BROKEN PROMISES

Another broken promise to the military (Next they'll start calling up folks from the VA hospitals....)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15041-2004Jun29.html?nav=rss_nation
The Army is preparing to notify about 5,600 retired and discharged soldiers who are not members of the National Guard or Reserve that they will be involuntarily recalled to active duty for possible service in Iraq or Afghanistan, Army officials said Tuesday.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-reserves29jun29,1,2110171.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
For the first time since Operation Desert Storm, the Army plans to announce this week an involuntary mobilization of thousands of troops from the Individual Ready Reserve, the latest signal that the service is struggling to bolster ranks stretched thin by the global war on terrorism...........In most cases, the Pentagon created the holes when it took soldiers with critical skills in short supply - such as civil affairs, intelligence, vehicle maintenance and truck driving - out of their units and shifted them to military units needed for more urgent deployments since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.......Now the bill for this system of "robbing Peter to pay Paul," as one defense official put it, has come due.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/politics/30RESE.html?ex=1246248000&en=92609093eb386017&%2338;ei=5090&%2338;partner=rssuserland
Amid Congressional concerns that the military is stretched too thin, the Army is preparing to take advantage of a rarely used wartime program that allows it to recall soldiers who have left the service and did not join the reserves.....The decision was immediately cited by members of Congress as more evidence that the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and, more broadly, for the global campaign against terrorism, have left the Army unable to fulfill all its missions.......Proposals to expand the Army already are being debated in Congress, where some lawmakers have described the large reserve mobilizations and other unusual steps to fill the rosters in Iraq and Afghanistan as an unofficial draft.

And in Iraq....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/international/middleeast/30RECO.html?ex=1246334400&en=
Reality Intrudes on Promises in Rebuilding of Iraq
More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.......At the same time, an economy that is supposed to become a beacon of free enterprise remains warped by central controls and huge subsidies for energy and food, leaving politically explosive policy choices for the fledgling Iraqi government.......

Interesting new murmurings: "It's all Cheney's fault" (Bush, like Reagan, just an amiable doofus who has been ill-served by his lieutenants)

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_29_bestof.html#108854398115147368
There is a new meme developing that must be crushed before it turns into a full-fledged mindstorm and that is the notion of Shrub as victim. Under this formulation, our president is a likeable doofus who has been misserved by those around him, especially Dick Cheney.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan, uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive, partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist.......

Today, few doubt that the Bush administration's postwar planning was disastrous. Insiders' books, congressional testimony, and recent investigative reporting indicate that the miscalculations resulted from a toxic combination of ideology, terrorism, and an incurious president who allowed Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies to implement their unrealistic policies.......

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004223.php
The lead of Dana Priest's latest article in the Washington Post says that the CIA has stopped using "extraordinary interrogation techniques." The bigger news, however, might be a few paragraphs down:

The suspension is the latest fallout from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and is related to the White House decision, announced Tuesday, to review and rewrite sections of an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department opinion on interrogations that said torture might be justified in some cases....... Although the White House repudiated the memo Tuesday as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office.

It's remarkable how Dick Cheney's name keeps coming up in these contexts, isn't it? Seems like something of a bad apple to me.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/06/29/long_executive_reach_distinguishes_cheney?pg=full
Dick Cheney occupies an unprecedented position in American history. There has never been such a powerful vice president. There has never been anyone other than a president as powerful as Cheney......Cheney hides his influence behind a low public profile.......Cheney also shields his clout behind President Bush's determination to show that he himself is in charge. At times, Bush has even pointed a finger at his own chest and praised his own ''tough decisions," while Cheney stands quietly in the wings.......In recent weeks, however, the astonishing range of Cheney's influence has been on display in virtually every controversy involving the administration. The chain of events drew Cheney out of the shadows even before he created a ruckus by lobbing an obscenity at his slightly thinner twin, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont......First came the 9/11 Commission reports showing Cheney's take-command attitude on Sept. 11, 2001, ordering the shootdown of any hijacked plane......Cheney claims that he got Bush's approval for the shootdown order, but notes taken at the time made no reference to it, and the commission found discrepancies in the accounts of those present......Then came the commission's rejection of ''collaboration" between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This trope was one of the pillars of the case Cheney built for war in Iraq, and the administration can't afford to lose it. Cheney reasserted the link, hinting he had more information but not providing any.......Since the vice president's influence is already embedded in the administration through his numerous friends appointed to high positions -- including his mentor, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- Cheney's character and motivations ought to be fair game for the media as the campaign heats up. So should efforts to connect the dots on his unusual ascent.........It began with a move that was, in retrospect, perfectly illustrative of his approach to power: Charged with heading the committee to choose Bush's running mate, Cheney quietly shifted his voter registration from Texas (the presidential nominee's state, and thus ineligible) to Wyoming and appointed himself to the job.......

Amiable doofus? If the shoe fits....

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040625/ap_on_go_pr_wh/ireland_bush
President Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq and insisted most of Europe backed the move during a tense interview Thursday on Irish television.......When Coleman said most Irish people thought the world was more dangerous today than before the Iraq invasion, Bush disagreed and responded, "What was it like Sept. 11th, 2001?" .....Bush was asked whether he was satisfied with the level of political, economic and military support coming from European nations in Iraq......."First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq. Really what you're talking about is France, isn't it? And they didn't agree with my decision......"

[Right, "most of Europe" (except France). Well, he says he doesn't read the newspapers, so maybe this is what Condi et al. were telling him.....]

An administration at war with itself

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1803&e=2&u=/washpost/20040630/pl_washpost/a13200_2004jun28

It's stunning to think that there are people who think that Bush Co. hasn't been ruthless ENOUGH

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003215
You can file the of Mussolini's rise under "H" for Hegel, the idea that extreme movements always beget extreme counter forces. It was the far left, by relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of Italian life, that gave birth and power to the far right--as it did a decade on when Hitler rode nearly the same path under similar circumstances....... This is what seems most pertinent today, as "activist" groups like Moveon.org and demagogues like Michael Moore and angry men like Al Gore and George Soros rail so irrationally against.....the president...........Either this November or in four years, George W. Bush is going to be turned out of office; even the judge agrees with that. Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left's constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won't go quite so easily.

So . . . we may not like George W. Bush but if we don't lay off with the complaining soon enough the right's going to come up with a leader who's not afraid to pour some castor oil down our throats to shut us up? What kind of an argument is this supposed to be? And this isn't the first time I've found conservatives "warning" liberals to stop making so much trouble or else something nasty might happen to our nice little democracy.

Speaking of which...this is a scenario everyone has pondered and rejected as "even these people wouldn't go so far" (or would they?)

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/dum-diddi-dum-diddi-diddi-dum-dum.html
The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission........Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel.......Soaries was appointed to the federal Election Assistance Commission last year by President Bush. Soaries said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in April to raise the concerns

The "new democracy in Iraq": now Allawi can rule the way Bush Co. wished they could

http://www.misleader.com/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df06292004.html
In the days leading up to his departure, Bremer "issued a raft of edicts" in an effort to "exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political authority." Specifically, Bremer empowered a seven-member appointed commission "to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support."

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1156399/posts
Iraq's interim government yesterday said it was considering reviving emergency martial law powers from the Saddam Hussein era to combat a wave of violence that has killed nearly 200 people and paralyzed oil exports.......Malik Dohan al-Hassan, justice minister in the caretaker Iraqi government, said authorities may resort to "exceptional" laws imposed by the former dictator after it takes power on June 30......Defense Minister Hazem Shalan al-Khuzaei and Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib also warned that the new government may impose martial law.......Such a move would be welcome by Col. Haydar Abdul Rasool, an officer in the fledgling Iraqi Civil Defense Corps....."Right now we can only open fire on people if they threaten us," the burly commander of 1,300 soldiers said in an interview. "We should have more freedom to act. We must have more brutal laws. The American laws are weak laws." ........Mr. al-Khuzaei, the defense minister, vowed this week that his government would track down insurgents "from house to house and from street to street, by all means available."........."We will cut off the hands of those people; we will cut their necks if it is necessary to do so," he told reporters.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/meet_the_new_boss_same_as_the_old_boss.php
The "new Iraq" looks a lot like the "old Iraq," doesn't it?.......Now the real bloodshed will begin......Despite Allawi's offer of amnesty to resistance fighters, it's likely that the new "prime minister" will launch the kind of bloody crackdown that even U.S. forces could not have initiated. "Prime Minister Allawi, as head of a sovereign government, may decide he has to take tough measures to deal with a brutal cold-blooded killer," said President Bush yesterday, signaling that the new regime in Baghdad will start to look pretty brutal itself. That statement indicates that the White House will wash its hands of the coming bloodbath by Allawi and Co., making sure that the world gets the message that from now on civil war in Iraq is in Iraqi hands, and Iraqis are to blame.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1779
From Allawi's press conference today:

Q: Mr. Prime Minister, what are the procedures that your government is going to take to deal with the security situation? Are you going to declare a state of emergency or emergency law?

PM ALLAWI: I want questions to be related to this subject [of the Saddam trial]. We will talk and tell you about those procedures later. Maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow......

So, what will the media call US troops in Iraq if they are no longer an "occupying force"?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/29/184737/643

But frankly, all most people care about now is, "when will our troops come home and stop getting blown up?" (and the answers are not good for Bush Co.)

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml?pid=1780

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200427#444

Second thoughts - well, sort of -- among some war supporters (and some pretzel logic)

http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/002497.php
Had the defeat of Saddam's armed forces resulted in a general Iraqi acceptance of the outcome, no doubt the anti-war coalition would have spluttered out, to be remembered only as a footnote to events........What has sustained the anti-war coalition, and allowed it to become influentially dominant, is the rise of resistance within Iraq to the Anglo-US presence. The war itself cost the lives of fewer than 100 US servicemen, but in the aftermath 600 have been killed, either in ambushes and car bombings or in gunfights with insurgents in the "Sunni Triangle".

Please: take a second to read that again. Follow the logic. If everything had gone just about perfectly, the anti-war movement would no longer be heard from. The only thing that has "sustained" the anti-war coalition is that everything hasn't gone well. In other words, the only thing that has "sustained" the anti-war coalition is....................that they were right!......The rest of the article goes on to explain how those dratted neo-cons failed to understand the situation they were getting into, failed to plan properly for the post-war, badly underestimated the strength of the insurgency, and made a number of overtly bad decisions......So there you have it: if you pointed out all this before the war, argued that the neo-conservatives were on a ideologically inspired power-trip likely to end in tears, and if you urged, therefore, that the invasion not take place......then you were nothing but a whining member of the anti-war coalition, beneath contempt...... However, if you were clever enough to be like John Keegan and urge the war to go ahead anyway, in the absence of the aforementioned planning, thus actually creating the mess that everyone--including you--can now plainly see, then you are a wise fellow who can safely stand back and complain that the "neo-cons" didn't plan things well enough.....Unbelievable.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001105.html
Gen. George C. Marshall began planning the postwar occupation of Germany two years before D-Day. This administration was fumbling for a plan two months before the invasion. Who can read Bob Woodward's ''Plan of Attack'' and not find his jaw dropping at the fact that from the very beginning, in late 2001, none of the civilian leadership, not Rice, not Powell, not Tenet, not the president, asked where the plan for the occupation phase was? Who can't feel that U.S. captains, majors and lieutenants were betrayed by the Beltway wars between State and Defense? Who can't feel rage that victorious armies stood by and watched for a month while Iraq was looted bare?......Someone like me who supported the war on human rights grounds has nowhere to hide: we didn't suppose the administration was particularly nice, but we did assume it would be competent. There isn't much excuse for its incompetence, but equally, there isn't much excuse for our naivete either....

For Ignatieff to say that there is "no excuse" for his assumption that the Bush administration was competent is not satisfactory: Ignatieff needs to tell us what chain of thought could possibly have led him to the assumption that the Bush administration was competent.....

On the timing of Saddam's "trial"

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003213

["Trial," right. Just don't ask any questions about events prior to 1992]

The growing prospect of a major electoral bath for the GOP?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13500-2004Jun28.html
Rep. Jay Inslee knows about political tidal waves, because one of them almost sank his political career.....Inslee, who now represents a suburban Seattle district, was tossed out of Congress from another district in the 1994 Republican sweep. "When you see a tidal wave go over your head about 35 feet high," Inslee says, "you notice it."......But he came back to the House in 1998, and now what he's seeing "is the same tidal wave moving in the opposite direction. . . . There's a passion out there." And the passion, Inslee says, is running against George W. Bush....... True, party loyalists often see what they want to see.........But having spent much of the past three weeks on the road, visiting eight cities in the Northeast, the Midwest, the South and the West Coast, I sense the same passion Inslee does on the anti-Bush side.........Individuals who never before made a campaign contribution are opening their checkbooks to Kerry and the Democrats.............And, perhaps most significant, moderate and moderately conservative Republicans are showing little enthusiasm for Bush........"I've never seen a time with so many Republicans expressing consternation about their party and a willingness to support the other party," said Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat whose district, in Washington's southwest corner, went for Bush four years ago.

The power of "unified government"

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1803&e=1&u=/washpost/20040630/pl_washpost/a15997_2004jun29
A deep rift in the Republican Party has left Congress unable to pass a budget this year, raising the probability that, for the third time in three decades, lawmakers will not agree on a detailed blueprint for government spending and tax policy....The budget meltdown was triggered by a feud between conservative Republicans who favor continuing to cut taxes in the face of record budget deficits and GOP moderates who are pushing for curbs on tax cuts and are reluctant to slash spending. Even a face-saving effort in the House to impose federal spending curbs blew up just after midnight Friday.....

Another GOP "Christian" hypocrite

http://tristero.blogspot.com/2004_06_27_tristero_archive.html#108851501623640617
When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his "family values" agenda, calling gambling "a cancer on the American body politic".......But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect--and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret. Reed has always operated behind the scenes, and apparently he didn't want to risk becoming a humbled hypocrite like his right-wing cohorts William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh.

Bonus item: Bush's REALLY DUMB campaign ad

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/06/godwins_law_in_.html

- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:45 AM

 
"AGGRESSIVE, BUT LAWFUL"

You didn't really believe him, did you?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/22/prisoner.memos/index.html
President Bush said that he had never sanctioned any torture techniques, as the White House sought to quell questions about the interrogation of military prisoners......"Look, let me make very clear the position of my government and our country," Bush said Tuesday in the Oval Office......"We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture."

It didn't even take a week for this lie to be unravelled

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/middleeast/27MEMO.html?ex=1246075200&
An August 2002 memo by the Justice Department that concluded interrogators could use extreme techniques on detainees in the war on terror helped provide an after-the-fact legal basis for harsh procedures used by the C.I.A. on high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials......The full text of the memo was made public by the White House on Tuesday without explanation about why it was written or whether its standards were applied.......The memo suggested that the president could authorize a wide array of coercive interrogation methods in the campaign against terrorism without violating international treaties or the federal torture law. It did not specify any particular procedures but suggested there were few limits short of causing the death of a prisoner.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8534-2004Jun26.html
The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said......The "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed......."Everything's on hold," said a former senior CIA official aware of the agency's decision. "The whole thing has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we're on legal ground."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-27-cia-interrogation-methods_x.htm
The Justice Department spelled out specific interrogation methods that the CIA could use against top al-Qaeda members in a still-classified August 2002 legal memo, issued as the spy agency pressed terrorism suspects about possible strikes on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, current and former Justice officials said......CIA officials had demanded specific guidance for handling "high-value al-Qaeda captives," said a former Justice official who worked on the memo. The techniques discussed were "aggressive" but "lawful," the former official said. A current Justice official who knows the memo's contents said it specifically authorized the CIA to use "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he is suffocating....The memo has not been made public in the ongoing investigations of abuse of prisoners by military and intelligence officials. Because the document is classified, the former and current Justice officials spoke on condition of anonymity. The memo is far more detailed and explicit than another August 2002 document generated by Justice's Office of Legal Counsel concerning U.S. obligations under anti-torture law. That document has been made public.

http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/why_the_bybee_memo_reads_like_a_onesided_brief_it_was_for_the_cia.html
One of the minor mysteries troubling lawyers who care about such things was why the Bybee memo was such a lousy piece of craft. The OLC is traditionally drawn from the elite of the profession, even if its head sometimes has to pass an ideological litmus test. One would expect an advisory memo on a major issue like torture to at least present both sides....One plausible explanation for these mysteries appears now on the New York Times web site and will presumably be in tomorrow's paper: the Bybee memo was not written in a vacuum, nor (perhaps) due to some order from on high motivated by a desire to squeeze more info from detainees who were not coughing up the locations of weapons of mass destruction. No, what the NYT suggests is that the memo was written after the CIA had already done something - presumably excessive - to one of the detainees. Thus, it seems likely the White House was scrambling to find some legal cover for abuses that had already happened.....

This is pretty devastating, from any humane standpoint -- and it would have come out eventually. But the typical WH move: drop it during the week when everyone is distracted by the "transfer of power" in Iraq. Oh, and on that subject....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/middleeast/29IRAQ.html?ex=1246161600&en=2746e5b8eaaa4593&%2338;ei=5090&%2338;partner=rssuserland
American aides and Iraqi officials said they had moved up the date of the ceremony, and held it in near secrecy, to foil the timing of any terrorist attacks that might be in the works. After more than a week's discussion, the decision was made only on Sunday, an American official said, after Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi prime minister, indicated he was prepared to take charge......But even now, it is unclear how much control his government will exercise, particularly over the 160,000 troops from the United States, Britain and other countries that will remain here, or even over Iraq's own army and police forces

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/opinion/29KRUG.html
The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong.......The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start - but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country......

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108843853517271330
It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony. .....This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration.

A stunning rebuke from the SC against the Imperial Presidency argument

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/administration/whbriefing/
"A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens," wrote Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13226-2004Jun28.html
Liberal or conservative mattered little in the ultimate outcome. The court roundly rejected the president's assertion that, in time of war, he can order the "potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," to quote the court's opinion in the case of foreign prisoners held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In fact, the administration's claim to such power over U.S. citizens produced an opinion signed by perhaps the court's most conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, and possibly its most liberal, John Paul Stevens.....Only Justice Clarence Thomas embraced the administration's positions without reservation, referring in a dissenting opinion to "the breadth of the President's authority to detain enemy combatants, an authority that includes making virtually conclusive factual findings" that the Supreme Court is powerless to "second-guess."

[More: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/29/supreme_detainees/index_np.html]

Cheney's recent.....uh......indiscretion. OK. by now everyone knows about his using the F-word in public. But what is more interesting is his response and the secondary analysis of what this suggests about the Bush admin state of mind

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003202
Vice President Cheney today acknowledged that he had a bitter exchange on the Senate floor with a senior Democratic senator, in which Cheney uttered a big-time obscenity, but said he had no regrets and that he "felt better after I had done it.".......Later in the interview, Cheney added, laughing, that "a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."........ Nice model he's setting for the kids there. But then again, I'm sure this kind of bravado will appeal to the Fox News set, who see this kind of thing as an example of an appealing kind of toughness in Republicans -- and as a sign of moral lassitude in everybody else.

[Originally, Cheney said only that he "probably" used it, which goes to show how unable he is to acknowledge even a direct fact put to him: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/politics/campaign/26cheney.html]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_27.php#003105
We are all up in arms right now, it seems, about Vice President Dick Cheney, and the fact that Cheney told one of the more irenic of Democratic senators to "f--k off" in a brief exchange on the Senate floor last Tuesday because the senator in question, Pat Leahy (Democrat of Vermont) had earlier had the temerity to raise questions about lucrative no-bid Iraqi contracts secured by his former employer Halliburton....[I]t's entertaining to watch avatars of dignity, good order and responsibility like Bill Frist and the folks over at the White House call Cheney's antics good clean fun and politics as usual......But for those who have few good things to say about the vice-president, I think, the correct response is less outrage than the sort of grim (or perhaps not so grim) satisfaction one feels when a malign character unwittingly reveals himself to a larger audience. Because even if Cheney "felt better" after his outburst, this wasn't a show of strength but one of desperation or, perhaps, impatient impotence..........Who is Dick Cheney? What do we know of him? None of us like being questioned or critized. But in him the disinclination runs particularly deep. He prefers to act in secrecy and is a man to whom government transparency has all the allure that a shaft of sunlight has to a vampire. When challenged, violence seems always to be his preferred method of response, that of first resort --- often a literal sort on the world stage, but with bureaucratic (viz. Plame) and what we might call verbal violence at home. By verbal violence I mean specifically tough talk and threats meant to frighten people away from challenging him further, to knock them on their heels. Even this new case -- saying Leahy et al. had it coming -- is but another example. When that doesn't work, he gets sloppy.......Cheney et al. can see all sorts of bad business coming down the pike in the next few months -- much of it already on the public radar screen, some of it still clogged up no doubt in back channels, newsrooms and new rounds of dirty-tricksterism. It seems clearly to be getting to them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5127-2004Jun25.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
Do you get the sense things are a little tense at the White House these days?.......Let's see........On Tuesday, right on the Senate floor, Vice President Cheney snarled obscenely at a Democratic senator........We can only imagine what it was like in the Oval Office yesterday morning when President Bush -- attended only by his new private lawyer -- faced 70 minutes of questions from prosecutors about the outing of a CIA operative.........But not long after that meeting, Bush got downright snippy with an Irish TV reporter when she tried to move him beyond his stock answers.

[More on that Irish reporter story:
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_06_20_atrios_archive.html#108825764687097446
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004222.php]

Enjoying this? Here's more

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,658285,00.html
The Vulcans-a campaign 2000 nickname for George W. Bush's hawkish national security team-went Krakatoa last week. Dick Cheney erupted on the Senate floor, deploying the F word against Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who had been belaboring the Vice President over the no-bid deals that Cheney's old company, Halliburton, had scored in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suffered a meltdown in a House Armed Services Committee hearing, blasting the press for "sitting in Baghdad" and "printing rumors." (He later apologized.) And the White House was forced to acknowledge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved, at least for a while, the use of dogs, nudity, stress positions-that is, torture-against enemy combatants. Indeed, Rumsfeld, who works at a stand-up desk, indicated a desire for at least one more strenuous stress position: "I stand 8-10 hours a day," he scrawled on a memo. "Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"......Presumably the Secretary of Defense doesn't do his standing naked, continuously, in the middle of the night, surrounded by hostile guards and attack dogs. But then, Rumsfeld's blustery testosteronics are at the heart of what has gone wrong with the Bush foreign policy-and last week the assorted temper tantrums appeared to be a leading indicator of a gathering summer storm confronting this presidency..........The torture investigation is one of four major defensive battles the Administration is facing. In the weeks to come, the White House will also have to deal with the 9/11 commission's final report, the congressional investigations into the CIA's bungled assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and a special prosecutor's hunt for the White House leakers who blew the cover of CIA secret operative Valerie Plame. Not only is the Administration defending itself against the Democrats, the investigators and the media. Two other serious, surreptitious-and quite possibly unprecedented-battles are going on: the intelligence community is at war with the White House, and the uniformed military is at war with the civilian leadership of the Pentagon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/opinion/27DOWD.html?pagewanted=print&position=
One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground....... This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even find described in Bill Clinton's "My Life.".....While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free Bushies were acting jangly.........First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11 commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney's F-word........Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It's all in how you define "Europe.")........Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts......."I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.


Other good cracks: Bush is even losing Wall Street support

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/29/mustreads/?source=RSS
The Wall Street Journal reports that not every Wall Streeter wants President Bush to win re-election. "Though George W. Bush has been a decidedly pro-business president, a few cracks are surfacing in what had been a solid wall of business support."....."Those small cracks, some stemming from dismay with record budget deficits, others from fears that his foreign policies are clouding the global business climate, have grown wide enough for Sen. John Kerry to launch a behind-the-scenes effort to woo business executives......"The upshot is a mostly quiet but significant struggle over business's allegiance. For Mr. Kerry, last week's endorsement by onetime corporate icon Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler Corp. chairman, was only the first of what his campaign promises will be more such staged appearances with business leaders. Mr. Kerry already had won backing from Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and Apple Computer's Steve Jobs." ... Among Kerry supporters is Eric Best, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, who says Mr. Bush's tax cuts go too far at the expense of mounting deficits. "I was raised as a fiscal conservative, and I think his fiscal policy is scary," he says.

A good summary of Bush's oh-so-very-bad year (and it will probably still get much worse)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4394-2004Jun25.html

Our "good friends" the French....no they're not....yes, they are....no they're not....

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/2004/06/guardian-angry-chirac-puts-bush-in-his.php
Jacques Chirac bluntly told George Bush to mind his own business yesterday when the US president urged European leaders to give Turkey a firm date for starting EU membership talks later this year.........Ignoring the determined effort to celebrate improved transatlantic relations after the Iraq crisis, the French president publicly rebuked Mr Bush at Nato's Istanbul summit for calling for special treatment for the Turks........Mr Bush, he complained, "not only went too far but went on to territory which is not his own".......He added: "It's as if I was advising the US on how they should manage their relations with Mexico."

Remember that bogus Niger/yellow-cake memo that started the whole Plame affair?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004224.php
[From the Financial Times] The fake documents were handed to an Italian journalist working for the Italian magazine Panorama by a businessman in October 2002. According to a senior official with detailed knowledge of the case, this businessman had been dismissed from the Italian armed forces for dishonourable conduct 25 years earlier.....The businessman, referred to by a pseudonym in the Panorama article, had previously tried to sell the documents to several intelligence services, according to a western intelligence officer........It was later established that he had a record of extortion and deception and had been convicted by a Rome court in 1985 and later arrested at least twice.........He did not return telephone calls yesterday, and is understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel.

[NOW it gets interesting....]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_27.php#003106
According to the Financial Times article, that business man is likely himself the forger of the documents and he has a long history of bad acts which, they say, discredit him as a source of information. That last tidbit plays a key part in the FT story because, in their words, the provider of the documents is "understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel."

That's what the FT says......I hear something different.......In fact, I know something different.

My colleagues and I have reported on this matter extensively, spoken to key players involved in the drama, and put together a detailed picture of what happened. And that picture looks remarkably different from this account which is out today -- specifically on the matter of the origins of those forged documents and who was involved......I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to say more than that. And at some later point in some later post I will do my best to explain the hows and whys of why I can't. But, for the moment, I can't.

Let me, however, offer a hypothetical that might help make sense of all this.......Let's say that certain individuals or organizations are responsible for some rather unfortunate misdeeds. And let's further postulate that such hypothetical individuals or organizations find out that some folks are on to them, that a story is in the works -- perhaps more than one -- and that it's coming right at them. Those individuals or organizations -- as shorthand, let's call them 'the bad actors' -- might well start trying to fight back, trying to gin up an alternative storyline to exculpate themselves and inculpate others. If that story made its way into the news, at a minimum, it might help the bad actors muddy the waters for when the real story comes out. You can see how such a regrettable turn of events might come to pass.

This is of course only a hypothetical. But I thought it might provide a clarifying context......So read the FT article. But also keep your ears open. It is, I'm quite confident, not the last word you'll hear on this story.

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000858.html
When trying to identify the perpetrator of a crime, one looks for two things: means, and motive. What do we think the motive is of those sources who would seek to discredit the testimony of an individual who is prepared to tell the story of where he got some forged documents? The motive would seem to be: to intimidate that individual, in order to prevent him from telling his story, and by extension, to attempt to prevent the truth from getting out. Who would want to prevent the truth from getting out? Those who have something to fear from the true story getting out, it seems to me. In other words, those who have knowledge of the crime....... It looks to be a summer of many interesting revelations.

"Bush's Worst Foreign Policy Disaster" (hint: it's not Iraq)

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003208

OK, Bush's OTHER Worst Foreign Policy Disaster (it IS Iraq)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10539-2004Jun27.html
The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush's foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials........When the war began 15 months ago, the president's Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad's transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change..........But these central planks of Bush doctrine have been tainted by spiraling violence, limited reconstruction, failure to find weapons of mass destruction or prove Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, and mounting Arab disillusionment with U.S. leadership........."Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth -- democracy promotion -- is hanging by a sliver," said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center........The president has "walked away from unilateralism. We're not going to do another preemptive strike anytime soon, certainly not in Iran or North Korea. And it looks like terrorism is getting worse, not better, especially in critical countries like Saudi Arabia," Kemp said.......As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq, which is entering a new phase this week as the United States prepares to hand over power to the new Iraqi government......Setbacks in Iraq have had a visible impact on policy, forcing shifts or reassessments. The United States has returned to the United Nations to solve its political problems in Iraq. It has appealed to NATO for help on security. It is also relying on diplomacy, with allies, to deal with every other hot spot.
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 4:27 PM

 
PBD will be on break for a few days while I am away from Internet access. The next issue will be available on Tuesday, June 29. Today's posting is the last until then.

Nick
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 4:10 AM

 
NO SHAME

Bush Co. "drops" request to UN to have US soldiers immune from World Court (dropped, of course, because in light of the torture scandals there was NO WAY the Security Council would have approved it).

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/007021.html
In a stunning defeat for the U.S., it has withdrawn its resolution seeking immunity for American peacekeepers from prosecution for war crimes......

[More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/24NATI.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64323-2004Jun23.html?nav=rss_nation]

But in Iraq (the new "sovereign" Iraq), US unilaterally declares its soldiers immune from prosecution

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A757-2004Jun23.html?nav=rss_nation
The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said.......The administration is taking the step in an effort to prevent the new Iraqi government from having to grant a blanket waiver as one of its first acts, which could undermine its credibility just as it assumes power. But U.S. officials said Washington's act could also create the impression that the United States is not turning over full sovereignty -- and giving itself special privileges........The issue of immunity for U.S. troops is among the most contentious in the Islamic world, where it has galvanized public opinion against the United States in the past. A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people.

A look into Bush's soul and being

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/22/prisoner.memos/index.html
President Bush said that he had never sanctioned any torture techniques, as the White House sought to quell questions about the interrogation of military prisoners......"Look, let me make very clear the position of my government and our country," Bush said Tuesday in the Oval Office......"We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being."

http://www.electablog.com/2004/06/our-soul-our-being-oh-yeah-and-our.html
First, let's make this very clear. It is our government. I use of first person singular to describe a government is one of this President's worst and most telling behavioristics. Second, while it's nice that Bush says he does not condone torture (although the religious imagry is less impressive), it's really not the point. Neither is our soul or our being. (Incidentally, first person singular is far more appropriate when discussing souls and/or beings).

What matters here are our laws. What the President should be saying is that we do not torture prisoners because we have signed treaties and adhere to a set of laws that render such behavior illegal. This is where the memos that have been released are the most interesting. What we see is an administration questioning to what extent the laws apply to them.

Should we torture prisoners? Should we torture Saddam himself or those who plan terrorist attacks? Is torture an effective means to gather accurate information?.... These questions may be open to debate. The question of whether or not a Chief Executive of "his" nation is above the law is not......Souls, beings and personal condoning are fine for places of worship or the family dinner table. But at the highest levels of government, it's simply got to be about the law.

What the document release didn't include

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64079-2004Jun23.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
[T]oday's coverage makes it clear that there are still a host of unresolved issues. Among them:

･ Does President Bush still believe, as his 2002 memo said, that he has "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to some combatants?

･ The memos describe Pentagon prohibitions against torture. But do the distinctions drawn between forceful interrogation tactics and torture meet the common-sense test? And what rules did the White House set for the CIA?

･ Did the White House set a tone that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib?

･ What was the president's involvement in the deliberations on torture, beyond putting his name at the bottom of that one memo?

･ And the debate within the administration, as illustrated most clearly by memos from the Justice Department, continued to rage long after Bush's memo. So how long did the issue of torture remain in play?

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/007018.html
The released documents stop in April 2003 and do not cover practices at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq, Human Rights Watch said. Even so, they show that in December, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of techniques, such as the use of guard dogs to instill fear in detainees, stripping detainees nude, and the use of painful stress positions, that violate the law. Rumsfeld later rescinded his approval of these techniques on Guantanamo detainees, yet they later featured prominently in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.....Human Rights Watch calls for "an independent investigation, not a selective self-investigation." In addition, it wants the administration to release everything, "including the 2003 memoranda from Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq authorizing coercive interrogation techniques there," and documents relating to CIA interrogation practices.

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003182
After having the Office of Legal Counsel write a memo explaining that torture isn't really torture, and that even if it is, the laws don't apply to the president, but in case they do, here's a whole bunch of ways to break the law and get away with it, too, and then refusing the release the memo to Congress without any legal authority, the White House has decided to release it after all and note that maybe this whole thing wasn't such a good idea in the first place. ......

The administration's line on this is still filled with impenetrable ambiguities. "Bush has not authorized any interrogations that would employ methods outside the law, [an official said] said." The whole point of the memo, however, was to define as legal certain things that are not, in fact, legal. It didn't say, "go break the law," it said, "if you do this you won't be breaking the law." So when they say they're not employing methods outside the law, we need to know which law they're talking about -- the real ones, or the ones their lawyers have made up.

Stepping back, though, the really important thing is this: The administration wrote this opinion, and then sought -- quite stridently -- to keep it secret. Only when faced with a public outcry are they willing to back away from the doctrine it entailed. If the White House had had its way, the public would never have heard a word of any of this, and the memo would never have been disavowed. And, of course, we don't know what other secret memos may be lurking around somewhere. What's more, as Michael Froomkin points out it's not clear from this that the administration has disavowed the expansive view of presidential power that underlay the original torture memos -- the new position seems to be that Bush could order torture if he wanted to, but he just isn't doing it.

Author of the discredited torture memo now an Appeals Court judge (we had this before, but it's worth a repeat now)

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003091
The Justice Department attempted to dissociate itself from an August 2002 memo condoning the torture of prisoners. But it didn't dissociate itself from the memo's author, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. As TPM reader Hope P. reminded me, George W. Bush nominated Bybee as a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Seventeen Democrats, citing Bybee's opposition to gay rights and his highly restrictive views of the First Amendment, opposed his nomination, but he was confirmed by the Repbulican Senate in March 2003. This man, who advocated that the United States ignore international law--and some might say, commit war crimes--now holds a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24MEMO.html
Former colleagues say the judge, whose chambers are in Las Vegas, is a serious, soft-spoken, reflective man. They say it is difficult to reconcile his discussion of torture in clinical, dispassionate detail with his background. A former legal academic, Judge Bybee told Meridian, a Mormon magazine, last year that he hoped to be remembered for his probity......"I would like my headstone to read, `He always tried to do the right thing,' " Judge Bybee said.

[Uh, Judge Bybee? I hate to tell you, but....]

Another judge-to-be?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A756-2004Jun23.html?nav=rss_nation
Although the White House this week repudiated a Justice Department opinion that torture might be legally defensible, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II in 2003 forced the Pentagon working group to use it as its legal guidepost. He did so over objections from the top lawyers of every military service, who found the legal judgments to be extreme and wrong-headed.......

[More on his nomination: http://www.westwindnet.com/ireland/debatcen/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=usdomestic&Number=257236&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=]

Bush's reach out to North Korea: you would call it "hypocrisy" if terms like that even applied any longer...

http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002809.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - President Bush has authorized a team of American negotiators to offer North Korea, in talks in Beijing on Thursday, a new but highly conditional set of incentives to give up its nuclear weapons programs the way Libya did late last year, according to senior administration officials.....The proposal would be the first significant, detailed overture to North Korea since Mr. Bush took office three years ago........

Good thing we didn't do this three years ago! That would have been appeasement!

Bush's Rwanda - will we ever learn?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62451-2004Jun22.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/opinion/23KRIS.html

Bush's home-grown terrorist

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200426#422

Juan Cole's hilarious tutorial on the Shakir/Shakir fiasco (I guess it helps when you actually KNOW Arabic and regional nomenclatures, which some of those DoD "experts" clearly don't)

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108797915390057606

The truth about those Saudi flights

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/23/unger_isikoff/?source=RSS

[More: http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/f911facts/isikoff.php]

The best and the brightest in Iraq: an interesting case study in the ironies of "cronyism"

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_23_bestof.html#108800032548362793
[Michael] Fleischer was in the Foreign Service for four years after college in the 1970s, serving in Washington and Africa. He also worked briefly on Capitol Hill and received a Harvard MBA.....He said that from his Foreign Service stint, he was already acquainted with Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy who heads the CPA......With an assist from his brother, Ari, who "got my resume to Bremer," Fleischer landed interviews that led to his appointment......

Among Fleischer's key tasks was training more Iraqi businessmen in the ways of U.S.-style procurement so they can land part of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction aid the U.S. has earmarked for Iraq......Competitive bidding "is a new world for the Iraqis," Fleischer said. Under Saddam Hussein, "it was all done by cronies. The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

Will we ever hear the Sybel Edmonds story?

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/23/pogo/?source=RSS

GOP manipulates vote timing so that Kerry can't support veteran's benefits (classy guys, aren't they?)

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_23_bestof.html#108799673651272548

GOP involved with Nader campaign in Arizona?

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/23/nader_az/?source=RSS

More insight into the "soul and being" of the GOP (from Clinton's book)

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/clinton-on-press.html
I was genuinely confused by the mainstream press coverage of Whitewater...One day, after one of our budget meetings in October, I asked Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming to stay a moment to talk. Simpson was a conservative Republican, but we had a pretty good relationship because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan. I asked Alan if he thought Hillary and I had done anything wrong in Whitewater. 'Of course not,' he said. 'That's not what this is about. This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you didn't.' Simpson laughed at how willing the 'elitist' press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: 'You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that's much more important.' When I asked him to explain, he said, 'Democrats like you and Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don't think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they like power. So does the press. And since you're President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.'

And still more on how the GOP operates - you think these guys don't understand hardball?

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/23/democratic_lobbyists_give_insider_info_to_republicans.html
"Democratic lobbyists are giving House Republican aides and lawmakers closely held information about the voting intentions of congressional Democrats in exchange for access to private meetings with GOP officials on Capitol Hill," The Hill reports......"For House Republican whips, the inside information on Democratic voting strategies can yield a crucial awareness of what the ultimate vote count on the floor might be."

[More: http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003184]

GOP condemns 527's, tries to get them thrown out in court, fails, then decides to try to start their own, fails, and now decides on a new strategy

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/23/bush_campaign_bypasses_527_groups.html
"In a major shift in fundraising strategy, President Bush's finance team has begun asking wealthy Republicans to cut checks as large as $1 million to GOP state parties in key election battlegrounds rather than steering their funds to independent groups created in recent months to support Republican candidates this fall," Roll Call reports.

Bonus item: Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly lying? LYING?! How can that be?

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/lies-and-lying-liars_23.html
More puzzling, though, was Limbaugh's apparent decision to fabricate a story involving Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the powerful chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Discussing American Forces Radio during his June 18 program, Limbaugh told listeners, "He [Stevens] sent me a fax today with a revised [Harkin] amendment. They've gone in and they fixed the amendment. They -- they've watered this thing down. Whatever the Harkin amendment was, it now doesn't mention my name."

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=6228#2
During his appearance last night on "the Factor," Bill O'Reilly asked John Podesta for "one example where I smeared somebody." Podesta noted that O'Reilly compared Al Franken to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. O'Reilly -- displaying his notorious command for the facts -- denied it, saying "I did not refer to him [Al Franken] as Joseph Goebbels, that was Michael Moore." O'Reilly accused Podesta of misstating "what I said." Apparently, O'Reilly is having a little trouble with his short term memory. On his June 10 show, O'Reilly said "Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi regime and whose very famous quote was, 'If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth'...And that's what Stuart Smalley [O'Reilly refers to Al Franken as Stuart Smalley, Franken's played on Saturday Night Live], and Michael Moore and all of these guys do."
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:24 AM

 
WE COULD IF WE WANTED TO, BUT WE DIDN'T

(But we could. If we wanted to.)

WH document dump on torture policies settles nothing

http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/bush_ordered_humane_treatment_in_feb_2002_then_what.html
This evening the White House released the text of an order signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, regarding the treatment of al-Qaida and Taliban detainees......This Bush order applies to the Afghanistan Taliban, and to alleged al-Qaida members in Iraq and worldwide; it says they don't have rights, but doesn't say that they should be tortured; rather it says they should be treated "humanely" and that they should be given Geneva-like privileges when not too inconvenient to do so.

The order accepts the Royalist theory of Presidential power, but says it declines to apply it: "I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time."

The key command: "As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.".....

[Given what we have learned about these people, I consider that carefully worded exception big enough to drive a truck through]

Note also what's not there. For example, nothing in this memo seems directed to the CIA, just to the military. I wonder if there's a separate order for the CIA with more flexibility? ......It's also important to keep the confusing timeline straight. The OLC torture memo was delivered in August 2002, i.e. several months after this order. Thus, it is clear that this command, in Feb. 2002, to be "humane" was not the last word on the subject in the minds of all policy makers, including the President's closest advisors such as his Legal Counsel. And we know that the Walker Group was still chewing on the torture question in March 2003, although we don't know what if anything came of it...... In short, we don't know if this memo was ever countermanded, or amended, whether it applied to the CIA, or indeed what if anything ultimately resulted from subsequent advice to Bush that he could allow great physical pain to be applied during questioning of detainees......

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60719-2004Jun22.html
President Bush's aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law...... Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.

In a highly unusual repudiation of its department's own work, a senior Justice official and two other high-ranking lawyers said that all legal advice rendered by the department's Office of Legal Counsel on the subject of interrogations will be reviewed.

As part of a public relations offensive, the administration also declassified and released hundreds of pages of internal documents that it said demonstrated that Bush had never authorized torture against detainees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the administration revealed details of the interrogation tactics being used on prisoners, an extraordinary disclosure for an administration that has argued that the release of such information would help the enemy.......

In the White House briefing, the aides took the extraordinary step of publicly questioning advice provided by top administration lawyers, with Gonzales saying that the internal administration debate included "unnecessary, over-broad discussions."..........A Justice Department official said yesterday that the administration planned to scrap a provision in it opining that interrogators who torture al Qaeda or Taliban captives could be exempt from prosecution under the president's powers as commander in chief.......Gonzales...acknowledged that some of the conclusions were "controversial" and "subject to misinterpretation."

The documents that were released and the White House briefing focused on military interrogations and left many questions unanswered. Gonzales refused to comment on techniques used by the CIA, beyond saying that they "are lawful and do not constitute torture." He also would not discuss the president's involvement in the deliberations.

[In other words: they still haven't released everything pertinent to the issue. Apparently, most of the top Al Qaeda suspects are under the control of the CIA, not the military.]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-torture23jun23,1,3750842.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Critics said Tuesday that the newly released documents still do not give the public a full picture of how the administration decided what was the right treatment for enemy captives or how the policies were carried out......Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the document release a "self-serving selection" and said "much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."

And this intriguing tidbit about Rumsfeld's involvement

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-torture23jun23,1,3750842.story?coll=la-home-headlines
In the fall of 2002, military authorities were becoming concerned that they were not getting enough information out of Guantanamo Bay and asked Rumsfeld for permission to step-up their techniques. Rumsfeld was advised of three escalating categories of techniques that could be used......The third category called for harsher measures. Detainees could be exposed to cold weather and cold water. Wet towels could placed over them along with dripping water to make them think they were going to be suffocated.......Some prisoners could be convinced they were going to die, and that family members also would be killed if they did not cooperate. The category also called for the "use of mild, noninjurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger and light pushing.

Rumsfeld approved only the "use of mild, noninjurious physical contact."

The policy was in effect for six weeks at Guantanamo Bay. On Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld rescinded his directive. He gave no reason for his decision, but did say that if intelligence officers wanted to step up techniques against individual detainees in the future, "you should forward that request to me" and it should include a "thorough justification.".....The materials released Tuesday do not state whether any such requests were made or approved.

[If he only approved "mild, noninjurious physical contact," then what happened that made him rescind this order? More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61942-2004Jun22.html]

Ashcroft still faces criticism that he dismissed terror concerns pre-9/11

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5271234/
The 9/11 commission is busy writing its final report, but is still investigating critical facts, including the conduct of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. NBC News has learned that the commission has interviewed two FBI officials who contradict sworn testimony by Ashcroft, about whether he brushed off terrorism warnings in the summer of 2001......At issue is a July 5, 2001, meeting between Ashcroft and acting FBI Director Tom Pickard. That month, the threat of an al-Qaida attack was so high, the White House summoned the FBI and domestic agencies, and warned them to be on alert......Yet, Pickard testified to the 9/11 commission that when he tried to brief Ashcroft just a week later, on July 12, about the terror threat inside the United States, he got the brush-off......."Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear about this anymore," Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste asked on April 13. "Is that correct?"....."That is correct," Pickard replied.....Testifying under oath the same day, Ashcroft categorically denied the allegation, saying, "I did never speak to him saying that I didn't want to hear about terrorism.".....However, another senior FBI official tells NBC News he vividly recalls Pickard returning from the meeting that day furious that Ashcroft had cut short the terrorism briefing. This official, now retired, has talked to the 9/11 commission......NBC News has learned that commission investigators also tracked down another FBI witness at the meeting that day, Ruben Garcia, head of the Criminal Division at that time. Several sources familiar with the investigation say Garcia confirmed to the commission that Ashcroft did indeed dismiss Pickard's warnings about al-Qaida.

Redactions to Senate Intelligence Committee report erase Cheney's central role in prewar intelligence "stove-piping"

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/22/cheney_cia/?source=RSS
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,655889,00.html

Torture and abuse in Afghanistan: the untold story

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/2004/06/guardian-they-said-this-is-america-if.php

At Guantanamo, in the days following Gen. Geoffrey Miller's arrival with his new methods, prisoner suicide attempts soared

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/007004.html

Part Three of the WP series on what went wrong in Iraq

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58888-2004Jun21.html
The nascent political institutions designed to replace the U.S. administration of Iraq are beset by challenges to their popular legitimacy and effectiveness, and by grave risks to Iraqis who have joined the experiment in representative government. As Iraqis prepare for their country to regain sovereignty, it is uncertain how much their political future will be shaped by the $700 million program in democracy-building that has been at the core of the U.S. occupation.......Inside the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which will dissolve with the handover on June 30, some officials express doubts that Iraq's political system will conform to the American blueprints. "Will this develop the way we hope it will?" a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. "Probably not."......

Council members said they envisioned a democracy different from what they have read about the United States, suggesting that many of the concepts Americans have been preaching here have not been accepted. For instance, many said that a separation between religion and the state makes little sense in Iraq.......Men on the council said they supported allowing women to vote and hold elective office, but several scoffed at the notion of giving women the same personal freedoms they enjoy outside the Arab world......

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108796355262683910
US Has Lost War for Hearts and Minds in Iraq......

In the last days before the handover, the CPA is rushing to spend billions of Iraqi oil revenues (which means the new govt won't have it to spend)

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1764
[T]he CPA has started spending about $2.5 billion in Iraqi oil revenue in order to compensate for bottlenecks--both bureaucratic and security-based--in spending the congressionally appropriated $18 billion, of which only $3.2 has actually been spent......Explains an occupation official:

Would we rather have been able to save the money and have a nice kitty? Sure. There's always a tension between putting money to work right away and having it available for a tough year next year. This is the way we resolved it.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373157793&p=1012571727088
United Nations-mandated auditors have sharply criticised the US occupation authority for the way it has spent more than $11bn in Iraqi oil revenues and say they have faced "resistance" from coalition officials.......In an interim report, obtained by the Financial Times, KPMG says the Development Fund for Iraq, which is managed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority and channels oil revenue into reconstruction projects, is "open to fraudulent acts".......The auditors criticise the CPA's bookkeeping and warn: "The CPA does not have effective controls over the ministries' spending of their individually allocated budgets, whether the funds are direct from the CPA or via the ministry of finance."

U.S. to turn over "custody" (cough cough) of Hussein to Iraq

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20040622/ts_nm/iraq_saddam_dc_2
The United States plans to turn over legal, but not physical, custody of Saddam Hussein and some other prisoners to the Iraqi interim government soon after it takes over on June 30....The official said Saddam and other detainees handed over legally to the new government would then become "subject to Iraqi due process, including the right to speedy trial, the right to counsel and the right to have judicially issued arrest warrants in place to authorize continued detention." .....Salem Chalabi, a lawyer leading the work of the special tribunal, has said those convicted could face the death penalty if the interim government decides to restore it.

[Yes, in case you didn't already know it - THAT Chalabi's nephew]

Speaking of whom, Wolfowitz stands by his man (sort of)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4233837,00.html
"Nothing in Iraq is black and white. I don't think I know of any figure we're dealing with who hasn't had in one way or another to compromise with the incredibly difficult circumstances of the last 35 years of that country's history,'' Wolfowitz said......"I am surprised that he seems to be the target, for many years, of particular animus from some parts of this government,'' Wolfowitz said. "But on the other hand, there are aspects of his recent behavior that are puzzling to me.'' He did not elaborate on what those activities were.

And what is exactly the iron-clad evidence the administration keeps citing as "proof" of a "link"? Even this weaker new formulation stands on pretty thin ground

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004199.php
The continuing FUD campaign over Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda is endlessly frustrating - and, frankly, probably not an argument that's winnable for liberals. There's just enough uncertainty about the whole thing that war opponents will never be able to produce a firm smoking gun showing that the administration is lying......But let's review the primary evidence anyway........

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003181
This reminds me of another insufficiently noted element in this saga, namely the tendency of certain folks out there on the right to spin grandiose tales of collaboration on the rather slender thread that Abu Zarqawi once got his leg amputated in Iraq. This was always a bit dubious -- Zarqawi typically operated in the part of Iraq that was outside of Saddam's control, he traveled under aliases as though he didn't want the Baath regime to know what he was doing, and his organization wasn't really a part of al-Qaeda anyway -- but more importantly, some of the videotapes we've seen over the past month have made it pretty clear that Zarqawi has two legs.

More coming out now on the Shakir/Shakir connection (which is shaping up into another argument between the DOD propaganda machine and the CIA intelligence crew)

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8978562.htm
Defenders of President Bush's charges that Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaida have been citing what they say is new evidence that could help substantiate one of the administration's main justifications for invading Iraq.....They say the evidence is the name of a paramilitary officer in captured documents that appears identical to that of an Iraqi who met two Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia nearly two years before the attacks in New York and Washington.

But U.S. officials told Knight Ridder on Monday that U.S. intelligence experts were highly skeptical that the Iraqi officer had any connection to al-Qaida......On Sunday, John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the independent commission that's probing the attacks, cited the documents as "new intelligence" on Iraq's links with al-Qaida.

The U.S. officials said the lieutenant colonel's name is different from that of the man who met the hijackers in Malaysia. The man who met the hijackers wasn't in Iraq at the time the documents were dated and he's never been implicated in the Sept. 11 plot by any top al-Qaida operatives in American custody.....The officials said they were unsure why Lehman portrayed the documents as possible new intelligence on Iraq's links to al-Qaida. The documents have been cited by such staunch administration defenders as conservative author Stephen F. Hayes and The Wall Street Journal editorial page......

Lehman didn't return a telephone call to his office in New York. A spokesman for the commission said he couldn't answer questions about the intelligence Lehman cited Sunday.......

Some civilian officials in the Pentagon and other experts have suggested that the officer may have been the same person as Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi at the center of an unresolved subchapter of the Sept. 11 plot.....Some civilian Pentagon officials and other experts have cited Ahmad Hikmat Shakir as potential evidence of an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy......

But the U.S. officials who spoke to Knight Ridder on Monday said there were a number of reasons that intelligence analysts doubted that the officer was the same Iraqi who met the two Sept. 11 hijackers in Kuala Lumpur......

[http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uscia223863038jun22,0,6059318.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines: The CIA concluded "a long time ago" that an al-Qaida associate who met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia was not an officer in Saddam Hussein's army]

......"It's very confusing, but it's not the same guy," one U.S. official said.

"Very confusing" to say the least. Laura Rozen and Spencer Ackerman straighten out the different names and players, below. But here is the question people keep missing: who gave Lehman this information (it clearly wasn't a connection he made on his own), and were these sources also deluded about the connection or using him to float a story they knew was trumped-up and bogus? And how do you think Lehman is feeling right now?

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000835.html
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003086
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003087

[Wonkette captures the wackiness of it all: http://www.wonkette.com/archives/you-say-ahmad-hikmat-shakir-azzawi-i-say-hikmat-shakir-ahmad-lets-invade-anyway-016600.php]

How philosophy (!!!) helps Matt Yglesias decode the deceptions of Bush and Cheney

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=7924
I studied philosophy in college, which I never thought would come in handy in any sort of professional pursuit. In the course of doing so, however, I did take several courses on the subject of semantics and studied Paul Grice's theory of "conversational implicature." As aptly summarized by Kent Bach, the point is this:

What a speaker implicates is distinct from what he says and from what his words imply........a speaker can say one thing and manage to mean something else or something more by exploiting the fact that he may be presumed to be cooperative, in particular, to be speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and otherwise appropriately. The listener relies on this presumption to make a contextually driven inference from what the speaker says to what she means.

[More: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004202.php]

AP sues to get all Bush National Guard records (oh-oh)

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/8985661.htm
[T]he lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin......The White House says the government has already released all the records of Bush's military service.

[This is a revealing lie. We know they never released his medical files and other materials relevant to his suspension from flying -- so they are parsing "military service," and what they consider relevant to it, in the narrowest possible sense. I don't believe this is a fishing expedition: I think these records show something Bush hasn't told us about yet. Should be fun.]

Supreme Court decision on "patient bill of rights" a big headache for Bush

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200426#418
http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/lying_in_politics_/2004/06/acrobatics.php

Bonus item: GOP operatives behind "grassroots" campaign to block theatres from showing "Fahrenheit 9-11"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/22/174912/259

And to all my Illinois friends and colleagues, you can STOP LAUGHING NOW

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003177
Now that the divorce papers of Jack Ryan -- the GOP's Senate candidate in Illinois -- have been unsealed, we can see what it is he didn't want out there:

Jeri Ryan said her then-husband took her on three "surprise trips" in the spring of 1998 to New Orleans, New York and Paris, during which he took her to sex clubs. She said she refused to go in the first and went into the second at his insistence......."It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," she said in the court document, adding that her husband "wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused."........She said on arriving at the third club, in Paris, "people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. [He] became very upset with me and said it was not a 'turn on' for me to cry."

[I think you can chalk this up now as a Democratic takeover of one Republican Senate seat]


- posted by Nick Burbules @ 2:43 AM

 
"CREATING SOME OPTICS"

Iraq: "creating some optics" (a rare moment of candor)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56479-2004Jun20.html
"If Americans are in danger, if there's a really bad person we've got to go after, it's the same old rules," Wolfowitz told reporters traveling with him, making clear that U.S. forces had no intention of withdrawing from the fight. "But we would like people to see that something has changed. In the first few weeks, a lot of the challenge is how to create some optics when the underlying substance hasn't changed that much."

Oh, Christ -- you WON'T BELIEVE this

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58899-2004Jun21.html?nav=headlines
Al Qaeda Link To Iraq May Be Confusion Over Names
An allegation that a high-ranking al Qaeda member was an officer in Saddam Hussein's private militia may have resulted from confusion over Iraqi names, a senior administration official said yesterday........Former Navy secretary John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sunday that documents found in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda." Although he said the identity "still has to be confirmed," Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."........Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.

[If this information turns out to be bogus, it wasn't because it was LEHMAN who made the mistaken connection. The Bush people have been floating this questionable "link" for a while. And guess whose office is implicated? Douglas Feith: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003085]

"The Axis of Evil" -- reversing the spin

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/21/north_korea/
With Secretary of State Colin Powell promising a "spirit of flexibility," the United States and its negotiating partners are working on a plan to offer economic aid jointly to North Korea......The United States has helped North Korea with massive food shipments over the years, but it would not provide economic assistance under the proposal being prepared for the talks, a senior Bush administration official said Monday.....Japan and South Korea would provide aid to the desperate communist government....

[And then we would reimburse Japan and S. Korea, no doubt]

More reversals: Is the Bush administration opening up back-channel contacts with the Taliban? (good grief!)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FF18Ag02.html

State Dept to release corrected report showing sharp INCREASE in terrorism

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58880-2004Jun21.html?nav=rss_nation
A revised report to be released today shows a dramatic increase in both the number of deaths and other casualties, as well as a less dramatic boost in incidents, a senior State Department official said......Still, the revised report shows that international cooperation and a new awareness of the terror threat are bringing positive results, the official said.

Full sovereignty: Allawi's press contacts being run out of the WH

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/21/142310/784

Does Cheney weave some kind of spell on interviewers?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5258292/#040621
From When Presidents Lie: "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face." -- Ben Bradlee

Transcript, CNBC's "Capital Report," June 17, 2004

Gloria Borger: "Well, let's get to Mohammed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was quote, "pretty well confirmed."

Vice President Cheney: No, I never said that.

BORGER: OK.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that.

BORGER: I think that is...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not.

Transcript, NBC's "Meet the Press," December 9, 2001

Vice-President Cheney: "It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April."

Cheney's decisions during 9-11 again under scrutiny (how the 9-11 report got edited after WH complaints)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5251871/site/newsweek/
Did Dick Cheney follow proper procedures in ordering the shoot-down of U.S. airliners on 9/11?.....[T]he question of Cheney's behavior that day is one of many new issues raised in the remarkably detailed, chilling account laid out in dramatic presentations by the 9-11 Commission. NEWSWEEK has learned that some on the commission staff were, in fact, highly skeptical of the vice president's account and made their views clearer in an earlier draft of their staff report. According to one knowledgeable source, some staffers "flat out didn't believe the call ever took place." When the early draft conveying that skepticism was circulated to the administration, it provoked an angry reaction. In a letter from White House lawyers last Tuesday and a series of phone calls, the White House vigorously lobbied the commission to change the language in its report........Ultimately the chairman and vice chair of the commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former representative Lee Hamilton-both of whom have sought mightily to appear nonpartisan-agreed to remove some of the offending language. The report "was watered down," groused one staffer.

Will the 9-11 commission allow itself to be bullied into watering down its conclusions on Saddam-Al Qaeda links too? (looks like it)

http://www.ericumansky.com/2004/06/911_panel_to_ba.html
http://www.tompaine.com/print/will_the_commissioners_cave.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/opinion/21SAFI.html

[Good analysis of Safire's piece: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000832.html]

Scott McClellan watch:

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200426#412
It's Monday morning. If you're mumbling about the start of another work week, buck up because it could always be worse: You could have Scott McClellan's job........Here's poor Scott at last week's White House press conference, trying to explain to the national press corps and you, the good people of the United States, how the 9-11 Commission's conclusions in no way contradict the Administration's various statements during the past two years about the alliance, er, collaboration, er, contacts - yeah, contacts, that's the ticket - between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda:

Track 1: "Deep, longstanding ties."
Track 2: "Sinister nexus."
Track 3: "Had a common enemy."
Track 4: "High-level contacts"

Hang on, Scott. It's almost over.....

Go see "Missing Link" - you'll be glad you did

http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/

Soon to be 1000: Senate Republicans agree with Bush to block coverage of war dead

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/21/204942/723

Guantanamo prisoners: mostly nobodies caught in the net

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/politics/21GITM.html?hp
For nearly two and a half years, American officials have maintained that locked within the steel-mesh cells of the military prison here are some of the world's most dangerous terrorists -- ''the worst of a very bad lot,'' Vice President Dick Cheney has called them.......The officials say information gleaned from the detainees has exposed terrorist cells, thwarted planned attacks and revealed vital intelligence about Al Qaeda. The secrets they hold and the threats they pose justify holding them indefinitely without charge, Bush administration officials have said....

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the [600] detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings......While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said.....[T]he Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said.

Bush admin already anticipating that their Guantanamo rules will be struck down by the SC

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006994.html
The Bush Administration has developed a strategy to deal with Guantanamo detainees in the event the Supreme Court declares its current rules unconstitutional. Trouble is, they're not much better than those currently in place......

Gens. Abizaid, Chavez, and other high ranking officers to face questioning under oath in soldiers' torture trial (can I help draft some questions, please?)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3825089.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/middleeast/22IRAQ.html
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/21/abuse_lawyers/?source=RSS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57125-2004Jun21.html
".....unless they invoke their rights against self-incrimination."

[ouch!]

Hey guys, you can take the quotation marks off now

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/21/rumsfeld.interrogation.memos/index.html
Pentagon to release Rumsfeld 'torture' memos
The Pentagon has declassified and will release as soon as Tuesday memos signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that critics argue authorized torture of detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.......But Pentagon officials strongly disputed the contention that the aggressive techniques, including the use of dogs to induce fear, constituted torture.......Among the memos, Pentagon officials said, is a directive signed by Rumsfeld in October 2002 authorizing a technique called "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, immersed in water and made to feel as if he is going to drown.....

Last week, Rumsfeld complained that people were defining torture in a way that -- in his words -- "doesn't fit a dictionary definition of the word that one would normally accept."....... "There is no wiggle room in the president's mind or my mind about torture," he told reporters at the Pentagon...."That is not to say that somebody else couldn't characterize something in a way that would fit what I described.".....Sources said another memo signed by Rumsfeld authorizes forcing detainees to stand for up to four hours at a time....."I stand for eight hours a day," scribbled Rumsfeld at the bottom of the page, according to a source. Rumsfeld, who does not like to sit, works at a stand-up desk in his Pentagon office.....

[With a hood on his head and electrodes attached to his genitals?]

Saudi Arabia: Our ambiguous ally

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5251883/site/newsweek/
This, then, is the paradox. Saudi officials claim that the militants have no support and yet constantly act as if they do. Officials cite a recent (secret) government poll that showed 49 percent support Osama bin Laden's ideas. They speak of the need to move "slowly and carefully." While still sensitive on this topic, educated Saudis will now admit that parts of their society have become dangerously extreme.......During the 1950s and 1960s, other Arab governments like Egypt and Syria had expelled Islamic fundamentalists. The Saudis, as competitors to these regimes, welcomed the dissidents, who came with revolutionary ideas advocating pure Islamic states across the Middle East....... Hoping to co-opt the Islamists, the royal family handed over education, the courts and cultural affairs to the imams. Many of the rigid features of modern Saudi life-no women on television, no music in any media, an overdose of religion in schools, stores closed during prayer times, increased powers for the religious police-were passed in the early 1980s....... To fight extremism, the regime will have to make space for the enemies of extremism. Every noxious version of Wahhabism has had free rein in Saudi Arabia, and yet all liberal ideas and debates have always been closed down. Even the baby steps the regime has allowed-in publications like Al-Watan and Al-Sharq-al-Awsat-have been followed by reversals. If preachers speak of infidels burning in hell, they are, at most, scolded. But when 116 brave Saudi liberals put forward a petition in March suggesting reforms that would lead to a constitutional monarchy, the regime arrested some of them and forced them to recant. It continues to imprison those who refuse to take part in this charade. With this kind of imbalance, is it any surprise that the public is more receptive to Islamic fundamentalism than reformist thought? Saudi Arabia is a conservative society. But it also has political and religious elites who have reinforced and perpetuated that conservatism for their own purposes.

Is there a constituency for liberal democracy in the Middle East? A debate (of sorts)

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003082
TPM: But can't we support, and materially support, Arab liberals? And in the case where it would hurt Arab liberals to be associated with us, to say "We'll back away and give you what you need?" In order [for them] to seek an open path according to [their] local circumstances?

ANONYMOUS: I'm not sure if there is a liberal element out there anymore in the Arab world, insofar as someone who would stand up and say "We want to adopt Western society or democracy." I think we're so viewed as malignant in the Islamic world that there aren't that many people who would say that, first because they're mad at us, and second because they'd risk being killed by people who disagree with them. So I'm not so sure we can talk our way out of this one. I think that's probably one of the most important points of this crossroads we're at. No one's going to listen. It doesn't matter what we say. It doesn't matter how many Madison Avenue people we hire to put out the word, to put out magazines. Ain't no one out there listening anymore.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003083
A valuable addition from reader J.:
There are many indigenous forces that push for liberalization and democratization [in the Middle East]. These range from the moderate Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to the old leftists--most of whom are quite tired by now--and the newer, human rights-oriented generation of activists and sympathizers. There are, in other words, plenty of people who are willing to make the sacrifices for democracy that this process will require, and are doing so now........

The coming Kurdish civil war?

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003174
So far in Iraq, America's policy dilemmas have focused around problems within the Shi'ite and Sunni Arab communities. Kurdistan, whose population is broadly pro-American and enthusiastically supportive of the war effort, has been extremely quiet. Recently, however, trouble seems to be brewing. The new interim government dropped hints that it might not abide by the extremely pro-Kurdish interim constitution, prompting the two main Kurdish political parties to drop out of the militia demobilization process and threaten to secede from the Iraqi state unless things go their way......Yesterday's New York Times contained an enlightening report from Dexter Filkins on Kurdish efforts to re-secure control over formerly Kurdish areas that were subject to ethnic cleansing during the Ba'ath area, indicating that if Kurdish-Arab relations at the political level deteriorate further, those Kurdish militias might get involved in something more than domestic security.....In a seemingly unrelated development, Ilan Berman writes in NRO about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations, a fact he attributes to the rise of a semi-Islamist party in Turkey. Seymore Hersh, however, has a rather different theory -- the Turkish government is upset about massive Israeli aid to Kurdish commando groups, a step Hersh reports Israel feels the need to take in light of the ascendance of pro-Iranian Shi'ite parties in southern Iraq...... Needless to say, international man of mystery Ahmed Chalabi has a role to play in this as well. Juan Cole reports that he's Iyad Allawi's chosen go-between in mediation between the Interim Government and the Kurdish leadership.

[More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1243588,00.html
http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108780128757677375]

Ashcroft's selective attention to terrorists (domestic threats just don't fit the story line)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/opinion/22KRUG.html?ex=1403236800&en=655cc242d21d6968&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

Hey, buddy, how about THIS for some optics?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004197.php

Bush AIDS policies governed as much by ideological doctrine as by health concerns

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/21/bush_aids/?source=RSS
In just the latest assault on AIDS prevention programs, the Bush administration is now requiring approval of the Web-site content of groups seeking grants from the CDC........New federal regulations say programs mentioning condoms "shall contain medically accurate information regarding the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness" of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. What "medically accurate information" about condoms means to the Bush administration is stressing the failure rate and that condoms don't prevent genital warts. The Bush administration's dubious focus on condom ineffectiveness -- a real tip of the hat to social conservatives -- isn't new. As Rep. Henry Waxman's office shows in its rundown on the administration's troubled relationship with scientific truths, the administration has frequently.....touted false information about condoms at an international health conference.

What? You mean all religiously devout people aren't fundamentalist Bush supporters?

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001393.html
A huge component of the Bush re-election strategy is the overwhelming support the president receives from white evangelicals -- both its leadership and rank and file. If, for some reason, this group were to grow either disaffected or less politically active, states that were previously thought of as Republican locks would suddenly be in play........Which is why Karl Rove can't be too happy about Larry B. Stammer's article in the Los Angeles Times about a new white paper on political action that's coming from the National Association of Evangelicals: The National Assn. of Evangelicals is circulating a draft of a groundbreaking framework for political action that strongly endorses social and economic justice and warns against close alignment with any political party.

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003172
Speaking of the religious right, check out this story by Wall Street Journal reporter Avery Johnson. Johnson evidently expected to find evidence that gay marriage had re-energized the Christian Coalition, which had fallen on hard times since the heady days of the 1990s. But Johnson's article provides zero evidence that such a resurgence has occurred.......The Washington Post reported last week that religous leaders across the country have been complaining that there isn't much energy among their congregations and activists. The author, Alan Cooperman, interviews a wide range of people, and even those who want the energy to be there are admitting it isn't (and, in some cases, proferring very wishful explanations for the dearth).

Only the finest....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56413-2004Jun20.html?referrer=email
Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in Washington, has been practicing law in Utah without a state law license for the past four years, according to Utah state officials.......Griffith, the general counsel for Brigham Young University since August 2000, had previously failed to renew his law license in Washington for three years while he was a lawyer based in the District.......

Media news: The laziness of most media coverage on the economy helps Bush

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001064.html
[WP] Now comes the next round of political gloom-mongering. Sen. John F. Kerry, the victor in the Democratic primaries, has been telling voters this week that although job creation may have recovered, wages are the real problem. "In the last year, wages have gone down, and prices have gone up," the candidate told an audience on Tuesday. Actually, hourly wages for non-supervisory workers have risen this year by 2.2 percent as of May, so they kept pace with consumer price inflation.

"What the hell is the matter with these guys?" my friend asks......Well, for starters, they're having some problems with basic math.......

More media news: The always-reliable Nedra Pickler

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003175
After a week of campaigning for the less fortunate, John Kerry went on vacation with the fabulously wealthy........Kerry is a rich man who promotes the Democratic ideal that government should do more to help the poor. He moves between both worlds, spending the past week traveling to downtrodden places like South-side Columbus, Ohio, and the affluent island playground of Nantucket.

Like Kerry, President Bush is a Yale graduate who has benefited from his wealth and family connections. But Bush spends his down time trying to be more of an everyman, preferring to spend vacations at his Texas ranch clearing brush.......

[A rich man who DOESN'T think the government should do much to help the poor.]

More media news: The OTHER big film in release

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200426#413
"The Hunting of the President"
Republicans are prone to draw parallels between the Clinton-hating of the 1990s documented in the film and the Bush-hating of today. But there are a couple of critical differences that need to be noted.....Those who are steamed about George W. Bush's presidency are working through the electoral process to get him booted from office. Those who opposed Clinton conspired (and that is not too strong a word) to get him removed by any means necessary. Many began planning ways to get Clinton impeached long before a certain young woman sauntered past the Oval Office with a pizza in her hand......[D]uring the Clinton years, the wacky conspiracy theories and clandestine plots to destroy the president were coming from the very heart of the Republican establishment, from members of Congress and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal alleging that he had Vince Foster killed, to the Reverend Jerry Falwell hawking videos accusing Clinton of murder and drug-running, to Ted Olson - the current Solicitor General of the United States and perhaps the country's most prominent Republican lawyer - running the "Arkansas Project" out of the American Spectator to dig up dirt on Clinton's sex life.....You can draw a straight line between the Clinton impeachment and the theft of the 2000 election in Florida. Simply put, there is a substantial portion of the Republican Party that doesn't believe in democracy, for whom, at the end of the day, it's all about gaining and holding power. They believe that their side is good and the other side is evil, and when you're facing evil, rules are for sissies.

Bonus item: How Bush got Saddam's gun

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/politics/21letter.html
The story of how President Bush ended up with Saddam Hussein's pistol mounted in his private study off the Oval Office has dribbled out in the last few weeks, and it is a good one.........

- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:31 AM

 
LINKS, CONNECTIONS, AND RELATIONSHIPS: A QUESTION OF SEMANTICS?

Here is the greatest irony of the whole Saddam/Al Qaeda "link": if this was the reason that made him our enemy, then there was (and still is) MUCH stronger evidence of support and assistance coming from two other countries -- countries we persist in calling "allies"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-alqaeda20jun20,1,440629.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia helped set the stage for the Sept. 11 attacks by cutting deals with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden that allowed his Al Qaeda terrorist network to flourish, according to several senior members of the Sept. 11 commission and U.S. counter-terrorism officials.....The financial aid to the Taliban and other assistance by two of the most important allies of the United States in its war on terrorism date at least to 1996, and appear to have shielded them from Al Qaeda attacks within their own borders until long after the 2001 strikes, those commission members and officials said in interviews......The officials said that by not cracking down on Bin Laden, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia significantly undermined efforts to combat terrorism worldwide, giving the Saudi exile the haven he needed to train tens of thousands of soldiers. They believe that the governments' funding of his Taliban protectors enabled Bin Laden to withstand international pressure and expand his operation into a global network that could carry out the Sept. 11 attacks.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/20/senate.saudis.ap/index.html
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist praised Saudi Arabia for cracking down on Muslim militants but said Sunday the kingdom can do more toward stopping the flow of charitable money to terrorist groups.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/20/saudi_police/index_np.html
Al-Qaida militants disguised in police uniforms and cars provided by sympathizers in the Saudi security forces set up a fake checkpoint to snare the American engineer they later beheaded, according to an account of the operation posted on an Islamic extremist Web site Sunday......The account of Paul M. Johnson Jr's abduction highlighted fears that some diplomats and Westerners in the kingom have expressed, that militants have infiltrated Saudi security forces, a possibility Saudi officials have denied.

http://www.slblogs.net/watcherofweasels/archives/001165.html
June 01, 2004
Survivors of the hostage crisis in Saudi Arabia have some pretty horrific descriptions of what went on inside the Oasis housing complex in Khobar during the day-long siege.....One of the survivors claimed that the Saudi government made a deal to end the bloodshed, which allowed three of the terrorists to get away. However, the official Saudi line is that the three men managed to escape on their own by using some hostages as human shields. Well.. that might explain how the terrorists managed to make it to their getaway car, but it doesn't explain why they were allowed to drive away without being followed. We have car chases in America all the time, and they always end the same way... only an idiot would think that they can outdrive a police force being coordinated by helicopters. So, how was it that most of these terrorists managed to drive off into the sunset?

NYT punts: 9-11 committee chair and vice-chair now say no "difference of opinion" with Bush version of Saddam/Al Qaeda links

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/politics/20CND-TALK.html
Last week, a commission staff report was released that said there did not appear to be a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network, an observation that seemed to weaken one of the main justifications for the decision to invade Iraq last year and overthrow Mr. Hussein.......Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton appeared to suggest that any differences over the issue were largely semantic.

["Largely semantic" here is meant to trivialize them, of course - but in this case it is EXACTLY the "semantic" connotations and implications of carefully parsed comments from Cheney and others that are at issue.]

"We have concluded there is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States," Mr. Kean said. "What we do say, however, is there were contacts."......Mr. Hamilton said he had looked at the statements "quite carefully" from the administration. "They are not claiming there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda with regard to the attacks on the United States," he said.

[They are not saying that NOW, but they did before.]

He later added that with regard to the administration's core statements, "I don't think there is a difference of opinion with regard to those statements."

[Look how hedged this comment actually is. WHY is this story coming out now, given this editorial yesterday? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/opinion/19SAT1.html?ex=1088632179&ei=1&en=7a82f74ebfc118c8:
Mr. Bush said the 9/11 panel had actually confirmed his contention that there were "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said his administration had never connected Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Both statements are wrong.......Before the war, Mr. Bush spoke of far more than vague "ties" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. He said Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with weapons training, bomb-making expertise and a base in Iraq. On Feb. 8, 2003, Mr. Bush said that "an Al Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990's for help in acquiring poisons and gases." The 9/11 panel's report, as well as news articles, indicate that these things never happened.]

More shoddy reporting from the NYT (and why "semantics" matters)

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001049.html
This time it is Reading A1 that bangs its head against the wall at the spectacle of New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson once again being.....

"too craven, and too lazy, to oppose Administration spin today with facts drawn from the record. This is true in several places in the article, nowhere more embarrassingly than in the matter of the much-debunked fable of a Prague meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence...

Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either.

"We just don't know," Mr. Cheney said.

Leave aside Cheney's transparent intellectual dishonesty, which turns the impossibility of absolutely proving a negative into a practical affirmation of the positive........ As nearly complete disproof of the Prague story as possible (to convince reasonable people) has, in fact, already been offered in the commission staff report-as noted by, among others, the NY Times' own James Risen earlier this week....."

BREAKING NEWS: Now it becomes more clear why the committee is suddenly hedging its bets: new evidence -- real evidence? -- of a Saddam/Al Qaeda link?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56380-2004Jun20.html?nav=rss_nation
The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been told "a very prominent member" of al Qaeda served as an officer in Saddam Hussein's militia, a panel member said yesterday......Republican commissioner John Lehman told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the new intelligence, if proved true, buttresses claims by the Bush administration of ties between Iraq and the militant network believed responsible for the attacks on the United States......."We are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence," Lehman said.

Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean urged the administration to make any such information available to the panel quickly. "Obviously, if there is any information [that] has to do with the subject of the report, we need it, and we need it pretty fast," Kean said on ABC's "This Week" program. "We'll ask for it and see.".....He said the final report would be modified to take any new intelligence into account.

Lehman said the information, contained in "captured documents," was obtained after the commission report was written that stated there was no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. "Some of these documents indicate that [there was] at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda," Lehman said. "That still has to be confirmed, but the vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don't yet have," said Lehman, a former Navy secretary.

[Now, this just came out on the Net, as I was finishing today's report, and there will be more to come in the next few hours, I assume. It certainly might be a blockbuster, but it raises so many questions: Did the Bush people have this information and never announce it to anyone or share it with the committee before? How can that be? Is it so bogus and flimsy that they are only pulling it out now out of desperation? Has it only recently been "discovered" (or fabricated)? Did they intentionally hold it back for just this sort of moment? Are they actually clever enough to have set up the committee, Cheney making his announcement at the Madison Institute right before the panel report was released, and knowing he would be challenged, so that he could spring this now, with maximal impact?

Furthermore, even if true, it still falls far short of the sort of operational "connection" the Bush people have been intimating. For one thing, we have no sense here that Saddam knew this guy was part of A.Q., or that it was the basis of any active cooperation (perhaps he was an A.Q. spy planted in Saddam's army without his knowledge.) But the press loves a "smoking gun" story, and this will probably be spun as "proof" that there was a "link."]

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: Here is more from that Meet the Press interview (transcript now available). Two stories worth noting:

1. The WH, under the auspices of previewing the 9-11 commission draft for "national security secrets" is also asking for -- and getting -- substantive changes to the text.

2. This Fedayeen Colonel story may be (much) less than meets the eye:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5255893/

(1) MR. RUSSERT: There is a discrepancy, it appears, between some people who testified before the commission as to who gave the actual order to shoot down aircraft. Was it Vice President Cheney or was it President Bush?

MR. LEHMAN: Well, I believe what President Bush and Vice President Cheney told us in their interview that it was President Bush, that Vice President Cheney was on scene in the White House in the command center and he made the call when asked......There are no logs to verify that, but there's also no reason to question their account of what happened, but it's also kind of purely academic because the order was given and the problem came in delivering the order because the order never got to the pilots in the cockpit.

MR. RUSSERT: What's your sense?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: I agree with John. The president and vice president gave us their recollections of what occurred. Unfortunately, there's no corroboration in any written account, although other things were written down contemporaneously at the time.

MR. RUSSERT: It does say, according to Newsweek, however, that the White House was allowed to review the staff report on this subject and the White House recommended changes in it. Is that appropriate that the White House is reviewing your draft reports?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, the White House reviews our reports for the purpose of determining whether there's any classified information that should be excised from the reports. In this case, they went somewhat beyond that and took issue with some of what the staff had concluded. We did not change our conclusions. We are, of course, willing to listen up to the last minute for the receipt of any information that would be helpful to us. In this case, they went a little beyond what we would have expected. Interestingly, they did not object or suggest any revision to the earlier staff statement which dealt with Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: Will the White House review the final report before it's made public?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Yes, they will for the same reasons.

(2) MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the staff report on the relationship, if you will, between Iraq and al- Qaeda, and I'll put it on the board and read it for everyone: "Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime....Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Which led to this coverage by The New York Times: "The staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks sharply contradicted one of President Bush's central justifications for the Iraq war, reporting on Wednesday that there did not appear to have been a `collaborative relationship' between Al Qaeda and Sadam Hussein. ...the commission's staff said its investigation showed that the government of Mr. Hussein had rebuffed or ignored requests from"--al--"Qaeda leaders for help in the"--'90s--"a conclusion that directly contradicts a series of public statements President Bush and Vice President Cheney made before and after last year's invasion of Iraq in justifying the war."

Do you agree with that, Mr. Ben-Veniste?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Yes, I do, Tim. There are two distinct issues. One, first of all, 9/11. Take it to the bank, there was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11. Let's put that to bed.....Were there contacts over time between Iraq and al-Qaeda? Yes, there were efforts made to communicate. We found no evidence of collaboration in any effort to mount any kind of operation against the United States' interests. And if there is additional information that the vice president has or others have, we think we should have gotten that information by now.........

MR. RUSSERT: Do you agree? Was there any evidence of any connection of Saddam Hussein with September 11?

MR. LEHMAN: Well, I really totally disagree with what I thought was outrageously irresponsible journalism, to portray what the staff statement--and again, this is a staff statement; the commissioners have not addressed this issue yet--to portray it as contradicting what the administration said. There's really very little difference between what our staff found, what the administration is saying today and what the Clinton administration said......The Bush administration has never said that they participated in the 9/11 attack. They've said, and our staff has confirmed, there have been numerous contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda over a period of 10 years, at least. And now there's new intelligence, and this has come since our staff report has been written because, as you know, new intelligence is coming in steadily from the interrogations in Guantanamo and in Iraq and from captured documents. And some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaeda. That still has to be confirmed. But the vice president was right when he said that he may have things that we don't yet have. And we are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence.......

MR. RUSSERT: I'm going to show two tapes. The first is Vice President Cheney from September 14, 2003, on this program, and then Vice President Cheney this last Wednesday on CNBC. Let's watch Vice President Cheney. First, September 14, 2003.

(Videotape, September 14, 2003):

MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?

VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: No, I think it's not surprising that the people make that connection.

MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don't know......

(End videotape)

(Videotape, "Capital Report," Thursday):

MS. GLORIA BORGER: Do you know things that the commission does not know?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Probably.......

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Lehman said that it's quite possible that Vice President Cheney does know things that the commission doesn't know. You agree with that?

MR. BEN-VENISTE: Yes, I hope he does on a current basis. With respect to the individual that John Lehman has talked about, who is supposedly a member of the Fedayeen, the storm troopers of Saddam Hussein's former army, we don't know whether that's the same individual as an individual who had some contact with al-Qaeda operatives. There were a lot of Iraqis, expatriates, opponents of Saddam Hussein, who joined up with al-Qaeda. But in terms of collaborative relationship in operations targeting the United States, we have come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that we have seen to support that. If there is additional information, we're happy to look at it, and we think we should get it.

U.S. missile attack in Fallujah hit innocent target, according to the U.S.-backed militia commander there

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-20-iraq-airstrike_x.htm

New Iraq government may declare martial law (notice the two versions of this story: the NYT version edits out the phrase "martial law" from the Allawi quote, calling it only "a state of emergency" -- the Telegraph includes it, and adds that Allawi "welcomed" the Fallujah air strike)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/21/wirq21.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/21/ixnewstop.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/international/middleeast/21IRAQ.html

Mistakes we've made, and mistakes we will make, in Iraq

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54029-2004Jun19.html

Part Two of the WP series: the collapse of the Iraqi educational system, and the prospects of "democracy" in Iraq

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56414-2004Jun20.html
John Agresto arrived here nine months ago with two suitcases, a feather pillow and a suffusion of optimism. He didn't know much about Iraq, but he felt certain the American occupation, and his mission to oversee the country's university system, would be a success...... "Like everyone else in America, I saw the images of people cheering as Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down. I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes," said Agresto, the former president of St. John's College in New Mexico. "Once you see that, you can't help but say, 'Okay. This is going to work.'"

But the Iraq he encountered was different from what he had expected. Visits to the universities he was trying to rebuild and the faculty he wanted to invigorate were more and more dangerous, and infrequent......His plans to repair hundreds of campus buildings were scuttled by the Bush administration's decision to shift reconstruction efforts and by the failure to raise money from other sources. His hope that Iraqis would put aside differences and personal interests for a common cause was, as he put it, "way too idealistic."......"I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality," Agresto said as he puffed on a pipe next to a resort-size swimming pool behind the marbled palace that houses the occupation authority......."We can't deny there were mistakes, things that didn't work out the way we wanted," he added. "We have to be honest with ourselves.".....

"We're trying to establish a democratic government without a democratic people," he said. "I don't know how possible that is."......Agresto's views are a break from those of his allies in the Bush administration, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who argue that Iraqis are ready for democracy........"We should have been less ambitious," Agresto said. "Our goal should have been to build a free, safe and a prosperous Iraq -- with the emphasis on safe. Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn't be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night.".......

"When I look at the rest of Iraq, sometimes I get very discouraged," he told the presidents. "But here at this meeting, I'm not discouraged at all.".......But in a more reflective and private moment next to the pool, with pipe in hand and Iraq's future on the table, Agresto was far more sober. He said he still believes Iraq will become a democracy, but not the sort of democracy the Bush administration envisions......"Will it be a free democracy? A liberal democracy?" he said. "I don't think so."

More from the author of "Imperial Hubris"

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003082
Anonymous makes several arguments in Imperial Hubris for why we're losing the war on terrorism. Some are a matter of keeping score in the military ventures we've undertaken. He sees our intervention in Afghanistan as a disaster.......Expanding Hamid Karzai's writ across the country is a recipe for violence, he writes: "After twenty years of war and ineffective or alien government in Kabul, the regions, subregions and tribes have never been more autonomously minded and jealous of their prerogatives." Democratization in Afghanistan, he believes, is a mirage. "We focus on issues that don't matter to Afghans--women's rights, democracy--and we denigrate those things that matter to Afghans--Islam, tribal and clan relationships, ethnic pecking orders," he says. Sometime soon, "you're going to have a government back in Kabul that looks like the Taliban, perhaps under a different name.".....With our inability to do that, our garrisoning of troops in Afghanistan and support of a weak central government of ethnic minorities provides little aside from an Islamist rallying cry against U.S. occupation--what he terms "an unmitigated defeat.".......Then there's Iraq. "[T]here is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," he writes.

Why the CPA failed: it was dominated by inexperienced staffers who were screened to be ideologically "pure" but who were unqualified. What were the consequences?

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001391.html
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001326.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48543-2004May22?language=printer
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis........Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars. But within their group, inside the "Green Zone," the four-mile strip surrounded by cement blast walls where Iraq's temporary rulers are based, their seven months at the CPA was the experience of a lifetime. It was defined by long hours, patriotism, friendship, sacrifice and loss.....The CPA was designed to be a grand experiment in nation-building, a body of experts who would be Iraq's guide for transforming itself into a model for democracy in the Middle East. Unlike previous reconstruction efforts, it was to be manned by civilians -- advisers on politics, law, medicine, transportation, agronomy and other key areas. They were supposed to be experts, but many of the younger hires who filled the CPA's hallways were longer on enthusiasm than on expertise.

The Philadelphia Inquirer nails it

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001048.html

Republicans, gearing up the "Abu Ghraib - no big deal" machine

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003080
Trent Lott's Q&A in the Sunday Times Magazine:

You recently created a stir when you defended the interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib.

Most of the people in Mississippi came up to me and said: ''Thank Goodness. America comes first.'' Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class. You don't get information that will save American lives by withholding pancakes.

But unleashing killer dogs on naked Iraqis is not the same as withholding pancakes.

I was amazed that people reacted like that. Did the dogs bite them? Did the dogs assault them? How are you going to get people to give information that will lead to the saving of lives?

"Gay marriage" issue not providing the boost Bush hoped it would

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/20/104015/874
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54966-2004Jun19.html

One person, one vote -- unless you're Black

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/ING2976LG61.DTL

Bonus item: Michael Moore sticks to the facts, but still gets slimed

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/movies/20SHEN.html?ex=1088713608&ei=1&en=1eac0be0bdb19f88
The movie's indictment of the president is nothing if not sprawling. Mr. Moore suggests that Mr. Bush and his administration jeopardized national security in an effort to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that the White House helped members of Mr. bin Laden's family to flee the United States after Sept. 11 and that the administration manipulated terrorism alert levels in order to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.......Mr. Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films; a handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracts the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting, Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced. After all, White House officials and the Bush family began impugning the film even before any of them had seen it......"Outrageously false," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, last month when told about the film's assertion of a sinister connection between Mr. Bush and the family of Osama bin Laden. The former president George H. W. Bush was quoted in The New York Daily News calling Mr. Moore a "slime ball" and describing the documentary as "a vicious personal attack on our son."

So how will Mr. Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's depiction of Mr. Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family, true to fact?........After a year spent covering the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as Mr. Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Mr. Bush's political career)..........

[By the way, this money line isn't included until well into the article, and AFTER the Bush attacks are quoted.]

Mr. Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a political-style "war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on the film's credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic Party strategist known as a master of the black art of "oppo," or opposition research, used to discredit detractors. He also hired outside fact-checkers, led by a former general counsel of The New Yorker and a veteran member of that magazine's legendary fact-checking team, to vet the film. And he is threatening to go one step further, saying he has consulted with lawyers who can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation.........."Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," he said, not an ounce of humor in his familiar voice. "The most important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them to court."........"We have gone through every single word of this film - literally every word - and verified its accuracy," said Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who shared in a 1993 Oscar for documentaries and who joined the fact-checking effort last month. Ms. Doroshow is responsible for preparing what she calls a "fact-checking bible," with material ranging from newspaper and magazine articles to copies of the Federal Register, that will allow the film's lawyers and publicists to provide backup for its allegations.........

Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the film are the least impeachable. Mr. Moore makes extensive use of obscure footage from White House and network-news video archives, including long scenes that capture President Bush at his least articulate. For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.

http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_06_13.html#001609
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:44 AM

 
IN-CREDIBILITY

Bush's (in)actions on morning of 9-11 under scrutiny (with some questions from me)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53548-2004Jun18.html
On 9/11, a Telling Seven-Minute Silence
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page C01

You're at a photo op, reading a book with schoolchildren and an aide suddenly whispers that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. "America is under attack."

You're the president of the United States. What do you do?

[OK, let's take this question seriously: what would YOU do? Would you (A) keep reading a children's story to a group of schoolkids? (B) sit quietly and think to yourself over and over again "why me Lord, why me?" (C) say to yourself "I'm sure Dick has a handle on things"? or (D) stand up, straighten your shoulders, and say, "this is the moment I was elected for -- excuse me kids, something very important has come up"?]

There have been other moments like this in American history, when the chief executive was suddenly plunged into a crisis, but they weren't caught on videotape. George W. Bush was on camera in an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He could see the pagers of reporters and photographers going off, one by one. He was on the spot like few people have ever been.

From two different angles, Americans have new glimpses of that historic moment. One comes from rabble-rousing Michael Moore, whose Bush-eviscerating film "Fahrenheit 9/11" premieres next week, and includes an uninterrupted seven-minute segment showing Bush's reaction after hearing the news of the attack. He doesn't move.

Instead he continues to sit in the classroom, listening to children read aloud. Moore lets the tape roll as the minutes pass painfully by.

And now from a second angle: The staff of the 9/11 Commission this week released a report that summarizes Bush's closed-door testimony about his thoughts as he sat there.

"The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis . . . The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

[This is so patently untrue. But let's imagine that it is: "Strength and calm. Calm and strength. I am calm. I am strong. This is my main job right now, making sure people see me as strong....and calm."]

This moment will surely be used by the president's political opponents, and with equal fervor defended by his supporters. However it is interpreted, it points out a basic truth about any president: He's both an executive and a symbolic figure. He's the spiritual leader of the nation as well as the head of state. He's monarch and prime minister.

["Oops! Forgot to mention that we've amended the Constitution to give the President new powers and responsibilities. Monarch. Spiritual leader. You don't mind, do you?"]

........

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at the University of New Orleans, concurs: "I don't understand how one sits there. I just don't. Minutes are an eternity in that sort of situation. . . . A quick presidential decision may save lives." ........."Character is not defined in good times, when you've been properly briefed, it's defined when you're in a desperate crisis situation."

Presidential scholar Fred Greenstein, a professor emeritus at Princeton, defends Bush's response in the initial minutes. "It's made a little more complex by being in the presence of little kids," Greenstein said. "It certainly wouldn't present the right message if he turned white, rushed out, and kids started crying."

[Because, you know, that would be the only way to take your leave - screaming and waving your arms in the air.]

The commission report this week is not the first glimpse into Bush's thought processes in the critical minutes after the first planes crashed. Bush has previously told Bob Woodward, "They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war."

["But first, I had this other thing to take care of."]

Eventually, at the suggestion of an aide, Bush got up and went to a holding room. He spoke briefly to the vice president, his national security adviser, the governor of New York and the head of the FBI, according to the commission report. Then, the report states, Bush spent roughly 15 minutes working on what he'd say to the cameras at the elementary school. He was acting as Communicator in Chief, in a sense. With his senior aides, he worked on his lines.

["At the suggestion of an aide..." Communicator in Chief. Not Commander in Chief... No comment.]

"As far as we know, no one was in contact with the Pentagon. The focus was on the President's statement to the nation. No decisions were made at this time, other than the decision to return to Washington," the report states. The president was persuaded to fly to Louisiana and then Nebraska before finally returning to the capital......

[OK, now I have a thought experiment for YOU, Mr. Bush. Imagine that Andy Card whispers in your ear, "Your wife and daughters are on a hijacked airplane and we don't know where it is." Now what the f--- do you do?]

Bush's credibility under fire

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54702-2004Jun19.html?nav=rss_nation
Many Republicans are furious about the commission -- though its members are evenly split between the two parties and it is chaired by a Republican appointed by Bush. They say that Bush was right to oppose the commission in the first place, and that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was right this year when he unsuccessfully fought an extension of the commission's deadline......The panel has become "a tool for partisan politics," Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview last week. "With the latest commission finding coming out that there were allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off their mission, and I think that's indicative of the political partisanship."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2027&e=2&u=/chitribts/20040619/ts_chicagotrib/911reportbringssubtleshift
Confronted with a changing picture--including, most recently, the Sept. 11 commission's dismissal of any "collaborative relationship" between Hussein and Al Qaeda--the White House has adjusted its rhetoric, while denying it has changed its position and suggesting its critics are misrepresenting the facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/politics/19CAMP.html
One outside adviser to the White House said the administration expected the debate over Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda to be "a regular feature" of the presidential campaign........"They feel it's important to their long-term credibility on the issue of the decision to go to war," the adviser said. "It's important because it's part of the overall view that Iraq is part of the war on terror. If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it's part of the war on terror. If it's not part of the war on terror, then what is it - some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?"

Major WP three-parter on what went wrong in Iraq (gee, will three articles be enough?)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54294-2004Jun19.html
The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority......... "We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity.".........

[Commentary: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003078]

New book coming out ("Imperial Hubris"): Bush is losing the war on terror

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1242639,00.html
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.....Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them..........

Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.......The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.............

Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage........"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."

In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable......."For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003077 (an interview)
"But within Saudi Arabia I think they're kind of the society's Robin Hood. It's an oppressed society, the Saudi government is a tyranny, and I think they have a tremendous audience in Saudi Arabia. I remember reading in The National Interest in 2002 that a poll taken by the Saudi government showed 95 percent of Saudis between 18 and 40 supported Osama bin Laden. Domestic support is not an issue for bin Laden....... In the course of the last decade, it's clear that the Saudis paid lip service to anti-terrorism, but as long as it didn't happen in the kingdom, that was all they did. The Saudis walk a very fine line on this issue. What we identify as terrorism is identified as jihad , as a religious responsibility within the Salafist or the Wahhabi doctrine that dominates Saudi educational facilities and has forever since the founding of the Saudi state in the '30s. Their efforts to suppress al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-like people angers as many as it pleases. So their efforts are not and cannot be to eradicate the problem, because it will just aggravate a huge number of people in a very young populace that is very religious. There's a certain point at which they can't trust anti-terrorism efforts without risking a much wider anti-al Saud response."

The best friend Bin Laden ever had (no, it isn't Saddam)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/19/11332/6469

The impossible job of Scott McClellan: Wonkette's hilarious parsing of the latest Press Briefing (what's most interesting is the almost open scorn with which the reporters are taking his "answers" these days)

http://www.wonkette.com/archives/al-qaeda-and-saddam-table-for-two-016442.php

[The full transcript: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040617-5.html]

Kurd update...big trouble ahead

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20KURD.html?pagewanted=1&hp

[Analysis: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003079]

Ha....ha......ha - Putin's phoney baloney "intelligence scoop" treated with the contempt it deserves

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=532147§ion=news
Putin's remarks on Friday looked certain to help U.S. President George W. Bush, but officials at the U.S. State Department expressed bafflement, saying they knew of no such information from Russia......State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters he did not know anything about the information that Putin said Russia passed on. No such information was communicated from Russia through the State Department, he said......"Everybody's scratching their heads," said one State Department official, who asked not to be named.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-putin19jun19,1,2269995.story?coll=la-home-world
Some Russian political analysts said Friday that, although Putin may have given the U.S. information about Iraqi terrorist plots, he was probably disclosing it now to boost Bush's chances for reelection......"It's apparent that Russians and President Putin are interested in a second term for Bush," said Liliya Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "We've always had good relations with Republicans. We dislike Democrats, because Democrats always care about democracy in Russia.".....Some analysts say the controversy over Bush's policies in the Middle East is distracting Europe from Putin's increasing authoritarianism and human rights abuses in Chechnya......"Once [presumed Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry comes to power, the U.S. and Europe will most likely engage in a new honeymoon ﾉ and it means they may jointly turn their attention back to Russia," Belkovsky said. "Thus the Kremlin is interested in seeing the Republicans cling to power, despite all the differences on many issues between Putin and Bush."

More from the UK

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=697202004
BILL Clinton claims that he warned President George Bush before he took office that the biggest threat to national security was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in a sensational passage from his memoirs revealed for the first time yesterday.......Mr Clinton claims Mr Bush said little in response, and then switched subjects.

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373094470 (The Financial Times!)
Bush has misled Americans on Iraq
The evidence the administration produced to demonstrate the link was, at best, spurious, at worst, fabricated. This is not a small matter, especially in the context of the Bush team's case for its war of choice against Iraq......The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger......

NYT to Cheney: Show us the proof

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/opinion/19SAT1.html?ex=1088632179&ei=1&en=7a82f74ebfc118c8

Uhhh....Sudan? Where's that? Do they have any oil?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/opinion/19KRIS.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fNicholas%20D%20Kristof


Chalabi's wacky clan of U.S. defenders and sponsors

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003070
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000819.html

"Shock and awe" in the Bush re-election campaign (hit early, hit hard) doesn't succeed any better than it did in Iraq - and most of his money is gone

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/19/75331/0815

Republicans, realizing they are about to lose control of the WH and possibly Congress, circle the wagons

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006963.html
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defeated a Democratic-sponsored effort to subpoena documents on torture and interrogation practices from the Justice Department. The 10 to 9 vote reflected the mounting partisan rancor over the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and whether U.S. officials condoned harsh interrogation practices on prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bonus item: Right-wing groups trying to block showings of "Fahrenheit 9-11"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3817993.stm
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 2:01 AM

 
WHEN CHALLENGED, ATTACK

Never admit, never apologize, never back down. When challenged, attack.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/index.html
Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible." ....."There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming," Cheney said in an interview with CNBC's "Capitol Report." ......"It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials."....."The press, with all due respect, (is) often times lazy, often times simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework."

[Now, let's be very, very clear about this. No one disputes that there were "contacts" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But contacts do not constitute a significant cooperative relationship -- which is what the 9-11 commission just denied: Hussein's people rebuffed Al Qaeda when approached. Bush's people now are redefining their previous position using a series of weasel words, like "relationship." It is undeniable that they asserted repeatedly that there were not just "contacts" between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but something much stronger than that. We offered numerous links on this yesterday. If you want to go through Cheney's actual comments and count the lies and misrepresentations, here it is: http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3.htm]

Condi throws her chips in as well

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/condi-lies-and-lies-and-lies-and-lies.html
"What I believe the 9-11 commission was opining on was operational control, an operational relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq which we never alleged," Rice said in an interview with National Public Radio......"The president simply outlined what we knew about what al Qaeda and Iraq had done together. Operational control to me would mean that he (Saddam) was, perhaps, directing what al Qaeda would do."

Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton said he was unaware of anyone ever claiming that Saddam had directed al Qaeda....."The word 'control' is new," Hamilton said.

[A little insight into the Bush rhetorical strategy, used repeatedly and in full bloom here: characterize your opponent's view in the maximal, least plausible terms (even if it's never what they said), while characterizing your own in the minimal, most reasonable terms (even if it means rewriting the history of what you actually did say). It's good to know that we're still being governed by a bunch of graduates from the high school debate club.]

Just in case the facts still matter any more

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1135079.htm
Experts say no evidence of al-Qaeda, Hussein link

ALISON CALDWELL: So when President Bush says there are numerous contacts between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein...

PETER BERGEN: Well, it's an interesting kind of construct, isn't it? Because, I mean, I have contacts with all sorts of people, I met with bin Laden - it's doesn't mean I did business with him. You know, I think this is grasping at straws at this point.

ALISON CALDWELL: So there's no evidence that the President and that the Vice President may have seen that you're aware of that the 9/11 Commission hasn't?

PETER BERGEN: Well, I mean. you know, if they've got some secret evidence about all this that they haven't made public, that would be surprising. After all, I think they're in a politically difficult situation. The point is that there's no there there, there's just nothing... I mean, some of the things that were supposed to have been true aren't true, for example, a meeting between the hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent, well, it just never happened.

And of course, CAP has it all, chapter and verse

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=6228
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=92288

Commentary

http://www.freep.com/news/metro/dicker18_20040618.htm
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush asserted in a press conference six months before the invasion of Iraq. And if fully half the American public leaped to the erroneous conclusion that Iraq bore some responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, well, that wasn't the president's fault, was it?......It sickens me to write these words, because I am one of those who gave Bush the benefit of the doubt -- one of the many Americans who, however much we may have disagreed with him on a dozen other issues, simply could not bring ourselves to believe that any president would mislead his constituents about so important a matter, or be so cynical about exploiting the emotional dynamite of 9/11......As for Bush's insistence that there is no direct contradiction between his vague assertions of a Saddam-Osama connection and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was never any cooperation between the two, well, that depends on what your definition of "is" is, doesn't it?..... The bottom line is that this president's pants are on fire -- again......And that's an outrage worth our attention, even if it is becoming old news.

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_18_bestof.html#108756616945099134
I wish there were a pithy, catchy way to say it, because it's important: George W. Bush and his administration used certain rhetorical and syntactical techniques to convince Americans that a war against Saddam was connected to 9-11.....The folks in this administration were careful in the way they constructed their talking points prior to the war. I've always thought that each mention of Iraq in relation to the WoT was vetted in anticipation of a situation like this week's. But Jon Stewart nailed it on the The Daily Show last night, by showing the President saying, "You can't distinguish between Iraq and Al Qaeda [when you're talking about the War on Terror]" and then pointing out what no one else seems to specify -- that Bush, Cheney et.al repeatedly put the words "Iraq" and "Al Qaeda" near each other in sentences and paragraphs and then did a *wink* and *nudge* and *"see?*" *ya get it?".........The evidence of their intent is in the result of their efforts: a majority of Americans have believed that Saddam had something to do with 9-11...........But now, suddenly, Bushco wants to go back and parse their sentences and say, "see? see? We didn't really say that."

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003165
UP IS DOWN. Amazing stuff out of Dick Cheney's mouth yesterday:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, and he said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible."

Among conservatives, charges of media bias have truly become the last refuge of the scoundrel.....The problem for the administration's Iraq policies is not that the media is biased against them. The problem is -- to borrow from "The Daily Show" correspondent Rob Corrdry -- that the facts are biased against them.

New WH "talking points": THIS is chutzpah

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003075
What did the 9/11 Commission actually say about Iraq-al Qaeda connections? And what did the Bush administration actually say about them? An e-mail sent out from the White House Office of Public Liaison titled, "TALKING POINTS: 9-11 Commission Staff Report Confirms Administration's Views of al-Qaeda/Iraq Ties"

But the 9-11 commission gets back: "put up or shut up"

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/politics/19CAMP.html
The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda......The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.

And this is actually funny: suddenly, Putin weighs in (Bush calls him "Pooty-poot" by the way, and according to CNN called to thank him personally for floating this now)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004177.php
In a move whose timing is widely seen in Russian political circles as an attempt to support Bush's reelection, Putin said Russian agents received information after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that Iraqi agents were plotting strikes against other U.S. targets, both at home and abroad.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-061804russia_lat,1,6226208.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Lending support to the Bush administration's claim of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said today that Russian intelligence received several reports before the war with Iraq that Saddam Hussein's regime was planning terrorist attacks against U.S. targets......."This information was passed on to our American colleagues," he said.

[Here's what hilarious about this, aside from the ridiculously transparent timing: if he already had given this information to the U.S., and if it were credible, then it would have been used by the U.S. to buttress the case against Hussein already. Having RUSSIA announce it now does nothing to support the credibility of the original claim. In fact, it only raises a host of new credibility questions -- for Bush AND for Putin.]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/18/94832/4851
Now, this would be precisely the sort of thing to justify the non-9/11-related claims by the Administration that Saddam was a terrorist threat (as opposed merely to the butcher that he is), wouldn't it?......Why would the Bush Administration not have brought this intelligence forward prior to going to Baghdad, especially given the much weaker evidence they were cobbling together to make their WMD case?

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001388.html
I wouldn't want to speculate on the quality of Russian intelligence, but that last sentence provokes a question to President Putin -- why didn't the information change your mind about the war ? You have intel saying that one sovereign state is planning to commit acts of aggression against another sovereign state in violation of the laws of war.......If that's not a justification for preventive action, what is?

Bush's religious war for re-election

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/campaign/18baptists.html
President Bush's re-election campaign took its effort to enlist churches in turning out conservative voters to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention this week, urging pastors to do everything short of risking their churches' tax-exempt status to support the president's re-election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/national/19BISH.final.html
The nation's Roman Catholic bishops approved a statement on Friday on "Catholics in Political Life" that brands politicians who support abortion rights as "cooperating in evil" and leaves the door open for bishops to deny communion to such lawmakers.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/no-communion-for-santorum.html
Yet another article in the liberal New York Times about Catholic politicians and abortion rights which miraculously manages to not mention a single pro-choice Republican......

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003157
George W. Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion -- which is a total ban that encompasses birth control. Needless to say, this is not a position shared by many Americans, let alone many Catholics. But that is the official position.......So, as far as we know, Bush does not share the Catholic Church's position on abortion. And when it comes to doctrinal issues and litmus tests, it seems to me you don't get to go halfway: Either Bush's position on abortion is one that devout Catholics can support, or it isn't. Bush, of course, is not himself a Catholic. But why is it that conservative Catholic bishops don't ask for Bush to publicly clarify his position, so that all devout Catholics who wish to vote their religious beliefs will know whether or not they can vote for him in good conscience?

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003167
According to the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, Catholics and Protestants differ little on a battery of abortion questions; large majorities think that abortion should be available when there is a risk of a defective child, a threat to the mother's health or a pregnancy caused by rape, while similar majorities reject abortion if the woman is unmarried or cannot afford another child or simply doesn't want a child. Only 4% of American Catholics consider themselves pro-life on all seven NORC questions, and a third of those voted for Gore anyway, despite his pro-choice stand. One might argue that Catholics should oppose abortion in all circumstances, but in fact they do not........most Catholics do not vote on the basis of the abortion issue, and those who do have little effect.

Bush writes a condolence letter to family of Paul Johnson, but of course it's all about his own agenda

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.html#003584
I want to express my deepest condolences to the family of Paul Johnson. We send our prayers and sympathies to them during this very troubling time.

The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face. These are barbaric people. There's no justification whatsoever for his murder, and yet they killed him in cold blood. And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans. See, they're trying to intimidate America. They're trying to shake our will; they're trying to get us to retreat from the world. America will not retreat. America will not be intimidated by these kinds of extremist thugs.

May God bless Paul Johnson. Thank you.

Cheney orders shoot-down of jets on 9-11 (belatedly, as it turns out). But did he clear that with Bush?

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_18_bestof.html#108756387101193922
Eyebrow-raising article in the Washington Post this morning that suggests maybe Dick....Cheney may had an Al Haig moment on September 11 and ordered hijacked passenger planes (and one stray medevac helicopter) shot down without first asking Shrub. Nobody else in the bunker seems to have mentioned such a conversation in their contemporaneous notes but Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten did suggest later that such a call be made to "confirm." Shrub told the commission that he remembered the call because it reminded him of the time he spent missing Air Guard meetings and pretending to be a fighter pilot. Personally, I've always found it best when caught in a lie to not add additional details.

Bush MIA on 9-11

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51852-2004Jun18.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
The report from the Sept. 11 commission out yesterday respectfully conveys President Bush's explanation for his conduct that morning, when he was visiting a Florida elementary school classroom..... "The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis. The national press corps was standing behind the children in the classroom; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

But it may not have been Bush's finest hour.......By recalling Bush's morning, the report inevitably calls attention to a less charitable interpretation, articulated by critics including filmmaker Michael Moore: While America was still under attack, Bush sat stunned into inaction, blank-faced, listening to children read about a pet goat for more than five minutes. And when he finally huddled with his advisers, it was to discuss what to say, not what to do to defend the country........

Scot J. Paltrow writes in the Wall Street Journal that yesterday's report "raised questions about whether Mr. Bush participated in the government's response before all four hijacked planes had crashed......"When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush had just arrived at a Florida elementary school to listen to a group of second-graders read. Mr. Bush learned while in the classroom that a second plane had hit and that a terrorist attack was under way........ "The report said that until he left the school about 30 minutes later, there was no evidence he or any of the senior staff with him contacted the Pentagon. It stated that 'no decisions were made' by the president or the staff with him while at the school, except for an initial decision to return to Washington. After leaving the classroom, their efforts were focused on preparing a short, televised statement from Mr. Bush."

Bloomberg reports: "President George W. Bush didn't react for five to seven minutes after learning a second aircraft had hit New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, because he was trying to 'project strength and calm,' a national commission investigating the attacks said."..........

So Who Was Calling the Shots?

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "The report portrays the vice president taking command from his bunker while Bush, who was in Florida, communicated with the White House in a series of phone calls, and occasionally had trouble getting through........"Cheney, who told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call, issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. But the commission noted that 'among the sources that reflect other important events that morning there is no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete.' ".......

Is That Why They Testified Together?

The assertion that Bush gave Cheney the okay to shoot down planes is one of the few in the report that is supported solely by statements from Bush and Cheney themselves -- statements which they made when they met together with the Sept. 11 commission.......Esther Schrader lays it out in the Los Angeles Times: "Cheney has told the commission that during one call to Bush, moments after he arrived at the command center, he asked the president to decide on the rules of engagement for combat planes being deployed over Washington. Bush said he authorized that hijacked planes be shot down........"But the commission staff seemed to question whether the call took place. Its report noted that there were no logs of that phone call between Cheney and Bush. 'Others nearby who were taking notes, such as the vice president's chief of staff, [I. Lewis] Scooter Libby, who sat next to him, and Mrs. Cheney, did not note a call between the president and vice president immediately after the vice president entered the conference room,' the report said........"Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters 'there's no documentary evidence' that Cheney conferred with Bush before issuing the shoot-down order....." 'And the only evidence you have is the statement of the president and the vice president, which was that the president gave the order to shoot down,' Hamilton said."

WH pressure to "pull the intelligence out" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-17-prison-cover_x.htm
The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice......Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib. The pressure stemmed from growing concern about the increasingly violent Iraqi insurgency that was claiming American lives daily. It came before and during a string of abuses of Iraqi prisoners in October, November and December of 2003...... Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting." And he said he was reminded of the need to improve the intelligence output of the prison "many, many, many times."
[Analysis: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003074]

Rumsfeld's fingerprints all over the place

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/18/81659/3360
For all the criticism reporters receive, we should give credit when it's due, such as in the press conference questioning yesterday of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld that, at certain junctures by some reporter (or group of reporters), was very strong and insistent.......Though you can read the full transcript here , the section below (apologies for its length, but reads better unedited) involves the Q&A between reporter/reporters and Sec. Rumsfeld and his DoD attorney, Daniel Dell'Orto. The subject was the procedural management of Iraqi detainees sent to Camp Cropper, and specifically how they were (or rather, were not) registered formally in such a way that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would know about their existence.......

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/changed-procedure.html
What's more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation's air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD's military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11.


Annan blasts US for opposing World Court

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/18/annan.us.reut/index.html
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has rebuked the United States for trying to get another exemption from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court and urged the Security Council to oppose the measure.

[Well, we can see WHY now, can't we?]

GOP in Congress - still making mischief

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/politics/2633730
House Republicans are trying to block U.S. Rep. Chris Bell's ethics complaint against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, with Democrats saying the GOP is trying to silence any criticism of its chief......Republicans denied they were trying to muzzle allegations against DeLay. But in the escalating partisan warfare touched off by investigations into DeLay's political dealings, Republicans' maneuvers may prevent Bell's complaint from being examined by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=710&e=1&u=/usatoday/20040617/pl_usatoday/gopcomesaroundtoamajorityview
During his first decade in Congress, Republican Rep. David Dreier of California complained bitterly about the heavy-handed way Democrats ran the House of Representatives. Now in their 10th year of holding the majority, Dreier and his Republican colleagues see things much differently.......As chairman of the House Rules Committee, Dreier is emblematic of the role reversal in the partisan, polarized Congress of the 21st century. He routinely uses his gavel to crush Democrats' efforts to air their proposals, much less enact them. His party writes legislation without Democrats' input, limits Democrats' ability to amend that legislation and prolongs votes in the House for as long as it takes to win. Republicans redraw congressional lines to elect more Republican members and pressure interest groups to hire more Republican lobbyists....... "We have had to do some of the things we criticized once," Dreier admits. "But now that I'm in the majority, I have this responsibility to govern. It's something I didn't completely understand when I was in the minority."

These critics point to a lengthy list of grievances against the GOP majority. The most serious:

* The House ethics committee is investigating whether Republicans offered campaign contributions amounting to bribes on the floor of the House during an unprecedented, three-hour roll-call vote on Medicare legislation last fall. Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., who is retiring, first made the charge, then backpedaled in later accounts. He didn't say who made the offer. But House Speaker Dennis Hastert spent much of the time with his arm around Smith's shoulder. Ultimately, the measure passed without Smith's support.

* Tom Scully, then the administrator of the Medicare system, negotiated for a job as a drug-industry lobbyist while helping write the law, which added a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare. He has denied wrongdoing and says he obtained a waiver from legal prohibitions to do so.......Meanwhile, Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, said he was ordered by Scully to withhold his higher estimates of the bill's cost from Congress while the legislation was being considered.

* House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has pressed industry interest groups and associations to hire Republicans as lobbyists. A Texas grand jury is looking into the use of corporate contributions to local Republican candidates by a political action committee he created. And DeLay engineered an unusual redrawing of House districts in Texas after Republicans took control of the state Legislature in 2002; as a result, Republicans hope to win about six House seats held by Democrats.

"The Republican majority has eviscerated the ethics process," says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. "It's the old story of power."

* Any semblance of cooperation between the parties has vanished. Tempers flared last fall when House Democrats, angry at being denied a vote on their Medicare legislation, demanded that a clerk read the text of a lengthy bill to prolong a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee. When Democrats left the room to talk strategy, committee chairman Bill Thomas called the Capitol Police to break up their session. The police refused, but Democrats haven't forgotten the attempt.

* The committee system has virtually collapsed under Republican rule. Bills are routinely dictated by House leaders, rather than written in committees. That leads to the concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders, led by Hastert - a man virtually unknown to the American people. When House and Senate bills need to be reconciled, Democrats are often excluded from the negotiations. Only two Democrats, who already were sympathetic with GOP goals, were allowed in the room when the final Medicare compromise was written.

* The predawn Medicare vote last November lasted three hours, rather than the customary 15 minutes. Stopping the clock until a bill is passed has become the norm under Republicans, but the Medicare vote set a record. "We've been working three Congresses for that," Hastert says. "We can wait three hours to vote."

Well, so much for that Kerry/McCain ticket

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html

Know any Nader supporters? Ask them to read this article

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cook18jun18,1,1637611.story

Bonus item: Ron Reagan asks, can you imagine my dad running a campaign this way?

http://mathewgross.com/blog/archives/000429.html
"My father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody else's mantle or pretend to be anybody else. I don't know what's wrong with these people -- they have to keep invoking him. It is their administration, their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, they're no Ronald Reagans, for sure."
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 2:14 AM

 
KEEP RUNNING, DON'T LOOK BACK

As Satchel Paige said, "They might be gaining on you..."

People seem surprised that Bush and Cheney are continuing to assert the Saddam/Al Qaeda link when their own select committee has just told them it isn't so. I'm not surprised: (1) they're shameless liars who refuse to admit errors and (2) when 57% of the people already believe that there was a link, it costs them much less to keep pushing that line than to abandon it. But I AM astonished at the breathtaking stupidity and hypocrisy of the arguments they are offering, and how seriously the press seems to be treating them.

# 1. Zarqawi
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/15/bush.alqaeda/index.html
President Bush repeated his administration's claim that Iraq was in league with al Qaeda under Saddam Hussein's rule, saying Tuesday that fugitive Islamic militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ties Saddam to the terrorist network......."Zarqawi's the best evidence of a connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda," Bush told reporters at the White House. "He's the person who's still killing."......U.S. officials blame Zarqawi for a series of attacks on U.S. forces, Iraqi civilians and others since the American-led invasion of Iraq, including the April beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg and the August 2003 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.......Earlier this year, U.S. officials touted what they said was an intercepted letter from Zarqawi to al Qaeda leaders seeking their help in provoking a civil war in Iraq, where the U.S.-led occupation authority is scheduled to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government at month's end..
[More: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004171.php]

# 2. "No contradiction" between WH and 9-11 commission positions
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49063-2004Jun17.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
The White House says there's no contradiction, because President Bush never made an explicit link between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.......On CNN yesterday, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said: "Just because al Qaeda and Iraq may not have collaborated in a specific attack on 9/11 does not mean that there's not a relationship or past relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda......."President Bush has made it very clear that there was not direct evidence linking to the 9/11 plot, and never did he make that suggestion"........Really?.....There are certainly a legion of quotes from Bush and Cheney directly asserting a connection between Hussein and al Qaeda -- and at the very least intimating a link between Hussein and 9/11.......
[More documentation on this clear and demonstrable lie:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/17/185436/985
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/17/cheney_insists/?source=RSS]

# 3. It depends on the meaning of what "relationship" is
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102589/fr/rss/
The administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda in Sudan.
Let's examine these words closely because President Bush clearly chose them carefully.
[More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17assess.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=]

# 4. There was a link because.....there was a link
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/middleeast/17CND-BUSH.html
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda" is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

["And there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda because.....I keep insisting there was a relationship. See? It makes a circle - perfect!"
More on "Bush logic": http://www.electablog.com/2004/06/you-gotta-like-reasoning.html
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/17/atta_debunked/?source=RSS
With its careful (if fumbling) ambiguity, Bush's statement today has the ring of truth....]

# 5. And the best analysis of all, c/o Seinfeld
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003072
"Just remember," George Costanza once advised Jerry Seinfeld, "it's not a lie if you believe it."

[Let me edit that: ".....pretend to believe it"]

Fun: a look at Bush's pathetically simple-minded cheat sheet

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/bush-notes.html
It's from Bush's cabinet meeting on Thursday. When I saw the photo I noticed the notes he had made and wondered what they said. I cropped the photo and rotated it so I could read them and...

Why DO they keep running this line? Other views

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_17_bestof.html#108750582776563275
You have to wonder why the White House and its crew of fellow travelers are spinning so hard to keep alive the myth that Saddam and Osama wore each others socks and took a big house together on Fire Island one summer. It smacks of desperation, big time......This jackhammer assault on truth, justice and the American way is going to backfire. The 9/11 Commission is not the DNC and all this right-wing whining and parsing of a handful of fruitless meetings among low level evildoers, only adds fuel to the notion that Bush and Cheney are idiots who can't tell the difference between an operational working relationship and a couple of "what if" lunches.......My theory is that the White House believes it simply cannot afford to be caught in another lie. After the missing WMDs, the botched occupation, the torture and illegal confinements, the mounting American and Iraqi deaths, and the zero to none chances of democracy taking root in Iraq, the Bushies have simply run out of credibility.......I got news for you, guys. It's too late. Shrub is going down and he's going to take a lot of GOP candidates with him.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1756
Now, it's probably the case that nothing will ever stop proponents of the Al Qaeda-Saddam link from subscribing to this fraudulent and refuted thesis. So, to gear up for revisiting the question in the future, this blog would like to propose a kind of online mixtape. What follows is an assortment of the best dubious Bush administration assertions that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allied against the United States. For those readers who care, I invite you to propose the best song we can match with each misleading statement.........

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/opinion/17THU1.html?ex=1088473509&ei=1&en=cb113d1e028b1462
This is not just a matter of the president's diminishing credibility, although that's disturbing enough. The war on terror has actually suffered as the conflict in Iraq has diverted military and intelligence resources from places like Afghanistan, where there could really be Qaeda forces, including Mr. bin Laden.....Mr. Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before Sept. 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration's actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world.

More impeccable logic from the Bush noise machine

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.html#003577
Jonah Goldberg says that if al-Qaeda doesn't follow the Geneva Conventions (which they don't) then the Conventions shouldn't apply to al-Qaeda detainees.....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barone17jun17,1,3722065.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Consider the presidential election of 1864. The defeat of the incumbent, Abraham Lincoln, would have made an enormous difference. Union casualties were heavy throughout the year. It was widely expected that Gen. George McClellan, ousted from heading the Union army by Lincoln in 1862, would be the Democratic nominee and that he would win.......Is the 2004 election as consequential as the election of 1864? The answer to that question depends on what you think John Kerry's military and foreign policy would be, and there is room for thinking many things. [Michael Barone]

Rumsfeld's ghost

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47806-2004Jun16.html?nav=rss_nation
A suspected Iraqi member of the terrorist group Al Ansar, whom CIA Director George J. Tenet asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to hide off the official registry of prisoners, became lost in the system for seven months and was not interrogated by CIA or military officials during that time, Pentagon and intelligence officials said yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17abuse.html
Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and at other detention centers as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law.".....Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/17/rums_secret/index.html
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended his decision to hold a prisoner captured in Iraq without notifying international authorities, saying it was at the request of CIA Director George J. Tenet and the detainee was treated humanely....... "He wasn't lost in the system," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. "There is no question at all ... that he received humane treatment.".....The terror suspect has been held since October without being given an identification number and without the International Committee of the Red Cross being notified, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Both conditions violate the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners of war.....The prisoner will be given a number and the Red Cross will be formally notified soon, Whitman said.

And it wasn't just one....

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006942.html

So: you can now add perjury to Rumsfeld's offenses

http://blog.dccc.org/mt/archives/000443.html

400 lawyers make the case for impeachment of the whole crew....

http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040616/APN/406161060

....and Michael Froomkin lays out the legal brief

http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/the_disappeared.html

From Congress? A sudden silence

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44874-2004Jun15.html

I think I would call this a case of misplaced sympathy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47810-2004Jun16.html?nav=rss_nation
"I can't tell you the anguish you go through," said Baker, 22, a short, baby-faced soldier from Pittsburgh. "All this goes down at Abu Ghraib. You can't do anything about it, and you feel" miserable....... The larger implications of the scandal -- eroding the credibility of U.S. military policy in Iraq and raising questions about the chain of command -- means little to Baker......"After Abu Ghraib, some of the detainees would taunt you," said Baker, who finished the work for a chemistry degree from the University of Pittsburgh while in Iraq. "They'd point to you and say in Arabic, 'No good, no good.' It was bad."......Dozens of military police officers interviewed during the past two weeks at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib described feelings of anger, resentment and frustration about being caught up in a scandal that they had no part in, feelings shared by other soldiers who were here when the abuse took place......"Morale is a tough issue right now," said Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Kauffman, a military guard at Camp Bucca from Dothan, Ala.

The confused, infuriating story of missed opportunities to shoot down the 9-11 jets, and the missing piece

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48471-2004Jun17.html?nav=rss_nation
The chief of U.S. air defenses testified today that if his command had been notified immediately of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings and ordered to intervene, U.S. fighter jets would have been able to shoot down all four of the airliners that were seized by terrorists and that ultimately crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania........ Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that had the Federal Aviation Administration conveyed word of the hijackings as soon it knew of them, "yes, we could shoot down the airplanes."..... The chairman and vice chairman of the commission later expressed surprise about Eberhart's claim, and a report by the panel's staff said it was uncertain that any of the hijacked planes could have been shot down......According to the commission's new staff report, Vice President Cheney did not issue orders to shoot down hostile aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, until long after the last hijacked airliner had already crashed, and that the order was never passed along to military fighter pilots searching for errant aircraft that morning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50745-2004Jun17.html
At 10:39 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney, in a bunker beneath the White House, told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a videoconference that he had been informed earlier that morning that hijacked planes were approaching Washington........."Pursuant to the president's instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out," Cheney told Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon. Informing Rumsfeld that the pilots had received orders to fire, Cheney added, "It's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out.".......Cheney's comments, which were soon proved erroneous, were detailed in a report issued yesterday by the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. The comments are part of the considerable confusion that surrounded top government officials as the tense drama unfolded.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50745-2004Jun17_2.html
About 9 a.m. that day, at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., it was Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, who first told him and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center....

[Yes, do the math - that's an HOUR AND A HALF delay]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18minutes.html
The nation has relived that morning countless times since Sept. 11, 2001, but never with the harrowing detail and minute-by-minute drama of the staff report released Thursday by the independent commission investigating the attacks.........The 29-page report recounts a frenetic 149 minutes unlike anything ever faced by the nation's aviation and military defenses. And it details moments both of unflinching calm, like actions by the air traffic controllers who managed to orchestrate the landings of all 4,500 flights aloft, and of maddening miscommunications, mangled coordination and broken chains of command.
[More: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html]

The missing piece

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.htm

Intelligence failings before the war: even worse than you think

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-intel17jun17,1,126799.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[You gotta read it to believe it. More: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004167.php]

And in Iraq....

http://www.diplomatsforchange.com/project/project.html
The undersigned have held positions of responsibility for the planning and execution of American foreign and defense policy. Collectively, we have served every president since Harry S. Truman. Some of us are Democrats, some are Republicans or Independents, many voted for George W. Bush. But we all believe that current Administration policies have failed in the primary responsibilities of preserving national security and providing world leadership. Serious issues are at stake. We need a change.

From the outset, President George W. Bush adopted an overbearing approach to America's role in the world, relying upon military might and righteousness, insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and allies, and disdainful of the United Nations. Instead of building upon America's great economic and moral strength to lead other nations in a coordinated campaign to address the causes of terrorism and to stifle its resources, the Administration, motivated more by ideology than by reasoned analysis, struck out on its own. It led the United States into an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is uncertain. It justified the invasion of Iraq by manipulation of uncertain intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, and by a cynical campaign to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11. The evidence did not support this argument.

Our security has been weakened. While American airmen and women, marines, soldiers and sailors have performed gallantly, our armed forces were not prepared for military occupation and nation building. Public opinion polls throughout the world report hostility toward us. Muslim youth are turning to anti-American terrorism. Never in the two and a quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted.......

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003069
With the handover of Iraqi "sovereignty" just two weeks away, there's no shortage of open questions about what exactly our behind-the-scenes role in Iraq will be. One particularly pressing question has been whether the interagency knife-fight between the State and Defense Departments over Iraq will finally draw to a close. You'll remember that the Pentagon essentially junked about a year's worth of laborious preparatory work for the occupation prepared at Foggy Bottom, and famously told the first U.S. proconsul, Jay Garner, that he couldn't hire its architect, Tom Warrick. Failures and recriminations have compounded and intensified ever since -- sometimes fairly, sometimes not. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has tried to present a united front going into the post-June 30 phase, when our political efforts will be housed in a new U.S. embassy, under the control of the Department of State....But it looks more like the conflict is about to enter its guerilla phase....

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/in_a_world_of_shit.php
A remarkable briefing yesterday at the Middle East Institute by Ahmed S. Hashim, a Naval War College professor just returned from Iraq , painted in broad outlines the potentially catastrophic situation that the Bush administration faces in Iraq the next few months. With polls showing that just two percent of Iraqis view the United States as "liberators," Hashim's report was sobering indeed. Making it clear that he was speaking only for himself, and not for any U.S. government body, Hashim said, "We went into Iraq with ideological lenses." U.S. war planners avoided thinking about the worst that could happen, he said. "If you start with a rosy scenario and work backward, you're in a world of shit. And that's where we are."........

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003073
Here's Donald Rumsfeld :

This much is certain: coalition forces cannot be defeated on the battlefield. The only way this effort could fail is if people were to be persuaded that the cause is lost or that it's not worth the pain, or if those who seem to measure progress in Iraq against a more perfect world convince others to throw in the towel. I'm confident that that will not happen.

Only the media, says the most powerful secretary of defense in history, can lose the war in Iraq. By that logic, a year's worth of mistakes--an insufficient number of troops to provide basic security; an inability or unwillingness to demobilize militias; a preference for wishing deeply-rooted conflicts in Iraqi ethnic and religious politics away instead of providing a civil forum for their arbitration; the installation of pliant Iraqis onto a council subsequently made powerless; torture--are simply wished away. And there are more mistakes to come......

Bonus item: O'Reilly on Alterman - "Just kidding, can't you take a joke?"

http://mediamatters.org/items/200406170008

Extra bonus item: I haven't gone after Rush Junior (Sean Hannity) yet - here's a page full of HIS whoppers

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=91585
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 3:18 AM

 
NO MORE LIES

Now stop insulting our intelligence, will you?

Yesterday
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2004/06/16/bush_backs_cheney_on_assertion_linking_hussein_al_qaeda/
President Bush yesterday defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion this week that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, even as critics charged that the White House had no new proof of a connection.......Bush stood by his vice president, saying Hussein ''had ties to terrorist organizations," though he did not specifically mention Al Qaeda........Bush has previously said there was ''no evidence" linking Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but he and other members of his administration have continued to say they believe there were ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called Hussein ''a patron of terrorism" and said ''he had long established ties with Al Qaeda." ......An April poll by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 57 percent of Americans surveyed believed that Iraq was helping Al Qaeda before the war, including 20 percent who believed Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Today
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040616/ap_on_re_us/sept_11_commission
Rebuffing Bush administration claims, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said Wednesday no evidence exists that al-Qaida had strong ties to Saddam Hussein. In hair-raising detail, the commission said the terror network had envisioned a much larger attack and is working hard to strike again.....Although Osama bin Laden asked for help from Iraq in the mid-1990s, Saddam's government never responded, according to a report by the commission staff based on interviews with government intelligence and law enforcement officials. The report asserted "no credible evidence" has emerged that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 strikes.

Of course, there IS an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection....NOW, thanks to our invasion

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46132-2004Jun16.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing
President Bush yesterday pointed to Abu Musab Zarqawi as the "best evidence" of a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.......In so doing, he came to the defense of Vice President Cheney, who on Monday asserted that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaeda.......Even though Zarqawi is actively terrorizing Iraq today, and does appear to have a relationship with al Qaeda, his association with Hussein has never been established.........Communications between Zarqawi and al Qaeda that Bush alluded to yesterday took place several months after Hussein was removed from power.

So, let's review. WMD excuse for war -- gone. Hussein/Al Qaeda excuse -- gone. So I guess now we'll start hearing a lot more of this:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2004/06/16/bush_backs_cheney_on_assertion_linking_hussein_al_qaeda/
''I look forward to the debates where people are saying, 'Oh gosh, the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power,'" Bush said.
[Analysis: http://www.electablog.com/2004/06/getting-framed.html]

[Because, you know, unseating all the autocratic and corrupt leaders around the world is now a sufficient reason for war.....Well, CERTAIN autocratic and corrupt leaders, then]

Here's how the WSJ tries to avoid using the phrase "Bush is a liar" (note also the echoes of Reaganesque excuses)

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001023.html
Did [George W. Bush] lie about Iraq's ties to terrorism? There has never been hard evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, but... Saddam Hussein... support[ed]... anti-Israeli terrorists. Mr. Bush's broad-brush division of the world into good guys and bad guys can be criticized for its crudeness and simplicity. But most who know him believe it is how he sees the world......We can vigorously debate President Bush's policies without impugning his character. If the day comes when Americans conclude that all presidents are liars, then all presidents will lose the incentive to tell the truth.

Alan Murray wants to say that Bush's claim that attacking Iraq was part of our war to destroy Al Qaeda and its ilk is not a lie but rather a "crude and simplistic" but honest failure on his part to see any meaningful distinction between the terrorists funded by Our Friends the Saudis who attack Israel (with whom Saddam Hussein was allied before 911) and Al Qaeda (with whom Saddam Hussein was not allied before 911)...... In this, I believe, Murray has been heavily lobbied by White House insiders--people who say that George W. Bush is neither a habitual liar nor totally clueless, but an honest and not-too-swift man with a crude and simplistic view of the world, a man who should never have become a president, but who is nevertheless trying his best. We need, I can hear them say, to turn down the partisan rhetoric--and need to stop maligning George W. Bush, who has many weaknesses but not those he is currently being blamed for......And so Murray writes his article: call George W. Bush crude, call his view of the world simplistic, but don't call Bush a liar......But fate takes a hand. A malign fate.....George W. Bush, on the day that Murray's article hit the newsstands, says that Cheney is right to claim that there were long-established ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, witness Abu Musab Zarqawi. Thus the wiggle room between "falsehood" and "crude and simplistic view" that Murray was attempting to buttress collapses under the weight of George W. Bush's words.

By the way, clearly this announcement from the 9-11 commission is the news of the day -- but look how "fair and balanced" Fox News covered it

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004157.php

Here is a prediction: the next big story to come out of the 9-11 panel will be WHY the Bush administration stalled and missed the chance to have fighter jets scrambled to shoot down the airliners if necessary - this is in some ways a bigger deal, and more easily documented, than whether "they should have known" about the attack before hand

http://www.soonerthought.com/archives/000778.html
On October 25, 1999, golfer Payne Stewart's Lear jet went off course and drifted across the country for several hours with no one at the controls. Due to a pressure leak, the passengers and crew were dead; aloft in a 20th Century Flying Dutchman. Within 20 minutes of losing contact with the ground, U.S. military jet fighters intercepted the doomed plane. They were under orders to be prepared to shoot the plane down if it were deemed to be a danger to a populated area. The plane eventually crashed in an unpopulated area after expending its fuel.

On September 11, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked by terrorists along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. According to published accounts, the hijacked jetliners veered radically off course and switched off their transponders. They would not respond to communications from the ground. When the first plane--Flight 11--slammed into the World Trade Center Tower, two F-15 fighter jets were in the air less than five minutes away-so close but yet so far. This was 25 minutes after the plane had been known to be hijacked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/politics/16panel.html?hp
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has found that the Pentagon's domestic air-defense command was disastrously unprepared for a major terrorist strike on American soil and was slow and confused in its response to the hijackings that morning.....

http://slate.msn.com/id/2060825
"The military screw-up nobody talks about"

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayaninterestingday.html
[A time line of that awful day, and how Bush and his people pissed away precious time]

Can we say it now? Cheney is a LIAR

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001016.html

From the Center for American Progress - a nice summary:

WEAPONS INSPECTOR SAYS NO PROOF: Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay shot down the idea that al Qaeda and Saddam were linked......

HEAD OF THE CIA SAYS NO PROOF: In testimony before the Senate intelligence committee earlier this year, CIA Director George Tenet flatly stated that, even if Zarqawi operated in the shadows of Iraq, there was no coordination between him and Iraqis......

PRESIDENT BUSH SAYS NO PROOF: In a press conference on 1/31/03, asked if he believed there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, President Bush admitted, "I can't make that claim."

COLIN POWELL SAYS NO PROOF: In January, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced he had seen no "smoking gun [or] concrete evidence" of ties between Saddam and al Qaeda.

BUSH COUNTERTERRORISM EXPERT SAYS NO PROOF: According to former White House counterterrorism expert Roger Cressey, there was no direct link between Zarqawi and al Qaeda.....

CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR PEACE SAYS NO PROOF: A January assessment of the war by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace debunked the White House claims, saying, "The most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda.".......

[To which we can now add: "9/11 Commission says no proof"]

BUT.....Cheney's office responds

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&e=1&u=/nm/20040617/pl_nm/security_commission_cheney_dc
Vice President Dick Cheney, who took the lead in pushing the idea of long-standing links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, has no intention of backing down despite a finding to the contrary by the Sept. 11 commission, aides said on Wednesday....."Hell no!" another administration official said when asked if Cheney would retract his statements after the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks found no evidence that Iraq aided al Qaeda attempts to strike the United States.

[Of course, this is the oldest trick in the book: having the VP talk trash that the administration wants out there, but which the President can keep distance from]

More lies. Cheney's office WAS kept apprised of Halliburton deals, they admit, but Scooter never told Dick (Uh-HUH - what kind of morons do they think we are?)

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/16/cheney/
Libby informed participants at a Defense Department briefing in October 2002 that "the vice president's office would not be involved and would have nothing to do with the matter," Kellems said.

[Then why were they even being kept informed? Why were Cheney's representatives even at these meetings?]

By the way, a recent poll shows Cheney is a significant drag on the Bush ticket

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003146

Those retired military and diplomatic people don't mess around: they're not just calling for Bush out of office, they're calling it a national imperative that we do so

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/16/diplomats/?source=RSS
"Today we see that structure crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the world around it," said Phyllis Oakley, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. ''Never before have so many of us felt the need for a major change in the direction of our foreign policy.".......Retired Gen. Merrill A. ''Tony" McPeak, former Air Force chief of staff, said the Bush administration anticipated a rosy reception after a military victory in Iraq but ''we were totally unprepared for the post-combat occupation. So we see here unfolding before us a total disaster."

And here's a good reason for them to worry: neo-cons in the administration are utterly unrepentant, planning even further misadventures for the second term!

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000815.html

Bush hesitates in handing over Saddam, says Sadr can form party

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44599-2004Jun15.html
Bush also said the administration is in talks about relinquishing deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to the interim Iraqi government once security arrangements can be made......The offers to hand over Hussein -- which had long been expected -- and to relinquish any claim to Sadr -- [represent] a significant softening of Bush's position......In Baghdad, Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, welcomed Sadr's decision to form a political party to compete in next year's elections, calling it a "smart move."

[Sadr? Isn't that the fellow we (a) issued an arrest warrant for -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3601887.stm, (b) vowed to "kill or capture" -- http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/04/12/world/iraq_ceasefire040412, and (c) Paul Bremer said was an outlaw who couldn't form a party -- http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108667779889319422]

And on Saddam, don't expect a real "handover" -- US will continue to hold him, probably in Iraq at a military installation (where? keep reading.....)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43004-2004Jun15.html
"If they ask for him, which I have every reason to believe they will . . . we'll turn him over," Bremer said. He added, however, that "legal custody and physical custody can be two separate things."

WOW: Rumsfeld ordered prisoner kept "off the books," hidden from Red Cross

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5226957/

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17abuse.html
This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first to have been kept off the books at the orders of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.

[Can we look further into this "Camp Cropper" (BIF) hell-hole - PLEASE?
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07242003.html]

WP editorial on torture policies:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44849-2004Jun15.html

Sean Baker's account of being beaten during an interrogation "training exercise"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-baker16jun16,1,5750193.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Baker says he volunteered to put on an orange prison jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee in a training drill. But the five-man MP "immediate response force" sent in to extract him was not told of the exercise. According to Baker's lawyer, the soldiers were told that Baker was an unruly detainee who had been doused with pepper spray after assaulting a sergeant........Four MPs slammed Baker to the floor, he says, then choked him and pounded his head at least three times against the floor. Gasping for breath, he managed to spit out a code word - "red" - and to croak: "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!".......But the beating continued, according to Baker, until the jumpsuit was yanked down in the struggle, revealing his military uniform. Only then did the MPs realize that they had been beating an American soldier - causing a traumatic brain injury, Baker alleges.

CIA trying to suppress up to 40% of the critical Senate Intelligence Committee report (FORTY PER CENT!!)

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000807.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/politics/16repo.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1087445105-H2S+3O9QzAN40PaErygqnA

This is fun: Google "Pentagon Inspector General" and see how many scandals his office has been handling (his name is Joseph E. Schmitz, by the way: http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/schmitz_bio.html). But you won't find ANYTHING recent on the "Boykin" or "BIF" scandals. Now try to go to his web site for more information on any of this: http://www.dodig.osd.mil/

Bush campaign starts to crank up the Reagan sound machine, hoping it drowns out their own failures. (Reagan's family doesn't approve.)

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/16/mustreads/
Just days after Ronald Reagan was buried, his image started appearing in ads promoting George W. Bush and criticizing John Kerry, the AP reports. "The Club for Growth's ad, which is to begin airing Wednesday, portrays both Republican presidents as leaders -- Reagan on communism and Bush on terrorism, while claiming Kerry was 'wrong then, wrong now' on national security."....... "The ad shows Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, testifying to Congress in 1971 that 'we cannot fight communism all over the world and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.' Former President Reagan is then seen at the Berlin Wall in 1987, saying 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' That's followed by Bush telling rescue workers at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: 'I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.'" ......But a Reagan family's spokeswoman said no one requested the permission to use Reagan's image in an ad, nor would permission be granted because it would imply that he endorsed one candidate over another........It's worth noting that Dick Cheney is also using the Bush-Reagan comparison on the stump.

Our buddies, the Saudis (did anybody say "autocratic and corrupt"?)

http://www.electablog.com/2004/06/farce-of-middle-east-our-policies-and.html
Oh, sure. Our great allies in Saudi Arabia. Our war on terror in which the royal family is our great supporter and totally onboard. The hand-holding, good friend hogwash and the smooth stylings of Prince Bandar and the band of thugs and liars whose false messages he delivers to the highest reaches of American government......What do these pigs tell their own people about the rise of the extreme militants who they helped to create? The killers who they nurtured with their backwards policies and oppressive hierarchy?.......Take a look at what Crown Prince Abdullah tells his own people about the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia (and by extension, every other thing that has ever gone wrong anywhere, anytime): "Zionism is behind it. It has become clear now. It has become clear to us. I don't say, I mean ... It is not 100 percent, but 95 percent that the Zionist hands are behind what happened."......You think this royal clown is our ally in the war on terror?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5218227/
As for the alleged Saudi doublespeak, a Saudi official in the United States defends the remarks, arguing that Zionists and others who argue for regime change in Saudi Arabia "share the same objective as Osama bin Laden."

[More: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/cfr_joins_jihad.php]

Bonus item: psychoanalyzing Bush (I don't put much stock in this sort of thing, but it is kinda fun to read)

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/06/16/bush_on_couch/index.html
Three new psychological portraits of George W. Bush paint him as a control freak driven by rage, fear and an almost murderous Oedipal competition with his father.......

Extra bonus item: Fox News gives "Fahrenheit 9/11" a rave review!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122680,00.html
It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail...... As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" - as we saw last night - is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty - and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:40 AM

 
THEY JUST NEVER LEARN

"Hey, John, we need something to show we're making progress in the war on terror - got anything dramatic-sounding we can announce?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41805-2004Jun14.html
Somali Man Charged in Plot to Bomb Ohio Mall

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/national/15terror.html
Somali Is Accused of Planning a Terror Attack at a Shopping Center in Ohio
The indictment against Mr. Abdi makes no mention of the alleged plot to blow up a shopping mall.....

And EVERYONE rolls their eyes

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_15_bestof.html#108730466542994504
You will probably not be surprised to learn that the Somali guy who Ashcroft said was plotting to "blow up a shopping mall in Ohio" was charged with no such thing. He was indicted instead on a number of relatively minor fraud and immigration-related violations.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/worst-ag-ever.html
When he did his latest "WE'VE ARRESTED A TERRORIST!!!!!" news conference yesterday I thought that finally there was a bit of skepticism on the part of the press. Maybe I was just projecting, but I sensed a bit of subliminal eyerolling coming from the CNN anchordesk.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004151.php
For what it's worth, I happened to be watching ABC News last night when they ran a segment about this, and the skepticism was more than subliminal. Peter Jennings came about as close as an anchor can to telling us that Ashcroft was completely full of shit before ABC ran its piece......The fact that Ashcroft is such an obvious camera hog is probably part of the reason for this treatment......Nor does it help that two weeks ago he announced a huge terrorism scare, only to have Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge sound confused the next day while admitting that, no, as far as he knew there was nothing serious going on and the threat level would stay at yellow.

Not a good week for Brother Ashcroft: called "the worst A.G. ever" (and this in the company of John Mitchell and some real whiz-bangs)

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_06_13_atrios_archive.html#108730186895134628
Ashcroft is corrupt. He's stupid. He's incompetent. He loves the spotlight. He believes laws don't apply to Republicans. He's obsessed with porn, pot, and prostitution.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
Remember John Ashcroft is the man who claims to have it in his power to arrest you, Mr. American Citizen, and hold you incommunicado in prison forever if he wants. He has apparently passed along a memo to the president claiming the right to torture and kill you as well....Meanwhile, under Homeland Security orders, journalists from England, Sweden, Holland and other friendly countries are being detained at U.S. airports, strip-searched and deported as well. The most pathetic thing is, for all their police-state tactics, they are doing a terrible job of protecting us, and terrorism is a greater threat than ever. Just ask the newly corrected State Department report.....I ask you, have we ever faced as great an internal peril to our most fundamental freedom since the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover?

[Oh, by the way, "TIA" aside, the government is data-gathering more personal information about you than you ever realized: http://fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0524/web-datamine-05-28-04.asp]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html
For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure.......First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions.....Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing.....Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat......For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings......But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials........For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot......Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention - that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb' - has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court.".......But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work......The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday - to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

Sibel Edmonds? Yes, let's look more closely at her case

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/14/sibel/

Now, let's get this straight, Gore makes a few claims that are labelled "lies" (but which turn out to be mostly true) and is scorned for months as a "pathological liar." Cheney repeatedly asserts things that he KNOWS aren't true, and he is called....?

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/15/cheney/

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=90121
Vice President Dick Cheney stated unequivocally last September that he had no connection to the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts granted to Halliburton. "I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government," Cheney stated on national television. As with many things uttered by the vice president, this simply is not true........

The Truth About Cheney

http://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/projects/DailyRealityCheck.asp?ID=164
Vice President Cheney's wild and wacky misadventures with the truth continue, much to the consternation of everyone who values transparency and accountability in government. What will it take for him to come clean?......Three years later, it's obvious that Cheney is the very embodiment of "typical" Washington behavior that Bush so often claims to despise.

Yeah, Cheney's in cahoots with Halliburton, but at least we're getting good value for all those insider deals, right?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41816-2004Jun14.html
When he complained about the apparent waste, West said, he was told not to worry about costs: Halliburton would make a profit no matter what happened. "I really saw no purpose for us being there," West said. "I don't know why Halliburton was hiring all these people.".....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-halliburton15jun15.story
The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency found that Halliburton's system of billing the government for billions of dollars in contracts was "inadequate in part," failing to follow the company's internal procedures or even to determine whether subcontractors had performed work.......At the same time, four former Halliburton employees issued signed statements charging that the company had routinely wasted money. Among other things, they said the company had paid $45 apiece for cases of soda and $100 per bag of laundry, and had abandoned nearly new, $85,000 trucks in the desert for lack of spare parts.

In Iraq: suddenly we're making nice with Sadr (we'd better - he might WIN)

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108728097431632166

Also: a new blueprint for our "exit strategy"

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108728335524861092
US Marines went into Fallujah on Monday, meeting with General Muhamma Latif, commander of the Fallujah Brigade, and the head of the local governing council, Saadu'llah al-Rawi. They signed an agreement on mutual confidence, with the US undertaking to release 50 Iraqis from Fallujah now in CPA prisons. The US also removed the checkpoint that had been set up to the east of Fallujah........Meanwhile, some Marine commanders consider the deal worked out with the Fallujah Brigade a failure because it has not made guerrillas give up their heavy arms or arrested those responsible for killing four foreign security guards in March.

Bush declares victory in Afghanistan...so sad, so sad

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/15/karzai/

What Bush Co. hath wrought

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108736144801952076
Associated Press reports a Coalition Provisional Authority poll of Iraqis taken in the middle of May that had only been used internally by the CPA and not released to the US public. The numbers do not reflect well on Bush administration policies in Iraq........55% of Iraqis say they would feel safer if the US troops would just leave. And over half thought that all Americans behave the way the accused prison guards at Abu Ghuraib did.........

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1599
The implications of Mr Bush's inadvertent destruction of the American mystique have yet to sink into America's progressive internationalists. Many hawkish neoliberals hope that if John Kerry is elected, Europeans, Arabs and others will let bygones be bygones. If only it were so. A new administration could do much to repair the damage that Mr Bush and his team have done to America's reputation. But it will take a generation or more to rehabilitate America's image.

Oh, how hard it is to be Scott McClellan these days: read the transcript, count the lies

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003066

Did Bush see the terror memos...what do you think?

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102416/fr/rss/

Why Bush isn't sleeping well these days: still to come.....

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/investigation_summer.php
The White House may look back on the first half of 2004 as the "good old days," despite the hammering Bush has already taken.......There are almost too many inquiries to count. There are several investigations of U.S. intelligence in connection with Iraq, the 9/11 commission is finishing its work, the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame investigation is proceeding, there are several panels looking at the Abu Ghraib scandal, investigators are examining who leaked what to Ahmed Chalabi, there is Halliburton dirt to be revealed and more. In normal times, any one of these would be enough to knock the pins out from under a president, but taken together it's a blitzkrieg.

Looks like Bush IS channeling Reagan: USDA declares frozen, batter-dipped, deep-fried, french fries a "fresh" vegetable

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fries15jun15,1,3906001.story
The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under PACA to include batter-coated, frozen French fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.

More on Bush's attempts to politicize Catholicism: could backfire

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003145

Gen. Geoffrey Miller (new head at Abu Ghraib): "treat them like dogs" (the sad thing is, that would be an improvement)

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_827511,00050003.htm

Here's an interesting argument against torture: IT DOESN'T WORK!

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=524502.html
This has been futile and irrational, as well as evil. The nearly universal uselessness of torture is well-known in intelligence and special warfare circles. Even if you have a key figure who does possess useful information, and you eventually get him (or her) to tell you what you want, what actual good is it?.....Is it really true? Is it merely what the torturer has inadvertently conveyed to the victim that he wants to hear? Even if true, is it any longer useful? Every resistance or underground organization works with a system of cut-outs that limits what any one individual knows, and signals everyone else to scatter when a prisoner is taken......A network doesn't have to be organized to do that. Any band of armed insurgents in Iraq knows that when one of them is taken the rest don't wait around.

And a name we haven't heard in a while: Jerry Boykin (General "My god is bigger than your god")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39088-2004Jun13_2.html
Still no word on that Pentagon inspector general's report on some controversial anti-Muslim statements, caught on videotape, made by Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence........It's been more than seven months since the Pentagon announced the investigation after Boykin, in uniform, talked about the war on terrorism as a "spiritual battle" and made comments disparaging of Islam. Muslims went ballistic........Back in early April, the Pentagon said to look for a report in the next couple of weeks or so. More than two months have gone by.

I'll help answer this question - no one wants close scrutiny of Boykin right now. Boykin is head of "Delta Force," which is implicated in torture at a top-secret "BIF" prison at Baghdad airport (another story that seems to have fallen off the radar screens)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5024068/
The Army's elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees.....The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad's airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the "BIF" is pictured in satellite photos.....According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq's prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don't apply.....These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF’s six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he’s drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation.

More on Boykin

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031215fa_fact
The rising star in Rumsfeld's Pentagon is Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who has been deeply involved in developing the new Special Forces approach....Cambone also shares Rumsfeld's views on how to fight terrorism. They both believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive in combatting terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the world and eliminating them. And Cambone, like Rumsfeld, has been frustrated by the reluctance of the military leadership to embrace the manhunting mission. Since his confirmation, he has been seeking operational authority over Special Forces. "Rumsfeld's been looking for somebody to have all the answers, and Steve is the guy," a former high-level Pentagon official told me. "He has more direct access to Rummy than anyone else." ....One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant General William (Jerry) Boykin, Cambone's military assistant. After a meeting with Rumsfeld early last summer-they got along "like two old warriors," the Pentagon consultant said-Boykin postponed his retirement, which had been planned for June, and took the Pentagon job, which brought him a third star. In that post, the Pentagon adviser told me, Boykin has been "an important piece" of the planned escalation.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/05/17/Worldandnation/Religious_remarks_hou.shtml
In the chain of command, Boykin ranks above military intelligence officers in Iraq, some of whom have been implicated in the abuse scandal. His name briefly surfaced at Tuesday's hearing when discussion turned to a report by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller on ways to improve intelligence-gathering at Abu Ghraib......The report recommended that military police work closely with military intelligence officers in getting information from detainees that could be used to fight the anti-American insurgency. MPs should be "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful interrogation and exploitation" of prisoners, the report said......Dr. Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said Boykin had briefed him on the report. Cambone went on to say that neither he, Miller, nor Boykin thought the report was "tantamount" to asking MPs to engaged in abusive behavior......Boykin's name was not mentioned again in the hearing, which lasted several hours. Cambone could not be reached for comment, and Boykin has declined all interviews since the Defense Department's inspector general began investigating him last year.

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031021-090352-6004r.htm
The latest proposed victim in our struggle against terrorism is ArmyLt.Gen. William G."Jerry" Boykin, recently named deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. His mission is to reinvigorate the search for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and other leaders of global terrorism. By training and experience, he is marvelously prepared for his new duties - having risen from a Delta Force commando to top-secret Joint Special Operations Command, through the CIA, to command of the Army's Special Forces. For a quarter century, he has been fighting terror with his bare hands, his fine mind and his faith-shaped soul.

Bonus item: why people love Fafblog

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_fafblog_archive.html#108713816093707710
The Medium Lobster has been disquieted of late at by the latest round of Iraq torture scandal news. There has been much uproar - among that irritating minority which have not been studiously scrutinizing the week's top story, the beatification of Ronald Reagan, at least - regarding the powers of the president and the incompatibility of torture with a liberal democracy. In the midst of all this, the Medium Lobster would like to offer those with cooler heads some perspective as to the merits of harsh interrogation.

Imagine there is some weapon of mass destruction planted by terrorists in the heart of a city, ready to go off - a "ticking bomb," if you will. Would it be wrong to torture a terrorist to find the location of such a device and save the millions of lives at risk? Hardly. Now, what if instead of torturing a terrorist, interrogators had to torture a confederate of that terrorist - some associate who would know where the terrorist was so they could locate that ticking bomb? Is that dirtying of our hands such a high price to ask in the goal to protect millions? I think not. Now, what if instead of a terrorist's comrade, interrogators have a terrorist's relative or neighbor? Is it still justified to go as far to save innocent lives? I should hope so! And what if that terrorist has a lot of relatives and neighbors - hundreds, even? Would it be wrong to grant blanket authority to torture hundreds of prisoners knowing full well that any of them could have the crucial information required to save a city? Certainly not! And what if the threat we're faced with is not a bomb at all but an even more pernicious threat - a rogue nation with the potential capability to someday construct that bomb? Would it not be America's right - no, her duty - to invade that country, occupy it, and set up a system of torture-like interrogations to rid that country of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction once and for all? Absolutely!

Indeed, the most unsettling question being raised by these latest news items is not the issue of torture itself, but the question of whether America will be strong enough to use that torture to defeat the enemies of life and liberty. The Medium Lobster can only hope that this great nation will retain its nerve.

Extra bonus item: let's see, Franken calls O'Reilly a "liar" (by pointing out his LIES), and O'Reilly goes ballistic that this is beyond the pale of fair criticism. O'Reilly calls Franken (and Moore) like Goebbels, and accuses their fans of being like the followers of Nazism. And that is.....?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200406140007

[More: Eric Alterman just filed suit against O'Reilly for defamation, and it looks to me like he'll win -- http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006911.html]
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 3:23 AM

 
"A MORAL CHERNOBYL"

Having trouble keeping all the torture memos straight? Here is a summary of how we got into this miserable situation.

Imagine this: Bush's re-election, the entire campaign, could hinge on the question of whether the American people are willing to rationalize torture as a method of investigation during wartime. What a legacy this man has brought to us.....

The DOJ ("Yoo") memo: January 9, 2002
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5032094/site/newsweek/
In a crucial memo written four months after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Justice Department lawyers advised that President George W. Bush and the U.S. military did not have to comply with any international laws in the handling of detainees in the war on terrorism. It was that conclusion, say some critics, that laid the groundwork for aggressive interrogation techniques that led to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.......The draft memo, which drew sharp protest from the State Department, argued that the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to any Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters

The White House counsel ("Gonzales") memo: January 25, 2002
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/site/newsweek/
In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes-defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions-such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners-was "undefined." .....One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote......The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision-then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell- to exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions....."Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.

The DOJ OLC ("Bybee") memo: August 1, 2002
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/olcs_aug_1_2002_torture_memo_the_bybee_memo.html
In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism......If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later.......The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document......The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.

The Dept of Defense ("Walker") memo: March 6, 2003
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5167122/site/newsweek/
A memo classified by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 explores ways of conducting interrogations in the war on terror that would allow guards to evade future prosecutions for torture. In a series of minutely argued points that appear designed to evade restrictions on abusive interrogation techniques, the memo concludes that "excessive force" is illegal only when it is "malicious and sadistic." It also argues that treatment of prisoners should be defined as torture only when "the infliction of pain" is an interrogator's "precise objective." ....The March 6, 2003 draft memo from the Defense Department, which was obtained in part by NEWSWEEK, is titled a "WORKING GROUP REPORT ON DETAINEE INTERROGATIONS IN THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM" and explores numerous legal defenses for acts that might be construed as torture.

Invaluable legal analyses from Michael Froomkin

The Gonzales memo
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/05/alberto_gonzales_memo_paving_the_way_for_war_crimes.html
Aside from its fundamental callousness and lack of moral outrage, there are odd things about it.....Gonzales rejects, without discussion, the concept that if armed people are not entitled to POW status they might still benefit from Geneva III, protecting civilians. Or might be subject to basic norms of decency and due process arising from the Constitution which creates the powers he and his boss exercise......Even stranger is the odd discussion of the War Crimes statute, 18 U.S.C ､ 2441. Gonzales opines that one good reason for NOT treating detainees as POWs is that not giving them POW status lessens the chance of subsequent prosecutions against their US captors under the war crimes statute......Why, you might ask, worry about prosecution at all? Is Gonzales aware of a plan to mistreat the detainees? It sure looks that way.

The Bybee memo
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/olcs_aug_1_2002_torture_memo_the_bybee_memo.html
The memo is about what limits on the use of force ("standards of permissible conduct") for interrogations conducted "abroad" are found in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Torture Convention) "as implemented" by 18 USC ､､ 2340-2340A (the Torture statute)......The memo concludes that the restrictions are very limited - that only acts inflicting and "specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering", whether mental or physical, are prohibited. Allowed are severe mental pain not intended to have lasting effects (pity if they doﾉ), and physical pain less than that which acompanies "serious physical injury such as death or organ failure" (p. 46). Having opined that some cruel, inhuman, or degrading acts are not forbidden, only those that are "extreme acts" (committed on purpose), the memo moves on to "examine defenses" that could be asserted to "negate any claims that certain interrogation methods violate the statute.".....This is not a draft, but it's not an action document either. It's legal advice to the Counselor for the President. The action document was Gonzales's memo to Bush......This OLC document is a legalistic, logic-chopping brief for the torturer. Its entire thrust is justifying maximal pain.....Nowhere do the authors say "but this would be wrong"......Lots of the (lousy) criminal law legal reasoning in this memo is picked up in the Draft Walker Working Group memo.....This memo also has a full dose of the royalist vision of the Presidency that informs the Draft Walker memo. In the views of the author(s), there's basically nothing Congress can do to constrain the President's exercise of the war power. The Geneva Conventions are, by inevitable implications, not binding on the President, nor is any other international agreement if it impedes the war effort. I'm sure our allies will be just thrilled to hear that. And, although the memo nowhere treats this issue, presumably, also, the same applies in reverse, and our adversaries should feel unconstrained by any treaties against poison gas, torture, land mines, or anything else? Or is ignoring treaties a unique prerogative of the USA?

The Walker memo
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html
If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, "I was just following orders" is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

And now come the defenses and rationalizations of Bush torture policies - pretty thin stuff

Yoo's LA Times op-ed (this guy is a LAW PROFESSOR??!)
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-yoo11jun11,1,142865.story
[Froomkin takes him apart: http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/yoo_unrepentant.html]

WSJ's willfully ignorant excuse
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003130
One thing the memos do not do -- though you'd never know it from the way they're being characterized -- is make the case for torture.
[Uh.....have you READ them?]

I suspect the National Review had to search a while to find someone willing to write this
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200406140831.asp
One couldn't help recalling desperate times and desperate measures while watching the abominable politicking in the Senate Judiciary Committee last week as Attorney General John Ashcroft was grilled by grandstanding Democrats about internal Justice Department memos analyzing the law of interrogation tactics and the propriety of torture. How could they ever ponder such things?......What do you think the Justice Department does in times of crisis......What it does - just as it did when the attorney general's last name was Kennedy - is brainstorm. It deliberates internally. It debates and grapples with what by nature are dicey, gut-wrenching questions......It is surely fair game, especially in an electoral season, for politicos to pounce on policy decisions . If the president were to adopt sadistic interrogation methods on the mere suspicion of terrorist activity; or even if he were to adopt more modest measures, restricted to only worthy targets, but try to implement them by fiat without seeking changes in conflicting laws; these would be topics highly worthy of Senate hearings, impassioned discussion, and perhaps vigorous criticism. It is an act of supreme recklessness, however, to publicize, much less politicize, internal policy deliberations.....We want - we need - our decision makers, particularly the president in wartime, to be acting on the best, most candid, most comprehensive advice of top aides. In times of crisis, the options posed will be dire because dire may be what is called for to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or an act of brazen aggression by a rogue state.......We have to struggle with the shifting balance between security and decency......Giving vent to these considerations did not enshrine them as policy. But they were options and they merited mulling over. They were legal approaches for dealing with a netherworld.....
[TAPPED replies to McCarthy's disingenuous excuse that these were just hypothetical "bull sessions" to consider options: http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003134]

More commentary

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001004.html
It seems very clear to me that Jay Bybee should not be a judge, on the 9th Circuit or anyplace....

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/14/memos/
President Bush insists that after receiving all of this advice from the highest-ranking lawyers in his administration on how to twist legal logic to get around domestic and international laws on torture, that his directives were to "adhere to the laws." As a reporter who questioned Bush last week put it: "When you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting," adding: "This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?".....The president ignored the question of morality and chose a legalistic answer. Bush's response: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. If I -- maybe -- maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions out of -- from me to the government."....It's not much comfort to look at the laws on the books, as the president suggests, when all of the memos we've seen so far indicate his lawyers were devising arguments that those laws could be ignored by an executive whose war time powers are, in the lawyers' views, boundless. Look for more scrutiny in the coming days and weeks on President Bush as the steady stream of torture memos point to culpability in the highest levels of government.

From the occasionally bombastic Christopher Hitchens, a time when bombast is appropriate: "A Moral Chernobyl"

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102373/fr/rss/
In a recent public debate, so I was told, an American officer referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a "moral Chernobyl." You might think that this was overstating matters, even if in one important sense-because Chernobyl was morally an accident, albeit in some ways a "systemic" one-it is actually understating them....But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not.

And c/o Froomkin, the best one-line analysis of all, from the noted legal scholar, Jay Leno:

http://www.newsmax.com/liners.shtml
According to the "New York Times", last year white house lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security - so if that's legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?

Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, we have made ourselves hated, not liberators, and have given new political leverage to the Shiite radicals - brilliant!

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&e=2&u=/washpost/a39504_2004jun14
"Long live Sadr! Long live Sadr!" they shouted in rhythm as they marched down the street as oily black smoke billowed up behind them....."We can do nothing about this chaos," said a policeman who declined to be identified by name. "These people would eat us if we tried to force them to leave. We have no authority, not enough weapons to protect ourselves.....They accuse us of being collaborators, so how can we convince them to obey us?"

"It's all the Americans' fault," shouted Amid Abdi, who displayed a bloody hand he said was wounded when the bomb went off as he walked nearby......As he talked, a teenaged boy, his head shaved close like that of a Marine, stepped up. "We will slaughter them," he said, drawing his fingers across his Adam's apple....."The bombings happening in Iraq these days are part of the U.S. plan," affirmed Wasam Basim, 24, who works for the Facilities Protection Service, a U.S.-financed corps assigned to prevent attacks such as Monday's. "They are doing these bombings to show the world that Iraq is an unsafe country and they have to stay longer to maintain security. Also, they want to find an excuse not to hand over full sovereignty to the Iraqi government."......Ali Hussein, 32, a member of the same service, accused Iraqi police of paying more attention to the foreigners killed and wounded by the explosion than the Iraqis lying nearby......"The police are traitors," he declared. "They moved the bodies of the foreigners and left the Iraqis lying in the street. They should all be killed. We have to burn these cars. We have to show them what it means to work against Iraq. This time we'll burn the cars empty. Next time, we'll burn them with their occupants inside."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/world/2625510
Standing on a street lined with shuttered stores, Karim Habib watched four U.S. tanks rumble through the impoverished Shiite enclave of Sadr City, past what was left of a police station blown up a few days earlier......Once grateful to Americans for ridding them of Saddam Hussein, many in this Baghdad slum have come to hate U.S. troops for bringing chaos -- and not much else -- to their door.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39159-2004Jun13.html
In an early test of its imminent sovereignty, Iraq's new government has been resisting a U.S. demand that thousands of foreign contractors here be granted immunity from Iraqi law, in the same way as U.S. military forces are now immune, according to Iraqi sources......The U.S. proposal, although not widely known, has touched a nerve with some nationalist-minded Iraqis already chafing under the 14-month-old U.S.-led occupation. If accepted by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, it would put the highly visible U.S. foreign contractors into a special legal category, not subject to military justice and beyond the reach of Iraq's ["fully sovereign"!] justice system.

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108701781138459419
At the Friday prayers at the Kufa Mosque, Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji preached in the stead of Muqtada al-Sadr, reading the latter's prepared sermon for the third week in a row. During the sermon, he mentioned that Muqtada al-Sadr would support the caretaker government if it demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of Occupation forces from Iraq......The wire services are misinterpreting this statement as an about-face on Muqtada's part. It is not. It is a piece of bargaining. He is saying that he will swing the Sadrist movement around to support the transitional government if it will commit to throwing the Americans out of Iraq on a strict timetable. That is what Muqtada has wanted since the fall of Saddam. He started calling for a US withdrawal in April, 2003. It seems probable that one reason the Americans came after Muqtada in early April, intending to kill him, was fear that he will become powerful enough after June 30 to lobby effectively for the expulsion of the Americans. ( It has now come out that the "Ministry of Justice" printed up broadsheets announcing that Muqtada had been killed resisting arrest, and that someone jumped the gun and actually put some of those out in early May even though in fact, Muqtada eluded his would-be murderers. All this can only have been done at the behest of the Bush administration and the US military.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/international/middleeast/14IRAQ.html
Moktada al-Sadr, the fiery Shiite cleric whose fighters have waged a 10-week insurgency against the American-led occupation, is starting a political party that will probably take part in elections early next year, a spokesman for him said Sunday........The move is the most significant sign that Mr. Sadr is trying to become involved in the mainstream political process. Last week, he softened his militant stance when he conditionally approved the new Iraqi interim government, which he had mocked.

[But don't worry, Paul Bremer says he can't run for office: http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108667779889319422]

Kurdistan - a mess

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1747

And as for Saddam? Let THEM deal with it (good idea: no rules of evidence, no testimony about previous US-Saddam connections, and a dead certain verdict)

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/14/saddam/index_np.html

Dick Cheney, once the eminence gris of this team of clowns, has become a clown himself

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&e=3&u=/ap/20040615/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney_terrorism
Vice President Dick Cheney said [again!] Monday that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaida, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/14/232016/097
These claims, made Monday night, are quite curious, especially since frickin' Colin Powell has admitted there was no such link......But really, isn't this all rather pathetic and bordering on the pathological?

Iraq a distraction from the true centers of terrorist support - Saudi Arabia and Iran

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/bigger_than_iraq.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41730-2004Jun14.html

Bush and Rove: "desperate" for Catholic assistance

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004147.php
Bush's entreaty to the Vatican is part of a serious, long term strategy to win Catholic votes away from Democrats. Here are John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation:

Bush has devoted a great deal of energy to trying to broaden the definition of the Religious Right....His main quarry has been Roman Catholics, the biggest single religious group in the country and the most ripe for picking.....Bush easily won the votes of a majority of religiously active Catholics in 2000, the best showing among them by a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. He has made a great show of visiting prominent Catholic institutions like the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The White House has a weekly conference call with an informal group of Catholic advisors, and the Republican National Committee has revived a Catholic task force. Bush tries to include fashionable Catholic phrases, such as "the culture of life," in his speeches....Bush's best chance of winning Pennsylvania and Michigan, which he narrowly lost in 2000, probably lies in seducing blue-collar Catholics.

Needless to say, Bush wasn't expecting the Catholic John Kerry to be the Democratic nominee, and the fact that he is has thrown a huge monkey wrench into his plans to "seduce" ever more Catholics to his side in 2004. The result has been a methodical and relentless assault on Kerry's Catholic credentials and a sustained effort to find and publicize Catholic bishops willing to go public with their complaints.....So, "is it proper for the president to enlist the Vatican as an arm of his political campaign"? And was his request just something that popped into Bush's head during one of his conversations? No and no. But the Catholic vote has been a longtime obsession of the Bush campaign and a Catholic opponent has made them desperate.....Remember this whenever you see a news story about a Catholic bishop speaking out against Kerry or a Republican operative questioning his fitness to receive communion. These aren't just spontaneous shows of support, they're part of an ongoing and highly professional media campaign to win votes in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. And judging by how the press credulously reports this stuff at face value, it's working.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003065
Now, a decision which leans in the direction of sanctioning Kerry would of course be helpful to the president. But a decision which led to denying communion to various Catholic politicians who dissent from various Church-positions could quickly get out of hand. So one of Karl Rove's chief conservative Catholic allies, Deal W. Hudson -- with whom he has recently been strategizing -- has tried to simplify the issue:

"Once you open this door, what's going to come rolling through it?" asked Deal W. Hudson, editor of the magazine Crisis and a key Catholic ally of the Bush administration. "Pretty soon, no one would be taking Communion."....Hudson said he believes the denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry. Even better, he said, would be if priests would read letters from the pulpit denouncing the senator from Massachusetts "whenever and wherever he campaigns as a Catholic."

Hudson's and Rove's agenda here seems rather clear......When the president tells Vatican officials that not "all the American bishops are with me" and then asks them to push the bishops to greater 'activism', what might he be getting at?

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003065
I guess on one level we can say we've come a long way since 1960 when John F. Kennedy had to foreswear that he'd follow the instructions of the Pope in his decisions of governance. Today we have a Protestant born-again who tries to enlist the Pope to intervene in an American election.

Tom DeLay: not just a crook, a sleazy, cash-grabbing, petty crook. He should be scared to death that the Dems don't take over the House and control the investigative committees

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2004/06/11/delay/
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&e=1&u=/washpost/a41568_2004jun14

Other news and outrages

Pentagon gains expanded domestic spying privileges (the Pentagon!)
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006895.html

Hastily convened, underfunded "WMD committee" has done.....exactly.....nothing
http://www.ericumansky.com/2004/06/wmd_panel_mia.html

League of Women Voters smells the coffee, opposes voting machines with no paper trail
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040615/ap_on_re_us/league_electronic_voting

Bush will not revisit stem cell policy
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2004/06/14/stem_cells/index_np.html

Yet another major corporate tax giveaway
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39184-2004Jun13.html?referrer=email

And on the lighter side

The Chalabi gang, still looking for someone to blame for the fall of their guy (pretty funny account of a recent AEI panel, with all the culprits on site)

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000799.html

Poor George - upstaged at every turn these days

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40091-2004Jun14.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing

Bonus item: What do Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea, and Ronald Reagan have in common?

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#003536
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 12:49 AM

 
FIRST YOU LAUGH, THEN YOU CRY

I caught this too -- the funniest quote of the week

Here's Colin Powell on "This Week", trying to explain why the State Department terrorism report was so off the mark in saying that terrorism worldwide was down:

It's a numbers error. It's not a political judgment that said, 'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books.

We can't get away with that now?

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_13_bestof.html#108715937362563284
http://mathewgross.com/blog/archives/000419.html

Higher education report: Bush's Great Compromise on university admissions under attack

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/education/13AFFI.html
Seven years ago, after a federal court outlawed the use of race in the admissions policies of the state's public universities, the Legislature came up with an answer: It passed a law guaranteeing admission to the top 10 percent of the graduating class from any public or private high school.....But the 10 percent rule, which seemed to skirt the tricky issue of race so deftly, is coming under increasing attack these days as many wealthy parents complain that their children are not getting a fair shake.......Parents whose children have been denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin, the crown jewel of Texas higher education, argue that some high schools are better than others, and that managing to stay in the top 25 percent at a demanding school should mean more than landing in the top 10 percent at a less rigorous one. The dispute shows how hard it is to come up with a system for doling out precious but scarce spots in elite universities without angering someone.

This is funny too, and sharp-witted: Bush invited to get a college education (worth reading!)

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/06/04/40c0331b7e51e
It disheartens me, though, that you dismiss my education, my planning and my purpose as elitism. This is especially confusing when you attended the most exclusive institutions in the world, while dismissing this fact as not worthwhile. I know of so many who struggle just to pay their electric bills, while dreaming of the chance to be educated in the way that you were. I am equally flummoxed by your political reasoning, which rejects differences of opinion and condemns a truly breathtaking feature of democracy: the press. For these reasons, as well, I look forward to you sitting beside me for a day as a PSU Viking (Vikings were fierce warriors, you know).

On Day One at PSU, we will attend the classes that I mentor in the general education program. Our goals, in these classes, are to negotiate ideas across rifts of opinion, to explore the reasons and social thinking that accompany categories of difference both locally and globally, and to communicate effectively using not only words, but all the media of technology, in presenting and arguing our evolving perspectives. The fundamental goal is to create a space of academic safety, not intellectual comfort, where we can challenge and inspire each other. On good days the room is filled with light, on others, like the day we discussed the torture at Abu Ghraib, we feel heavy and caked with the danger that you have foisted on our own fledgling democracy. You will be received with care, though, and knowing the intense consideration that my peers utilize with each other, you will be received with fairness. But you will be required to explain your actions; you will be required to clearly present your argument for all the things you do; you will be graded by your use of logic, not rhetorical flourish.......

Fafblog (sometimes quoted here): The hot new satirical site

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#003538

The wackjobs of Texas: more ha-ha's on the goofiest sector of the GOP

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2004/06/wackjobs-of-texas.html
Bush: "they're my people"

The State of Florida + voting machines = a few "minor technical hiccups"

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040612/ap_on_el_pr/florida_voting_machines_1
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.

GOP in Congress starting to challenge Bush on budget issues ("just trust me" doesn't work any more)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35424-2004Jun11.html

Wow - just like a spy novel.....

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000790.html
INC fugitives on the run . . . in DC? A couple weekends ago, at a nearby party in DC, INC spokesman Entifad Qanbar, dapper in a navy suit, sat on a stone hedge huddling next to Christopher Hitchens, deep in conversation. I took the opportunity when Hitchens went inside to corner Qanbar for a few minutes' discussion of the fate of his colleague Ahmad Chalabi.......
[Update: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000793.html]

Cheney's office linked directly to Halliburton deal

http://www.house.gov/reform/min/

Now the crying part...

WH memo justifying torture -- this is the week the s--t hits the fan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38894-2004Jun13.html?nav=rss_nation
Today washingtonpost.com is posting a copy of the Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum "Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A," from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush.....The memo was written at the request of the CIA. The CIA wanted authority to conduct more aggressive interrogations than were permitted prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The interrogations were of suspected al Qaeda members whom the CIA had apprehended outside the United States. The CIA asked the White House for legal guidance. The White House asked Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for its legal opinion on the standards of conduct under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.......The Office of Legal Counsel is the federal government's ultimate legal adviser. The most significant and sensitive topics that the federal government considers are often given to the OLC for review. In this case, the memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the office at the time. Bybee's signature gives the document additional authority, making it akin to a binding legal opinion on government policy on interrogations. Bybee has since become a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals......

Another memorandum, dated March 6, 2003, from a Defense Department working group convened by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come up with new interrogation guidelines for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, incorporated much, but not all, of the legal thinking from the OLC memo. The Wall Street Journal first published the March memo....... At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, senators asked Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to release both memos. Ashcroft said he would not discuss the contents of the Justice and Pentagon memos or turn them over to the committees.....

President Bush spoke on the issue of torture Thursday, saying he expected U.S. authorities to abide by the law. He declined to say whether he believes U.S. law prohibits torture.

Warnings of torture came much earlier, but were ignored

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/international/middleeast/14ABUS.html

The war within the White House

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5197853/site/newsweek/
The handling of al-Libi touched off a long-running battle over interrogation tactics inside the administration. It is a struggle that continued right up until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April-and it extended into the White House, with Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council pitted against lawyers for the White House counsel and the vice president. Indeed, one reason the prison abuse scandal won't go away-two months after gruesome photos were published worldwide-is that a long paper trail of memos and directives from inside the administration has emerged, often leaked by those who disagreed with rougher means of questioning.....Last week the White House dismissed news accounts of one such memo, an explosive August 2002 brief from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel disclosed by The Washington Post. The memo, drafted by former OLC lawyer John Yoo, has been widely criticized for seeming to flout conventions against torture.......White House officials told reporters that such abstract legal reasoning was insignificant and did not reflect the president's orders. But NEWSWEEK has learned that Yoo's August 2002 memo was prompted by CIA questions about what to do with a top Qaeda captive, Abu Zubaydah, who had turned uncooperative. And it was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, who discussed specific interrogation techniques, says a source familiar with the discussions. Among the methods they found acceptable: "water-boarding," or dripping water into a wet cloth over a suspect's face, which can feel like drowning; and threatening to bring in more-brutal interrogators from other nations...

Al-Libi's capture, some sources say, was an early turning point in the government's internal debates over interrogation methods. FBI officials brought their plea to retain control over al-Libi's interrogation up to FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA station chief in Afghanistan, meanwhile, appealed to the agency's hawkish counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. He in turn called CIA Director George Tenet, who went to the White House. Al-Libi was handed over to the CIA. "They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo" for more-fearsome Egyptian interrogations, says the ex-FBI official. "At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, 'You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f--- her.' So we lost that fight." (A CIA official said he had no comment.)

The other war within the White House (there seem to be so many, these days)

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/14/coup/
"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."......The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity.

Feith's office a clearinghouse for more bogus intelligence claims - this time from Israel

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000796.html

Bush Co. drags its feet on endorsing UN treaty on women's rights

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/chi-0406130142jun13,1,5879857.story?coll=chi-newsopinionperspective-hed

US holding Hussein without charges, may violate international law

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1238263,00.html

Iran's growing influence in Iraq

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108719301020355708
[More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-06-13-ebadi-usat_x.htm]

Bush appealed to Vatican to get more involved in US domestic politics

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/13george.html
Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."......Mr. Allen wrote that others in the meeting confirmed that the president had pledged aggressive efforts "on the cultural front, especially the battle against gay marriage, and asked for the Vatican's help in encouraging the U.S. bishops to be more outspoken." Cardinal Sodano did not respond, Mr. Allen reported, citing the same unnamed people.

Maybe this is the sort of thing he had in mind

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/06/politics/main610547.shtml
Boston's own [Archbishop] Sean O'Malley -- has refused to clarify a statement last summer that pro-choice Catholics are in a state of grave sin and cannot take communion properly........ Adding to the fray in February, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke forbade Kerry from taking communion while campaigning in the area due to Kerry's stance on abortion and possibly stem cell research......The denial of communion to a Catholic eminent politician would be unprecedented. Experts cite such action as forbidden by Catholic canon law......

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/119/53.0.html
Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles seemed perplexed by the controversy......."I'm slightly mystified why all this is all coming up now," he told Catholic News Service. "We've had pro-choice Catholic politicians going to Communion since Roe v. Wade," the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

[Really? I'm not perplexed AT ALL]

Josh Marshall is on this story too (and he picks up the money line)

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003064
Remember the words ... "Not all the American bishops are with me"

Bonus item: The political impact of blogs

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040621-650732,00.html

- posted by Nick Burbules @ 3:23 AM

 
A RECORD OF SUCCESS

Oh, this is rich: in second term Bush promises to be a "Peace President"

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646350,00.html

[Yeah, right: and also the "Fiscal Responsibility President," the "Protect the Environment President," the "Civil Rights President".....]

He'd BETTER BE the Peace President, because the military will revolt if he keeps misusing them this way

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35762-2004Jun11.html
President Bush has compared the war against terrorism to the 20th-century struggles against totalitarianism and communism, calling it "the great challenge of our time." But he has refused to adjust his policies to those stakes. And the first casualty of this crippling disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the U.S. Army.

26 former military and diplomatic officials (many of them GOP) call for Bush defeat

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936.story?coll=la-home-headlines
"A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration - by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," Harrop said.

Successes of Bush nation-building: Afghanistan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1237001,00.html
The elections in Afghanistan seem certain to be delayed for a second time, dealing a damaging blow to President George Bush's own election campaign........The delay comes amid growing concern about the security of the election process after the killing on Thursday of 11 Chinese construction workers......It is now impossible for the election to be held legally in September, the date for which both the interim government of President Hamid Karzai and the United Nations were aiming, itself a delay from the intended June polling day......It has also emerged that not a single dollar pledged to pay for the elections has been given by donor countries, including members of the EU and the US.

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=119-06112004
The former White House Drug Policy spokesman is ripping the Administration for allowing Afghanistan to return to being the world's number one heroin producer after several years of decline. Robert Weiner, the Office of National Drug Policy's spokesman 1995-2001 and earlier the U.S. House Narcotics Committee's spokesman, asserts, "Fighting drugs in Afghanistan is not a priority -- we're giving it a pass" and are "effectively working in concert with Afghanistan's tribal drug lords and jeopardizing our own goals against terror.".......Afghanistan, after a two-year lapse, is once again "the world's largest cultivator and producer" of opium and heroin, according to the 2004 White House National Drug Control Strategy. Afghani crops in 2003 were more than double the 2002 crop, Weiner points out.

Successes of Bush nation-coddling: Saudi Arabia

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_12_bestof.html#108707779474593056
How long can the Bush administration pretend that America isn't caught in the middle of a civil war going on in Saudi Arabia and that the fate of that oil-drenched land of religious wackos is not the major front in the "war on terror?" Iraq is, and has always been, a sideshow in the real struggle that will reshape the Middle East.....A corrupt, ruthless band of Saudi "royals" is engaged in a life-and-death struggle for power with an equally brutal and determined force of religious zealots who believe the House of Saud has sold the soul of Islam in exchange for Western petrodollars. With the usual American self-absorption, we have convinced ourselves that 9/11 was about us. It wasn't; it was just one battle in the Saudi civil war, triggered mainly by the presence on Saudi soil of U.S. Army "infidels." Mohammed Atta didn't die for "Palestine" or some abstract notion of a clash of civilizations; he died because he hated the Saudi royal family and its corruption of Islam's holiest shrines by its alliance with the infidels.......There are no good guys in this war but we have no choice but to support the royals and hope that some form of stability can be imposed. Without access to cheap Saudi crude, the American economy will collapse and take most of the West with it. That's why the Bushes and the Kerrys of the world look the other way at the miserable performance of the Saudi royal family and pretend that the main battleground of terrorism is elsewhere. All the alternatives are worse.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-saudi4jun04,1,5122502.story?coll=la-news-comment
For too long, the kingdom has vainly tried to use its oil wealth to paper over severe economic problems that are turning it into a hotbed of support for terrorists........The United States must continue to press the Riyadh regime to work more closely with U.S. intelligence to stop the flow of Saudi money and citizens into terrorist groups. For its part, the Riyadh government must work harder on badly needed social and political reforms, starting with promised municipal elections in the fall.

Successes of "shock and awe" in Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html
The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials........Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful......

Successes of Bush working with the UN: Brahimi, steamrolled repeatedly by CPA and IGC, quits

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/438248.html
Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, announced his resignation from the post at a meeting yesterday of the Security Council and in the presence of Secretary General Kofi Annan........The resignation, brewing for a number of days, shocked the diplomatic community at the world body....... Brahimi explained that his decision stemmed from great difficulties and frustration experienced during his assignment in Iraq. He said that he does not intend to return to Iraq.

Successes of the war against terror

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1-1142070,00.html
The US State Department acknowledged last night it was wrong to report that terrorism declined worldwide last year and admitted that attacks actually increased sharply.....

And on the torture front

More trouble for Gen. Sanchez: issued secret order to hide prisoner from Red Cross

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040621/usnews/21abughraib.htm
The disclosure of Sanchez's involvement may focus more attention on him. There have been reports that his top Army lawyers sought to curb Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib, only weeks after the humanitarian agency uncovered abuses and sexual humiliation at the prison late last year. Some Army officers, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th MP Brigade, have blamed Sanchez's staff for refusing to release security detainees from Abu Ghraib even when they were believed to pose no threat to coalition forces........Karpinski says Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, who is Sanchez's top intelligence officer, was a major obstacle to releasing detainees. Fast, she says, served with her and a third officer on a detainee release board and vetoed recommendations to release inmates from the overcrowded facility, even after determining that they were of no intelligence value. "She did not want to release the next Osama bin Laden," Karpinski says. "She had a certain kind of paranoia."

Military violated own policies on use of private contractors

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040612/D835IBM80.html

Closer scrutiny for Guantanamo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37364-2004Jun12.html?nav=rss_nation
The previously undisclosed memos provide one of the most complete pictures to date of life behind the "wire" at Guantanamo........The memos also document for the first time the precise nature of a number of long-standing concerns issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross over the treatment of suspected al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters held at the base.......Nearly two years after the camp opened, Red Cross officials sharply criticized the U.S. government for continuing to use the cages and keeping detainees in "excessive isolation," and for failing to establish due process or a stepped-up release schedule, according to the memos......"There was no improvement in any of the four major areas of concern," an Oct. 9, 2003, memo states........The memos also contain tantalizing clues about several high-value detainees who were off-limits to Red Cross inspectors during their periodic visits to Guantanamo, which typically lasted four to six weeks.

And here it comes......

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/13/wguan13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/13/ixworld.html
New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House........The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.........According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8903022.htm
What began as a military investigation of seven low-ranking Army reservists accused of tormenting Iraqi prisoners now appears likely to become a wide-ranging examination of whether top civilian and military leaders authorized torture or approved efforts to intimidate, humiliate or degrade suspected terrorists in violation of U.S. laws......In Congress, Democrats and some Republicans are calling for greater scrutiny of what interrogation guidelines the Bush administration approved for dealing with prisoners in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Such scrutiny is likely over the actions of top aides to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft.......Since that time, however, the Army has announced that it is investigating the deaths of 127 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, and evidence compiled by military and congressional investigators indicates that top civilian and military leaders dispensed contradictory advice on how far to push the bounds of laws against torture and whether certain detainees were covered by international treaties.

[127 deaths! That ain't just barking dogs]

Blurring the ethical line: most reflective people have by now asked themselves the question whether, under ANY circumstances, they could imagine using torture (a ticking bomb will kill thousands, only one person knows where it is, the only way to get the information in time....etc). But justifying its use in an immediate, extraordinary situation with demonstrable consequences doesn't lead to excusing it as a matter of ONGOING POLICY, simply as a convenient way to facilitate intelligence gathering generally

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-yoo11jun11,1,2870128.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
[From John Yoo, author of DOJ torture memo]
For example, suppose that the United States captures a high-level Al Qaeda leader who knows the location of a nuclear weapon in an American city. Congress should not prevent the president from taking necessary measures to elicit its location, just as it should not prohibit him from making other strategic or tactical choices in war. In hearings this week, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) recognized that "very few people in this room or in America would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake."........Ultimately, the administration's policy is consistent with the law. If the American people disagree with that policy, they have options: Congress can change the law, or the electorate can change the administration.
[Analysis: http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#003537]

Bonus item: Not ALL the Reagans want to see Bush using Reagan's legacy as cover for his own failings

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,41043253,5879,f/
RON REAGAN JR.: He is home now. He is free. In his final letter to the American people, Dad wrote, "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life." This evening, he has arrived......Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/04/14/ron_reagan/index_np.html
The Bush inner circle would like to think of George W.'s presidency as more of an extension of Ronald Reagan's than of his one-term father's. Reagan himself, who has long suffered from Alzheimer's disease, is unable to comment on those who lay claim to his political legacy. But his son, Ron Jr., is -- and he's not pleased with the association........"Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people."

- posted by Nick Burbules @ 4:08 AM

 
WHAT DOESN'T GET SAID

The story of the day, apparently: McCain turns down Kerry (according to the AP, then picked up by the news echo chamber). Except that when you actually read the stories and not the headlines, it turns out (1) Kerry hasn't actually asked him yet, (2) McCain didn't exactly say "no way" (3) many of the conversations took place weeks ago, and (4) McCain may still agree to do it....

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Kerry-McCain.html
McCain Rejects Kerry's Overtures to Join Ticket
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34742-2004Jun11.html
Although Kerry has made no formal offer to McCain to join the Democratic ticket, according to these sources, the purpose of the discussions appears to have been to gauge McCain's interest.....Mark Salter, McCain's chief of staff, said McCain "has never been offered the vice presidency by anyone."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/12/politics/campaign/12MCCA.html
"It was always artfully phrased, but he asked him on several occasions to serve as his running mate," the individual said. "He'd say, `I don't want to formally ask because I don't want to be formally rejected, but having said that, would you do it?' or `I need you to do it,' or `I want you to do it.' "..........."It was always phrased in such a way as to give both men plausible deniability," the individual added.

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml?pid=1744
Mickey Kaus says this AP story undermines the suggestion in David Ignatius's Washington Post column that, under the right circumstances, John McCain might be amenable to joining a presidential ticket with John Kerry. I'm not so sure Mickey's right. What the AP story says is that Kerry asked McCain to consider becoming his running mate some time in late May, and that McCain refused to consider it at that point. But Ignatius's conversation with McCain (or, as he puts it, McCain's "inner circle") happened this week--well after the Kerry-McCain meeting described in the AP piece. Which is to say, it's entirely possible that McCain was rethinking his earlier refusal to consider joining the Kerry ticket by the time he (or his inner circle) spoke with Ignatius. My hunch is that McCain's people just got a little nervous that the Ignatius column read like too overt a nod in that direction, so they leaked the news of the earlier Kerry-McCain meeting to the AP in an attempt to walk it back. But I could be wrong.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33145-2004Jun10.html
McCain doesn't see any easy answer, such as the much-discussed "national unity" ticket with Democrat John F. Kerry. But after visiting with his inner circle this week, I'm certain that he has thought carefully about it....... Despite McCain's public demurrals, he has been privately deliberating how things might work if he ever did agree to run as Kerry's vice presidential candidate. The bitter political divide in America worries McCain, especially when the nation is at war. He knows that for many Americans, he has become a symbol of a bipartisanship that could overcome these divisions..........

Blair's humiliation: another Bush war ally pays the price at the polls

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=527840§ion=news

Here's another reason Sanchez had to recuse himself from the torture investigations (by the way, I am always calling it the "torture" scandal now, not an "abuse" scandal -- we crossed that line a long time ago)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

[So much for the notion that these "special" interrogation techniques needed specific approval and review from superiors]

Remember Hersh's comment yesterday about mistreating children to get their parents to talk?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2027&e=5&u=/chitribts/giboymistreatedtogetdadtotalk

Let's put an end to this nonsense right now...what, the torture? No: letting military personnel talk to the press about it

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-06-10-gitmo-gag_x.htm

Froomkin notes, as we did yesterday, Bush's conspicuous refusal to disavow torture methods, when asked about it during his press conference:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/administration/whbriefing/
Given several opportunities at yesterday's press conference to express his opposition to torture, President Bush responded repeatedly with a legalistic answer that leaves him vulnerable to continued speculation about the role he and his top advisers played in setting interrogation rules in the war on terror.......Dana Milbank and Dana Priest write in The Washington Post: "President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law......."Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law......."Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum.".....James Harding writes in the Financial Times: "[W]hen asked whether he had authorised the use of aggressive interrogation techniques to fight the war on terrorism, Mr Bush resorted repeatedly to a legalistic formulation: 'The authorisation I issued was that anything we did would conform to US laws and would be consistent with international treaty obligations.' ".....Shannon McCaffrey and Sumana Chatterjee write for Knight Ridder Newspapers that Bush "sidestepped a question about whether torture was ever justified."

Could the torture scandal actually HELP Bush? Another contrarian view

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#003533
But I've been afraid since the first word of this started trickling out that it might be a dead end for American liberalism. The charge that he's been overzealous -- that he's gone too far, that he's done to much -- to try and defeat America's enemies is, I think, one that George W. Bush can live with. The American people may well feel that he really has gone too far in one or two points, but you'd rather have the guy who does too much to defend America than the guy who does too little. Pressing this line of argument makes it seem as if Democrats are saying that the government needs to be more evenhanded between the terrorists, on the one hand, and American soldiers on the other.......Running as the defender of the rights of accused terrorists, on the other hand, doesn't seem like a winning game plan to me.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel11.html
Today many Americans celebrate a ''strong'' leader who, like Woodrow Wilson, never wavers, never apologizes, never admits a mistake, never changes his mind, a leader with a firm ''Christian'' faith in his own righteousness. These Americans are delighted that he ignores the rest of the world and punishes the World Trade Center terrorism in Iraq. Mr. Bush is our kind of guy.

Chalabi? Huh? Who? What is that, a kind of sandwich?

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/chalabi_remember_him_the_spy.php
President Bush is not the only neocon with amnesia about Ahmed Chalabi, the lying spy who (still) would love to be Iraq's chieftain, but who now has to overcome that little matter of giving U.S. secrets to Iran's mullahs......

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=85754
The Chalabi File

[And by the way, if we had an administration whose first instincts weren't to circle the wagons and protect its own guys, you might think that having someone running around who gave national security secrets to this charlatan would be treated with a little bit more urgency, don't you think?]

And now this (you won't believe it....well, yes you will)

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1739
Mr. Chalabi and the INC were until recently on the payroll of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Directorate for Human Intelligence....The DIA relationship with Mr. Chalabi's INC is continuing through the new Iraqi Defense Ministry, officials said......

No, it gets even weirder.....

http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/06/john_brady_kies.html
Kielsing's letter looks like compressed version of an op-ed. It would be great to have the full-length version, because there is a lot here. In short, Kiesling suggests that the Iranians deliberately revealed Ahmed Chalabi's dual role, and in doing so, helped free the U.S. to manage the transition in Iraq without the disastrous influence of Chalabi.

The Grand Plan for Iraqi democracy - did we ever really mean it?

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1736
Yesterday, President Bush met with interim Iraqi president Ghazi Mashal Ajil Al Yawer at the G-8 summit for a photo op, and he said the most bizarre thing:

This has been a special day for me and those of us in my administration who are here, because I really never thought I'd be sitting next to an Iraqi President of a free country a year and a half ago.

Uh, you didn't? I wish you would've told me that at the time. In fact, a year and a half ago, in St. Louis, Bush declared:

And there will be serious consequences--should we be forced into action, there will be serious consequences for the Iraqi people--and that's freedom, freedom from oppression. Freedom from oppression, freedom from torture, freedom from murder, freedom to realize your God-given talents.

Well, we know how the freedom-from-torture thing turned out, but I never thought he doubted the rest.....

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108698703778823853
In recent weeks, political reporters have done much to clarify the development of prisoner-interrogation policies in Iraq. I hope that similar efforts might clarify the decision-making process that led the occupation authorities in June 2003 to reject any plans for early local elections in Iraq....... How important was this policy? Its consequences may be seen in the problems that we face today....

The memos: TAPPED catches Ashcroft talking out of both sides of his mouth

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003125
Exhibit A (2004)
ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT: I am not going to reveal discussions -- whether I've had them or not had them with the president. He asked me to deal with him as a matter of confidence. I have not invoked the executive privilege today. I have explained to you why I'm not turning over the documents.

SEN. KENNEDY: Well, what are you invoking then?

ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT: I have not invoked anything. I have just explained to you why I am not turning over the documents.

Exhibit B (1998)
Part and parcel of the President's abuse of executive privilege is his unwillingness to acknowledge the mere fact that he has asserted the privilege. Indeed, the President's lawyers recently have attacked the Independent Counsel's office for acknowledging the Court's entirely predictable rejection of the President's assertion of executive privilege. Apparently, the President wants to be able to assert the privilege and have a court rule on it, all without the knowledge of Congress or the American people.....The Executive Accountability Act of 1998 addresses the problem of the covert use of executive privilege through the simple expedient of requiring full disclosure......

The Plame investigation: a very revealing quote

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/international/10CND-STEX.html?pagewanted=5
Q: Given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney's discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, suggesting that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leak the agent's name? And do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so?

BUSH: Yes. And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts.

Q: My final point would be, or question would be, has Vice President Cheney assured you, subsequent to his conversations with them...

BUSH: I haven't talked to the vice president about this matter.....

[Now, given that Cheney's office is the primary rumored source of the leak, and given Bush's "determination to get to the bottom of this serious matter," this is either (1) a shocking lack of curiosity, (2) a lie, or (3) a case of not asking a question you already suspect the answer to, so that you can maintain deniability -- cf. Kerry, above. Personally, I vote for #2. But whichever it is, it points a larger finger in the direction of Cheney's people -- otherwise he wouldn't have said this.]

The last straw on Reagan revisionism: Tim Russert's whopper (and other whoppers)

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/god-does-it-ever-end.html
RUSSERT: One other political point: The Republicans achieved control of the United States Congress for the first time in 70 years, of both houses, under Ronald Reagan.

[Dummy.]

Some good news about Reagan's death: may prompt a revisiting of Bush's stupid, cynical stem cell policy

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000990.html

[More on Bush's abuses of science: http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=0001E02A-A14A-1084-983483414B7F0000]

Texas Republicans: a vision of our future?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/11/texas_republicans/index_np.html
The values and world vision of the movement today can be found enshrined in the 24-page party platform. It's a fearful, twilight, looking-glass world, beset by enemies, where the purity of the culture, under constant siege, must be protected from threats both internal and external.

Bonus item: Blog Left on failures of the press

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/2004/06/failed-by-press-in-iraq.php
If US news organizations truly wanted to get inside events in Iraq, there's a clear step they could take: incorporating more reporting and footage from international news organizations. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and other Arabic-language TV stations have a wide presence on the ground. European outlets like the BBC, the Guardian, The Financial Times, and Le Monde have Arabic-speaking correspondents with close knowledge of the Middle East; Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse have many correspondents stationed in places where US organizations do not. It's remarkable how little reporting from these organizations makes its way into American news accounts
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:41 AM

 
REWRITING HISTORY

Fail, declare victory

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/international/11SUMM.html
President Bush said Thursday that after two days of consultations with the leaders of France and other nations, he did not expect NATO to provide troops to bolster or replace American forces in Iraq.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/10/troops/index.html
French President Jacques Chirac remained skeptical of any additional NATO military role.....Despite the disagreement on NATO's possible role, Bush said the United States and France now have "excellent" relations.

[Oh, really? See:
http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108693466555431485
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2027&e=2&u=/chitribts/20040610/ts_chicagotrib/iraqrolefornatopromptstiffatg8]

Kurds: this is a real problem, folks (even if the final showdown has been postponed)

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108685332435592516
http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1733
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/international/middleeast/10KURD.html?hp
http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1734
According to Reuters, the Kurdish leadership is meeting in Sulaimaniya to discuss the crisis. Maybe it will be able to avert disaster right now. But it's hard to see how the crisis over federalism, the constitution, and secession will ultimately get defused without serious discussions between Kurdish and Shia leaders in advance of the constitutional assembly. The New York Times cites Sistani ally Mowaffak Al Rubaie as implying that the Shia intend to junk the TAL at the assembly no matter what: "You cannot control the will of the people. Whatever they will do, they will do." Without a Kurdish-Shia understanding about the permanent constitution, Allawi is surely blowing smoke when he calls the crisis "resolved."

Torture: What Bush didn't say [with translation]

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,40928712,5879,f/
President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law.

[That's what the memos were for!]

Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law.

[The memos suggest that the President gets to interpret what the law does and does not allow.]

Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum.

[That means he did!]

"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," he said.

A second questioner asked Bush whether he would authorize "any means necessary" to elicit information from a prisoner who had information about an imminent terrorist attack. The president replied: "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law."

[As Kevin Drum pointed out several days ago, all Bush has to say is "We don't condone the torture of prisoners. Period." The fact that he WON'T say that means THAT WE DO:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004098.php
I've got something simpler for the plain spoken President Bush: "We don't torture prisoners. Not on my watch." Why didn't he say that instead and just put the whole subject to rest?]

Pointing out that the administration lawyers who wrote the memo believe terrorist suspects could be tortured without violating the law, a third questioner asked whether torture is ever morally justified. "Look, I'm going to say it one more time," Bush replied. "Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."

[Are you comforted?]

Abu Ghraib: new developments

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,40834491,698,f/
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has asked to be removed from any role in reviewing the results of an investigation into prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, Pentagon officials said Wednesday......Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez requested that a higher-ranking general be appointed to assume that responsibility, the officials said....."Lt. General Sanchez's request clearly demonstrates his commitment to the truth, following appropriate regulations, and doing what's right to make sure that all evidence is considered," a Pentagon spokesman said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/politics/10ABUS.html
It was unclear whether how this change might delay the delivery of the final report, which had been expected in early July. Some lawmakers have said they would delay their calls for an independent congressional investigation or one modeled after the inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, until General Fay's report was completed.......The sudden turn of events in the investigation came as new details emerged about why General Fay in the last week or so requested and received a 30-day extension to complete his report......Within the last several days, an important figure in the inquiry who had previously refused to cooperate with Army investigators suddenly reversed his position and agreed to work much more closely with investigators, a senior Senate aide and a senior Pentagon official said.........That important development prompted General Fay to send some of his 29-person team back into the field to conduct more interviews, the officials said. "A key witness, a key person who'd pled the military equivalent of the Fifth has changed his attitude, and Fay is reopening the investigation," the Senate official said.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004123.php
So Fay needs to be replaced because the investigation has gone higher than a 2-star can conduct. And there's more: a new witness - possibly a high ranking one? - has recently decided to cooperate with the investigation.....This is potentially devastating for Bush. First, you have the possibility of high-ranking culpability, which is bad enough. But second, you have the recent leak of memos showing that even if Bush didn't personally approve the torture, he certainly presided over a culture that was doing its best to justify it as a routine exigency of war.......Or, since he's fond of Bible verses, let's put it this way: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Galatians 6:7.
[Also see: PBD June 1]

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000987.html
Torture and rumors of torture. In my email inbox this morning......If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened.

Seymour Hersh spoke... at the University of Chicago.... I took some scattered notes. The remaks will be disjoined--as will be the notes--but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of.....He talked about Carl Levin (though he didn't use his name) telling him about high officials lying to him in closed hearings, and how frustrating it was to be lied to, in classified settings, when the liars know the senators know they are lying. Levin said he'd never seen such brazenness in Washington......From My Lai, the transition to the current scandals was seemless. He connected the dots, and spoke of the CIA secret prisons we haven't heard about yet: "We're basically in the disappearing business." He made the first of several criticisms of our humble profession: "there's no learning curve in America. There's no learning curve in the press corps."....

"NATO's falling apart in Afghanistan now" ......And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.......He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors).....He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run." ......He looked frightened.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/09/prisoner.abuse.ap/index.html
The Bush administration "circumvented" the Geneva Convention with the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Thursday.....Its 38-page report, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," says the Bush administration deliberately allowed illegal interrogation techniques, then covered up or ignored reports of torture and abuse....."Basically the mindset was anything goes," said Brody. "The gloves come off. They felt we're not going to fight this war with one hand tied behind our backs so we're going to do what we have to........."Then they set about looking for every legal loophole they could, then they undermined 50 years of international law."
[More: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003059]

Mark Kleiman connects the dots: if only relatively mild forms of coercion were approved for interrogation, how did Sean Baker suffer a serious brain injury during a "training session"? Training in what? And what happened to the video tape of that training session?

http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/torture_/2004/06/disconnect.php
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/8866433.htm

Those legal memoranda

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102203/fr/rss/
However, no amount of caveating can save the latest Defense Department memorandum on the legality of torture (first reported by the Wall Street Journal) from being construed as what it is: a cookbook on how to conduct illegal torture and get away with it........Of course, it's not the lawyers we should be worried about. The lawyers who drafted this memo face little risk of prosecution, and they're not the ones in harm's way. We ought to be concerned about the soldiers and spooks charged with executing these missions, though, especially when they're asked to act on the basis of such shoddy legal advice. The Bush administration has created an atmosphere of legal ambiguity where the laws of armed conflict are concerned. This laissez faire attitude toward the law of war has filtered down to the lowest levels of command, where tactical decisions about taking detainees and targeting artillery are conducted. Before the events of 9/11 and America's global war on terrorism, soldiers and spooks had at least a few bright-line rules: Never target civilians; never beat prisoners; never violate the Geneva Conventions. Those rules have now been blurred by bad legal advice from the top lawyers of the Bush administration, with predictable results.......The great moral hazard of bad legal advice is not that it will corrupt the lawyers offering it, but that it will engender criminal behavior by those who follow it in the belief that their lawyers are right.
[More: http://home.pacbell.net/dsfinley/politics/torture_memo_comments.html]

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/abuse-and-torture.html
But, that really isn't the conceptual or legal distinction between torture and abuse (I'm not sure if "prisoner abuse" has a real legal definition, so this is a bit murky.) The distinction between torture and abuse is one of intent......If I'm a prison guard and I, for no good reason, beat the crap out of a prisoner then no matter what the severity of the beating I would not be guilty of "torture." If anyone cares and there happens to be video tape and the prisoner's lawyer gets his/her hands on it, I might find myself getting charged with some form of assault........What would make that beating torture is if I were doing it to elicit information. From my reading of the various statutes, treaties, etc..., even fairly mild forms of "abuse" are considered to be torture, if the purpose of the activity is to elicit information.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2619276 (Houston Chronicle!)
The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror.......Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees.........Most Americans will have difficulty believing that this memo.......and others were merely ruminations on the law not meant to guide how prisoners would be treated in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.......The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined......The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.

http://gadflyer.com/politicalaims/index.php?Week=200424#388
Legality vs Morality. One of the complaints I often hear from conservatives is that religious liberals are moral relativists, that they don't believe in evil.....[It's] an important point to consider. Especially now, as we listen to a conservative administration try to explain why sometimes it's perfectly okay to torture and abuse people who may or may not have done anything wrong......

If that doesn't do the trick of reminding Bush and his administration of their moral responsibilities, perhaps they need a refresher Bible lesson......Because in the end, the question we ask ourselves should be not "Can we do it?" (or "Can we get away with it?") but "Should we do it?"

Comment: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003058
We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud.

"Liberal" media watch

Dinesh D'Souza gets a gig on CNN: Michael Berube takes him down

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php?id=P187
More generally, no one has noted that Dinesh D'Souza is himself the most visible contradiction of the Right's major premise in the academic culture wars- namely, that campus conservatives are persecuted by liberal faculty and intimidated into silence. For here, after all, is perhaps the most vocal Young Conservative of them all, a founder and editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review who's since gone on to Princeton University, the Reagan Administration, and lucrative fellowships from the Olin Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and now a gig at CNN. He is, in short, a phenomenon. No matter how diligently his critics pore through his work, demonstrating time and again that the stuff doesn't meet a single known standard for intellectual probity, he is still taken seriously- and rewarded richly- by conservative foundations and the (hack, hack) liberal media......Of course, you could argue that in the age of semi-literate screechers like Coulter, Hannity, and Savage, Dinesh D'Souza looks almost distinguished and donnish by comparison. But that's their plan, folks! They're trying to lull us into "well, at least he's not as bad as the rest of the lineup," when in fact any reasonably civilized society would have tuned out any one of these creeps long ago.

The Long History of Reagan Hagiography

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/11/media/
Apparently one of the simplest, most uncomplicated creatures alive, and yet a character of rich meanings, of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his country in an unprecedented way," trumpeted Time magazine....."The rules were different for him," notes Walter Pincus, veteran reporter for the Washington Post. "Reagan got all sorts of passes from the press.".....In June 1986, Reagan gave one his more rambling and confusing performances at a press conference, after which aides were forced to "clarify" his comments on everything from the future of the Challenger space-shuttle program to the status of the SALT II treaty. Yet a White House aide marveled to the Los Angeles Times about "how easy the press was on him," saying that reporters treated Reagan "almost reverentially." The aide added: "He's gone from the Teflon President to the boomerang President. Nobody wants to throw anything at him, because it comes back and hurts them."..... In a sense, this week has been the 1980s redux, with the Reagan communication team again providing the press, and particularly TV, with priceless pictures and sentimental narrative lines while appreciative producers and reporters neglect to acknowledge the wholesale media manipulation that is going on. There's been little or no discussion, for example, of the long planning for this funeral by Reagan's old political handlers. It's morning again in America -- on a feedback loop......While it's true that the Reagan White House raised uncritical presidential press coverage to an art, it received a helping hand from a self-conscious press corps. As Hertsgaard wrote, "Relieved by the departure of Jimmy Carter, gulled by false claims of a right-wing popular mandate, impressed by Reagan's recovery after being shot and seduced by his sunny personality and his propaganda apparatus' talent for providing prepackaged stories boasting attractive visuals, the Washington press corps favored the newly elected President with the coverage that even his own advisers considered extremely positive."......"We used to do a fact-checking exercise after his press conferences at AP," says Parry, referring to Reagan's tendency to manufacture or wildly misstate facts and figures. "And we got such hostility from David Gergen at the White House, and publishers who didn't like it, that AP backed off and dropped it. That was one of the ways we were not as tough or as skeptical as we should have been." (In that worshipful 1986 Time cover story, Morrow wrote, "Reagan committed so many press-conference fluffs that eventually no one paid that much attention anymore, assuming that that was just the way Reagan was. Who cared? The results seemed to come out all right.") When covering early developments in the Iran-Contra affair for AP, Parry experienced that timidity firsthand. When he went to Newsweek in 1987, "it soon became clear they didn't want to pursue the Iran-Contra story much at all. They didn't want another Watergate -- that's the way it was put. The magazine was owned by the Washington Post, and although people look back on Watergate as a crowning achievement, it was a very unpleasant experience to live through, and [publisher] Katharine Graham didn't want to go through it again. So the feeling at Newsweek was, Let's just take what the White House is telling us, the 'mistakes were made' explanation." ......The iconic conservative may ultimately be remembered as one of the two or three most important U.S. presidents of the 20th century. And, Hertsgaard notes, "he could have accomplished none of this without the help of the American media."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11KRUG.html
In the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a reporter defends prettifying history: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That principle has informed many of this week's Reagan retrospectives. But let's not be bullied into accepting the right-wing legend about Reaganomics.

Reagan revisited

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29859-2004Jun9.html
This is not to begrudge the 40th president the thunderous applause that has come from politicians, journalists, historians and citizens to mark Reagan's final bow. Ill should rarely be spoken of the dead. But it is puzzling how these assessments of Reagan's accomplishments have improved so dramatically and uniformly in the 16 years since he left office.....Perhaps this is how contemporary history is made or, in the electronic era, mismade and distorted......The craving by Americans for uncluttered heroism -- for what is seen in retrospect as the order and clarity of the Cold War -- also powers this yearning for a near-mythical transformation of Reagan's death into a moment to sweep aside the dread and anguish of the wars in Iraq and against al Qaeda......As one television executive said to me not long ago, "Today history is what we say it is."

To one who covered many of the key international events of that day, Reagan seemed in fact to come late to a realistic view of the Soviet Union and the world, and -- like most presidents -- to have improvised furiously and not always successfully in foreign affairs........It is also easy in today's elegiac mood to forget how unpopular Reagan was abroad for most of his presidency, even among his peers.......There were important costs that came with Reagan's undeniable successes. His confrontational style used in getting much-needed Pershing 2 missiles deployed in Europe helped prematurely end the career of West Germany's highly competent chancellor, Helmut Schmidt........U.S. support extended to guerrillas to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan has blown back in the form of al Qaeda and extreme instability in Central Asia. U.S. help to Saddam Hussein in Iraq also boomeranged. Iran-contra was not as great an aberration at the Reagan White House as it is often painted today........The commentariat has made many of the right points about Reagan's uplifting personality and all the good and the fascinating that will live after him. Even if he was not a great president, he lived a great life from which we can all learn.........But if we airbrush and prettify history for the small screen and the front page, and ultimately for the books to come, we will not learn the most important lessons about mistakes that can be avoided. Let Reagan be Reagan, warts and all, for all time now.

Good ol' Bob Dole

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml?pid=1735
Television anchors and commentators reached - and at times overreached - to match the poignant images. When Tom Brokaw of NBC suggested to Bob Dole that Ronald Reagan had been an inspiring flag-bearer for the World War II generation, it was a bit too much for Mr. Dole, who was wounded in Italy. He replied dryly that Mr. Reagan, who spent the war making Army training films in Hollywood, had never heard a shot fired. "But he was a captain," Mr. Dole said. "And mighty proud of it."

And let's remember what might be the most shameful failure of Reagan - not taking AIDS seriously until it had already become an epidemic

http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_06_06_dish_archive.html#108683435717765818
I just got sent the following transcript of a press conference by Larry Speakes, presidential spokesman, on October 15, 1982. It speaks for itself:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What's AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don't have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don't.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn't answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President ...
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don't think so. I don't think there's been any ...
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping ...
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he's had no - (laughter) - no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn't have gay plague, is that what you're saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn't say that.
Q: Didn't say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn't you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you Larry, that's why (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don't put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It's too late.

Nothing I could write could be more damning than this, could it?

Campaign news

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/opinion/10DOWD.html
Showing they haven't lost their taste for hype, some Bushies revved up the theme that Son of Bush was really Son of Reagan.......Never mind that back in 1989, the deferential Bush pere couldn't wait to escape the Gipper's Brobdingnagian shadow. Though he liked Ronald Reagan, 41 had a secret disdain for 40's White House. He was dismayed by the way media wizards treated the president like a prop and the Oval Office like an M.G.M. set......The Reagans returned the favor. "Kinder and gentler than who?" Nancy sniffed after 41's convention acceptance speech......For the neocons, ideology is thicker than blood. Bush pere is the weakling who broke his tax pledge and let Saddam stay in power.........Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz tried to merge Junior and Gipper. Mr. Perle said on CNN that Mr. Reagan wouldn't have been "pushed out of Iraq before completing the mission," and Wolfie agreed that 9/11 had "changed everything. I think it would have changed it for Ronald Reagan. We've gone from just being concerned with the freedom of other people in the Middle East to the threat to our own country from totalitarian regimes that support terrorism."........The Bush crowd's attempt to wrap themselves in Reagan could go only so far. While Laura Bush and Donald Rumsfeld shared memories of fathers who had suffered from Alzheimer's, Mrs. Bush said she could not support Mrs. Reagan's plea to remove the absurd and suffocating restrictions on stem cell research.

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003122
Earlier this week I recollected reading something about how President Bush has made a practice of campaign on programs or policies he didn't support or plans to cut back on. The conservative in him wants to cut them, but the politician in him knows they are popular. So he has his cake and eats it too......I couldn't find the article I was thinking of, but reader J.A. points me to this Web page set up by the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. It turns out there are plenty of examples of Bush doing this -- it's pretty shameless.

[Oh, by the way, here's the story, c/o PBD, May 19: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/campaign/19GRAN.html]

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4667.shtml (CHB disclaimer!)
As the nation prepares to bury former President Ronald Reagan, Republican insiders fight among themselves over plans by the political team of President George W. Bush to use images of and speeches by Reagan in new television ads aimed at jump-starting a faltering campaign........"They're disgusting," says one long-time Republican who participated in a focus group to preview the new television ads. "They dishonor the memory of Ronald Reagan and if President Bush allows these ads on the air I, for one, will not vote for him in November." .....The ads, ordered up by Bush political advisor Karl Rove immediately after Reagan's death last Saturday, use images of Reagan and excerpts from his speeches in what one angry GOP conservative describes as a "callous attempt to tie George W. Bush to the legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan."......One proposed ad even goes so far as to show Reagan saying "George, go out and win one for the Gipper." The clip comes from Reagan's speech to the 1988 Republican National Convention where the former President's request was to Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, in his successful 1988 run for President.

Media doing its job in Florida (this time)

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/10/cnn_presses_for_release_of_voter_list.html

States circumventing NCLB provisions (of course)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/education/07CHIL.html

Bush backs corporate profiteering (again)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/business/10PHON.html

More budget lies (can you believe it?)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1803&e=3&u=/washpost/20040608/pl_washpost/a64715_2004may28

Neo-cons very, very nervous (and rightly so)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-neocons10jun10,1,2805682.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Many fellow conservatives have joined liberals in criticizing their case for the war. Rivals in the State Department and the Pentagon have taken charge of the U.S. effort in Iraq. And in a grave threat to their reputation, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of neoconservatives, is enmeshed in an FBI investigation of alleged intelligence leaks that supplied secrets to Iran......"Neocons" - best known for advocating aggressive foreign and military policies - are in the painful zone between distinction and disfavor in Washington. They are losing battles on Capitol Hill. Their principles have stopped appearing in new U.S. policies. And where neoconservatives were once seen as having a future in Republican administrations, the setbacks in Iraq could make it difficult for the group's leading members to win Senate confirmation for top posts in the future......Other neocons worry that the real trouble for them could begin if President Bush is not reelected and, among conservatives, the finger-pointing begins - in their direction..........."Bush could end up looking like the worst president since Jimmy Carter because of Iraq, and people are going to say, 'You got us into this mess,' " said one Washington source who considered himself a neoconservative and spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's going to be nasty and bitter and brutal."

Analysis: http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108684789351491063
There is, by the way, a throwaway line in Richter's piece from a Neocon lamenting that Bush may come to be seen as the worst president since Carter. That is ridiculous. Jimmy Carter was a far better president than W. can ever hope to be. Carter made peace between Israel and Egypt. He resolved the Panama Canal issue to everyone's satisfaction, and we've never heard any more about it because there haven't been subsequent problems. He avoided a potentially disastrous US attempt to prevent or roll back the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He used the foreign aid carrot to begin the process of pushing the Latin American military regimes to democratize (a process that has been wildly successful). He raised human rights as a foreign policy issue.

http://mathewgross.com/blog/archives/000417.html
Chris Bowers is exactly right. Pointing to an Investor's Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor poll that shows Bush's favorability rating at 42% and his unfavorability at 51%, he writes:

Now that, my friends, is the final tipping point. A candidate has virtually no chance to win an election if more than half of the electorate has an unfavorable opinion of that candidate. The only option would be to go nuclear on the opposition and drive his unfavorables up to an equal level. Oh wait--Bush has already spent around 75% of his $100M ad buys attacking Kerry, and Kerry's unfavorables are still five to fifteen points lower than Bush's nationally.

Considering all of this, expect the Bush campaign to dig up and try to spread some of the nastiest lies ever told about a candidate come September.

This election will be the nastiest you have ever experienced. It's not just the hollowness of Bush's "uniter, not a divider" rhetoric that we're dealing with any longer; it's the reality that only through division can he win. Every entry-level political consultant knows that when you're that far behind in favorability, the only way to win is to drag the other guy down to your level. One would think that at least one of the talking heads on television might start pointing out this fact.

Bonus item: Going negative? How about calling your opponents MENTALLY UNSTABLE?

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003123
Frequent readers of Tapped know that there are few arguments that I detest more in political punditry than the one that your opponents are crazy. And the evidence is that big-name conservatives do this far more than their liberal equivalents. Among allegedly respectable conservatives, alleged psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer is one of the repeat offenders. Among less respectable pundits, Ann Coulter is an obvious candidate. But you see this pretty much throughout the right-wing press.....Media Matters has some more of this, courtesy of Hannity & Colmes. Not surprisingly, it is Al Gore who they have targeted, regarding his recent speech. There seems to be a belief among conservatives that it's acceptable to shamelessly distort just about everything Gore he says or does beyond recognition -- perhaps it's the realization that more voters preferred Gore to the guy currently in the White House that gives them fits. I dunno. But what's so repulsive about all this is that neither Gore's recent speeches nor his demeanor during them have been remotely out of the ordinary, let alone weird. In the particular case at hand, he delivered an energetic, critical speech, yes -- but it's telling that Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and Susan Estrich chose to argue that Gore was crazy rather than engage the merits of his criticisms.

[And just a little trip down memory lane: Bush vs McCain, Republican primary 2000:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001291.html]
- posted by Nick Burbules @ 4:15 AM

 
TORTURED LOGIC

Bush's successful UN resolution provides a brief respite from scandal and criticism

[pause]

OK, now that's over - back to reality

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/08/politics/main621921.shtml
Publicly, it's working. The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the handover of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government on Tuesday, as world leaders met in Georgia at the G-8 summit of leading industrialized nations.....But in the corridors of the United Nations, people are skeptical, if not downright displeased, with current U.S. efforts to revive relations......The ardently independent President Bush, possibly the most unilateral of modern presidents, has estranged much of the world. And while polling has shown world opinion of the United States at new lows, it only takes a day at the United Nations to understand why the discontent runs so deep......Although they will not say it for attribution, those randomly interviewed want Americans to deny Mr. Bush four more years in office. They expect a rekindling of diplomacy, of statesmanship, if Sen. John Kerry becomes president. They have lost all trust in the Bush administration.

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003118
Too Little, Too Late....

NATO won't play in Bush's game

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/middleeast/09CND-PREX.html
"A lot of NATO countries are not in a position to commit any more troops - we fully understand that," Mr. Bush said, with Prime Minister Tony Blair, America's leading ally in the occupation of Iraq, at his side......."But I do think NATO ought to stay involved, and I think we have a good chance of getting that done."
[More: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/09/nato_iraq/index_np.html]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/09/g8.summit/index.html
"I do not believe that it is NATO's purpose to intervene in Iraq, nor do I believe that it would be relevant or proportionate or even well understood by people in Iraq and abroad," Chirac said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29434-2004Jun9.html
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a guest at the summit, later echoed Chirac's concern. Asked whether NATO, which includes Turkey as a member, should have a role in Iraq, Erdogan said: "The concept we've been emphasizing is the role of the United Nations.".....The dispute hinted at the tensions simmering beneath the surface of the summit. The administration is eager to capitalize on the unanimous passage Tuesday of a U.N. Security Council resolution recognizing the interim Iraqi government, and it has pressed for agreements here on a range of issues, including Bush's signature effort to promote democracy in the Middle East. But officials from other nations said they reluctantly accepted some of the administration's ideas, and then only in watered-down or otherwise revised form.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0,13365,1235440,00.html
It was dress-down Wednesday for the leaders of the west when they gathered in Sea Island yesterday. The mood was "business casual", and George Bush took the lead. Clad in a golf shirt and sucking a boiled sweet, he cracked jokes to show the cameras that this was an informal gathering, an attempt to return to the original summit concept of a "fireside chat" between old friends......Jacques Chirac was evidently unmoved by the attempt to be laid back. Not the sort of person to be impressed at the prospect of zipping around the secure compound in a golf cart, he turned up for talks in trad summit gear - a suit and tie.

[p.s. "rumor control": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29544-2004Jun9.html]

Iraqi pipelines an easy target

http://www.newsisfree.com/iclick/i,40727219,5879,f/

Kurds in the Way (yes, I know that's an awful pun)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/middleeast/09KURD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
A crisis for the new Iraqi government loomed Tuesday as Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from the Iraqi state unless they received guarantees against Shiite plans to limit Kurdish self-rule.

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108676099298442267
The Kurds on the other hand were absolutely furious that the UN did not mention the TAL, which they see as their safeguard against a tyranny of the Arab majority. It stipulates that the status quo will obtain in Kurdistan until an elected parliament crafts a permanent constitution next year this time, and that the three Kurdish provinces will have a veto over that new constitution if they do not like it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/opinion/09BULL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
So while the United Nations congratulates itself on the resolution passed last night, the Kurds see only a further undermining of the conditions that make a unified Iraq acceptable to them. And we should not take lightly their threats of boycotting the government and even seceding. While the West has gone to great lengths to appease the country's Arabs, both Shiite and Sunni, the Kurds are the only players at the table with the ability and the mettle to walk away. If they do, hopes of a democratic, multiethnic Iraq go with them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/opinion/09SAFI.html (Bill Safire!)
In his eagerness for the approval of the Shiite religious leader - and driven by desperation to get yesterday's unanimous U.N. resolution in time for the G-8 meeting - President Bush may be double-crossing the Kurds, our most loyal friends in Iraq.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kurds_threaten_civil_war.php
The Kurdish rebellion is only the latest sign that, despite the happy-happy talk at the UN and the G8, Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket.......

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102138/fr/rss/ (Tim Noah, who's been on this from the start)
It was no secret that the Kurds were threatening to secede if the United Nations passed a resolution on Iraqi governance that failed to reaffirm the protections Kurds currently enjoy under the Iraqi Governing Council's Transitional Administrative Law........Yet the prospect of a Kurdish secession received virtually no press coverage until after U.N. Resolution 1546 passed yesterday without the language the Kurds sought.....Now that it's too late to do anything, it's a huge story. The New York Times today has a Page One story, an op-ed , and a column by William Safire. This is how it used to go for the Kurds - nobody would pay attention until the time for action had passed.

Sadr more popular than ever

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8871812.htm
[Analysis: http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108675701127914809
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004106.php]

Terrorism has gone UP under Bush

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=716&e=28&u=/latimests/20040609/ts_latimes/uswillrevisedataonterror
[Analysis: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004108.php]

Iraqi's nowhere near ready to take on own security responsibilities

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/09/iraq_train/
"It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress," said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops......A credible, well-equipped national security force is crucial to America's plans to pull its 138,000 troops out of Iraq, along with the 24,000 soldiers from Britain and other coalition countries......As U.S. occupation leaders prepare to hand power to an Iraqi government in less than three weeks, Iraq's own security forces won't be ready to take a large role in protecting the country. A U.N. Security Council resolution approved Tuesday acknowledges Iraq's lack of a developed security force and provides a continued multinational troop presence until 2006.....Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. defense secretary, wrote in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi army -- including the Taji-based Iraqi National Task Force, which focuses on internal strife -- will begin assuming some security duties over the next few months......Iraqi forces could soon "take local control of the cities," with U.S. troops moving into a supporting role, Wolfowitz wrote.

Democratization? Ha!

http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en67357&F_catID=&f_type=source
In a report on Monday on the G8 plan titled "Imperilled at Birth", the International Crisis Group (ICG) said, "There are few indications (the administration) is prepared to put established relations with authoritarian but cooperative Middle Eastern states at risk and pin its future on civil society and political opposition movements.".....The report added, "Reformers throughout the region are hard pressed to say kinder things about the US initiative than that the message - the need for more democracy - should not be disregarded because the messenger, especially in the post-Iraq war world, is suspect.".....Europeans and Arabs said they believe the administration has scaled back the initiative in its struggle to win approval. The ICG report said the G8 document is a "considerable climb down from the lofty ambitions proclaimed in the President's November 2003 speech, and a drastic narrowing even of the initial goals suggested" in earlier drafts.....

"You are getting spin from the Europeans and the Arabs," a White House official said on Monday. "There is substantial resistance to the notion of the democratization of the Arab world. It comes partly from Arab rulers who don't want to democratize, and partly from Europeans who don't think that Middle Easterners and Arabs are really ready for democracy. It's an incredibly condescending viewpoint."

Our new guy in Baghdad (Allawi) a CIA goon who once helped plant bombs in Saddam's Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then......One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.......Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.....An American intelligence officer who worked with Dr. Allawi in the early 1990's noted that "no one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," adding, "I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn out today."

["Sabotage"?!!? In movie theatres and school buses? Why don't we call it terrorism when it's OUR guys? (yes, yes, I know the answer.)]

[More: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=529920&host=3&dir=75]

And, of course, sending more troops over that we were just told wouldn't be needed

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-08-marines_x.htm

Because I think evil deserves a name and a face, let me introduce you to Mary L. Walker, who headed up the team that drafted the memo exempting the US from torture prohibitions

http://billmon.org/archives/001518.html (definitely worth reading)

[A typical careerist lackey who will clearly say anything to appease her bosses. But more than this, an avowed Christian -- like Bush, Boykin, and other key figures in this inhuman, brutal travesty - no, not one of those wimpy "What Would Jesus Do?" Christians; more like those Crusade "slash their throats and burn the infidels in their beds" sorts of Christians]

But here's the big news: responsibility for torture abuses slowly climbing up the ladder

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-prison9jun09,1,3173753.story?coll=la-home-headlines
After American Taliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" in interrogating him.....The instructions from Rumsfeld's legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26401-2004Jun8.html
A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush's aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach....."He felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials," the official said. "That is not to say he was ready to authorize stuff that would be contrary to law. The whole reason for having the careful legal reviews that went on was to ensure he was not doing that."......The August memo was written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance.....The former administration official said the CIA "was prepared to get more aggressive and re-learn old skills, but only with explicit assurances from the top that they were doing so with the full legal authority the president could confer on them."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26814-2004Jun9.html?nav=rss_nation
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.....The reference by Jordan to a White House link with the military's scandal-plagued intelligence-gathering effort at the prison was not explored further by Taguba, whose primary goal at that time was to assess the scope of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The White House was unable to provide an immediate explanation.

Here's the latest "tortured" defense: we didn't mean it was okay to use torture, but if we did mean it, we only meant it to apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban, but it's okay because we didn't actually torture anybody anyway -- except that we did, but it was all unapproved acts by renegade individuals

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/06/09/bush_abuse/
William Moschella, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, said in a letter released Wednesday that despite this important difference, President Bush early in the Afghanistan conflict issued orders that al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners be treated humanely and consistently with Geneva Conventions principles....The letter was the administration's latest and most detailed attempt to address increasing criticism from congressional Democrats and human rights activists about what they consider a concerted effort to circumvent U.S. and international laws against torture during the fight against terrorism.....Yet the letter does not address one of the most contentious assertions in the March 6 memo: that the president, acting as commander in chief, enjoys such "complete discretion" during wartime that U.S. criminal anti-torture statutes may not apply......"Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield," the memo says.
[More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29742-2004Jun9.html?nav=rss_nation]

More devastating editorials on all this

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-torture9jun09,1,3900355.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
Those are the words of out-of-control government servants willing to discard the most fundamental values of this nation. But the declaration became the basis for a secret draft report in March 2003 by Pentagon lawyers to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. That report said the president's "inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign" meant prohibitions on torture did not apply..... It is not known if the language of the draft survived in a final report [and Ashcroft's not sharing: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24867-2004Jun8.html]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/opinion/09WED1.html?ex=1087444800&en=3923a1d0cb422de8&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY
In response to the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has repeatedly assured Americans that the president and his top officials did not say or do anything that could possibly be seen as approving the abuse or outright torture of prisoners. But disturbing disclosures keep coming. This week it's a legal argument by government lawyers who said the president was not bound by laws or treaties prohibiting torture......Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration.
[More: http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/06/index.html#003116]

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.html#003527
To clarify, this isn't just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady......Quite so. If the president had submitted a bill to congress suggesting that America laws against torture ought to be repealed for the duration of the war on terrorism (or even permanently) and then congress had passed it, I would not be happy with their actions. But then again, congress passing laws I don't like and the president signing them happens all the time......What Bush did here, however, was quite different. Merits of torture aside, this business of writing secret memos proclaiming that the president has an inherent power to selectively abrogate the laws is an absurd repudiation of constitutional government. The president holds an office and has to administer the state according to the laws as they stand. He can ask that the laws be changed, but he can't just ignore them.

http://andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_06_06_dish_archive.html#108683438240407655
The lame responses by John Ashcroft to the evidence in leaked memos that the Bush administration condoned torture with the personal approval of the president are damning. It's even more damning that Ashcroft will not release a critical memo, prepared by his department, making the point that some forms of torture, if approved by the president, would not be illegal. I'm hoping to write at length about this, but let me say one thing. I should have spoken up earlier. The signs were there - including the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to al Qaeda in Guantanamo. In a very small number of cases, this might have been a debatable question. But what we have clearly seen is a green light from the very top condoning at best mistreatment and abuse of prisoners of war in a whole slew of cases. We'll see as more facts emerge what the truth is. But the brutality of U.S. forces against prisoners in their care and custody is now public record - and a permanent mark of shame for the United States.

[Andrew Sullivan's long journey into the light....]

And, yes, serious people are starting to talk about impeachable offenses

http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html (GREAT legal analysis of the memo)
http://counterspin.blogspot.com/2004/05/tortured-logic-umm.html
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000963.html
http://bestoftheblogs.com/2004_06_09_bestof.html#108680587361848684

The Padilla case: completely mishandled from the very start

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5175105/site/newsweek/site/newsweek
Justice Department lawyers, fearing a crushing defeat before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few weeks, are scrambling to develop a conventional criminal case against "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla that would charge him with providing "material support" to Al Qaeda, NEWSWEEK has learned....The prospective case against Padilla would rely in part on material seized by the FBI in Afghanistan-principally an Al Qaeda "new applicant form" that, authorities said, the former Chicago gang member filled out in July 2000 to enter a terrorist training camp run by Osama bin Laden's organization.........But officials acknowledge that the charges could well be difficult to bring and that none of Padilla's admissions to interrogators-including an apparent confession that he met with top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah and agreed to undertake a terror mission-would ever be admissible in court.......Even more significant, administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention-that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological "dirty bomb"-has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used against him in court.......The reassessments of Padilla come amid a growing sense of gloom within Justice that the Supreme Court is likely to rule decisively against the Bush administration not just in the Padilla case but in two other pivotal cases in the war on terror: one involving the detention of another "enemy combatant," Yasir Hamden, and another involving the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the Padilla and Hambdi cases, the administration is arguing it has the right to hold the two U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial. In the Guantanamo case, the administration argues that foreign nationals being interrogated there there do not have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts......Lawyers within the Justice Department are now bracing for defeat in both the enemy-combatant and Guantanamo cases, both of which are expected to be decided before the Supreme Court ends its term at the end of the month, according to one conservative and politically well-connected lawyer. "They are 99 percent certain they are going to lose," said the lawyer, who asked not to be identified. "It's a very sobering realization."

[Read on, it gets worse]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040609/ap_on_sc/dirty_bomb_dud
The "dirty bomb" allegedly planned by terror suspect Jose Padilla would have been a dud, not the radiological threat portrayed last week by federal authorities, scientists say.....At a June 1 news conference, the Justice Department said the alleged al-Qaida associate hoped to attack Americans by detonating "uranium wrapped with explosives" in order to spread radioactivity.......But uranium's extremely low radioactivity is harmless compared with high-radiation materials - such as cesium and cobalt isotopes used in medicine and industry that experts see as potential dirty bomb fuels......"I used a 20-pound brick of uranium as a doorstop in my office," American nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, of King's College in London, said to illustrate the point.

[Analysis: http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/06/hope.html
http://mathewgross.com/blog/archives/000415.html]

YET ANOTHER post 9-11 flight approved to take Saudi nationals out of the country

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003052

THIS looks like a fun job: Scott M's recent "press briefings" (I think more and more of them are going to start looking like this....)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/briefings/

June 2
Q Is the President concerned about the idea that Chalabi might have given the Iranians information that the U.S. had broken the codes?

MR. McCLELLAN: I appreciate the question, and as Condi said earlier, we're not in a position to comment on it. I'm not going to get into commenting on anything that would be related to intelligence matters.

Q Is the President keeping abreast of it? Is he -- you know, was he briefed on it months ago or --

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I think you're asking me questions that could be related to intelligence matters, and those would be questions I wouldn't be able to discuss.

Q If it's true, how would it damage the U.S.-Iranian relationship, at this point?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think I've answered your question. I know you can try every which way you want, but I'm just not in a position to comment on it.

Q Scott, let me try one more time on Deb's count. Can you just tell me if the President had any reaction to the report -- forgetting the merits of the report, the validity of the report -- was there any reaction from them to the news that this could possibly be the case?

MR. MCCLELLAN: Look, that's just asking us to comment on reports that could be related to intelligence matters, and I'm just not in a position to do that. So I'm not going to comment on it.

Q You will acknowledge that differs from when Chalabi's home was raided, there were many comments given by the White House with regards to that situation. And, yet, now, you choose not to comment?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that was relating to some arrest warrants by the -- that were issued by the Iraqis and the Coalition Provisional Authority addressed that matter, and talked about how that was an Iraqi-led matter.

Q And what's the distinction here?

MR. McCLELLAN: What?

Q I mean, why is this something you can't talk about when the other was? I mean, what's the difference?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you're asking me to get into discussing something that could be related to intelligence matters, and we can't comment on intelligence matters. So I'm not in position to get into whether or not the reports are true or not.

......MR. McCLELLAN: But in terms of our relations with the -- with Iran, I think that you've heard the President talk repeatedly about how we stand with the Iranian people who aspire to greater freedoms.

Q Will the White House continue -- go ahead.

Q Does the White House think that that effort could be impacted at all by the recent news?

MR. McCLELLAN: What effort?

Q That our --

MR. McCLELLAN: Deb, that's just another attempt to try to get me to comment on reports that relate to intelligence matters.


June 3
MR. McCLELLAN: All right, good afternoon.....I know you all are interested in today's announcement by Director Tenet, so I'm here to answer whatever questions you have right now on that subject.

Q Did the President ask for his resignation?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. Director Tenet had requested a meeting with the President. And as the President said, the Director resigned for personal reasons.

Q You cannot elaborate on those reasons at all?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that that would -- those questions would best be directed to Director Tenet, and if he wants to expand on that further, then we will leave it to him to do so. But the President made it very clear that he's sorry to see him leave. Director Tenet has been a strong and very capable public servant......

Q The President had no advance warning before that, that he was going to do this?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. That's when the President was told about this.

Q But, Scott, I mean, the Director has been Director for seven years, the President is running for reelection -- it's a natural time for a DCI to talk to a President about future plans. Had Director Tenet given no hint that this was coming?

MR. McCLELLAN: He made it known to the President yesterday that he had made a decision to resign. And I think in his letter he talks about how he had been talking with his family for the past several months. And, again, it was a decision based on personal reasons.

Q Did the President try and talk him out of it?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President understood his reasons for leaving. The President greatly appreciates his service and his leadership.

Q Are you saying after all of the intelligence failures of the past year that the President was still satisfied with him, and that he didn't want him out?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President made it very clear in his remarks, if you look at what the President said, that the President believed he was a very strong and capable leader.....

Q Why would a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency pull the plug on a President as he's heading into an election?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I think that those are questions you can direct to Director Tenet, if he wants to expand further on the personal reasons that he stated to the President that he was leaving --

Q He wasn't pushed --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that it was based on personal reasons and it was Director Tenet's decision.

Q He wasn't pushed out?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's what I said. It was Director Tenet's decision.

Q Did I hear you say the word "family"? Was this about more family time for the Director?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I'll leave it to the Director, if he wants to expand further on the personal reasons that he told the President he was resigning......

Q Did the President at any time pass a signal or suggest indirectly to Director Tenet that now would be a good time to spend more time with your family?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. Look, I understand there's going to be a lot of speculation related to the Director's decision, but this was a decision he made based on personal reasons. And that's what it is. And the President was very clear in saying he is sorry to see him leave......

Q So that's a "no" to my specific --

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes.

Q -- question? "No" to a direct signal --

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, that's right. That's correct.

Q -- no hint, we'd like you to go?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's what I just said.

Q Okay.

Q Was the President completely surprised by this yesterday?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, the first time he was told about this was last night, when he met with the Director.

Q Was he surprised, though?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know if I'd look at it that way. I think he understood the reasons why the Director had made the decision to resign. And, again, he appreciates his service very much.......

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you heard the President in his remarks. The President said that Deputy Director McLaughlin would serve in an acting capacity once Director Tenet leaves. He is certainly a strong and capable leader.......

Q It's a difficult process. Do you expect it to extend pass the election?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not going to try to predict the timing on that. But as I said, there is certainly a strong and capable leader in Deputy Director McLaughlin,......

Q The President said he was a strong and capable leader. Is that the same thing as saying that he had full confidence in his ability to lead the CIA --

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes. And, in fact, I think we've made that clear previously, when asked over the last few months. Absolutely.

Q So you would have been happy -- the President would have been happy for him to stay?

MR. McCLELLAN: Look, we can speculate all you want. That's getting into a hypothetical. He's come to a decision that for personal reasons he is leaving.......

Q But if Director Tenet had not come to this decision, the President would have been quite happy for him to remain?

MR. McCLELLAN: As I said, the President appreciates his service; he had great confidence in the job that he was doing.......

Q That's not a "yes," though.

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I think I answered your question. I mean, it's a complete hypothetical at this point. The decision was made that he was leaving. The President made it very clear that he was sorry to see him leave.......

Q Is there any connection between this resignation and the President consulting a lawyer in the CIA investigation?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. This was a decision made by Director Tenet for personal reasons, and I would not connect it to anything else.....And the President also made it very clear in his remarks how sorry he was to see him leave.......

Q What about a connection to Chalabi?

MR. McCLELLAN: No...... I would not make a connection to anything else, other than this was a decision made by Director Tenet for personal reasons.

Q Was there any concern about the timing of this announcement,.....

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I don't think that anyone was looking at it in that context. Director Tenet made the decision that he wanted to meet with the President last night and inform him about his decision, and that's what the timing was based on. I wouldn't look at it in connection with anything else

Campaign news:

Within hours of pasting Reagan all over their campaign site, Bush handlers have the audacity to accuse Kerry of breaking agreement not to campaign during Reagan Week

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/09/campaign_cease_fire_fails.html

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003055
Now, earlier today I noted how the Bush campaign has replaced the front page of their website with a Reagan tribute, with a huge picture of the late president backgrounded with flags, accompanied by links to a Reagan tribute video, links to President Reagan's most famous speeches and statement of his praise for President Reagan by President Bush...Now, how many days of leaving the site that way will it take before people start to see the obvious: that President Bush's campaign staffers believe that pushing their own guy isn't a particularly good political strategy and that bashing Kerry or grasping on to Reagan nostalgia is far preferable?......Yes, it's crass and cynical. But it's also a tad desperate. And that's the more important point, I think. Having watched the Bush White House for some time and seen them try all manner of crude and crass political gambits, very few of them, in my recollection, haven't ended up biting them in the behind.

GOP still trying to job the Florida election

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/sfl-felection08jun08,0,1906734,print.story?coll=sfla-news-florida
[More: http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/09/florida_elections_chief_resigns_under_pressure.html]

Colorado GOP redistricting outrage fails in Supreme Court

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2004/06/09/justices_decline_to_hear_redistricting_case.html

Bonus item: new book out on the viciousness and stupidity of Republicans, in their own words

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/06/09/at_their_words/index_np.html

[Samples]

"We're going to keep on building the party [the Texas GOP] until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."

-- Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, Mother Jones, August 1995

"Every lesbian spear-chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated."

-- Rep. Bob Dornan, R-Calif., Washington Post, 11/23/96

"If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot the liberals?"

-- Mississippi state Sen. Mike Gunn (R), Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12/31/96

"[Environmentalists] are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party ... I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans."

-- Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, 8/19/96

[Maybe this explains why they distrust that damn liberal media - they just keep quoting them!!
http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200424#382]

- posted by Nick Burbules @ 1:01 AM

 
PAPER TRAILS

UN Security Council approves Iraq transfer plan (damn - I was hoping they'd be more demanding than this)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26300-2004Jun8.html
On the most delicate issue, the United States preserved the authority to wage offensive military operations as American commanders see fit. The Bush administration promised "close coordination" and "full partnership" with the Iraqis, who may opt to keep Iraqi forces out of such operations......"Iraq's sovereignty will be undiluted," U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte told the Security Council after the vote. "The government of Iraq will have the sovereign authority to request and to decline assistance, including in the security sector."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/international/middleeast/09NATI.html
While the resolution put an international stamp on the American-led military force in Iraq, American diplomats said they had reined in their earlier hope that it might attract more nations to contribute troops...... Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Monday that the United States no longer expected to draw in additional troops but that it did hope that the resolution would persuade countries with military forces already there not to remove or reduce them.........

Kurdish leaders had asked the United States to include in the resolution a guarantee of Kurdish rights, but American officials rejected the request after it was strongly opposed by prominent Shiites. The absence of such a guarantee threatened to create a serious split between the Kurds and the new Iraqi government.

Full sovereignty, huh? Well what about this?

http://www.juancole.com/2004_06_01_juancole_archive.html#108667779889319422
The Guardian reports that US civil administrator Paul Bremer signed an order Monday banning Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants from running for elective office for 3 years because of their membership in an illegal militia.

[Now, this is interesting for two reasons - one is that Sadr is popular enough that they feel the need to do it. But the other is WHAT THE HECK sort of jurisdiction does the US-controlled CPA have to decide who runs in an Iraqi election six months from now?]

The danger now is that the US media become uncritical cheerleaders for the new Iraqi government, just as they were uncritical cheerleaders for the war itself

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/media_lost_on_iraq.php

Ashcroft refuses to release documents providing torture rationale

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24867-2004Jun8.html
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the memo on interrogation techniques permissible for the CIA to use on suspected al Qaeda operatives "appears to be an effort to redefine torture and narrow prohibitions against it.".....The 50-page Justice Department memo said inflicting physical or psychological pain might be justified in the war on terrorism "to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network." It added that "necessity and self defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability.".....The Bush administration has said that the discussion in the memo notwithstanding, al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, including those held at Guantanamo Bay, have been treated in accord with international conventions prohibiting torture..... The memo and a second written by Pentagon lawyers surfaced in news reports this week amid the ongoing abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. The documents reflect discussions on the legality of softening prohibitions against inflicting pain on al Qaeda suspects abroad......

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08CND-TORT.html
Mr. Ashcroft, who seemed uncomfortable during the sometimes tough questioning, often responded by saying that the United States was at war and the critics often failed to take that into account. Mr. Kennedy told him curtly that he could not withhold the memorandums from Congress unless there was an invocation of executive privilege, something only the president himself can do........Mr. Ashcroft replied that it was simply not good policy to openly debate what powers a president had in wartime.

It's okay, John. This is the age of the Internet: here it is

http://www.isthatlegal.org/mil_torture.pdf

FOUR torture-defending memos out now: let's review

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_06/004098.php
The administration says that despite this rather chilling obsession with torture, all prisoners - with the unfortunate exception of a few at Abu Ghraib - have been treated humanely. Maybe. But surely I'm not the only one who finds it disturbing that the topic of torture came up almost immediately after 9/11 and continued to be a subject of conversation on such a regular basis after that?

http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/06/are_these_peopl.html
What struck me about the reports today and yesterday on memos from the Justice Department and the Defense Department arguing that U.S. prohibitions on torture might not apply to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq or Guantanamo was not so much their moral implications -- I'm beyond the capacity for shock -- but their glib, loose, bull-session tone.......[It] just doesn't sound remotely like an actual legal argument, much less "a scholarly effort to define the perimeters of the law." It seems to be just a series of assertions, such as, "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable."

[More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar