bill, legalizing torture while calling it a “compromise.” I agree with Glenn Greenwald in calling this bill, and the tepid and occasionally supportive language it has received from democrats, as evidence of just how “dysfunctional” and “sickly” our political institutions are.
Congress would have the power to specifically spell out which kinds of torture are prohibited. Beyond that, the President would have the sole statutory authority to determine the “alternative techniques” that would be administered to victims. His determinations would be unreviewable, and this legislation would prohibit anyone from even raising the issue of the Geneva Conventions.
This is administrative bullshit, a smokescreen to cover previous war crimes, and a tacit admission to the president that he can use whatever techniques he wants as long as he’s creative and can think outside the box of well-known, hardcore torture techniques like electrocutions.
Forget about the Geneva Conventions. In fact, forget about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Our nation’s word is worth horse pucky on the international stage as we’ve simply ignored the most basic laws of common decency and international governance that we allegedly agreed to follow several decades ago.
Glenn has his excellent Salon.com article here, and Marty Lederman’s good analysis is here. The Wall Street Journal’s celebration is here. Driftglass has a winner up here.
Terrified of being painted as “weak” on national defense, democrats in Congress made no effort to add their opinions to those of republicans like John McCain who called for a less morally repugnant bill. They watched from the sidelines. They were “as mute and neutral as stone.” They were, in short, chickenshits.
But bad fascism was the order of the day last week. The republican bill to legalize the president’s torture program banned anything that might result in disfigurement or gross physical wounds while allowing other torture techniques that are more subtle. So sleep deprivation, stress positions, induced hypothermia, and other tools of the trade will apparently be allowed. Call it pussy fascism: we’re totally willing to torture people, just not in a way that leaves gross wounds.
This, sadly enough, is fine with many in America like Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, a purportedly religious organization that, frankly, mixes nationalism with religion in a way that can only be found in the right wing of this country. The website is, of course, red, white, and blue. A banner proudly proclaims that “The homosexual activist movement and pedophiles” (they’re all the same, of course) “are linked together by a common goal: To gain access to children for seduction into homosexuality.”
I’m done with these people. And why they have access to McCain is beyond me. I have, from time to time, questioned the judgment of Catholic priests, bishops, and popes, but never have I seen a Presbyterian minister as political (and as demented) as Louis Sheldon. Drifty’s blog once again comes to mind…
Sept 20
Key US allies in the War on Terra has made it clear recently that they think a less militarily intensive approach is justified.
Robert Scheer cites an AP report that 14,000 foreign nationals are being held without charges in foreign prisons at the direction of the United States.
Sidney Blumenthal has a good piece about the first few errant years of the Bush Administration.
While the administration focuses seemingly exclusively on Iraq, danger grows in Afghanistan as the numbers of potential suicide bombers “waiting in the wings in Pakistan's restive Waziristan and the adjoining parts of southern Afghanistan” grow into the hundreds.
The media continues to ignore reports of corrupt hiring practices revealed in the Washington Post regarding the reconstruction of Iraq.
Robert Scheer cites an AP report that 14,000 foreign nationals are being held without charges in foreign prisons at the direction of the United States.
Sidney Blumenthal has a good piece about the first few errant years of the Bush Administration.
While the administration focuses seemingly exclusively on Iraq, danger grows in Afghanistan as the numbers of potential suicide bombers “waiting in the wings in Pakistan's restive Waziristan and the adjoining parts of southern Afghanistan” grow into the hundreds.
The media continues to ignore reports of corrupt hiring practices revealed in the Washington Post regarding the reconstruction of Iraq.
Sept 18
Drinky organizes the footsoldiers of the right-wing media machine to “catapult the propaganda,” as he previously described, in a 90 minute meeting with such luminaries as Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz, and Laura Ingraham.
Maj. Leader Boehner refuses to ask Bob Ney to resign, even after the guy pleads guilty to corruption charges. You have got to be kidding me.
Reconstruction contracts for Iraq in 2003 were handed out to political loyalists. All 18 billion dollars worth of them.
The genocide is real. Two researchers, whose report was published in the journal Science, estimated that 255,000 people have died in Darfur.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Secretary Rumsfeld
If you are someone concerned with the state of American commentary today you have much to be concerned about.
You have Don Rumsfeld, the most incompetent and dishonest Secretary if Defense in history, pissing on democrats and calling them terrorist “appeasers” while R. Emmett Tyrrell II of CNN and his clones in the media call them “ignoramuses” and insist that the Secretary never, in his speech, compared them to appeasers of Hitler before WWII.
R. Emmett Tyrrell II, or Thurston Howell IV, or whatever the fuck his name is seems to be counting on the fact that his pig-ignorant audience can’t spend 30 seconds googling Rumsfeld’s speech to see for themselves. Indeed, if you actually read Rumsfeld’s speech you see a lot more there than comparing democrats to Neville Chamberlain.
He attacks the news coverage of the war, Newsweek, CNN, and Amnesty International, in that order.
First of all let me say this: if you ever see a politician attacking Amnesty International you can be pretty sure you’re looking at a war criminal. If you ever hear some lunatic excoriating Mother Theresa or Bono or Human Rights Watch you can be pretty sure you’re looking at a criminal.
Rumsfeld resorts to familiar lines in his defense. The people responsible for the 600 documented cases of abuse and torture at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram are “a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation,” of course. We just have a lot of “bad apples.”
As nefarious sources like Amnesty International have pointed out, the number of documented cases pales in comparison with the number of actual cases. Several thousand prisoners, many of whom have been tortured, are being held in third-world prisons without charges under the direction of the CIA and the State Department. When the final accounting of Don Rumsfeld’s crimes are done he will look at lot closer to Adolf Hitler than to Winston Churchill.
Don is waging a one-man war on the media, as usual. He asserted that, during Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, these enemies “doctor photographs of casualties. They use civilians as human shields. And then they try to provoke an outcry when civilians are killed in their midst, which of course was their intent.”
See? You can’t trust news accounts of the Israeli offensive. The photographs of dismembered Lebanese children are “doctored.” The civilians murdered by Israeli strikes were all “human shields” for terrorists, no matter what you hear anyone else say.
It is a disgrace to our nation to have a Secretary of Defense like this, one who urinates on the graves of Lebanese civilian victims of Israeli aggression, who compares war critics to Nazi appeasers, and who receives the support of syndicated columnists who are featured in every major news outlet in the country.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Lies About Terrorists
This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Bionic arms that work. Welcome to Bladerunner.
Colin Powell recently voiced his disapproval with the Administration’s plans to rewrite the War Crimes Act and enact new legislation to protect interrogators from criminal charges. There is also some indication there was concern in the Justice Department and the JAG Corps.
Fred Barnes also reiterates after an interview with the president that bringing Osama bin Laden to justice just isn’t a big priority for him.
The UN International Atomic Energy Commission recently complained to the Bush Administration about the deceitful analysis of Iran’s capabilities issued by the republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee. The House report was written by a single republican staffer and it was not reviewed by the full committee.
The “liberal” media once again fail to challenge factual inaccuracies of the Bush Administration, giving a platform to people like Rush Limbaugh but failing to host a liberal voice. Tony Snow ignores the deceitful record of the administration in alleging Hussein shielded Zarqaqi.
Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff asserted that protecting every target in the US would be too expensive, a bland generalization that cloaked the truth: We are spending half a cent on every mass transit rider for security measures while we spend $9 for every airline passenger, even as terrorists have recently targeted rail and bus riders.
Glenn Greenwald covers the passage of the Specter Bill and a couple of others through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Monday, September 11, 2006
More Lies
In his never-ending quest to label war critics as the best ally the terrorists have, Darth Cheney yesterday once again asserted that “suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq…validates the strategy of the terrorists.”
In other words, we should pursue the same strategy as Israel, occupying foreign lands regardless of the will of the people and continued terror attacks, because that has worked so well in the past to decrease the number of terror attacks against Israel. Cheney also stumbled through his usual coterie of lies about Saddam Hussein, WMDs, and terrorist ties.
ON the Sunday round tables Condi Rice also continued to lie about Iraq and terror links to al Qaeda, despite the recent release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s latest report.
Recently the president urged a renovation of the FISA bill, asserting that it is a relic from 1978 that can’t take into account new technologies: “When FISA was passed in 1978, there was no widely accessible Internet, and almost all calls were made on fixed landlines. Since then, the nature of communications has changed, quite dramatically. The terrorists who want to harm America can now buy disposable cell phones, and open anonymous e-mail addresses. Our laws need to change to take these changes into account.” Of course, when Congress renovated FISA in 2001 at his request he praised it: “The existing law was written in the era of rotary telephones. This new law that I sign today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including e-mails, the Internet, and cell phones.”
Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for this extraordinary citation of rediculous dishonesty by the president.
In a little article about a speech former President Bill Clinton gave lies a small gem: “Outside the Pageant, about a dozen protesters underscored that line of Republican attack. One protester sported a giant telephone costume, while others waved phones, to mock the Democratic opposition to some of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism measures.”
It reminds me of Chile in the first few years of the 1970s, when right-wing protestors pelted soldiers at military parades with chicken parts, the symbolism being that the military was too “chicken” to stage a coup that the right wing wanted. They got what they wanted: Augusto Pinochet staged a coup and took power in 1973. Tens of thousands of his victims, of course, didn’t get what they wanted.
Some people in this country want a police state, it is clear. I hope they don’t get what they want.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Bombshell
Brigadier General Mark Scheid, retiring in three weeks, recently said in an interview with the Newport News that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a post-war Iraq.”
Snap! You have got to be kidding me. This is a bombshell.
Scheid was promoted to be chief of logistics war plans at the Central Command on September 10th, 2001. Central Command oversees war plans for the Middle East.
Scheid said, during the planning for Iraq, that planners wanted a plan for occupation. “I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”
This is incredible, and I can’t help but wonder if and when the GOP smear machine will kick into gear to silence the general. Either this guy is completely making this up or the Secretary of Defense is and was completely unfit for his position.
To help cover up the mess Iraq has become, US military officials are working hard to reduce the number of civilians who die in fighting every month in Iraq—by changing the way they count.
A good article pointed out by Sirota in his letter to Nancy Pelosi about the DLC, and another article Sirota wrote recently fulminating about the fearmongering and crass advertisements of the GOP.
John Kerry gives a stirring speech in Boston.
"Alternative" Jails
Anya Kamanetz recently reported (again) on the detention practices of Israel, which regularly detains Palestinians for months and years without trial and without contact with their families on the orders of individual Israeli generals. They are frequently beaten, according the NGO observers.
Anya, however, seems to have a problem with criticizing Israel. She mentions in her earlier work (in 2003) that these practices are covered by the Geneva Conventions but she fails to mention that they are also covered by UN conventions like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She does mention “UN human rights laws” that only provide for “preventive detentions” in cases where the suspect is perceived to be an “immanent threat,” but nothing in those conventions could possibly be construed to allow preventive detentions that last months and years. Much like laws in the United States, these conventions allow holding someone for weeks without charges, nothing more.
She then quotes extensively from defenders of the system, including a former Israeli prison guard who maintains "I think the Israeli officials bend over backwards to be fair to prisoners. I never saw one case of abuse. The conditions are as if for a prisoner of war." She also quotes from an Israeli military official who says that they are given “extra rights.”
Good work, Anya. I’m sure if you interviewed an Iranian military official and former guard you could do a similarly good job of providing “balanced” coverage of the abuses there.
Anya is notable because her work is featured on the Huffington Post, an ostensibly left-wing media outlet. You will sometimes also find the work of Alan Dershowitz and Bill Maher on the Huffington Post and Alternet, two men that are famous for their defense of Israel.
There is a clear border on the limits of criticism allowed in these left wing sites. In all my considerable time reading the Huffington Post and Alternet I have never seen them give space to multiple defenders of the Bush Administration. I have, obviously, seen them extend that courtesy to Israel, which is a curious distinction.
In her latest post she brings up the Israeli detention practices again, concluding that, “I love Israel. I support its right to exist. And I believe that democracy in Israel is compromised by the nation's treatment of Palestinians, in its justice system and elsewhere.”
I want to say something up front. I love Anya Kamanetz. I support her right to exist. But her argument falls apart when she criticizes Israeli detentions from the point of view of it making Israel less safe. There is very little in her article explicitly stated by her about these detentions beings morally wrong, detentions that make life frightening and miserable for Palestinians who have never been convicted of a crime in any court. There is little mention of the fact that nations that use these powers (outside of Israel and the United States) are regularly excoriated by the US State Department. There is also little in either of her articles that might be construed as a blunt and honest criticism of Israel’s practices.
No, to do that we need to venture over the Amnesty International, a place where we find the characterization of Israel’s detention practices in a very different light. Amnesty International in an August 2005 report said that “Since 2000, thousands of Palestinians have been held in administrative detention in recent years, some of them for more than three years.” Commenting on the Huwara Military Base where many detainees were held, Amnesty International reported in 2003 that “for a year no lawyers were allowed to visit detainees… Cells are overcrowded and many detainees are forced to sleep on the floor as there are not enough mattresses to go round. The few mattresses and blankets which are available are dirty and bug-infested and no soap or cleaning material is provided for the detainees to wash themselves or to clean the cells, leading to the spread of skin diseases.”
There are a lot of human rights issues regarding Israel you won’t hear about in even the left-wing spectrum. For example, Amnesty International also reported in August of 2005 (among other times) that “Israeli authorities have taken no concrete measures to prevent the daily harassment and attacks against Palestinians and their property by Israeli settlers throughout the West Bank. The consistent failure of the Israeli authorities to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and to investigate such attacks and bring settlers to justice has created an atmosphere of impunity, which has ultimately encouraged further attacks.” This has been going for decades.
This is indeed relevant to the United States, as Anya Kamanetz maintains. As President Bush has recently said, the CIA has held “high value” detainees for years without charges and questioned them using “alternative” techniques. He also maintained that the CIA no longer holds people in secret prisons, which is largely unverifiable, though human rights groups like Human Rights Watch have demanded to know the location of several dozen detainees who disappeared and can’t be accounted for. His claim that the CIA no longer holds detainees is probably also disingenuous, as the US has, many times in the past, rendered detainees to foreign countries where they are held without trial or charges by the foreign government, as in the case of Salah Nasser Salim Ali, to name one of many, who was rendered to Yemen and held without charges by the Yemeni government (who confessed they had no information to prosecute him with, and were simply holding him at the request of the US government). Along with many others, Salah describes torture including regular beatings and humiliation techniques like verbal abuse and surrounding him with guards and forcing him to run around in a circle until he was exhausted, after which he was beaten.
Our prisons in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan are only part of the international network of prisons the US has used over the past five years to detain suspects. This includes outsourcing the duties of prison guards and torture to proxy nations like Jordan and Yemen as well as the secret CIA prisons. As I have written recently, the US government seems very willing to outsource all sorts of military duties to foreign mercenaries from Chile to Egypt. This part of the picture is not very accurately described or emphasized in US press reports. Amnesty International estimated in April of 2005 that, worldwide, about 40 detainees were held in the controversial secret CIA prisons. They concurrently estimated that several thousand were held worldwide in the jails of foreign governments at the behest of the United States.
Thus, as I mentioned, the president touting the elimination of CIA prisons seems like much ado about nothing. Thousands of prisoners are held in Iraq at various camps, not to mention thousands more in the prisons of foreign countries and over four hundred more in Cuba. “Secret CIA prisons” is a sexy and interesting (if not frightening) concept, but there were never very many people held there. The thousands that comprise the vast majority of US detainees are not being given trials, nor have they for many years. Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have denounced the military tribunal system as unlawful, and the Supreme Court recently concurred in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Case.
I tire of the obfuscations, head fakes, and ridiculous lies “We do not practice torture” of this administration, as well as their more recent efforts to immunize themselves from prosecution by trying the rewrite the law after the fact. Human Rights Watch echoes my thoughts on these issues: “If the administration really wants to insulate personnel from spurious prosecutions, perhaps it should take a page from retiring dictators like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and work to obtain an amnesty for the administration for all criminal acts committed while in office. (Or why look all the way to Chile? Perhaps the administration should study how President Bush's father gave pardons to various Iran-Contra scandalites like Casper Weinberger.)”
Our Mercenary Army
This is getting a lot of coverage, so I will return to it: ABC is running The Path to 9/11, a fictionalized docu-drama with some conversations completely made up. Disney is ABC’s parent company. I already noted that in 2003 they jettisoned a docu-drama on Reagan because of the cries from the right. In 2004 Disney refused to distribute Farenheit 9/11, even though it was made by a subsidiary, because, in the words of Michael Eisner, he didn’t want to get political: he "did not want a film in the middle of the political process where we're such a nonpartisan company and our guests, that participate in all of our attractions, do not look for us to take sides." Things change, apparently.
Of course, the drama can’t be criticized before it’s released because it’s not in its final cut, despite the fact that ABC sent copies out to conservatives so they could pimp it on their shows. If it can’t be commented on before it’s publicly released then why did they screen it? Of course, Clinton officials were refused when they asked to see it.
Conservative hacks who excoriated CBS back in the day are jumping on board this time around.
This is, however, just a small part of the misinformation pumped daily into the American mainstream by the mainstream media. The only thing at stake here is Clinton’s legacy and maybe the opinions of some people in a very general way as to the effectiveness of democrats in the War on Terror. The sad truth is, however, that ignorant votes count as much as informed ones.
Many more stories are buried and ignored by the MSM, and this collective action results in a far more severe bent to the news than active distortion, which must be minimized because of the attention it brings as well as the possible lawsuits. According to Amnesty International, for example, half of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were civilians and many had no formal training in interrogation. Some were former Apartheid-era South African “hitmen,” as documented by the Amnesty International report. They were considered by the administration to be outside the law, as they were not bound by military codes and were exempted from prosecution for war crimes by the decree of Paul Bremer, the US-installed provisional governor of Iraq at the time. In fact, it’s estimated that half of the $46 billion dollar classified intelligence budget is handled by private contractors in general, for everything from satellite operation to the administration of urine tests.
It might come as no surprise, recalling the massive international network of mercenaries, foreign nations, and private lenders that Reagan’s administration used to fund the contra rebels and others in Central America in the 1980s (and thus to circumvent Congressional spending limits): the Sultan of Brunei, Israel, ex-military personnel and private companies all pitched in. This has been repeated in Iraq, where mercenary companies like Blackwater are recruiting thousands in Central and South America for soldiers to serve in Iraq. Many of those are ex-military from the darkest chapters of this hemisphere’s history. US contracts have also been dispersed to people like Victor Bout, a shady Russian arms dealer implicated in selling arms to dictatorships in Africa.
What we’re talking about here is a mercenary army of truly questionable moral character, though the problem is that might be the point. Several commentators, some anonymous, have alleged that this is a purposeful plan: relegate shady activities to private contractors largely outside the law, which also provides plausible deniability if anything bad happens.
These are thugs, according to an anonymous former special operations officer in the Amnesty International report, and Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. An anonymous intelligence officer in Kuwait, where Blackwater’s recruits are flown before their assignment, added that the Central and South American recruits are chosen because those nations have experienced “dirty wars” and “have military men well-trained in dealing with internal subversives. They are well-versed in extracting confessions from prisoners.”
Indeed. I’m sure that the military and ex-military people coming out of Chile, Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia are very well versed in “extracting” confessions, though I pray they are not using the same techniques. “Submarining” was one of my favorites, used by Pinochet’s DINA secret police when he ruled Chile from 1973-1989. It involved shoving a victim’s head underwater (much like waterboarding) until they drowned or almost drowned, except that the “water” was frequently vats of human feces.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Kabuki Theater
Bush and Rumsfeld have lately been ratcheting up the campaign rhetoric, asserting that our perpetual war against invisible terrorists is now the exact historical equivalent of WWII, an argument I have addressed before and will not again. Rumsfeld has even compared critics to appeasers before WWII. Somehow, Islamic terror groups have morphed into one enemy with one goal, a phenomenon Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, as have I and many others.
How much longer can this insulting, incompetent Secretary of Defense continue to open his mouth? How can this guy, who regularly lies to Congress, slander critics?
Bush yesterday admitted was has been being reported in newspapers for months: the US has secret CIA prisons, where the detainees are interrogated using “an alternative set of procedures” of interrogation. This is as gentle a description of torture as you will hear. Based on this admission he expects Congress to approve a new law that will allow detainees to be tried in a military tribunal system, the kind of system the Supreme Court ruled was illegal recently. That’s no problem for Drinky, though. He will, as he said, simply do what he wants, and Congress can legalize it after the fact. That’s what senators like Arlen Specter are for.
Is there any government left in Washington outside of the White House?
Nancy Pelosi seemed amazingly uncritical of the president’s admission, instead criticizing the timing of the admission as “long overdue.” But I’m sure Orifice will still be hyperventilating tomorrow about how terrible it would be if she became the Speaker of the House.
Human Rights Watch had a more in-depth analysis of the bill the White House submitted to Congress, noting that, in its current form, it would allow the admission of evidence the defendant couldn’t see or refute and hearsay testimony. The bill would amend the War Crimes Act to reduce the number of prosecutable crimes to “an extremely narrowly drawn list.”
This redefinition of what constitutes torture and inhuman treatment is sickening, and it appears to be a crude ploy to retroactively legalize what has already been done. Why are we living under a demented reincarnation of August Pinochet?
We know the answer. Buried in an article about how Drinky has lost support among southern women is this sterling quote from a Bush supporter: “There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord. I don’t care how he governs, I will support him. I’m a Republican through and through.”
Sweet baby Jesus, would you please get out of my country. “Some people,” as is clear, so firmly anchor their support in utterly irrational religious conviction that Dear Leader can literally do no wrong, because he is anointed by God. These slope-browed, knuckle-dragging, primitively-religious quislings comprise about 36% of the population, last time I checked.
I can’t get it out of my head. “I don’t care how he governs, I will support him.” It’s amazing. It’s completely unpretentious, unselfconscious insanity.
I have listened to many ignorant people talk about politics in my years, and most of them irritate me. But this amazing specimen is truly extraordinary, and she is not rare. This is what happens when you mix religion and politics in the conservative world: people that, for lack of a better word, are abortions of normal people. Abominations.
Of course, what the president has done is already illegal under multiple treaties and laws we have signed, including the Convention Against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This Kabuki Theater is ridiculous.
In other news, CBS’s docu-drama about 9/11 reportedly falsifies some of the facts in order to blame Bill Clinton. Lefties have complained and CBS has responded tersely, saying that the editing process isn’t complete and any criticisms are premature and “irresponsible.’’ Of course, as Eric Weiner points out, when republicans were crying about a documentary CBS was going to run on Reagan in 2003 CBS quickly shunted the production over to Showtime. I doubt they will do the same this time.
David Sirota eviscerates the Leiberman—I mean, Democratic Caucus in Washington.
Larry C Johnson describes a sad but interesting situation. Khaleid Sheikh Mohammed, a terrorist involved in 9/11, was captured and tortured by US forces. Bush personally authorized threatening his family in order to get KSM to talk (a move Andrew Sullivan characterized as the President lowering himself to the level of a mafia boss). When confronted with the threat of the rape and murder of his family KSM said, “Do what you will. My family will be with God.”
I’m no big fan of KSM, but does it seem a little disturbing that our intelligence and security forces resemble the KGB when questioning some subjects? Torture? Threatening to rape and murder his family?
This is part of the descent into fascism of the United States, amusingly chronicled by David Wallenchinsky. It is amazing that these kinds of abuses were excoriated in the 2000 Republican Party Platform, as Glenn Greenwald accurately points out. Those are truly amazing. “Sending our military on vague, endless, and aimless missions rapidly saps morale…Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments.” It goes on. Wow. What a bunch of hypocritical bastards.
Tony Snow has recently been echoing the president’s lie (not spin. Lie.) about the illegal warrantless wiretapping program. “Some democrats don’t want the president to be able to listen in when al Qaeda calls,” both the president and Tony Snow have lied. Greenwald and I are both exasperated by this ridiculous mischaracterization, and he fulminates about it here.
By the way, Iraq is officially a blood-soaked, civil war torn international disaster. Civilian deaths from the Baghdad morgue: 1595 in June, 1855 in July, and 1535 in August. Sweet baby Jesus, that’s 15,940 dead people a year at the current rate, and that’s just in Baghdad. Lights out, ladies and gentleman. Iraq is officially out of control. You can call Iraq in a civil war or a May Day celebration, but it doesn’t really matter what General Abizaid and Don Rumsfeld call it anymore.
Friday, September 01, 2006
They're All the Same
As I wrote before, they’re all the same to our president. In the words of our Preznit all Muslims, whether Sunni or Shia or Persian or Arab or Hamas or Al Qaeda are “a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals.”
He might explain that to the Sunni and Shias who are killing each other by the tens of thousands in Iraq.
But we must be menaced by “a worldwide network” to justify the president’s extraordinary plans. We have seen this before, when Nicaragua in the eighties was transmuted from an impoverished socialist country into a Communist beachhead in Central America that might have threatened Texas with the awesome might of their military, against which the US military would have been nearly powerless. Terrorist now serve the same capacity that Communists once did, and the United States still meddles in the elections of Nicaragua.
The administration’s efforts to shore up flagging support for their wars has proven to be, so far, unsuccessful. A majority continue to believe the Iraq War was a mistake and it has left us more vulnerable to terror attacks.
Few presidents have used recess appointments like this one. Drinky has announced he will recess appoint a union-busting corporate lawyer for Walmart as head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hours Division. Thanks, Drinky. Keep appointing anti-labor people to be the head of the Labor Department.
