The President's praise of fair trials and the rule of law

(updated below - Update II)

By Glenn Greenwald - President Bush today hailed the critical importance of fair trials and the rule of law . . . . in Iraq:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

The President is certainly right that it is is a good thing that Saddam Hussein was given a trial, represented by lawyers, with an opportunity to contest his guilt, before being deemed to be guilty. That is how civilized countries function, by definition. In fact, allowing people fair trials before treating them as Guilty is one of the handful of defining attributes -- one could even say (as the American Founders did) a prerequisite -- for countries to avoid tyranny.

That is why it is so reprehensible and inexpressibly tragic that the Bush administration continues to claim -- and aggressively exercise -- the power to imprison and punish people without even a pretense or fraction of the due process that Saddam Hussein enjoyed. The Bush administration believes that it has the power to imprison whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, without even giving them access to the outside world, let alone "a fair trial." The power which it claims -- which it has seized -- extends not only to foreign nationals but legal residents and even its own citizens.

George Bush ordered U.S. citizen Jose Padilla abducted and shoved into a black hole for almost four years, all the while torturing him and refusing him any contact with the outside world, let alone any due process. He did the same to U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi and legal resident Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. In all of those cases, he claimed -- and still claims -- the power to hold them in that manner forever, and claims they are not entitled to any process of any kind.

The President -- the American President -- has also ordered foreign nationals abducted both inside the U.S. and from other countries, including our own allies, and sent to Syria and Egypt with the knowledge, with the intent, that they be tortured. None were given any trials, "fair" or otherwise. In fact, some were unquestionably innocent.

For the Bush apologists who require them, help yourselves to all the meaningless caveats you want. Saddam Hussein was far more brutal, more tyrannical, more liberty-abridging than George Bush. When it comes to internal repression, the two should not be compared.

Those who take comfort in comparisons like that, who think that these sorts of rationalizations constitute some kind of mitigating argument -- "hey, American behavioral standards still hover above those of Saddam's Baathist Iraq, so only deranged Bush-haters would object to America's treatment of its detainees!" -- are precisely the people who have no understanding of what kind of country America is supposed to be.

It is truly vile to listen to George Bush anoint himself the Arbiter of Due Process and Human Rights by praising the Iraqis for giving a "fair trial" to Saddam when we are currently holding 14,000 individuals (at least) around the world in our custody -- many of whom we have been holding for years and in the most inhumane conditions imaginable -- who have been desperately, and unsuccessfully, seeking some forum, any forum, in which to prove their innocence. This lawlessly imprisoned group includes journalists, political activists, and entirely innocent people.

The Bush administration has been steadfastly refusing to grant the very "fair trials" which served today as the basis for the President's pious, patronizing praise for the Iraqis (which, in reality, is intended as self-praise). The President and his followers -- including the majority of the 109th Congress, which just enacted the Military Commissions Act -- have made unmistakably clear that they do not actually believe in fair trials, literally.

The President's unreviewed and unreviewable accusation of guilt is sufficient to justify imprisoning anyone -- including for life -- and no process at all, let alone a "fair" one, is necessary. After all, allowing "fair trials" for those whom we consign to Guantanamo and similar hellholes might "swamp" our busy court system, an administrative concern which, by itself, easily outweighs the imperative of proving someone's guilt before deeming them to be Guilty.

And all of this is to say nothing of the President's grotesque praise for what he called "a society governed by the rule of law," praise issuing from the same person whose presidency has been centrally predicated on his claim to be larger and more powerful than the petty constraints imposed by "law" -- something which is, at best, a theoretical luxury to be enjoyed during peacetime but not during our Eternal War.

Apparently, "fair trials" and the "rule of law" are requirements for the Iraqis if, in the President's moving words, their "young democracy [is to] continue to progress." But for our older democracy, such concepts are quaint and obsolete relics which must not interfere with the Leader's Will and with his Glorious, Endless War.

UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick has the only non-worthless year-end Top 10 list I've ever read -- The Top 10 Most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations of 2006. The ultimate perpetrator of each abuse is the same individual who today arrogated unto himself the right to pat the Iraqis on the head for their embrace of "fair trials" and their adherence to the "rule of law."

* * * * * * *

On Thursday, I was a guest on a radio program hosted by Sean-Paul Kelley, who blogs at The Agonist. The show is broadcast in San Antonio. Sean-Paul is an excellent interviewer and we discussed multiple topics, including the President's war-making powers, our policies towards Iran and Iraq, and the torture bill. For those interested, the podcast of the interview (about 35 minutes long) is here.

UPDATE II: One need not agree with each of Jane Hamsher's specific points here, but she has some of the best insight into the underlying meaning and creepiness of the Saddam execution -- the way it was done and the motives behind it far more than the act itself -- and she expresses those insights perfectly.

Joe Lieberman: Iran's Best Friend

By Anonymous Liberal

By Anonymous Liberal---As Glenn points out below, in his Washington Post op-ed today, Joe Lieberman all but declared war on Iran. Lieberman summed up the fault lines in the current conflict in Iraq thusly:

On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States.

Let's put aside for the moment the fact that this is an absurd description of the actual state of affairs in Iraq. Let's put aside the fact that Lieberman implies here, and throughout the piece, that al Qaeda and Iran are somehow in cahoots (which is totally ridiculous). Let's just accept Lieberman's premises, as simplistic and strange as they are. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Iran really is the Supreme Enemy and is pulling all the strings behind the scenes.

If you accept all that, you are left with one inescapable conclusion: our Supreme Enemy has no better friend than Joe Lieberman.

There can be little doubt that, from an Iranian perspective, our invasion and occupation of Iraq has been an extraordinary windfall. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Saddam's Iraq was Iran's chief enemy and regional rival. The two nations had fought a long and costly war that eventually ended in a stalemate. They were checks on each other's power.

But then, at the urging of Joe Lieberman (who co-sponsored the Iraq war resolution), we invaded Iraq. In doing so, we not only eliminated Iran's chief regional rival, we replaced Saddam's regime with a Shiite-led regime that is destined to become, if it hasn't already, a client state of neighboring Iran. Not only that, but in the process of implementing this regime change, we managed to get ourselves bogged down in an endless guerilla conflict which exposed our weaknesses, depleted our manpower and resources, and rendered us both unable and unwilling to confront Iran in any meaningful way.

And throughout this slow-motion trainwreck, there has been no more outspoken and influential advocate of this policy (other than the President himself) than Senator Joe Lieberman. Seriously, had Iran managed to plant a "Manchurian Candidate" in the United States Senate back in 2002, a candidate whose secret agenda was to advance in any way possible policies that benefit Iran, that Senator could not possibly have done a better job than Joe Lieberman actually did. Iran is in an infinitely better position than it was four years ago, and due almost entirely to policies for which Lieberman has been the chief advocate.

Lieberman claims that if we don't "win" in Iraq, it will be a big victory for Iran. But, as Steve Clemons points out, the government we're fighting to support, the al-Maliki government, has the support of Iran. To the extent "victory" is defined as leaving Iraq in the hands of this Shiite-run, Iran-friendly regime (which is what Lieberman seems to think), it's hard to see Iran being terribly upset by such an outcome. I believe this is what's called a win-win situation, at least from Iran's perspective (from ours it's pretty clearly a lose-lose).

Moreover, it was beyond predictable that the primary beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq would be Iran. Yet I don't remember Joe Lieberman giving this obvious consideration even a moment's thought in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.

Lest my sarcasm be misunderstood, I obviously don't think Lieberman has been consciously trying to help Iran. But there can be no doubt that the policies he has championed have benefited Iran, immeasurably, a fact which makes Lieberman's current lectures about the dangers of Iran all the more exasperating and intolerable.

Joe Lieberman's declaration of war on Iran

(updated below)

In his Washington Post Op-Ed today, the Great Warrior Joe Lieberman predictably endorsed sending more troops to Iraq, in the process dutifully spouting (as always) every Bush/neoconservative talking point. But Lieberman had a much larger fish to fry with this Op-Ed, as he all but declared war on Iran, identifying them as the equivalent of Al Qaeda, as the Real Enemy we are fighting:

While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States. Iraq is the most deadly battlefield on which that conflict is being fought. How we end the struggle there will affect not only the region but the worldwide war against the extremists who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.

Everything that is happening in Iraq is the fault of Iran and Al Qaeda:

This bloodshed, moreover, is not the inevitable product of ancient hatreds. It is the predictable consequence of a failure to ensure basic security and, equally important, of a conscious strategy by al-Qaeda and Iran, which have systematically aimed to undermine Iraq's fragile political center.

Our Real Enemies on the "battlefield" in Iraq are Iran and Al Qaeda:

On this point, let there be no doubt: If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran. Iraq is the central front in the global and regional war against Islamic extremism.

The real danger if we "lose" in Iraq -- if (perish the thought) -- is that it will enable Iran to commit still more terrorist attacks (like all the ones they've been sponsoring in order to kill Americans, such as 9/11):

Radical Islamist terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shiite, would reap victories simultaneously symbolic and tangible, as Iraq became a safe haven in which to train and strengthen their foot soldiers and Iran's terrorist agents.

One might question why someone who is one of the most vocal advocates of the Iraq Disaster would seek to expand the war to include Iran, a country much larger and more formidable on every level than Iraq. After all, things aren't going that well in Iraq, and it might seem to a simplistic and Chamberlain-like appeasing coward that the absolutely most insane idea ever is to try to expand "our war" to include Iran. So what would motivate Lieberman to do this?

Initially, it must be emphasized that whatever his reason is, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sentiments expressed by Israel's newest cabinet minister, Avigdor Lieberman (whose duties include strategic affairs and Iran) when he visited the U.S. earlier this month and gave an interview to The New York Times:

“Our first task is to convince Western countries to adopt a tough approach to the Iranian problem,” which he called “the biggest threat facing the Jewish people since the Second World War.” [Minister] Lieberman insisted that negotiations with Iran were worthless: “The dialogue with Iran will be a 100-percent failure, just like it was with North Korea.”

Joe Lieberman's desire for the U.S. to view itself as being at war with Iran also has nothing whatsoever to do with this:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Friday compared Iran's nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel with the policies of Nazi Germany and criticized world leaders who maintain relations with Iran's president. . . .

Israel has identified Iran as the greatest threat to the Jewish state. Israel's concerns have heightened since the election of Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frequently calls for the destruction of Israel and has questioned whether the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews took place.

"We hear echoes of those very voices that started to spread across the world in the 1930s," Olmert said in his speech at the Yad Vashem memorial.

Back in late 2001 and early 2002, U.S.-Iranian relations were at their best state, by far, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The two countries were cooperating extensively in Afghanistan. New diplomatic channels had been created. Iran was eager to make one concession after the next in order to achieve rapprochement with the U.S. And foreign policy experts including Colin Powell were hailing the prospects for a new cooperative relationship with the Iranians.

In November, 2001, Powell shook hands with the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, at the U.N. headquarters in New York City. PBS’ Frontline described that event as “a simple yet historic gesture that seemed the most tantalizing hint of rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran since the Islamic revolution and the hostage crisis in 1979.”

But also in January, 2002, the Israelis intercepted a ship filled with mostly defensive (though some offensive) arms destined for the Palestinian Authority, which they claimed came from Iran. And the Israelis began a full-scale campaign to prevent Iran-U.S. rapproachement.

By the end of that month, David Frum wrote George Bush's State of the Union speech declaring Iran to be a charter member of the "Axis of Evil," and relations between the two countries have been quite hostile ever since. Even after that occurred, the Iranians continued to make extraordinary overtures to better relations, but they were all unceremoniously rejected by the Bush administration.

Sen. Lieberman's call for the war to include Iran has absolutely nothing to do with strategies such as those articulated by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in January, 2002, in a Report entitled Destabilizing Implications of Iranian-U.S. Rapproachment for Israeli and Global Security. That Report warned of what it called “multiple signs of this developing U.S.-Iranian relationship over the last three months." Insisting that "any Iranian-U.S. rapprochement" is "premature and potentially destabilizing," its core strategy was clearly described:

If Iran only posed a threat to Israel, while offering new diplomatic opportunities to the U.S. and its NATO allies, then it would be possible to anticipate a threat perception gap between Jerusalem and Washington.

However, Iran's continuing support for international terrorism through Hizbullah -- an organization with proven global reach from South America to Saudi Arabia -- and its declared interest in achieving a nuclear-strike capability demonstrates the severe hostility and broad geographic scope of involvement of the Iranian regime.

When Sen. Lieberman warns of Iran's "terrorist agents," what he means, of course, are Hezbollah and Hamas, groups that are dedicated to fighting against Israel, not the U.S. But the tactic of those who want to conflate Israel's enemies with American enemies -- and thereby draw the U.S. into fighting those who are hostile to Israel -- is to ignore any such distinctions and to pretend that supporting anti-Israeli groups is evidence of support for the people who flew those planes into American buildings on 9/11.

That is one of the principal deceitful tricks that was played with Saddam Hussein (the "support for terrorism" of which he was supposedly guilty was payments to the families of Palestinians carrying out attacks against Israel, not terrorist attacks against the U.S. -- a distinction which was never made, but instead, was purposely obscured). Here Sen. Lieberman is invoking the same deceitful little game to try to underhandedly suggest that Iran is an Ally of Al Qaeda and a Supporter of "the Terrorists," purposely blurring all distinctions in the hope of driving a deeper and more hostile wedge between the U.S. and Israel's worst enemy.

But we nonetheless must be very clear at all times that Sen. Lieberman's desire that the U.S. "recognize" that the war has already "expanded" to include Iran has nothing whatsoever to do with the strategy by right-wing Israelis to convince the U.S. that Iran poses a threat not only to Israel but to the U.S., so that the U.S. will act against Israel's most formidable and threatening enemy. Those two matters are completely unconnected -- when they converge, it is pure coincidence -- and to suggest otherwise is conclusive evidence of poisonous anti-semitism and bigotry of the worst sort.

In fact, anyone who would even raise the possibility of such a connection is engaging in the worst type of irresponsible debate, as the Leader himself instructed us earlier this year:

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

Clearly, Sen. Lieberman just happens to believe that it would be a really good idea for us to start a new war with Iran (or, more accurately, to "recognize" that we are already at war with Iran and start acting like Churchillian men and fight them). After all, everyone knows that Iran has invaded all sorts of countries, threatened to invade the U.S., poses a grave risk to our sovereignty, helped plan the 9/11 attacks, is best friends with Osama bin Laden, and is ruled by madmen way beyond the realm of reason and are even building concentration camps as we speak.

What rational, brave patriot wouldn't agree that the U.S. should wage war against Iran? The only possible reason to suggest that Sen. Lieberman, in his war dances against Iran, might be driven by considerations other than American interests could only be the by-product of an ugly, bigoted mind. Such people must be -- and most assuredly will be -- scorned with a venom reserved for few others. Just ask Jim Baker. Or Jimmy Carter. What Sen. Lieberman's Op-Ed painfully and conclusively demonstrates is that the people who brought us the war in Iraq are nowhere near done with their wretched work.

UPDATE: For the sake of clarity, and to avoid being misunderstood, I want to add one point here that really merits its own separate discussion. If I were an Israeli, I'd very likely perceive Iran as an enemy (and vice-versa). And as I've argued many times before, one can reasonably argue that the U.S. should have a policy of supporting its most important allies and/or other democracies, including Israel. The U.S. provides security guarantees for all sorts of countries. That's all fair game for open discussion.

But few things are more threatening to Israeli interests than deceitfully securing American policies based on pretext or by concealing the real agenda. People can be fooled only for so long, and people who feel deceived generally backlash against the deceivers. The argument is not that people like Joe Lieberman do too much to help Israel but that, though that might be their motive, they achieve the precise opposite result.

A cult of wrongness

Mark Steyn -- the deeply brilliant foreign policy guru and most highly revered neoconservative, Muslim-hating prophet (and favorite of New Republic editor Marty Peretz) -- participated in a National Review "symposium" last December concerning what we should expect in 2006 in the Middle East. Among other things, here is what he wrote:

* Iraq will recede deeper and deeper into the newspaper due to an ongoing lack of bad news.

* Baby Assad will not last the year as Syria's President.

* Osama bin Laden will continue to be dead, and will be confirmed as such.

And, for good measure: "Despite the many obvious defects of congressional Republicans, Democrats will fail to make any gains in November's elections."

In mid-2005, Steyn made virtually the same claims about Iraq:

I think Iraq is on the wane as a domestic policy issue in the US. American troops will be there for some time, but increasingly in a supporting role to the new Iraqi forces.

My bet is that enough of the American people are made of sterner stuff, and that Democrats who continue to argue for retreat – and thus defeat - will find the anti-Iraq drum has less and less resonance. . .

There’ll be other changes with the Iraqis in the driving seat, rather than a Bush Administration that has to keep one eye out on whether Dick Durbin’s going to blubber all over the Senate floor again. . . .I'm also thinking of the Syrian border, where Iraqi troops are much more likely to exercise their right of hot pursuit than the Americans are. This time next year, it could be Iraq destabilizing Syria rather than the other way around.

I'm well aware of this lamentable though blossoming "tradition" where all the pundits playfully issue their little quirky year-end predictions about what is to come -- Person X will lose his job and Person Y will be appointed to that position and so-and-so will win an Academy Award -- and it's really cute and funny when they review their predictions the following year and oh-so-humbly laugh at all their errors, at their "defective crystal ball." A good time is had by all. But that's not what this is.

Steyn is one of those endlessly deceitful propagandists who have been lying for three straight years about what is happening in Iraq -- doing everything he can to assure Americans that the war is going well, that the media is exaggerating the violence, that we are on the precipice of victory, that American cities are more unsafe than Baghdad, that concerns over sectarian violence are nothing more than disguised Bush-hating desires that America lose, etc. etc.

In a rational, fact-based, truth-concerned country, wouldn't someone who said this:

Iraq will recede deeper and deeper into the newspaper due to an ongoing lack of bad news. . . .

. . . and who has been saying essentially the same thing for three years now, publicly present themselves and simply admit: "I am forced by my record of continuous abject wrongness to acknowledge that I actually have no idea what I am talking about and the tiniest amount of shame that I possess therefore precludes me henceforth from ever opining on this topic again, and if I am incapable of adhering to this commitment, I urge you in the strongest terms not to rely upon anything that I say, because my pronouncements have been so blatantly misleading for years"?

And if, as is true in Steyn's case, the person is devoid of even the minimal shame which would compel a public accounting of that sort, wouldn't statements like this lead virtually everyone to agree that the person is a delusional quack, without a shred of reliability or credibility, and cease listening to anything he has to say? And yet . . .

As bizarre as it is, it is simply beyond doubt that when it comes to foreign policy credibility, advocating an extremely stupid and destructive war with false and ill-informed claims is valued more highly than opposing an extremely stupid and destructive war with correct, prescient, and highly informed claims. Advocating a war -- any war -- is always worth more credibility and seriousness than opposing a war. That twisted formula explains a great deal about many things.

The point here is not that the opinions which Steyn expresses are unpersuasive or amoral or extremist (though they are all of that). It's that his statements -- his factual claims -- are repeatedly demonstrated to be pure nonsense, completely false, purely wrong, demonstrably erroneous. And Steyn is by no means alone.

Most of our respected foreign policy analysts and general political pundits -- not to mention our wonderful national "journalists" -- have a rich history of statements over the last four years on Iraq filled with claims just as misleading, inane, and wrong as Steyn's are. And among the crowd who caught the terrorism "fever" (to use Colin Powell and Gerald Ford's accurate term to try to account for what happened to Dick Cheney), the more wrong Steyn is, the more wise and prophet-like he becomes.

That is how our foreign policy debates function. After all, one of the wrongest people on the planet -- Fred Kagan -- is the one whose grand "plan," the Glorious Kagan-Keene Surge, is, according to the most loyal Bush followers, what the President is turning to in order to save us now in Iraq. We've somehow become a country run by a political movement for which Error, Deceit and Wrongness are the highest virtues (and their opposites the greatest vice).

Cliff May's free speech lectures desperately needed here at home

National Review's Cliff May doled out a lecture yesterday about the meaning of free speech to an Islamic cleric in Azerbaijan. The cleric was objecting to a newspaper article which blamed Islam for Azerbaijan's economic troubles, and the cleric said: "I am for freedom of speech but not the freedom to insult." In reply, May sermonized: "You can't have one without the other."

Many of May's ideological comrades here in America are in need of that lecture as much as (at least) the Azerbaijan imam. On Fox News several days ago, Bill Hemmer hosted a segment protesting the "comparison" by The View's Joy Beher of Adolph Hitler and Donald Rumsfeld. One of the two Fox guests was right-wing radio talk show host Mike Gallagher, and this is what he said (h/t mbf):

You know it's a little bit ridiculous that we continue to watch these TV stars and movie stars who smear our leaders. I just wonder, Rob, if you'll think for a moment what our enemies think of seeing TV personalities comparing the outgoing Defense Secretary to Adolph Hitler.

I mean, you know, conservatives never get a pass. Strom Thurmond is wished a Happy Birthday by Trent Lott and the sky falls in on Trent Lott. But if Joy Behar goes on national TV and compares a good man like Rumsfeld to the evilest man in the world and there's no repercussions for Joy Behar.

You know, I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar, round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann, take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors.

Let us leave to the side for the moment the laughter-until- choking-inducing premise (highlighted by Newshounds) that Islamic terrorists are watching The View and are emboldened by Joy Behar's criticisms of Donald Rumsfeld.

Let us also leave to the side Gallagher's gushing praise, also expressed on Fox back in 2004, for a political ad that he said "brilliantly put together side by side Al Gore's raging, maniacal rant next to Adolf Hitler. It was actually pretty cleverly done."

And let us further leave to the side the all-consuming irony that Gallagher is bitterly complaining about the oh-so-inappropriate invocation of Nazism when criticizing right-wing Bush followers, only to then advocate that critics of the Government-- what he calls "our leaders" -- should be "rounded up" and placed into concentration camps (but only "until this war is over" -- which happens never). One could spend all day if one were so inclined ridiculing Mike Gallagher, but he isn't the issue here.

What is notable is how unnotable comments like these are. There is something quite striking about the fact that Fox News casually broadcasts to its viewers a call for Americans who critcize government leaders to be put into detention camps. And while the opposing guest, radio host Rob Thompson, somewhat lamely pointed out that criticism of "our leaders" isn't treasonous, there was no real challenge to Gallagher's truly disgusting remarks.

In fact, the grinning, empty-headed Bill Hemmer said nothing about Gallagher's outburst. He did, though, point out that he found the remarks by Beher to be "a bit unexcusable," and he ended the segment by inviting the guests back "next week," and then cheerfully added: "Happy Holidays, see you guys."

Perhaps my surprise is a bit naive (and I know there will be several people in comments eager to point out how naive), but shouldn't the expressed call to put domestic political opponents of the Bush administration into "detention camps" render someone beyond the pale? If that doesn't, what does? Is there anything that is considered too authoritarian for Fox News?

Gallagher isn't the first person to make this "argument" of course. Ben Shapiro, among others, on Townhall called for the prosecution and imprisonment of leading Democrats (Al Gore, Howard Dean, John Kerry) for their "sedition" (meaning their criticism of "our leaders").

And Michael Reagan -- a regular guest on Fox and sometimes guest host on Hannity & Colmes -- made one of the most reprehensible though under-appreciated statements from any relatively mainstream political figure when he called for the hanging -- the hanging -- of Howard Dean as a result of Dean's remarks about the war in Iraq:

Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!

The danger here -- at least the short-term, imminent danger -- is not that anyone is going to be implementing the calls by Gallagher, Shapiro and Reagan to start putting Bush critics into concentration camps. The real issue is the same one raised by the post yesterday discussing Commentary's call for war on Iran in order to seize its oil assets, and it is the same point raised by the "debates" we have had over torture and indefinite detention.

By including advocates of these views in what is considered to be acceptable political discourse -- given forums by the likes of Fox News and treated with respect -- the scope of acceptable and mainstream viewpoints expands outwards towards its most authortarian fringes, until it squarely includes full-blown advocacy of tyranny. As but one example, by including pro-concentration-camp arguments from Gallagher and Reagan in our mainstream discourse, Fox renders the recent, repeated and truly radical calls from Newt Gingrich for a so-called "debate" on what the First Amendment "should protect" as moderate and mild.

The fact that one can turn on Fox News and regularly hear people who advocate the hanging or imprisonment of mainstream Bush critics for the opinions they express is a far more notable development than passive acceptance of it would suggest.

A Glorious War Plan for Iran

By Glenn Greenwald - It is hardly news to point out that the warmongers and neoconservatives in the Bush movement are radical, and are becoming increasingly more desperate with the rapid worsening of the predicaments for which they are responsible.

But if you really spend intensive time digging deeply into the things they've been saying and thinking for the last five years -- as I've been doing recently in writing my book -- it is nonetheless astounding: (a) just how deranged and detached from basic reality are their statements and (b) that they have not been forcefully cast out of respectable and mainstream political dialogue as a result of what they say and how they think.

Neoconservatives have now become such caricatures of themselves that it almost pity-inducing to read what they are writing (though even the briefest reminder of the tragic damage they have wrought precludes any possibility of real pity). When it comes to operating within the minimum confines imposed by basic rationality and plain reality, neoconservatives really are indistinguishable from, say, Lyndon LaRouche or Fred Phelps or any number of other deranged extremists who are not merely radical in their ideology, but are so far removed from reality that they command no attention beyond the occasional derisive reference.

Yet there is little doubt that these same neoconservatives still exert the greatest influence on the thinking of our current President, and the more decorated among them still command great respect from our nation's media stars. They are as bloodthirsty as they are detached from reality, as amoral as they are radical, and it is long past the time that just a fraction of the scorn that they so plainly merit be heaped upon them.

The immediate proximate cause prompting this observation is this most repellent article in the leading neoconservative magazine, Commentary, by Arthur Herman, a History Professor at George Mason University. The article, entitled Getting Serious About Iran – a Military Option, is an all-out demand that war with Iran commence as soon as possible, and it offers a detailed plan for how the war should be executed.

Herman declares at the outset that his purpose in the article is to undermine what he scornfully calls the "consensus [that] has taken root in the minds of America’s foreign-policy elite." What is this heinous "elite consensus" that must be uprooted? "That military action against Iran is a sure formula for disaster." Yes, perish that thought. Herman's mission is to defeat the "appeasing line" that war with Iran is "unthinkable." Not only is it thinkable, he contends, but it is feasible and urgently necessary for America's survival.

After reviewing all of the available short-of-war options for deterring Iranian nuclear proliferation, Herman declares -- with a claim that defines a new level of irony -- that “all of these recommendations fly in the face of reality." Dismissing away the consensus of the intelligence community, Herman claims that Iran may possess a nuclear weapon “within the next two to three years,” and that the U.S. (of course) possesses more than ample justification for waging war now on Iran:

Which brings us back to the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer.

Like a teenager in the obsessive midst of an online vídeo war game, Herman lays out a detailed fantasy plan for our military attack on Iran:

the attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the “hard” sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one to site to another. Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries.

But with the massive air attack on Iran’s industrial infrastructure (not to mention the destruction of their bridges and tunnels, tacked on as an afterthought), Herman is just warming up:

The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf.

North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch.

Once the U.S. controls Iran’s oil, Herman envisions that we can then start dictating to Iran what their government will be, what policies they should and should not undertake, and basically put them into complete submission to our will. Herman argues that our war plan:

must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy.

And what of the rather self-evident, towering risks of unilaterally attacking a country like Iran and seizing its oil assets? Those are all dismissed away by Herman as casually and cursorily as he drew up his grand war plans: “The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.”

This is not some "thought experiment" or some game theory. This is really what Herman, and so many like him, believe the U.S. should do, and do now.

The very idea that we are going to launch a unilateral bombing campaign against Iran, shatter its infrastructure, and then seize its oil assets is pure insanity of the highest order. There is no other way to describe that. And that would be true at any time, let alone when we are bogged down in the greatest strategic disaster in our nation's history, where our already horrendous position could be worsened immeasurably by Iran.

One feels absurd even dignifying Herman's "analysis" with a substantive response. It really is the stuff of the babbling prophet standing on a cardboard box in the 1980s version of Times Square.

But with the fate of our Iraq occupation sealed through the end of the Bush presidency, the most pressing question is whether the Leader will use the last two years of his presidency to provoke some sort of military confrontation with Iran, and people like Herman are not standing on boxes in Times Square where they belong, but instead are writing in Commentary, which continues to exert real influence among the radicals who have driven our country into the state it is currently in (as but one example, Mark Halperin favorite Hugh Hewitt commended Herman's war plan as a "must-read").

When attempting to understand what has happened to the United States over the last six years, the fact that moronic commentary like Herman's was (and largely continues to be) treated as "serious" and "responsible" foreign policy wisdom, while those opposing the commencement of offensive wars were demonized as frivolous radicals, is the necessary starting point. For the same reason, excising people like Herman and his allies from our political dialogue is the highest priority in beginning to repair the destruction they have spawned.

Incentivizing Honesty in Politics

By Anonymous Liberal

By Anonymous Liberal--In my post yesterday, I highlighted the stark difference between the rigid standards that apply to commercial advertising in this country and the ‘anything goes’ nature of political advertising. My primary point was that human nature doesn’t suddenly change when the conversation shifts from shopping to politics, and therefore it’s bizarre that everyone seems to assume that “voters” possess the sort of truth-detection skills that we all know “consumers” do not. Consumers and voters are, after all, the same people, and advertisements are advertisements, regardless of whether they’re selling laxatives or representatives.

Indeed, the robust protections provided to consumers may actually make the problem of false political advertising more acute. As a commenter over at Digby’s points out, many people have internalized the prohibition against false-advertising and simply assume that it applies to political ads as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say things like “that ad must be at least technically true or they wouldn’t be allowed to air it.”

We live in an era where the outcomes of elections often hinge on the effectiveness of political advertising. For reasons I discussed in my previous post, however, it is simply not feasible (or advisable) to regulate the truthfulness of political advertising in the same way we regulate the truthfulness of commercial advertising.

But that doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to a system that actually encourages deceptive political advertising.

In the realm of commercial speech, we incentivize honesty by punishing dishonesty. Those who mislead consumers face the prospect of stiff fines, high damage awards, injunctions, and even imprisonment depending on the circumstances. It’s a very stick-heavy approach, which is why it raises so many First Amendment concerns when applied to political speech. But good behavior can be encouraged through the use carrots as well as sticks. And therein lies the key to avoiding First Amendment objections: focus less on punishing dishonesty and more on rewarding honesty.

A change of emphasis is also needed. Because consumer protection laws are primarily aimed at businesses and those driven by a desire to make money, they understandably focus on combating dishonestly through the use of economic disincentives. The idea is to create a system where your economic interests are better served by being honest than being deceptive.

But politicians and political parties are driven by a different bottom line. In order to tailor this approach to the political realm, incentives and disincentives have to be political in nature. We need to try to create a system where a candidate’s political interests will be better served by honesty than deception.

The most effective tool for aligning incentives in this way is the media, both new and old. To the extent journalists and bloggers can generate political blowback when a politician lies, politicians will be discouraged from doing so. Unfortunately, our emasculated press corps tends to do the exact opposite. In order to avoid accusations of bias, journalists adhere to a painfully formulaic "dueling narrative" style of journalism which actually encourages dishonesty by giving lies equally billing to the truth. Blogs are a welcome counterweight in this regard and do have some ability to influence media narratives and expose lies and deception. I’m optimistic that as the medium of blogging continues to mature and evolve, blogs will play an increasingly important role in creating the sort of incentive structure necessary to encourage more honest politics.

That said, I believe it will take more than just the media (even the new media) to create the structural incentives necessary to significantly improve the situation. We really need to start thinking outside the box on this issue. We need to think of ways in which legislation and private initiatives can create the sort of incentives necessary to influence the basic political calculus.

What am I talking about? Well, for instance, you’re probably familiar with the provision of the McCain-Feingold bill that requires those sponsoring political ads to indicate who paid for them (“My name is Bob Smith and I approved this message.”) The idea behind the provision was that it would discourage truly sleazy and dishonest ads by making politicians embarrassed to be associated with them. I think the authors of the bill failed to appreciate just how little shame many politicians have, but I’m more concerned with the structure of the provision than the provision itself. The important thing is that the Supreme Court held that this disclosure requirement does not violate the First Amendment. That’s important, because it opens the door to a number of other creative ways of discouraging deceptive politics.

For instance, suppose a state were to pass a law creating some sort of body—perhaps consisting of retired judges—which was empowered to review the truthfulness of political ads. It could be called the “Election Commission” or something similar. To avoid First Amendment concerns, there would be no requirement that ads be submitted to the Commission for review, but there would be a requirement that all ads disclose prominently, ala McCain-Feingold, whether or not the ad has been submitted and approved by the Election Commission (i.e. “this ad has been reviewed for truthfulness by the Election Commission” or “this ad has not been submitted to the Election Commission”).

The Commission would be instructed by law to withhold its blessing of ads which are either false or materially misleading (the same standards that govern commercial advertising). Those seeking approval of ads would submit them, along with an affidavit attesting to and supporting its truthfulness. Preliminary approval could be granted very quickly, within hours. If anyone wished to question the approval, they could submit counter-evidence, which if found to be persuasive, would result in the withdrawal of the Commission’s approval.

While politicians and interest groups would be under no obligation to submit their ads for review, there would be a strong incentive to do so. Those who wish to be taken seriously and viewed as honest would readily submit their ads to the Commission. Those who choose not to submit their ads to the Commission would be free to run them anyway, but would likely pay some political price for doing so. The ads would be looked upon much more skeptically by the public and opposing politicians would likely try to score political points by pointing to the candidate’s unwillingness to seek Commission approval (“What is my opponent so afraid of?”).

Would this sort of legislation really work? It’s hard to know. I’m sure the insightful commenters at this site will point out any number of potential problems with such a plan, perhaps some of them fatal. But I hope this example at least illustrates the sort of proposals I have in mind. We need to think of ways to establish structural incentives that reward honesty and discourage deception. We need to work toward creating a system where politicians see it as being in their best political interest to avoid making false and misleading claims.

I realize that’s an enormously ambitious goal, but even a marginal improvement in the current incentive structure would go a long way toward improving the quality of political discourse in this country. And one of the greatest aspects of our federalist system is that we have 50 laboratories in which to experiment with these kinds of proposals; all it takes is a good idea and a state willing to try it. So I ask you to put aside your cynicism for a moment and really think long and hard about this issue. There have to be creative ways we can come up with to incentivize honesty in politics—even if just a little bit--without running afoul of the First Amendment. That’s my challenge to you (and to myself).

The Paradox at the Heart of Modern Politics

By Anonymous Liberal

By Anonymous Liberal - As a political junkie and a litigator who works primarily with large corporate clients, I’ve come to appreciate that there is a fundamental disconnect between the assumptions that underlie the prevailing approach to and coverage of political issues in this country and the assumptions that drive our policies in virtually every other context.

For example, within the context of commerce and the marketplace, we long ago realized that the average consumer is generally not in a position to tell whether or not she is being lied to or misled, whether by way of an advertisement or an overzealous sales pitch. That’s why, over the years, we have put in place a complex array of overlapping laws and regulations designed to protect consumers from being misled. If a company makes a claim which is even slightly misleading, it will quickly find itself up to its eyeballs in litigation, whether in the form of government enforcement actions, lawsuits by competitors, or consumer class actions (often all three). There are also any number of tort and quasi-contractual claims that aggrieved consumers can bring against the individuals and companies who deceived them.

As a result, companies take great care to ensure that their statements are truthful, and consumers can be reasonably confident that advertisers are not lying to them.

The same is not at all true in the realm of politics, where candidates and interest groups can pretty much say whatever they want and voters are generally left to fend for themselves. Lies and misleading claims are commonplace, if not the norm. The perverse result is that most Americans are far better informed (or at least far less misinformed) when they step into the mall than when they step into the voting booth.

To put it another way, our system attributes to people in their capacity as voters the very truth-detection skills that it assumes they do not have in their capacity as consumers.

What accounts for this disparity? Why is it that the basic assumptions about human nature that animate our approach to so many areas of the law are suddenly thrown out the window when it comes to politics?

As an initial matter, I should point out that it’s not as if no one has ever thought of trying to import our consumer protection policies into the realm of politics. Various states have experimented with such laws. But these attempts invariably run into two major problems.

First, the realities of the political calendar make the consumer protection approach difficult to implement. By the time an aggrieved party can successfully litigate a false-advertising claim, the election is usually over and the issue is either moot or very difficult to remedy.

Far more important, though, is the second obstacle: the Constitution. The First Amendment provides much more robust protections to political speech than it does to commercial speech (and for good reasons). As a result, consumer protection laws can go much farther in regulating what people can and cannot say. For instance, in the commercial context, false advertising laws can and do prohibit claims that are truthful-but-misleading; they also create liability regardless of whether the maker of the statement knew it to be false.

In the political context, however, a law that does anything more than prohibit the making of knowingly false claims--a very difficult burden to meet--is unlikely to pass constitutional muster. There’s plenty of room to be deceptive without resorting to demonstrable falsehoods, and even when caught red-handed in a lie, candidates and interest groups are likely to plead ignorance or mistake.

These difficulties have led most states to abandon legislative efforts to protect voters from false and misleading political claims. As a result, we end up with a system in which you have to be scrupulously honest when selling a toaster, but you can pretty much say anything you want when you’re selling the next president of the United States.

As a believer in the First Amendment, I understand why this is the case and why the same approach we use to protect consumers from deceptive and misleading claims would be highly problematic if applied to political speech. What I don’t understand is why everyone seems to throw their understanding of human nature out the window when the conversation shifts from commerce to politics.

For reasons that I don’t understand, our mainstream journalists and media figures always seem to operate under the assumption that the average person is capable of sorting through all the political information they’re bombarded with and reaching an informed decision. This despite the fact that half of our laws are premised on the exact opposite assumption, i.e., that people are easily misinformed by those with an incentive to do so.

I remember, for example, that in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the media made a habit of noting that most Americans supported the invasion. Rarely, however, did anyone mention the fact that nearly 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 or the fact that the Bush administration had been going out of its way to foster that misperception.

As I’ve observed before, when it comes to covering politics, journalists today are much more like play-by-play announcers than referees. They no longer see it as their job to step in and call fouls, i.e., to call a lie a lie. This is a pity because--for the reasons explained above--it is in the arena of politics where we are most in need of referees; it is in the arena of politics where the normal referees (government officials, judges, private litigants) cannot operate effectively.

I'll have much more to say about this topic in the near future, including (hopefully) some suggestions of ways to incentivize honesty in political advertising without running afoul of the First Amendment. For now, though, I thought I'd start by simply highlighting this paradox. We live in a country of incredibly well-informed consumers and incredibly misinformed voters. We desperately need to find a way to improve the level of political discourse in this country.

Lapping up Zawahiri's hate

By Nitpicker

By Nitpicker--You would think that Republicans would be shamed by the fact so many of them seem to agree, at least to some extent, with the beliefs of terrorists and other Muslim extremists. For example:

• Dinesh D'Souza thinks that "decadent and depraved American culture...angers and repulses other societies—especially traditional and religious ones." You know, like the religious conservatives of al Qaeda.
  
  
• Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA) believes, in the manner of the Taliban, that countries should be run by a single religion. They only disagree on which religion should rule.
  
  
• Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter think certain Americans are simply asking to be attacked by terrorists.
  
  
• Bush supporter author Orson Scott Card thinks that, when terrorists call us decadent and evil, Hollywood movies "prove their point."
  
  
• Mary Grabar, writing on one of the most-visited conservative sites, writes she agrees with pre-Enlightenment views of women, specifically that"Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner." It's unlikelythe Saudis who keep women from taking part in the electoral process would disagree.

Me, I'd be ashamed if these beliefs were held by people on my side of the political aisle, but not Republicans.

Tom DeLay, for example, has said about the midterm elections that "Democrats didn't win. Republicans lost." Today, Ayman al Zawahri released yet another tape (a reminder, of course, that he's still on the loose) and it seems like he's been listening to Tom DeLay.

(Democrats) aren't the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen -- the Muslim Ummah's vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq -- are the ones who won...

Shit, if terrorists directly copied the "it's not you, it's me" explanation of one of the leaders of my party, I'd probably whistle quietly to myself and hope that no one else noticed. Republicans, they lap it up.

The Jawa Report: How many times have we said that Democrat victotry will be seen by Islamic terrorists as a victory for them?

Riehl World View: If the Democrats had the slightest bit of back bone to offer in support of the war on terror, you'd think some Democrat leader would immediately want to take this head on. Unfortunately, they can't really do that, perhaps because to a good extent, it's true.

California Yankee, at Redstate: Zawahri may be right, but the Democrats couldn't have done it without the help of the biased media wing of the Democratic Party.

Power Line's Hinderaker: I actually agree with Zawahiri on that one...Once again, I think he has a point...Once again, Zawahiri isn't entirely wrong...(And I simply have to add that Jules Crittenden praises Hinderaker for "sacrific(ing) himself to give us a good roundup. No greater love..." Apparently, in right wing world, reading is now what amounts to sacrifice and is worthy of praise similar to that which Jesus gives to those who sacrifice their lives for their friends [John 15:13].)

Yeah, you're reading that right. Those are four major right wing blogs agreeing with al Qaeda's Number Two!

Hell, Zawahiri should probably get his own log-in over at the Corner for his statement that attempting a diplomatic solution involving Iran would be to "embark on a painful journey of failed negotiations." (Then again, they've got too many radical weirdos over there already...How about My Pet Zawa?)

So far, only the conservative blogger "Captain Ed" has shown the sense to warn his "friends on the internet" that this is propaganda from a "delusional psychopath" and "(t)aking any part of it seriously is a mistake of the first order." Too bad for Ed that so many of his friends are themselves delusional and, therfore, willing to agree with a terrorist as long as he supports their beliefs about Democrats.

Cross-posted at Nitpicker.

What Haditha says about the warbloggers.

By Blue Texan

By Blue Texan -- Yesterday, the Haditha tragedy was again in the news, as 8 Marines now face criminal charges in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians -- including women and children -- killed in the Iraqi town on November 19, 2005.

Predictably, this has been totally ignored thus far by Bush followers, including Mobius Dick, Michelle Malkin, Powerline and RedState. It's a given, had the Marines not been charged, that their sites would be lighting up like Christmas trees, attacking the media over its rush to judgement, how it hates our troops, how it was trying to hurt Bush and undermine the war, etc.

Oh wait, they already did that.

Those who would reduce war crimes to mere partisan footballs are not manning the bulwarks of moral seriousness, however much they might adopt that pose.

Indeed. Remember, unserious leftists, it's only acceptable to use war crimes as partisan footballs to flog the media again and again and again and again, accuse it of "Bush-bashing" and attack the UN for good measure.

All of Mobius Dick's Haditha posts can be found here, and they're basically all about the same thing: media bias. Kind of a narrow, um, analysis.

Ironically, two days prior to the killings at Haditha, John Murtha, who Mobius deemed a "disgrace," called for the complete withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, saying they no longer had a clear mission and that the war in Iraq was a "flawed policy." This is the very same month, by the way, that President Bush announced his "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq.

The warbloggers shrieked and screamed at Murtha (Powerline later called him "disgusting" and Michelle Malkin accused him of "hanging the Marines"), and of course propped up the Great Leader. But in their frantic demonizing of Murtha and the media they never bothered to ask this critical question about Haditha: why were the Marines there? Why were Marines getting blown up by IEDs and knocking down civilian doors in Anbar, almost three years after Mission Accomplished?

We should remember that the cretins (as Chris Matthews called them earlier this week) who put those guys in that terrible situation are just as responsible for Haditha as the men on the ground. If you put overstressed combat soldiers in an untenable situation, bad things happen. John Murtha, who was a Marine for 37 years, understood that. The warbloggers like Mobius Dick, who've never served, still don't.

A doubly informative op-ed

By Nitpicker

By Nitpicker--In today's New York Times, Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and Hillary Mann, a former Foreign Service officer, write about how the Bush administration has been playing rhetorical chicken with Iran since the beginning of 2002. Glenn (who should be working on his book) discussed the administration's most recent and blatant provocations against Iran earlier today, but Leverett and Mann describe an administration which has been dragging us toward this point all along.

In December 2001, xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx x Tehran to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the brutal pro-Al Qaeda warlord, from returning to Afghanistan to lead jihadist resistance there. xxxxx xxxxxxx so long as the Bush administration did not criticize it for harboring terrorists. But, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush did just that in labeling Iran part of the “axis of evil.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hekmatyar managed to leave Iran in short order after the speech. xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx the Islamic Republic could not be seen to be harboring terrorists.

If you're curious about all those Xs, they represent the black bars covering portions of the op-ed redacted by the White House. According to Leverett, this op-ed is "based on (a) longer paper...just published with the Century Foundation--which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a single word of the draft." The White House, Leverett says, demanded that he and Mann redact several sections of the piece, including at least one whole paragraph, claiming that they deal with classified information.

Leverett, Mann and the Times, however, have performed a great service to the American public. Not only have they highlighted this administration's failure to act in a diplomatic, intelligent way toward Iran, but, by printing the essay with the black bars and providing a page entitled "What We Wanted To Tell You About Iran," they are also giving us an insight into the administration's continued attempts to politicize intelligence. The page offers links--without specific connections to redacted areas--to sites which already host the information the White House wanted covered up.

I have not yet definitively filled in the redacted portions yet, but the links provided show that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and others said they spoke with Iranian diplomats in December 2001. It is only a matter of time until someone fills these Xs in and posts a repaired version of the op-ed on their blog. (My money's on Juan Cole having the most accurate version.)

Since the information is already in the public domain, however, we get to see a bit more of how the increasingly creaky clockworks of this administration operate. The muckrakers at Josh Marshall's TPMmuckraker's site have been creating a list of information that this administration has "disappeared" since Bush took office. When you look at that list in light of today's piece, it becomes clear that this is part of and informational set piece, designed to keep Americans from understanding the full depths of either their ineptitude or their intent to begin yet another war in the Middle East. Bushies do not want Americans to connect these dots. They know the information exists in scattered bits--as thousands of points of light?--but clearly intended to prevent the synthesis of this information becoming part of the conversation about how the U.S. should deal with Iran.

It is likely the White House believed slicing Leverett and Mann's essay drastically would convince the Times, but, instead, the redacted version is ever more useful.

The Bush administration's provocations towards Iran

(updated below)

By Glenn Greenwald - Over the past several days, there have been reports of increasing U.S. military activity in the Persian Gulf aimed at Iran, and today The New York Times confirms that "the United States and Britain will begin moving additional warships and strike aircraft into the Persian Gulf region in a display of military resolve toward Iran." The buildup includes "a second aircraft carrier and its supporting ships to be stationed within quick sailing distance of Iran by early next year."

There is no doubt that these moves are intended to signal to the Iranians (as well as to what the Times describes as "Washington’s allies in the region who are concerned about Iran’s intentions") that we are capable of an offensive military strike against Iran:

Senior American officers said the increase in naval power should not be viewed as preparations for any offensive strike against Iran. But they acknowledged that the ability to hit Iran would be increased and that Iranian leaders might well call the growing presence provocative.

One purpose of the deployment, they said, is to make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military watch on Iran.

Bush officials cite two "justifications" for these maneuvers: (1) to enforce any sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council as a result of Iran's refusal to comply with its resolutions (sanctions which have not yet been imposed), and (2) to deter Iran from a military blockade of oil shipments in retaliation for not-yet-imposed sanctions.

The President was not even asked about his intentions with regard to Iran at yesterday's Press Conference. He was asked whether he would follow the ISG's recommendation to negotiate with Iran concerning Iraq, and the President gave his standard bizarre answer that he would negotiate with the Iranians once they agreed to suspend their nuclear research program -- i.e., once they agreed in advance to do everything we would demand that they do in negotiations. The Iranians have responded in-kind by saying that they would negotiate with the U.S. only once we left Iraq.

According to the Times, Bush officials "view recent bold moves by Iran — and by North Korea as well — as at least partly explained by assessments in Tehran and North Korea that the American military is bogged down in Iraq and incapable of fully projecting power elsewhere." There is undoubtedly truth in that. For an administration which has operated on the bellicose premise that "weakness is provocative," it has hard to overstate the extent to which the Iraq disaster has -- quite rationally -- emboldened countries around the world against the U.S. and diluted the deterrent threat of our military force.

Any action which brings us even a small step closer to military confrontation with Iran should be, by definition, the most attention-generating news story. Any military conflict with Iran would be so disastrous for the U.S. that it cannot be adequately described. In contrast to the weakened, isolated, universally reviled Saddam regime, the Iranians are smart, strong, shrewd and supported by scores of vitally important allies around the world. And that's to say nothing of the resources that are being drained away, and the ever increasing U.S. isolation, that occurs every day that we continue to occupy Iraq.

It's unclear whether the President really believes that a military confrontation with Iran is inevitable if they do not stop their nuclear program (which they will not do, particularly if we refuse to negotiate). He has given speeches in the recent past in which he spoke of Iran exactly the same way he spoke of Iraq in late 2002 when, in his mind, an attack on Iraq was already a fait accompli.

It's possible that that rhetoric was designed to satiate his hungry, crazed warmongering "base." And it's also possible that it was designed to simply convey to the Iranians that military force is possible despite our occupation of Iraq.

But it's equally possible that he really does believe that some sort of war with Iran is inevitable -- even if it is "just" an air attack -- and recent news events suggesting that public opposition to President Ahmadinejad is growing may trigger the President's messianic complex and lead him to the belief that the U.S. is "called upon" to help bring democracy to that country. And many of the people who convinced the President to invade Iraq have long harbored dreams of regime change in Iran as the Ultimate Success, or at least the Next Step in the Epic War of Civilizations.

The warmongers who unquestionably still have the President's ear immediately transformed the recent debate over whether we should negotiate with Iran (prompted by the ISG) into an argument that Iran is our Real Enemy, not just in general but specifically in Iraq, and that Iran should be attacked, not negotiated with. Those wild-eyed war-loving elements are tempting to dismiss because of how obviously extremist and detached from reality they are, but they continue to occupy places of high influence with the President (both inside and outside of the White House).

Worse, there are convincing signs that the President is one of them, i.e., that he now irreversibly shares their world view that War with Islamic Extremism requires a progressive series of wars with various states, the next of which is Iran. One thing that is so clear that it ought to be beyond doubt: if the President is convinced that some sort of military action is necessary or even warranted, nothing -- not public opinion nor his supposed "lame duck" status nor the sheer insanity of the proposal -- is going to stop him.

Few things have been as disturbing as the President's now immovable belief that he is Harry Truman -- fighting a necessary war even in the face of widespread opposition from weak and blind people in his own country and around the world -- but destined to be vindicated by history. And, as he sees it, the more he fights against anti-war headwinds and the bolder he is in the risks he takes, the greater his vindication will be.

Geopolitical considerations do not determine what the U.S. will do vis-a-vis Iran. The President's personality does.

Even if the President and/or his top advisors are less than clear about their intent with regard to Iran, it may not matter. Military build-ups of this sort, plainly aimed at one country in particular, can easily produce miscalculations or lead to unintended provocations. As but one of countless permutations, if the Iranians -- governed, we are unconvicingly told, by irrational and crazed Hitlers -- perceive that moves of this sort suggest that military confrontation with the U.S. is inevitable, then they can become incentivized to strengthen their position, particularly while the U.S. is weakened in Iraq, which can in turn cause the U.S. to escalate its actions, etc.

Or a restless anti-mullah movement can be quieted by uniting the country behind conflict with the U.S. It is an incomparably dangerous game and the consequences are almost certainly beyond our capacity to predict, let alone manage.

There are also all sorts of constitutional questions about the type of Congressional authorization required in order to interact militarily with Iran, but those would almost certainly be swept aside by an administration that would claim that it already has such authorization either inherently or as a result of Iran's involvement in our war in Iraq. If the President were really intent on war with Iran, it is very difficult to envision Congressional Democrats, or really anything else, stopping him.

None of these issues is clear and I would not describe anything as inevitable when it comes to Iran. But at a time when the country is vigorously opposed to our ongoing occupation in Iraq -- opposition which is being steadfastly ignored by a Washington Establishment that is about to increase our troop presence there -- any actions of the sort we are currently undertaking to militarily provoke Iran should be at the top of the list in our political debates.

While there may be all sorts of nice, clean, abstract theories which even Democrats can embrace about why a military build-up is wise and necessary as a show of force against Iran, it must be kept first and foremost in mind that it is the Bush administration that is overseeing the build-up and will decide whatever steps are taken as a result. That is reason enough not only to justify urgent opposition to these events, but to make such opposition a matter of unparalleled importance.

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UPDATE: Digby -- whose blogging, more than anything else, convinced me of the unique potential of the blogosphere, which, in turn, motivated me to begin this blog -- is asking for reader donations to sustain and help support the truly invaluable blogging that takes place on Hullabaloo. Last year, I donated to Digby myself and encourage anyone who is a fan of Digby's blogging to do so.

Some bloggers have a larger daily readership, but few have as much impact and influence on the content of our political dialogue as Digby does. And that, in my view, is a very good thing that ought to be maintained and encouraged.

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Atrios, whose blog has been down ever since he was hoodwinked by Blogspot into accepting the "quick, easy and painless" upgrade they have been offering (which I have been steadfastly resisting), is blogging temporarily here.

Instapundit's brave and principled stand for truth and accuracy.

By Blue Texan (Updated below) (Updated again)

By Blue Texan -- Glenn Reynolds aka "Mobius Dick" continued his tedious campaign against the free press today. Reflexive hostility to the press is a favorite staple of right wingers, so it's no surprise that this is an ongoing obsession of his. Since the war began, not satisfied with calling the media merely biased, Mobius Dick has accused the press of being objectively pro-terrorist on more than one occasion.

A rational person looks at our media and sees Fortune 500 corporations -- GE, Viacom, Disney, News Corp. Corporations that, by their very nature, are conservative. Corporations which actually financially benefit from war. Corporations which are cozy with political authority. Corporations which are driven by conservatives' beloved free market --- ratings and revenue --- over any political agenda.

A crazy person looks at our media and sees willing accomplices of jihadists and suicide bombers, eager to defeat the Great Satan, eager to humiliate the Great Leader and bring about the downfall of the West.

Mobius Dick, though he has insisted for over three years that the pro-terrorist media has been exaggerating the calamity that is the Great Leader's Iraq policy, has finally gotten around to facing reality and admits today that maybe we're not winning after all. But he's still angry.

Just because things are bad in Iraq doesn't justify false reports using phony sources, something that the AP's defenders seem to be suggesting. "Fake but accurate" isn't a standard to be raising, is it? The fact is that we've seen a massive institutional failure on the part of the media.

How can anyone who compiles a pathetic public record like this on Iraq claim to have the credibility or moral standing to lecture anyone else on failure? What about his many failures? I'm sorry, but anyone who promoted a bizarrely imaginary link between Timothy McVeigh and Saddam Hussein pretty much forfeits their standing to criticize anyone else's accuracy forever.

And his smug self-righteousness is that much more nauseating now that he's been proven wrong. While Mobius Dick glibly pecked his "Hehs" and "Indeeds" on his keyboard from the safety of East Tennessee while Iraq burned, real reporters were dying in Iraq, and in record numbers. Reporters that were telling the story he dismissed as anti-Bush and defeatist. The story that happened to be true.

Also, note his incessant, reductive use of the word, "the press" and "the media", as though that's a single entity. What media, Mobius Dick? Fox News? Rush Limbaugh? The New York Post? The Chicago Sun-Times? The National Review? The Wall Street Journal? NBC? Your blog?

What set Mobius Dick off today was fellow Bush follower and National Review editor Rich Lowery's admission that the mainstream media was right about Iraq and the Bush followers like Mobius Dick who were screaming media bias were wrong.

(This is a long quote, but it's so fun to read, again and again).

Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right -- that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war...

The "good news" that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone's heads in a full-scale civil war. An old conservative chestnut has it that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces are beset by violence. True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country's future is being waged.

In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation's will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.

And that explains this. That at least partially explains why Bush followers like Mobius Dick have done a tremendous disservice to their country -- and ironically, their own political party -- in propping up a failed policy, a failed war, a failed President. But really, what it comes down to is simple, base partisanship. Iraq was more a Republican war than any other, and it was to be the Great Leader's legacy.

And yet Mobius Dick is defiant still. In 20 years, when we speak of Iraq like Americans once spoke of Vietnam, people like Mobius Dick will still be blaming the media, just as the right today blames Walter Cronkite for losing Vietnam.

The only word that comes to mind is crazy.

UPDATE:

If you need any confirmation how delusional the far right is, check out the hostile reaction to Lowery's column in Town Hall. Amid the cries of "leftist" and "defeatism", right on cue, Walter Cronkite is yet again blamed for losing the Vietnam War:

If the MSM wants to report the bad news and also the good news, that would be okay. But when a popular talking head like Walter Cronkite gets on national tv and tells everybody that we have lost the war, when in fact that is totally false, that is determental to our national security. I also consider the blood of 3 million Vietnamese to be on his hands, along with his media cohorts! Cronkite wasn't reporting the news, he was making non-factual statements about the war based upon his ideology, which caused many people to die.

Ah, yes. You see, it wasn't that the communists had popular support in the south, or that the government we were propping up in Saigon was totally corrupt, or that the Vietnamese people viewed the US presence there as imperialism. No, it was all Walter Cronkite's fault. He is responsible for the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese. If it weren't for him, Vietnam would now be a Jeffersonian democracy, instead of one of the few remaining communist countries in the world.

Yep -- crazy.

2nd UPDATE:

For a related discussion, see this excellent analysis at Media Matters by Eric Boehlert. He concludes,

It's odd that warbloggers have expended an enormous amount of time and energy trying to pick apart a single source from a single, relatively brief AP dispatch, arguing that the misleading information in that article somehow calls into question all of the Iraq reporting, yet warbloggers have been relatively silent about the recent string of book-length critiques of the war. I'm thinking in particular about Thomas Ricks' excellent book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin Press, July 2006), which, in its first 100 pages, tells readers all they need to know about the botched war. Warbloggers either don't read books, or are so completely overwhelmed by the definitive evidence produced in a book like Fiasco, which relies heavily on sources from within the U.S. military to paint its convincing picture of Bush administration incompetence, that warbloggers simply have no choice but to turn away and focus their attention on evil AP stringers.

Indeed.

Quotes within quotes

By Nitpicker

By Nitpicker--For the record, I was all ready to write a post pointing out how, finally, Bush was coming around to reality in realizing that we are not winning in Iraq, as quoted by Washington Post reporter Peter Baker.

As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."

Thank God, I thought upon reading that. Bush has at least met the reality-based community halfway. This should be the Come to Jesus Moment those few Americans still hanging on to the shreds of this debacle.

But, unfortunately for both those who want this end this war and those interested in the current state of the American press, Bush didn't really sign on to this "formula," but you'll only know that if you look at the transcript.

WAPO: Are we winning in Iraq, in your estimation?

BUSH: You know, I think an interesting construct that General [Peter] Pace uses is, "We're not winning, we're not losing." There's been some very positive developments. And you take a step back and look at progress in Iraq, you say, well, it's amazing -- constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, which is a remarkable development in itself.

So, despite the fact that Bush is clearly quoted in the article, there should be quotes within those quotes. He never says he believes "we're not winning, we're not losing," but only describes Pace's "interesting construct" on the issue. Of the three Post reporters present, no one asks him whether he subscribes to that "construct" himself. Later, there is this follow up:

WAPO: Can we come back to General Pace's formulation about winning, not losing? You said October 24th, "Absolutely, we're winning." And I wanted to --

BUSH: Yes, that was an indication of my belief we're going to win...

You see, Bush clearly never backs Pace's view, but ducks and dodges as well as Clinton ever did. Regardless, the Post ran with the headline: U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time

I mocked right wing bloggers like John Hinderaker when they complained that Robert Gates' admission we weren't winning (or losing!) in Iraq wasn't news. It's clearly newsworthy when someone nominated by a president clearly disagrees with the president's stated position on something as important as the Iraq war, no matter how Tony Snow tries to spin it. But here you see an example of how the American media has devolved into a "gotcha" machine. The only news in this entire article was Bush's statement that he wanted to increase the size of the military. The rest was political fodder, questions designed to stock the quivers of Hannity and Colmes, Limbaugh and Franken, Hinderaker and me.

Those on the right will say that this is a sign of media bias, but that's a ridiculous argument. Ask Howard Dean--whom the press treated like a slipup slot machine--if the press only focuses its gotcha guns on the right. The truth is, the press has simply lost its sense of purpose. There are too few members of the Fourth Estate who understand the need to help Americans to make the important choices citizens must make in a democracy by giving their stories context; by discussing the ideas which drive (or should drive) our political debate; and, yes, by crying bullshit when necessary.

Do I think we're a nation led by a dolt? I most certainly do, but that doesn't mean I want the press feeding my beliefs or the beliefs of others by misrepresenting what is said. I want the truth. Those on the right will cry bullshit about the headline of the Post article and they'll be correct in doing so. The press needs to learn that the "media critics" on the right are, in a way, like the Iraqi insurgents: They will use a small error to create big damage. Every time a member of the press writes an article like this one, they give the right more ammunition to chip away at their credibility. From now until doomsday, Brent Bozell will always be able to fall back on "If the press is so balanced, then why did they say Bush said we're not winning in Iraq?" All he--and others like him--are looking for is an opportunity to cloud the issue, to give their believers on the right, as I've said, permission to not believe the press.

As I've admitted many times, I'm just a filthy blogger, a "fool" writing to "imbeciles" (as The Wall Street Journal's Joseph Rago would have it) and I'm not above mocking politicians or making the informational equivalent of a fart joke. But let me say this again: I'm just a filthy blogger. I am neither paid six figures to be credible (though I like to think I am, and for free) nor am I entrusted with an audience with one of the most important people in the world. It's damn hard for anything I write on my blog--or even here at this much more trafficked one--to influence the course of human events, which is one of the inevitable results of journalism in a democratic society. For example: The media, in general, failed to question this president appropriately before the war. So we got a war. Now it's mea culpas all around and promises of we'll do better next time and, meanwhile, another 12 people died in Baghdad.

There are journalists who are doing God's work. There are journalists who are risking their lives trying to tell us about the world (32 of them died in Iraq this year, which is why I get so pissed at some of the b.s. bias complaints of bedwetters who refuse to put their own asses on the line). But so much of our major American media refuses to treat their job as if it makes a difference. Corrupt politicians? Feh. Most of them are tiny, broken people who take their thirty pieces of silver and stow it away, hurting relatively few people in the process. We should be focusing on the corruption of our media, which, instead of the doing the hard work of finding the truth, spends most of their time saying Look! Shiny things! To make my case, I give you another excerpt from the transcript of Bush's interview with the Washington Post.

BUSH: You're the objective filter through which my -- (Laughter.)

WAPO: I suspect your message gets out. (Laughter.)

BUSH: I do want to say something about the press. I hope you realize that, one, I enjoy the relationship, and two, know it is vital for my presidency. You can't exist without me, and I can't exist without you. And I generally respect the hard work of the press corps. I don't necessarily generally respect every word you write, but nevertheless, I do respect the fact that you're a hardworking group of people seeking the truth. And we're necessary for each other. And that relationship can either be a positive relationship or a suspicious, harmful relationship. And I have worked hard to make it a positive relationship. And I think it is, generally, I do believe it is. And I bear no ill will, and I don't think you do, either.

WAPO: We appreciate that, and you've certainly been good for business --

Yuk yuk yuk. Bush is good for business. Division is good for business. Strife is good for business. War is good for business. Car wrecks are good for business. The search for the truth? Ideas? Borrrrriiiiinnnng.

Jon Stewart may have put it best: "A free and independent press...serves to inform the public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery."

Update: At Bush's press conference today, this exchange took place:

Q Mr. President, less than two months ago at the end of one of the bloodiest months in the war, you said, "Absolutely we're winning." Yesterday you said, "We're not winning, we're not losing." Why did you drop your confident assertion about winning?

THE PRESIDENT: My comments -- the first comment was done in this spirit: I believe that we're going to win; I believe that -- and by the way, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't have our troops there. That's what you got to know. We're going to succeed.

My comments yesterday reflected the fact that we're not succeeding nearly as fast as I wanted when I said it at the time, and that conditions are tough in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad.

He didn't back off of WaPo's take, so Blue Texan's point (in comments) that "we can assume from the context that Bush has partially, at least, backed off from his 'Of course we're winning' hard line" is dead on. Still, the journalism here was shoddy and symptomatic, in my opinion, of the larger issues raised. After all, who gives a damn whether Bush thinks we're winning or not? We're not. Everyone knows that. Put those three journalists to work figuring out something we don't know.

The death of another talking point.

By Blue Texan

By Blue Texan -- From today's New York Times ("General Opposes Adding to US Forces in Iraq"): (Updated below)

As the new secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, takes stock of the war in Iraq this week, he will find Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior commander in the Middle East, resistant to increasing the American fighting force there. General Abizaid...argues that foreign troops are a toxin bound to be rejected by Iraqis, and that expanding the number of American troops merely puts off the day when Iraqis are forced to take responsibility for their own security.

His assessment, which includes plans to increase the number of American trainers embedded with Iraqi units, is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, as well as by the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

George W. Bush, 6/28/05

Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.

Scott McClellan, 11/29/05

We will look to our commanders - and I think that's one thing the President will emphasize in his remarks, that it's our commanders who should be determining what our troop levels are in the country, and they make those decisions based on the conditions and circumstances on the ground and that those decisions should not be made by politicians in Washington.

George W. Bush, 11/30/05

These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders -- not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.

George W. Bush, 1/1/06

As the Iraqis are able to take more of the fight to the enemy, our commanders on the ground will be able to make a different assessment about the troop strength. And I'm going to continue to rely upon those commanders, such as General Casey, who is doing a fabulous job and whose judgment I trust, and that will determine -- his recommendations will determine the number of troops we have on the ground in Iraq.

George W. Bush, 2/1/06

So I will make my decisions based upon what these commanders tell me...And if they say these Iraqis are capable of taking the fight, they're there firsthand to tell me that, and then we'll reduce our troops based upon their recommendation, not based upon the politics in Washington, D.C.

Scott McClellan, 3/13/06

It's important to let our military commanders, who are in the best position, to manage the war on terrorism and to carry out the war on terrorism. They're the ones who are in the best position to call the shots.

George W. Bush, 3/13/06

And my decisions on troop levels will be made based upon the conditions on the ground, and the recommendations of our military commanders -- not artificial timetables set by politicians here in Washington, D.C.

Dick Cheney, 3/17/06

And as always, decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground and the judgment of our commanders -- not by artificial timelines set by politicians in Washington, D.C.

Scott McClellan, 3/23/06

Our commanders on the ground -- the President has made it very clear repeatedly that our commanders on the ground will make the determinations about our troop levels, based on conditions.

George W. Bush, 10/25/06

I trust our commanders on the ground to give the best advice about how to achieve victory.

George W. Bush, 10/25/06

Absolutely, we're winning.

George W. Bush 12/20/06

We're not winning, we're not losing.

UPDATE:

Via Atrios, Think Progress notes that John Kerry wanted to increase the size of the military in 2004, and President Bush insisted that his proposal would make us "less safe."

Swamped by Muslims

By Glenn Greenwald -- The following is a letter sent by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) to various constituents as a result of what his office claims is "a flood of e-mails from constituents in response to newly elected Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison’s declaration that he would use the Koran, not the Bible, when being sworn into Congress next month."

Unfortunately, I don't have much time to comment on this, but fortunately, not much comment is required, because it really speaks -- quite powerfully -- for itself. I wonder how long it will be before Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Fox News, National Review, Bill Kristol and friends start touting Rep. Goode for the GOP Presidential nomination:

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.

The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.

We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.”

Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Sincerely yours,
Virgil H. Goode, Jr.
70 East Court Street
Suite 215
Rocky Mount, Virginia 24151

I was particularly moved by the way Rep. Goode stood up to the inquiring, treasonous "Muslim student." That was very brave, powerful and resolute of Rep. Goode to stand his ground. Maybe he is the Churchill we've all been hungrily craving.

Also notable was how Rep. Goode pointed out that all of this -- our being "swamped" by Muslims -- is Bill Clinton's fault. Clinton hasn't been president for six years now. Republicans have had a stranglehold on the Congress for virtually all of that time. Yet the fact that we are drowning in Muslims and Korans and the like is all due to Bill Clinton.

If you look too hard at the specific individuals who compose our Government, it is difficult to maintain any residual sense of optimism about America's future. It's just best not to look too closely at the specific individuals, because what you will see are many, many Rep. Goodes floating around.

The right wing blogosphere's tender embrace of Tom DeLay.

By Blue Texan

By Blue Texan -- Everything you need to know about how morally corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and divorced from reality the conservative movement is today was on display last week when Tom "The Hammer" DeLay launched his new blog.

RedState, where DeLay had already been a regular contributor, invited him to analyze the results of the midterms, Right Wing News did a sickeningly fawning interview with him, and Glenn Harlan Reynolds aka "Mobius Dick" linked approvingly to a discussion between two Bush supporters about DeLay's blog.

One of the links, to Dr. Helen aka "Mrs. Mobius Dick," was melodramatically titled, "The Scarlet R" and began by attacking the mean, nasty "liberal" anonymous posters who had the gall to post insults on The Hammer's blog. She then quoted uncritically this passage from DeLay's interview at Right Wing News.

Quoth The Hammer,

When was the last time the Republicans or conservatives attacked the left for their outrageous comments or outrageous activities? We don't attack.

Apparently, neither Mrs. Dick or Right Wing News saw nothing at all ridiculous or surreal about Tom "The Hammer" DeLay claiming that Republicans don't attack, because Mrs. Dick wistfully added,

I am beginning to see that while it is admirable to hold facts and substance above attacking one's opponents views, it doesn't work...Maybe speaking up and not slinking around in shame would be a better strategy.

Indeed, Mrs. Dick, indeed! Conservatives like "The Hammer" should stop being such shrinking daisies, build some sort of media presence and get on offense for a change. Because, gosh darn it, it's time they stopped getting pushed around!

Maybe what conservatives need is a few dozen nationally-syndicated radio shows, a global 24-hour news network, some newspapers, blogs, maybe even some endowed think tanks at major universities. That way, good and honest conservatives could finally rebut those awful John Kerrys, Dick Durbins, Howard Deans, the Jimmy Carters, Michael J. Foxes and Barbara Streisands, the Dixie Chicks, the Cindy Sheehans and the Bill Mahers, the Dan Rathers, the 9/11 Widows, and the gay Teletubbies of the world, who keep annoyingly getting away with saying whatever they want, whenever they want, without being challenged by anyone.

Mrs. Dick bravely adds,

It seems like those with views other than liberal must wear the Scarlet R. Well, I will not hide any longer. If people want to call me a Republican, I will wear the label with pride with the R proudly displayed on my forehead whether it really fits or not, just to show my solidarity with those who are oppressed by such labels.

Let's just ignore the use of the word "oppressed" because it's so laughable. How astonishing that Mrs. Dick does not grasp the simple, basic, cause-and-effect relationship between the electorate's rejection of Republicans and the person she just lovingly cited, who led the GOP for the past decade, Tom DeLay.

The Tom DeLay who blamed the tragedy at Columbine on the teaching of evolution. The Tom DeLay who claimed that he's on the side of Jesus Christ. The Tom DeLay who diverted Homeland Security resources to track down Texas legislators. The Tom DeLay who was the highest-ranking member of Congress to face criminal prosecution. The Tom DeLay who poisoned our politics.

You wear that label with pride, Mrs. Dick!

It's also more than a little amusing that the right wing blogs who asked "The Hammer" to analyze why the GOP lost in November didn't happen to notice that exit polls indicated that corruption was a key factor, and that Tom DeLay was at the center of that corruption.

If the conservative base thinks really believes they lost because they weren't enough like Tom DeLay, I'm looking very forward to 2008.

Brownback's selective belief in openness

By Nitpicker

By Nitpicker--Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) is backing down on his opposition to the confirmation of Janet Neff. Neff, you may remember, is a Michigan judge nominated to a federal seat who *gasp* attended a same-sex "commitment ceremony."

Brownback first blocked a vote on Neff, then offered a deal: If she would recuse herself from all same-sex union cases, he'd lift his hold. Once it was pointed out to him (slowly, I presume) this was like saying people who've driven cars shouldn't adjudicate cases which deal with automobile accidents and, therefore, stupid, he backed off.

Still, Brownback says he'll likely vote against Neff's nomination and he'd "like to know more factually about what took place."

I've always been a person who believes that the personal and public lives of political figures should be considered separate except when someone's personal life highlights a specific hypocrisy. Add in a bit of the old "appearance of impropriety" and you've got probable cause to begin prying, in my book. Such is the case with Sam Brownback.

In order to supposedly understand the judge's views, Brownback is asking for a play-by-play of a ceremony a nominee for a federal court seat attended, despite the fact he has been a member of a secretive, extremist group for years, the rules of which require that he remain silent about it. This might be understandable behavior in an eighteen-year-old frat pledge, but when the person keeping secrets is a sitting senator, his group's leaders praise the "Hitler Concept" as an organizational tool and have connections to members of unfriendly foreign governments, this secrecy must be lifted.

The group is known primarily as "the Family." It was the focus of an excellent (if frightening) expose by Jeff Sharlet in the March 2003 Atlantic Monthly Harper's. An excerpt from the piece shows just how far outside the mainstream the group is. The group's leader, Doug Coe, explaining how the Family works to Kansas congressman Todd Tiahrt. Coe says it's based on

"A covenant...Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt's face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it's honor,” Doug said. “For us, it's Jesus.”

Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

Brownback, who wanted to get to the bottom of Judge Neff's partygoing habits, is a particularly powerful leader in this group and lived with other members of the group in a Washington, D.C., mansion at the unheard of D.C.-era rent of $600 a month, according to a separate Sharlet article. No one seems to have asked him about this great deal, however, or whether he believes that Jesus--or most Americans--would get behind a Christian schutzstaffel or al Qaeda in a religious "great leap forward."

I think Americans deserve to know more about this group's connections, its goals and Sam Brownback's leadership position within it. Someone who demands disclosure should also provide it--especially if he wants Americans to trust him with our nation's highest office. The journalists who cover him should demand it.

There's easy and then there's magic

By Nitpicker*

By Nitpicker--In the list of dumb things said about the Iraq War, Robert Pollock's claim that it's "not a hard thing" to push some soldiers into Iraq sooner and keep others there longer ought to be put somewhere below Rumsfeld's "I doubt (the war will last) six months" and above Tony Snow's claim that journalists were trying to "summarize a complex situation (Iraq) with a single word or gerund, or even a participle." In other words, it's better than dangerously blinkered monomania and worse than mush-brained understanding of the English language.

Why would Robert Pollock (who, as far as I can tell, has never had a job outside the Wall Street Journal editorial pipeline) think that it would be easy to find 40,000 soldiers lounging around just waiting to lose a leg? Because, he said, we do have 1.4 million troops.

Anyone who's served in uniform a day in their life just plotzed.

Robert Pollock is technically correct. According to the DoD (PDF link), we do have 1.4 million active duty service members. However, half of those service members are sailors and airmen (PDF link). They do not have the training required to serve as infantry riflemen or military police, the MOSs most needed in Iraq. Not to mention those 700,000 Navy and Air Force service members are already manning the ships and aircraft for which they've been trained. Does Pollock think they can simply switch? No?

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of squids and zoomies with sand in their shorts, but only that Pollock's suggestion that dropping 40,000 troops in Iraq wouldn't be hard is asinine.

Don't look to the Army to just do more, either. It's nearly broken. That's not me saying that, but the Army Chief of Staff.

And I can't even begin to explain the compassion-free nature of Pollock's statement. I'm sure he thinks he can feel soldiers' pain having spent five grueling years in the Wall Street Journal office in Brussels, but as someone who's been deployed in the past couple of years, I can assure you the unplanned-for extension of a soldier by even a month would drop like a lead weight on the families waiting patiently at home.

Still, as I've said before, none of these Magic Number Theorists can explain what the extra troops would actually do, but that doesn't keep them from baring their teeth and screaming for more blood.

Update: It seems the Joint Chiefs agree with me. There's no plan in this plan.

But the Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House review is not public.

The chiefs have taken a firm stand, the sources say, because they believe the strategy review will be the most important decision on Iraq to be made since the March 2003 invasion.

NOTE: Typos corrected.

* I want to thank Glenn for inviting me to guest blog here at Unclaimed Territory. I admit to being a bit surprised--I'm no lawyer and I'm a bit coarser than Glenn, but that's what you get when the military trains a welder's son to write. Come see me at Nitpicker.

Why does SMU's school of theology hate America?

By Blue Texan

By Blue Texan -- Last month, there was a minor uproar around the reality-based community blogs about leaked plans for the future George W. Bush Presidential Library, the cost of which was reported to be $500 million.

The library's obscene price tag and shady fundraising practices stirred predictable outrage on the left, but I'm all for it. If wealthy Republicans want to throw their money away in a hopeless effort to salvage the reputation of the Great Leader, I say -- the more the merrier. They'll just have that much less to give to Mitt Romney.

Anyway, the three finalists for the library are reported to be SMU in Dallas, Baylor in Waco and the University of Dallas, with SMU considered the favorite (insert Bob Jones University joke here).

But not everyone at SMU, the alma mater of Laura Bush and Harriet Miers, is happy about it. A blog at Texas Monthly obtained a letter to SMU's President, signed by "Faculty, Administrators and Staff " of the Perkins School of Theology contained this bit of unserious defeatism:

"We count ourselves among those who would regret to see SMU enshrine attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious: degradation of habeas corpus, outright denial of global warming, flagrant disregard for international treaties, alienation of long-term U.S. allies, environmental predation, shameful disrespect for gay persons and their rights, a pre-emptive war based on false and misleading premises, and a host of other erosions of respect for the global human community and for this good Earth on which our flourishing depends."

These people clearly haven't gotten the memo.

Various matters

A few matters worth noting (Personally and for the record, I don't count this as a violation of my necessary blogging hiatus, though, admittedly, reasonable people might disagree):

(1) Few people understand and critique neoconservatism better than the writers and editors of American Conservative Magazine (I've written two articles for them). Its Editor, Scott McConnell, has a superb article in the current issue which warns that neoconservatives -- though scorned and discredited -- are far from defeated and will have plenty of further opportunities to continue to wreak havoc in our country.

McConnell documents how "resilient and tactically flexible" neoconservatives have been -- they cater themselves and their advocacy opportunistically to fit the prevailing political circumstances -- and have little loyalty to the political figures to which they attach themselves. In the wake of neoconservatism's signature Iraq disaster, it is "likely to present a different public face."

The most current, pressing question is the extent to which they will influence the last two years of the Bush presidency, and in particular whether they will be able to cause escalation in Iraq and additional wars with Iran and/or Syria. McConnell provides an excellent guide of what is likely to come from this most pernicious movement.

(2) Barbara O'Brein performed jury duty last week in a criminal case in which the defendant was charged with the dastardly crime of possession of marijuana. She recounts the travesty of what occurred here. It is well worth reading not because her experience is unusual but because it isn't.

Our judicial system is plagued with towering and systemic flaws, but they receive relatively little public attention because only those who interact frequently with the legal system -- judges and lawyers -- are really aware of just how broken it is. Other than being an actual party to a civil litigation or criminal proceeding, jury duty provides the best glimpse into how the whole thing works, and Barbara's reaction is quite typical.

(3) Wired's Ryan Singel is attempting to force the White House's "Privacy and Civil Liberty Board" -- also known as the Lanny Davis Presidential Reverence Commission -- to disclose information it learned about the President's warrantless eavesdropping program. In particular, Single wants to discover how many Americans have been targeted by the warrantless eavesdropping program, information which, as he notes, is "something that the Justice Department has to do when the government bothers to get a warrant."

As I've noted before, we have transformed ourselves from a citizenry which expects and demands transparency in our government, to one which operates from the premise that our Government leaders should operate in secret and tell us only what they think we ought to know. Government secrecy ought to be the exception -- the rare exception -- not the rule.

(4) An update on the House of Death matter I am hoping to pursue further: I expect to have a few interview scheduled for this week, and will post both the podcast and transcript when they are available, and will write further about it when warranted.

(5) Here is an unnecessary reminder about how little Peggy Noonan knows, how her columns are driven by nothing but the most dreadful platitudes, and how wrong she is all the time (without ever remotely acknowledging any error). From her September 15, 2006 Wall St. Journal column -- with an assist from the equally cliche-dependent Kellyanne Conway -- on why Democrats will lose the midterm elections (something I delightfully stumbled into while searching for something else):

But I feel the Democrats this year are making a mistake. They think it will be a cakewalk. A war going badly, immigration, high spending, a combination of sentimentality and dimness in foreign affairs--everyone in the world wants to be free, and in exactly the way we define freedom at dinner parties in McLean and Chevy Chase--and conservative thinkers and writers hopping mad and hoping to lose the House.

The Democrats' mistake--ironically, in a year all about Mr. Bush--is obsessing on Mr. Bush. They've been sucker-punched by their own animosity.

"The Democrats now are incapable of answering a question on policy without mentioning Bush six times," says pollster Kellyanne Conway. " 'What is your vision on Iraq?' 'Bush lied us into war.' 'Health care? 'Bush hasn't a clue.' They're so obsessed with Bush it impedes them from crafting and communicating a vision all their own." They heighten Bush by hating him.

One of the oldest clichés in politics is, "You can't beat something with nothing." It's a cliché because it's true. You have to have belief, and a program. You have to look away from the big foe and focus instead on the world and philosophy and programs you imagine.

Mr. Bush's White House loves what the Democrats are doing. They want the focus on him. That's why he's out there talking, saying Look at me.

Because familiarity doesn't only breed contempt, it can breed content. Because if you're going to turn away from him, you'd better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don't appear to have one.

Which leaves them unlikely to win leadership. And unworthy of it, too.

That was, as Noonan pointed out, an extremely brilliant Republican strategy indeed -- have one of history's most unpopular Presidents, at the height of his unpopularity, make the midterm elections a referendum on him. And those stupid, hapless Democrats played right into Karl Rove's hands (as always) by falling into the trap and talking too much about Bush. That proved that not only would they lose the midterm elections, but that they were "unworthy" of victory. Onto the next column.

What happened to Instapundit's blog symposium on Iraq?

By Blue Texan

By Blue Texan --- "When three people tell you you're drunk, it's time to sit down." -- Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 6/18/2006

Greetings, fellow Unclaimed Territory readers. I'm Blue Texan from Austin, TX, and I can usually be found at my blog, Instaputz. And why is it called "Instaputz" you ask? It's exactly what you think: to taunt and ridicule Glenn Harlan Reynolds, aka "Instapundit" aka "Mobius Dick."

Anyway, it's great to be here. Many thanks to Glenn Greenwald for having me.

A couple weeks ago, with great fanfare, Mobius Dick announced that he was launching a blog symposium on Iraq. It was a damn good idea, too, because, as he noted again and again, those bunch of paper-pushing, inside-the-box thinkers in the Baker-Hamilton Group couldn't possibly come up with anything useful. I mean, a former Supreme Court Justice, two former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense---what the hell do they know?

Besides, a panel of actual experts is soooo pre-Army of Davids.

Anyway, when he made the announcement, Mobius Dick wrote,

"I'm going to try a blog symposium on Iraq, Iran, and Syria. I want some new ideas -- beyond 'cut and run' or 'stay the course' -- on things we're not doing that we should be doing."

Well, let's ignore for the moment the point that those two "ideas" aren't really ideas at all, but shallow GOP talking points, parroted by Bush followers like Mobius Dick to attack Democrats. And let's also put aside the fact that Democrats like Murtha, Kerry and Biden have been publicly offering alternative proposals on Iraq for months, while Mobius Dick labeled them traitorous disgraces and insisted that we were winning.

But the mighty 101st Fighting Keyboardists responded enthusiastically to Mobius Dick's call to action. Here at last was a chance for the Army of Davids to prove itself, and to snatch victory from the pro-terrorist MSM and Defeatocrats, and pave the way for the Great Leader's triumph in Iraq.

The centerpiece proposal of the symposium's first round was perfectly summed up by Mobius Dick himself thusly:

Bottom line: "Regime change. More of it."

In a nutshell, Mobius Dick's symposium concluded that our problem in Iraq is that we haven't invaded enough Arab countries. What we really need to do, pronto, is invade Syria, Iran, and possibly Saudi Arabia, and then we'll have those people right where we want them.

In your face, James A. Baker III!

As I noted at the time, the reaction in the blogosphere wasn't pretty. Conservative Andrew Sullivan called it "unhinged," Kevin Drum deemed it "insane," and another conservative blog, Balloon Juice, wrote that it was beyond parody. And those were the good reviews.

Strangely, there hasn't been a single word about the symposium from Mobius Dick since. After only one round, it appears it's all over. Has Mobius Dick lost interest? Has he lost faith in his Army of Davids? Is he busy grading papers or cutting a new album?

Maybe it's just that Mobius Dick realized that he's had too much neocon moonshine, and it was time to sit down.

I guess this solving Iraq thing is harder than it looks.

Winning hearts and minds

As you may recall, one of the primary "justifications" for invading Iraq was that we were going to reduce anti-American resentment in the Middle East -- which fuels terrorist recruitment -- and therefore make the world safer for our country. They were going to so appreciate everything we did for Iraq and Afghanistan that they would realize how great we were, like us much more, and therefore not want to attack us anymore. How is that going?

Attitudes toward the U.S. from those in the Arab world have suffered greatly as a result of American foreign policy in the region, according to an Arab American Institute/Zogby International poll released today . . .

In 2002, the favorability rating of the U.S. among Moroccans was 38%. Now it's 7%.

In 2002, the favorability rating of the U.S. among Jordanians was 34%. Now it's 5%.

In 2002, the favorability rating for the U.S. among Saudis and Egyptians was already so low -- 12% and 15% -- that it basically could not go any lower. And it has not, but it certainly has not improved either after four years of our grand wars of "liberation."

In particular, support for our "Iraq policy" commands 2% of the Saudi population (96% disapprove), 6% of Moroccans (93% disapprove), and 7% of Jordanians (86% disapprove). Those approval numbers are slightly higher -- slightly -- in Lebanon (16-73%) and Egypt (25-50%).

It is worth recalling here that the idea of winning Muslim "hearts and minds" in the Middle East was not the solution invented at an International Solidarity Conference sponsored by Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Kofi Annan, and Fidel Castro. This was the paramount goal which warmonger neoconservative insisted justified our invasion of Iraq and which President Bush himself has repeatedly identified as the central objective in our Epic Worldwide War of Civilizations.

In his best neocon-ese, the President recently attributed the September 11th attacks to "conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits. We saw the consequences on September the 11th, 2001, when terrorists brought death and destruction to our country, killing nearly 3,000 innocent Americans." And in the same speech, he warned:

The experience of September the 11th made it clear that we could no longer tolerate the status quo in the Middle East. We saw that when an entire region simmers in violence, that violence will eventually reach our shores and spread across the entire world. The only way to secure our Nation is to change the course of the Middle East -- by fighting the ideology of terror and spreading the hope of freedom.

Maybe the lesson to learn is that people do not like you better when you send your military into the middle of their region and invade, bomb, and occupy the country which is one of the most important to them religiously, geopolitically, culturally and historically. Doing that is more likely to increase your unpopularity rather than decrease it.

But I'm sure this problem will be solved once we start bombing Iran. Muslims will definitely appreciate our pro-democracy bombing campaign and their hearts and minds will finally be ours.

Blog news

I am currently working on my second book, the first deadline for which came and went on November 15 because the topic and focus of the book have changed somewhat. The book -- the details of which will be forthcoming shortly -- is being published by a large publishing house and, as a result, this new deadline, January 15, is hard, real and cannot be missed.

In order to finish the book by that date, it is necessary for me to drastically reduce the amount of time and energy I devote to this blog over the course of the next several weeks. I'm not going to disappear completely during this time -- having developed an addiction to daily blogging, I doubt that would be possible even if I tried -- but I am going to have to reduce the frequency of my posts.

As a result, I've arrange for two guest bloggers (so far) to begin posting here on Monday, both of whom are among my favorite bloggers whom I read daily -- Anonymous Liberal, who has guest blogged here several times before, and Blue Texan, whose blog is devoted to critiquing the mindset of the Bush follower via his extremely insightful and quite amusing focus on one particular Bush-following blog. I will likely have one other as yet-unknown guest blogger.

As indicated, I will be posting here and there during this time -- a couple of times a week at least. Blogging will resume in full force as soon as I finish the book.

What does this say about their judgment?

People like Mickey Kaus, David Frum, Glenn Reynolds, and National Review's Andrew McCarthy and Byron York have spent the last week disseminating claims that the Clinton administration eavesdropped on Princess Diana. They've been insinuating all sorts of wrongdoing based on these reports, all which came from unreliable British press accounts.

Some of them -- Kaus and York in particular -- were spewing all sorts of speculative accusations that the Clinton administration broke the law and that the real target of the eavesdropping was Diana's boyfriend, New York billionaire Ted Forstmann. That led Kaus to speculate that the whole thing was all a plot by Hillary, because Forstmann was a potential rival for her Senate seat and she wanted to eavesdrop on his conversations with Diana for that reason.

The official British Government investigative report was released today, and as it turns out -- and as was painfully predictable -- the whole story is a sham, completely untrue. As York is forced to admit today: "Did the Clinton Administration Spy On Princess Diana? No." And Frum: "The bugging Diana story turns out to be a hoax or anyway an error. " And Kaus: "That official police report on Diana's death appears to be a bust, as far as alleging spying by the Clinton Administration on Republican magnate Ted Forstmann."

But just look at what these individuals said over the past week -- the kinds of accusations and insinuations they so recklessly spewed. Kaus, for instance, spent virtually the entire week hysterically spitting out one vapid conspiracy theory after the next about the entire matter, repeatedly citing Drudge and similar gossip rags (breathless emphasis in original):

The Brit papers are breaking the story that the Clinton-administration "secret service"** secretly bugged Princess Diana "over her relationship with a US billionaire" Ted Forstmann. Initial questions: What was the grave high-level concern about Forstmann, a big-deal investor, Republican, and education activist? ... What, were they worried Diana might endorse school choice?*** ... And did they have a warrant? ... Plus, of course: What did the Clintons know, etc.?... Intriguingly, Forstmann once made noises about running against Hillary Clinton in 2000. ...

***KEY UPDATE*** Even better, according to a September 15 , 2006 New York Daily News story [via NEXIS]:

CLAIMS THAT Princess Diana dreamed of moving into the White House as America's First Lady were confirmed yesterday by a source close to the politically minded mogul she hoped would take her there.

Update: Carefully worded U.S. denials here. ...

More: The NSA is "working on a statement"! ...

Observed Kaus: "Wow. I guess there's no way Hillary and Bill would be interested in what Forstmann and Diana were saying to each other, is there? ... See also. ...[via Drudge] ... " And on and on . . .

Then we have National Review's Byron York, who wrote one of the most amazing "news" articles I've seen in an awhile, with the headline: "What the new revelations could mean." The whole article is nothing but a series of speculative claims discussing all the laws which the Clinton administration may have broken and all of the nefarious plots they were pursuing, all based on a series of hypotheticals about what they "might" have done:

Forstmann is what is known in the intelligence/legal world as a “U.S. person.” If there were a conversation between him, in the United States, and Diana, outside the United States, it would resemble, at least in structure, the conversations between people in the United States and those in foreign countries that have been at the center of the controversy over what President Bush calls the terrorist-surveillance program and what Democrats call “domestic spying.” . . .

If the Clinton administration did engage in surveillance of Diana/Forstmann, it is not clear if it was done with or without a warrant. . . .

If the Clinton administration did engage in surveillance of Princess Diana and Theodore Forstmann, without a warrant, it would appear to run contrary to statements made by former administration officials during the Bush warrantless-wiretap controversy. . . .

Nevertheless, the law required that the administration seek a warrant if it intended to wiretap a U.S. person’s — in this case Forstmann’s — communications.

Then we have Glenn Reynolds, who reliably is at the center of every baseless accusation and dirt-mongering story: "MICKEY KAUS is staying on the Diana-bugging story." And Reynolds again:

MICKEY KAUS: "The Brit papers are breaking the story that the Clinton administration 'secret service' ** secretly bugged Princess Diana 'over her relationship with a US billionaire' Ted Forstmann. Initial questions: What was the grave high-level concern about Forstmann, a big-deal investor, Republican, and education activist? ... What, were they worried Diana might endorse school choice?*** ... And did they have a warrant?" I'm guessing the answers are no, and no.

UPDATE: Lots of updates to Kaus's post, so be sure you follow the link.

Meanwhile Byron York has more on the Diana-bugging story. Is this what Sandy Berger was trying to cover up?

Then there is Andrew McCarthy, in the Corner: "To echo Byron's excellent piece today, the breathtaking hypocrisy of those who played partisan politics with our national security by railing about the NSA's terrorist surveillance program has long been evident. . . .Would that the mainstream press took time out from Bush-bashing to cover it."

John Hinderaker: "I agree with Mickey that, while, absent Diana, Forstmann's political ambitions would have been a long shot at best, this would explain why the Princess could have been a source of anxiety to the Clinton regime."

I could go on like that all day. I won't even mention David Frum (too late), who -- before the "story" was even a few hours old -- demanded to know why all of those opposed to Bush's illegal eavesdropping on Americans hadn't condemned Clinton's legal eavesdropping on a British citizen. Frum, at least, had the decency today to sheepishly acknowledge his error.

Here is the real point: like anyone who blogs, I get email tips and links every day to all sorts of sensationalistic claims and stories. Sometimes those stories are not merely floating around in the Internet gossip swamps frequented by Mickey Kaus (places like Drudge and Lucianne), but can be found in perfectly legitimate media outlets.

But having "judgment" means that you are able to discern what stories are likely credible and what ones aren't. Nobody is going to be perfect in that regard, but you at least make the effort. You don't just leap like a drooling, rabid bat for every story that reflects poorly on political figures you dislike, and then use it to unleash every irresponsible accusation and speculative charge your brain can churn out.

So often, preliminary, sketchy stories like this are plainly unreliable, just wrong. And that was clearly the case with this "Diana spying" story from the beginning.

What kind of judgment do these people have that they have been running around for the last several days all but accusing the Clinton administration of lawbreaking and dark eavesdropping plots? That, of course, led to the standard campaign to start heaping all the blame on Hillary and her amoral, monstrous quest for political power.

Fox News linked to York's National Review original article, touting it as a story suggesting the need for a "Clinton probe" over wiretapping. Between the multiple National Review items (York, Frum, McCarthy), Instapundit, Kaus at Slate, the Fox link, not to mention all the right-wing blogs linking to them -- how many people were subjected to this completely baseless innuendo, all of which was designed to suggest that Bush's eavesdropping is unnoteworthy because Clinton did the same (if not worse) and/or that Hillary illegally bugged poor Princess Diana all for selfish political reasons, etc.

It was so obvious from the beginning that there were gaping holes in the story and that the "sources" for it were extremely unreliable. York even prefaced his article with this acknowledgment: "The first thing to remember in trying to evaluate reports that U.S. intelligence services wiretapped Princess Diana is that British press accounts can be notoriously unreliable."

But that isn't good enough. In fact, that makes it worse. Gossip columnists pass on rumors. Responsible, credible analysts, political pundits, and journalists do not. And they certainly don't spend day after day, like Kaus did (with Reynolds cheering on every word) building one scurrilous accusation after the next based on chatter.

Among Bush followers, making up false stories about political opponents and loudly broadcasting them to the world does not seem to undermine the credibility of those who do it. It actually seems to have the opposite meaning; it seems to be viewed as a virtue.

It is to be expected that such fabrications would seem to satiate those who want nothing more than to have their immovable political biases fed with mindless bile. But at some point, do other more independent types (if there are any left who read them) actually start to assess what behavior like this says about the judgment and credibility of those who are doing it?

Media as adversary to the government

(updated below)

The Iranian President convened a convention this week to "debate" whether the Holocaust occurred, whether it is exaggerated, etc. In reporting on this event, The New York Times did not simply convey the views of both sides, but instead, declares definitively that one side of the "debate" -- the side of the Holocaust deniers -- ignores evidence, uses discredited sources, and relies upon false claims:

Iran’s so-called Holocaust conference this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider the historical record and, thereby, the legitimacy of Israel. But why would the Iranians invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars?. . . .

The two-day meeting included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened.

By pointing out the reality that the Holocaust denialists are making false and unsupportable claims, the Times is not reporting this incident in a "biased" or subjective way. It is not being unfair to the holocaust deniers by siding against them. To the contrary, even though it is clearly siding with one side over the other in terms of whose statements are truthful, the article is reporting on this issue objectively, because it reports the objectively verifiable fact that the arguments advanced by holocaust denialists are simply false.

That is what objective and meaningful reporting requires -- not merely uncritically conveying what statement a person makes, but scrutinizing that statement for accuracy and clearly reporting if it is false. That is what the Times did here by labelling the denialists' claims "fantasy" and pointing out the fact that their claims are contradicted by abundant documentation. And it would be hard to find many people who would object to how the Times reported on this "debate."

But in general, journalists are willing to engage in this sort of meaningful reporting only when doing so is completely uncontroversial and risk-free, usually because the person whose statements are labelled false is universally reviled. National journalists virtually never subject statements from government officials to this sort of scrutiny, and virtually never label such statements as "fiction," or point out that they are contradicted by all available evidence, even when that is plainly true. That, of course, is why government officials lie with impunity -- because they know that journalists will not report that they are lying.

All of this is the by-product of the well-documented and much-discussed journalistic myth that "objectivity" requires mindless recitation of both sides's claims, and that it is improper and "biased" to take sides. But as the Times article above documents, objectivity and meaningful journalism often requires taking sides, particularly where one side is making objectively false statements.

Journalists are not the only ones laboring under this misconception. In response to my post yesterday regarding the adversarial function which a healthy press performs, several Bush followers equated a belief that the press ought to be "adversarial" to the government with a desire for "agenda journalism" (Bush followers have a handy cliche for every issue), i.e., with a belief that journalists should be "partisan" by siding with one side of a political debate over another.

That just isn't what "adversarial" means. An adversarial press does not mean that the media automatically and reflexively contradicts what the Government says or does. That is called being a mindless "contrarian," not "adversarial."

An adversarial process is designed to uncover deceit and falsehood by ensuring that claims and arguments are subjected to meaningful scrutiny by some opposing force. An adversarial press means that it views its function as a watchdog over the Government, as a check on its power. It fulfills that function by viewing Government statements and actions skeptically and with the intent to scrutinize them and determine their truth, rather than mindlessly convey what the Government asserts. It means that there is a difference between a free press and Pravda.

The media abdicates its function, and becomes a propaganda arm of the government, when it simply repeats verifiably false Government claims without pointing out, as the Times did with respect to holocaust denial arguments, that the statements are false and objectively contradicted by clear evidence. And our media does that all the time.

It fails in its function to report objectively when it simply conveys claims from the Government that we invaded Iraq only once Saddam refused to allow U.N. inspections, that Democrats oppose eavesdropping on terrorists (rather than oppose eavesdropping without warrants), that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda, that Denny Hastert forced Mark Foley to resign once he learned about his IMs with pages, that the President only decided to fire Rumsfeld after the midterm election, etc.

Such Government claims -- like Holocaust denial claims (but without equating them) -- are all examples of: (a) factually and verifiably false assertions by the Government (b) for which there is no reasonable basis, yet the media repeatedly recites these statements without pointing out the fact that they are false. Adversarial reporting would mean not that the media sides against the Government in every case, but only that they scrutinize and investigate the Government's claims and then clearly report when they are false. The only "agenda" being pursued is a refusal to allow the Government to mislead citizens.

This is not some exotic new theory of the media's function. There is a reason that the Founders included in the First Amendment absolute protections of a free press. It's because a free press plays an indispensable role in imposing checks on the Government. But it does so only when it is adversarial, not when it uncritically recites the Government's views. Thomas Jefferson explained that long ago in a letter to George Washingon:

No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.

The Founders viewed the press as a "censor" of the Government, as an opposing force, not as some mindless vehicle for reciting and disseminating the Government's claims. It serves as a check on government deceit and abuses of power only when it sees itself as something more than a microphone for the Government to use to amplify its statements.

The view of Bush followers and most journalists has become that it constitutes improper "agenda journalism" for the press to report when government officials are making false statements or engaging in deceitful acts. But there is no such thing as objective or meaningful journalism where the media turns itself into nothing more than a venue for government claims to be broadcast without scrutiny and critique. Really, none of these propositions should even be controversial, let alone systematically ignored by the media.

UPDATE: There were many times, in 2002 and 2003, when I read The New York Times in hard-copy form delivered to my door, where the entire front page would be nothing but articles which began with "The Bush administration yesterday said" or "A senior administration official told The New York Times yesterday that . . . " And the story wasn't just that "the Government said X." The story was "X" itself, reported as fact, with the only source being what the Government said (a classic case of such "reporting" is here, from the Post). That is when the media is indistinguishable, by definition, from Pravda.

And, via Capt in Comments, here is Justice Hugo Black's Concurring Opinion in New York Times v. U.S. (the Pentagon Papers case) (emphasis added):

In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.

The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

There are some exceptions still, but that description of the core function to be performed by the press is indescribably distant from what the press actually does.

UPDATE II: Gator90 re-writes the Times article on the Holocaust denialists in order to make it comport to our modern rules of journalism.

A judicial victory for the Leader

The first court decision (.pdf) to interpret and apply the legislative atrocity known as the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" was issued yesterday in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The decision was a major victory for the Bush administration's attempt to vest the President with the power to imprison individuals -- even for life -- without according them any meaningful opportunity to contest the validity of their imprisonment.

The district court ruled that (1) the MCA successfully stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed by "war on terrorism" detainees, and (2) under controlling Supreme Court precedent, "enemy aliens" who have no substantial connection to the U.S. (i.e., never resided inside the U.S.) have no constitutional right to seek habeas corpus review. As a result, the court dismissed the case of the Guantanamo detainee seeking habeas review here and, in essence, upheld the Bush administration's power to detain such "enemy combatants" forever while denying the detainees all access to our courts.

Several observations about this decision:

(1) The plaintiff-detainee in this case is Salim Ahmed Hamdan -- the same Hamdan whose case led to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year that the Bush administration's Guantanamo military commissions violated both federal law and the Geneva Conventions, the decision which led to enactment of the Military Commissions Act. The ruling yesterday was the result of Hamdan's case returning to the district court level once the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be tried in the Guantanamo military commissions established by the administration prior to enactment of the MCA.

Hamdan, who acted as a driver on occasion for Osama bin Laden, vehemently denies the administration's accusation that he was involved in a "conspiracy" to commit terrorist acts (the only charge against him). He has been in U.S. custody since late 2001, and in Guantanamo since early 2002. He has been seeking the right to prove his innocence by petitioning our federal courts for habeas corpus relief.

Once the MCA was enacted, the Bush administration moved to dismiss all habeas corpus petitions -- including Hamdan's -- on the ground that Congress has now stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear such claims. The ruling yesterday granted that motion and dismissed Hamdan's petition.

(2) The judge who issued this ruling is District Judge James Robertson, a Clinton appointee who ruled originally that Hamdan could not be tried before a Guantanamo military commission that had not been authorized by Congress (it was that ruling that ended up in the Supreme Court). Robertson also is the federal judge who resigned from the FISA court in protest of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program.

Clearly, Robertson's ruling is not the by-product of pro-administration sentiment. Rather, he obviously felt constrained to enforce the MCA by his (not necessarily correct) understanding of controlling Supreme Court authority on the question of whether accused enemy aliens -- who have been detained on foreign soil and who have no connection to the U.S. -- have a constitutional right to access U.S. federal courts for habeas corpus petitions. Robertson's ruling that they have no such constitutional right (and that Congress therefore has the power to deny habeas access to such aliens under the MCA) is what led him to dismiss Hadman's petition.

(3) The judge did not rule that the MCA constitutes a general "suspension" of the right of habeas corpus under the Suspension Clause of Art. I, Sec. 9. Quite the contrary, the court found that Congress did not intend to suspend habeas corpus, and, independently, that Congress could not constutionally suspend the right of habeas corpus (because there is no "rebellion or invasion" as required by the Constitution).

Rather than having "suspended" habeas corpus rights, the court ruled that Congress intended with the MCA only to block federal courts from entertaining habeas petitions from alien detainees. Thus, the question which the court was required to answer was this: Do aliens -- who have no connection to the U.S. and who are detained outside of the U.S. -- have a constitutional right to habeas corpus (which no Congressional statute could deny)?

To answer that question, the court relied upon prior Supreme Court rulings -- in particular the 1950 case of Eisentrager v. Johnson, which dismissed habeas corpus petitions brought by German nationals who were convicted of war crimes in China by a post-WWII U.S. military tribunal. Judge Robertson concluded that, under Eisentrager, aliens with no U.S. connections have no constitutional right to bring habeas corpus petitions, and Congress is therefore permitted to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to entertain such petitions.

(4) Whether this ruling is correct largely depends upon how one understands the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush, the 2004 case in which the Supreme Court held that Guantanamo detainees have the right of habeas corpus.

The Rasul court held that the statute which provides habeas jurisdiction to federal courts (28 U.S.C. 2241) includes not only petitions filed by U.S. citizens, but also petitions filed by aliens, and applies even to aliens detained in territories over which the U.S. maintains "complete jurisdiction and control" even if not ultimate sovereignty (i.e., Guantanamo Bay, Cuba). That is how Guantanamo detainees have been filing habeas petitions -- because Rasul ruled that the habeas jurisdiction statute applies to petitions brought by aliens.

But it was the Rasul Court's decision which Congress sought to overturn by enacting the MCA, which expressly amends the habeas statute to strip federal courts of the jurisdiction found by Rasul. The plaintiff here argued that Rasul recognized not only a statutory right for aliens to file habeas petitions, but also a constitutional right to do so. Judge Robertson disagreed.

(5) As Lyle Denniston notes, Judge Robertson's ruling heavily depends upon the fact that Hamdan has no established connections to the U.S. -- i.e., he never voluntarily entered the U.S., never resided here, etc. The decision makes clear (albeit in a non-binding way) that any alien who (unlike Hamdan) does have strong ties to the U.S. (such as legal residents here in the U.S.) would have a constitutional right to petition a court for habeas corpus relief and Congress could not deny that right.

Thus, at least according to this ruling, it is unconstitutional for Congress to deny legal residents (such as Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri) access to federal courts for habeas petitions. Since the MCA does purport to strip even legal residents of that right, Judge Robertson's ruling, in essence, concluded that that part of the MCA is unconstitutional.

The MCA does not purport to strip habeas rights for U.S. citizens. Thus, if Judge Robertson's decision is correct and upheld, it would mean that (a) U.S. citizens, along with alien detainees who have a substantial connection to the U.S., would have the right to file habeas petitions in federal court, but (b) alien detainees with no such connection (the overwhelming majority of detainees in U.S. custody) would have no such right.

(6) It is quite possible -- assuming the make-up of the Supreme Court remains the same -- that the Court will reverse this ruling by holding that all alien detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus review (Justice Stevens, in his majority Rasul opinion, clearly laid the foundation for such a ruling, if he did not in fact already make it). There are multiple other grounds on which this ruling specifically, and the constitutionality of the MCA generally, may be vulnerable on appeal.

(7) The principal fault here lies with the 109th Congress (and, of course, the administration it so faithfully served), not with Judge Robertson (unfortunately, whether there is a constitutional habeas right for aliens with no connection to the U.S. is, under controlling Supreme Court precedent, less than crystal clear).

What is so radical and indescribably regressive is the Congress' enactment of a law which expressly denies habeas rights to everyone in the world other than U.S. citizens. Not only did the Founders repeatedly emphasize that the right of habeas corpus is the most critical safeguard against tyranny from the Executive branch (and never drew any distinction between citizens and non-citizens), but the statute granting habeas jurisdiction to federal courts (sec. 2241) was the very first statute ever enacted by the U.S. (in 1789) which bestowed jurisdiction to the federal courts. That is how paramount a right the Founders believed habeas petitions to be.

The history of our country has been to progressively extend and expand habeas rights, not to restrict them. As Rasul explained (emphasis added):

Congress has granted federal district courts, “within their respective jurisdictions,” the authority to hear applications for habeas corpus by any person who claims to be held “in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.” 28 U.S.C. § 2241(a), (c)(3). The statute traces its ancestry to the first grant of federal court jurisdiction: Section 14 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized federal courts to issue the writ of habeas corpus to prisoners “in custody, under or by colour of the authority of the United States, or committed for trial before some court of the same.” Act of Sept. 24, 1789, ch. 20, §14, 1 Stat. 82.

In 1867, Congress extended the protections of the writ to “all cases where any person may be restrained of his or her liberty in violation of the constitution, or of any treaty or law of the United States.” Act of Feb. 5, 1867, ch. 28, 14 Stat. 385. See Felker v. Turpin, 518 U.S. 651, 659—660 (1996). . . . As it has evolved over the past two centuries, the habeas statute clearly has expanded habeas corpus “beyond the limits that obtained during the 17th and 18th centuries.” Swain v. Pressley, 430 U.S. 372, 380, n. 13 (1977).

The MCA -- passed in a pre-election frenzy with virtually no thought or deliberation -- drastically reverses that 210-year trend and deliberately seeks to limit habeas rights as narrowly as possible. Put another way, it seeks to vest the maximum possible power in the President to order people imprisoned -- even for life -- with no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations against them or the treatment to which they are subjected. That, as has been repeatedly noted, is a power which not even the British King possessed.

It is one thing to warn of these abuses in the abstract. But we will start to see more and more actual cases of human beings who -- as a result of the MCA -- face life imprisonment under the most inhumane conditions imaginable based on nothing more than George Bush's unreviewed accusation that they are Guilty of Terrorism. The attack on our national character, and the abandonment of our most defining values, continues unabated.

UPDATE: The Washington Post's article on the decision is here. Statements from lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights are here.

War advocates v. flatworms

(updated below)

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, today:

DAVE WEIGEL NOTES the Ohio gun control rollback that I mentioned earlier and observes: "this is just one policy area where Democrats have finally caved to the libertarian consensus, to avoid another decade of drubbings over the gun issue."

Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain. Which means that political parties eventually manage, too.

Talking Points Memo, today:

Just to put things in perspective... with public approval solidly in the 20s, the war in Iraq is now less popular than a bevy of social issues that have long been considered political poison for Democrats. Imagine if a Democratic president and Congress had made any of these issues their #1 priority, as Bush has with Iraq.

And they wonder why they lost the election?

The Iraq War is less popular than gay marriage, legalizing pot, banning handguns, and rescinding the death penalty.

Rich Lowry, National Review, today:

This LA Times piece Kathryn noted says the Pentagon favors a surge [it reports: "strong support has coalesced in the Pentagon behind a military plan to 'double down" in the country with a substantial buildup in American troops"].

This Washington Post story says the State Department favors a surge: "Other options under consideration include a short-term increase of 15,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to secure Baghdad, a plan supported by the State Department..."

The New York Times has Hadley talking up a surge: "The idea of a surge has been raised repeatedly by Stephen J. Hadley."

Not only is the Iraq War itself less popular than legalizing pot, gay marriage and gun control (which Instapundit notes is so politically unpopular that even a flatworm would be smart enough to avoid supporting it), but the specific proposal which seems to be the administration's leading contender right now -- adding 20,000 more troops as part of a "surge" -- is so unpopular that it is literally about as fringe as a view can be in the U.S. (its support ranges from 8% to 16%).

Even the craziest, most despicable ideas can attract more than 8%-16% in polls. More and more Republicans realize the grave political danger posed to them by this war. Are they going to just sit by and let the President sink their party for a generation by "doubling down" and continuing to worship at the altar of its most extremist warmonger elements?

Lowry notes that the "only" group opposed to more troops is the military, specifically Generals Abazaid and Pace, which leads to a glaring question that never seems to be answered by the increase-troop proponents: namely, what are these additional 20,000 troops supposed to accomplish exactly? If Generals Abazid and Pace have no answer to that question, isn't it a pretty good bet that there is no good answer?

What the dead-ender war advocates really seem to crave is not so much an increase in troops but an increase in our willingness to use military force -- i.e., indiscriminate killing. When they urge greater "resolve" to achieve "victory," they don't really talk about strategies that increased troops could enable as much as they excitedly beat their chest and spit out extremely vague and manly phrases such as: "do we have the will to do what needs to be done"?

The only specific plan one ever hears from them is that we can go and kill Moqtada al-Sadr, but that is certainly something we can accomplish without more troops. Independently, is killing one of the most popular and powerful Shiite leaders really going to help stabilize Iraq and help us achieve our goals? While that would be very emotionally and psychologically fulfilling to some, doesn't that choice seem far more likely to have the opposite effect -- which is almost certainly the reason we haven't done it since 2003?

The problem with fighting insurgencies, of course, is that they are blended into the population itself. They aren't sitting in a field somewhere waiting to be engaged by more brigades. The problem we've had isn't a lack of desire and attempt to kill insurgents. That's what our soldiers have been doing in Iraq for almost four years now. The problem is that you can't actually end insurgencies using military force without using extremely indiscriminate force that slaughters enormous numbers of civilians, and flattening whole neighborhoods wholesale is one of the few things we haven't done during the Bush presidency.

Isn't all this talk about "more resolve" and "doing what needs to be done" -- while it is masquerading around as a strategic call for "more troops" -- really about demanding that we step up the indiscriminate bombing, violence and killing, including -- especially -- of civilians, based on the theory, as immoral as it is misguided, that that is the real way we will "win the war" and drive "our enemies into submission"?

As bad as this war is being managed now, the only thing that's certain is that whatever "new way forward" the President is about to embrace is only going to make things much, much worse. Everything he does has that effect.

UPDATE: Via Blue Texan, this is what a flatworm looks like:

The Washington Post and authoritarianism -- then and now

The more one thinks about The Washington Post's warm editorial embrace yesterday of Augusto Pinochet (as well as its affirmation of Jeane Kirkpatrick's general affection for right-wing dictatorships), the more extraordinary it seems. Few events illustrate quite as vividly the complete corruption of our journalistic institutions, as well as just how fundamentally the political spectrum has shifted over the last decade, and particularly during the Bush presidency.

Both in theory and in practice, The Washington Post -- as the most influential newspaper in the nation's capital -- has been a vitally important check on the power of the federal government. Its greatest successes and contributions have been when it has acted as an adversarial force balancing abuses of power by national political officials. That is the core function which newspapers are intended to perform, and the Post has a long and illustrious history of performing it as well as any other newspaper.

Those who have political power are naturally seduced by the temptations of tyranny. That's why our entire system of government is structured so as to provide as many mechanisms as possible to check and limit that temptation, with newspapers being one of the most critical opposing forces. Politicians will naturally err on the side of exceeding the proper limits of their power, and balance is achieved when adversarial branches -- led by newspapers -- err on the side of opposing audacious and novel exercises of government power.

That is why it is so jarring and amazing to read the Editorial Page of the Washington Post -- in the form of Fred Hiatt -- defend and laud one of the most vicious and reprehensible tyrants of the last 30 years.

What kind of media do we have where one of the most prominent editorial voices views the slaughter of political opponents, pervasive torture, death squads, state-sponsored terrorism, military coups, and merciless, bloody tyranny as nothing more than some necessary, perhaps unfortunate measures, benevolently invoked to preserve order and mitigated -- even justified -- by the pursuit of free market economics? That is just perverse for anyone to argue, but particularly perverse for a newspaper editorial page.

It is not the least bit surprising to see the National Review hold a "symposium" in which its authoritarian-loving participants gush with admiration for the lawless and violent despotism of Augusto Pinochet. That is who they are.

But to see the "centrist" Post Editorial Board join them in paying homage to this despicable, murderous dictator -- a tyrant who, even ten years after his coup, was so brutal and inhumane that even the dictator-loving Reagan administration eventually tried to help push him out of power -- reveals all one needs to know about how radical our political dialogue and newspapers have been transformed in a relatively short period of time.

Just compare yesterday's pro-Pinochet Post Editorial to what the pre-Fred Hiatt/Donald Graham Washington Post used to say about Augusto Pinochet -- there are all from the Editorial Page (via NEXIS):

September 11, 1983:

Some tens of thousands of Chileans were killed outside the law, many others were imprisoned and exiled, the natural political tendencies of the country were suppressed, and an economic system was imposed that has meant extreme hardship for most of the people.

For turning a national crisis into an excuse for personal dictatorship, Gen. Pinochet will not be forgiven. It explains why most of his countrymen, believing his continuance in power to be a national disgrace, have turned against him now.

November 25, 1984:

TO CONTINUED criticism of its harsh state of siege, Chile's government responds by pointing to the spread of terrorism in the country in recent months. . . .

Of the hundreds of Chileans arrested and either detained or sent into internal exile, none -- at least until yesterday's massive police sweeps -- has been charged as a terrorist. The independent organizations, meanwhile, are convinced that Gen. Pinochet exploited the threat of terrorism to default on his pledges of liberalization.

Over a period of years, moreover, much of Gen. Pinochet's rule has deserved to be called state-sponsored terrorism: murders, disappearances, torture.

April 12, 1985:

Is Chile going back to the death squads? Seven political opponents of the Pinochet regime were seized on the streets in broad daylight the other day. Three were found dead the next morning, their throats cut, and four were released, having been tortured. . . .

Nearly 15 years after Gen. Pinochet seized power, Chile is foundering. Even before last month's cruel earthquake, the Chilean "economic miracle," which was just the opposite of a miracle to the classes that paid for it, had long since yielded to pervasive hardship, depression, inflation and indebtedness.

April 13, 1986:

Human rights conditions in Chile, which had gravely deteriorated in 1984, remained at least as poor if not worse in 1985 despite the lifting June 16 of the seven-month state of siege. Abuses in the country occurred on such a broad scale throughout the year that Pinochet's rights record ranks Chile as the worst violator in South America . . . .

July 9, 1986:

THE CHANCE DEATH of a 19-year-old with Washington connections has given Americans a rare glimpse of the condition of state terrorism prevailing in Chile. Rodrigo Rojas graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and recently returned to visit his native country, which his mother had fled as a political refugee.

He was in a group of students entering one of the slums that army units regularly invade and terrorize. Soldiers grabbed him and a companion, beat them, doused them with an inflammable fluid, set them afire and dumped them by a road. When they were finally brought to a hospital, they were denied suitable treatment. Mr. Rojas died last Sunday.

October 31, 1986:

THERE IS near universal agreement among political people in Chile and elsewhere in the Americas that President Augusto Pinochet ought to leave office before he drives Chile into a renewal of civil war. . . . So far, however, President Pinochet has managed to use terrorism as a rationale for his own continued strongman rule.

March 19, 1987 -- HEADLINE: The Chilean Torture Master

CHILE HAS a military dictator who, quite incredibly, may be planning to extend a rule that began in 1973 to nearly the year 2000. . . . But it is easy to see one of the things President Pinochet is doing along the way. He is using violence on detained terrorist and political suspects in newly enlarged and vicious ways.

Torture seems to have been routine in Gen. Pinochet's Chile from the start. But a run of terrorist actions against his regime last fall, including an assassination attempt, produced a surge of horrors by the security police of the CNI.. . .

Gen. Pinochet always contrives to look stern and well turned out in his public poses. Can you imagine this man -- acting through his CNI -- beating, shocking and drugging prisoners, forcing them and their kin to watch each other suffer unimaginable abuses, shoving live rats into their mouths?

Chile, remember, is not the sort of unorganized place where a leader could plausibly claim that, for 14 years, no less, he didn't know what his police were up to. . . .

It is terrible that President Pinochet keeps his country from returning promptly to its democratic traditions. But torture is an unforgivable abuse, and his practice of it deprives him of any claim on the respect of decent people anywhere.

October 20, 1998:

The arrest of Gen. Pinochet is being protested partly on the basis that "no legal respect for his position is being applied." The irony is cutting: This plea is being made for the officer responsible for arresting, killing, terrorizing and torturing large numbers of Chilean (and Argentine and Spanish) citizens without an iota of legal respect for their positions. In Santiago, the general was able to contrive a soft landing for his dictatorship on Chilean soil; this is how he comes to be living in comfortable and even, in some quarters, respected retirement.

But in London a striking example has now been set of international collaboration in the pursuit of alleged war-crimes violators who desert their domestic havens. If it is carried through, the arrest of Gen. Pinochet will be a model for extending political accountability internationally for a range of grievous offenses committed at home.

When the Post editorialized that "for turning a national crisis into an excuse for personal dictatorship, Gen. Pinochet will not be forgiven" -- and that Pinochet's torture "deprives him of any claim on the respect of decent people anywhere" -- it probably would never have believed that a mere 19 years later, Pinochet would be able to claim exactly such respect and forgiveness from the Post's own Editorial Page Editor.

But in 2006 Establishment Washington, things like torture and unlawful, arbitrary detentions are really not all that bothersome -- not just when wielded by third-world dictators, but by the U.S. itself. At worst, they're just some isolated "excesses" and flaws which only shrill, partisan hysterics object to in moralistic and outraged tones.

Careful, serious, somber "centrists" like Fred Hiatt understand that rulers sometimes need to get their hands a little dirty, unburden themselves from the effete constraints of law and civilized norms, in order to preserve the proper order of things. Thus, a history of state-sponsored torture, murder and tyranny -- while undesirable and all -- can be dismissed away with a deeply amoral "however" ("It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America") or by some sort of depraved comparison to something that is allegedly worse ("ultimately less malign than communist rulers").

The disintegration of our nation's media -- likely the single greatest enabling factor that allowed the President to drag the nation to war in Iraq -- is glaring, and is demonstrated by so many events. But few events demonstrate it as profoundly as that Washington Post editorial yesterday, particularly when it is contrasted to what the Post editorial page was only a decade ago.

In the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick's defense of authoritarian dictators was a radical and extremist right-wing position even in the right-wing Reagan administration. It is now the officially embraced position of the Washington Post Editorial Page -- "She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right" -- the Page which lies at the heart of the "liberal" national media.

The Washington Post's praise for Augusto Pinochet

(Updated below - Update II)

The Editorial Page of The Washington Post today lavishly praised right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Editorial begins with the cursory (really almost bored and resentful) acknowledgement that "for some [Pinochet] was the epitome of an evil dictator." Why would the dreaded, unnamed "some" shriek that Pinochet was an "evil dictator"? No good reason; only this:

Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.

The Post even belittles the contempt expressed for Pinochet by claiming that it is due less to his murder and torture of political opponents -- that can't possibly be the real reason -- and is driven instead by the fact that "he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked."

So, with the Rush Limbaugh/National Review straw man in place (i.e., Pinochet is only hated in "some" circles because he was pro-U.S. and overthrew a darling of the socialist-anti-American-internationalist-left), the Post builds its case that Pinochet is, on balance, an admirable figure despite his bad points (murder, terrorism, torture): "It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America."

To the Post, Pinochet's "excesses" are mitigated, perhaps even outweighed, by his noble embrace of capitalism (via which he enriched himself with hundreds of millions of dollars):

Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse.

The Post Editorial, appropriately enough, concludes with a reverent embrace of Jeane Kirkpatrick's signature belief "that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies." Concludes The Post: "[Kirkpatrick], too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right."

It is hard to overstate just how radical and extraordinary it is -- though also unsurprising and revealing -- for the Post, particularly in our current political climate, to expressly embrace Augusto Pinochet and to endorse Kirkpatrick's seminal pro-dictatorship article, titled "Dictatorship and Double Standards," which was published in Commentary in November, 1979 (the headline of the Post's Editorial tracks Kirkpatrick's title). Kirkpatrick's article is now proudly displayed on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, where it belongs.

The crux of Kirkpatrick's argument was a defense of American support for right-wing dictatorships (the euphemism she used was "traditional autocrats"), including those which employ "martial law" to imprison and even torture their political opponents.* Critically, Kirkpatrick defended such dictatorships not only on the ground that supporting them promotes U.S. interests, but also on the ground that such dictatorships are more benign than left-wing dictatorships ("revolutionary autocrats") and, beyond that, are even justified in their human rights abuses given the nature of the opposition they face.

In defending the regimes of the Iranian Shah and the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza -- again, defending not only U.S. support for them, but defending the dictatorships themselves -- this is what Kirkpatrick wrote:

Both did tolerate limited apposition, including opposition newspapers and political parties, but both were also confronted by radical, violent opponents bent on social and political revolution. Both rulers, therefore, sometimes invoked martial law to arrest, imprison, exile, and occasionally, it was alleged, torture their opponents. Both relied for public order on police forces whose personnel were said to be too harsh, too arbitrary, and too powerful.

The word "therefore" in that passage is amazing. It signifies Kirkpatrick's belief that these dictators' reliance upon martial law, "harsh" and "arbitrary" personal police forces, and even torture were understandable, if not outright justifiable. After all, the opposition the dictators faced was "violent" and was seeking "social and political revolution." Under the circumstances, can't we all appreciate the need for some hard-nosed, "extra-legal" tactics where rulers get their hands dirty in order to preserve order?

Western precepts of due process and revulsion towards torture are nice, esoteric luxuries and all, but when faced with revolutionary savages bent on radical change, the implication of Kirkpatrick's argument is that one simply can't afford to abide by those nicities (hence the "therefore"). A little -- or even a lot of -- torture and arbitrary imprisonment in order to preserve security and crush the evil ones might be just what is needed.

That is also a pure and complete summary of the current mindset of the Bush administration and its followers and enablers (including The Washington Post Editorial page) with regard to the administration's lawbreaking and its worst excesses.

Objections to the Bush administration's human rights abuses, total disregard for basic precepts of due process, and its reliance on "coercive interrogation" methods are routinely dismissed away by pointing to -- just as Kirkpatrick did -- the extreme and savage character of the Enemy, which renders such measures not only justifiable but even necessary. As long as the government continues to defend the free market and only uses such methods against those who really deserve it, that's something we can all tolerate, even appreciate.

One can draw a short and straight line from Kirkpatrick's defense of right-wing dictatorships to the Bush administration's ongoing abuses.* As Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday in response to various right-wing commentators exhibiting a bizarre reluctance to criticize Pinochet:

I think this is the context in which you have to understand American conservatism's generally blasé attitude toward the Bush administration's more modest ventures into the fields of arbitrary detention, corruption, and torture. Years of apologizing for the deployment of such tactics by America's proxies abroad naturally desensitizes the political culture to the re-importation of these methods to the center.

The Washington Post's editorial enabling of most (though admittedly not all) of the Bush administration's excesses over the past five years is clearly grounded in the Kirkpatrickian view that sometimes such measures are necessary to preserve order and security, and can never been seen as "pure evil" as long as they are imposed by a government committed to the free market.

What is so striking is that, in the aftermath of 9/11, that justifying mindset, previously used to defend third-world dictatorships, was so seamlessly imported into the domestic policies of the United States. This is how Kirkpatrick defined the "traditional autocracies" which she defended:

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.

Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.

Objectively speaking, Kirkpatrick's description of the virtues of "traditional autocracy" sound quite similar to the vision which Bush followers and certain elite enablers (e.g. Fred Hiatt and similar Beltway pundits) have of the Ideal America today.

Despite the radical transformation of our national character over the last five years, The Washington Post continues to be able to earn money and enjoy the rewards of the free market. We continue to "worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos." And Bush officials "leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few."

Just as Kirkpatrick argued in 1979 -- and as the Post implicitly endorsed today -- we can all live with some torture and arbitrary arrests and detentions. And we must always keep in mind that things could always be worse -- at least the Bush administration (like Pinochet) is keeping taxes low and corporate profits high. So our view of its human rights abuses (like our view of Pinochet's) should be tempered by our appreciation for its rejection of socialism.

Thus, argues the Post (following along with the illustrious Jonah Goldberg, among others), let's set torture and lawbreaking and indefinite detention to the side. At least George Bush (and Pincochet) aren't Fidel Castro. That this has become the Post's measuring stick for our own government explains much about the last five years in this country.

UPDATE: The homage paid by Fred Hiatt to Augusto Pinochet would likely baffle Ariel Dorfman, whose New York Times Op-Ed today (h/t Kovie) examines the lingering and tragic effects on Chile of Pinochet's despotism. Hiatt's admiration for Pinochet would also likely be baffling to what Dorfman describes as the "thousands upon thousands of Chileans who spontaneously poured into the streets here to celebrate the news of his extinction."

UPDATE II: Even Paul Miregnoff and David Frum -- let's say that again: even Paul Mirengoff and David Frum -- recognize what a vicious and vile tyrant Augusto Pinochet was. To Fred Hiatt: if you find yourself cheering on a right-wing dictator who is too despotic even for Powerline (Pionchet responsible for "a bloody campaign of repression") and David Frum (Pinochet unleashed "a spasm of cruelty and violence unprecedented in the country's history"), that ought to be a fairly convincing signal that you've fallen into some pretty morally depraved territory.

On a separate note: Ezra Klein makes a good point here, and I hope people will listen to his suggestion about what should be done about it.
_____________________________________

*Two caveats that ought to be self-evident but will not be to some: (1) Nothing here is intended to equate (or not equate) the quantity or extent of the human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime and the Bush administration; the point is that the underlying, justifying mindset is similar; and (2) Kirkpatrick's argument is well-argued and makes several other points besides the one highlighted here, including a very persuasive case against the foolish and inevitably futile attempt to "democratize" other countries that have no history of democracy.

Exploring the distinction between "legal" and "illegal"

(updated below)

It was reported over the weekend that the CIA was secretly eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of Princess Diana on the night she died in Paris in 1997. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, over at his National Review blog, thinks that this revelation makes some sort of point about the objections to President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens inside of the U.S.:

So the Clinton administration was tapping Princess Diana's phones. Repeat after me: the Clinton administration. And of course there was no warrant. . . .

So question: when will we hear from all those valiant defenders of the civil liberties and personal privacy trampled underfoot by the fascist Bush administration? Slate magazine, you who boldly dared to compare Republicans to Nazis - where are you?

George Soros? Glenn Greenwald? Rob Reiner? Sidney Blumenthal? Al Franken? And will the mass media take their familiar ominous view of this outrageous intrustion (sic)? Will the editorial pages denounce the unilateralism and arrogance and high-handedness of the departed administration? I'm sure we're all breathless with uncertainty.

Of course these persons and others like them might reasonably answer that there might be many excellent reasons for the United States government to wish to monitor the activities of the ex-wife of the heir to the British throne. . . . Still you do have to wonder why such common sense seems to ebb and flow according to whether the president doing the wiretapping has a (D) or (R) after his name.

This petulant, adolescent, self-victimizing cry of persecution -- Republicans are treated so unfairly, and people always complain when we do something that they let the Democrats do -- has become virtually automatic in the parlance of Bush followers and neoconservatives. It's almost reflexively inserted into any political argument they make. And it's virtually always as baseless as it is trite. Frum's argument here provides an excellent illustration of why that is so.

If Frum tries hard enough, he may be able to find a difference between these two eavesdropping stories beyond the fact that one involves a (D) and the other involves an (R). How about . . . . . what the Clinton administration did is perfectly legal, while what the Bush administration did (and is doing) is a criminal offense under American law? Might that explain the acceptance of the former and the objections to the latter?

The "warrants" to which Frum refers are required under the law we call "FISA" only when (roughly speaking) the conversations to be eavesdropped on involve (a) a "U.S. person" who is (b) inside the U.S. Princess Diana, sitting in Paris, was neither (a) nor (b), and therefore, the CIA did not need a warrant under "FISA" to eavesdrop on those conversations. Thus, that eavesdropping was "legal."

By rather stark contrast, President Bush is eavesdropping on conversations without warrants for which FISA explicitly requires warrants, and what he is doing is therefore "illegal." In general, there is a difference between a legal act and an illegal act. In particular, the latter tends to provoke more protests than the former.

Further, "illegal" acts -- such as warrantless eavesdropping on Americans -- are even punishable by imprisonment, whereas "legal" behavior is not. That's because the U.S. is a country that was founded to exist under the "rule of law," where "legal behavior" is allowed but "illegal behavior" is not.

What is so very odd about Frum's complete disregard for the distinction between "legal" and "illegal" behavior is that he previously not only understood the distinction but was one of our nation's most intrepid defenders of the rule of law. Here he is explaining why he felt compelled to speak out in 1998 in the pages of The Weekly Standard, urging the impeachment of President Bill Clinton:

During the Lewinsky scandal, those of us on the pro-impeachment side repeatedly said – and said and said and said again – that the offense for which Clinton deserved to be removed was not sexual misconduct, but perjury. . . . In other words: the idea that sex ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny was what was at stake for Clinton’s defenders. For those of us on the other side, what was at stake was the rule of law and the integrity of the presidency.

Indeed, those were stirring words in defense of the "rule of law." Yet now, Frum not only exhibits complete indifference towards the rule of law, he actually fails even to recognize it as an issue. He literally is either unaware or pretends not to know (I'd honestly like to know which?) that opposition to presidential lawbreaking (rather than legal eavesdropping) is the objection to President Bush's warrantless NSA eavesdropping on Americans.

I genuinely hope Frum will answer that earnestly posed question, because he used to be such an ardent and vigorous supporter of the rule of law, and we need more of those. It would be deeply disappointing to think that his opposition to illegal behavior is dependent upon whether the lawbreaker "has a (D) or (R) after his name."

UPDATE: Frum replies here. Other than mischaracterizing my argument (I didn't call Bush's eavesdropping "fascist," only "illegal"), his principal point is that it is premature to refer to Bush's NSA program as "illegal" because the issue is "being litigated as we speak, and pending a final result."

Where: (a) a statute as clearly as can be says that doing X is a criminal offense, (b) someone, by their own admission, does X, and (c) a court rules that the person has broken the law by doing X, then X is, by definition, "illegal." There is nothing "uncertain" about any of that.

Moreover, Frum's attempt to justify Bush's conduct -- "Whether the Bush administration's actions are ultimately approved by the courts or not ["not" means that he broke the law], they were undertaken in defense of the public interest" -- illustrates his contempt for the very "rule of law" principles which he previously claimed to find so sacrosanct. A genuine (rather than cynical) belief in the "rule of law" means, at minimum, that one does not justify criminal behavior by claiming that the lawbreaker sought to achieve good results.

In any event, whether warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is, in fact, illegal had nothing to do with Frum's post. Frum's original argument was that those who object to Bush's eavesdropping without also objecting to Clinton's eavesdropping are revealing themselves to be unprincipled hypocrites driven by partisan considerations. But given the self-evident principle underlying that position -- namely, that such individuals object to the illegality of Bush's eavesdropping, while nobody claims that Clinton's was illegal -- Frum's accusation of partisan-based hypocrisy was frivolous from the start.

The only partisan hypocrisy one finds here is from those who paraded around piously as Advocates of the Rule of the Law throughout the 1990s, but who then spent the last six years justifying systematic lawbreaking as something noble -- as nothing more than "act[ing] overzealously in defense of the nation."

Did Rahm Emanuel lie about his knowledge of Mark Foley? Yes.

At the height of the Mark Foley scandal in October -- when Democrats were pounding Denny Hastert and company on a daily basis for having taken no action despite knowing about the emails sent by Foley to at least one page (and for lying about their past knowledge) -- Democratic Congressman (and DCCC Chair) Rahm Emanuel went on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (along with GOP Rep. Adam Putnam). I haven't been able to find a full transcript, but the full video is here, and this article provides an account of the segment.

All week long, Republicans had been insisting that the Foley scandal was a Democratic "dirty trick," speculating that Democrats -- specifically the DCCC of which Emanuel was the Chair -- were just as aware of the Foley e-mails as various GOP House Leaders were, and they accused Democrats (with no evidence) of being responsible for engineering the story.

Stephanopoulos explicitly asked Emanuel: "I just want to ask you plainly -- did you or your staff know anything about these emails or instant messages before they came out?"

Emanuel interrupted the question with an emphatic "no." Then, once Stephanopoulos was done with the question, this is what Emanuel replied: "George, never saw 'em . . . . "

After that answer, Putnam interjected this question: "Were you aware of them?" Emanuel replied: "Never saw them." A moment later, Stephanopoulos said to Emanuel: "So you were not aware of them, had no involvement?" Emanuel replied: "No. Never saw them. No involvement. . . ." Putnam again asked: "Was there an awareness?" Emanuel replied: "No. Never saw them. The first time I ever saw these things, right here was when Brian Ross broke the story."

When summarizing the reasons why he believed that the GOP House Leadership was guilty of poor judgment and a cover-up in the Foley scandal, this is what Emanuel said:

"As far back as 2002, 2003, there were warning signs . . . . What happened since that time? . . . . In 2005, he's appointed to head the Missing and Abused Children Caucus for the Congress. When he wants to retire, they ask him to run for re-election in 2006, even knowing -- clearly -- that there is something amiss and wrong here. The whole point here -- let's just take one analogy -- if a high school teacher was found doing this with a child, and the principal knew . . . the community and parents would have that principal and teacher out."

On Friday, the House Ethics Committee released its Report (.pdf) on this matter, and it was extremely critical of the Republican Leadership -- including just-elected GOP Minority Leader John Boehner -- for their "negligence" in failing to take steps to investigate Foley's conduct despite having ample signs that something was amiss (in particular, the e-mails Foley sent to pages).

But the Report also found that "the Communications Director for both the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also had copies of the emails in the Fall of 2005" (p. 76). Specifically, the Report documented that back in October, 2005, the Communications Director for the House Democratic Caucus (Matt Miller) was sent copies of the Foley e-mails, and he was very disturbed by them.

Convinced that the GOP-led House Committees would take no meaningful action, Miller sent the e-mails to various newspapers in Florida (The Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times), as well as Roll Call. He also provided copies of the e-mails to Bill Burton, the Communications Director of the DCCC (pp. 45-46).

It is now being reported by CNN that not only was the DCCC's Burton aware of the e-mails in 2005, but so, too, was Emanuel:

The head of the House Democrats' campaign committee, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, had heard of former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a former male page a year before they became public, a campaign committee aide told CNN. . . .

Emanuel's campaign committee aide said Friday that the Illinois Democrat was informed in 2005, but never saw the correspondence and did not have enough information to raise concerns. The aide said Emanuel took "no action" because his knowledge was "cursory" and little more than "rumor."

Did Rahm Emanuel explicitly and clearly lie during his October appearance on ABC?

Emanuel would likely say that he did not "lie," because each time he was asked whether he was "aware" of the e-mails -- which he plainly was -- he never denied being "aware" of them. Instead -- he would likely argue -- he changed the subject by denying that he ever "saw" the e-mails, a fact which appears (based on what we know) to be true (or at least not demonstrably false). Therefore, in the narrowest and most technical way, an argument could be constructed that Emanuel did not actually "lie" in his responses.

But that argument, ultimately, is nonsense. If you listen to the video, there is little doubt that Emanuel was lying in every meaningful sense of that word. He not only denied having "seen" the e-mails, but also interrupted Stephanapolous's first question about whether he was "aware" of the e-mails with an emphatic "no," and at least on one other occasion, denied not only having seen the e-mails, but also having been aware of them. Those denials were just outright false (i.e., "lies").

Independent of the question of whether Emaneul "technically lied" -- and far more important -- is the fact that Emanuel was clearly and deliberately misleading. Any reasonable person would have come away from that interview (as I know I did) with the strong impression that Emanuel was completely unaware of any e-mails sent by Foley to the pages, and that he had no reason to know anything was amiss with Foley until ABC broke the story.

In fact, Emanuel emphasized how inappropriate it was for Republican House Leadership to allow Foley, in 2005, to become the Chair of the Missing and Abused Children Caucus despite what Emanuel called the "warning signs" about Foley's behavior. But Emanuel was aware of at least some of these same "warning signs" in 2005, and he said nothing about them at the time. He was guilty of doing exactly what he was piously and indignantly accusing the GOP House Leaders of doing -- namely, knowing about the Foley e-mails to pages and taking no action.

None of this excuses or mitigates the conduct of the GOP House Leaders in the slightest. Nor does it vindicate the claim that this was some sort of "dirty trick" on the part of Democrats to sabotage GOP electoral chances. To the contrary, Miller, the House Democratic Caucus staffer, appears to have been genuinely disturbed by the emails and he took appropriate action -- he sent them to the media not in the weeks before the 2006 election, but all the way back in October, 2005, when he concluded (reasonably and, as it turns out, correctly) that the media was a far better vehicle for stopping Foley than the GOP-led House, which would protect Foley.

But what it does mean is that Emanuel was guilty of exactly what he was accusing the GOP House Leadership of. And his hypocritical, pious lectures about the "warning signs" which GOP Leaders had were dishonest at their core.

An entire essay can be written -- and probably should be -- about why things like this matter so much, but for the moment I will just make a couple of observations. I wrote a lot about the Foley scandal back in October and repeatedly argued that I thought that worse than the GOP House Leader's inaction was the obvious lies they were telling in order to protect themselves once the scandal was uncovered. For instance:

This scandal is not and has never been exclusively -- or even primarily -- about what GOP House leaders did in 2003 or 2005 regarding Mark Foley. That is a big part of the story, but bigger still is the blatant lies they have been telling ever since this scandal began.

And:

As much attention as has been devoted to what GOP House leaders did and did not do with regard to Foley, more attention needs to be paid to what is, in my view, the more important issue -- that ever since this scandal began, Hastert and the other key GOP figures at the center of the scandal, including Hastert's Chief of Staff, have blatantly lied repeatedly about what happened. And they still are.

But Emanuel was guilty of the same thing. Exactly the same thing. And he sat there on ABC and adopted this melodramatically concerned, earnest voice as he expressed righteous outrage that the GOP could let someone like Foley become the head of the "Missing and Abused Children Caucus" even though they had "warning signs" of Foley's conduct -- "warning signs" which Emanuel also had, even if not as many.

It's possible that the Democratic takeover of Congress can result in genuine and meaningful -- and desperately-needed -- change for our country. But it's also possible that it could result in nothing notable, that it will produce only the most marginal and politically risk-free actions, all justified by the need not to do anything too "extreme" due to a fear of harming their 2008 electoral prospects.

Which course Democrats take will be determined by whether they are guided by political figures committed to genuine change due to a conviction that such change is needed (even if that means incurring some political risks), or whether they are driven by cynical, exclusively political and dishonest Beltway operatives like Rahm Emanuel.

To compete with Republicans, Democrats need not only political idealists, but also calculating strategists who are devoted to winning. That's fair enough. But they also need to enforce some (at least) minimal ethical standards if they are to avoid becoming indistinguishable from the rotted and corrupt GOP tyrants who were just so deservedly tossed out of power. Rahm Emanuel seems to fall well below even those most minimal standards.

Neoconservatives -- exposed, scorned, but still in control

The one positive aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report is that the reactions it is provoking -- both positive and viciously negative -- have shed as bright a light as one could hope for on our current predicament. Never before have the reasons we are in Iraq -- and staying indefinitely -- been as clear as they are now.

Most notable is the frothing intensity of the personal attacks on Jim Baker coming from the neoconservatives and other assorted warmongers. Here is Marty Peretz, Editor of the very sober and serious foreign policy magazine The New Republic:

Yes, I can't get over James Baker being the chairman of a civil commission on war and statecraft. The first reason is that he is primarily responsible for American policy in the first Bush administration. That policy was a strategic disaster and a moral enormity. On Baker's head rests almost all of the responsibility for Saddam Hussein surviving in power after the first Gulf war.

And, given that fact, also responsible for Saddam's atrocities against the Shia and Kurds for which the deposed tyrant is at last being tried in the very context of this war. James Baker is actually an accessory to war crimes of the Iraqi Baath Party in a war fought entirely against civilians. The truth is that he trusted Saddam ... just as he seems to trust Bashar Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be reasonable. If he truly trusts them on anything he is, well, as gullible as Chamberlain.

To Peretz, the 1991 ejection of Iraq from Kuwait -- undertaken with U.N. approval and a genuine, worldwide coalition -- was "a strategic disaster and a moral enormity," all because we didn't proceed to invade Iraq and occupy Baghdad. But the current war in Iraq is noble and wise. How much more extremist and out of touch can a person be?

Beyond branding Baker as a war criminal, neonconservatives are also (of course) smearing him as an anti-Semite -- again. Peretz, in a separate post, accuses Baker of using the Report to further wage what Peretz calls "Baker's old war with the Israelis and with the Jews." Powerline's Paul Mirgenoff compared Baker to the Hated Anti-Semite de Jour: "other than Jimmy Carter, I can't think of a major public figure I like less than James Baker." Rush Limbaugh accused Baker of leading the "Iraq Surrender Group," and at Pajamas Media, Michael Ledeen called Rush's epithet "elegant" and himself pronounced the B-H Report "disgusting" because it recommended talks with Israel's enemies.

As I argued immediately after the election, the disaster of the Iraq War and the resulting rejection of Bush-Republican policies presents a real opportunity to isolate, and relegate back to the fringes, the neoconservatives and more generic crazed warmongers who have dictated our foreign policy over the last five years -- the Bill Kristols, Rush Limbaughs, John McCains, Charles Krauthammers, Joe Liebermans, American Enterprise Institutes and Rich Lowrys, who have an insatiable appetite for endless wars that degrade America's credibility, resources, strength, security and national character.

At a time when most Americans have recognized that this war is a disaster and want to withdraw, this group of radical warriors continues to insist not only that the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, but that we need more of it -- more troops, more fighting, more threats, less diplomacy, less concern for world opinion, more regime change, more wars. John McCain and Bill Kristol favor a policy -- i.e., deploy as many more American troops as possible to Iraq -- which only a tiny percentage of Americans (ranging from 8% to 16%) support. Although the media has yet to realize it, this group is already on the outer fringe of our political spectrum.

Hateful rants directed towards Baker like those from Peretz, Limbaugh and the AEI luminaries (even as Baker endorsed an indefinite presence in Iraq) illustrate just how radical they are. And as they are now quite openly admitting, neoconservatives hate Jim Baker for three reasons -- Israel, Israel and Israel.

It isn't just that the B-H Report committed the crime of suggesting in passing that it might be beneficial for the U.S. to increase its efforts to forge an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Even worse (to them), it also suggested that there might be benefits for the U.S. if we tried to achieve some sort of cooperative understanding with Israel's two remaining formidable enemies -- Syria and Iran. Treating Syria and Iran like anything other than new Nazi Germanys to be bombed and crushed is the greatest neoconservative sin there is.

We're told that these two countries are so hateful and insane that the mere idea of doing anything other than bombing them into submission -- or, even better, out of existence -- is "unrealistic." Neoconservatives argue this even though, as Baker himself pointed out during his friendly chat with Larry King this week, Iran already cooperated with the U.S. in stabilizing Afghanistan (because a stable Afghanistan was in their interests), and Syria was cooperative on multiple post-9/11 fronts until the neoconservatives succeeded in convincing Bush to treat them like lepers, thereby forcing them into the arms of the Iranians.

It may (or may not) be true that Syria and/or Iran are intractable when it comes to hostility towards Israel (those who argue this previously said the same about Egypt). But it is clearly false -- empirically proven to be false -- that those countries are dedicated to "waging war" on the U.S. and would thus refuse to cooperate no matter how much their interests were served by doing so. Those two countries are the implacable enemies of Israel, not the U.S., but many neoconservatives want to abolish any such distinction.

At the same time, Baker and his friends are far from pure in their motives either. Much of their bickering with the AIPAC warriors was driven not by some principled belief in the unfair plight of the Palestinians, but by their desire to forge business relationships with Arab governments. As this generally pro-Israel, anti-Baker history of that period recounts, Bush 41 officials were eager to pursue arms sales and oil contracts in the Middle East, transactions that required a "realist" approach, meaning a willingness to do business even with the most brutal and suffocating Arab dictators who also happened to be Israel's enemies.

In Syria and Iran, Baker, Frank Carlucci and company saw (and see) large oil fields and/or a large market for Boeing to be cultivated, while American neoconservatives saw (and see) enemies of Israel needing to be smashed. As the events of this week revealed, neither Baker nor his neoconservative enemies have changed any.

Hence, Baker's Report urges the privatization of Iraqi oil fields and negotiations with Israel's enemies, while American neoconservatives see him as a surrender-happy anti-Semite. All of this is so tiresome and dishonest that it really engenders a strong desire to ignore it all, which one could do if not for the fact that the Baker-Hamilton Report has virtually sealed the fate of our Iraq policy for the next two years -- stay the course with a few cosmetic alterations, at best -- and still greater dangers lie ahead.

The Baker-hating neoconseratives continue to agitate for more war, undeterred by their growing repudiation and loss of credibility because they believe they still possess the ultimate trump card -- namely, their ongoing ability to continue to sway the poor, besieged, increasingly isolated President with their visions of neoconservative grandeur. Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol all but demanded a show of Bush's manhood yesterday in their war-rallying column in The Weekly Standard, entitled "It's Up to Bush":

It's all up to the president now. . . . That means the president will have to be, much more than he has been, his own general and strategist. He will have to decide on his own that incremental measures, such as stepping up the pace of Iraqi training, will not make enough of a difference in a short enough time to prevent a collapse of American policy and of Iraq itself. He will have to decide, contrary to the advice of many of his top advisers, that many more American troops need to be sent to Iraq, and as quickly as possible. . . .

Now he needs to display a different kind of courage. He has to take into his own hands the fate of Iraq and make his own decisions about what needs to be done. Of course, he should listen to all his advisers. But he must also know that his advisers, both civilian and military, have been failing him for the past three years. American policy, if it is to have any hope of turning the tide, must change dramatically in the next month or two. No one other than President Bush can make that change.

All of the American anti-war sentiment and Baker-Hamilton Reports in the world do not change the one fact on which neoconservatives and warmongers are (understandably) placing all of their war-hungry hopes and dreams -- namely, that the President, who is in fact still the Commander-in-Chief, will remain convinced that both his historical legacy and theological goodness depend upon Victory in the Epic War of Civilizations, the Great Challenge of the 21st Century. Thus, unburdened and unrestrained by any future elections, they hope that Bush will continue to wage war, and will escalate those efforts -- in Iraq and beyond.

Yesterday, the President -- jarringly enough -- petulantly provoked an argument with Dick Durbin by making clear that he sees himself as Harry Truman, pressing forward with our grand, important wars even in the face of a lack of resolve on the part of Americans. Bush believes he will be vindicated by history -- like Truman -- and anyone who thinks he is going to change course or moderate his aggression any simply hasn't been paying attention to how he operates. The opposite course -- a marked increased in aggression and military force in order to prove he still can -- is the far more likely outcome.

That is the truly bizarre and indescribably dangerous situation we face. America has turned against these extremists and this warmongering sentiment, but the President (and especially his closest advisor, the Vice President) remains solidly in their camp. They're convinced that they will be vindicated by staying forever in Iraq, and possibly expanding our military force beyond Iraq. And Jim Baker, having supported the war in the first place, all but ensured that this would happen (even, admittedly, while forcing into the establishment dialogue some important observations).

It's true that these extremists (and, hopefully, the establishment institutions which have enabled them, beginning with the Beltway media) are being marginalized as they become further and further removed from popular American sentiment. And that could be a real long-term gain for the country. But it's also true that we are going to remain in Iraq (at least) through the Bush Presidency (at least), and it's hard to see any benefit that could possibly compete with that tragic harm. Chris Floyd captured the bottom line perfectly:

The Iraq Study Group's report simply confirms, yet again, the bedrock truth of the war: the American Establishment has no intention of leaving Iraq, ever, and no intention of having anything but a pliant, cowed, bullied puppet government in Baghdad to carry out whatever the Establishment decides is in its best interests on any given day.

Iraq was invaded because large swathes of the American elite thought they could make hay of it one way or another (financially, politically, ideologically or even psychologically, for those pathetic souls who get their sense of manhood or personal validation from their identification with a big, swaggering, domineering empire).

And U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, indefinitely, at some level, because the American elite think they can make hay of the situation one way or another. The war is all about -- is only about -- what the American elite feel is in their own best interest, how it aggrandizes their fortunes, flatters their prejudices, serves their needs.

I've been persuaded by those who have argued here over the past couple days that the Baker-Hamilton Report isn't pure evil, because it so fundamentally undercuts the neoconservative narrative about the world. That may be true. But its effect of solidifying our ongoing presence in Iraq and transforming anti-withdrawal sentiment into the mainstream, centrist, bipartisan position vastly outweigh that. As long as we stay as an occupying force in Iraq -- with all of the abuses and destruction and drain that inevitably goes with it -- it is difficult to imagine how we are going to reverse any of the damage that has been done to our country over the last six years.

The neoconservatives are being revealed as the ugly, crazed extremists that they are. But they still remain more or less firmly in control in the form of George Bush, Dick Cheney and company. And that control has not been loosened any by the Baker-Hamilton Report. If anything, the opposite has occurred.

The principal sin of the Baker-Hamilton Report

Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Steele identifies the most pernicious aspect of the Baker-Hamilton Report (h/t Zack):

The country's political elite wants to ignore the American people's doubts and build a new consensus behind a strategy of staying in Iraq on an open-ended basis, with no exit in sight.

Americans are done with this war. They have given up on it and want it over with. But the B-H Report has somehow supplanted the views of the vast majority of American voters as the "mainstream position." The B-H Report single-handedly cancelled out the results of the last election by purporting to identify as the "center" a position which is squarely at odds with the emphatically anti-war views of the American public that is the real mainstream.

This is what the real centrist, mainstream view is in the United States regarding the war (via Atrios):

Americans are overwhelmingly resigned to something less than clear-cut victory in Iraq and growing numbers doubt the country will achieve a stable, democratic government no matter how the U.S. gets out, according to an AP poll. . . .

Seventy-one percent said they would favor a two-year timeline from now until sometime in 2008, but when people are asked instead about a six-month timeline for withdrawal that number drops to 60 percent.

They phrase support for a six-month withdraw plan as "dropping to 60 percent" -- but 60 percent, for the American electorate, constitutes a decisive and solid majority. It isn't that most Americans have grown "weary" from the war or that they are "frustrated" and "impatient" because they like to win. Put simply, they have given up on this war, and favor withdrawal -- now. That just has to be the first, clear premise for every one of these discussions.

This is what the B-H Report (.pdf) has to say about what is, in fact, the centrist, mainstream view in America -- a view which the Report condescendingly refers to as "Precipitate Withdrawal":

1. Precipitate Withdrawal

Because of the importance of Iraq, the potential for catastrophe, and the role and commitments of the United States in initiating events that have led to the current situation, we believe it would be wrong for the United States to abandon the country through a precipitate withdrawal of troops and support.

A premature American departure from Iraq would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions, leading to a number of the adverse consequences outlined above. The near-term results would be a significant power vacuum, greater human suffering, regional destabilization, and a threat to the global economy. Al Qaeda would depict our withdrawal as a historic victory. If we leave and Iraq descends into chaos, the long-range consequences could eventually require the United States to return.

That is all the Report has to say about the position that is favored overwhelmingly by Americans -- it offers nothing more than a brief, patronizing and irrational dismissal of that option ("irrational" because the argument in favor of leaving is that all of the harms which the Report claims will result if we leave -- even if true -- will be worse if we stay for a year or two more and then leave).

There is something profoundly undemocratic about what Establishment Washington is doing here. As always, they begin from the premise that their physical presence in Washington and their greater information about the inner workings of the Beltway bestow upon them not just greater information, but superior wisdom, elevated judgment (and the fact that they bear substantial responsibility for what has happened here doesn't seem to have diluted that abundant self-regard in the slighest).

They now recognize that Americans have given up on the war but they believe that that view is rash, uninformed, emotional -- "precipitous," to use the condescending label assigned to that view by the Report. The crazed and lowly masses need the steady, sober hand of the Washington Establishment -- symbolized by the old Washington relics dragged out to put their stern seal of approval on the next two years of our occupation (despite the fact that they were the ones who helped bring about this disaster). And before the ink was dry on the Report, all of the entrenched propagandists for the Washington Establishment fell all over themselves praising its great wisdom and pronouncing it to be the solemn duty of all serious people to endorse it.

There is something for everyone to love and hate in this Report. That was necessary to attract the approval stamps of the "bipartisan" members and, more importantly, to provoke the wrath from "extremists" on both sides -- always the most convincing "proof" for the simple-minded Beltway elite that they struck the sensible center ("hey, both sides hate it, so we must be doing something right").

But the rhetoric and specific claims in the Report matter little. What matters most -- really exclusively -- is that this Report (in the eyes of the Beltway media and related types) has become the defining position of the Center. And the Report unmistakably endorses our ongoing occupation of Iraq, and emphatically rejects the notion of withdrawing any time soon.

We just had an election where Americans repudiated this war and made clear that they want to withdraw. Yet somehow, within a matter of weeks, Washington power circles were able to shoo that election result away like the annoying mosquito that it is and supplant their own pro-war judgment as the "mainstream" view to which all serious people, by definition, pledge their allegiance.

When 2008 comes around and we still have between 130,000-150,000 troops occupying Iraq (at the cost of $8 billion per month) -- and another 20,000 or 30,000 American soldiers are dead or maimed and a few hundred thousand or so more Iraqi civilians are dead -- we can look back at this moment when the Washington Establishment, yet again, blocked the path of withdrawal.

And none of that damage will be mitigated because the Report included some "candid" assessments of how badly things have gone, suggested "negotiations" with Iran or Syria, "recommended" that we try harder to solve the Israel-Palestine problem, or any of the other nice ideas it included, all so that the Report will feel "reasonable," even while it hands George Bush free rein to stay in Iraq through the end of his presidency -- exactly what Americans do not want.

The company we keep

The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued a new report documenting the rise of what it considers to be one of the most dangerous trends -- the arrest and detention of journalists who are held indefinitely without any charges being brought. China, Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopa "were the top four jailers among the 24 nations who imprisoned journalists."

Those four countries are followed on the list by seven other countries which have more than one journalist in custody. The U.S. is part of that group, tied with Russia. Both Russia and the U.S. are each holding two journalists without charges (that we know of). Also in that group are Algeria, Azerbajian, Burma, Burundi, and Uzbekistan. Iran did not make it into that group because it is holding only one journalist in custody, and the same is true for Vietnam (Venezuela, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are holding none).

The U.S. has in its custody Associated Press Photojournalist Blial Hussein (held eight months somewhere in Iraq without charges), and Al Jazeera Photographer Sami Muhyideen al-Haj (held for more than five years in Guantanamo). There has also been a string of violent attacks on journalists by the U.S. military over the years -- almost always journalists perceived as unfriendly -- under rather questionable circumstances, to put it mildly.

None of this is to equate the level of press freedoms in China, Cuba or Iran to the United States. They're not comparable. But that isn't the point. That the U.S. violates press freedoms less than Communist China, Iranian mullahs, and Fidel Castro mitigates nothing. For those who believe in the U.S. and the values it has long embraced (even if its adherence to those values, like all countries, has been imperfect), what is so striking and genuinely tragic is lists of this type -- from credible and essentially nonideological sources which document abuses of basic liberties around the world -- now invariably includes the U.S., because no list would be complete without it.

The track record of the U.S. in arresting journalists should inspire absolutely no confidence that the journalists we detain are guilty of anything:

In 2005, the U.S. detention of al-Haj and at least four journalists in Iraq placed the United States sixth among countries jailing journalists, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma. In Iraq, each journalist was held for months without charge. Each was eventually freed; no charges were substantiated in any of the cases.

What kind of American isn't angered by our Government's detention of journalists with no charges who are guilty of nothing? If that behavior doesn't bother someone, what would? As always, if there is evidence to support the claim that a journalist or anyone else actively worked with Al Qaeda and the individual is found guilty of that allegation as part of a fair procedure, I think the U.S. Government has every right to detain that individual. But that is not what we do.

We detain people, including journalists, with no charges, no fair process, and usually with no opportunity even to know the "evidence" against them, have a lawyer present, or anything else. Here is the statement of Al Jazeera's al-Haj during his "Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo, the absurdity and shamefulness of which I described yesterday and which is documented in full here:

Thank you for the opportunity to address you. Obviously, I would really like to have my attorney here to help me put my case, but since this is not allowed, I must speak for myself.

I am a husband and a father. I have not seen my wife or my son for three years. My son was just one year and three months when I last saw him and the idea of missing those important years of his young life saddens my soul, as I am sure you realize it would any parent.

I was told that I have been found to be an enemy combatant. I do not know how this came to be and I do not know the evidence against me.

The charges against him have repeatedly been changed. Virtually all of the original ones have been dropped. The U.S. has repeatedly refused to advise him of what evidence they are using to declare him an "enemy combatant." And the Congress just enacted legislation permanently blocking his ability to contest the validity of his detention in any court, thus consigning him to permanent imprisonment in Guantanamo for as long as George Bush (and then subsequent Presidents) desire for him to remain there.

Worse, I don't think there is any question about the fact that Bush administration attacks on journalists of this sort are going to escalate. As I noted the other day, there is growing agitation among Bush followers for express restrictions on the First Amendment. They routinely blame the media for most of the woes of the U.S., attributing such problems to the media's treasonous motives.

Last night, Bill O'Reilly's first guest was Mark Steyn (who, just by the way, has literally become The New Republic Publisher Marty Peretz's most-praised foreign policy prophet). As part of his first answer, Styen said this:

I believe that the majority of American newspapers, which are filled with Associated Press content, on the central issue of our time, they are either duped at best, or actually semi-treasonous, and colluding with the enemy and demoralizing America on the homefront, including having agents of the enemy on their payroll. This is a disgraceful organization.

Blial Hussein was one of the examples Steyn cited as an "enemy agent" on the payroll of the Associated Press.

Much of this ties into the discussion yesterday regarding the Baker-Hamilton Report, including in the comments section, where numerous people seemed to want to defend the Report. I recognize that the Report contains some nice acknowledgments and some ideas which might be theoretically praiseworthy. It's also true that the Report deviates from -- and at time criticizes -- the neoconservative view of the world (which is why rabid neoncons hate it).

Nonetheless, the reason I expressed such disdain for the Report is because it not only fails to advocate short-term, genuine withdrawal, but it does the opposite. It advocates that we stay until at least 2008, and endorses the notion that we should keep fighting in the hope that we will achieve something positive. It also expressly and emphatically opposes all efforts to withdraw now.

But beyond what the Report says, its effect -- in the real world, in actuality -- is that it alleviates the pressure on the President to remove our troops from Iraq, thereby ensuring that this war continues indefinitely. And as long as we remain in Iraq, abuses of this sort -- Abu Grahib and Bilal Hussein and more and more slaughter -- are going to continue and worsen. Fiddling around with "tactics," finding new excuses to stay longer, and proposing incremental strategic changes which will be ignored (and hopelessly botched if adopted) are all just cosmetics -- and dangerous ones at that. I agree completely with what Kevin Drum said:

Every extra day that we spend in Iraq merely makes our eventual disengagement harder and bloodier. Always remember: things can get even worse than they are now. They have for each of the previous three years, after all.

Independent of whether something good in theory could be squeezed out of Iraq by remaining, nothing good can come from staying in Iraq under this particular "Commander-in-Chief," which is the only one there is in reality. Staying in Iraq means a Bush-led occupation, just like invading Iraq meant a Bush-led invasion.

This administration simply does not believe in -- and is intent on further violating and eroding -- the most basic liberties and values of human rights which we have long sought to defend. And their disregard for human rights is matched only by their total ineptitude. They degrade and destroy everything they touch.

The war in Iraq enables an erosion of liberties, our standing in the world, and our national character in all sorts of devastating ways. Thus, anything which helps prolong it -- and the Baker-Hamilton Report unquestionably does that -- is something that deserves to be discredited, no matter what nice language it contains.

Two blog items

(1) I am in the process of arranging interviews with some of the key figures who helped uncover the complicity of the Homeland Security Department and Department of Justice in multiple kidnappings and murders in Mexico (including at least one victim kidnapped from the U.S.), as well as the DOJ's efforts to punish the whistleblowers and journalists who uncovered it (while, as always, protecting the Bush-allied wrongdoers).

The interviews are going to be conducted by telephone and will be tape-recorded, and I would like to create an uploadable file for the interview, as well as transcripts for each. If anyone can assist with that -- particularly with generating transcripts -- please e-mail me. For reasons I described over the last week, I think this case really deserves to be aggressively pursued and there are substantial potential benefits from doing so.

(2) Voting for the Weblog Awards began yesterday. This blog is nominated in the Best Individual Blog category, and you can vote here.

Voting for all categories can be done here.

What rational person would listen to people like James Baker?

(Updated below - Update II - Update III)

Atrios posted an excerpt of Russ Feingold making a vitally important though barely-recognized point last night on MSNBC (C&L has the video here):

The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report.

Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. . . .

This report does not do the job and it's because it was not composed of a real representative group of Americans who believe what the American people showed in the election, which is that it's time for us to have a timetable to bring the troops out of Iraq.

The reason it is worthwhile -- actually imperative -- to continuously document what war advocates said in the past is because they have proven themselves to be completely bereft of judgment and insight and, in most cases, lacking any sort of moral compass. And yet, these same war advocates -- and only they -- are deemed even today, as Iraq lies in ruins, to be the responsible leaders who have a monopoly on worthwhile wisdom. Conversely, those who exhibited great judgment and foresight are as mocked and stigmatized as much as ever (just a little bit less overtly, but only a little), and are excluded entirely from the process of determining what we should do now.

This matters for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that the people who brought us into the disaster we are in have not accepted responsibility and, consequently, have not changed their mentality or premises any. Where are the mea culpas for Iraq? With very rare exception, they are nonexistent, because nobody believes that they were at fault for what happened. Virtually all of the people who advocated this invasion have all created their own private rationalizations as to why they were right and other people failed to implement their plan.

As a result -- like everyone who thinks they were right in the past -- war advocates of every stripe believe not only that they were right originally, but that the solution now -- not just in Iraq but in the Greater Epic War of Civilization -- lies in doing more, not less, of what they advocated originally, that we need to listen even more to what they believe. The principal excuse for war advocates as to why we have failed was that their advice was not followed enough, not that it was followed too much. Thus, continuing to treat these individuals as wise and responsible cannot achieve anything other than leading us further into disaster. It is vital that they be discredited the way they deserve, based on their prior, towering errors.

From the start, the Baker-Hamilton Commission was a travesty waiting to happen. Its composition ensured that it could be nothing else, for exactly the reason Russ Feingold said. James Baker exhibited absolutely horrendous, amoral judgment on Iraq prior to the war, yet here he is, hauled in as the responsible savior, as though his past was really the opposite of what it is. As a war advocate, Baker is driven by a compelling and vested interest to make this war look like the right choice from the start, not in finding a way to end our involvement in it (and thereby confirming that it was a mistake).

In August, 2002, just as the public debate over Iraq was really taking shape, Baker wrote a New York Times Op-Ed in which he advocated -- not opposed -- the invasion of Iraq. And although he included all sorts of Friedman-esque caveats about how we should try to do it with as many allies as possible and how the costs would be substantial, he made absolutely clear that he supported the invasion as a necessary and wise measure to depose Saddam Hussein.

What possible rationale exists for listening to someone who urged us to pursue a course that is the greatest strategic disaster in our country's history? A person who said this should be shunned, not idolized:

Peace-loving nations have a moral responsibility to fight against the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by rogues like Saddam Hussein. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do so, and leading that fight is, and must continue to be, an important foreign policy priority for America. . . .

The only realistic way to effect regime change in Iraq is through the application of military force, including sufficient ground troops to occupy the country (including Baghdad), depose the current leadership and install a successor government. Anyone who thinks we can effect regime change in Iraq with anything less than this is simply not realistic.

Although it is technically true that the United Nations already has sufficient legal authority to deal with Iraq, the failure to act when Saddam Hussein ejected the inspectors has weakened that authority. Seeking new authorization now is necessary, politically and practically, and will help build international support. . . .

And even if the administration fails in the Security Council, it is still free -- citing Iraq's flouting of the international community's resolutions and perhaps Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which guarantees a nation's right to self-defense -- to weigh the costs versus the benefit of going forward alone.

Others will argue that this approach would give Saddam Hussein a way out because he might agree and then begin the ''cheat-and-retreat'' tactics he used during the first inspection regime. And so we must not be deterred. The first time he resorts to these tactics, we should apply whatever means are necessary to change the regime. And the international community must know during the Security Council debate that this will be our policy.

If we are to change the regime in Iraq, we will have to occupy the country militarily. The costs of doing so, politically, economically and in terms of casualties, could be great. They will be lessened if the president brings together an international coalition behind the effort. Doing so would also help in achieving the continuing support of the American people, a necessary prerequisite for any successful foreign policy.

So that was the brilliant Baker's advice in 2002 -- we should try to get as many countries as possible to help us and should try to get U.N. authorization if we can for the invasion (as though anyone didn't realize that). But, argued Baker, if we can't do that, we should invade anyway.

And we followed Baker's advice exactly. The administration did try to get as many countries as possible to help and did try to get U.N. authorization. And when it largely failed at the former and failed completely at the latter, it invaded anyway, just as Baker advocated. And unimaginable disaster resulted. And now Establishment Washington says that the wise, responsible, revered expert to lead us to safety is the same James Baker who urged us to embark upon this course in the first place. Deeper irrationality is hard to fathom.

Compare the profound wrongness of Baker's pre-war arguments to the pre-war prescience and insight of war opponents such as Howard Dean, Jim Webb, Russ Feingold Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi, or the statements over a year ago from crazy, insane, cut-and-run-coward Jack Murtha about what would happen in Iraq if we stayed. The incoherence of viewing the former as some sort of responsible and wise foreign policy expert, while viewing the latter as frivolous and irresponsible radicals, is so intense that it makes one almost dizzy to contemplate.

If you go to a doctor for an operation and he completely botches your surgery and you lose an organ due to his abject ineptitude and recklessness, you don't go back to that doctor for repair surgery; you find another one. If you go to a lawyer who almost destroys your company through complete ignorance of your basic legal obligations, you don't stay with that lawyer in the hope that he will get you out of the disaster he created for you; you retain another one. All of that is just basic common sense.

Yet here we are, revering and listening to and following the same dense, amoral people who could not have been more wrong about everything they recommended and asserted prior to this war, while we scorn or (at best) ignore those who were so right. As but one example, one of the appointees on the Commission was the wildly extremist, warmongering American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin, though he is really different only in degree, not in kind, from most of the other Commission members and "experts" on whom they relied.

Worse, the people to whom we are listening do not recognize they were wrong. They believe they were right and that what we need is more of their great wisdom and advice, in greater doses. As a result, they are using exactly the same premises and assumptions and moral calculus that they used to bring about this tragedy, and astoundingly, there seem to be enough people -- at least in Washington -- willing to embrace the fantasy that somehow, this time around, listening to them will bring about better results.

UPDATE: Some commenters seem to be trying to find some good in what James Baker did here -- as though the Baker-Hamilton Report will help end the war. It won't.

In 2002, it was clear that the President was intent on invading and occupying Iraq, and all sorts of people endorsed that central idea but then -- like James Baker or Tom Friedman -- added their own caveats about how they thought it should be done. That didn't matter. Anything other than unambiguous, emphatic opposition to the invasion counted as support for the war. It fueled, rather than impeded, Bush's ability to invade at will.

Exactly the same is true now. Anyone who does not clearly advocate withdrawal sooner rather than later in accordance with a clear timetable is, in effect, endorsing the status quo. Anything muddled or any "plan" which calls for our ongoing, indefinite presence in Iraq (as the Report does) is tantamount to support for Bush to have license to do what he wants. There is clear language in the Baker-Hamilton Report that warns against the dangers of withdrawal (just as one would expect from a Commission comprised of war advocates).

Therefore, the Report will be used as an instrument against withdrawal and thus, by definition, in support of our ongoing occupation -- exactly what the President wants to do and will do. Just as was true for those who failed to oppose the invasion, by failing to loudly and clearly oppose our ongoing occupation (and, if anything, by clearly endorsing it, even if lamentably), the Report does nothing other than enable the ongoing occupation. Under the circumstances, one either advocates withdrawal or one does not. The Report did not. It's really just as simple as that.

UPDATE II: I agree completely with Jonah Goldberg, who makes the point I just made in the Update above:

The report undercuts the Murtha crowd by delegitimizing the quick bug-out (AKA redeployment) option and makes staying in Iraq at least until '08 the "conventional" or "mainstream" point of view.

For Bush, isn't this the only part of the ISG report that matters? And when it comes to the actual situation in Iraq, the report basically confirms established policies of the White House and the Pentagon. So, in effect, doesn't the heralded bipartisan commission in effect give Bush the leeway to — ahem — stay the course?

That's exactly what the Baker-Hamilton Report does. By undercutting real, definitive withdrawal -- the only real competitor to staying the course under Bush -- it endorses staying the course, which is now what is going to happen (that was going to happen anyway, but that option now has the cover of the Baker-Hamilton Report).

UPDATE III: Hilzoy has two in-depth posts about all of this which are highly worth reading -- this one, an analysis of Iran and Syria's interests, and this one a general analysis of the Baker-Hamilton Report. Both posts have convincing insights not readily available elsewhere.

Possibilities for restoring habeas corpus rights

(updated below)

The incoming and outgoing Chairmen of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter, yesterday jointly introduced legislation to repeal the portion of the Military Commissions Act which purports to eliminate habeas corpus rights for detainees and strip federal courts of jurisdiction to adjudicate detainee claims. The statements submitted by each, along with the text of their bill, can be found here (Pat Leahy's statement is highly worth reading; every day, he sounds more and more like a passionate liberty-defending blogger).

This bill, particularly in its current form, has no chance of passing. In October, Specter introduced an amendment to the Military Commission Act prior to its enactment which would have deleted from the bill the provision abolishing habeas corpus. That amendment failed 51-48. Specter then proceeded, the following day, to vote for the MCA even though it abolished habeas corpus rights.

Now that the MCA and its habeas-eliminating provision has been signed into law, repealing it is close to impossible under the circumstances (but not outright impossible - see below). Not only would the Specter-Leahy bill need to attract 60 votes in order to overcome a Mitch McConnell-led filibuster, it would need 66 votes in order to override what would, without question, be President Bush's second veto (it would be remarkably illustrative if the only two measures over the course of six years which moved the President to exercise his veto power were a bill to provide for stem cell research and another to protect the 900-year-old writ of habeas corpus).

It is true that five of the GOP Senators who voted against Specter's habeas amendment in October have now been replaced by Democrats (the habeas-opposing Santorum, Allen, Talent, DeWine and Burns are gone; Chafee voted in favor of Specter's amendment). But even if all five of the new Democrats vote in favor of this bill, that brings the total only to 53. Seven additional votes would be required to end a filibuster, and 13 additional votes would be needed to override a veto. And as Lindsey Graham tauntingly suggested yesterday, it is uncertain whether all five new Democrats would support the restoration of habeas corpus (though I believe they all would).

It's worth pausing here for a moment to remind ourselves of the profoundly deceitful "rationale" underlying the Military Commissions Act, as recited yesterday by Sen. Graham, one of the most aggressive habeas corpus opponents in the Senate (h/t Edward Copeland):

"I'm curious to see what the five new Democrats would think about giving terrorists the ability to sue our troops in federal court and having federal district court judges make wartime decisions," Graham said Wednesday. "I got a feeling a lot of them would agree with me."

As always, those accused of being "Terrorists" by the President are, by definition, "Terrorists." If we had a minimally functioning political process, Sen. Graham would not be able to justify the denial of judicial review to determine if someone is really guilty by arguing that terrorists should not have rights. That's like opposing criminal trials for accused murderers on the ground that murderers shouldn't have any rights. Yet, there he is, making that self-evidently dishonest argument without any hint of a challenge from the "reporter" who merely transcribes it.

In any event, it is certainly possible (I'd even say likely, though far from certain) that the Supreme Court will rule unconstitutional the MCA's elimination of habeas corpus, on the ground that, among other things, habeas corpus rights can be suspended only "in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion" (Art I., Sec. 9), and even then, only when "the public Safety may require it." Contrary to the rabid fantasies of Bush followers, we have not been invaded nor are we faced with rebellion, and the Constitution therefore does not permit the suspension of habeas corpus.

The argument that habeas corpus has not really been suspended because detainees have been provided a satisfactory alternative -- namely, adjudication of their status by the Pentagon's Combatant Status Review Tribunals -- is frivolous. The CSRT is a one-sided, Kafka-esque mockery of a judicial procedure that even most show-trial-loving dictators would be embarrassed to sanction (read the Leahy/Specter statement for a summary of just some of the reasons why that is so, as well as these superb materials from Thomas Sullivan detailing the laughable CSRT procedures). It seems highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will view that as a sufficient process to serve as an alternative to habeas corpus.

While the Leahy-Specter bill appears doomed to certain defeat -- and was thus likely introduced for symbolic reasons (in Specter's case to dishonestly cleanse himself from the support he lent to the passage of the MCA) -- there is a much more plausible legislative tactic for restoring habeas corpus rights which ought to be pursued.

As I wrote about previously, this Washington Post article by Jeffrey Smith strongly suggested that Specter could have saved at least limited habeas corpus rights, but chose not to. Specter had two amendments -- one to restore full habeas rights to detainees (the one he introduced and which failed), and another one which would have provided limited habeas rights (limiting challenges to one-per-lifetime and kicking in only after a full year in detention). The Post article suggests that Specter's more limited amendment commanded majority support in the Senate, and that had Specter introduced it, it would have passed. But Bill Frist permitted him to introduce only one amendment, and he chose the one which failed.

Thus, the only type of bill which would seem to have any chance of passing would be a habeas restoration bill along the lines of Specter's limited amendment -- one which negates the truly inane objection that habeas rights will somehow "flood" our court system and which allows the compromise-fetishists in Washington and in the Senate to vigorously support it. There is obviously no good reason to limit habeas rights in this fashion, but if that is the only way to at least allow detainees some access to a court, it is imperative that this be pursued.

The difference between a limited, one-time-only habeas challenge and unlimited habeas rights is significant. But the difference between a one-time-only habeas right and no habeas rights at all (i.e., lifetime imprisonment with no opportunity to contest the validity of one's detention or treatment) is an entire universe. Being able to access a federal court -- as opposed to rotting in Guantanamo with no tribunal to hear your complaints -- can change everything for a detainee. Once in federal court, all sorts of abuses and injustices can come to light, which is precisely why the Bush administration and its Congressional servants are so eager to extinguish that right in full.

If Leahy, Chris Dodd and other Democrats are going genuinely to pursue the restoration of habeas corpus, they should do so in a way that creates some genuine opportunity for succeeding. The bill introduced yesterday has none. Their intention might be to introduce a full-fledged habeas restoration bill at first and then negotiate a more limited version that can attract the 66 votes needed to override a presidential veto (even forcing a presidential veto by overcoming a filibuster would be worthwhile on many levels). But it remains to be seen if this will be a real attempt or just a symbolic, futile one.

UPDATE: As indicated above, the materials assembled by Thomas Sullivan regarding the travesty known as the CSRT hearing are really worth reading. In comments, Dan D excerpts this description of what happened with one detainee:

Murat Kurnaz (Tab 4): Mr. Kurnaz, a German resident of Turkish descent, was traveling through Pakistan with Islamic missionaries in November 2001 when he was detained by local police and eventually turned over to U.S. officials. The U.S. justified Mr. Kurnaz's detention on the basis that he was associated with a man who allegedly committed a suicide bombing in Turkey.

In his CSRT hearing, Mr. Kurnaz explained how he knew the alleged suicide bomber but did not know he was a terrorist; and he believed terrorism is not the way of Islam. Based on classified evidence Mr. Kurnaz was not allowed to review or answer, the CSRT upheld the determination that Mr. Kurnaz was an enemy combatant and associated with al Qaida.

However, when that information was later declassified, it contained no evidence directly linking Mr. Kurnaz to a1 Qaida, and showed U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies believed that Mr. Kurnaz did not have links to al Qaida.

The alleged suicide bomber was found alive in Germany, and German authorities said they had no proof that he was a terrorist. After being detained for five years without charge, Mr. Kurnaz was released in August 2006. (See Carol D. Leonnig, Panel Ignored Evidence on Detainee: U.S. Military Intelligence, German Authorities Found No Ties to Terrorists, The Washington Post, March 27, 2005, p. Al.)

And I'm sure he was treated very humanely during his five years in Guantanamo. Historians and others are going to look back on this exceptionally dark period of time in our country's history -- which is filled with incidents like this and far worse, only a fraction of which are known and some of which have yet to happen -- and ask how our Government could have engaged in conduct like this with so little opposition or challenge.

Today's tour around the world of the Bush follower

(updated below)

(1) Even in light of all the radical and tyrannical conduct pursued as part of the "War on Terror," I would have thought that most every American could agree that having Newt Gingrich re-write the free speech clause of the First Amendment -- really abolish it -- would be an idea so grotesque, stupid and dangerous that it would merit no debate. I was very wrong.

Gingrich followed up his speech last week calling for "a serious debate about the first amendment" so that we can "break up [the terrorists'] capacity to use free speech," with a new article that goes even further. Titled "The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact," Gingrich said that suspected terrorists should be "subject to a totally different set of rules" and called for "international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims."

To defend his argument, Gingrich cited a Commentary article by former prosecutor and current National Review contributor Andy McCarthy, who expressly rejected the core principle of the First Amendment when urging, in essence, that there be a Free Speech Exemption for Islamist ideas:

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously put it in 1919, “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—[and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

But does this self-correcting competition never end? Is everything, ultimately, relative—left forever to be weighed against everything else? Do we so lack confidence (except in the sacrosanct status of speech itself) that we are unable to say with assurance that some things are truly evil, and that advocating them not only fails to serve any socially desirable purpose but guarantees more evil?

Must our historical deference to opinion, however noxious, defer as well to a call to arms against innocents, or a call to destroy a form of representative government that protects religious and political freedom? May we not even ban and criminalize the advocacy of militant Islam and its métier, which is the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians?

In a TCS Daily column this week entitled "Why Newt is Right," Josh Manchester talked about all the bad things that would happen in the event that a nuclear bomb were detonated in Long Beach, California, and then expressly urged measures for "physically stopping or legally outlawing the ideas behind radicalism" (h/t Instapundit the Libertarian, who promoted Manchester's anti-First-Amendment article).

As Terry Welch notes, if Bush followers are serious about criminalizing the advocacy of terrorism-promoting ideas, they should begin with many of their own political comrades, who specialize in violence-advocating rhetoric. And, as always, it is worth noting for those who favor free speech restrictions in other "benign" contexts: if you advocate the criminalization of ideas which you don't like (or which you believe are "dangerous"), you really have no ground to object to efforts to do the same thing (when applied to ideas that you do like or dislike less) by people like Gingrich, McCarthy, Manchester and Reynolds.

In any event, I ask this literally: are there any American values at all in which Bush followers and neocons actually believe -- any constitutional principles that are sacrosanct and whose violations they would oppose if undertaken in the name of fighting The Terrorists? It certainly doesn't appear so. They literally do not believe in "America" -- other than as a physical land mass.

(2) Ann Althouse yesterday: "calling your opponent stupid is incredibly lame... an admission that you have no substance."

Ann Althouse last week: "Glenn Greenwald is such an idiot. Am I supposed to respond to this foolishness? Glenn, you moron . . . , you disreputable slimeball? (And your writing is putrid.)"

Obviously, the interesting point here is not Ann Althouse. By itself, her observation yesterday that the treatment of Jose Padilla may have been justified by a fear that he would use his eyes to blink "coded messages" to The Terrorists says all that needs to be said about her, ever.

But a more general point here is worth making. It would just seem natural -- almost instinctual -- that before a person stands up publicly and says: "It is outrageous/disgusting/wrong/pathetic to engage in Behavior X," they would ask themselves: "Do I engage in Behavior X?" One would think they would do so because -- if for no other reason -- they would want to prevent others from so easily documenting their complete lack of integrity and credibility.

Yet it is truly amazing how many people do what Althouse did here -- namely, stridently condemn the exact behavior in which they routinely engage (one of the most common examples, of course, is the Bush follower who writes every day about how liberals are unpatriotic, traitorous, American-hating, subversive Friends of the Terrorists and then decries the lack of civility in political discourse or rails against the "Angry Left").

More baffling still, so often the hypocrisy is demonstrated not by some obscure, isolated behavior the person engaged in many years ago, such that they might reasonably have forgotten that they did it. Instead, the behavior which they flamboyantly condemn is very often behavior in which they very recently engaged and/or in which they repeatedly -- even routinely -- engage. As a result, just the most minimal amount of self-awareness ought to prevent them from so blatantly doing this -- or at least should cause them to define the behavior they are condemning in such a way so as to create a plausible argument that they don't do it.

Yet one can literally find examples this blatant every day, where someone spews the most self-righteous, vicious condemnations towards other people for doing exactly what the sermonizer routinely does. And it is genuinely difficult to understand how, in those cases, the sermonizer avoids the realization of what they're doing.

(3) If someone whose punditry you read regularly said this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, wouldn't you expect them to acknowledge error and explain what went wrong in their analysis, what they learned from it, etc? And if they failed to do so -- if, instead, they proceeded to pretend that they were right all along -- wouldn't you seriously question their judgment, reliability, and credibility?

That is really the question that applies to most of the nation's media figures and pundits (to say nothing of most of its politicians) who (a) cheered on the President's war in Iraq with multiple false and erroneous claims but (b) have never even acknowledged that fact, let alone accepted responsibility for it and retracted the very vicious and often personal accusations made against those who were right. Although the situation in Iraq has forced us to move somewhat closer to reality about what is taking place there, we are still living in a fantasy world when it comes to identifying exactly why we are in this predicament and who bears responsibility for it.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux courageously confronts (but, tragically, succumbs to) a temptation against which many of us battle everyday. As least in his failure, he makes several worthwhile points regarding the mindset of Bush followers with respect to basic liberties.

More on the Homeland Security and DOJ case

I want to follow-up on the post from yesterday regarding the complicity of Homeland Security and Justice Department officials -- including several very high level administration officials -- in the multiple murders committed by one of their paid informants. Radley Balko has some observations about this story here and here:

If true, this ought to be a scandal on par with Abu Ghraib. But in the three years since Luis Padilla's death, the Guardian reports that not a single American media outlet has spoken to his widow, and only the Dallas Morning News has given the case any coverage at all. It's certainly the first I've heard of it, and I follow drug war stories pretty closely.

Added to the facts from yesterday is this letter (.pdf) from the DEA's Sandy Gonazlez (the now-fired whistleblower and former Agent in Charge of the DEA's El Paso Office) to the El Paso Director of Homeland Security's ICE. That letter provides even greater detail and documentation as to the extent not only of the DOJ and Homeland Security's knowledge of the multiple murders committed by their paid informant, but, worse still, their efforts to actively shield the murderer from prosecution and to prevent the Mexican Government from arresting him and his associates for these murders.

Beyond that, this article from The San Antonio Current (h/t sysprog) details the attempts by the U.S. Attorney in Texas who played a central role in all of this -- George Bush and Alberto Gonzales associate Johnny Sutton -- to intimidate and threaten the independent journalist from Narco News who obtained the DEA memorandum which brought all of this to light:

When federal agents knock on your door, chances are they're not bringing you a Publisher's Clearinghouse check. Just ask San Antonio freelance journalist Bill Conroy: Federal agents visited his home and workplace trying to squeeze him for the source of a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo.

Conroy freelances investigative pieces about the drug war, border issues, and national security for Narco News, an online magazine covering Mexico and Central and South America. He is also the editor of the San Antonio Business Journal, but his work for Narco News is unrelated. . . .

According to Conroy's lawyer, Ron Tonkin, a former assistant U.S. attorney specializing in drug cases, around 6 p.m. on May 23, a man and woman identifying themselves as internal affairs agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited Conroy's home. Conroy was still at work and his wife answered the door.

At the behest of Conroy's wife, Agent Carlos Salazar gave her a phone number for Conroy to call him, then he and the unidentified agent left.

After receiving a call at work from his wife, Conroy phoned the number Salazar provided and left a voicemail, Tonkin said.

The Current called Salazar's number several times over the course of four days, but no one answered, nor was there voicemail.

Salazar didn't call Conroy back, but the next day, he and a male agent showed up at the Business Journal. Conroy escorted them to a conference room, where Salazar reportedly said, "I want to know your source" of a leaked, yet unclassified DHS memo that had been the centerpiece of one of Conroy's Narco News stories. Tonkin said Conroy refused to give up his source and told Salazar that if they planned on continuing to question him, he would record the conversation.

The agents left the conference room, reportedly asking Conroy, "Does your boss know you write for Narcosphere?"

The agents then took Conroy's boss into a conference room, where, according to Tonkin, he told them Conroy had done the work on his own time for another publication and there was nothing he could do for them.

As is always true for the Bush administration, they are not interested in investigating severe government wrongdoing. But they are very vigilant about investigating -- and trying to ferret out and punish -- those who bring the wrongdoing to light (the classic case being their eagerness to punish the whistleblowers and journalists who informed Americans that the President was illegally eavesdropping on them, while doing everything possible to protect the lawbreakers themselves).

The context of this "visit" by federal agents to Conroy's home and office, as well as the accompanying threats issued to him, must be emphasized: the story which Conroy had reported on for Narco News involved the complicity in multiple murders on the part of federal DHS agents as well as the U.S. attorney who sent the agents to Conroy's home and business. Under the circumstances, receiving a "visit" to one's home and business by federal agents sent by the Bush associate at the heart of this matter would be seen by any reasonable person as quite intimidating, just as intended.

The specific DHS memo which the agents claimed to be interested in was a DHS memo obtained by Conroy in which "ICE supervisors were ordered to purge terrorism records from the computer system and reclassify them as unrelated to terrorism." That order, by itself, seems corrupt on its face: "Mark Conrad, a retired supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, told the Current that this order contradicts any protocol he knew of while an agent and violates federal law."

But there is little doubt that this unbelievably threatening behavior towards this reporter was motivated by the reporter's exposure of the complicity of ICE and Sutton's office in the Lalo murders:

"The agents would not do this on their own," Conrad said, adding that in his experience as a supervisor, "we could not interview a reporter especially about sources or anything they had written without Washington approval, including the Department of Justice."

Tonkin and Conrad speculated that the visits were "payback" for Conroy's stories that were embarrassing to U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas Johnny Sutton. On April 1, Conroy reported on an alleged cover-up regarding ICE agents who were reportedly protecting a criminal informant accused of multiple drug-related murders in Ciudad Juárez. The case fell under Sutton's jurisdiction.

Ordinarily -- meaning when our Republic works the way it is supposed to -- grave misconduct of this sort is investigated by Congress, which has as one of its principal functions the duty of oversight. It is the responsibility of Congress -- and, really, only Congress can fulfill the responsibility -- to ensure that the vast law enforcement powers under the control of the Executive branch [in order (theoretically) to execute our laws] are not abused.

But, needless to say, our Republic hasn't been functioning the way it is supposed to, in large part because the Congress has been ruled by authoritarian followers of the President who believe that the Leader does not err. Therefore -- outside of Narco News and a couple of isolated, ignored reporters -- nothing relating to any of these events has been investigated, neither by the media nor the Congress. And that is really as pure of a microcosm of the last five years as anything I can think of.

There just must be a Congressional investigation into this entire matter. The extent of wrongdoing here is staggering. It would be one thing if it were just some rogue law enforcement officers engaging in excessive, criminal and/or violent behavior. By itself, that would compel all sorts of investigations and corrective actions, but that would be a more commonplace outrage.

This case goes far beyond that. Agents of our government worked with, paid and recorded a serial murderer who repeatedly tortured and slaughtered people with the knowledge of high-level DOJ and DHS officials. The 30-year DEA agent in charge of the El Paso office who complained about this and brought it to light was threatened and then fired. The independent reporter who reported on it was harassed, intimidated and threatened by agents who, with pure malice, went to his boss in an unrelated job in order to disclose information about him that they thought would be damaging, if not get him fired -- all done to force the reporter to disclose his sources.

This is lawless, thug behavior of the most extreme type. And it resulted in the deaths of numerous people, including the brutal torture and murder of a completely innocent life-long resident of the United States (and husband and father of three), and at least 12 Mexicans, including at least some who were completely innocent of wrongdoing. Homeland Security's conduct also came close to resulting in the slaughter of a DEA agent and his wife and daughters. And those who objected and tried to bring all of this to light were threatened, intimidated and punished.

And all of it was done with the knowledge and consent of very high-ranking Homeland Security and Justice Department officials -- possibly including the Attorney General and others -- with at least the partial intent to protect a close associate of the President and Alberto Gonzales, an individual who continues to serve as a U.S. Attorney today. And the still-serving DEA administration herself appears to have actively sought to punish the DEA whistleblower.

I believe (without being certain) that it is the House Judiciary Committee (Chairman John Conyers), and specifically the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Reform, and Claims, which has oversight responsibilities for ICE. In the Senate, it would seem that oversight responsibility is within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Chairman Joe Lieberman), and specifically the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I'm sure other Committees and Subcommittees have overlapping jursidiction as well.

I think some sort of campaign is in order to demand a Congressional investigation into all of these events. It is a modest and focused enough objective such that an effectively designed campaign could succeed. I would think all that would be necessary is to find one new Chair of a House or Senate Subcommittee with some possible jurisdiction who would find this matter worthy of investigation. That shouldn't be too difficult.

As I said yesterday, the primary reason that this is all so worth investigating (beyond the heinous conduct that drove all of this) is because (a) the sheer lawlessness and thugishness is how the administration operates generally, (b) it involves political officials at very high levels of the administration, and (c) it removes terrorism manipulation and national security excuses from the equation.

And all of the issues here -- political, legal and moral -- are very straightforward and clear. Our Government really shouldn't be standing idly by and, worse, paying, actively protecting and assisting a homicidal psychopath while he continues with his torture and killing spree (that he records with our Government's equipment). Nor should it threaten and intimidate career DEA agents and investigative journalists who object all because high-level administration officials were directly responsible for the misconduct.

Pervasive, systematic criminality plagues our federal government. Investigating this most egregious matter seems to be a manageable and modest way -- not to mention, for Democrats, a politically risk-free way -- to expose and punish at least some of it.

In the other "war" -- more of the same

(updated below - Update II)

This lengthy and extremely well-documented investigative article from the British newspaper The Observer has to be read to be believed. Although the subject of the investigation (the U.S. Government's conduct as part of its "war on drugs") receives little attention in the U.S., the incident reported by the Observer powerfully highlights exactly what the Bush administration is and how its "Homeland Security" Department operates (most of the original investigative reporting for this story was actually done by the online anti-drug-war newsletter, Narco News, a fact which The Observer should have but failed to acknowledge).

I really recommend reading the Observer article in its entirety, although though I will summarize the basic facts. In 2000, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department (ICE) -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- recruited Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as "Lalo," to work as an informant for ICE as part of its investigation into a Mexican drug cartel which operated close to the Texas border. ICE was intent on gathering enough information to indict high-level Mexican drug traffickers, and they paid "Lalo" more than $220,000 to work as a spy for them, including the wearing of a wire.

In August, 2003, Lalo's cartel boss ordered him to participate in the murder of a Mexican lawyer. Lalo participated in the murder -- which was extremely brutal -- while wearing the wire supplied to him by ICE. The ICE agents thus became aware that the cartel they were investigating was murdering people and that their own informant was participating in those murders -- even as he wore their wire.

After the initial murder, the ICE agents sought permission to continue using Lalo as their informant. Permission was given by high-level Justice Department officials in both Texas and Washington, including several Texans who are very close associates of both George Bush and Alberto Gonzales:

The information went up the chain of command, eventually reaching America's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John G. Malcolm. It passed through the office of Johnny Sutton, the US Attorney for Western Texas - a close associate of George W. Bush. When Bush was Texas governor, Sutton spent five years as his director of criminal justice policy. After Bush became President, Sutton became legal policy co-ordinator in the White House transition team, working with another Bush Texas colleague, Alberto Gonzalez (sic), the present US Attorney General.

Earlier this year Sutton was appointed chairman of the Attorney General's advisory committee which, says the official website, 'plays a significant role in determining policies and programmes of the department and in carrying out the national goals set by the President and the Attorney General'. Sutton's position as US Attorney for Western Texas is further evidence of his long friendship with the President - falling into his jurisdiction is Midland, the town where Bush grew up, and Crawford, the site of Bush's beloved ranch.

Permission was given by Homeland Security and the DOJ to continue to work with Lalo. Over the course of the next six months, Lalo directly participated in the murder of 13 different Mexicans, usually extremely brutal murders, and all with the knowledge of ICE. Despite one murder after the next being perpetrated by their paid informant, they never intervened (even though they obviously, by that point, had more than enough evidence to do so). Instead, they continued to seek and obtain permission from the Justice Department to continue to work with (and pay) Lalo, now a serial murderer.

On January 14, 2004, Lalo kidnapped Luis Padilla in El Paso, Texas, drove him across the Mexican border, and then murdered him along with two other Mexcians, all while wearing an ICE wire. It was later revealed that Padilla -- who had lived in the U.S. (legally) since childhood and at the time with living (legally) in Texas with his wife and three children -- had nothing to do with any cartels and was abducted by Lalo as a matter of mistaken identity.

At around the same time, members of Lalo's cartel-- the cartel which ICE knowingly allowed to go on murdering -- went to the home of an undercover DEA agent in order to kill him (they obtained his identity and home address by torturing an informant). The DEA agent barely escaped with his wife and daughters, though sheer luck.

The DEA had not known about ICE's ongoing work with Lalo. They thought, naturally, that ICE severed its connection to him once he began murdering people while wearing an ICE wire. But after the DEA's agent and immediate family were almost murdered by the cartel, they found out that ICE was still working with Lalo and they reacted with extreme anger (obviously):

On 24 February, Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice counterpart, John Gaudioso:

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

Once the DEA's Gonzalez put these accusations in writing, the Bush Justice Department responded boldly and vigorously . . . by attacking, threatening and ultimately forcing the retirement of the DEA's Gonzales -- the whistleblower who brought this to light -- for the crime of complaining about it and putting it in writing, thereby risking discovery of what ICE had done (with the permission of the DOJ). Not only was no action taken against the perpetrators, but they were actively protected.

Specifically, U.S. Attorney Sutton -- the long-time Texas associate of George Bush and Alberto Gonzales -- used his DOJ connections, including with John Ashcroft, to have the entire matter concealed and have the DEA's Gonzalez threatened:

Gonzalez was told that Sutton was 'extremely upset'. Gonzalez, who had enjoyed glittering appraisals throughout his 30-year career, was told he would be downgraded. On 4 May, DEA managers in Washington sent him a letter. It said that, if he quietly retired before 30 June, he would be given a 'positive' reference for future employers. If he refused, a reference would dwell on his 'lapse'. Gonzalez resigned, and launched a lawsuit - part of which is due to come to court tomorrow.

So, to recap -- Homeland Security agents at ICE were so obsessed with building a case for drug trafficking that they knowingly stood by and continued to work with and pay a murderous psychopath who brutally murdered innocent people (Mexicans, that is) while being recorded by Homeland Security agents. Despite that, they continued to receive permission from the highest levels of the DOJ to maintain their connections with him. And when a 30-year DEA agent complained about this -- after one of his agents and the agent's family was almost slaughtered as a result -- the DOJ sided with Bush's Texas cronies and threatened and punished the whistleblower with all sorts of recriminations (despite 30 years of exemplary service).

What kind of morally deranged people are working in Homeland Security and the Justice Department? (The same type responsible for this). Who would just sit idly by knowing the exact identity of serial murderers and do nothing to stop them, even continue to work with them and pay them, as they continue to slaughter more and more people? As The Observer noted with exasperation:

Now, as a result of documents disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that [Luis Padilla's] murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to top Washington officials close to President Bush. . . .

The US agencies and officials in this saga - all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to have thought it more important to get information about drugs trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people.

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the first narrative account to appear in print.

And the DEA's Gonzalez said:

If Congress and the media start to look at this properly, they will be horrified. It needs a special prosecutor, as with the case of Valerie Plame. But Valerie is a nice-looking white person and the victims here are brown. Nobody gives a shit.

All the familiar elements are here. The Bush administration acts without legal or moral limits. When the conduct is uncovered, it is the whistleblower who is punished. Virtually no American media outlet is even slightly interested, and we have to rely upon an Internet newsletter and British newspaper to do the heavy investigative work.

And if any of this ever were actively discussed here -- and, really, why would it be? -- all of it will be justified by invoking scary bogeymen, in this case the dark Mexican drug lords instead of the dark Arab Terrorists. The one thing you can say about the Bush administration is that they act in accordance with a very consistent template.

UPDATE: As police officer (and periodic commenter here) Diana Powe points out in this excellent comment, there is a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, Alfredo Corchado, who has been reporting on this story quite vigilantly. See, for instance, here and here. The Observer article alluded to Corchado's work.

Independently, Officer Powe's argument against the "drug war" underscores an increasing trend among law enforcement officers of all types who are now actively opposing drug prohibition laws.

UPDATE II: The actual letter from the DEA's Gonzalez to the ICE agent is here (.pdf), located at Narco News' superb collection of documents relating to this matter (and similar ones) (h/t Karson). Gonzalez's letter (which was clearly an attempt by him to record his version of events with regard to the DEA's dispute with ICE) provides even more details concerning the complicity of ICE agents (and, by effect, the DOJ) in the multiple murders committed by its informant.

Howard Kurtz speaks on Jose Padilla: just some leg shackles for the Dirty Bomber

(updated below)

Howard Kurtz, the media critic for both CNN and The Washington Post, participated in an online chat yesterday, and was asked about the Jose Padilla story in yesterday's New York Times. This is what ensued:

Princeton, N.J.: On the front page of the NY Times today is an article replete with pictures of the Bush administration's treatment of Joseph (sic) Padilla, an American citizen. Do you think the pictures will have a similar effect on the U.S. public as did the pictures of torture in Iraq?

Howard Kurtz: I don't know. It depends on whether you believe that someone accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack should have to wear blacked-out goggles and have his legs shackled when he is taken outside solitary confinement for a dentist's appointment.

Kurtz's answer, brief though it may be, illustrates so very many things about our country and its media (h/t to this TPM commenter, who obviously knows how to bait).

Some aspects of Kurtz's answer are too self-evident to merit extended discussion, beginning with his painfully shallow and misleading understanding of what the entire Padilla story is about. To Kurtz, the uproar is about nothing other than whether an Accused Terrorist should have to wear leg shackles and "goggles" when being transported outside of his prison cell.

In Kurtz's world, the only thing this non-story really implicates are some routine matters involving prisoner security which only whiny human rights hysterics would be upset about. After all, what sensible person would ever question whether a Dangerous Prisoner should be subject to some reasonable security precautions when being transported? It's just some leg shackles and goggles. What's all the fuss about?

What's next? Will the ACLU also demand a color television for Al Qaeda murderers? Kurtz's "understanding" of this story is the rough equivalent of what a garden-variety right-wing blogger would say about it -- say, Kurtz's most favorite TV guest, John Hinderaker, or even Rush Limbaugh.

And then there is the inexcusable outright factual inaccuracy of claiming that Padilla's treatment can be justified on the ground that he is "accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack." It's fairly obvious that Howard Kurtz knows very, very little about what has happened to Jose Padilla.

Anyone who has paid even mild attention knows that when the Bush administration was finally forced to indict him, the criminal charges included none of the flamboyant accusations they had made in press conferences and via leaks over the last 3 years, including the accusation that he is a "dirty bomber." Contrary to Kurtz's claim, Padilla does not stand accused of that.

Even when confronted with that fact in a subsequent question by a reader much more informed than he was, Kurtz continued to display abject ignorance about the Padilla case on which he was opining:

Wilmington, N.C.: "It depends on whether you believe that someone accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack should have to wear blacked-out goggles and have his legs shackled when he is taken outside solitary confinement for a dentist's appointment."

None of the allegations against Mr. Padilla mention a dirty-bomb attack. Have I missed something?

Howard Kurtz: Well, the second graph of the NYT story says, "Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges..."

Kurtz is ignorant of the most basic facts here because he is indifferent to this story. And he's indifferent to this story not because he has no opinion about it, but precisely because he does have an opinion about it -- a very clear and didactic opinion.

Kurtz's answer to the reader -- as well as his factual ignorance about this entire matter -- makes clear that he thinks there is nothing even notable, let alone objectionable, about the fact that the Bush administration imprisons American citizens and treats them for years like farm animals even though they've never been charged with (never mind convicted of) any crime. To Kurtz, that is not something even worthy of discussion.

When someone discusses the Padilla matter specifically -- or the general fact that the Bush administration imprisons people indefinitely, including U.S. citizens, with no charges and often in the most inhumane manner -- it is quite common to hear expressions of incredulity, genuine bafflement, over the fact that not only is our government engaging in such conduct, but that it is prompting so little public outcry. I'm rarely able to avoid talking about this issue without making that point -- why isn't this most patent violation of our country's core principles, whereby our fellow citizens are being imprisoned and tortured by our government with no charges, prompting genuine anger?

This is the reason why. Over the last five years, the media (with some notable and noble exceptions) essentially embraced the central premise of the Bush administration -- that in order for us to be protected, we must place our faith in the Leader and know that he is doing Good, because he wants to protect us.

He may err at times. He might even go a little too far or be a little zealous in what he does to make us safe. But there are Very, Very Bad People in the world who want to kill us -- Padilla is "accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack"! -- and the Leader needs the power to get his hands dirty and take care of them. The last thing we should be concerned with is what the Leader does to them.

With those premises snugly in place, "journalists" like Kurtz have spent the last five years doing the opposite of what they were supposed to be doing -- rather than skeptically scrutinize the conduct and motives of the Leader, they became his most enthusiastic followers. The President's promises of protection from the Scary Terrorists Who Want to Kill You resonated most loudly among the frightened, coddled media elites like Kurtz, who were more than eager to fulfill their end of the bargain by assuming the core goodness and honesty of the Government and never questioning that basic premise.

For the media to have any worthwhile function at all, it needs to be the least trusting group in the country, not the most. Their principal function is to serve as an adversarial watchdog over those in power, informing Americans when the Government's claims and behavior are suspect. That's just Journalism 101. It is vital that, if anything, they err -- strongly -- on the side of excess skepticism. Placing blind faith and trust in the actions of political leaders is the antithesis of the journalistic ethos, but those are the attributes which have been driving most of the nation's most influential political journalists throughout the Bush Presidency.

As Walter Pincus' belated though still welcome Post article this week illustrates, the time of reckoning for journalists -- an examination of the indispensable and corrupt role they played in enabling what has happened over the last five years -- is rapidly approaching. Journalists and similar types are beginning to acknowledge the almost complete co-opting of the media by the Bush administration over the last five years. There is, in some journalistic circles, a burgeoning (and very well-earned) shame over the entirely voluntary transformation of the media into a subservient propaganda arm of the most extreme elements of the Bush agenda.

The Bush administration was able to invade Iraq, imprison and torture people (including U.S. citizens), and repeatedly and openly break the law not because the Howard Kurtz's of our country failed in their duty as journalists (although they did, profoundly). It goes beyond that. They affirmatively believed in those things -- and in many cases, still do -- every bit as much as the President and his government did, and they worked in harmonious concert with the administration to do as much, if not more, to enable it.

Why isn't there more of a controversy over the radicalism of the Bush movement? Ask Howard Kurtz. It's just some goggles and leg shackles for a Terrorist. What's there to discuss?

UPDATE: Credit where it's due - one authortarian Bush follower has discovered a very likely and reasonable explanation as to why Padilla was forced to wear those "goggles." And just to be clear: she did not say this in jest.

The fruits of democracy

(updated below)

Hugo Chavez was overwhelmingly re-elected yesterday as Venezuela's President. Opposition to the United States played a significant role in his successful campaign, as he promised "a more radical version of socialism and [to] forge a wider front against the United States in Latin America."

Over the last two years, the Palestinians democratically elected Hamas leaders. The Lebanese have democratically elected Hezbollah to play a major role in their parliamentary government. The Iranian-allied militias in Iraq are led by factions with substantial representation in the democratically elected Iraqi Government. And the Iranian Hitler himself was democratically elected (just like Hitler the First was, long before the parade of all the new Hitlers).

If the leaders whom we are supposed to hate so much -- even the ones who are The Terrorists -- keep getting elected democratically, doesn't that negate the ostensible premise of our foreign policy -- that America-loving allies will magically spring up all over the world where there are democracies and they will help us fight The Terrorists?

And beyond that, isn't it more likely that leaders who are hostile to the U.S. will be democratically elected around the world if we continue to engage in conduct seemingly designed to make the whole world resentful and suspicious of us? We're not supposed to care about world opinion -- we don't need permission slips from the U.N. and all of that -- and there is a good argument to make that every country has to decide for itself what its own interests are (which, in reality, is what every country does, including those which pretend to be guided by selfless ideals and international institutions).

But if we continue to be overtly belligerent and essentially indifferent to world opinion -- because we can be, because we're militarily stronger -- that would seem to make it virtually impossible for pro-American candidates to be elected anywhere in the world, thereby subverting the central goal we claim we have of eliminating anti-U.S. resentment by spreading democracy throughout the world. As this Bush follower lamented after complaining about Chavez's victory (h/t Instapundit):

It seems to be a popular move this year to run an Anti-Bush, anti-US military campaign. It worked for the democrats, too.

Good Luck.

There are obviously other issues that account for the support which the Venezuelan poor give to Chavez, but people whose foreign policy vision consists of alienating our allies, changing other countries' governments at will, and invading whomever we want shouldn't really be that surprised when anti-American sentiment is a potent electoral tool. Independently, engaging in such resentment-producing behavior might also worsen what the President himself says is the reason the 9/11 attacks happened: "anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits."

Perhaps we can soon come to the realization that it may not be such a good idea for a country which is intensely disliked by much of the world's population on every continent to urge that leaders be chosen democratically, since, by definition, that will likely produce leaders who are hostile rather than friendly to the U.S. And if spreading democracy is going to be our central goal, then maybe it does matter after all what the rest of the world thinks, since that is what will determine who the leaders are of other countries.

Of course, all of these concerns disappear if what we really mean by "democracy" is "a country run by leaders who act in the interests of the U.S., even if their rule has nothing to do with elections." Whatever it is that is driving our foreign policy, a premium on democracy doesn't really seem in reality to be high on the list, given that some of our most important allies have as little to do with democracy as possible, while some of our worst Enemies and even The Terrorist Enemies are democratically elected.

But one thing that ought to be clear today is that democratic elections do not inherently produce governments friendly to the U.S. Some might even be quite hostile, which is why overt contempt for world opinion -- while enabling some of us to feel powerful and exceptional -- may not be so smart.

UPDATE: I did not intend to suggest that all or even any of the above-referenced elections were free of irregularities, improprieties and/or outright corruption (although I don't know of any credible source which concluded that the victors were not really the victors, and that's certainly the case for Chavez's victory). The point is that each of the anti-American winners in those elections has substantial popular support, illustrating the fact that -- particularly given our recent behavior in the world -- there may actually be an inverse relationship between a democratic election and the likelihood that a government will be favorably disposed towards the U.S.

Additionally, Paul Rosenberg in comments takes issue with the notion that Hitler was democratically elected, and my response is here.

The ongoing national disgrace of lawless indefinite detentions

I've honestly run out of adjectives to use when discussing the Bush administration's treatment of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. Last month, I wrote about the torture -- there is no other accurate word for it -- to which Padilla alleges, quite credibly, he was subjected over the 3 1/2 years of his lawless detention. Today, The New York Times describes the apparently jarring video showing a completely dehumanized Padilla being transported from his black hole to a dentist visit. The article includes an assessment from a psychologist describing how Padilla's humanity has basically been extinguished by his treatment.

Digby says everything that needs to be said about how depraved this specific behavior is. And any decent human being can see that for themselves. It is as self-evident as anything can be. So I want to make a few additional observations about this revelation:

(1) We are only learning about what was done to Padilla because, after 3 1/2 years of being held without any charges, he is now in the criminal judicial system and the Government's conduct and its allegations against Padilla are both now being subjected to scrutiny (just like the pre-9/11 Founders intended and explicitly required).

But if the Bush administration had its way, Padilla would still be languishing in solitary confinement -- prohibited from any contact with the outside world, including lawyers -- and detained without any charges at all. Bush officials did not voluntarily indict him and transfer him to the judicial system because they suddenly woke up one day and realized that American citizens shouldn't be imprisoned for years and years without due process. To the contrary, they still believe they have the power to detain U.S. citizens in that manner.

They only brought charges against Padilla in November, 2005 -- and transferred him from his military brig to a federal prison -- because the Supreme Court was set to rule on the legality of their treatment of Padilla, something they were desperate to avoid. By indicting him and finally allowing him to contest the accusations in court, the administration was able to argue -- successfully -- that the Supreme Court should dismiss Padilla's case because the relief he was seeking (i.e., either be charged or released) was now granted and his claims were therefore "moot."

But the administration continues to argue that it has the power to detain U.S. citizens -- including those, like Padilla, detained not on a "battlefield," but on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without any charges being brought. Nothing has changed in that regard.

(2) The Bush administration "justified" its treatment of Padilla through rank fear-mongering -- having John Aschroft flamboyantly brand him "the Dirty Bomber" and then leak to the press over the next two years that he wanted to blow up apartment buildings. But the indictment contained none of those allegations (because the "evidence" on which they were based was flimsy from the start and, independently, was unusable because it was obtained via torture). Instead, the Indictment merely recites the vaguest possible terrorism-related conspiracy accusations against Padilla.

Now that they are forced to defend their accusations in court, the Bush administration's case against Padilla has been revealed to be incredibly weak, as Dan Eggen's typically excellent article in The Washington Post last month detailed:

But now, nearly a year after his abrupt transfer into a regular criminal court, the Justice Department's prosecution of the former Chicago gang member is running into trouble.

A Republican-appointed federal judge in Miami has already dumped the most serious conspiracy count against Padilla, removing for now the possibility of a life sentence. The same judge has also disparaged the government's case as "light on facts," while defense lawyers have made detailed allegations that Padilla was illegally tortured, threatened and perhaps even drugged during his detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina. . . .

But some legal scholars and defense lawyers argue that the government's case is so fundamentally weak, and its legal options so limited, that Padilla could draw a relatively minor prison term or even be acquitted. The trial has already been postponed once, until January, and is almost certain to be delayed again.

It should go without saying (though I have no doubt that, for some, it does not) that whether Padilla is ultimately found guilty has absolutely no bearing on the disgraceful crime of detaining him with no charges for years and torturing him.

But the fact that the case against Padilla is so weak ought to cause any rational person to understand the dangers of vesting the power in the President to order people imprisoned forever without any real judicial process. Unfortunately for the U.S., the majority of the Military-Commissions-Act-approving 109th Congress was not composed of people who reason that way or who actually believe in the way America was designed to work.

(3) As Jeralyn Meritt said yesterday with profound understatement: "There should be a greater outcry over this." As I have said many times, the most astounding and disturbing fact over the last five years -- and there is a very stiff competition for that title -- is that we have collectively really just sat by while the U.S. Government arrests and detains people, including U.S. citizens, and then imprisons them for years without any charges of any kind. What does it say about our country that not only does our Government do that, but that we don't really seem to mind much?

Along those lines, it is hard to express the contempt merited by the drooling sociopaths who not only endorse this behavior but, with what can only be described as serious derangement, laugh about it and revel in its cruelty and its lawlessness. Here is Boston Herald columnist and hero to the most rabid Bush followers, Jules Crittenden:

I Think We're Supposed to Feel Bad About This

NYT offers up a day in the life of Jose Padilla. You may recall he is the gentleman from Chicago who converted to Islam, hobnobbed with al Qaeda, and, our
government has alleged, came back here with a plan to blow up apartment buildings, and now apparently lives in a state of virtual sensory deprivation while awaiting trial on charges of providing support to terrorists. A big day for Jose is having a root canal done.

Posted by jules crittenden at 1:41 AM

Of course, "our government" has not alleged that Padilla tried to "blow up apartment buildings." They "alleged" that only through leaks to the press, but in the actual Indictment, they alleged nothing of the sort, opting instead to rely on charges of "terrorism" so vague and bereft of substance that Padilla's lawyers have barely been able to figure out what he is being charged with and the Federal Judge has demanded more specificity.

But this is America. We don't need any of those 9/10-era indictments, trials and convictions. Once "our government" -- through "our Leader" -- unilaterally decrees, in secret, that someone is a Terrorist, there is no punishment too severe for them. And we must allow our Leaders this power, otherwise our freedoms might be threatened by Terrorists.

(4) The Bush administration currently has in its custody 14,000 human beings around the world (at least) who have never been charged with any crime (needless to say, we're not entitled to know the number or what is being done with them, because that's Secret, like everything else). That includes legal residents of the U.S. detained on U.S. soil and a photojournalist for The Associated Press in Iraq whose photographs of the war Bush followers disliked -- all simply decreed to be Guilty and held indefinitely with no process of any kind, undoubtedly in many cases subjected to the same treatment to which Padilla was subjected, if not worse.

The value of the Padilla case is that some light will at least finally be shined on the behavior of the Bush administration in its treatment of these detainees, because they will be forced to disclose information about what they have done. Between the truth-producing weapons of the criminal justice system and the imminent Congressional investigations, this relatively mundane video is only the beginning of what will be revealed in this area. It remains to be seen what the consequences of all of this will be, if any, for those who have perpetrated it.

UPDATE: Atrios has some observations regarding the effects of prolonged solitary confinement -- a tiny fraction of what was done to Padilla. I had a client once who was charged with various crimes completely unrelated to the Epic Global War of Civilizations. Nonetheless, under legislation enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, he was declared by Attorney General Ashcroft to be a "domestic terrorist" and, as a result, was kept in his tiny cell, in solitary confinement, for 23 out of 24 hours a day, allowed one hour for "recreation," by himself, in an indoor recreation room. His contact with the outside world was extremely limited.

He had no history or prior signs of mental illness. But within six months of confinement under those conditions, he was forced to take large doses of anti-depressants after he attempted suicide. His behavior changed palpably -- fundamentally -- and he became extremely passive and, a short time thereafter, was visibly broken. All of that occurred before he was convicted of any crime.

There are punishments as bad as, and in some cases worse than, execution. It takes a truly authoritarian mind -- and a decisively un-American mentality -- to want to vest the power to mete out those punishments in a Leader unburdened by the need to prove guilt.

UPDATE II: In comments, Zack describes the core of what is going on here.

The Federal Government's domestic intelligence-gathering on U.S. citizens

(updated below - Update II)

The Associated Press reported Friday that the Department of Homeland Security, over the last several years, has been secretly compiling detailed records of the travel activities of American citizens and assigning "risk assessment" ratings based on a whole slew of related information it collects and stores -- assessments which citizens have no right to review and which will be maintained by the U.S. Government for the next 40 years, (via the excellent Wired blog 27B Stroke 6):

Without notifying the public, federal agents for the past four years have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Federal law provides that citizens have the right to access records being maintained about them and to contest their accuracy, but Homeland Security has the power to exempt certain programs from that right of access, and -- needless to say -- it provided itself such an exemption here:

In the Federal Register, the Homeland Security Department exempted ATS from many provisions of the Privacy Act designed to protect people from secret, possibly inaccurate government dossiers. As a result, it said travelers cannot learn whether the system has assessed them. Nor can they see the records to contest the content.

Privacy advocates were previously able to force DHS to shut down a similar program which also collected data concerning purely domestic travel pending enhanced privacy protections, but the just-revealed DHS program has been proceeding for years without the public's knowledge.

It is also worth remembering -- because it seems to have disappeared almost completely from our public memory -- that USA Today revealed earlier this year that the NSA continues to compile comprehensive records of every telephone number which every person inside the U.S. calls, every telephone number from which they receive calls, and the duration of the calls. We hear about these things, express a day or so of outrage, and then proceed with docility to accept it:

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” the paper quoted one source as saying. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within U.S. borders, it said the source added. . . .

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told Fox News Channel: “The idea of collecting millions or thousands of phone numbers — how does that fit into following the enemy?”

And all of that, of course, is to say nothing of the NSA's ability not just to document, but also to listen in on -- in secret and with no oversight -- any and all international calls which Americans make or receive.

Combined, all of this (i.e., the surveillance activities that we happen to know about) amounts to a vast amount of data that the Federal Government is now compiling and maintaining about the activities -- including the domestic activities -- of its citizens. The Department of Homeland Security has rapidly become a multi-tentacled agency of domestic intelligence, and the NSA -- which, for the first several decades of its existence, had as its first mandate that it would never be turned against Americans inside the U.S. -- is being used exactly for that purpose, in ways that we know about and in ways that we almost certainly do not know about.

Worse still -- far worse -- the Government has developed these capabilities and instituted them almost entirely in secret, with no oversight of any kind. And as this week's revelation of this years-long travel data surveillance program makes clear (as did the revelations of the NSA programs before that), there are almost undoubtedly entire spying and other data-collection programs of which we are still completely unaware -- "we" meaning not only American citizens, but also virtually none (if not none) of our representatives in Congress, or, for that matter, anyone else outside of the Bush administration.

If a Government is permitted to collect and maintain vast dossiers on its citizens, that information is going to be abused. Period. As James Bamford wrote last year in The New York Times:

Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

I had an ultimately inconsequential but nonetheless quite illustrative personal experience with this several months ago. Back in July, when right-wing blogs were obsessed with investigating my personal life, including where I spend my time, this comment was left at Wizbang, in response to a July 21 post by Wizbang's Kevin Aylward:

Kevin,

Glenn Greenwald departed the United States on June 22, 2006 and hasn't come back since. If you want to know how I know that and more, send me an Email.

Posted by: Baggi at July 21, 2006 06:30 AM

The information provided there by "Baggi" was accurate. I left the U.S. on exactly June 22, and as of July 21, had not re-entered the country.

Knowing the date I exited the U.S. would not necessarily require access to a DHS data base. It would be possible, for instance, for someone to have known that I left the country on that date by having access to the records of the specific airline I used to travel. But to know -- as this commenter did -- that, as of the date of the comment, I had not re-entered the U.S. (even for a day, or a few hours), would absolutely require access to non-public DHS customs and immigration data bases compiling data regarding international travel. There is simply no other way to have known that (let alone the "and more" to which the commenter obliquely referred).

We're not supposed to have a Government which keeps track of what we do, absent some reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. Even with the most well-intentioned administration, it is self-evidently dangerous to allow the Government to maintain vast dossiers on tens or hundreds of millions of citizens. Those dangers are exacerbated -- severely -- when, as has been the case to an unconscionable degree, the Government is permitted to do all of this almost entirely in the dark, with no meaningful checks or oversight of any kind. And again, those conclusions are compelled by what we already know about all of this. The universe of what we don't know is assuredly vast.

Personally, I am going to have very little patience, understanding and tolerance for those who argue -- and there will be plenty of them, found everywhere -- that Democrats should use their new Congressional powers to investigate this administration only tepidly, delicately, and in the most limited and focus-group-tested ways. There is absolutely a need to ensure that investigations proceed in an orderly way and that they not be driven by vindictiveness. That's all well and true.

But along with the rule of law, the idea that we are supposed to have a transparent and open government -- one which operates in secret only in rare and extraordinary circumstances, i.e., when it truly needs to, not as a matter of course -- has been so discredited and forgotten that we almost reflexively accept, in a disturbingly sheep-like way, that we need not and should not know what the Government is doing because that is what is best for us (just like we reflexively accept that they can violate the laws we enact because that, too, is best for us).

Surveillance technology is only becoming more potent, as is -- in some circles -- the mentality that the Government's claimed need to "protect us" means that its power to monitor what we do ought to be unlimited. Those two trends -- increasingly potent surveillance abilities combined with an increasingly submissive and authoritarian-minded public -- have the potential, actually the likelihood, to create all sorts of undesirable outcomes, to put it quite mildly.

The last thing that ought to happen is that these matters get decided without public awareness, let alone debate. If our Government thinks it has good reason to start monitoring our actions and collecting and storing detailed data about how we live our lives -- including the millions of citizens suspected of no crimes -- then it ought to say what it wants to do and we can then debate if it ought to have that power. Why is that proposition controversial? (Apparently, like the prior disclosures about domestic spying, there was no national security reason to conceal this program, since it was the Government itself which, after several years of collecting this information, just disclosed the travel data program in the Federal Register).

Aggressively investigating what the administration has been doing over the last five years, behind the impenetrable wall of secrecy it erected, is not an option, and it isn't something to do for drama, political gain, or emotional retribution. It is vital because our democracy can only function if citizens know what its Government is doing.

There is more than ample ground for believing that this administration has engaged in all sorts of wrongdoing and lawbreaking. Even if that were not the case, there are all sorts of questions that ought to be publicly debated, not decided by Dick Cheney in the dark. There is no good or even decent argument -- none -- for believing that those matters ought to be simply left unexplored and undisturbed by Congressional Democrats due to some unseemly eagerness to show how "moderate" they are in order to maximize their prospects in the 2008 elections.

UPDATE: I have a post at C&L regarding the warrior GOP Congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence.

UPDATE II: Via some creative Google and Technorati searches and the like, Todd Larason and Mona in comments have rather conclusively established that the "Baggi" referenced above is (or at least repeatedly claims on right-wing blogs to be) an employee of the Department of Homeland Security.

As I said in comments, I'm not trying to suggest that this incident is the result of some exotic data-collection program, but am only using it to illustrate not just the potential -- but the inevitability -- of abuse when the Government collects and maintains information about the activities of its citizens.

In case you didn't get enough of Tom Friedman yesterday . . .

Following up on my post yesterday concerning Tom Friedman [having read (more like overdosed on) that many Tom Friedman columns over the last 48 hours, I haven't even come close yet to expunging all Friedmanish toxicity from my system], there are two items highly worth reading:

(1) This analysis by Chris Floyd of Friedman's latest, truly heinous column on Iraq (which Floyd re-prints at the bottom of his post); and,

(2) This 2005 review of Freidman's best-best-selling book, The World is Flat, by Matt Taibbi, one of the nation's most superb political writers (I've previously highly recommended Taibbi's Rolling Stone cover story on the depraved state of the U.S. Congress, and also recommend with equal enthusiasm his quite hilarious and insightful election night "diary," which chronicles how cable news programs "reported" on the midterm election results).

When it comes to assessing (and repairing) the deeply dysfunctional state of our political process, pundits like Tom Friedman play as significant a role as anything else in enabling and propping it all up. There are many reasons for the (rapidly) growing popularity and influence of the blogosphere, but the craven, mindless and worthless political pundits and "analysts" who dominate our media's political dialogue is, in my view, the principal cause.