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Archive: POLITICS

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Hersh on Iran

Seymour Hersh had another important article in The New Yorker on the possibility that the U.S. is headed towards a war with Iran. There are some interesting – and positive – suggestions that high level military leaders are pressing the Administration not to rush down that path. At the same time, however, those with the ultimate decision-making powers (i.e. Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al) apparently continue to fantasize about the use of force:

“The Air Force is hawking it to the other services,” the former senior intelligence official said. “They’re all excited by it, but they’re being terribly criticized for it.” The main problem, he said, is that the other services do not believe the tactic will work. “The Navy says, ‘It’s not our plan.’ The Marines are against it—they know they’re going to be the guys on the ground if things go south.”

“It’s the bomber mentality,” the Pentagon consultant said. “The Air Force is saying, ‘We’ve got it covered, we can hit all the distributed targets.’ ” The Air Force arsenal includes a cluster bomb that can deploy scores of small bomblets with individual guidance systems to home in on specific targets. The weapons were deployed in Kosovo and during the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Air Force is claiming that the same techniques can be used with larger bombs, allowing them to be targeted from twenty-five thousand feet against a multitude of widely dispersed targets. “The Chiefs all know that ‘shock and awe’ is dead on arrival,” the Pentagon consultant said. “All except the Air Force.”

“Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this—they don’t want to repeat the mistake of doing too little,” the government consultant with ties to Pentagon civilians told me. “The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground”—an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq—“so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force.”

Read the full article here

John Robb adds his scary thoughts here

Newsflash: Justice Thomas is A Hack

From the AP:

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent from Thursday's ruling and took the unusual step of reading part of it from the bench — something he had never done before in his 15 years. He said the court's decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy."

[snip]

The court's willingness, Thomas wrote in the dissent, "to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous."

Think about that second quote, in particular. Does it not sound exactly like the sort of demagogic rhetoric which we've come to expect from the right-wing? I mean come on, does anybody truly believe that the Justices in the majority are, with their opinion in this case, second-guessing the determination of the political branches to bring the conspirators to justice?

A Real hero

I'm not prone to using hyperbole, but a real hero has emerged in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan desicion: Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the U.S. Navy lawyer who represented the defendant. Digby provides an excellent summary, including the following excerpt from the L.A. Times:

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift could have taken the easy route of arranging a plea bargain for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni alleged to have worked as a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But fearful of the dangerous precedent that could be set by denying international standards of justice to those swept up in the war on terrorism, Swift battled to get the rights and protections of the Geneva Convention for his client.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his war powers in sending Hamdan and nine others to face military tribunals, America's first since World War II.

"I feel like we all won, that the rule of law won, and that is essentially what we are all about," Swift said of the high court's validation of his three-year campaign on behalf of his 36-year-old client.

Swift was assigned to defend Hamdan by the Pentagon in November 2003 and initially was ordered by a superior officer to secure a plea bargain so there would be a timely conviction.

"I had the unenviable task of going down to this guy from Yemen in the uniform of people who had been treating him badly and saying, 'If you don't make a deal you may never see me again,' " Swift recalled of his first meeting at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo with Hamdan and his decision to fight a process stacked against the defendant.

Read Digby's full post here

The Hamdan Decision: "democracy forcing"

There has, appropriately enough, been a lot of discussion already about the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, which it rendered yesterday. This included a mildly interesting chat on the Jim Lehrer Newshour last night, which featured John Yoo, the chief architect of the road leading to many of the Bush Administration's abuses of power.

When working for the White House in the aftermath of 9/11, Yoo paved the way for the unchecked power claimed by the administration with his (extreme) legal opinions. Now a Law Professor, Yoo was somewhat contrite in tone last night, but (of course) suggested that the ruling was a mistake, and largely downplayed its importance.

The truth of the matter is that the court was exactly right to kick the ball back to Congress, so that these crucial decisions can be made in the light of day, by elected politicians who are accountable. JB makes the point really well:

What the Court has done is not so much countermajoritarian as democracy forcing. It has limited the President by forcing him to go back to Congress to ask for more authority than he already has, and if Congress gives it to him, then the Court will not stand in his way. It is possible, of course, that with a Congress controlled by the Republicans, the President might get everything he wants. However this might be quite unpopular given the negative publicity currently swirling around our detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. By forcing the President to ask for authorization, the Court does two things. First, it insists that both branches be on board with what the President wants to do. Second, it requires the President to ask for authority when passions have cooled somewhat, as opposed to right after 9/11, when Congress would likely have given him almost anything (except authorization for his NSA surveillance program, but let's not go there!). Third, by requiring the President to go to Congress for authorization, it gives Congress an opportunity and an excuse for oversight, something which it has heretofore been rather loathe to do on its own motion.

Read JB's full post here

UPDATE: Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post article:

For five years, President Bush waged war as he saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, he authorized it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, he let it.

Now the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country. In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects, the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.

Read the full summary

Soccer and Politics

The two mix in a variety of ways during the World Cup, and Jere Longman has written an article in the NY Times which provides one particularly interesting example.

When Michael Ballack arrived here [in West Germany] as a 7-year-old soccer prodigy in 1983, with East Germany entering its dying years, the city was named Karl-Marx-Stadt. Eventually, Ballack moved into an apartment built for socialist privilege, with hot running water and central heating.

Sixteen years after German unification, the apartment block where Ballack lived is crumbling, half empty and scheduled for demolition, residents said. Ballack is long gone, his early promise having blossomed into the role of captain of the German national team, which faces Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals Friday in Berlin.

That such visible figures as Ballack and Chancellor Angela Merkel are eastern German suggests both how far the country has come in uniting and how far it has to go before the so-called wall in the head of identity politics disappears like the Berlin Wall, academics and soccer experts said.

To many Germans, Ballack, soon to be 30, is simply an outstanding midfielder, deft with both feet and his head, adept at attacking and defending, perhaps the only truly elite player on the national Mannschaft, which the German team is known as.

For others, who consider the former East-West divide, Ballack is more complicated: His socialist upbringing has either made him ideal to marshal the collective aspirations of a team or left him lacking the individual assertiveness required of a leader. He is either selfless or egotistical, a consummate professional or a mercenary too interested in money. He recently signed for a reported $11 million a year to join Chelsea, the English club champion, after the World Cup.

Read the full article here

The Truth about the U.S. Occupation of Iraq

If you want a real window into the occupation, a clear, unfiltered glimpse, Nir Rosen is the one journalist who can provide such a view. Rosen, fluent in Arabic, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a free-lance writer, has been reporting first-hand from Iraq since 2003, and his contributions have been extraordinary. His new book on postwar Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, was published in May. Here's an excerpt from a long, wrenching report just published at his truthdig.com website:

The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. “Oh he just hates anything Iraqi,” another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army’s civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of “incidents” and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.

In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army’s appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man’s backyard. “He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming,” one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.

Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. “He was up to no good,” the captain explained.

Read the full article here

Scheer on Freedom of the Press

THE BUSH administration's jihad against newspapers that reported on a secret program to monitor the personal-banking records of unsuspecting citizens is more important than the original story. For what the president and his spokesmen are once again asserting is that the prosecution of this ill-defined, open-ended "War on Terror" inevitably trumps basic democratic rights in general and the constitutionally enshrined freedom of the press in particular.

The stakes are very high here. We've already been told that we must put up with official lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the unprecedented torture of prisoners of war and a massive electronic-eavesdropping program and other invasions of privacy. Now the target is more basic -- the freedom of the press to report on such nefarious government activity.

The argument in defense of this assault on freedom is the familiar refrain of dictators, wannabe and real, who grasp for power at the expense of democracy: We are in a war with an enemy so powerful and devious that we cannot afford the safeguard of transparent and accountable governance.

Read the rest of Scheer's editorial in the SF Chronicle

Freedom of the press? For how long?

Glenn Greenwald is all over the most important current story.

Any questions about whether the Bush administration intends to imprison unfriendly journalists (defined as "journalists who fail to obey the Bush administration's orders about what to publish") were completely dispelled this weekend. As I have noted many times before, one of the most significant dangers our country faces is the all-out war now being waged on our nation's media -- and thereby on the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press -- by the Bush administration and its supporters, who are furious that the media continues to expose controversial government policies and thereby subject them to democratic debate. After the unlimited outpouring of venomous attacks on the Times this weekend, I believe these attacks on our free press have become the country's most pressing political issue.

Documenting the violent rhetoric and truly extremist calls for imprisonment against the Times is unnecessary for anyone paying even minimal attention the last few days. On every cable news show, pundits and even journalists talked openly about whether the editors and reporters of the Times were traitors deserving criminal punishment. The Weekly Standard, always a bellwether of Bush administration thinking, is now actively crusading for criminal prosecution against the Times. And dark insinuations that the Times ought to be physically attacked are no longer the exclusive province of best-selling right-wing author Ann Coulter, but -- as Hume's Ghost recently documented -- are now commonly expressed sentiments among all sorts of "mainstream" Bush supporters. Bush supporters are now engaged in all-out, unlimited warfare against journalists who are hostile to the administration and who fail to adhere to the orders of the Commander-in-Chief about what to print.

The clear rationale underlying the arguments of Bush supporters needs to be highlighted. They believe that the Bush administration ought to be allowed to act in complete secrecy, with no oversight of any kind. George Bush is Good and the administration wants nothing other than to stop The Terrorists from killing us. There is no need for oversight over what they are doing because we can trust our political officials to do good on their own. We don't need any courts or any Congress or any media serving as a "watchdog" over the Bush administration. There is no reason to distrust what they do. We should -- and must -- let them act in total secrecy for our own good, for our protection. And anyone who prevents them from acting in total secrecy is not merely an enemy of the Bush administration, but of the United States, i.e., is a traitor.

Read Glenn's full, important post here

Republican jingoes

Geoffrey Wheatcroft of The Guardian (U.K.) doesn't mince words in today's column:

Well before the Senate debate on Iraq began on Wednesday, the Democrats knew what they were in for. "When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," Karl Rove, President Bush's Mephistophelean and mephitic adviser, said recently, setting the tone for other Republicans.

There is something truly impressive about the appropriation of patriotism by President Bush and his colleagues, giving new meaning to Johnson's phrase about the last refuge of scoundrels. Here is an administration peopled almost entirely by "chickenhawks" or military virgins: men like Dick Cheney, who "had other priorities" when he should have been drafted, or the president himself, who served in the National Guard, notoriously a means of avoiding active service - in the days of Vietnam, that is; thanks to Bush, volunteers in the National Guard can now expect long tours of duty in and around Baghdad. And these people have managed to question the courage of John Kerry, who actually fought for his country.

All the same, the Republican jingoes are right in one respect: withdrawal from Iraq in any foreseeable future can only be utterly ignominious. It was another Republican, Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who said during the Vietnam war that his country should "declare victory and get out". But that moment passed; when the Americans did get out in 1975, it was in contemptible circumstances.

In Iraq things have gone wronger quicker. At one point, not long after Bush's hubristic "mission accomplished" stunt, it seemed that the White House might adapt Aiken's advice, declare a democracy and get out. But that moment has likewise now passed. As insurgency developed into incipient civil war, events turned worse than the most pessimistic opponent of the invasion could have foreseen.

Not only has every one of the ostensible reasons for the war been confuted, they have all been stood on their heads. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but there was much noxious weaponry, which has since been used to terrible effect. There were no Islamic terrorists - Saddam had a very short way with any such - but now the country is awash with them.

Read the full editorial here

More progress: State of emergency declared in Baghdad

From the AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgents set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. and Iraqi troops outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered everyone off the streets of the capital. U.S. and Iraqi forces also fought gunmen in the volatile Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad.

A car bomb ripped through a market and nearby gas station in the increasingly violent southern city of Basra, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.

A bomb also struck a Sunni mosque in Hibhib, northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain this month, police said.

At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.

Throughout the morning, Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with attackers armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street, which runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.

Full report here

Witch Protection Amendment?

Anonymous Liberal skewers the politicians who are inches away from passing the "Flag Desecration Amendment".

According to the USA Today, the Senate is currently only one vote shy of the 67 votes needed to pass the "Flag Desecration Amendment." If so, I'm convinced the amendment will go down in history as the dumbest law ever written.

As an initial matter, it's hard to think of anything more un-American than banning a purely symbolic act. It would be the first time we've ever amended our Constitution to curtail the Bill of Rights. We would be carving out a bizarre exception to our most celebrated right, the right to freedom of speech. The new rule would be, in essence, you can say anything you want (but you can't say that).

But let's put aside the fact that we would be trading in an eloquent statement of principle for something that sounds like a Meatloaf song. Let's put aside the fact that we would be joining the ranks of such illustrious regimes as Nazi Germany, Cuba, China, Iran, and Iraq (during the Saddam era). Let's forget all that and assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no more heinous transgression than the desecration of an American flag and that we must do whatever it takes to--God willing--stop this horrible crime for taking place. Assuming all that, is the Flag Desecration Amendment good policy?

The answer to that is--of course--a resounding "no." I, for one, have never felt any real desire or inclination to burn an American flag (or any other flag for that matter). Apparently most Americans are in the same boat because, according to one study, there were only 45 reported flag burning incidents in the first 200 years of the republic (h/t Think Progress). That means there are probably more historical incidents of witch-burning than flag-burning. Maybe we should start debating the Witch Protection Amendment.

Read AL's full post at Glenn Greenwald's site

Barring Reporters from Guantanamo

How profoundly stupid. I mean could the U.S. government possibly add a more incendiery fuel to an already blazing fire? If you're not up to speed on the three recent suicides at Guantanamo, and the highly questionable aftermath, David Rose of the Guardian (U.K.) has an important story out today.

The high degree of surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. 'It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,' Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells' mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was slowly, by hypoxia.

'That would take at least four or five minutes, probably longer,' said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. 'It's very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.'

Accomplish it, however, they did. And virtually simultaneously. A little before midnight the bodies of Manei Shaman Turki al-Habadi, 30, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 21, both from Saudi Arabia, and of a Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 29, were found on Alpha Block. How long they had been like that, the Pentagon will not disclose. Their mouths were stuffed with cloth, apparently to muffle any cries.

[snip]

Last week Rumsfeld got what he wanted: the removal of media scrutiny from Guantanamo's deepest crisis. Potentially embarrassing, perhaps very damaging, headlines have been averted, and tomorrow, with the most sensitive tasks in the wake of the deaths complete, Guantanamo's public affairs office will resume its chaperoned tours. But the bigger costs of shutting out the daylight are making themselves felt.

On BBC1's Question Time last week, Falconer called the camp 'intolerable and wrong', adding that it acted as a recruiting agent for those who would attack all our values. Proving his point next day, some former Guantanamo detainees suggested the three dead men had been murdered, a claim echoed by their families and the government of Yemen next day.

Read the full, powerful piece here

The Power of The Story

As elections draw near, there is plenty of talk about whether the Democrats will be able to make big gains in an environment which seems ripe to do so. But given the poor strategies employed by Democrats in 2000 and 2004, the continued lack of cohesion within the party, and the appalling lack of guts shown by most prominent members, it's hard to muster much confidence. Frank Rich highlights a fundamental problem in his article in today's NY Times:

What’s most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it’s his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he’s stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won’t lose at the polls if there’s no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won’t tell their own. And they don’t — whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans’.

Read Rich's full piece at trueblueliberal

The Washington Post: enabling the liars

Greg Sargent of The American Prospect correctly points out that the mainstream media's repetition of lies spewed by Administration officials have insidious consequences.

REPUBLICAN FALSEHOODS GO UNCORRECTED IN WASHINGTON POST. Today's Washington Post piece on yesterday's congressional debates about Iraq floated two key GOP falsehoods without debunking them.

The first:

"I'm not surprised at John Kerry switching his position yet again," [Dick] Cheney said on Sean Hannity's radio talk show. Kerry is charging "that somehow he was misled," the vice president said. "He wasn't misled. He saw the same intelligence all the rest of us saw." (Emphasis added.)

Lies, lies, lies. The falsehood that the President and Congress had access to the same intel in the runup to Iraq has been thoroughly debunked numerous times. Yet the administration has continued to peddle this line for years. And here it is again, quoted in the Post, with not a single word providing this crucial context or noting that it is simply false.

The second:

Central to the House Republicans' argument was the much-disputed link between the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq. (Emphasis added.)

Much-disputed? Not a single scrap of real evidence has ever emerged lining Sept. 11 to Iraq. No one with any credibility at all believes there were any such links. Hence, there are no meaningful connections between Sept. 11 and "the war in Iraq," only rhetorical ones conjured up by people who want to cloud the issue and retroactively justify our failing Iraq venture. To describe this as "much-disputed" creates the false impression that the jury's still out on the question of whether there's some sort of real, meaningful link between the two.

Look, these may seem like niggling objections. But little by little, such journalistic failures add up. The numbing repetition of uncorrected falsehoods creates a phony atmosphere of uncertainty around key questions which in fact have already been resolved. Eventually voters throw up their hands and accept the fact that they'll never know for sure what the truth is, and confusion ensues. If the media more aggressively debunked such lies -- every single time, and in every single context -- voters just might stand a chance.

Middle East Oil: A different take

Greg Palast provides an interesting history lesson, as well as an unusual theory which runs counter to the notion that the invasion of Iraq was (at least in part) about the U.S. gaining access to more oil.

World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?

Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again. The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production. Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less. This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?

Read Palast's full post at AlterNet

Bush in Baghdad and Shiny metal Objects

The mainstream media continues to crumble, and, luckily for us, Billmon covers the most recent episode in typically fine style.

Sending America's titular head of state to Baghdad the first time, to celebrate Thanksgiving with the troops in 2003, was a clever stroke -- just the thing to distract the media from the rapidly deteriorating security situation, which only a few weeks before had sent generals and diplomats (including the current president of the World Bank) scurrying for cover in their underwear.

Of course, simply waving a shiny metal object in front of the White House press corps probably would have been just as effective, not to mention a whole lot cheaper for the taxpayers, but you still can't argue with the results: saturation coverage of the world's biggest Thanksgiving turkey -- serving dinner to a bunch of grinning GIs.

But that was then and this is now, and while distracting the media is still child's play (literally) the voters have grown quite a bit more jaded after nearly three years of watching flag-wrapped coffins shipped home COD. At this point, Sending Bush to do the grip-and-grin with the new Iraqi prime minister and his cabinet isn't exactly must-see TV.

[snip]

And politically, it comes down to this: Ever since the war began to go south -- say, in the late summer or early fall of 2003 -- the Cheneyites have relied on a never-ending string of bogus "turning points" to deflect criticism and create the illusion that victory in Iraq (whatever that means) is creeping closer, despite the mounting chaos and death. But with Zarqawi's elimination, the never-ending string has, for all intents and purposes, ended.

There are no more name-brand dictators or terrorists left to catch or kill: Zarqawi's successor is so obscure nobody seems to know who he is or where he came from -- it's not even written into the script yet. The elections are over, so there'll be no more purple fingers to wave in front of the cameras. The "permanent" government has been formed; all of its ministers finally named.

The turning points, in other words, have all been turned, and Iraq is still a killing field. Now that the last few macbre headlines have been squeezed out of Zarqwari's autopsy report, democracy boy and his handlers literally have nothing to look forward to -- except a long, hot summer of IEDs, ethnic cleansing and more of those flag-wrapped caskets being Federal Expressed to cemetaries around the country.

To be sure, you know this won't stop the machine from simply making shit up -- kilowatt hours of available electricty conjured out of thin air, paper battalions magically transformed into crack commando units, pins on maps marking pacified villages where insurgents held sway only days before. If there is one thing that any bureaucracy knows how to do, and do well, it's spit out the kind of statistics that can make defeat look like victory, at least for a while.

Who knows? Some of those stats might even be true. But the kind of painfully slow, infinitesimally incremental progress that might -- might -- be possible over the next five months, if a full-scale sectarian civil war can be avoided, is hardly going to cut through the televised misery of a war that no longer seems to be under anyone's control, least of all the pinheads in charge of the American side of it.

The real irony, though, is that all of it -- the recycled propaganda tricks, the bogus progress reports, the brainkilling repetition of Orwellian talking points -- might well be for naught, even if it works.

Read the full post at Billmon's Whiskey Bar

Two takes on the Rove news

Karl Rove apparently won't be indicted, but there are different ways to interpret the information which has thus far been released. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, who has been reporting on this story as closely and accurately as anyone, has this take. Billmon is more cynical, and I'm inlcined to (optimistically) side with his perspective. Here's a bit of the latter:

In any case, I have a hard time believing Fitzgerald backed off because he's decided Rover wasn't such a bad pig after all. That "Official A" label stamped on Karl's balding pate by the Libby indictment was the prosecutorial equivalent of the kiss of death, and based on his track record, Fitz is about as likely to show clemency as your average Mafia hit man, and probably less so.

If Murray Waas is right (and he usually is) and the FBI agents who initially interviewed Rove and their superiors both believed the evil one bore false witness -- and so notified the Attorney General of the United States -- then it's not very plausible that Patrick Fitzgerald would decide, after sweating Rove five times in front of a grand jury, that it was all just an honest mistake. And the theory, currently being peddled by the naifs at New York Times, that Fitz relented because of allegedly exculpatory testimony from Rove's own mouthpiece doesn't even pass the laugh test.

This leaves two possibilities. Fitzgerald may have decided that getting a conviction against Rove was going to be tough -- too tough to justify the investment and the potential negative blowback on the Libby case. Or, Karl may have decided that it's far better to be a rat than a imprisoned ratfucker, and turned state's evidence.

Guantanamo reaction: continued U.S. ignorance

Hooman Majd, a writer and businessman originally from Iran, exposes the astounding ignorance and insensitivity displayed by U.S. government officials in the wake of the three suicides at Guantanamo.

Perhaps even more stunning, staggering really, is the U.S. reaction to the three suicides at the Guantanamo detention facility on the weekend. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the camp commander, called it a form a "asymmetrical warfare" (as opposed to acts of desperation). It's perhaps asking too much for a military commander to understand public diplomacy, or to understand how his words will echo in the Arab world, but one of Karen Hughes' deputies, Colleen Graffy, said (in an interview with the BBC) that the deaths were part of a strategy and "a tactic to further the jihadi cause"; further saying that the three men "did not value their lives nor the lives of those around them". Since Ms. Hughes doesn't appear to have any Muslims on her staff, here's a little something for her and her deputies to consider: suicide is against Islam. Suicide is considered one of the greatest sins in Islam, and suicide means, to a pious Muslim, that he or she will never gain entrance to heaven. There is a reason what we call "suicide bombers" are called "martyrs", and what we would call "suicide operations" called "martyrdom operations" by terrorists, those who support the tactic and even many ordinary people in the Middle East. It's not because "martyr" just sounds better than "suicide": it's because of Islam. If, as a tactic to inflict military damage against an enemy or adversary a suicide mission is deemed necessary, then some in the Muslim world (and some Muslim clerics) claim that those suicides don't actually qualify as suicide in Allah's eyes, and whether that argument is specious is not is irrelevant, for the terrorists themselves have certainly accepted it before they've blown themselves up.

If it weren't for the constant stream of decisions based on appallingly bad judgment flowing from the Bush administration during the past six years, one might have expected the blundering idiots to educate themselves on the culture of the "enemy".

Read Majd's full post at Huffingtonpost

Guantanamo

There were three reported suicides at the Guantanamo Bay detention center yesterday. You can read the NY Times account here. Much more disturbing, however, is how predictable such attempts were. Here some behind-the-scenes details from Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux:

One of our clients was forceably extracted during our interview day because he was attempting suicide and required force feeding. He said that he would rather die than stay in Guantanamo and they confiscated our news stories in which Bush announced that he wanted to close Guantanamo. The same detainee who was so depressed that he wanted to die, was prevented from seeing a news story that might have given him hope.

Our client Mohammad Rahman actually has serious health conditions that they will not address. When he was 32 he had a pacemaker installed and he had a heart valve replaced. The valve seems to be leaking again. We have tried to obtain his medical records, to no avail, and to obtain real medical assistance for his heart and other his serious health problems. They provide nothing-- but they will interrupt our client interview to "protect his health and life" by force feeding him.

Thanks to TalkLeft, who has been tapping Denbeaux's expertise and insights for some time.

Bad news from the Middle East

Seven Palestinians were killed when an errant Israel Defense Forces artillery shell apparently slammed into a beach in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday. Some 40 others were wounded.

A woman and two young children, aged six months and 18 months, as well as a young teenager were among the dead, medical officials said. All of the dead were believed to be related. The IDF apologized for the incident, saying it "regretted the strike on innocents."

IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz expressed regret Saturday evening for the shelling, but clarified that the army was not taking responsibility for the incident, as the investigation has not yet been completed.

Halutz noted that following the incident, the IDF stopped shelling the Strip, but he stressed that the shelling had been in response to Qassam rockets launched at Israel.

"The IDF will continue to chase the Qassam-launching cells and rocket manufacturers. We will make efforts not to harm innocent bystanders. We fired artillery shells and will do so again, under very limited circumstances," Halutz said.

In Beit Lahia, thousands of Palestinians gathered on Saturday afternoon to attend the funeral procession of the seven people killed.

Chanting "revenge, revenge" and "destroy Israel, destroy America," the mourners made their way through the town's narrow streets to the families' homes, where weeping women tried to touch the bodies of the dead.

In the wake of the shelling, the military wing of the ruling Palestinian Hamas party said that it would renew suicide bombings in Israel, ending the truce that the group declared last year.

"The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle and that means the earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage," Hamas militants declared in a leaflet. "The resistance groups... will choose the proper place and time for the tough, strong and unique response."

Read the full details in Haaretz

al-Zarqawi's death in perspective

Nir Rosen, arguably the best reporter on Iraq, provides a harsh, accurate assessment of the killing of al-Zarqawi and its likely ramifications:

The bulk of the resistance and insurgency was Iraqi and they had different goals than Zarqawi. Often Zarqawi's fighters clashed with indigenous Iraqi fighters, who wanted only to liberate Iraq and regain political power, but who did not care for Zarqawi's puritan ways or his global jihad. It is likely that they may have provided the tip that cost Zarqawi his life. But in death Zarqawi struck one final blow for his cause. He had come to Iraq to fight the infidels and become a martyr, gaining entry to paradise. And so he did, the infidels finally killed him and his supporters now believe he is in paradise. This only proves that Iraq is the place to go to if you want to gain entry to paradise, kill infidels, and become a martyr. More will flock to replace him and avenge him. Expect to see a new group, naming itself after Zarqawi, claiming responsibility for attacks targeting Shia leaders or Shia shrines in Iraq, but also in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, where tensions between Sunnis and Shias have been simmering since the war in Iraq.

We in the media are often pilloried for only reporting "the bad news" in Iraq. But there is no good news. Its too dangerous to even tell you how bad things really are, but they are worse than what you see on the media, not better. The insurgency is passe, Iraq is about the civil war, chaos, anarchy, random and deliberate violence everywhere. And it is spreading throughout the region. Instead of stabilizing the Middle East, the US war in Iraq is tearing it apart, destabilizing it, reviving radical Islam and jihadism and giving a bad name to reform and democracy.

Read Rosen's full article at The Washington Note

The essence of today's political values

Paul Krugman does the distilling:

On one side, a measure that would have increased scrutiny of containers entering U.S. ports, at a cost of $648 million, has been dropped from a national security package being negotiated in Congress.

Now, President Bush says that we’re fighting a global war on terrorism. Even if you think that’s a bad metaphor, we do face a terrifying terrorist threat, and experts warn that ports make a particularly tempting target. So some people might wonder why, almost five years after 9/11, only about 5 percent of containers entering the U.S. are inspected. But our Congressional leaders, in their wisdom, decided that improving port security was too expensive.

On the other side, Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, tried yesterday to push through elimination of the estate tax, which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates would reduce federal revenue by $355 billion over the next 10 years. He fell three votes short of the 60 needed to end debate, but promised to keep pushing. “Getting rid of the death tax,” he said, “is just too important an issue to give up so easily.”

So there you have it. Some people might wonder whether it makes sense to balk at spending a few hundred million dollars — that’s million with an “m” — to secure our ports against a possible terrorist attack, while sacrificing several hundred billion dollars — that’s billion with a “b” — in federal revenue to give wealthy heirs a tax break. But nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.

Read Krugman's full column here

Net Neutrality: One last chance

The First Amendment of the Internet – the governing principle of net neutrality, which prevents telecommunications corporations from rigging the web so it is easier to visit sites that pay for preferential treatment – took a blow from the House of Representatives Thursday.

Bowing to an intense lobbying campaign that spent tens of millions of dollars – and held out the promise of hefty campaign contributions for those members who did the bidding of interested firms – the House voted 321 to 101 for the disingenuously-named Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE). That bill, which does not include meaningful network-neutrality protections creates an opening that powerful telephone and cable companies hope to exploit by expanding their reach while doing away with requirements that they maintain a level playing field for access to Internet sites.

"Special interest advocates from telephone and cable companies have flooded the Congress with misinformation delivered by an army of lobbyists to undermine decades-long federal practice of prohibiting network owners from discriminating against competitors to shut out competition. Unless the Senate steps in, (Thursday's) vote marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as an engine of new competition, entrepreneurship and innovation." says Jeannine Kenney, a senior policy analyst for Consumers Union.

John Nichols spells it out at his blog on The Nation site

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