corrente

Or is it good morning, midnight?

Back to Philly, grilled out.

Hope your weekend was good, too!

And from the Happiness is a Warm Gun Department, this by alert reader scaramouche:

On November 3rd, George W is very depressed having just lost the election.

To console himself he visits his trophy room. Then in a moment of doubt and despair over whether he had made all the wrong choices by listening to the Vice-President, he sees his favorite gift from the troops: Saddam’s pistol.

He takes the gun and points it to his head…

Just then Cheney enters the room and yells, "No, George, don't do it!!"

"Shut up Dick," he says, "You're next."

[Rim shot. Laughter. Applause.]

Sigh...

The next Iraqi government must negotiate the legal basis under which the 135,000 American troops and other coalition forces will remain here under a sovereign Iraqi government.

Council sources said that the Americans warned that if the members went ahead and voted for al-Yawer, the United States might not recognize the choice.
(via AP)

Freedom's untidy...

You know that expression "all hat, no cattle" which is frequently used to describe that pseudo-cowboy currently squatting in President Gore's house?

I think we have a sequel here. This is from a delightful column on the origins of odd phrases.

(via The Telegraph (UK))

"All mouth and trousers"

This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we're fairly sure that it is a pairing of "mouth'', meaning insolence or cheekiness, with "trousers'', a pushy sexual bravado. It's a wonderful example of metonymy ("a container for the thing contained'').

My Mom has a TV, so this morning we watched Nancy Pelosi on MTP. She's really good—ran rings around Russert.

OK, off to the grill...

A handgun that Saddam Hussein was clutching when U.S. forces captured him in a hole in Iraq last December is now kept by President Bush at the White House, Time magazine reported Sunday.

Military officials had the pistol mounted after it was seized from Saddam near his hometown of Tikrit last year, and soldiers involved in the capture gave it to Bush in a private meeting, Time said.

The magazine quoted a visitor who had been shown the gun, which is kept in a small study off the Oval Office where Bush displays memorabilia. It is the same room where former President Clinton had some of his encounters with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

Bush shows Saddam's gun to select visitors, telling them it is unloaded, both now and when Saddam was captured, Time reported.

"He really liked showing it off," Time quoted a visitor who had seen the gun as saying. "He was really proud of it."

A White House spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

(via MSNBC)

Ah, so that's what this is all about!

It's not about democracy.

It's not about human rights.

It's not about WMDs.

It's so Dear Misleader can get a memento!

Great, huh?

Looks like Bush's Base is having a hard time dealing with all that "realist" worldview they are always clamouring to claim. Great champions of liberty and freedom and chivalry and morality that they are. I shudder to think about what kind of recent physical abuse they must be heaping upon their own boob tube machines and the glowing gallery of images emanating from within.

Gallery Owner Attacked for Iraq Abuse Art, by Lisa Leff, Associated Press Writer.

SAN FRANCISCO - A San Francisco gallery owner bears a painful reminder of the nation's unresolved anguish over the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison — a black eye delivered by an unknown assailant who apparently objected to a painting that depicts U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.

"the nation's unresolved anguish" - ??? - Oh BULLSHIT. That gallery owner bears the painful reminder that this country is also infested with pig-eyed knucklewalking fascists and petty despots and unhinged bigots and it always has been. Unresolved anguish of the nation my ass. These kind of low bred predatory criminal idiots don't represent anything but a reflection of their own narrowly indoctrinated stupidity and ignorance and unresolved fear. And ironically, on a weekend in part dedicated to such worthy causes as the defeat of fascism during WW2, so we get the Associated Press characterizing events that resemble Volkischer Block beer hall stunts circa 1924 as, ya know, "reminders of the nation's unresolved anguish." Ay yi yi.

The assault outside the Capobianco gallery in the city's North Beach district Thursday night was the worst in a string of verbal and physical attacks directed at Lori Haigh since the artwork was installed at her gallery on May 16.

San Francisco police are investigating and have stepped up patrols around the gallery. But Haigh decided to close the gallery indefinitely, citing concern for the safety of her two children, ages 14 and 4, who often accompanied her to work.

Guy Colwell's painting, titled "Abuse," depicts three U.S. soldiers leering at a group of naked men in hoods with wires connected to their bodies. The one in the foreground has a blood-spattered American flag patch on his uniform. In the background, a soldier in sunglasses guards a blindfolded woman.

[...]

Two days after the painting went up in a front window, someone threw eggs and dumped trash on the doorstep. Haigh said she did not think to connect it to the events at Baghdad's notorious prison until people started leaving nasty messages and threats on her business answering machine.

"I think you need to get your gallery out of this neighborhood before you get hurt," one caller said.

She removed the painting from the window, but the gallery's troubles received news coverage and the criticism continued. The answering machine recorded new calls from people accusing her of being a coward for moving the artwork.

Last weekend, Haigh said a man walked into the gallery, pretended to scrutinize the painting for a moment, then marched up to her desk and spat in her face.

On Thursday, someone knocked on the door of the gallery, then punched Haigh in the face when she stepped outside.

[...]

Haigh has received some expressions of support since closing the gallery. Her favorite: an e-mail whose writer said, "I'm sure that a few and dangerous minds don't understand that they have only mimicked the same perversity this painting had expressed."

*

Nico Pitney has a new blog. Visit: Nico Pitney's Priority Wire. Priority Wire has a great list of resource links focusing on a wide range of topics and issues - from Art and Activism to Globalization - so save that link.

You'll also find there a recent short post dated May 28, 2004 and titled New Campaign: Yum Foods which you should read in full because thats where I located the following:

In the fields of Florida, California, North Carolina and other states, one million farmers earn less than $7,500 per year. To earn $50 a day a tomato farmworker must pick nearly two tons of tomatoes. The reason? The supply-chain model of global economics has tightened profit margins. In 1990 growers received 41% of the retail prices of tomatoes; by 2000 they were receiving barely 25%. Value is passed up the chain, while workers at the bottom pay the price.

The PW post cited above contains a link to Oxfam's Take Action! One Penny More for Workers Rights campaign which in part reads as follows:

Global food giants such as Yum Brands — owner of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut — use their purchasing power to squeeze growers who, in turn, cut their labor costs and offload risk onto farmworkers. Today's tomato pickers toil in often dangerous conditions for rock-bottom wages; they must pick two tons of tomatoes to earn just $50. If they were paid just one penny more per pound, they could nearly double their daily wage.

Scroll down the Oxfam page to contribute your two cents on behalf of "a penny a pound more" for farm workers. Help support labor rights and a living wage. Message sent on your behalf will be delivered to "Yum Brands Chairman and CEO David Novak" and "Taco Bell President and Chief Concept Officer Emil Brolick."

Links:
Nico Pitney's Priority Wire
Oxfam America

(via LA Times)

After the homecomings are over and the yellow ribbons packed away, many who once served in America's armed forces may end up sleeping on sidewalks.

This is the often-unacknowledged postscript to military service. According to the federal government,
veterans make up 9% of the U.S. population but 23% of the homeless population."> Their ranks included veterans like Vannessa Turner of Boston, who returned injured from Iraq last summer, unable to find healthcare or a place to live.

Or Ken Saks, who lost his feet because of complications caused by Agent Orange, then lost his low-rent Santa Barbara apartment in an ordeal that began when a neighbor complained about his wheelchair ramp.

"I'm 56 years old," Saks said. "I don't want to die in the streets…. This is what our [soldiers in Iraq] are coming home to? They're going to live a life like I have? God bless them."

Studies indicate that some will live such a life. Male veterans are 1.3 times more likely to become homeless than non-veterans, women 3.6 times more likely. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the estimated number of homeless Vietnam veterans is more than twice the number of soldiers, 58,000, who died in battle during that war.

In the past, data quantifying homelessness among veterans did not exist, said Phillip Mangano, who heads the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. "It's been precisely the lack of research that had us groping in the dark as far as what our response should be," he said.

...It is impossible to know exactly how many U.S. veterans are on the streets, but experts estimate that about 300,000 of them are homeless on any given night and that about half a million experience homelessness at some point during the year.

Now, as fighting continues in Iraq and Afghanistan, social service providers wonder what will happen to this generation of service men and women returning home from war.

"What are they going to do for these guys when they come home … other than wave a flag and buy them a beer?" asked Paul Camacho, a professor of social science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Vietnam veteran.

...Homelessness among veterans is currently
the topic of joint talks between the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, said Peter Dougherty, the VA's director of homeless veterans programs.

"Traditionally, what happens to you after you leave has not been a concern of [the] service," he said.

The LA Times has a particularly noxious registration form, but go through it if you have to to read the rest of this. There ARE some folks busting their humps to help with this situation, many of them ex-veterans and ex-homeless themselves.

Oh, and you could always print out a copy, to have handy to shove up the nose of the next person who huffily accuses "the left" of not supporting our troops.

Remember John Belushi's running character on Saturday Night Live back when it was funny the first time, the Samurai Guy? One week he was running a dry cleaners, the next time it would be some other job. It always concluded with him getting offended and whipping out his trusty katana and just whacking hell out of the object in front of him.

Billmon's got the Whiskey Bar reopened. He's got a katana of a keyboard and oh MY, is he offended. The floor of his fine drinking establishment is currently littered with the shredded, bloody, quivering remains of (just for starters) the SCLM, the "strategists" who brought us the hit sequel "Vietnam II: Apocalypse Yet to Come" and a few other of the usual suspects.
(via The Whiskey Bar)

I mean, if the mainstream media is going to, in effect, wallow in the blogosphere’s archives, and military officials – the safely retired ones, at least – are going to confess what’s been obvious for the past six months (Gen. Hoar: “I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss.”) then the only value a lowly blogger like myself can add to the debate now is to try to peer a little further down the road, to see if I can guess what blindingly obvious facts the media will be wallowing in this time next year.

Notta lotta yux in this one, folks. The sample graf above is just about the happiest part of the whole thing. We here....no, strike that, *I* at least have been guilty lately of getting a little too happy watching Biker Boy and the neocons he rode in on getting their well deserved and long overdue comeuppance. While that task is not yet finished (by a long shot!) even completing their downfall will represent merely getting our leaky, battered canoe past the first set of rapids.
That white noise you hear faintly in the distance is going to get louder. Niagara lies ahead.

The situation in Sudan is a complicated one and has been for years. Still, isn't it amazing that while we and most of the rest of the world sit and watch, inch by inch and bit by bit the scenery is moved into place, the vast cast of extras is driven onto the stage and the scene is set for another inevitable genocide that wasn't inevitable. What happened to "never again?" As with Rwanda, no one can say we didn't know something terrible was happening.

But what exactly? That's part of the problem of mobilizing concern. Most of us think of conflict in the Sudan in terms of the decades long civil war between the North, mainly Muslim, and the South, mainly Christian. And it's all the more confusing for many of us to read that Wednesday, an historic agreement was signed between the government in Khartoum, and the main rebel army in the south, ending that conflict, in which, by the way, it is estimated that two million people have died.

The agreement does not include Darfur, in western Sudan, where both sides in the conflict are Muslims; for over a year now a new civil war has emerged between Arab militias aligned with, and probably armed by the government in Khourtoum and tribal African leaders who have fielded an armed rebellion in pursuit of more equitable share of Sudanese resources, chief of which is limited arable land.

This all Muslim off-shoot of the longer running conflict has resulted in a program of ethnic cleaning by the majority Muslim militias, which, in addition to the killing of tens of thousands, has driven somewhere near a million non-combatants from their villages into makeshift camps where the Sudanese government is making it near impossible for relief workers to get to them. Sound all too familiar? The stage is set for that too familiar but still horrifying pageant of dazed refugees, women, children, the elderly, wounded young men, huddled together in a vast tract of desert, without sufficient water or food or medicines, dying hideous deaths from starvation, dehydration, dysentery, and diseases that are easily cured by the most commonplace of medicines, watched by their own deathly ill loved ones, and watched by us, while we wonder why we didn't do something sooner?

Surely there is something we can do to cancel the performance.

Knowledge of the situation is the first step toward action, and courtesy of John Quiggin, another of those estimable Australian bloggers, whose eponymous website is well worth a visit, I can direct you to a remarkable website, "Sudan: The Passion Of The Present," maintained by a small group of people who have set themselves the task of pulling together the kind of information that is required, as John puts it, "to motivate action."

The site carries news, analysis, and links to other important websites, like this one, The Sudan Tribune, another invaluable mine of information and analysis.

Memorial Day weekend strikes me as an excellent opportunity to pay a visit, follow the links, inform yourself as a prelude to some kind of action. It's already late, perhaps too late to stop the ethnic cleansing, but not too late to stop genocide. The Bush administration, to its credit, has expressed concern, as has Kofi Anan, and other UN representatives. Up to now, the government in Khartoum has been able to use the desire of the international community to achieve a peace settlement in the larger, longer-running civil war as a trump card to tamp down their concerns about this other smaller conflict.

What is called for is not outrage that this or that official, institution, or government hasn't yet mounted effective action; what is needed is a grassroots effort to support those NGOs, and other humanitarian sources who are trying to get those with the power to do so to find a way to intervene effectively on behalf of a population who cannot fight back, or fend for themselves.

Any thoughts from readers on various kinds of grassroots action that blogs and their readers might accomplish are welcome.

BLUE SPRINGS, Mo. - Almost half of a $273,000 grant awarded in 2002 to fight the Goth culture in Blue Springs has been returned because of a lack of interest — and the absence of a real problem.

Blue Springs received the grant two years ago from the Youth Outreach Unit, money the city and U.S. Rep. Sam Graves trumpeted proudly as a way to fight a perceived Goth problem.

But $132,000 of the grant was returned because officials never found much of a problem with the Goth culture, which some students called a fad that most people eventually outgrow.

...

You have to admit if you saw one, two, three, four or more people dressed in traditional Goth, it would be discerning," [project manager Allyce Ford] said.

(Story via Patriotboy and Atrios)

"Discerning?" Don't you mean "disconcerting?"

In case you're wondering, Sam Graves is my moronic congressman.

Sigh.

Boy. Remember the days when a little ol' felony—the Plame Affair—was big news? No longer. Looks like the whole winger enterprise is falling to bits, through a combination of hubris, the tragic flaw of ideological blindess, and sheer stupidity. Sidney Blumenthal writes:

At a well-appointed conservative think tank in downtown Washington and across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S. government and military?

The Iraqi neocon favorite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the "axis of evil" for decades. Last week Powell declared, "It turned out that the [WMD] sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I'm disappointed, and I regret it." But who had "deliberately" misled him? He did not say. Now the FBI is investigating espionage, fraud and by implication treason.
(via Salon)

Pass the popcorn!

I thought only the bad guys did that?

In a little-noticed development amid Iraq's prison abuse scandal, the U.S. military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender, according to human rights groups. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. The practice also risks associating the United States with the tactics of countries it has long criticized for arbitrary arrests.

"It's clearly an abuse of the powers of arrest, to arrest one person and say that you're going to hold him until he gives information about somebody else, especially a close relative," said John Quigley, an international law professor at Ohio State University. "Arrests are supposed to be based on suspicion that the person has committed some offense."
(via Newsday from The Agonist)

Why do we hate freedom?

Except now it's been put on a solid business footing:

As the United States spends billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq's civil and military infrastructure, there is increasing evidence that parts of sensitive military equipment, seemingly brand-new components for oil rigs and water plants and whole complexes of older buildings are leaving the country on the backs of flatbed trucks.

By some estimates, at least 100 semitrailers loaded with what is billed as Iraqi scrap metal are streaming each day into Jordan, just one of six countries that share a border with Iraq.

Recent examinations of Jordanian scrapyards, including by a reporter for The New York Times, have turned up an astounding quantity of scrap metal and new components from Iraq's civil infrastructure, including piles of valuable copper and aluminum ingots and bars, large stacks of steel rods and water pipe and giant flanges for oil equipment — all in nearly mint condition — as well as chopped-up railroad boxcars, huge numbers of shattered Iraqi tanks and even beer kegs marked with the words "Iraqi Brewery."

"There is a gigantic salvage operation, stripping anything of perceived value out of the country," said John Hamre, president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington research institute, which sent a team to Iraq and issued a report on reconstruction efforts at the request of the Pentagon last July.

"This is systematically plundering the country," Dr. Hamre said. "You're going to have to replace all of this stuff."
(via the New York Times)

"Freedom's untidy."

I guess it turns out to be a good thing we've only been able to spend $2 billion on Iraqi reconstruction instead of $17 billion, eh? Since as fast as we replace the infrastructure, the Iraqis cut it up with blowtorches and ship it off to Jordan as scrap. [Tinfoil hat time: Infrastructure like radio towers, perhaps?]

Hey, and guess who's on the hook for replacing it all, again? We are!

And in case I don't get a chance to say goodnight tomorrow, let's all try to remember what Memorial Day is for.

Eh?

Yesterday, we wrote (back) that the one concrete proposal in Bush's Monday speech—razing Abu Ghraib and building a new state of the art prison—was, besides being ludicrous as a symbol of what America stands for, not budgeted for, would take money from other programs, wouldn't make up for the Abu Ghraib scandal, wasn't wanted by the Iraqis, and that the prison that has been budgeted for is way behind schedule because Bush's lack of planning botched the security situation.

Well! Now we learn—surprise!—that the scheme was cooked up in the West Wing without any input from anyone else:

On Monday night, President Bush made the dramatic announcement that the United States would demolish Abu Ghraib prison and build a modern maximum-security center in Baghdad to replace it. But on Wednesday, Pentagon officials said the president's words had taken them by surprise, and they scrambled without success to come up with details of the plan.

"It's just an idea [Bush] came up with," [a White House] official said.
(via NY Times)

Great.

Looks like Bush isn't really talking to anyone outside of his small circle of advisors (and, of course, the crowds that are handpicked to give him the standing ovations he craves). Not a recipe for success.

we are not putzing around with Zachary Taylor (passed the Fugitive Slave Act), James Buchanan (turned down an offer of free elephants from the King of Siam, how boneheaded was that?) or even Rutherford B. Hayes (Dumbest Name Ever maybe, but Meant Well.)

No, we're talking about worse than THIS guy:

(via WaPoodle):

President Richard M. Nixon jokingly threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Capitol Hill in March 1974 as Congress was moving to impeach him over the Watergate scandal, according to transcripts of telephone conversations among his closest aides that were released yesterday.

"I was told to get the football," White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig Jr. told Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger less than five months before the president's forced resignation, during a conversation in which the two men exchanged stories about Nixon's increasingly erratic behavior.

"What do you mean?" asked Kissinger, who had called Haig to express concern that the president might unwittingly unleash a Middle East war with his new, get-tough policy against Israel.

"His black nuclear bag," replied Haig. "He is going to drop it on the Hill."

The March 20, 1974, exchange is among 20,000 pages of transcripts of telephone conversations that Kissinger deposited in the Library of Congress in 1976 with the stipulation that they remain secret until at least five years after his death. [Oopsie. There was a lawsuit. They got released early.]

...In the March 20 transcript, neither Kissinger nor Haig seems alarmed by threats to bomb Congress or "to go after the Israelis" after "he is through with the Europeans."

"He is just unwinding," Haig told Kissinger. "Don't take him too seriously."

...The transcripts include several episodes that appear at odds with Kissinger's version of events, such as his claim that Washington had nothing to do with the September 1973 military coup in Chile that toppled the democratically elected, leftist government of Salvador Allende.

...As the Watergate crisis deepened, Kissinger began to worry about Nixon's mental state. On October 11, 1973, according to the transcripts, he rejected a British request for a telephone conversation between the president and Prime Minister Edward Heath on the grounds that Nixon was in no condition to take the call.

"Can we tell them no?" Kissinger said to his deputy, Brent Scowcroft. "When I talked to the president, he was loaded."

You really gotta work at it to be worse than Tricky Dicky.

David Dellinger has died. Most likely this is one of those names that rings a bell, but you can't quite remember why.

Go read the obit at WaPo, the only place I saw that had it. This should have been the lead item on every newscast and a 72-point headline in every paper, like you get when presidents die, or popes, or similar figures not nearly as deserving of the honor as Dave Dellinger was.

For those who don't have the time, here's the short version:

*Labor organizer in the 1930s.
*Spent all of World War II in jail for refusing to register for the draft, despite a guaranteed deferrment as a divinity student. Kept getting sent to solitary for leading hunger strikes.
*Did the civil-rights thing in the '50s, before it was cool. Protested Korean War, nuclear testing.
*One of the Chicago Seven in '68, which is why that bell was ringing in your head. Find a picture; Dave's the bald-headed guy in the suit and tie in the midst of wild-assed long-haired loons like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
*Antiwar stuff in the 70s.
*Spare time spent fighting for living-wage laws, prisoner's rights, reforming US foreign policy, frivolity like that.
*Three years ago, aged 85, he hitched to Quebec to lead a protest against the Western Hemisphere free-trade zone.
*Other free time spent staying married for 62 years and raising at least four children. Worked as a printer, writer and editor to pay the bills.

As a lifelong philosophical agnostic, I maintain a varying stance on the issue of an afterlife. Hell is right out, of course, but I go back and forth on the question of whether or not there's a heaven. Just for today I'd like there to be one, because the welcome home party tonight is gonna be a blast. May you live YOUR life in such a way that when you get there, Woody Guthrie and John Lennon are jamming together on "When The Saints Come Marching In."

That would be the eponymous blog of the svelte, smart, witty, i.e., the non-Dick Cheney's stooge, Roger Ailes.

Does anyone do it better than our Roger? Check out this scorching of the earth Roger accomplishes using the useless and(against all odds)increasingly repellent pile of poop known as Kausfiles, starting with the title, "Wankette."

And this lightning swift evisceration of both the hypocrisy of three rightward facing blog kingpins and the arrogance of Bill Keller's unapolegetic apology for the NYTimes fucked up coverage of the administration's propoganda offensive in the leadup to our invasion of Iraq.

And perhaps most importantly, this catch from one of those Wa Po on-line forums in which questions from the peasants are entertained by their superstar journos, and wherein both Howie Kurtz and Pumpkinhead Russert are exposed as the jerks they are by one of the peasants, important because of the use by Kurtz of the name of Al Gore.

I present these links not for your amusement, dear reader, though our Roger Ailes is always amusing, but as an exercise to prepare us for the great work we have ahead of us, which, in the nature of the peculiar structure of blogs, you may have already read about in the posts to come, before you get here. So be it.

The other demerits of broadcasting Rush Limbaugh over Armed Forces Network aside, is it really a smart move to offer Muslim Iraqis, very many of whom speak English, a bigot who regards torturing them in Saddam's prison to be a "fraternity prank" and "good old American pornography"? Especially under the imprimatur of the US Military and the Coalition Provisional Authority? Or is there a US-only part of the electromagentic spectrum that I don't know about?

I mean, I understand we're having some trouble convincing the locals of our good intentions, and well, it just seems to me that this doesn't help. But maybe that's just me. I'm sure the experts running things have a better grasp of the situation in Iraq than I do.

As usual, whenever Bush tries to take credit for a program in public, he tries to cut it in secret:

The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.

But the cuts are politically sensitive, targeting popular programs that Bush has been touting on the campaign trail. The Education Department; a nutrition program for women, infants and children; Head Start; and homeownership, job-training, medical research and science programs all face cuts in 2006.

"Despite [administration] denials, this memorandum confirms what we suspected all along," said Thomas S. Kahn, Democratic staff director on the House Budget Committee. "Next February, the administration plans to propose spending cuts in key government services to pay for oversized tax cuts."
(via WaPo)

Surprise!

Lovely:

The Bush administration is considering easing environmental requirements for a multitude of gasoline blends and streamlining permits for new refineries to increase fuel supplies and fight soaring prices, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans said Wednesday.

Evans, a former Texas oil company executive, said in an Associated Press interview that the cost of gasoline, which hit a record national average of $2.06 per gallon this week, was affecting driving habits, with people making fewer trips to the store.
(via AP)

"Fewer trips to the store" versus clean air... Leave it to the Bush administration to make the tough decisions!

Fun how all things work together for good, isn't it? Bush go to war for oil, botch that, but the oil companies still make out!

Apparently the NYT, in their deep soul-wrenching quest to find a way back to respectability, has decided to inspect first the question of How They Could Have Gone So Far Astray. What went wrong? How could they have done better? Is there anyone out there who is ALREADY doing better?

This led them to discover blogs. Not good blogs, mind you. Not Atrios. Not Kos. Not (ahem) us here. Not any of those fine establishments cited in the blogroll. But let's look at what they did find.....

(via Bad Judy! No kneepads! NYT)
Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.

Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, 26, a graduate student at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied bloggers, said that for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.

"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr. Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation. You have a connection to people through the blog."

Ms. Wang's online journal is now her life.

Dammit, they're onto us. We're lazy, we're crazy, we're narcissistic and egotistical too. Finally I have found a place where I fit in! Damn but I love you people!

Now in fairness they DID find one political blogger worthy of mention (of course that isn't till Page 2, which begs the question of why one needs a page 2 in an online format other than to give a double dose of the same ads to the same reader and up one's page count). This fellow, who we will call Richard K. here, runs a joint called runagainstbush.org.
They note he "blogs late into the night, although he knows that the site still attracts relatively few visitors."

Yeah right. I checked his site meter, which says "Average Per Day 1,719." This (1) sounds respectable to me for a guy whose hobbies are running and opposing Bush and (2) suggests that they are about to crash his servers into oblivion with traffic overload. Go Richard!

Finally, of course, there are the Sane Bloggers. Those are the ones who have quit, kinda like smokers and drinkers, right? They cite:

Suffering from a similar form of "blog fatigue," Bill Barol, a freelance writer in Santa Monica, Calif., simply stopped altogether after four years of nearly constant blogging.

So that's the story, per the New York Times, which we know is the definitive source for news. We're nuts and should just get over it and go back to reading what they give us to read.

Baaaaaaah.

UPDATE: Alert reader Shystee makes an excellent point in Comments:

This article comes out the same day as the half assed "mea culpa" about legitimizing lies that lead a country to war? What if we started rating news sources based on accuracy and foresight rather than prestige?

I love the smell of the establishment when it's scared. It smells like... soiled underpants.

Once in awhile, just for practice, do this mental exercise: Take your mind back to Election Night 2000, just as the networks called Florida for Gore and you went to bed with a happy heart.

Pretend the next 3 1/2 years had gone the way they should have, and try to picture the following speech being made by presumptive Republican Presidential candidate George Bush, who is making another run for the office he so narrowly lost after the full Florida recount.

(via the crawling-back-to-respectability-on-sore-knees NYT)

In a scathing attack on what he termed the White House's failed policies in Iraq, Al Gore called today for the resignation of six members of the Bush administration [starting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld].

"We cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team," he said.

Others on his list were George J. Tenet, the director of national intelligence, and Mr. Rumsfeld's deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, and his intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone.

The Bush national security team is "endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home," Mr. Gore insisted.

"They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point."

Resolve to go down to your county election office tomorrow and see what you need to do to sign up to work a polling place THIS November. If they tell you all the poll workers' jobs are filled, see what credentials are needed just to hang around all day as an observer.

And just when privatization was going so well in Iraq:

Federal civil servants proved they could do their work better and more cheaply than private contractors nearly 90 percent of the time in job competitions last year, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
(via WaPo)

Of course, in the future things will be different:

An OMB report released yesterday found that such competitions, the cornerstone of President Bush's "competitive sourcing" initiative, cost federal agencies $88 million in fiscal 2003. But they are projected to bring savings of $1.1 billion in reduced personnel costs and overhead during the next five years, the report said.

Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today...

Kind of a reality/faith-based kind of thing:

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is due to announce by Monday the makeup of the caretaker government due to take power on June 30, a key step in U.S. plans to hand over authority to the Iraqis.

[Hussain al-Shahristani], a Shiite Muslim nuclear scientist is among those being considered for Iraq's prime minister.

A U.S. coalition spokesman, however, denied that Hussain al-Shahristani, a sharp critic of the occupation, is the frontrunner for the premiership and said no choice had been made yet.

The latest name floated as a possibilty for prime minister, scientist al-Shahristani was jailed under Saddam Hussein's regime - reportedly for refusing to help build a nuclear weapon.

Good for him! Of course, whether he'd build them for himself... Especially when Pakistan has them and Iraq might be getting them is another issue ..

In an April 29 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, al-Shahristani roundly criticized the U.S. handling of Iraq, saying the United States "failed to win the trust of the Iraqi people and has allowed the country to slip into turmoil" by failing to allow Iraqis to hold elections.

So the guy is a scientist: he can work from evidence.

The column identifies al-Shahristani as "a senior adviser" to al-Sistani, who has been the leading proponent for early elections in Iraq.

That takes care of the Shi'ites. And I don't imagine this guy thinks too much of Sadrists...

Before the war, al-Shahristani was among the Iraqi exiles who insisted that Saddam maintained weapons of mass destruction. In February 2003, he told CBS' "60 Minutes" that such weapons may have been hidden in tunnels for a Baghdad subway that never opened.
(via AP)

Whoops! I take back what I said about evidence....

And it only took what, two days?

To begin with, there's no money budgeted for it:

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said U.S. taxpayers will finance a second prison to replace Abu Ghraib. She said there is sufficient flexibility within the $18.4 billion in Iraq reconstruction aid approved in October to build the prison.

But Tim Rieser, a Democratic aide on the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, which is monitoring the reconstruction, said Bush would have to consult Congress on such a large transfer of money. "For all intents and purposes, the money is not there," Rieser said.

Just for the administration's reference, that would be the Congressional power of the purse.

Then, because Bush butchered security for the occupation, the prison that was budgeted for is way behind schedule:

The [previously budgeted] prison in Nasiriyah is already behind schedule, occupation documents indicate. In January, occupation authorities said they would direct $33 million to the project. By April, nothing had been spent. The occupation authority cited only one accomplishment in its latest report to Congress: approval of "the initial scope of work for the new prison."

Finally, if Bush doesn't want to spend more money, he'll have to cut something. But what?

But unless the White House breaks its pledge not to ask for more reconstruction money, the additional prison construction funds will have to come from other projects -- a potential public relations problem. Members of Congress have already questioned the administration's shift of $213 million from drinking water and democracy-building projects to administrative expenses and U.S. Embassy operations.
(via WaPo)

Oh, don't you love it? It's 105 in the shade in Baghdad, and Bush cuts the money for drinking water. And look at the bait-and-switch on democracy!

Meanwhile, Froomkin writes that some Iraqis want to make the prison into a museum, not raze it, the IGC says razing the the prison is a waste of money, and none of the Iraqis think a new prison will make up for the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Can someone explain what the Bush team was thinking when they put this boondoggle into Bush's speech? The only concrete proposal, and already it's right down the tubes.

Hey, here's an idea! Instead of sending Iraqis to prison, let's send them to Mars!

UPDATE The Iraqis aren't stupid, you know:

On Tuesday, Ahmed Hassan al-Uqaili, deputy chief of the Human Rights Organization in Iraq, dismissed Bush's promise as a Republican ploy "to win the (presidential) election in the United States."
(via AP)

Translation: "How stupid does Bush think we are?" A question more of us in this country should be asking?

I wish these guys would get their stories straight. It makes the country look bad when the President gives a speech and then the next day our faithful allies, the Brits, can't figure out what He meant to say.

A day after President Bush declared in a major speech that Iraqis would exercise authority over their own affairs, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London that Iraq's interim government would have the right to veto specific military operations by the U.S.-led coalition, a view American officials immediately disputed. And French President Jacques Chirac told Bush in a telephone conversation that France wanted any new U.N. Security Council resolution to spell out clearly that the Iraqis would have a say over U.S.-led military operations.
(via LA Times)

It is kind of hard to understand how Iraq could be "sovreign" if the United States can still conduct military operations on Iraqi soil whenever and however it likes. And assume we still need to do this: These clowns in the Bush administration are so stupid and feckless they can't even figure out how to arrange a diplomatic fig-leaf that will let it go on. Have Sistani say it's doing the work of Allah, or something. Sheesh.

The Times finally gets round to a little self-criticism for its essential role in enabling Bush's stupid war of choice in Iraq. Here's the money paragraph:

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.

Bottom line: The once-proud Times took stenography. We can't blame Chalabi for being what he is—a complete slut, playing all ends against the middle—but we can certainly blame the Times for falling for Chalabi's romances as badly as the neocons did.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.
(via NYTimes)

The word is not "complicated." The word is "systemic."

So, the Times got punk'd by Ahmed Chalabi, just like the administration did. We can only hope they are sadded and wiser. But I doubt it. Did any heads roll for Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee? Of course not.

Say, is anybody at the Times going to take any responsibility? Surely you

We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.

"Aggressive," eh? Could be settle for "correct" or "critical" or even "not fawning"? Sheesh...


NOTE Not that the Pulitzer-light Times would consider mentioning Judith "Kneepads" Miller by name, as the dynamic Los Angeles Times notes.

UPDATE AP also notes the absence of the name "Judith Miller."

Light blogging for me, at least until a moment's pause for lunch. Deliverables.

Talk amongst yourselves!

Yech.

ractically ignored in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are the Iraqi female prisoners who have told their attorneys they were raped by U.S. soldiers. The Taguba report confirms that some women were indeed raped by American G.I.'s. There is one photo of an American soldier having sex with an Iraqi woman. And there is the by now infamous story of how American soldiers harnessed a 70-year-old woman and rode her around, calling her a donkey.
(via Village Voice)

Well, "freedom's untidy!"

I've been sleeping badly, lately, and people I know have been sleeping badly.

Random, or something more? Readers?

I guess the WhiteWash House thinks politics is beanbag after all?

The White House asked the media on Monday to "show respect" for President Bush's twin daughters as they emerge from private life as students to work for their father's re-election campaign.
(via Reuters)

Barbara, Jenna—don't worry about a thing. Our guarantee to you:


It's sad, though, isn't it? Do they feel used? Yet?

Otherwise, we might be in major trouble!

U.S. officials have obtained new intelligence deemed highly credible indicating al-Qaida or other terrorists are in the United States and preparing to launch a major attack this summer, The Associated Press has learned.

The intelligence does not include a time, place or method of attack but is among the most disturbing received by the government since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a senior federal counterterrorism official who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity Tuesday.
(via AP)

Come on! They're doing their best! Cut them some slack! After all, "there's no time, place, or method of attack." If there were, don't you think Bush would be "moving heaven and earth" to protect us?

Granted, all of this leakage is meant to innoculate us against bad news to come. It's really a win win situation: If nothing happens, that's proof Bush policies are working. If something does, well, "Don't say we didn't warn you."

The stupidity of it... Three years of underfunding and neglect, and a useless war that left us worse off before our true and now stronger enemies, the fundamentalists both foreign and domestic, and Bush is already setting himself up to weasel away from taking responsibility. Again.

Great news, though! They've dropped that stupid color coded alert system.

Idiots.

Finally, Bush got religion on loose nukes (assuming the program isn't a politically driven election year fraud, of course).

The Energy Department is creating a $450 million program to collect, secure and dispose of used reactor fuel and other materials from around the world that could be used by terrorists in "dirty bombs" for spreading radiation over several city blocks.
(via AP)

For the fundamental unseriousness of the malAdministration on this issue from its first day in office until now, see "Bush's reckless indifference to the nightmare scenario" (back).

Not that the people who matter don't already know it's too late (back).

Love a mystery? Think that maybe, just maybe, the question of our treatment of Iraqi prisoners and its implications for our position internationally isn't yet a closed book? Check out Roger Ailes, heroic and always witty independent leftist blogger, and John Gorenfeld, actual, heroic, independent journalist on an obscure, Moonie connection to Abu Ghraib.

Another Roger don't miss; under the glorious title of Putzapalooza, Roger makes hash of Howie Kurtz's pretensions to the status of journalist. (While there, also don't miss his professorial guidance to conservatoit wonderkind, Ben Shapiro. Also, check John's just posted questions about Rev Moon's possible ties to North Korea.

Julia has two fine posts up at American Street, a brand new one on Republicans playing catchup to the mighty 527 Democratic cash machine, and this beauty that will bring you up to date on the "Whole Frist/Thune/Daschle thing."

While there, don't miss Chuck Corrie's "Gay Marriage Is Just Like Terrorism"

Okay, on to the President's speech last night. My first response: Wow! What the hell was that? I'm still thinking on it. From our fine open thread comments section, two among the many gems: Xan's first response to Bush's choice of a five "step" plan was to wonder what happened to the other seven steps. And from Marine's Girl, this:

I hope that new state of the art prison has a "presidental suite". I'm looking forward to paying for that as I'm sure my 8 year old son will too.

And speaking of Marine's girl, you can find out more interesting stuff from the perspective of someone who has a loved one "over there" by clicking here. If you're feeling strong, you might want to look at any of the conversations with her marine that she has generously chosen to share with the rest of us, like this one, or this one

The President's speech had a dramatic impact on at least one well-known blogger/political activist: Stirling Newberry of both The Agonist and Blogging of the President, 2004. Mr. Bush drove Mr. Newberry right round the bend, and out the other end. It is such an arresting piece, I'm going to quote a larger piece than I might ordinarily:

It is time for someone, someone with something to lose, come forward and state the obvious: we have, installed in our oval office, a man who is so unfit for the duties - by reason of a pathological dishonesty and complete disregard for the welfare of the citizens of this country - as to demand that we remove him, and his party, from power - and then use every law and organ of government to investigate the nakedly criminal underpinnings of that party. And exact precisely the punishments that they have so gleefully inflicted upon others.

There is no other alternative - any individual who can, backed by media and political system - state that Iraq is part of the war on Terror - is beyond hope. Any journalist, politician, general, writer, political operative or other so called public intellectual who can cling to such a statement is, equally, beneath contempt.

If I am fired from the campaign, so be it, if I am ostracized, so be it. No money or social position or talisman of status - of any kind - from such a society is worth my soul, and what scraps of honour any American maintains.

We must face the facts, the cold, hard facts. We illegally invaded another nation, engaging in war crimes to do so, in that we lied to the UN as to the causes for war. We did so without pressing necessity to invade - or to lie at all, since our target was an individual who could have been legally indicted for war crimes by merely stretching forth our hand. We invaded solely because of the electoral time table of George W Bush Jr, and for no other reason. This is worse that a crime, it is worse than a mistake, it is a blot against that most precious object of a free people - our willingness to comply with our own laws.

We did not invade because Saddam was a threat, but because he was not. We did not invade because we knew he had WMD, but because we knew he did not. The high officials of the State Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were perfectly aware of this, and their war plans reflect this knowledge, since we took scant precautions that any reasonable military would take against a foe with such capabilities in a fight for its own survival.

Our leaders, if we were a defeated nation, would be sent to the Hague or some other tribunal for War Crimes prosecution. That we will not do this insures that our enemies, fortified by the clear bankruptcy of our laws, and our clear willingness to flagrantly break them when it is to our own advantage, and the complete and utter lack of accountability for those that break them, and those who enable breaking them - will strike, with devastating force, at the centers of our commerce and population. The will, rightly, point to the devastation of Baghdad as their reason for attack.

The United States, in the wake of 30 years of devastating conflict, laid the foundation for international institutions that endured until this conflict took place. While imperfect, often abused, and frequently engaged in their own follies, there was a progressive adherence to the idea of international law, and global leadership. This has been broken. Merely removing Bush will not restore it, because legitimacy rests not on there not being a criminal in power, but it being impossible for a criminal to come to power.

There's more here, along with an excellent thread of comments.

I should say that we've had an internal conversation here at Corrente, provoked by a similarly angry response by Lambert to the ever astonishing depredations by this administration of everything we as Americans think we hold sacred, about whether or not mere ejection from office by means of an election is a sufficient rejection of the Bush presidency, or if some additional smoting is required, like say, impeachment. Conclusions were not reached. My position, I'm still thinking on it.

Here's another perpsective on just how seriously this administration is undermining the Geneva conventions.

Mark LeVine, an asst. prof of history at UC,Irvine, an Arabic-speaker, among other languages, with much accumulated experience in the Middle East, wrote an essay published in the AsiaTimes which caught my eye some months ago that presented the issues of occupation in the context of corporate globalization. He's also the co-editor of the book "Twilight Of Empire: Responses To Occupation," ** an anthology of essays which I highly recommend; the book, published by a small publishing house, Percival Press, is beautifully produced in paper with some extraordinary photographs; something about the quality of the book, not only the contents, the feel of it in one's hands, is heartening; at least here, in opposition to the occupation of Iraq, we're attempting to treat the Iraqi people with the respect they deserve.

Not so on the ground, says LeVine, in this essay you can find here.
LeVine has taken the time to actually read the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Resolution that pertain to our occupation, and by which we ought to be judging our own behavior. We don't come off terribly well. A sample:

Though the issue of war crimes is almost inescapable in Iraq itself and has been a subject of much discussion abroad, the American media has largely avoided the issue. I searched the archives of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post to no avail for any article dealing with this issue substantively; CNN and the Christian Science Monitor have occasionally discussed it, but only on progressive webzines or at blogs can one find the issue considered in any detail.

Given the lack of coverage of such an important issue, perhaps Americans should take a minute next time they're online to actually read the 4th Geneva Convention. Or they could simply read the US Army Field Manual 27-10. If we assume that, among the thousands of people in coalition prisons, significant numbers aren't simply civilians arbitrarily detained in sweeps of supposed insurgent neighborhoods (which is probably not a good assumption), then this manual clearly defines prisoners like the ones in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos as "prisoners of war," since the Army considers "members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements" (art. 61(2)) as falling under this category.

And so "softening them up" for interrogation, as several of the soldiers now charged with their abuse have said they were ordered (or was it merely asked?) to do, is expressly prohibited both according to U.S. military law and the 4th Geneva Convention. Yet both the U.S and British armed forces have special training camps to teach their military intelligence personnel techniques -- code named "R2I" (Resistance to Interrogation)--to do just what was done at Abu Ghraib. In other words, they are literally training their soldiers to commit war crimes as part of the normal practice of war.

This is not an issue of soldiers exceeding their authority. It's an issue of the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces, along with his top commanders and civilian officials, being responsible for a military system that, once unleashed, cannot but commit systematic violations of humanitarian law. Without making ludicrous comparisons between President Bush and Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, the same logic and international laws that led the U.S. to support their captures and trials could leave both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair open to prosecution for the systematic commission of war crimes by the military forces and civilian personnel under their command.

You can see how LeVine and Newberry start to intersect.

**The book is carried at Amazon; buy it from one of the private sellers; they'll get it to you faster.

They say* that when the Nazis came to Denmark they ordered the Jews to put on the yellow Star of David. King Christian X went out for his usual tour around town the next day...wearing a yellow star. "I am my country's first Jew," he said calmly.

Chicago Tribune reports today that a certain Church is on another ban-'em-from-Communion kick. Who is the target of the send 'em to Hell if they can't follow the rules drive this time--pro choicers? Death-with-dignity activists? Pedophiles, maybe? (Naw, I threw that in just for a laugh). Yeah, you guessed it:

"Cardinal Francis George has instructed priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to deny communion Sunday to those who wear a so-called rainbow sash indicating they are gay or lesbian, WGN-Ch. 9 reported.

"In a letter to pastors, the cardinal said those who wear the sash signal their opposition to church teaching and should not receive communion, WGN reported.

The national Rainbow Sash Movement has asked gay and lesbian church members to wear a sash made from rainbow-colored cloth to show their sexual orientation this Sunday, which is Pentecost on the church calendar.

"In wearing the Rainbow Sash, we proclaim that we are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (and) with our families, friends and loved ones we witness and celebrate our sexuality as a sacred gift," the movement states on its
website.

Wouldn't it be nice to see every Catholic--not to mention every Presbyterian, Methodist, Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and members of Hell's Angels--march into a church currently under the tyranny of Cardinal George on Sunday wearing a rainbow sash? You don't even have to try to take Communion, just sit there and let him gaze out at that room full of rainbows through the whole service.

Bonus points to every person, gay, straight or otherwise, who says to the press sure to be waiting outside that day, "I am my church's first queer."

Just a thought.

*It turns out this story of King Christian and the star may be patriotic hokum, although it IS true that Denmark saved more of its Jews than virtually any other country, smuggling them en masse to Sweden in fishing boats. So put this story in the category of, as the book title had it a few years ago, "I Love Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not."

Dick Polman of our own (Knight-Ridder) Inky does a thorough demolition job:

[Bush] offered virtually nothing new, except for a promise to demolish the Abu Ghraib prison.

I love that we're (Halliburton?) going to build the Iraqis a new prison. It's so... Republican.

I count at least 8 big questions that Bush should have addressed, but didn't.

He mostly invoked familiar elements of the neoconservative vision of a democratic Middle East, a vision that is drawing fire these days even from disaffected Republicans.

He never mentioned [1] Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader and neoconservative favorite who supplied dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, and whose dreams of running Iraq were dashed last week when he was bounced from the U.S.-led coalition, after having collected $27 million from American taxpayers.

Nor did Bush substantively address [2] the prison scandal, except to say that "a few American troops" had dishonored American values - a reading of the scandal that fails to jibe with the suspicions of key Republican senators who believe it goes much higher.

Most important, Bush did not address the most troubling questions about how his vision for Iraq will actually work in practice. And that's arguably what skeptical Americans most want to know.

He said, for example, that "our coalition will transfer full [3]sovereignty" to the Iraqis on June 30. But American officials have repeatedly indicated in news briefings that this government (whose leaders have not been chosen) would have "limited sovereignty" and that it would not have any power to enact major laws; nor would it control the 135,000 American troops still on the ground.

Bush said that Iraqi troops would be led by Iraqi commanders and that those troops would battle alongside the U.S. troops - in his words, "working as allies." But he didn't address the nagging question of [4]whether Iraqi commanders will have the option to refuse American battle orders in sensitive cases where the Iraqis disagree with U.S. strategy. (The recent disputed U.S. attack on what Iraqis say was a wedding party probably won't help matters, at least in the short run.)

Bush said America will provide "technical experts" to help establish 26 ministries, including criminal justice. But he didn't say [5]whether the new Iraqi criminal-justice system would have the right to prosecute Americans for crimes against Iraqis on Iraqi soil. Americans are immunized under a decree from the U.S.-led occupation authority, but that decree expires along with the authority June 30.

What happens [6]if a sovereign Iraqi government, reflecting the popular will, decides that it doesn't want U.S. troops roaming the land, and doesn't want U.S. advisers roaming the corridors of power?

A Gallup poll a few weeks ago said 57 percent of Iraqis wanted the U.S. troops to leave immediately. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said this month that the Iraqis would have the right to order the Americans to go, but other administration officials, in testimony on Capitol Hill, have suggested otherwise.

Bush added nothing to that debate. The answer to that question may hinge on who actually runs the country. At one point, Bush did say that the new government - which is temporary, pending elections in January - is slowly taking shape, under the auspices of a special envoy from the United Nations (the same body that he called "irrelevant" in 2002). But he said nothing about [7] who [the new] leaders would be, probably because the U.N. envoy is still mediating among Iraq's ethnic rivalries. (The Kurds, for example, want one of the top two posts.)

He also said nothing about [7]any kind of U.S. exit strategy, perhaps because he doesn't foresee the favorable circumstances for withdrawal. He also said nothing about [8]what he thought it would cost to achieve those circumstances.

Roughly half the American electorate opposes Bush already, and probably nothing he said last night will change those minds, and he wouldn't expect to do that. His primary aim is to hold the allegiance of his Republican base, because that's where the problem is. In recent weeks, national polls have found that roughly 8 percent of self-identified Republicans have turned against Bush on the war.
(via Inky)

Looks to me like Inerrant Boy's still got some 'splainin' to do.

UPDATE A nice roundup from alert reader justin here.

The ISS makes AQ sound like a thriving, well-managed small business with a sound business model and a resilient organizational structure. Quite unlike the bunglers in the WhiteWash House, I might add.

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s network, a leading London think-tank said on Tuesday.

And this was doubtless written before Bush's Abu Ghraib fiasco.

Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.

It warned in its annual Strategic Survey that al Qaeda would keep trying to develop plans for attacks in North America and Europe and that the network ideally wanted to use weapons of mass destruction.

"Meanwhile, soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq, will do," the institute said.

"Galvanized by Iraq if compromised by Afghanistan, al Qaeda remains a viable and effective network of networks," it said.

The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralized, "virtual" and invisible in more than 60 countries.

"The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled but defensively benefited al Qaeda," it said.

The institute said 2,000 al Qaeda members and more than half of the group's 30 leaders had been killed or captured.

So all the Special Access Program has managed to do is kill off the stupid ones.

The IISS said the 1,000 al Qaeda militants estimated to be in Iraq were a minute fraction of its potential strength.

It said al Qaeda was reported to be exporting extremism on a global scale with "middle managers" providing planning, logistical advice, material and financing to smaller groups in Saudi Arabia and Morocco and probably Indonesia and Kenya.

The IISS said http://www.agonist.org/archives/015949.html#015949the Madrid train bombings in March suggested al Qaeda had now fully reconstituted and had set its sights firmly on the United States and its closest allies in Europe.
(via Reuters from the essential Agonist)

A network of networks, eh? You and I, readers, we know this is how AQ is structured. We've known it since they surfaced. Clarke's known it for years.

Question: How then, does it make any sense at all to claim that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror [sic]", as Bush does?

Answer: It doesn't. A network of network has no front! The inanity of the neocon thinking has never been so clear.

Idiots!

Nixon lost to JFK because of a bad makeup job. That will never happen to Inerrant Boy:

The president's makeup job was a resounding success. There was almost no sign of the facial scrapes and bruises Bush acquired in a weekend bicycle mishap. Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News credits "what looked like a smart copper/peach powder base."
(via Froomkin, WaPo)

"Scrapes and bruises," eh? Too bad the wounded and the amputees in Bush's stupid war can't solve their problems so easily.

Very light blogging for me today—deliverables.

Until someone else steps in, talk amongst yourselves!

That's what Bush thinks Iraq is: "The Central Front in the war on terror."

What century is He living in? Trench warfare on the Western Front in 1917?

The (so-called) war on terror doesn't have any fronts. That is its nature!

Gee, I guess His speech didn't really build my confidence....

Gee, I wonder why? Or could it be that Sanchez just wants to spend more time with his family?

Sanchez is considered by many of his peers to be a solid soldier who has been overwhelmed by the task of commanding the U.S. mission in Iraq.
(via WaPo)

Well, since the mission was never defined clearly, except the parts of it that were lies, that is hardly surprising.

Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove.
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It's easy.
All you need is Rove, all you need is Rove,
All you need is Rove, Rove, Rove is all you need.
Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove, Rove.
All you need is Rove, all you need is Rove,
All you need is Rove, Rove, Rove is all you need.
There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
All you need is Rove, all you need is Rove,
All you need is Rove, Rove, Rove is all you need.
All you need is Rove (all together now)
All you need is Rove (everybody)
All you need is Rove, Rove, Rove is all you need.

There's really no end to the deception, is there? Once Bush started us down the wrong path with His lies.

As part of an aggressive recruiting effort, Army and National Guard officials have warned inactive reservists that they could face being sent back to Iraq unless they re-enlist in the active reserves or join their local Guard units, according to a published report.

MariAnn Curta told the Chicago Tribune in a story published Sunday that a recruiter called her last weekend, saying her 22-year-old son Bill -- who recently completed a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq -- could be headed back there unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard.

"It's devious, it's deceptive, it's dishonest, it's valueless," she said. "I can't believe they'd pull this kind of fast trick on kids who have already served."

Army Reserve spokesman Steven Stromvall told the newspaper that there has been a problem with misleading, inaccurate and intimidating retention efforts throughout the country in the past few weeks. He said the Army Reserve is moving quickly to fix the problem.

"They went a bridge too far," he said.

The telephone warnings have been concentrated in four areas: Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Louisiana, according to the newspaper. But Stromvall said National Guard recruiters heard about the tactic andbegan using similar techniques.

"It then spread through the country, with the exception of New England," he said.
(via NBC Newa, Columbus from the Agonist)

"Mistakes were made."

I don't have a TV, so I can't see for myself.

If He's still going, feel free to chip in with some play-by-play. Was His tie psychedelic again? How was the makeup job, and did it cover the road rash? Any signs of an earpiece?

Oh, and anything substantive? Heh.

If you missed Steve Croft's segment with General Anthony Zinni last night, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the online video of same. You can see it with either a Real Player, or the Windows model, and the link, with summary can be found here. But even a full transcript wouldn't convey the power of the man himself.

Though heaven knows he is but the latest in an astonishingly long line of mainstream public servants who've come forward to say that George Bush's Iraqi policy was a misbegotten misadventure that has set the foreign policy of this country on a disasterous course, Zinni's vigorous certitude, his centrist credentials, his straightforward bearing, his critical pre-war perspective, and his insistence that those who promulgate a failed policy ought to be willing to be judged by that failure, made him especially impressive. Of course this is an administration that does not countenance failure, not in the usual "if you fail you're gone" sense, but in that other sense, that no policy of this administration, which represents all that is good and decent about America, can, by definition, be a failed policy; it is only failed belief in the policy that will doom it, and only disloyal, unAmerican, elitist voices that hate America who would attempt to convince Americans, wrongly, not to believe in the policy. Feel dizzy yet?

Zinni was bracingly clearheaded. No, Saddam was not an immediate or even a gathering threat. He was contained. Sanctions had worked. An invasion of Iraq made no sense in the context of 9/11, which dictated that our priorities lay elsewhere, namely in Afghanistan, where we did a half-assed job initially, and where we continue to look the other way as that country tetters on the verge of failed statehood yet again. Stay the course? Not when it is taking you over Niagra without benefit of even a barrel. If for nothing else, go look at the video to watch Zinni talk about the kind of personal attacks he received when he wrote critically about the strategic failure of neo-con doctrine, and detail his hearty contempt for those who would claim that once troops take the field in war, any criticism of the policies that sent them to war is beyond the pale.

Zinni's notions of how we get out of this mess are actually quite close to those articulated by Kerry thus far, and by no stretch of anyone's imagination can they be said to be a continuation of the Bush Iraq policy.

More on this in a subsequent post.

We explained (back here) the new wave of insider selling like this: "If a dirty bomb hits, the market will tank. So why not cash in?"

Paranoid? Not really. See "WhiteWash House assumes attack will happen before election" (back).

And guess which set of insiders is selling out now? Why, none other than The Sulzbergers, the owners of the New York Times....

So long, Manhattan! Nice knowing you....

NOTE A tip of the ol' Corrente hat to alert reader 56K.

So the messengers can't shoot (pictures)?

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

I wonder why?

So Brig. General Kimmitt has told us, in regards to that so-called wedding taking place in that isolated desert area of Iraq.

There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration.

AP is reporting that they are in possession of a videotape that appears to show a wedding.

...a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert, escorting a bridal car decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.

The videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people. The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck

Centcom continues to insist that they hit a legitimate non-civilian target. Remember, fellow citizens, civilians who are in any way connected to insurgent activities, i.e., support terrorism, become combatants, so none of the following should bother any of us.

....video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.

An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video — which runs for several hours.

APTN also traveled to Mogr el-Deeb, 250 miles west of Ramadi, the day after the attack to film what the survivors said was the wedding site. A devastated building and remnants of the tent, pots and pans could be seen, along with bits of what appeared to be the remnants of ordnance, one of which bore the marking "ATU-35," similar to those on U.S. bombs.

A water tanker truck can be seen in both the video shot by APTN and the wedding tape obtained from a cousin of the groom.

edit

The survivors agree that the wedding festivities had broken up for the night when the attack began, but they insist that there were no foreign fighters or other combatants in their group.

The video shows the bride arriving in a white pickup truck and quickly being ushered into a house by a group of women. Outside, men recline on brightly colored silk pillows, relaxing on the carpeted floor of a large goat-hair tent as boys dance to tribal songs.

The singing and dancing seems to go on forever at the all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride Rutbah Sabah. The men later move to the porch when darkness falls, apparently taking advantage of the cool night weather. Children, mainly boys, sit on their fathers' laps; men smoke an Arab water pipe, finger worry beads and chat with one another. It looks like a typical, gender-segregated tribal desert wedding.

As expected, women are out of sight — but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities. Al-Ali was buried in Baghdad on Thursday.

Prominently displayed on the videotape was a stocky man with close-cropped hair playing an electric organ. Another tape, filmed a day later in Ramadi and obtained by APTN, showed the musician lying dead in a burial shroud — his face clearly visible and wearing the same tan shirt as he wore when he performed.

As the musicians played, young men milled about, most dressed in traditional white robes. Young men swayed in tribal dances to the monotonous tones of traditional Arabic music. Two children — a boy and a girl — held hands, dancing and smiling. Women are rarely filmed at such occasions, and they appear only in distant glimpses

You can read more here

One thing that 9/11 didn't change, unfortunately for "our" side; if the factual basis of your statements is shown continually to be false, your believability becomes increasingly compromised, at some point fatally so.

Some of you, dear readers, may rankle at that "our side." But this is our military, our president, etc., etc., etc., in the immortal words of Mr. Hammerstein, as sung so indelibly by Yul Brenner, an Eastern European Jew pretending to be the King of Siam, and how American is that.

Before you become too chafed by this notion of "our" complicity in what "our" government does, let me direct you to Jeanne D'Arc's essay on the subject. It has provoked an equally compelling series of comments you should also not miss, in particular, the long thoughtful essay by alert reader, "Beth." Jeanne's blog has been on temporary hiatus due to family matters; welcome back, Jeanne, and our best wishes to your family.

Finally! She writes about Abu Ghraib:

What seems to me more important than the "Oh ugh" factor is just how easy it is for standards of law and behavior of slip into bestiality.

The problems go all the way back to the administration's refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions. President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft "signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods.

Normally something like Abu Ghraib can be blamed in part on the Downward Communication Exaggeration Spiral, which afflicts most organizations. Someone at the top makes a mild suggestion, and by the time it reaches the troops, it's iron-clad law. This appears to be a rare case of a reverse spiral, with the orders coming from the very top and questions being raised about them all the way down, until finally Army Spc. Joseph Darby spoke out and set off the Taguba investigation.

In this case, there is more than sufficient evidence pointing to the culpability of those at the top. But at the same time, the Pentagon is putting out the word that it was "only a few bad apples," six low-level soldiers who have already been charged, with no one else involved. This just stinks of cover-up. Damned if I think these six low-level soldiers should be hung out there to take the blame for a set of explicitly written and signed policies made by people wearing expensive suits, getting paid big bucks and bearing some of the highest titles in the land.

You can read all the memos and documents for yourself. It's important to know how fascism starts.
(via Naples Daily News)

Fortunately, Bush has found many fewer "willing executioners" than Hitler did. The democratic traditions and values that Bush is trying to hard to undermine are still powerful. Thank Heavens.

WaPo has a graphic and a timeline diagramming Perle's business and policy connections.

First, WaPo's terrific graphic reporting on Bush's spheres of influence, now this!

You'd almost think that WaPo is starting to connect the dots!

Say, how come we never get graphic reportage like this from the Pulitzer-light and increasingly demoralized Times? Oh sure, we get it for manhole cover electrocutions, or WTC architectural proposals, or landscape gardening, but never for, you know, NEWS, especially about politics, policy, and how to follow the money. I wonder why?

Good question! Over to you, Rush!

Heh.

Predictably, the wingers are all hot and bothered.

Incidentally, nobody else seems to have picked up that they were lying when they gave the alibi for Bush that "It's been raining a lot, and the topsoil is loose." National Weather Service reports show otherwise (back). I guess (thanks to alert reader Mark) we have a mini-scoop. Not that catching Bush out in a lie is ever hard.

Best Philly story of the week: A drug ring gets busted right in the new Dunkin' Donuts in our plush convention center. How? Guy waltzes in and sings out, "Ladies, who's buying?" when there's an undercover cop getting a glazed....

Philly, the city that loves you back!

Meanwhile, can it be true that Inerrant Boy's Monday speech is only going to be carried on cable? That's what my Mom says, and she has a TV. Probably it's doing Him a kindness, but can it be right?

Oh, and a tip of the ol' Corrente hat to all our alert readers. This week, I dunno, you've just seemed especially alert. 'S beautiful.... Thanks.

link to this post - by Lambert :   9:33 PM | |

Dana Milbank in Pravda on the Potomac:

President Bush, always a bit star-crossed in his leisure pursuits, suffered a new misadventure in athleticism Saturday when he fell off a bicycle.

Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, immediately offered excuses for his boss. "It's been raining a lot, and the topsoil is loose," he said.
(via WaPo)

YABL. Alert reader Mark looked up the National Weather Service report for Waco, TX, near Crawford, here. There's been no rain at all for a week.



YABL, YABL, YABL!

UPDATE Greetings to the readers of Drunk cyclist! Who knew? Enjoy!

Eesh. Read the whole thing (via The Agonist).

I really, really like the picture of the Republicans shutting down Manhattan's Penn Station and a good chunk of the island so they can hold their convention without getting bombed.

Presumably, they'll reimburse all the ordinary working people for lost time and wages.

Oh? No? "They should be grateful"? Oh, right. I get it.

Oops! Or not.

Time magazine reported Sunday that committee aides noticed the report was missing a third of its pages after they divided the document and its 106 annexes into separate binders, stacking them and comparing the stack with an already counted stack of 6,000 pages.

[Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita] said he understood there may have been a computer glitch that made some of the electronically stored pages difficult to open, but the problem was resolved.

"Certainly, if there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight," Di Rita said in a statement read to The Associated Press.
(via AP)

A computer glitch, eh? How con-veeeen-ient.

Thanks to alert reader pansypoo for the moniker.

``We're going to be there no matter what,'' Gen. John Abizaid, commander of American troops in the Middle East, told Congress.
(via Boston Herald)

"There"? Where? Up shit creek without a paddle?

NOTE Thanks to alert reader raison de fem, who posted the link before going back to bed.

The Brat Pack...

From the Department of Never Being Cynical Enough:

Remember how we've been saying (back; and [1]) instead of "CPA," "RNC/CPA," implying, in our oh-so-subtle corrente way, that the Coalition (heh) Provisional (heh) Authority (heh)[2] was nothing other than a branch of the Republican National Commmitee?

Blogger hyperbole, certainly, but good clean fun all the same. "We do but jest, poison in jest..." No offense!

Readers, it was all true:

Managing a $13 Billion Budget With No Experience
When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience.

Let's—following the example of their co-workers—call them "The Brat Pack."

When [The Brat Pack] showed up at the [Republican (heh) Palace] -- with their North Face camping gear, Abercrombie & Fitch camouflage and digital cameras -- they were quite the spectacle. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.

They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected.

Translation: The sane ones blow town, and only the wingnuts are left.

In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.

And what, you may ask, were their qualifications for doing so? The light dawns:

For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Surprise! And blowing past all the human interest stuff, we come to this:

Some also grumbled about the new staffers' political ties. Retired U.S. Army Col. Charles Krohn said many in the CPA regard the occupation "as a political event," always looking for a way to make the president look good.
(via WaPo)

It's just like a fairy story, isn't it? Show up with no skills, and in what seems like minutes, you're in charge of an entire country! And better yet, every day is a new day in which to make Dear Leader look good in the media!

Now, to be fair, The Brat Pack—no matter how hard they must have tried to shovel Iraqi money to their Republican allies—must have been able to spend a fraction of that money. Of the reconstruction money (another budget) just $2 billion of $17 billion available has been spent (back) because the security situation in Iraq is so bad).

And, oh yeah, The Brat Pack got the jobs from a single email, and didn't have to undergo a security check. Looks like if you hook up with the Heritage Foundation, you can get signed up faster than you or I could board a plane on a domestic flight...

Say, if Nick Berg had sent his resume to The Heritage Foundation, he might be alive today!

Alert reader pansypoo is right: We need a new word to use instead of "clusterfuck." Something just as vivid, but even more intense.

Lots more good stuff from the essential Atrios.

Notes
[1] Actually, the argument I make back here is a lot worse than that the CPA/RNC organization means that the war is all and only about Bush's re-election, at least in the minds of Republican operatives. Rather, the CPA/RNC is an extra-constitutional chain of command for running mercenaries. It would be interesting to know which of these bright young people—I hereby make the ritual disclaimer "if any"—was back-channelling Aby Ghraib torture photos into the West Wing, so Bush can compare them to the list of "bad guys" he keeps in his desk drawer.

[2]Kinda like that old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, right? Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire? So with the CPA. I mean, can anyone believe that the same guys aren't going to be running the show when "sovreignty" gets transferred to the Iraqis? Pas si bete.

Too, too delicious. Almost too rich: If it weren't for the cost in treasure and lives of Bush bungling that Chalabi enabled.

Ahmed Chalabi, the one-time White House favourite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs.

US investigators are now seeking to determine if the effort was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush Administration to oust the Baghdad regime, Tehran's long-time enemy.

US officials say the INC may have been acting on its own, rather that at Iran's behest, when it sent out a steady stream of defectors between 1998 and 2003 with apparently co-ordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.

Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants, or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has become clear only in recent months that Mr Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy...

Hmmm... Remember the "crude forgeries" from the Italian service on the yellowcake story?

....France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the US, the officials said.

In some case US intelligence analysts used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence sources" to corroborate their own assessments of Saddam's suspected illegal weapons. Few of the CIA's pre-war judgements have been proved accurate so far.

"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior US intelligence official.

"They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."

(via The Age)

Looks like the entire Bush foreign policy apparat were just babies by comparison to the Iraqi intelligence service.

Gee, I wonder if anyone in the administration will take responsibility for this?

Sigh....

I just can't get my head around this:

Neo-con slut Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi Garibaldi, Waura's guest at a SOTU, whose supremely counterfactual intel Rummy's Office of Faith-Based Intelligence mainlined right into the West Vein of the White House, is an Iranian spy.

I mean, I always knew things weren't good, but that's really, really, really not good.

Doubleplus ungood.

Super ungood.

Double-mondo-super-plus ungood.

I'm not sure that "Freedom's untidy" or "What difference does it make?" is going to cut the mustard on this one.

And I just can't get this one picture out of my head. From Fahrenheit 911:

Wolfie licking his comb and then running it through his hair

Eeew. Does Wolfie do that a lot, like, around other people? Is this Pink Flamingos stuff, or what? Don't think about this while trying to sleep, OK?

NOTE Image from here.

From the Department of Thinly Veiled Euphemism, more flackery on His bike accident:

"It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," the spokesman said. "You know this president. He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say He wasn't whistling show tunes."
(via AP)

Oh-kay....

Could it be that the insiders know something we don't?

Insiders Are Selling Like It's 1999
Across corporate America, executives have been selling company stock as if it were 1999. Even amid this resurgence of insider selling, however, a few dozen executives - including those at Zimmer - stood out for having unloaded supersized portions of their personal stakes in their company's future. At Wendy's International, Qualcomm, Occidental Petroleum, Boston Scientific and Comverse Technology, one or more executives sold at least half their holdings, according to a SundayBusiness analysis of hundreds of big companies.
(via NY Times)

The Times then goes on to a lot of thumbsucking speculation about why on earth the execs would be doing this, but I'd classify it under the Department of Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship: The execs realized that through his Iraqi blunder, Bush has totally hosed the war against the real enemy: AQ and its mutations.

If a dirty bomb hits, the market will tank. So why not cash in?

This is a bike! Not a snowboard! So it isn't the same!

Right. First the pretzel, then the Segway, now the bike accident. Sensing a pattern?

A bike ride has left President Bush a bit dinged up.
The White House says Bush suffered cuts and bruises today after taking a spill while mountain biking on his Texas ranch.

A spokesman says Bush has minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, lip, nose, right hand and both knees.

His personal doctor was along for the ride and cleaned the cuts. Bush finished the last mile of his ride -- refusing a Secret Service offer to drive him home.

The spokesman says there had been a lot of rain in the area lately and that the topsoil was wet.
(via AP)

Right.

Maybe the twins got new stuff, and the dosage is different?

Aw, what do the French know! It isn't like they ever got into un grand projet of an endless colonial war on the wrong side of a national movement, or started torturing prisoners. Oh, wait. You know, I guess they did, didn't they? In their own small way....

With Moore's customary blend of humor and horror, "Fahrenheit 9/11" accuses the Bush camp of stealing the 2000 election, overlooking terrorism warnings before Sept. 11 and fanning fears of more attacks to secure Americans' support for the Iraq war.

Moore appears on-screen far less in "Fahrenheit 9/11" than in "Bowling for Columbine" or his other documentaries. The film relies largely on interviews, footage of U.S. soldiers and war victims in Iraq, and archival footage of Bush.

Just back in Cannes after his daughter's college graduation in the United States, Moore dedicated the award to "my daughter and to all the children in America and Iraq and throughout the world who suffered through our actions."

"Fahrenheit 9/11" made waves in the weeks leading up to Cannes after the Walt Disney Co. refused to let subsidiary Miramax release the film in the United States because of its political content. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein are negotiating to buy back the film and find another distributor, with hopes of landing it in theaters by Fourth of July weekend.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" was the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's "The Silent World" in 1956.
(via AP)

Sheesh, I remember seeing Jacques Cousteau movies on our black and white TV when I was growing up. They were boring as hell. So you'd think Michael Moore would be able to find a US distributor for a film that's a lot more exciting. Eh?

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

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

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

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

[via Newsday]

I guess we know who the "useful idiots" really were now, don't we?

I wonder what the warfloggers will say now?

Eh, Insty?

What's it feel like to be played for a fool, Glenn?

Federal law requires that subpoenas to journalists is a last resort, not a first. Well, I guess we're at the last resort stage:

The special prosecutor investigating whether the Bush administration illegally disclosed a CIA operative's name to the media has subpoenaed NBC correspondent Tim Russert and a Time magazine reporter, seeking information about the leak.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issued the subpoenas late yesterday, according to the media outlets. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, had no comment.
(via Newsday)

Funny how big this story was... It really did show that Bush would do anything, including outting an undercover agent to gain revenge on a whistleblower. Of course, now if we want to show that Bush will do anything, we can point to Abu Ghraib and the Special Access Program of extra-judicial assassination.

Lawlessness. That's the common thread between the Plame Affair and Abu Ghraib. It's the modus operandi of the Bush regime.

Good question.

Once Bush and Kerry are officially nominated by their parties, they will no longer be permitted to raise and spend private donations. Instead, each will receive $75 million in federal funds for the general election.

By postponing his official nomination — an unparalleled move for a presidential candidate — Kerry could spend his privately raised donations for longer and receive his public funding at about the same time as Bush. The president is to be nominated at the Republican convention in early September in New York, five weeks after Democrats gather in Boston.

The Massachusetts senator demurred when asked about the possible delay of his nomination.

"The decision hasn't been made," Kerry told The Times. "But I am for anything that would level the playing field."

(via LA Times)

Hmmm....

I'm not sure. However, I can make a case for answering No. I thought the Dean campaign went off the rails when it made exactly the same decision: forgoing Federal matching funds because the Internet fundraising operation was going so amazingly well. I thought then—and was, in retrospect, in error not to criticize Dean—that it would have been better to take the matching money, and work out a way to make the Internet fundraising operation into an operation to benefit all Democrats. If Dean had done that, he might not have been so alone at the end, and the party and the activists would have been in much better shape....

But, hindsight is 20/20, another cliche that has a certain truth.

Readers, what do you think? Should Kerry postpone the nomination? Is there a principled way to justify it?

I think Josh Marshall—commenting on the almost-too-beautiful revelation that neocon creature and White House invitee Ahmed Chalabi was either a fool or working for the Iranian Secret Service—has cause and effect exactly right here:

But what we're seeing here is less the result of new revelations than the outward signs of deep tectonic shifts within the US government -- the discrediting of some factions and agencies, the attempts of others to reposition themselves in a moment of acute crisis and get ahead of the storm, and the freeing up of others to assert themselves for the first time in years.

It's probably too dramatic to compare this to the bubbles, choppy water and occasional scraps churned up by a Piranha feeding. But the struggles that are giving rise to all these leaks and tergiversations of the state are the real story -- one that it is difficult to see directly, but possible to glimpse in what we can infer from its effects and repercussions.
(via Talking Points Memo)

Sure, there are bad guys and worse guys, but that's politics....

If the contract had come through... But it didn't. If the family support had been able to continue... But it couldn't.

And then the cut-offs began. In September, the phone. In October, the electricity. And finally, the gas, which meant the cooking and the heat. In the winter. All that was left then was the freezing apartment, and on December 1, I told my long-suffering landlord I was going, and used up the last month's rent.

Every night sleep was a methodical battle, as I arranged the covers, all the coats, all the sweaters over and around me to seal any chink against the cold.

What saved the situation, was, first, my fellow bloggers Leah, the farmer, and tresy, who paid for the Blogger Professional when I had no money to contribute.

Second, public space. Having no phone, gas, or heat I could deal with: But no Internet connection would really have been a problem. Fortunately, the Philadelphia Free Library has Internet terminals, and so I would walk over in the morning and move, nomadically, from terminal to terminal as each 45 time minute expired. Here, I was in strange company, since a crew of street people were doing the same thing. The public terminals are a catchbasin, filled with students, the poor, unemployed IT professionals—I looked over the shoulder of one terribly scruffy guy, and saw he had a network administrator's resume a mile long—the homeless, and, as we know now, potential terrorists. And here, too, the end was approaching, since the Library, at wit's end with the homeless monopolizing the system, was about to install card readers, so that only paid-up patrons would be able to use the system, and then only for a single session.[1] And that wasn't enough time, and anyhow I didn't have the money. That would have been more than my food budget for a month!

Electricity: Every night I unscrewed the lightbulb on the stairs, screwed in an adapter, and ran extension cord into the apartment, so I could use a hotplate; the laptop, too, sometimes: Later, I learned that there was a vagrant WiFi signal that I could just pick up, sometimes, if I held the laptop at the right height and angle.

Food: I discovered dollar stores. Dollar stores are amazing and wonderful, especially if you don't care about brand names. Chinese Crest! Turkish soap. And two nights worth of spaghetti sauce for one dollar. My worries about retirement have been considerably reduced... Oh, and charity? It isn't. I had the foolish notion that I could go to a church for food, if I needed it. Not a chance—they all had means testing, which required a checking account, which at that point I didn't have.

Fortunately, at this point a friend arranged to fly me out to California for a conference, and I was able to update my linux system to install the WiFi drivers I was previously unable to install. This meant that I was able to go to coffee houses, rent my seat for an hour, and connect. Not Starbucks, of course, but the local houses that compete with the chains by offering a free connection. Far improved from the library, where the librarians had me classified as an abuser of the system, as I was, but had no way to protect the system from me.

Now that I had a reliable Internet connection, I discovered that there was a salaried job—after two years—that I could apply for, and so I got a prepaid phone to have a number on the resume, and applied. Remember the month when Bush created 500 jobs? The job I got was 1/500th of the job creation total in that month.

And then a fellow coffee house patron mentioned Craigs List, and all in the one week between Christmas and New Year's I used it to find a new, cheaper, and better apartment, then found a mover, and moved.

This experience explains why I give Bush zero credit on the economy, or the Wecovery.

For one thing, it's obvious that the recovery we are now in—even if all the jobs are for manicurists, security guards, and other providers of personal services—happened in spite of Bush, not because of Him. When two hundred billion of war money gets injected into the economy, it would be remarkable if the economy did not grow. Especially with Greenspan inflating a housing bubble.

And I rememember a lot about Republican policies and actions when I was unemployed.

I remember the Bush promises, promises about all the jobs that would be created through His policies. And then month after month after month after month of nothing, with all the professional employed analysts and MWs acting surprised at the most obvious thing in the world: that the horrible job market was a touch of the overseer's lash on the backs of those who had jobs, to make them work harder for the same money ("be more productive").

I remember the Republicans not renewing unemployment payments. Over Christmas. Not that I had any, but one thinks of others.

I remember the Republicans trying to take away overtime—another touch of the lash. How many families, right on the edge, would be pushed over the line into my condition if their overtime disappeared?

I remember countless acts by the Republicans to give more to those who were already rich, and take away more from those who were already poor.

And do I have any confidence that I won't be thrown on the trash heap again, with millions of others? Of course not.

Give Bush credit for the economy? Don't make me laugh. It hurts too much.

Notes
[1]I don't think, unfortunately, that the library was wrong in this. A few months later, a streetperson—who I am almost certain I sat next to; he was, of course, browsing porn—raped and almost killed a little Chinese girl in the Independence Branch, who had been brought there by her non-English speaking grandmother, on the premise, no doubt that the library was safe.

Hey, great news! My train down the Northeast Corridor didn't get bombed (back), no thanks to Inerrant Boy.

And let's look on the bright side! I had no trouble getting a seat, no trouble at all...

So I went out once again to Pasion.

Eat, drink, and be merry....

Oh, and what Digby said.

And Aaron Swartz opens the green door.

Culture of responsibility, rule of law, strong leadership, yadda yadda yadda:

Hundreds of new images ... videos.. 13 previously secret sworn statements by detainees ... "Because they started to hit my broken leg, I curse my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I am alive." ...prisoners being fondled by female soldiers... forced to masturbate ... an Army translator having sex with a screaming boy 15 to 18 years old .... prisoners being ridden like animals, sodomized with a phosphoric light and forced to retrieve their food from toilets ... "We had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy." ... U.S. soldiers shown laughing and delighting in the abuses .... five hooded and naked detainees standing against the wall in the darkness, each masturbating
(via Reuters)

"Having sex"?!? WTF? That would be rape, right?

And good one, guys, on renouncing Islam and thanking Jesus. We just sold the whole Arab world on the idea that the war really is a crusade.

Then this little tidbit:

The Washington Post said the 65 pages of sworn written statements in Arabic were taken in January and were translated by U.S. contractors.

"Contractors," eh? Wonder if we're getting the unexpurgated story, or the expurgated one?

Bush to outline "clear strategy" for Iraq Monday.

What a relief!

I was beginning to worry that He didn't have one!

But now the Truth will be made plain!

Ouch! I've got to stop slamming my head on the table...

The actual situation is bad enough, but there was one quote that just leaped out at me....

The United States has failed to rebuild Iraq's university system just weeks before the planned handover of control, [John A. Agresto], the top American education adviser to Iraq told The Associated Press on Friday.

Congress has provided only about $8 million of the $500 million needed to repair damage resulting mainly from postwar looting, and foreign governments have done little more, John A. Agresto said in an interview at Samford University, where he was scheduled to give a commencement speech Saturday.

As a result, Agresto said thousands of Iraqi university students and faculty members do not have basic supplies like desks and chairs, and teaching equipment stolen from technical schools has not been replaced.


At some vocational colleges, students learn "theoretical carpentry" because they lack tools, he said.
(via AP)

"Theoretical carpentry," don't you just love it?

Because it's so much like everything else about this farcical war: "theoretical freedom," "theoretical democracy," "theoretical WMDs"...

I was going to title this "Leave No Child's Behind Behind" but didn't want to give the impression I was making fun of fat kids when the intended target was fatHEADS, one in Washington in particular. To any fat kids reading this, I was once a fat kid too, but am no longer. I am now..old.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- The state is eliminating a popular school program to teach healthy eating because changing policies have eliminated its federal funding, officials said.

The Nutrition Education Program, which served 600 schools statewide will be ended Sept. 30, said Evelyn Crayton of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service, which manages the program.

Alabama's Nutritional Education Program has relied on funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service and matching money from local schools and governments. They supplied $6 million apiece.

Under the program, nutrition educators taught students the basics about healthy eating. Schools in all but one county chose to participate in the program, Crayton said. About 700,000 children were served by the program last year.

Federal officials now say the program must target food stamp recipients, and children don't apply for food stamps, state officials said.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture's regional office in Atlanta denied that the federal government directed the state to pull the program out of schools.

Crayton said the state doesn't have the money to replace the lost federal funding.

Miriam Gaines, director of nutrition and physical activity at the state Department of Public Health, said students will still learn some nutrition basics in health classes, but it won't be enough, given Alabama's problem with obesity. She said many schools have phased out home economics classes.

Just asking.

TROLL PROPHYLACTIC By "them," of course, I mean Bush and His acolytes, not the troops. Obviously.

A long time ago, in a small village, many miles from "the nearest civilization."

Dear Mom and Dad:
Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight!
It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you.
The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters.
My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground.
When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could....
It was then that we burned these huts....Everyone is crying, begging and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.
Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock.

Ramadi - May 2004:

[excerpt:] Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.

The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. "The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony," said Mr Nawaf. "We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area."

Armored military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. "They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house," he said.

Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.

"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world," said Mr Nawaf. "There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces."

[excerpt:] "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me."

[excerpt:] "We took ground fire and we returned fire," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. "We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement." -- US Soldiers Started to Shoot Us, One by One Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologize - by Rory McCarthy in Ramaldi, May 21, 2004 by the Guardian/UK

My Lai - March, 1968:

The story of the battle, as told by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, leader of the task force bearing his name, detailed sniper attacks from the village, fierce fighting, booby traps, the killing in action of 128 "VC" and the capture of thirteen "sympathizers." Later he changed his report and said the residents of My Lai had been killed either by artillery or gunship fire. Both versions of events were false, but Barker would not have to answer for them. He died in an air crash soon after My Lai. ~ Source: The Wound Within; America in the Vietnam Years 1945-1974, by Alexander Kendrick - Little Brown, 1974.

May, 2004:

Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive." -- Gaurdian/UK

"Let's not be naive." - Yeah, I'll remember that.
What really happened in Ramadi, in "the middle of the desert,... 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilization?"

Notes: "Dear Mom and Dad" letter above was written by a GI in Vietnam and mailed home to his parents. The letter was also reported by Seymour Hersh and is republished in A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn - chapter 18, The Impossible Victory: Vietnam

Also see: Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath, NY, Random House, 1970. And: Hersh/My Lai 4 - 1970

*

First reports were that the arrestees where Saddamites from Tikrit, but that seems to have faded from the scene.

The U.S. detained four men two days ago in Baghdad on suspicion of involvement in the murder of American Nicholas Berg in Iraq, U.S. Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said during a briefing televised from Baghdad.

Two of the individuals have been set free, Kimmitt said. The intelligence leading to the detentions came from tips from Iraqis, and troops from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq took the suspects into custody, he said.
(via Bloomberg)

Funny timing, though, isn't it? "Round up the usual suspects"?

Could Terrorists Be Casing New York-Philadelphia-D.C. Rail Corridor? (via the essential Agonist).

Here's one detail I don't like at all:

[In a separate investigation], the FBI's Philadelphia field office is probing the discovery of an infrared sensor that was carefully concealed along the track bed of a Pennsylvania Southeast Transit Authority line.

The device — a commercially available wireless infrared transmitter made for home security use — was discovered, spraypainted black and tucked neatly into the trackside ballast, by a conductor. Such devices transmit a signal when something cuts across their infrared beam.

Gee. More proof that the flypaper theory is really, really working, eh? I'm sure glad we're in Iraq, because.... Because.... Because...

I take SEPTA—or, as we Philadelphians lovingly call it, SEPTIC—every day, on this very route.

It's a train not a car, it doesn't use enough oil, it's in a blue state, and it doesn't provide any nice photo ops, so Inerrant Boy doesn't give two shits about it. And I'm a Democrat and not a SIC, so He doesn't give two shits about me. Grrrr!

My only consolation is that SEPTA probably doesn't run reliably enough to trigger anything.

Dan Froomkin writes an entirely invaluable column for the Washington Post called White House Briefing which you should try to read daily (Monday through Friday anyway.) Often this is little more than snarky gossip from the journo-industrial complex, but he's doing some real journalism the last few days.

Did you know there was such a thing as the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction," or that the panel was created by an executive order of President Bush in February? I didn't think you did. I didn't either.

Why they're so concerned, considering the way they've stacked the membership of this body, I'm not sure. But their dedication to openness and transparency can be guessed from this note to nosy lawyers with the National Resource Defense Council and the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, groups who for some reason want to be involved in this matter:

"Because of the inherently sensitive nature of the materials it will be reviewing during the course of its work, the Commission's offices will be contained within a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility ("SCIF")...providing public access to those offices would raise security concerns, and accordingly [we are] exploring various locations for its reading room."

Per the Federal register notice of May 13: "Members of the public who wish to submit a written statement to the Commission are invited to do so by facsimile at (202) 456 -- 7921. Comments also may be sent to the Commission by e-mail at comments@wmd.gov"

"The commission will have a Web site, at wmd.gov, up and running in the near future, [commission and former WH spokesflack Larry] McQuillan says.

I just wonder if there will be anything on it." [end Froomkin remarks]

Brethren and sistren, I know it's getting to be Commission Overload time. Earlier this week we were cursing the networks for putting on the 9-11 Commission testimony because that is now Old News, when we wanted the Senate Icky Pictures Committee testimony instead. Neither of those panels is done with their work, so we're now going to have THREE of the damn things to keep track of.

I not only think we can do it, we may be the ONLY ones who can do it. If, for instance one Mr. Chalabi suffers a tragic accident before he can testify here for instance, we at least will know why.

According to Froom, there was posted "a notice in the Federal Register of [the commission's] intention to hold a closed meeting May 26-27". So we know who, and we know when. We may have to raise some hell to find out any more, or get it out in the open air and healing sunlight.

Gee, sure hope this movie finds a distributor. Maybe FUX?

Whatever you think of Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources - foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video - he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, once again, Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of [Bush] continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for seven long minutes after learning of the attack.

We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."

Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded Iraqis in a holding pen near Samara in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: Why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?

Speaking of America's volunteer army, Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
(via International Herald Trib)

Not "hate." Outrage!

New photos, videos.

UPDATE Hersh: "I'm still working on the story.". Thank God.

Have at it!

Back.

Just one of the many, many unanswered questions....

Light blogging for me today: Deliverables. Oh, the joys of nine-to-five. I mean, aside from actually being able to pay the rent and bills, and stuff like that....

man bosskill.

Come, my coach!

Send in the clowns!

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

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

Don’t you love a farce?

If it's true, what are the odds that Wolfowitz or Perle will admit they were wrong to support Chalabi? Or apologize? Or take any accountability?

Look, I'm going to bed. It's dark under the table, and it's far too late to try to make sense of this. If indeed such a thing is possible.

But just one question: Doesn't "rock solid" mean about the same thing as "slam dunk"?

We call it "troll prophylaxis" when we warn the enemy in advance that we're onto their tricks, so they might as well not bother. We could learn something from the esteemed Sen. McCain.

Republicans Postpone Senate Vote on Budget
(via NYT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republicans retreated Thursday and decided to postpone a Senate vote on their $2.4 trillion budget until at least next month, averting a certain defeat by party moderates demanding curbs on future tax cuts.

The decision was an election-year embarrassment for both the Republicans who control Congress and President Bush. It came just hours after Bush met privately with GOP lawmakers at the Capitol and urged them to push the 2005 budget through the Senate.

But that could be a tall order: Four moderate GOP senators and moderate Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska have all resisted weeks of entreaties to support the budget, leaving GOP leaders two votes shy of passage.

Asked what might make them change their minds, one of the moderates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., joked,
``Some of us could get killed in tragic accidents.''

A stalemate over the issue has persisted for two months. Its continuation has overtaken earlier statements by GOP leaders that they would complete the plan on time -- April 15 -- to show how well they could govern.

The other recalcitrant senators were Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both R-Maine, and Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I."

No small plane rides for them either. Sorry kids, maybe when the fair comes to town next year.

Sorry for the size, I'm thinking of having a postage stamp made up....

NOTE From a suggestion from alert reader pansypoo.

Newsweek, via alert reader scaramouche's new blog.

Why? Because of the "unorthodox measures" used in the war on terrorism. (Nice euphemism, "unorthodox measures.")

Unorthodox like targetted assassiations in the Special Access Program?

The Special Access Program that's the real story behind Abu Ghraib?

The story that Hersh broke (back)—and from which everybody else in the SCLM and the political establishment is studiously averting their eyes?

Not! So Inerrant Boy goes to the Hill to throw the troops some red meat:

At a closed-door meeting described by some as a pep rally, Bush vowed to "stay the course" and do what is right for America, prompting lawmakers to shower him with ovations, Republicans said afterward.

"The overall thing he accomplished was it's clear to everybody in the room this guy is leading," said Rep. John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

Bush took no questions from lawmakers.

(via Reuters)

Heh. Bush sure is addicted to ovations (back) Remember when He wouldn't speak before the European Parliament unless they guaranteed Him a standing one? An ovation, I mean. The European Parliament turned down the demand, but the House Republicans? No problem, sir!

Isn't it weird? I truly don't understand the Republican notion of leadership. How can taking no questions from the guys on your own side be seen as strong leadership?

Oh, wait. Now I understand. There must be no need for questions, since that would imply a lack of faith, and that would imply that Inerrant Boy was not The Leader. Phew! Now I feel better.

My Uncle Clyde was as patriotic as the next guy in 1941. His devotion to the American war effort led him on a different path though. Instead of rushing down to the recruiting center like everybody else (including his half-blind father-in-law, which is another story) he wisely sought his father's counsel on the subject. His dad arranged for him to contribute to victory by wrangling him a job in a chicken hatchery, which was a guaranteed draft deferrment as vital agricultural work.

Clyde worked as a chicken sexer. In those days (and maybe these days too for all I know) the newly hatched little yellow balls of fluff would roll out of their nests and into the hands of the cruel world of agribusiness in the person of my uncle. His task was to pick up each one, pry its little toothpick legs apart, and inspect the region between them to determine whether this was a future hen (guaranteed a long and happy life of egg production followed by a starring role in Sunday dinner) or a rooster. Those got tossed in a box and I never heard what became of them thereafter.

It was nice work if you could get it. Required a certain amount of standing but you got to go home to your wife every night (although if you knew Aunt Maxine that might not...well, best not go there). And it required building up an immunity to the sort of odors which accumulate around any area where chickens live, thrive, eat, lay eggs, and poop.

This discussion of chickenshit seemed an appropriate introduction to today's topic of "What The Hell Is Going On With This "Ready Reserve" Thing Anyway?"

We start in chronlogical order. One week ago, May 13, the mighty Army PR machine groaned and brought forth a press release which began thusly:

"The Army's Human Resources Command - St. Louis (HRC-STL), is identifying Individual Ready Reserve Soldiers with a statutory Military Service Obligation (MSO) remaining for possible assignment to an Army Reserve unit. These Soldiers may be assigned to position vacancy requirements within designated Reserve units based upon the needs of the Army.

At this time, there have been no involuntary assignments of IRR Soldiers to any Army Reserve units. The HRC-STL is identifying IRR Soldiers for possible assignment."

Enlistments in the military, you see, are sort of like the yin-yang symbol. You sign up for, say, six years. Three years are active duty, the other three years you are in this Ready Reserve thing and subject to callback. This has been virtually ignored for decades--it may have been used to some extent in Vietnam but the last really big callup under these provisions was the Korean War.

Today we hear--or at least people in the vicinity of Salem, Oregon hear--that this was all a big "oopsie." Per the Salem Oregonian:

SALEM -- Thousands of recent U.S. Army veterans nationwide were told to choose by Monday a new assignment in the Army Reserve or National Guard -- meaning a potential return to active duty -- or the military would decide for them. The Army now says the order was a mistake.

The consequence of the error appears to be a sharp increase in enlistments in Oregon and elsewhere by reservists who feared being assigned a unit without their consent. They face possible deployment to the Middle East.

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, commander of the Army Reserve, declined comment on how the mistake was made, a spokesman said. How the mistaken order was issued is a mystery, said Steve Stromvall, the civilian public affairs director for the U.S. Army Reserve Command in Atlanta.

"God only knows at this point where the miscommunication started," he said.

God may not. Gen. Helmly may not. But YOU do.

First, the "Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force" wants the logs, the messages, and the IP addresses from pro-voting rights/anti-electronic voting machines activist Bev Harris's site (Leah, back here). Yikes!

Now, Xan comes up with this, from the Baltimore Sun:

"About 100 Maryland voters who requested paper ballots for the March primary because they did not trust the state's new touch-screen voting machines may never have their votes counted.

"The Campaign for Verifiable Voting had urged thousands of its supporters to request paper ballots to create a verifiable paper trail.

"State officials learned of the protest effort, and on Feb. 20, 11 days before the primary, distributed a list of "last minute instructions" to local election boards.

"Instruction No. 4 addressed the provisional ballot issue: "Do not issue a provisional ballot to a voter who simply does not want to use the DRE [electronic] voting equipment. The voter can either use the DRE voting equipment or forfeit his or her right to vote."

"Forfeit the right to vote?" How is it I'm hearing those words from a local election board? Sounds like they'll be using their "training wheels" (back) for awhile, eh?

From the Department of Throwing My Hands Up at the Sheer Boneheadedness of It All:

"[Bush] talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,'" said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio. "The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward."
(via LA Times)

Sheesh. Just as if the Iraqis were little kids. What next? Is he going to start calling them "our little brown brothers?"

But don't worry, it's just a blip.

Jobless claims last week rose 3.6% to 345,000, according to a report today that analysts describe as a small bump in a downward trend in the number of Americans applying for unemployment insurance.

Last week's small spike "is mildly disappointing but likely inconsequential," said Ian Shepherdson, an economist with a New York-based consulting firm. "There is every reason to expect claims to continue falling over the next few weeks," he said.
(via LA Times)

"Inconsequential" if you lost your job? When are we going to start outsourcing the analysts, anyhow?

Of course, the moving average looks better. But what's the bottom line?

Despite the optimistic showing on employment, the job market needs to get even stronger. The economy has lost a net 1.5 million jobs since President Bush took office in January 2001. Private economists said it will take time to recoup those losses.
(via LA Times)

Not to mention that the ones that will never be outsourced are the ones where "meeting the public" is part of the job description. Security guards, manicurists....

A little gem from the Department of Keeping a Straight Face:

Without a budget, it would be harder for Congress to cut taxes and raise the government's borrowing limit later this year.
(via AP)

Hey, here's an idea! I'm going to arrange to make less money, and start buying food and paying the bills with a credit card! Yeah, that's the ticket...

Anyone ever done that? I have, more or less. And you know what? It ended very badly. As I hope it will for President Charge It.

In Iraq, it seems people don't just play both ends against the middle, they play all sides against the middle.

The U.S. command in Baghdad raided Ahmed Chalabi's home and headquarters in Baghdad at dawn today. U.S. soldiers put a gun to his head, according to his nephew Salem Chalabi, the Associated Press reports. Chalabi aides blame the CIA and Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Why did the Bush administration turn against its former favorite Iraqi? Almost certainly because it realized that Chalabi, maddened by the realization that he was being excluded from the post-June 30 hand-over arrangements, was putting together a sectarian Shiite faction to destabilize and destroy the new Iraqi government.

"His dream has always been to be a sectarian Shia leader," says the Iraqi political observer of his old friend Chalabi. "He knows that, sooner or later, Muqtada al-Sadr is going to be killed, [and] that will leave tens, hundreds, of thousands of his followers adrift, looking for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim after [today's raid], he can take on that role."

U.S. disenchantment with Chalabi has been growing since it dawned on the White House and the Pentagon that everything he had told them about Iraq -- from Saddam Hussein's fiendish weapons arsenal to the crowds who would toss flowers at the invaders to Chalabi's own popularity in Iraq -- had been completely false. Some months ago King Abdullah of Jordan was surprised to be informed by President Bush that the king could "piss on Chalabi." Fanatic neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Michael Rubin may have continued to champion Chalabi, insisting that the United States should have imposed him as Iraq's ruler right after the invasion, but elsewhere in Washington his stock has been dropping like a stone.
(via Salon)

So much for the Garibaldi of Iraq. No wonder Bush is going to have to make so many speeches on Iraq.... But don't cry for Chalabi, Iraq! He's still got the millions we gave him, the files we gave him from Saddam's secret police, and his brother is in charge of the tribunal that's going to try Saddam...

I haven't seen any apologies from the nec-cons on Chalani, incredible though that may seem. Readers?

UPDATE Then, of course, there is the conspiratorial view. Leave it to the Brits in the person of the London Times Diplomatic Editor who writes:

"Paradoxically, Mr Chalabi's fall-out with America may actually work in his favour. He has been regarded by many Iraqis as little more than a CIA stooge since arriving here. Now that their relations have ended, that charge no longer applies."

So Bremer is doing Chalabi a favor, since Chalabi is the strong man we really want? The mind reels....

Samuel Huntington, fresh from the triumph of having predicted a global "Clash Of Civilizations" that the American right may well be able to take credit, in the near future, for having made into a reality, has recently moved from the macro to the micro. In an article based on a chapter in his new book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” published recently in Foreign Policy, Huntington zeroed in on Hispanics as the weak link attenuating what it is that makes us Americans, which turns out to be having last names that couldn't possibly be taken for Hispanic ones, like, for instance, Huntington. Of course there's always a Bill Richardson...oh, never mind.

Lucky us, Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, takes on Huntington's not so new new ideas, and pays them the enormous compliment, coming from a critic and prose stylist of Menand's stature and grace, of taking Huntington exactly as seriously as his work here deserves, not a jot less, and not a jot more. What ensues, in addition to delicious merriment of a very high order, is a way to think about the differences between the liberal response to 9/11 and the right wing response to it, in which our side does rather better than than the other side does, to indulge in a bit of bifurcation that isn't entirely true to the tenor or Menand's review.

A few samples to whet your appetite:

Most readers who are not political scientists know Huntington from his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was published in 1996, and which proposed that cultural differences would be the major cause of global tension in the future. The book was translated into thirty-three languages and inspired international conferences; its argument acquired new interest and credibility after the attacks of 2001 and the American response to them

(edit)

The optimal course for the West in a world of potential civilizational conflict, Huntington concluded, was not to reach out to non-Western civilizations with the idea that people in those civilizations are really like us. He thinks that they are not really like us, and that it is both immoral to insist on making other countries conform to Western values (since that must involve trampling on their own values) and naïve to believe that the West speaks a universal language. If differences among civilizations are a perpetual source of rivalry and a potential source of wars, then a group of people whose loyalty to their own culture is attenuated is likely to be worse off relative to other groups. Hence his anxiety about what he thinks is a trend toward cultural diffusion in the United States.

You might think that if cultural difference is what drives people to war, then the world would be a safer place if every group’s loyalty to its own culture were more attenuated. If you thought that, though, you would be a liberal cosmopolitan idealist, and Huntington would have no use for you. Huntington is a domestic monoculturalist and a global multiculturalist (and an enemy of domestic multiculturalism and global monoculturalism). “Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes,” as he put it in “The Clash of Civilizations.” The immutable psychic need people have for a shared belief system is precisely the premise of his political theory. You can’t fool with immutable psychic needs.

"Who Are We?” is about as blunt a work of identity politics as you are likely to find. It says that the chief reason—it could even be the only reason—for Americans to embrace their culture is that it is the culture that happens to be theirs. Americans must love their culture; on the other hand, they must never become so infatuated that, in their delirium, they seek to embrace the world. “Who Are We?” would be less puzzling if Huntington had been more explicit about the larger vision of global civilizational conflict from which it derives. The new book represents a narrowing of that vision. In “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington spoke of “the West” as a transatlantic entity. In “Who Are We?” he is obsessed exclusively with the United States, and his concerns about internationalism are focussed entirely on its dangers to us.

The bad guys in Huntington’s scenario can be divided into two groups. One is composed of intellectuals, people who preach dissent from the values of the “core culture.” As is generally the case with indictments of this sort, recognizable names are sparse. Among those that do turn up are Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the political theorist Michael Walzer, and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. All of them would be astonished to learn that they are deconstructionists. (It is amazing how thoroughly the word “deconstruction” has been drained of meaning, and by the very people who accuse deconstruction of draining words of meaning.) What Huntington is talking about is not deconstruction but bilingualism, affirmative action, cosmopolitanism (a concept with which Nussbaum is associated), pluralism (Walzer), and multiculturalism (Clinton and Gore). “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization,” Huntington says. “It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”

He thinks that the deconstructionists had their sunny moment in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, and were beaten back during the culture wars that their views set off. They have not gone away, though. In the future, he says, “the outcomes of these battles in the deconstructionist war will undoubtedly be substantially affected by the extent to which Americans suffer repeated terrorist attacks on their homeland and their country engages in overseas wars against its enemies.” The more attacks and wars, he suggests, the smaller the deconstructionist threat. This may strike some readers as a high price to pay for keeping Martha Nussbaum in check.

Menand shreds both the theoretical and the statistical basis for Huntington's belief that Hispanic migration,(he means from Mexico), is somehow different (he means worse, because of a refusal to assimilate) from all the other historical waves of immigration from everywhere else in the world, a faith-based creed shared alike by Jonah Goldberg, David Frum, Michele Malkin, and pretty much most others of their ilk. Menand's discussion here, based on some very smart academic research by others, is not to be missed and leads to this rollicking insight.

This brings us back to the weird emptiness at the heart of Huntington’s analysis, according to which conversion to a fundamentalist faith is counted a good thing just because many other people already share that faith. Huntington never explains, in “Who Are We?,” why Protestantism, private enterprise, and the English language are more desirable features of social life or more conducive to self-realization than, say, Judaism, kibbutzim, and Hebrew. He only fears, as an American, their transformation into something different. But how American is that? Huntington’s understanding of American culture would be less rigid if he paid more attention to the actual value of his core values. One of the virtues of a liberal democracy is that it is designed to accommodate social and cultural change. Democracy is not a dogma; it is an experiment. That is what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address—and there is no more hallowed text in the American Creed than that.

Multiculturalism, in the form associated with people like Clinton and Gore, is part of the democratic experiment. It may have a lot of shortcomings as a political theory, but it is absurd to say that it is anti-Western. Its roots, as Charles Taylor and many other writers have shown, are in the classic texts of Western literature and philosophy. And, unless you are a monoculturalist hysteric, the differences that such multiculturalism celebrates are nearly all completely anodyne. One keeps wondering what Huntington, in his chapter on Mexican-Americans, means by “cultural bifurcation.” What is this alien culture that threatens to infect Anglo-Americans? Hispanic-American culture, after all, is a culture derived largely from Spain, which, the last time anyone checked, was in Europe. Here is what we eventually learn (Huntington is quoting from a book called “The Americano Dream,” by a Texas businessman named Lionel Sosa): Hispanics are different because “they still put family first, still make room in their lives for activities other than business, are more religious and more community oriented.” Pull up the drawbridge!

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

I should admit a bias: If it's possible to have a crush on someone's mind and writing style, then I have a crush on Louis Menand. If you haven't read "The Metaphysical Club," a brilliant work of intellectual history that is also a captivating page-turner, hop to it. I noticed the other day at The Corner that Jonah G was putting out a call to receive recommended citations for works of intellectual history, John Dewey being one of the subjects he mentioned, perhaps some kind reader might like to email Jonah this recommendation, although I think he was looking for works that debunk, and doubtless would regard any work of intellectual history that aims at a complex understanding its subject as being biased. Such is the rich life of ideas enjoyed by our rightward brothers and sisters.

BTW, don't just go to The New Yorker online; the new issue just went up (an excellent Nick Lehman takedown of on Russert's new book replaces Menand's review), so use the link, and hurry while it's still good.

Quick reminder who Bev Harris is - perhaps the most effective grassroots activist since Ralph Nader decided he'd rather be President. Or as the Seattle Weekly puts it:

In the past 20 months, Harris has become America’s leading critic of electronic voting Her reporting on the problems with new computer voting machines has been a key component in a national, grassroots movement to safeguard voting. Her astounding discoveries have resulted in important studies by distinguished computer scientists. She has been leaked thousands of pages of internal memos from Diebold Election Systems, one of the country’s leading electronic voting companies. She is frequently cited by newspapers across the country and is a guest on national and local television and radio stations. Thousands of people visit her Web site and participate in its reader forums. Now, Harris claims, the government wants our names, forum messages, and computer addresses.

On the advice of her lawyer, Harris refused to be interviewed for this article which tries to piece together what's going on using other sources.

I'm not sure what to make of it. But its worth worrying about. Here's a link to Harris' own website,

Readers, any other information out there about this?

Sorting out all the lies will be a full-time job.

Beginning with Monday's address at the Army War College, Bush will give a major speech on Iraq every week through June 30, when the U.S.-led coalition is due to turn over limited authority to a new interim Iraqi government. "We're entering a critical phase, and the president will be speaking out each week to discuss with the American people, and the world, the way forward in Iraq," said a White House official.
(via WaPo)

Wow, in the midst of a Presidential campaign? How will He find the time?

Sheesh, when it's already out in the public domain? Have they never heard of the blogosphere? Winston Smith, will you please report to the office?

The Justice Department has taken the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago regarding a former F.B.I. translator who charged that the bureau had missed critical terrorist warnings, officials said Wednesday.

Law enforcement officials say the secrecy surrounding the translator, Sibel Edmonds, is essential to protecting information that could reveal intelligence-gathering operations.

Ms. Edmonds testified in a closed session this year before the Sept. 11 commission, and she has made increasingly vehement charges about the F.B.I.'s intelligence failures, saying the United States had advance warnings about the attacks. Families of the Sept. 11 victims - who are suing numerous corporate and Saudi interests whom they accuse of having links to the attacks - have sought to depose her as a witness, but the Justice Department has blocked the move by saying her testimony would violate "the state secret privilege.'' Her lawyer could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

While some Congressional officials said they were confident the Justice Department had followed proper procedure in classifying the information, others said they could not remember any recent precedents and were bothered by the move.

"I have never heard of a retroactive classification two years back,'' said an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is classified.

"It would be silly if it didn't have such serious implications,'' the aide said. "People are puzzled and, frankly, worried, because the effect here is to quash Congressional oversight. We don't even know what we can't talk about.''
(via NY Times)

I'm not sure the aide really sees the true beauty of this....

You remember Sibel Edmonds, right? See DOJ tries to bribe FBI translator Sibel Edmonds to alter terrorist intercept transcripts (back)

So the kids from the Real World are hanging out at a Starbucks? When Old City Coffee is so much more hip, doesn't burn the coffee, and has free WiFi? WTF!

Missed this one. It's from Powell's bizarre interview with Tim Russert, where his minder tried to pull the plug on the interview before Powell and Russert were done. Via the ever essential Juan Cole:

MR. RUSSERT: Thank you very much, sir.

In February of 2003, you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case against Saddam Hussein. It now appears that an agent called "Curve Ball" had misled the CIA by suggesting that Saddam had trucks and trains that were delivering biological chemical weapons.

How concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the world is now inaccurate and discredited?

SECRETARY POWELL: I'm very concerned. ... But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment, of the intelligence community, but it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I'm disappointed, and I regret it.

"Deliberately misleading," eh? Too bad Russert didn't ask the obvious follow-up, but maybe poor old humiliated Colin will find a way to say who misled him.

But since it was His will, how could it violate the law?

The Bush administration's ad campaign to promote changes to Medicare violated two laws, Congress' investigative arm said Wednesday.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) illegally spent money on what amounted to covert propaganda by producing videos that were made to look like news reports. Portions of the videos, which have been broadcast by 40 television stations, did not make clear that the announcers were not actual news reporters and that they were paid by the department.

The 16-page legal opinion says that HHS's "video news releases" violated a statute that forbids the use of federal money for propaganda, as well as an "Antideficiency Act" that prohibits misuse of federal funds for unauthorized purposes.

The finding does not carry legal force, because the GAO acts as an adviser to Congress. House and Senate Democrats immediately vowed to try to extract repayment of the $44,000 that the administration spent for the three videos, two in English and one in Spanish.

Administration officials insisted they had not erred with the videos, and they predicted the GAO findings would have no effect on their efforts to implement the Medicare changes -- or on public opinion. "That's an opinion of the GAO. We don't agree," said Bill Pierce, an HHS spokesman.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called the videos "another example of how this White House has misrepresented its Medicare plan."
(via Minneapolis Star Tribune)

No, Senator. It's another example of how Republicans break the law with impunity.

Nick Berg has his own Wikipedia entry. With a page of conspiracy theories.

And he's number one in search:

"Nick Berg-related searches are so prevalent that they dwarf all other searches, including the consistent pop-culture leaders.

"Over the past week, Nick Berg searches were 24 times higher than Britney Spears (number 4), Paris Hilton (number 6), and US pop singer Clay Aiken (number 5).

Top 10 internet searches in the week ending May 15, as released by Terra Lycos internet group: 1. Nick Berg, 2. War in Iraq, 3. Muntada al-Ansar, 4. Britney Spears, 5. Clay Aiken, 6. Paris Hilton, 7. al-Qaeda, 8. Kazaa, 9. Al Jazeera, 10. Survivor.
(via The Age)

Tell me it's not a great country...

The Times gets a little feisty and actually puts two and two together. Well, they got three, but they get an A for effort!

[M]any administration officials are taking credit for spreading largess through programs that President Bush tried to eliminate or to cut sharply.

For example, Justice Department officials recently announced that they were awarding $47 million to scores of local law enforcement agencies for the hiring of police officers. Mr. Bush had just proposed cutting the budget for the program, known as Community Oriented Policing Services, by 87 percent, to $97 million next year, from $756 million.

The administration has been particularly energetic in publicizing health programs, even ones that had been scheduled for cuts or elimination.

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.
(via Times)

That was the windup—the pitch—

Whether they involve programs Mr. Bush supported or not, the grant announcements illustrate how the administration blends politics and policy, blurring the distinction between official business and campaign-related activities.

Eesh. Outside and away, all the way to the backstop.

No, the announcements don't illustrate the "blend of politics and policy." Give me a break.

They illustrate how the administration just flat out lies. Up is down. "We had to cut the program's budget in order to save it."

And the story illustrates how the press, and the Times, keeps giving Inerrant Boy a free pass.

Somewhere in the world there must be a contest for World's Stupidest Smart Person, because William Saletan is clearly competing for the crown. Following up on his First Round essay, "George Bush Does Not Lie", Saletan outdoes himself today with "[Kerry] Can't Talk Either!" Here's his idea of a Kerryism on a par with any random Bushism. And this is going to be a regular Slate feature? Bring it on. Apparently it's news to Saletan that extemporaneous speech is not as terse as edited prose.

It's apparently news to Christopher Hitchens, too, speaking of windy. Compare any paragraph of Hitchens tedious piece with Saletan's Kerryism, and tell me which one gets to the point about Abu Ghraib faster. Trick question: only Kerry's statement has an intelligible point.

I'd say that Hitchens is giving Saletan serious competition for the title, but chronic abuse of performance-enhancing drugs should, I think we all agree, be grounds for automatic disqualification.

The delightful column to which I am about to link you is not my find; that honor belongs to the Farmer, who is busy tending to more earthly matters, (of the daily bread, production of variety), and thus asked if I might wish to blog upon it.

The intriguing title of the column by Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post is "A girl gave Rove a bloody nose," which refers to a story Mr. Rove told as part of a commencement talk he gave at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Mr. Blackburn gives us the AP version of that story:

"At the age of 9, I put a Nixon bumper sticker on my wire basket in the front of my bicycle. Unfortunately, the little Catholic girl down the street was a couple of years and about 20 pounds on me. She was for Kennedy. When she saw me on my bike with my bumper sticker for Nixon, she put me on the ground, flattened me out and gave me a bloody nose."

Mr. Blackburn then goes on to comment:

That's supposed to be a cute story about the man who enjoys being called "Bush's brain" bleeding for Republican Richard Nixon at the age of 9. But why did his assailant have to be a Catholic? Is the implication supposed to be that no one else would stick up for a Catholic running for president? It is, despite the plain historical fact that John F. Kennedy wouldn't have been elected if his votes came only from Catholics.

But Mr. Rove's bully had to be a Catholic, not a generic American. She was undoubtedly Irish, which would make her a brawler, although Mr. Rove didn't spell it out. With that audience, he didn't have to; the Liberty graduates could fill in the blank.

The point I take from the story -- even though Mr. Rove didn't intend it -- is that at a tender age, Mr. Rove was attracted to the kind of politician who leaves office one step ahead of the impeachment posse. For that point, the girl didn't have to be Catholic. For Mr. Rove's intended point, though, she had to be Catholic because the politics he preaches and practices is "us against them," and there weren't likely to be many Catholic "thems" in the Liberty audience.

Mr. Blackburn takes what Mr. Rove was doing personally, and in the process of explaining why, gives us a stirring defense of the separation of state and religion.

Read the whole thing here, you'll be glad you did.

While we are speaking of a certain evangelical, fundamentalist approach to the Bible, the one that tends to fetishize the Book of Revelations, let me recommend for any of you who haven't had a chance to follow-up the other copious recommendations you've probably encountered during you're travels in blogovia, Fred Clark's brilliant "Left Behind" series at The Slacktivist, which, with wit and brilliance analyzes the Tim LaHaye ultra bestseller novels which spin out narratives of modern life in which the Rapture is an ever present reality: Fred's work is not only important to understanding the world view of a highly influential portion of the evangelical community, but is also invaluable if, like myself, you were ever traumatized by a too early exposure to "Revelations," (in my case, a neighboring family close to my family, genuinely lovely people who wished to spread the "good news" of how one could be included in the Rapture, but which had the opposite effect on me when informed that it was not certain that all of my family would be included and I realized that I preferred, in that case, to be left behind), an outcome you can insure by patterning your life after any of the "bad" characters in the Left Behind series. Here's a hint: If you read Corrente, you probably don't have to worry; you'll be here for the apocalypse.

Fred also has an interesting "take" on the Rick Perlstein Village Voice article previously blogged by Atrios, so interesting that Perlstein visited to add his own comment to it

While you're there, check out this sharply worded post about Bishop Michael Sheridan of the Colorado Roman Catholic Diocese; I doubt that any secularist would dare be as cutting as a religionist like Fred feels free to be. And don't miss this lovely, and somewhat surprising, I'll admit, post about C.S. Lewis's view of theocracy.

Greetings all...the Esteemed Lambert has invited me to join the Privileged Poo-Bah's of Page 1 Posting Primacy. This is my first try at this Blogging stuff (aside from incessant drivel in the comments sections) so please be kind if I screw anything up.
*****
If anybody was watching the Senate Armed Services committee this morning they saw a good deal of talk about a slide, of a poster, of a list of things interrogators at Abu Ghraib were allowed to do (which were listed on the left side of the sheet) and things they had to get the Commanding General (CG)'s permission to do (right side of the poster).

Never did find the poster itself but turned up this transcript of a "background" briefing given at the Pentagon last Friday. I would describe it in theatrical terms as a "tryout in the sticks" for today's Senate testimony, since some paragraphs were repeated almost word for word.

(via Briefing transcript)

The money quotes are just short of halfway down. Check the dates on when "changes were made." And, oh yeah, way down at the bottom, on who made the decision to send commanders from Gitmo to Iraq...this just may be the smoking gun to Rummy.

And don't ask me why the only place this turned up was on the website of the US Embassy in Tokyo.

I am suddenly taken back to the day I first got behind the wheel of a car with permission to turn the key. Being as I figured that out (eventually), I expect this will work too. Lambert et al, thanks for the invite.

Oh, in October?

White House officials say they've got a "working premise" about terrorism and the presidential election: It's going to happen. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." And, he added, "it will happen here." There are two worst-case scenarios, the official says. The first posits an attack on Washington, possibly the Capitol, which was believed to be the target of the 9/11 jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. Theory 2: smaller but more frequent attacks in Washington and other major cities leading up to the election. To prepare, the administration has been holding secret antiterrorism drills to make sure top officials know what to do. "There was a sense," says one official involved in the drills, "of mass confusion on 9/11. Now we have a sense of order." Unclear is the political impact, though most Bushies think the nation would rally around the president. "I can tell you one thing," adds the official sternly, "we won't be like Spain," which tossed its government days after the Madrid train bombings.
(via US News)

What's wrong with being like Spain? They got out of a war that had nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda, one of their real enemies. Sounds like a reasonable sense of priorities, to me.

Oh, wait a minute. It's the "tossed the government" part that won't be the same. So, would not being like Spain mean cancelling the election?

Why on earth would the country rally round Bush, when an attack would be totally His screw up?

From God's lips to Inerrant Boy's ear:

"My resolve is firm," [Bush] said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This is an historic moment. The world watches for weakness in our resolve. They will see no weakness. We will answer every challenge."
(via WaPo)

Truly weird.

Inability to admit error. That's not weakness?

Wishful thinking and faith-based planning. That's not weakness?

Seeking revenge on truthtellers (Snow, Clarke, Shinseki). That's not weakness?

Really, this does remind me of 1984: "Ignorance is Strength."

UPDATE An off-by-one error in "1984" fixed, thanks to alert readers.

Your morning craziness - Report from the Bughouse:
John Gorenfeld has it all cued up for you.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Audio of the Washington Times owner at full snarl Listen to this...

"this" can be found right HERE

The hissing, snarling, venom spitting, demon infested ravings of an unglued scary. I'm not exagerrating either. Go hear it for yourself. (what you'll hear jumps right out at ya)

*

Office Space! What a great movie!

Surprise! When Bush distributes homeland security money, it's not on the basis of any actual threat.

New York City is expected to receive $96 million in federal antiterrorism aid this year, roughly half the amount it received in 2003, prompting the city's new emergency management commissioner to add his voice yesterday to those urging Washington to change the way funds are disbursed.

The commissioner, Joseph F. Bruno, who took office last month, said it was illogical to base so much of the states' shares of homeland security funds on population, since doing so does not take into account other factors that make some places, like New York City, more likely to be attacked. Currently, states receive the same base amount plus additional funds depending on population.

Testifying at a joint hearing of the City Council's finance and public safety committees, Mr. Bruno cited a statistic often used by critics of the federal allocation formula showing that Wyoming's share comes to $38 per person while New York City's is $5. New York City officials estimate that the city would receive $400 million a year if the formula considered the many likely targets here.

"We've got to have threat-based funding - we need it," Mr. Bruno said. "It's absurd to do it any other way."

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington said no one was available yesterday to comment on how funds are allocated to states.
(via NY Times)

What possible explanation could there be? Silly Mr. Bruno! New York City is blue!

Why on earth these clowns think they'll be welcome in New York for their convention I cannot imagine. Fingerprint them at the bridges and the tunnels, say I.

ABC has the story, but they don't know they have the story:

"There's definitely a cover-up," the witness, Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. "People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet."

Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to.

"What I was surprised at was the silence," said Provance. "The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."

Provance also described an incident when two drunken interrogators took a female Iraqi prisoner from her cell in the middle of the night and stripped her naked to the waist. The men were later restrained by another MP.

Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison.
(via ABC)

Well, it's nice to hear someone in the midst of the maelstrom confirm what we already know, that a cover-up is going on.

We've been asking (back):

Who ran the system on which the photos were stored, who had privileges on that system, and what was the distribution list for the system?

Now, thanks to ABC, we have a possible name of the system administrator: Sgt. Samuel Provance. So, that answers the first question. So, ABC, why not ask who had privileges on the system, and wwhat was the distribution list? So, even if the chain of command was deliberately obscured, for pplausible deniability, perhaps we can still follow the trail of the photos themselves, since they would go to the people who set up the system.

Say, I wonder if the logs of the Abu Ghraib system have been sequestered? Or has The Fog Machine already erased them? You'd think the defense lawyers for the scapegoats in the Baghdad show trials would want to know that...

Loons.

Hey, and they've re-"designed" their web site. I thought the old design was more authentic. Retro, don't you know.

And speaking of loons, get this from the Village Voice via Atrios:

The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all—at least until the rapture.

I think it's time someone ripped this "Methodist" veil off Inerrant Boy....

Condi's big committee seems to have gone the way of so many other Bush "initiatives": Announced, then dropped... Mission to Mars, Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment, Iraq stabilization....

President Bush and his aides announced with some fanfare in October that they were creating the Iraq Stabilization Group within the National Security Council to increase the White House's role in coordinating Iraq policy. "We're trying to mobilize the entire U.S. government to support this effort" in Iraq, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said at the time.

But seven months later, the four original leaders of the Stabilization Group have taken on new roles, and only one remains concerned primarily with Iraq. A search of the White House Web site indicates the phrase "Iraq Stabilization Group" has not been mentioned publicly since October.
(via WaPo)

Condi does a great Emily Litella imitation, doesn't she?

I wonder why? Perhaps there is a smoking gun:

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

The evidence of apparent scheming — in one recorded conversation, traders brag about taking money from "Grandma Millie" in California — is in a filing by a utility in Snohomish County, Wash. The municipal power unit north of Seattle wants refunds for alleged overcharges made by Enron during the electricity market meltdown.

The utility obtained transcripts of routinely recorded trader discussions from the Justice Department, which seized them in its Enron investigation.
(via AP)

I can see it all now: Taking OBL off the ice and indicting Kenny Boy, packaged as a twin surprise in October...

Looks like photography really was part of the modus operandi, unless it's just the parallelism of great minds. And not just at Abu Ghraib.

Reuters said Tuesday three Iraqis working for the news agency were beaten, taunted and forced to put shoes in their mouths during their detention at a military camp near Fallujah in January.

After being freed from their Jan. 2-5 detention, the men told Reuters about their alleged ordeal but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence of abuse, and news broke about the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Reuters quoted all three men as saying they were beaten and forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. Two told the news agency they also were degraded by being forced to insert fingers into their anuses and then lick them, and to put shoes in their mouths.

"The U.S. investigation in this case remains totally unsatisfactory as far as we're concerned," Susan Allsopp, a Reuters spokeswoman in London, said Tuesday. "We would urge them to reevaluate the investigation in light of recent invents."

The Reuters staff said the abuse happened at Forward Operating Base Volturno, near Fallujah, after they were detained while covering the aftermath of the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter near the Iraqi city. There were held at Volturno, then at Forward Operating Base St. Mere, they said.

The men were Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Fallujah-based freelance television journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani. They were released without being charged.

On Monday, the news agency said, it received a letter dated March 5 from U.S. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, that he was confident the investigation had been "thorough and objective" and its findings were sound.
(via AP)

Smart move, guys. Abusing reporters...

The pattern of the latest wave of revelations is clear: They are coming from significant numbers of senior figures in both the U.S. military and intelligence services. They reflect the disgust and contempt widely felt in both communities at the excesses; and at long last, they are being listened to seriously by senior Republican, as well as Democratic, senators on Capitol Hill.

Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.

Yet Rumsfeld and his lieutenants remain determined to hang on to power, and so far President Bush has shown every sign of wanting to keep them there. The scandal, therefore, is far from over. The revelations will continue. The cost of the abuses to the American people and the U.S. national interest is already incalculable: And there is no end in sight.

Read the rest of it here.

Is W really stupid enough to keep Rummy around?

Jon Stewart returned to his alma mater, WILLIAM & MARY, to give the commencement address. My favorite part:

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.

But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this—and I believe you can—you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you’ve outdid us.

We declared war on terror. We declared war on terror—it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui.

But obviously that’s the world. What about your lives? What piece of wisdom can I impart to you about my journey that will somehow ease your transition from college back to your parents' basement?

To find out what advice Jon has to give, read the whole thing here; the rest is just as rude, smart, and amusing.

As smart, but with a keener, rawer edge, and surely the most amusing reference to the Donner Party in years, DO NOT MISS Tresy's post below on the latest babbling from the pundit Brooks.

Alert reader Beth, in the excellent Comments section which you should also not miss, offers this excellence:

Shorter Brooks
The early settlers were heroes for going out West, ill-equipped and unprepared. Therefore Bush is a hero for sending American servicemen and women into Iraq, ill-equipped and unprepared

A Modest Suggestion:
Dear Mr. Brooks,
For an exciting and rewarding adventure, try jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. It might be scary at first, but never fear. Good old-fashioned American adaptability will save you long before you hit the ground.

Mustang Bobby has more on Brooks' historical analogies at Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Will you contact lambert with an email address that works? (The one in comments doesn't seem to—unless my fingers outran my brain, as indeed often happens.)

I have a question for you. TIA!

In another laugh-out-loud column, David Brooks takes us on a fact-free tour of his papier mache version of American history to demonstrate that the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq is actually going according to, if not a plan, then at least an ultimately happy American pattern:

The guides who aided and fleeced the pioneers who moved West were struck by how clueless many of them were about the wilderness they were entering. Their diaries show that many thought they could establish genteel New England-style villages in short order. They leapt before they looked, faced the shock of reality, adapted and cobbled together something unexpected.

And it is that way today.

Now I really don't know who Brooks imagines the contemporary versions of thse unscrupulous guides are, but I think most people would think of the very Administration that lied, schemed, and bullied us into this disaster, and who now disavow any responsibility for its unfolding consequences. (Does Brooks think before he commits his nitwit ideas to paper?) Some might even think of the story of the Donner Party, whose horrific ordeal began with a decision to trust some of those very hucksters with an untried, and largely invented "shortcut" through the high Sierras. Even before their fateful ascent to the verdant hell that now bears their name, the party had been decimated by Indian attacks and the punishing heat of the Great Basin Desert, but showing Brooks' virtues, they persevered. "They looked, faced the shock of reality, adapted and cobbled together something unexpected." That is to say, they wound up eating each other.

Happily, unlike the other Donner Party, the hucksters behind this one find themselves trapped as well, in a sort of meteorologically inverted version of that party's snowy tomb, but with similar cannibalistic dynamics. Fred Kaplan writes:

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh's story states that Rumsfeld's secret operation stemmed from his "longstanding desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA." Hersh's sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld's secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

It would be nice if, just once, the hucksters upon whom the babbling Brooks unblinkingly gazes paid the price for their chicanery. For thousands of their victims, it is of course too late to matter. Still, some measure of justice for the perpetrators of this outrage would indeed be "the start of a new beginning now," if not the one that a witless shill like Brooks has in mind.

I'm thinking of having cards made up that look something like this:

---

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING

your very special ringtone
your business affairs
your medical history
the most intimate details of your hopes, fears, and dreams
with me
with your neighbors
with the entire:
car
restaurant
theatre
for the last:
few minutes
half hour
hour
several hours

USING YOUR CELL PHONE

---

Then, just check of the appropriate boxes and hand the card to the offender. Simple and clean. As long as I don't get shot.

Readers, any thoughts on additions to the list?

After all, Pennsylvania's a swing state!

But why does the word "Caligula" come into my mind....

Could it get any stranger? Yes. Remember, from Nick Berg's diary, "Aziz will do us well I think"? (back) Our own Daily News gets the story:

Aziz Kadoory Aziz, also known as Aziz al-Taee, hooked up earlier this year with the 26-year-old West Chester man to start a small company called Shirikat Abraj Babil, or Babylon Towers Co., that would install, inspect and repair telecommunications and utility towers.

After living in Philadelphia for two decades, Aziz arrived in Baghdad sometime last year. A friend said he left for Iraq before the government moved on the deportation case.

Here in America, Aziz was the highly visible spokesman for a group he'd founded called the Iraqi American Council and appeared frequently on major media outlets like Fox News Channel calling for the military ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Aziz' outfront role also included speaking at pre-war, pro-troop rallies. It continued even after it was reported the inner-city electronic entrepreneur had pleaded guilty in [selling millions of crack vials in a] case in 1994 and later had legal run-ins involving stolen computers and bootlegged CDs.

Berg's first efforts to win radio-tower repair work were unsuccessful, and he was robbed on the streets of Baghdad.

Aziz said that Berg left his equipment with him during a short trip back to the U.S. When he came back, the two spent an hour climbing tall buildings at Abu Ghraib, site of the infamous prison. Aziz said they re-recorded measurements that were in his stolen notebook.

It's not clear whether Aziz received "media training," but the handsome, nattily dressed ex-pat, now 40, probably didn't need it. He addressed similar rallies in Valley Forge, St. Louis and Washington, where he claimed Hussein's henchmen killed both his cousin and brother-in-law. The rallies were launched by Clear Channel syndicated talk-radio host Glenn Beck, and the media giant sponsored many of them.

"There are no cell phones in Iraq," Aziz told a reporter in May 2003. "That's the way to the future."

Now, Aziz is now getting publicity for monitoring the final cell-phone calls of his slain partner. He said this weekend he understands Berg's phone was used as recently as April 19, and that three calls were made that day to Jordan, to the United Arab Emirates and to a local number.

"He could still have been alive."
(via our own Daily News)

Hmmm... Wonder where the cell phone records are? Wonder who he called?

Gas is $2.00 a gallon.

Another "Mission Accomplished" for the Bush administration!

Sheesh, if they'd just cut that deal with Qaddafi sooner, or gotten that guy in Venezuela, Chavez, overthrown ... Or hadn't turned Iraq into be a geopolitical dry hole....

Good thing the Saudis are rock solid, or we'd really be in trouble!

And hey, look on the bright side! Pretty soon it's going to be profitable to drill in Texas again!

Fred Kaplan writes in Slate:

Read together, the [Hersh and Newsweek] magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.

That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

Much is at stake here—budgets, bailiwicks, careers, reputations, re-elections, to say nothing of national security and the future of Iraq. Get ready for a bumpy ride.

And really, it couldn't be happening to a nicer set of guys! Double butter with mine, please!

As an addendum to Tresy's post below: PoTimken Village Closes Up Shop -- earlier initial context on Timken and his company and relations to the Bush pool can be found previously on this page. See Saturday, May 15 post titled Commander LeGree's Magical Productivity Tour. The comments section to this that (Magical Productivity Tour) post contains a wealth of links to articles, speeches, fund raising efforts, background info on Timken and associates, and their cozy relationship to Bush and the Republican Party down through the years. Including Timken's postion on the board of Diebold Corporation.

One of the corporations in charge of electronic vote counting, Diebold, has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and one of its board members, W.R. Timken, is a Bush "Pioneer." Diebold will be counting votes in the electoral-vote rich state of Ohio next year. According to Democracy Now, Diebold can not only track election returns as they come in, but it can change them without leaving any evidence. LINK

Likewise, Sid the Fish has been all over this story for days. See, for instance: Hey, Ohio: Mission accomplished! and or HERE

WR Timken, no doubt one of those small business mom and pop entrepreneurs the Bushlette is always yammering about, also managed to secure hisself a nomination and appointment to the National Consumer Cooperative Bank and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Hi-ho silver spoons away!

Likewise, in 2001, Stephen A. Perry, former "senior vice president - human resources, purchasing and communications, at The Timken Co.," was booted up the greasy pole to serve as Bush appointed Administrator of the General Services Administration. It's all just one big happy mom and pop family over there at Timmy Timken town.

Timken is also a Bush Pioneer. Which means he gets to wear a funny hat and "discover" new continents and stuff like that. Timken's pirate ship will sail for the East Indies any day now. As for all you sore losers in Canton, Ohio, - hey, why don't you just shut up and get a friggin' job!

*

This story neatly encapsulates everything meretricious about this Administration (not to mention its plutocratic supporters), and it doesn't have anything to do with Iraq. This could do for Junior what a supermarket checkout scanner did for his Dad. If the Kerry campaign can't give the story legs, I'm going to start worrying that his doubters have a point.

Hesiod has more.

Update: Sid's Fishbowl has still more (plus a URL with a Pynchon reference in it, making his post doublegplusgood).

Well, there's hysterical and then there's hysterical, you understand..

"This is the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed," said Lawrence DiRita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in response to Hersh's report.

A senior intelligence official said the article contains "fantasy," adding, "I haven't found any truth in it."

The unit described simply does not exist, the intelligence official said
(via CNN)

Well, of course, they have to say exactly what they are saying. It's a Special Access Program. Looks like they've decided to tough it out—which should last, oh, until next week's New Yorker.

Remember how Perle was going to sue Hersh in the UK courts? How's that coming, anyhow?

UPDATE Tom tells me I got my neocons confused: Perle, not, as I had it, Wolfie.

Bush is sure mentioning his doctrine about as often as going to Mars or the gay marriage amendment.

The second anniversary is approaching of the speech in which President Bush unveiled the doctrine of preemption that he hoped to enshrine as the centerpiece of America's national security strategy. But the celebration is likely to be muted, inside the White House and beyond. Preemption, as applied in Iraq, has become the greatest threat to its author's reelection.

"As a doctrine, it's dead as a doornail," insists Ivo Daalder, a former national security aide under President Clinton and coauthor of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy." Even one GOP strategist familiar with White House national security thinking acknowledges that for any president looking to apply the doctrine again, "the bar is higher, the country would be more reluctant, and the case would be harder to make."

The reason, of course, is Iraq, the doctrine's first test.

But after the intelligence debacle in Iraq, Bush or any successor is certain to face stiffer demands at home and abroad for proof before acting.

The world, and perhaps the American public as well, would probably demand much more proof than Bush mustered in Iraq. That looms as the ironic legacy of Bush's attempt to elevate preemption from a tactic of last resort to a guiding doctrine. By defining preemption so much more aggressively than his predecessors, he may have reduced his successors' ability to employ it.
(via LA Times)

I don't think Bush does irony, though. And what the heck is a doornail, anyhow?

An Improvised Explosive Device exploded by an Iraqi roadside:

"The round was an old binary-type requiring the mixing of two chemical components in separate sections of the cell before the deadly agent is produced," Kimmitt said. "The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece."

I can hear the drums starting to beat on finding WMDs... I wonder how many reports will retain the word "old"?

I have nothing original to contribute to this morning's statutory unfurlings in the Mayflower state. Aside from imagining the continuous stream of dejected rag tag ultra-conservative Bible thumping refugees fleeing that ground and bound for Salt Lake City or Midland Texas or any other number of brutal outbacks, with all of their belongings lashed to the roof of Ford Explorer flipover carriages like so many retreating rebels fleeing over the Potomac at Williamsport, i haven't prepared any additional official imaginings. Perhaps though, it will all remind some of Josiah Gorgas's grim diary entry of July 28, 1863,: "It seems incredible that human power could effect such change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success - today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction."

In which case all i can say is: Yeah well Josiah, ya win some and ya lose some. Git over it.

So heres to all the same sex marriage victors in Mass who will celebrate liberty this morning - May 17, 2004 - and their new won freedom to hitch their wagon to whoever the hell they want to hitch their wagon to. And as a hi-ho thumbs up go-get-em don't tread on me salute i offer an old yarn, written a year ago and tossed into the roaring current of the Eschaton, in honor of the occasion. Just for the celebratory fun of it.

Originally titled "A Spy in the Garden of Sapphos," here goes again. Roll the tape.

Obviously, Bill Clinton's bad example put Mary Cheney on the path to lesbianism.

I was shown the path to lesbianism once.
It seemed a worthy enough path. So I decided to venture down it. And at the end of the path there was an inn tucked into a green woodlot at the base of a hill. A handmade sign that hung at the entrance to the inn read "The Tenth Muse". Ok then, pretty regular looking place, front porch, flower garden, pickup truck in the drive with a "Melissa Etheridge rocks" bumper sticker attached. Whatever. So I went up to the door and rang the bell. A woman opened the door and I said "Is this the path to lesbianism"? She said "no, this is the end of the path to lesbianism, the path to lesbianism is behind you." Then she whacked me in the side of the head with a paperback edition of 'The Journals of Anais Nin'.

"Ow" I said. She said "c'mon in". So I went inside with her. It was a nice enough place filled with light and the sounds of falling water. Then she took me out into a backyard garden where a mountain brook fed into a beautiful pool of lilies ringed with iris and globeflower, aspodels and babys breath. Spotted baby fawns drank from an indigo fountain and a jaguar lay sleeping in the crook of a huge Banyan tree. And right there, in the middle of the pool, was none other than the Clenis. Naked as a wood duck. Frolicking among the sapphic nymphs as Erato plucked notes from a lyre. They were all singing a stanza to a little song, which went like this:

Albert Mooney says he loves her
All the boys are fighting for her
Knock at the door and they ring that bell
"Oh my true love, are you well?"
Out she comes as white as snow
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
Old Jenny Murphy says she will die
If she couldn't get the fellow with the roving eye.

And then they'd laugh and laugh and clap and begin the stanza all over again.

I said to my host, "I had no idea that the path to lesbianism would lead me to the Clenis." She said "Oh yes, sometimes it may. He frequently stops by for a swim with the nymphs and naiads. Then she told me, "Although the Clenis has a penis, he's a friend of Venus! A special genus. We like to kid him and call him the Clenis Dionysus... think about it."

"I am" I informed her.

I then remarked, "You have a nice place nestled here beside this hill. Not without its troubles I'm sure, but cozy enough and well away from the harpies and scirons of reactionary theogony or the reckless plunders of spartan conservatism. But why not build it atop the hill so you could look down upon those encroaching upon your path." At which point my host pointed to a sign swinging from an arbor made of woven willow boughs smothered with morning glory and grapes - the sign read:

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the other."

"Frank Lloyd Wright" my host informed me.

"I like it!" I exclaimed. "It makes good sense!"

"Now, can I have a sponge bath?" I could see her cocking the Anais Nin volume again so I jumped to my own defense, "just kidding, just kidding" I quipped, "you know how it is." And she looked at me in a mischievous way that reminded me of a wood-sprite and said, "I do at that." Then she slapped me smartly on the back of the head with Anais Nin anyway, and said, "watch here."

At which point I heard splashing sounds and giggling coming from the garden pool. I turned quickly, just in time to see the Clenis, bathed in a rainbow, transformed magically into a silenus. The Clenis silenus. At which point the whole noisy pool party went skipping off into the fauna, the Clenis silenus and the nymphs, all of them, laughing and clapping and singing together:

Tell me ma when I go home
The boys won't leave the girls alone
They pulled my hair, they stole my comb
But that's all right till I go home
She is handsome, she is pretty
She is the bell of Dryad city
She is a-courting one, two, three
Pray won't you tell me who is she
Let the wind and rain and the hail blow high
And the snow come tumblin' from the sky
She's as nice as apple pie
She'll get her own lass by and by.....

And then they were completely gone. Swallowed up by the woodland twilight.

I thanked my host for her hospitality and told her I'd be back as soon as I could find a copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" to bludgeon her with. She laughed and said, "good one", and then we shook hands and said goodbye.

I walked back up the winding path from lesbianism and when I got home late that evening I sat down and turned on the TV. There was that obnoxious boob-toob man-shrew Joe Scarborough sneering forth with some self-righteous opinionated bit of excitable concocted quackery or another. Desecrating whatever sliver of journalistic integrity MSNBC might still have left. Which granted, ain't much of a sliver these days. Click.

I wasn't going to let that horseshit shoveler ruin my day. No siree by mother nature. So I poured me a shot of bourbon and took a big drink and slid into my manly action outerwear jacket from the Cabela's sporting goods catalog mail order warehouse and went out hunting. Hunting like a rutting buck......through the bookstore stacks and used book bins for my very own copy of "Spy in the House of Love".

Dateline: Lexington and Concord, May 2004.
amor vincit omnia

*

I feel like howling, even if the moon isn't full.

After reading Sunday in the Park with Seymour (back)...

I always worried what Sistani's price was for letting us invade Najaf to take down the Sadrists. Now I know:

The United States, in a policy reversal, yesterday signalled its readiness to accept an Islamic theocracy in Iraq.

Asked if a theocratic Islamic government would be acceptable, Mr Powell indicated it was ready to entertain this option.

'We will have to accept what the Iraqi people decide upon,' he said in comments to be broadcast in yesterday's 'Meet the Press' programme.
(via Straits Times)

Question: If the administration had known that the result of going to war in Iraq was a second Shi'ite theocracy in the Arab world, would they still have gone to war? Just asking.

Seymour Hersh kicked the Abu Ghraib story into another level today (the ugly story).

The real story is the Special Access Program of targetted assassination
Here's the money paragraph:

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps.
(via The New Yorker)

Note the order:

1. Kill
2. Capture
3. if possible interrogate

Note: AP gets this wrong. They call the SAP a program of "aggressive interrogation." But see above, especially the artful "if possible."

A classic non-denial denial from the Pentagon
Here's Lawrence Di Rita's non-denial denial, straight from the Pentagon. I quote it in full, for the sheer pleasure of wallowing in high-grade flackery:

"Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.
(via DOD)

Heh. The fact that they are "outlandish" and "conspiratorial" makes it par for the course with this administration. One fact (below) is challenged.

"The abuse evidenced in the videos and photos, and any similar abuse that may come to light in any of the ongoing half dozen investigations into this matter, has no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order in the Department of Defense.

Right. It's a Special Access Program! It's secret, so they have to lie about it!

"No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos.

Whooo! Parse that one.... I can't, my head is starting to hurt.

"To correct one of the many errors in fact, Undersecretary Cambone has no responsibility, nor has he had any responsibility in the past, for detainee or interrogation programs in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

Re Cambone: Hersh writes that Cambone was in charge of the SAP, which is the real story. This statement says "detainee or interrogation programs," so is a non-denial with respect to the SAP. Anyhow, Hersh has got two sources on Cambone, so I take that over the flak.

"This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

True, the sources are mostly CIA, DOD consultants, and JAGs. Does that make the story untrue?

Can we fight and win a war on terror?
So, the story is true.

The SAP is a program of targetted assassination of AQ suspects.

The story begins at Abu Ghraib, but becomes the story of how Pentagon neo-cons, in the fathomless incompetence that has become the hallmark of Inerrant Boy's malAdministration, brought the spark of the SAP's black world interrogation techniques and operatives together with the human fuel at Abu Ghraib: the human fuel of prisoners, demoralized GIs, their families, and the people in the legal chain of command. The explosion of torture begat an equal and opposite reaction: An explosion of truth-telling in the "white" world by the GI families to Congress (though ignored until they went to CBS), and ultimately by the legal chain of command in the persons of whistleblower Joseph Darby and General Taguba. Now the explosion is reverberating outward through the efforts of what we have left of a free press, doing its best in what we have left of a free society.

In danger, opportunity. Now that we know the way the Bush administration has really been fighting the war on terror, there is at last a way for liberals and democrats to begin to pose alternatives to it.

To begin with, the Bush administration has been making the same mistake all along: They retain the mental habits of the cold war, when our enemies were states. When fighting states, we could always, through our nuclear arsenal, say in effect to the leaders of enemy governments, "We can kill you. Personally." There are a host of works from the 60s, from Seven Days in May to Doctor Strangelove, that make this point. The desire of the Pentagon for a "bunker busting" bomb shows that this mindset persists today.

So, Bush thinks he can decapitate AQ, as if AQ were a state or a corporation, and sets up an SAP to do just that. But AQ and its mutatations after 9/11 aren't like states: They are a lot like the leaderless resistance championed by winger ideologues. AQ and its ilk are project-based and corpuscular: They fragment and mutate. We can't kill 'em all.

Even if we can't kill 'em all, was it right to try? Maybe. I don't like the prospect of a dirty bomb in Philadelphia's port any more than the next guy, and if there's a 200-person SAP, a "heart of darkness" as Hersh puts it, that prevents that, well ... Tell me the other choice that's better?

But the abstract question isn't really the right one. The real question is, Was the Bush Administration right to try? Here, the answer is almost certainly No, because they've already given ample proof they're incompetent at best, starting with the WMD fiasco, and continuing on with the botched post-war planning. And now they've proved it all over again: Assume that the SAP was justified; assume that it was keeping America (more) safe. In that case, the Bush administration has managed to blow the cover, not just of a single intelligence operative (Valerie Plame) but a large, critically important, and ongoing, intelligence operation. That's what the decision to combine the SAP with military intelligence at Abu Ghraib did.

So, still assuming the SAP program of targetted assassination was and is justified, how do things net out? With the photos, we've covered the walls of the Arab world with recruiting posters for AQ or worse. And if in fact the SAP did work, Bush blew its cover. I think it's a net loss. No wonder they don't know what to say.

It may be too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It may be too late to restore America's soft power—the reality of the freedom Bush keeps talking about—but let's hope not. Surely we still do have a reservoir of good will from those who seek to immigrate here, or having immigrated, send money home, among those with whom we have shared schooling, vacations, human contacts. Surely just as there are People of the Book there are also People of the Law, who would wish to see us restored by the better angels of our nature.

I still think the so-called war on terror is a law enforcement problem and should be treated that way: Wars against states can be won (or lost). Wars against social conditions, like poverty or drugs, are never won. The so-called war on terror falls into this category.

The Bush administration, in its crude and principle-free way, seems to understand this idea. Stupidly killing Saddam's sons, they were smart enough to hold Saddam for trial (though not smart enough to make the lawful conditions for that trial an end in itself). And even a show trial of the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib trial shows they understand the value of the appearance of the rule of law. (Like so many of the Republican talking points during the coup against Clinton, the "rule of law" was stood on its head as soon as Bush seized power.) So why not turn the appearance into reality?

Seems to me we could turn the war on terror into a law enforcement problem in the following way:

1. The American voters must repudiate Bush. There's no other way, since he's a proven liar, and no program he proposes will have credibility.

2. Publish whatever documents and directives there are that show Bush's plans for the war. The directive establishing the SAP would be a good start. Do the same for Bush's directives on treatment and handling of prisoners. Repudiate as much as necessary.

3. Restore the Geneva Convention.

4. Join the International Criminal Court.

5. Turn the SAP into a police-like force. We should be able to change the rules to put interrogation and capture first, instead of last, on the list. Then internationalize it, maybe through NATO.

6. When the SAP has some prisoners, try them. Now, we've got the rule of law back in place, and the court (the ICC) to do the trials.

7. Make sure the trials become a media event—the ultimate "reality show" that in fact it is. We're good at this, it's our ultimate soft power, and this is where the Hague has failed. If the court is sufficiently well run, it won't become a platform for fundamentalists we're fighting. Further, if the message of the the fundamentalists is as stunted and trivial as we think it is, we have nothing to fear. Finally, it will expose the workings of a system of justice and the rule of law to a worldwide audience. Heck, if people watch soccer, they'll certainly watch this.

8. Get serious about loose nukes. If we need war dogs and a heart of darkness for that, the world will understand.

If anyone thinks this is Utopian or idealistic—please, tell me how it is more crazy than what Bush is doing now?

NOTE Alert reader riggsveda recommends the following study by Dr. Jeffrey Record: "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism." Here's the abstract:

The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration's postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war's political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power.

These are sober, Army war college types.

I sure wish Blogger, or Mozilla, or Haloscan, or whoever, would fix whatever is causing this blog, written and stored on billion dollar corporation Google's system, to stop spewing tons of garbage instead of HTML pages into the browsers and, worse, the caches, of Mozilla users.

Sheesh. Please don't tell me to use IE5, I'm on linux.

NOTE Alert reader fightingdem reminds me to fix the long URLs that are pushing the sidebar too far right.

The Man needs a new turtleneck.

One of the unanswered questions about Nick Berg's death is the site where the video originally surfaced.

Alert reader john says the site is this:
www.al-ansar.biz

Nada. Interesting.

Even Google cache, here:
Cache Link

shows nothing but an empy frameset.

Then again, here's the cache form the main page:
Cache Main Page

And the left column:
Cache Left Column

Readers? Can anyone shed any light here? To start with, is the URI the right one?

Here is the standard operating procedure at Gitmo:

Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.

[UK citizen Tarek Dergoul, a] 26-year-old, from Mile End in east London, spent 22 months at Guantanamo Bay from May 2002. Today he tells The Observer of repeated assaults by Camp Delta's punishment squad, known as the Extreme Reaction Force or ERF.

'They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.'

Dergoul who now reveals that every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened.

Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, confirmed this last night, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could be 'reviewed' by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive there, he said. He refused to say how many times the ERF squads had been used and would not discuss their training or rules of engagement, saying: 'We do not discuss operational aspects of the Joint Task Force mission.'
(via The Observer)

Well, so much for the bad apples theory! The torture, and the filming, was indeed systemic.

So, Miller organized Gitmo, then Miller organized Abu Ghraib. Clearly the filming technique was part of the interrogation technique he brought with him—and the videos may indeed just have been for CYA. However, someone in Iraq thought of using the videotapes for blackmail.... I wonder who?

And, as we keep asking? What was the distribution list for the photos and tapes?

After all, we know that Bush keeps a list of targets in his desk drawer, and likes the cross off the ones that "are no longer a problem" (back). Hmmm... Wonder where those photos came from? Wonder if, well, any new photos are ever compared to the old ones?

One of the few pleasant features of the exploding story of the decisions and policies that led to the Abu Ghraib clusterfuck is the way we keep meeting old friends.

Old friends like Alberto Gonzales, counsel to Inerrant Boy in Texas and now in the WhiteWash House. Newsweek reports:

By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

Well, what is one example of wishful thinking among so many?

Of course, anyone who thinks that Gonzales's "counsel" is anything other than sycophantic bloviation in service to yet another one of Bush's death dealing fiascos should examine the Texas Clemency Memoes once again:

During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas—a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by [Albert] Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court. He is now the White House counsel.

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die.

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

The scum also rises...

And let's hope Seymour Hersh (the ugly story, back) doesn't go up in any small planes, have a heart condition that suddenly worsens, or agree to meet a source in a parking garage after a phone call from a mysterious stranger. Or open an envelope with white powder in it, from one of those guys we just don't seem able to catch...

I mean, Hersh just ripped the lid of the story beneath the story:

Not just the torture at Abu Ghraib, but the existence of a Special Access Program (SAP) at the Pentagon whose ground rules were Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”.

Sure, mixing the "unconventional," covert SAP with regular army in interrogations at Abu Ghraib, as Carbone>Rumsfeld>Bush did, was a blunder fit to be measured on the Richter scale.

But what about the SAP itself? Sounds like a targetted assassination program, to me. Readers, any thoughts on this?
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA3OO8JBUD.html
UPDATE AP gets it wrong:

The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted on Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment.

The roots of the scandal lay in a decision approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.

The real story is not the Bush trashing the Geneva convention—though that's a good story—but Hersh's story (back) on the Special Access Program, which is starting to look like a program of targetted assassination of AQ suspects. Compared to that story, the legality story pales.

A compendium from Buzzflash.

Plenty of them. Why the Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits in the video, for example? Are they that common in Iraq?

And if we combine what we read today about Abu Ghraib below—that it was a nexus of CIA, military intelligence, and a highly secret Pentatgon Special Access Program, code named "Copper Green," that was directing a program of torture—with what we know, that Nick Berg was climbing an nearby antenna (back) ....

Well, it gets weird, doesn't it? And then there's the timing of it all, as well as the obvious use the administration's Department of Changing the Subject makes of the story.

Certainly Abu Ghraib was a very wrong place. Could Berg have been there at a very wrong time? Unanswered questions....

UPDATE Alert reader scaramouche points us to this excellent post by soj at Kos. Among other incongruities, he points out that although the story broke simultaneously in many media outlets, they all refer to an Islamic website—which cannot be found. There's also the odd fact that Nick Berg's father appears on an Enemies List posted by freepers. Weirdness piled on wierdness.

UPDATE Alert reader Grrrpy points to this RNC/CPA transcript on the orange jumpsuit:

Q Bill Glauber with the Chicago Tribune. It appeared in the video that Mr. Berg was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Are such orange prison jumpsuits used in any detention facilities in Iraq that you know of? And also, he was, I believe, released a day after a court case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Can you explain why that was?

MR. SENOR: He was released by the Iraqi police service?

Q Yeah.

MR. SENOR: I would refer you to the Iraqi police service on the exact day -- or the reason behind the exact day he was released. I am aware of the court case that was filed. It is public knowledge. But all I know about it is that it was filed. As for the exact moment or day, time that he was released, that's something for the Iraqi police to address.

What was your -- ?

Q He was pictured in an orange -- what appeared to be an orange prison jumpsuit.

MR. SENOR: Oh, the orange -- yeah. You know --

Q Are any such jumpsuits used in Iraq in any detention facilities, coalition and/or Iraqi?

MR. SENOR: I'll let General Kimmitt speak to security detainees. As far as criminal detainees that are under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi police service or the Iraqi Ministry of Interior or the Iraqi Ministry of Justice, I don't know of any policy that they have. I would -- you should ask them, you should contact them about uniforms that they require inmates to make. To my knowledge, there's no such case in which that is done. But I will check on that and check with the various ministries.

I don't see an answer to the question, here.

On page A1, the positively whorish headline "Accused G.I.s try to shift blame in prison abuse" takes pride of place at right above the fold. Sheesh. Is Kate Zernike Judith "Kneepads" Miller writing under a pseudonym, or what? (For Kate Zernicke see the A1 Project, but see also following posts)

So much for page A1.

Now let's look for some mention of Seymour Hersh's explosive revelation that "the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners" (more below).

Is the story on A2? No. A3? No. A4? No. A5? No. A6? No. A7? No. A8? No. A9? No. A10? No. A11? No. A12? No. A13? No. A14? No. A15? No. Aaah!

Page A16. Buried. Really pitiful.

You can share your considered thoughts with sadly overworked yet increasingly co-opted Public Editor Daniel "Bud Man" Okrent here: mailto:public@nytimes.com. Maybe he can tell you why we have to get news coverage from a New York weekly.

Hey, and Hersh finally writes a lead! Here it is:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

The Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
(via The New Yorker)

Not that the CIA wouldn't have done all this themselves, of course. But, as any parent knows, "Everyone's doing it" is no excuse.

So, I guess I'll just start at the top of the story, and excerpt and comment as I go. Note that it looks like No More Mr. Nice Blog put a broad outline of the story together, from open sources, two weeks ago.

The origins of the program:

[A]lmost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. ... In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. ...

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...

The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said

Approval would not have been difficult to secure from Bush. Remember "they are no longer a problem for the United States," from Bush's first post-9/11 SOTU. I—and if I'm not alone in the blogosphere on this, I'd be very glad to hear this—saw this statement as the sign of an Operation Phoenix-style (or, if you prefer, an Israeli style) program of extra-judicial assassination of suspected AQ members. Looks like I was right, and the SAP is that program (see back here, 11/30/2003 ([1]. This SAP sounds like the program that enabled Bush to childishly cross out photographs (hmmm...) of "high value targets" that he keeps in his desk drawer as they were killed (see back here).

Here's the nature of the SAP and who knew about it:

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone...

Ah. Cambone. The Bad Cop the Pentagon wanted at Good Cop Taguba's side when testifying. Ah. Cambone. The guy in charge of the WMD search. The boss of that Jeebofascist nutter Boykin
Right.

So far so good! But enter the Iraqi insurgency:

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. ...By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The SAP was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.

In fact, in mid-2003 the military (honest, at least to a degree, internally) knew that even if they had won the battle for Baghdad, they could be losing the war:

[One internal report prepared for the U.S. military] concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

So, as the danger of losing the war becomes real, the SAP's mission is changed:

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures.

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba.

Or, as we would say in Texan, "git tough." But Rummy and Cambone went beyond Miller's recommendation:

[T]hey expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

[T]he former intelligence official told me: “Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Once again, Rummy's ideologically driven poor planning is (almost literally) the Achilles heel. Without enough manpower, Cambone brings people from the "white" world into the heart of darkness:

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would [Cambone] bring the SAP’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

Which explains something the poor old Times (for example) just can't understand: the chain of command is murky because that's the nature of a covert operation: another word for a murky chain of command is "plausible deniability" (meaning the kind of story the Times falls for).

Enter The Fog Machine (back):

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts."

Nacht und nebel....

The CIA was apparently smart enough to bail from the Abu Ghraib operation at this point, seeing Carbone's actions as a recipe for blowing the cover of the SAP in its original form:

“This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

I've been reading, lately, about the rise of Hitler, and it seems clear that in the United States—so far—our democratic traditions have been an order of magnitude stronger than those German liberals and democrats had to draw on during the demise of the Weimar Republic. The above is one example; there are more in this story.

And now, how the "bad apples" went bad:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

.
Making the question I keep asking—Who ran the system on which the photos were stored, who had privileges on that system, and what was the distribution list for the system?—still pertinent. Is there a reason to think it all stops with Cambone?

Finally, the clash between the military and the heart of darkness happens. A soldier with a some sense of respect for our democracy blows the whistle, and the Pentagon at once goes to work pushing the "Bad Apple" theory. It's a bad choice, except for all the others:

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

Remember when "the adults were in charge"? To me, it looks like Joseph Darby is one of the few adults in this story. Certainly the "six morons who lost the war" aren't ...

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the [SAP]? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.”

Once again, the Bush administration reacts to unpleasant reality with denial.

The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

Denial, and throwing the little guys to the wolves.

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality. The SAP is still active, and the United States is picking up guys for interrogation.

That is, Abu Ghraib undermines the Operation Phoenix-, Israeli-style, targetted assassination program: the SAP that is the part of the "legitimate" war on terror.

"The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover? Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

Depends on what you mean by maligant, I supppose.

So let's look at the bottom line so far. Bush, through his deputy, Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld, through his deputy, Carbone, have:

1. With the torture photos, managed to splash every wall in the Arab world with recruiting posters for AQ.

2. Managed to blow a (reportedly) successful and highly covert program against the AQ leadership. (We can talk about what "success" might mean in another post).

Makes the Plame affair look like a tiny slip, eh? Tell me again why the Republicans are supposed to be so good on national security?

Readers, now that you've come to the bottom of this long post, what's your take on the bottom line?

NOTE:

[1] After noticing that an Iraqi general had "fainted" in US custody, this on 11/30: "Torture, assassination, arbitrary detainment ... Hope none of the karma on this catches up with us!" Heh. THE LIBERALS WERE RIGHT AGAIN, YOU WINGERS, JUST LIKE WE WERE RIGHT ON THE WAR. The comments section is available for the requisite apologies to be entered.

I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.

Indeed.

(via Independent Weekly)

Well, OK. Not the paper. It's an OpEd by the owner of the paper. Still:

Only a carefully planned withdrawal can clean up the biggest military mess miscreated in the Oval Office and miscarried by the Pentagon in my 80-year lifetime. In Journalese, the traditional five Ws of Who, What, When, Where, Why:

Who? George W. Bush.

What? His cowboy culture.

When? After 9/11. Bush bravely took on a necessary fight against terrorists who attacked us. But then he diverted his attention to an unrelated and unnecessary "pre-emptive" war.

Where? Iraq. He led us astray by falsely claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us. After the "Mission Accomplished" boast in May 2003, he put our troops in new jeopardy by taunting terrorists from other countries with his "Bring 'em on!" challenge last July 2. His anything-goes-against-the-bad-guys attitude and his total lack of postwar planning helped prompt the ongoing prison-abuse embarrassments and brutal retaliations.

Why? Because he believes he can be re-elected as a tough-talking, self-proclaimed "War President."
(via Atrios in USA Today)

Mainstream in the blogosphere for over two years finally makes it, well, the mainstream.

Of course, Inerrant Boy will never resign. And after raising $200 million dollars? Forget about it.

In any case, it's essential not merely to get rid of Bush—by allowing him to step aside in a statesman-like way—but to thoroughly repudiate him. That's the only way we can restore our standing in the world, and, more importantly, our own national self-respect (for those not in the deep, deep denial promoted by winger groupthink).

Worse, if Bush did resign, his successor might win. That would mean that Bush's more disgraceful and destructive policies could take root.

So, I'm glad Al Neuharth put the boot in, but I think Bush is better for us. Readers?

WaPo has a really excellent graphic called "Spheres of Influence" that diagrams, basically, the web of connections between the consortium of fixers and wealthy wingers that own Bush. Who paid what, who got what in return.

Go play!

Watching Lou Dobbs tonight (Friday night that is), Dobbs reminds us:

DOBBS: Massive job cuts today in the battleground state of Ohio. These job cuts come from a company whose performance was lauded and praised one year ago by President Bush standing right at their plant. The president visited the Timken company in Canton, Ohio last April as part of his "Big Jobs and Growth" tour. [President Bush pointed to Timken's remarkable productivity. Productivity at Timken had risen 10 percent from the previous year. Today, Timken announced plans to close three plants in Canton, Ohio, cutting 1,300 jobs despite the productivity, of their labor force. As many as 20 percent of those jobs could go overseas.

Clarification note: The "presidents" tour wasn't really called the "Big Jobs and Growth" tour. Its was called the "Jobs and Growth" tour. The word "big" belonged to Dobbs. He was being sarcastic. Whoever the dolt is at CNN who transcribed this stuff, or where-ever they transcribe this stuff, they apparently don't have a very keen ear for the language. But of course i shouldn't be surprised should I? Considering the nature of the mainstream television media today. Anyway, rolling along....

Since the president's visit last April, Timken has laid off more than a quarter of its [O]hio workforce. President Bush, by the way, said high productivity, quote, raises the standard of living for the American people. 1,300 people at those plants in Ohio tonight probably disagree with the president's assessment now.

See: LOU DOBBS TONIGHT: Interview With Governor Ed Rendell; President Bush's Poll Numbers Plunge, Aired May 14, 2004.

The Canton visit, and speech at Timken, took place on April 24th, 2003. See: President Discusses Plan for Economic Growth in Ohio Remarks by the President to Timken Company Employees Canton, Ohio.

9:56 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all, very much. (Applause.) Thanks a lot. (Applause.) Thanks for the warm welcome. I appreciate you letting me come by to say hello. (Laughter.) I'm honored to be in Canton, and I'm honored to be here at the Timken Company.

Tim was telling me that you all have been in business since 1899 -- turns out that's when William McKinley, of Canton, slept in the same room I'm sleeping in. (Laughter.) Tim told me that this is a company -- we are a "roll up your sleeves" company, a can -- it is a can-do environment. Which is one of the reasons I've got so much optimism about the future of our economy -- because of the "roll up your sleeves" attitude by thousands of our fellow Americans, because of the business sense of "we can do whatever it takes to overcome the obstacles in our way". I know you're optimistic about the future of this company. I'm optimistic about the future of our country. It's important that Washington, however, respond to some of the problems we face.

One of the problems we face is not enough of our fellow Americans can find work. There's too much economic uncertainty today. And so three months ago, I sent Congress a package that would promote job growth and economic vitality. For the sake of our country, for the sake of the workers of America, Congress needs to pass this jobs growth package soon. (Applause.)

And that's why I thank you for letting me come and talk to you about some of the problems that we face here in America. I appreciate the Timken family for their leadership, their concern about their fellow associates. They're working hard to make sure the future of this company is bright, and therefore, the future of employment is bright for the families that work here, that work to put food on the table for their children.

I appreciate so very much Jim Griffith, the CEO of the company, for setting up this wonderful setting for a speech. I want thank you all for taking time out of your work to come and let me share some thoughts with you. I want to thank you for loving your country.

Yeah, sure, and i'll bet good buddy Timmy "can do" Timken is a wonderful "roll up your sleeve" fund raiser too. And maybe those 1,300 former "fellow associates" will find work at the new Hoover blanket factory just south of Uniontown.

Ay yi yi.

UPDATE: Sid the Fish (see comments) writes:

I did a little digging through the archives. The Timkens and their cronies have coughed up more than a million bucks for the Republicans. As far as I'm concerned, that money came straight out of the pockets of the 1300 people who are now unemployed.

Sure nuff, Sid goes trolling for Timkens and you can see everything that he reeled in over at Sid's Fishbowl. Thanks Sid.

Jimmy Mac over at Angry Finger stood the hairs on the back of my neck on end. Really. I'm not kidding. Check it out

While you're at it you can scroll down one post and sign a petition..."to Withdraw US Troops from Iraq."

Ok, thats it - you know what to do.

It's early, but it's been a hard week and I'm stunned with exhaustion.

Talk amongst yourselves. What will the weekend bring?

OK, they're His counter-terrorism chiefs.

But still, what's wrong with you liberals? Can't you give Him credit?

Oh the humanity!

From alert reader raison de fem:

There's a fine example of the total war rhetoric right up the road from where I work. Big sign in front of what claims to be a Baptist Church with yellow ribbons all over it. Text says, "Support our Troops and Christ or Support Islam. You cannot Support Both."

Although George Boole would take pride in the slogan—

Not in my name and not with my tax dollars!

FTF...

Hope Sistani blessed this effort, eh?

Backed by helicopters, American tanks charged into the centre of this holy city today and shelled positions held by fighters loyal to a radical cleric, who condemned the United States and Britain in a sermon. The Shrine of Imam Ali, one of the most sacred sites for Shiite Muslims, was slightly damaged in the fighting.

Four Iraqis died and 22 were wounded, said Hussein Hadi Karim, administrator at Najaf General Hospital, adding most were civilians. Fearing arrest by American troops, members of the militia loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr often avoid taking their casualties to hospitals.

Meanwhile, explosions and heavy machine-gun fire rocked Najaf neighbourhoods for hours today, and bands of militiamen with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar tubes roamed the city of dun-coloured buildings. Smoke billowed from blasted buildings.

Four holes, each about 30 centimetres long and 20 centimetres wide were visible on the golden dome of the Imam Ali mosque. They appeared to have been caused by machine-gun fire, but it was unclear which side did it.

During their crackdown on al-Sadr’s militia, U.S. forces have been careful to avoid damaging shrines in Najaf and elsewhere for fear of enraging Iraq’s Shiite majority.

But Al-Sadr’s spokesperson, Qays al-Khazali, told The Associated Press that the Americans were responsible.

Reports of damage to the shrine were widely reported on Arab TV.
(via Toronto Star)

Nice one, guys. Really, Bush seems kinda schizzy. At home, they do everything they can to manipulate the media ("work the refs," as Alterman says). Abroad, they don't seem to care. And it isn't that they don't work the refs abroad, it's they go out of their way to foul, and then thumb their noses. Seems very short-sighted. Do they care about the base, and only the base? Does Bush truly believe the Rapture is coming, so long-term considerations are not relevant? WTF?

Looks like the Iraqis police held him because the FBI asked him to:

Nicholas Berg, the West Chester businessman decapitated in Iraq last weekend, was questioned repeatedly in Iraq by FBI agents who thought he might have ties to Zacarias Moussaoui, the confessed al-Qaeda member and accused Sept. 11 conspirator, government officials said yesterday.

Not, apparently, in Iraq.

When FBI agents questioned Berg on March 26, while he was detained at an Iraqi police station in Mosul, he was not suspected of being linked with Moussaoui, a senior Justice Department official said.

But during the questioning, Berg volunteered that he had been questioned by the FBI once before in connection with the Moussaoui investigation, after his computer password turned up in Moussaoui's belongings, the official said.

That piqued the FBI agents' interest, and they asked that he be held while they investigated further.

Never volunteer information, eh?

The original Moussaoui link was determined in 2002 to be "a total coincidence," the official said, and FBI agents in Iraq determined that Berg should be released, indicating they also found nothing suspicious.

But the investigation delayed Berg's release long enough that he missed a flight back to the United States on March 30. By the time he returned to Baghdad on April 6, Iraq was in the grip of a bloody insurgency, with U.S. troops fighting throughout the country and foreigners being taken hostage.

Berg's father said in an interview with reporters yesterday that his son had once been questioned by the FBI because of the computer password.

Michael Berg said that when his son was a student at the University of Oklahoma, he took a course on a remote campus and had to take a bus with fellow students to get there.

"Someone asked, basically, to use his computer. And it turned out that this guy was a terrorist, and that he used my son's e-mail, amongst many other people's e-mails."

Berg said the other student "was not a friend of my son's. He was not even an acquaintance, but just a guy sitting next to him on the bus."

The FBI investigated a little over a year ago, Berg said. "Of course, my son cooperated... . This was never an issue. No one knew they were terrorists at the time. They were just students that were also taking the bus."
(via our own Inky)

So. Lack of planning led to the Iraqi looting, including the looted towers. That brought Nick Berg to Iraq. Then, the FBI holds him because he volunteered information. So Nick Berg missed his flight. And so he died.

So I'd like to know more:

1. What's the FBI doing in Iraq, anyhow?

2. How did the FBI get the email and link it to Nick Berg?

3. Can an expert in investigative procedure tell me if it's usual to hold people who volunteer information like Nick Berg did?

4. And I still wonder whether the FBI/CPA/Military intelligence or whatever had Berg followed after they released him. If they were still suspicious, that would the thing to do, eh?

5. Kudos to Dan Senor for parsing! "US forces" didn't have him! The Iraqi Police and the FBI did. Honestly, these guys need a corkscrew when they put on their pants in the morning!

When I read Nick Berg's diary this morning (back), I found it really touching. I didn't know there was such a thing as a tower nerd, but Nick Berg was one. Express condolences here.

So I thought I'd quote some passages from his diary—when I came to a sentence I'd missed this morning that brought me up short. Read on:

Saturday I got onto a really over-engineered 328 meter tower just on the edge of Mosul, currently supporting Channel 7, a 20 kW VHF television station around here. The tower was fabricated in Iraq and has more steel per vertical foot than any tower I've ever been on, the 2000' kings down in Texas included. ...

Sunday we went out to a site called Al Khayzer, which used to house an AM broadcast site on 607 kHz or so. What's left is the 150 meter tower, guyed, with 1" guy wires, sitting on the biggest base insulator I've ever seen - probably 4 feet high and three feet in diameter.
(via our own Inky)

See what I mean?

The whole tower was looted, including some of the diagonals on the first 50' and the lighting system.

Looted, thanks to the lack of planning by the cakewalkers and POTL in the Bush administration.

These have been replaced, but it was kind of un-nerving to inspect this thing with so many incongruities. Monster guy wires, with monster Johnny-ball insulators, but little 1/2" stainless hardware at the guy takeoff points. And there were fox-holes dug all around the tower, which was right on the edge of Kurdish-controlled territory. Still, it was beautiful, a really superb piece of engineering nestled on a beautiful riverside. It was much more peaceful there and I would have taken a good long hike in the hills ....

Here it comes...

... if I had not hopped a ride with the ultra gung ho contract security guys.

Well.

I wonder who these surprisingly generous contract security guys were, and what, exactly, was so "ultra" about them?

On that thought—pleasant dreams.

P.S. The Hindu Nationalists lost in India. Sometimes, the bad guys lose! FTF!

Can't these guys ever get their stories straight? Newsday has emails from the State Department's Beth A. Payne to the Bergs:

I have been able to confirm that your son is being detained by the U.S. military. I am attempting to identify a person with the U.S. military or FBI here in Iraq who you can contact directly with your questions.
(via Newsday)

So RNC/CPA flak Dan Senor was lying (surprise!) when he said that US forces didn't have Nick Berg in custody.

And can someone tell me what the FBI is doing over in Iraq? Don't we have enough spooks over there with the CIA, military intelligence, the contractors, and whatever the CPA has going, not to mention the Iraqis? Sheesh...

And as alert reader Bryan notes, isn't it funny that, if whoever had Berg thought he was a spy, that they would just release him? Wouldn't it make more sense to release Berg, then follow him to see who he contacted? If so, where did Nick Berg go, and who did he contact?

For those who came in late, earlier today, we wrote (details back):

Nick Berg's parents filed suit in the Eastern District court in Philadelphia to get him out of an Iraqi jail (Berg et al v. Rumsfeld, back). And after they filed the suit, the very next day Nick Berg was released from jail. Coincidence?

I got the docket number and other search information for the case, and alert readers Xan, Enrico, and upyernoze couldn't find the case on the electronic court filing system for United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania—although the filing declaring the case moot (presumably because Berg had already been released) was there. Question:

Can an alert reader with authority on the Federal District Court system clarify whether the missing copy of the lawsuit is a cause for concern?

Quite possibly. And there may be cause for concern.

Alert reader Jennifer has a friend who is a lawyer, and she sent me the following article, which I excerpt here. (The article is behind the green door, so thank heavens the fair use doctrine still holds). The article describes the use of an illegal secret docket system used by the federal courts in Miami, mostly for drug cases, but now also for the "war on terror." If such a system is also at work in Philadelphia, it would explain why we have a docket number for Berg et al v. Rumsfeld, but no court filing to go with the number.

Miami Daily Business Review, Vol. 77, No. 232 May 9, 2003

COURT SECRETS: U.S. DISTRICT COURT IN SOUTH FLORIDA HIDES CIVIL, CRIMINAL CASES FROM PUBLIC

[Being kept secret] by Court Clerk Clarence Maddox's office is a civil case brought against a prison warden by a young Algerian man living in Deerfield Beach, Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, who was once mistakenly suspected of involvement with terrorists. Neither the courts nor the U.S. attorney's office, however, acknowledges that dockets are being secretly maintained.

A 10-year-old decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta -- U.S. v. Valenti -- forbids the use of so-called dual dockets in which some matters are held back from the public. "The government has convinced judges in this court to use the same type of dual docketing system' prohibited by Valenti," said [Miami super-lawyer and Rush Limbaugh defender Roy] Black in a recent court filing.

The law
Under federal law, even matters that are properly sealed by a district court judge aren't supposed to be hidden completely from view. Says Local Rule 5.4: "Unless otherwise provided by law, court rule or court order, proceedings in the U.S. District Court are public and court filings are matters of public record." There's even a form for judges to close individual filings from public view, "Order Re: Sealed Filing." But there are no provisions for sealing the entire docket of a case, or sealing individual docket entries themselves.

Several defense attorneys interviewed for this article said there is no law or rule issued before or after the attacks of Sept. 11 that could justify the sealing of dockets in cases involving terrorism, immigration or anything else in the district court or in higher courts. That includes the Classified Information Procedures Act,

Invisible
There are at least two completely invisible cases on the secret docket of the Southern District of Florida. One is the criminal case in federal district court in Miami against Colombian businessman and imprisoned drug dealer Nicholas Bergonzoli. A federal grand jury in Bridgeport, Conn., indicted Bergonzoli on a conspiracy to import cocaine charge in October 1995. That court's docket shows the case was transferred in March 1999 to Miami, where it was given a case number, 99cr196, and assigned to then-Chief Judge Edward B. Davis, who has since retired. Once the case landed in Miami, though, it seemed to vanish. Court dockets accessible to the public don't include Bergonzoli's name.

And a computerized search for Docket No. 99cr196 on the PACER electronic docket system yields the reply "no matches found." But the Review has learned that Bergonzoli, now 39, was convicted

This is just like to our experience with Berg et al v. Rumsfeld. The docket number exists ("2:04cv1497"); but there's no court filing to go with it.

Traces of case removed
A second case kept completely out of the South Florida sunshine is an apparent habeas corpus petition stemming from an immigration detention case brought by the Algerian, Mohamed Bellahouel.

Again, like Berg et al v. Rumsfeld.

[Bellahouel] was detained for five months on skimpy evidence of ties to the Sept. 11 terrorists. As first reported in the Daily Business Review in March, Bellahouel was a waiter at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Delray Beach, where he apparently served food to some of the Sept. 11 hijackers who dined at the restaurant. A Delray Beach movie theater employee told the FBI she thought she saw Bellahouel go into the theater with one of the hijackers. As a result, in October 2001, he was detained at the Krome Processing Facility in southwest Miami-Dade Bellahouel, who lives in Deerfield Beach, later was hauled before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va. -- apparently the same grand jury that investigated the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacharias Massaoui. Bellahouel has since been released on a $10,000 bond. But his case has rolled along in secret. Sealed proceedings of an unknown nature took place March 5 before a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in Miami. Bellahouel's case surfaced briefly because of a court clerk's mistake. Later, the Review found, a court calendar and the 11th Circuit's computerized docketing system in Atlanta were altered to remove any trace of Bellahouel's case from the public record. Information on why the appellate court heard the case and whether it has ruled is not publicly available. Federal Public Defender Williams and her chief of appeals, Paul Rashkind, were present at the sealed appellate hearing in March and represented Bellahouel. They don't acknowledge representing Bellahouel and won't discuss the case at all. The Review has asked each of the 11th Circuit judges in the case -- Stanley F. Birch Jr., Ed Carnes and visiting Judge Procter Hug Jr. of the 9th Circuit -- to unseal Bellahouel's case and any opinion. There has been no response.

How secret system works
Further evidence of a secret docket and the human dynamics behind it comes from a once-sealed transcript, recently uncovered by Black, [in which] then-prosecutor Theresa M.B. Van Vliet asked Chief U.S. Magistrate Ann Vitunac in West Palm Beach to seal proceedings as well as any evidence the hearing ever happened. ... "We will hold those tapes, not docket this proceeding," Vitunac said. "And my order at this moment is oral and to be put in writing at a later date." [Like the 32nd of Never?] Seven months passed before the court disclosed in the public docket that a hearing regarding Sanchez-Cristancho was held that day.

Did the Honorable Mary A McLaughlin (the judge in Berg v. Rumsfeld, back succumb to the same human dynamics?

We don't know. But we certainly need more information.

Readers! Can anyone give us assurance that the disappearance of Berg et al. v. Rumsfeld from the records of the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania has a legitimate explanation? That the original filing for a moot case might be removed from the system, for example? That it's not the result of a secret docket?

Philadelphians! Can anyone forward Corrente a copy of the filing?

NOTE The Naples News, via AP has more on secret dockets, and the Mohamed Bellahouel case.

Anyone know if Rummy flew to Baghdad by way of Mexico?

A series of brightly lit, rapidly moving objects filmed in the skies over Mexico could have been caused by a scientific phenomenon involving gases in the atmosphere, a scientist said Thursday.
(via AP)

Then again, maybe the aliens have landed. And just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder...

AFGHANISTAN
Human Rights Watch issues new statement on detainee abuse in Afghanistan, similar to reports coming from Iraq.

U.S.: Systemic Abuse of Afghan Prisoners | Open Files on Detainee Deaths May 13, 2004.
Afghans have been telling us for well over a year about mistreatment in U.S. custody. We warned U.S. officials repeatedly about these problems in 2003 and 2004. It's time now for the United States to publicize the results of its investigations of abuse, fully prosecute those responsible, and provide access to independent monitors. - John Sifton, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. [...]

On May 10, the AIHRC formally requested access to U.S. detention sites in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has also made several formal requests to visit U.S. detention sites in Afghanistan through 2003 and 2004, none of which received any response.

The following is excerpted from HRW's comprehensive report titled "Enduring Freedom:" Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. (published in March, 2004.)

I. Summary
From 2002 to the present, Human Rights Watch estimates that at least one thousand Afghans and other nationals have been arrested and detained by U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. Some of those apprehended have been picked up during military operations while taking direct part in hostilities, but others taken into custody have been civilians with no apparent connection to ongoing hostilities. (This latter category may include persons wanted for criminal offenses, but such arrests are not carried out in compliance with Afghan or international legal standards.) - (continued....

V. Conclusions:
This report raises serious concerns regarding the actions of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, specifically with regard to the use of excessive force during arrests; arbitrary or mistaken arrests and indefinite detention; and mistreatment in detention:

- U.S. forces regularly use military means and methods during arrest operations in residential areas where law enforcement techniques would be more appropriate. This has resulted in unnecessary civilian casualties and may in some cases have involved indiscriminate or disproportionate force in violation of international humanitarian law.

- Members of the U.S. armed forces have arrested numerous civilians not directly participating in the hostilities and numerous persons whom U.S. authorities have no legal basis for taking into custody. These cases raise serious questions about the intelligence gathering and processing that leads to arrests and call into question the practice of arresting any and sometimes all Afghan men found in the vicinity of U.S. military operations.

- Persons detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan are held without regard to the requirements of international humanitarian law or human rights law. They are not provided reasons for their arrest or detention. They are held virtually incommunicado without any legal basis for challenging their detention or seeking their release. They are held at the apparent whim of U.S. authorities, in some cases for more than a year. (continued.... LINK)

Arbitrary or Mistaken Arrests and Indefinite Detention:
Mohammad Naim’s brother told a similar story.54 Ahmaddullah and Amanullah, who are brothers, were arrested in a house nearby. Another villager, Khoja Mohammad, was arrested when he came out of his house to investigate what was happening in the other houses.55 Amanullah described the arrests as follows:

I awoke, there were helicopters all around the house. And I looked out and there were people in my house [in the compound]. There was a man I could see, I thought he was a thief. He had a gun. But he spoke English, and I realized he was an American. I don’t speak much English, but I said, “How are you?” But then he said, “shut up” in Pashto – “Chopsha.”

My brother was there too, and he was arrested. They tied his hands, and they were pointing their guns at me all the time. Then they arrested me too, and tied my hands.56

The five men were taken to Bagram. Mohammad Naim described what happened after they landed: They threw us in a room, face down. We were there for a while. Then they stood me up and led me somewhere, and then they took off my blindfold. I saw that I was alone. I saw that there were some other people in the room, but I was the only prisoner.

I was on the ground, and a man stood over me, and he had a foot on my back. An interpreter was there at this point. He asked me, “What is your name?” and I told them.

They made me take off my clothes, so that I was naked. They took pictures of us, naked. And then they gave us new clothes, which were dark blue.

A man came, and he had some plastic bag, and he ran his hands through my hair, shaking my hair. And then he pulled out some of my hair, some hair from my beard, and he put it in a bag. . . . The most awful thing about the whole experience was how they were taking our pictures, and we were completely naked. Completely naked. It was completely humiliating.

[...]

Human Rights Watch has learned that U.S. forces routinely hold Afghans at the local airport in the eastern city of Jalalabad. However, former detainees there refused to speak in detail with Human Rights Watch about their experiences in U.S. detention. One told Human Rights Watch:

We were treated absolutely terribly there. They did terrible things to us, things we'll never forget. It was absolutely awful what they did. . . . We absolutely cannot talk about it. We don’t want to talk about it with you. We have made our agreements not to talk, and we won’t talk about it. (continued....LINK)

Full HRW report, March 2004: "Enduring Freedom:" Abuses by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan Index Page

RNC/CPA spokesman Dan Senor says (back) that "to his knowledge Berg ''was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces." But, through the voices of his friends, Berg himself disagrees:

Chilean freelance journalist Hugo Infante told CNN that weeks before the videotape of Berg's grisly death emerged on the Internet, "Nick told me, 'Iraqi police caught me one night, they saw my passport and my Jewish last name and my Israeli stamp. This guy thought I was a spy so they put me with American soldiers and American soldiers put me in a jail for two weeks.'"

Infante stays at the $30-a-night Al Fanar Hotel, where Berg was staying, and regularly chatted and shared drinks with him.

And Berg already knew he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time once...

Infante said Berg told him that Iraqi police were suspicious of the electronics equipment he was carrying for his work on radio communications towers when he was arrested in Mosul.
(via CNN)

Wrong place, wrong time... But what time and place, exactly?

So, the possibilities are:

1. RNC/CPA's Dan Senor is lying.

2. RNC/CPA's Dan Senor is mistaken.

3. Hugo Infante, Nick Berg's friend, is lying—hard to believe

4. Hugo Infante is mistaken—also hard to believe

5. Nick Berg was lying—what's the incentive?

6. Nick Berg was mistaken—but the only way I can see how this could be is if the people he thought were US troops weren't really. But that's really only possible unless there are people in Iraq wearing Army uniforms who aren't really in the Army... Hmmm....

The Philadelphia Inquirer is on this one, since Nick Berg was from Philly, and they've published some of his mail from Iraq here.

It's a poignant and ironic series, and will repay full reading for the picture it gives of Iraq and the Iraqi people during the occupation. Berg saw the world through fresh eyes, and the mail fills me with sadness.

As far as the Nick Berg story, as opposed to Nick Berg the person goes, irony abounds here as well. Berg's business was maintaining antennas: big radio-type antennas, which he called "towers." And why did the towers need to be repaired? Because they were looted during the war. So, another of the countless little human tragedies that can be laid squarely on the backs of the wingers and factually challenged ideologues who dragged us into this misbegotten venture.

There's no smoking gun in the email, so I'm not in full tinfoil hat mode, but there are some points that are, well, suggestive:

The other big news was the announcement Friday morning (9 Jan 2004) that the Harris/Al-Fawares/Lebanon Broadcast Company consortium had finally been awarded the new IMN contract. With out getting too technical, this is a one year (at least) contract to operate and rehabilitate the former Ministry of Information, Minister Naji's turf.

The reason this is good news is that we were announced as Harris's approved tower sub-contractor about two days before the award. we should be involved with quite a bit of tower work as part of the reconstruction, repair and new construction of the statewide Iraqi Media Network (something like PBS/NPR in the US). There are other private broadcasters being licensed, and there are folks like the VOice of America and the CPA operating small stations, but when it comes to existing broadcast, IMN is it. So we're fairly happy about this development.

I wonder who has this contract how?

So between the 11th January and the time of writing, I have been on six major sites, inspecting towers and cataloging the extent of looting/sabotage damage. Most of the destruction was intentional looting or even sabotage on the numerous (at one time twenty-six) tall towers in Iraq. There are twenty-two left, and at least ten have some major problems. The worst site I have been on was the Abu Gharib I tower, a 320 meter (1040') guyed tower in the main broadcast complex for Baghdad, near the Abu Gharib political prisons.

So here's a guy in Iraq, climbing up tall towers, and seeing... What? Well, just about anything, eh? And if it looked like he had binoculars, or any kind of recording equipment....

The other site I visited in the South was Diwaniya, a larger town with some big grain silos and two universities. It's also home to Camp Santo Domingo, one of the many non-US military bases. I actually had to meet An American CPA guy who worked there and so I got into the base - it was full of Dominican soldiers.

I wonder who the CPA guy was? And what he did for Nick Berg?

So this last Thursday afternoon I had the bright idea of running down to Diwaniya to inspect this temporary tower which was built by the former FPS (something like the Secret Service). This is one of many portable sites which were set up in strategic areas to beam the message out.

Hmmm.... And I'm not the only one who thought this way:

so I started to negotiate with a throng of taxi drivers (none of whom had a car - that's kind of an afterthought to actually winning the negotiations). I've got one down to 30,000 ID (about $20 at the time) when the IP (Iraqi National Police) swings by on patrol. It seems they had reports about unknown Iranian people infiltrating their town, and at night they can't see much of my face. Anyhow, the story ends in a rather anti-climatic fashion - the police collect me and take me off to the Lieutenant who is more worried for my safety than about me being an Iranian spy.

Later, they do release him. But the lieutenant was playing Good Cop. Eh?

I've found a very competent and fairly reliable commercial Manager here. He's actually been living in Philadelphia the last twenty years and just came back - so he's similarly a bit out of his element. Imagine coming home to a country so different form where you grew up. We're right now at an office near the sporting club where he played European Football as a kid.

Since then it's been destroyed, rebuilt, run by Oday, son of Hussein, and finally privatized. The fact alone that he and I are just now sitting in a free and open internet shop is unbeliveable to most Iraqis. Even a year ago he would have been arrested upon his return. Neither of us would be seeing the un-restricted internet. At any rate, Aziz will do us well I think, and I'm happy I finally found someone I can strategize with.

And who is this Aziz, I wonder? Does anyone know him from Philadelphia?

In the last two days I have inspected two surviving towers for the IMN (state run broadcast media). IMN is now being "managed" or overseen by the CPA, through a contract with an American consulting company who does not specialize in broadcast, telecommunications or anything nearly so specific.

What, then, does this "unspecific" company do?

I came to Mosul to meet Moffak Mustaffa Yasin, Mudafer's (my paternal uncle) brother. It was very easy to find his office (it took about one hour of broken Arabic and a few family-tree sketches).

Nick Berg had relatives in Iraq?! Now this:

Moyser (Moffak's brother) doesn't live at the same house. I still don't know where he is. Back to the Ninaveh Palace (where I'm staying tonight) I went, and I see a man gesturing at the desk with one of my cards. Ever the opportunist, I put on my best Arabic and introduced myself as "Bodgne Berg" (tower guy). Of course that was Moffak and got along splendidly. We spent a few hours and I helped him establish an e-mail account. The bank account is still waiting as he claims none of the Mosul banks will do international wires - I'll probably have to open in Baghdad. It was a very interesting time and I noticed again that there is a huge disconnect with relationships here.

Translated: Nick Berg helps an unknown Iraqi set up an email account. Oh no...

Well, that's all I can post for now. It's heartbreaking. Reminds me of The Zone in Gravity's Rainbow.

So... Here's a lone American travelling around Iraq helping unknown people set up email accounts (this is not the only example). In his work, he has to climb tall towers near sensitive installations. Some of the installations are owned by powerful Iraqi ministers, others by shadowy CPA forces, and, when you think about it, the entire tower system is the infrastructure for intelligence communication, and the media. Not to mention cell phones, which still don't work, and for which there is a lot of competition for contracts worth billions. He's picked up at least once for being an Iranian spy.

I think, at least, we can say that the case that Berg's death was entirely due to Islamic fundamentalists or AQ is, as the Scotch would say, "not proven."

I can well imagine a scenario where "Ali" (let's call him), the first cousin of the Iraqi Minister of Information, wanted the tower contract, took Nick Berg out for a beer, and after giving him knockout drops, handed him over to the CPA, who also had their own ideas about the contract. Then it turns out the "Ali's" CPA contact is a real wrong 'un, so Berg got handed over to ...

Yeah, pure fantasy, I agree, but a little more nuanced than the noxious pablum we're being fed now (see farmer, below).

Readers? Anyone with more detail? There's more in the Inky— but I have to run.

For those who came in late, Nick Berg's parents filed suit in the Eastern District court in Philadelphia to get him out of an Iraqi jail (Berg et al v. Rumsfeld, back). And after the filed the suit, the very next day Nick Berg was released from jail. Coincidence?

So I got the docket number and other information that would enable a copy of the suit to be found, and asked if any alert readers could find it, since the Federal courts have a pretty good electronic filing system. Alert readers Xan, enrico, and upyernoze both tried, and came up empty. Here's what upyernoze (who has the required password access to the Eastern District's database) said:

i checked and i found exactly the same thing as enrico. the only pdf is the notice that the suit is moot. a habius petiton is also listed on the docket, but there is no pdf file of the document. under the eastern district's rules, all filings are supposed to be accompanied with a pdf, but apparently this one did not make it into the public database

Which is interesting.

The "moot" stuff is there presumably, because Nick Berg was released, and the parents dropped the suit.

But why is the original suit not there? My first thought was that it was just a production problem, and that the original suit would come along in the next batch of PDFs, whenever that is. But the moot document got in right away.

Maybe it's just tinfoil hat time for me, but I'd really like to trace that suit and get a copy of it. It's a big loose end, and with the Bush administration, a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is warranted at all times.

Can an alert reader with authority on the Federal District Court system clarify whether the missing copy of the lawsuit is a cause for concern?

Boy, these guys sure are in a rut! More Nixonian secrecy and, in an attempt to save themselves, they're reduced to recycling the same tired script:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Bush administration lawyers are advising the Pentagon not to publicly release any more photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. soldiers, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the outset of a hastily arranged visit to Iraq aimed at containing the abuse scandal.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'd be happy to release them all to the public and to get it behind us," Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him from Washington. "But at the present time I don't know anyone in the legal shop in any element of the government that is recommending that."

The government lawyers argue that releasing such materials would violate a Geneva Convention stricture against presenting images of prisoners that could be construed as degrading, Rumsfeld said en route to the Iraqi capital on a trip that was not announced in advance due to security concerns.
(via MSNBC)

Oh, so now we've discovered the Geneva Convention, huh?

Any port in a storm, right? Advocate violating the Geneva Convention whenever you want but then, almost in the same breath, use it as an excuse to CYA and keep evidence from the public. Once again, I'm not even sure calling this "rank hypocrisy" quite covers it, eh?

Oh yeah, and Don, if you're following the script closely, don't forget to take the plastic turkey with you!

Wait. That's right. He's staying behind in the White House.

Never mind.

So who really killed Nick Berg?

MSNBC, who never met an official government press release they wouldn't swallow hook line and sinker, was alive and hoppin' with analysis of the Berg murder. Dan Abrams (The Abrams Report), never short of wind or at a loss for some grand expoundment on this that and the other thing, was motoring away about the entire matter as it applied to fingering al Qaeda and the Jordanian Zarqawi for the beheading of Berg. Deborah Norville was whooping up the tale as well, making no secret that, by God and country and king, the message delivered upon that tape from the group that killed Berg was a message from al Qaeda. (unfortuantly MSNBC is slow on transcript production values so I have no links to those transcripts as of this writing.)

Moving along...

Well, I dunno if al Qaeda was involved or not. And i don't know if Zarqawi was the man who performed the execution in that video, although Debbie Norville repeats the allegation, ie: conventional wisdom, that he has taken credit for the act. Which I guess is good nuff for MSNBC. Ah yes, MSNBC, you can always count on them folks to straighten out any confusing news-like stuff, thanks berry much. Sure. (Isn't that how they sold us the glorious CakeWalk War and all those excitable yarns about WMD and forty five minutes to mushroom cloud meltdown?) Nice to see MSNBC is back in fine form.

In any case, apparently no one at MSNBC's television day camp actually listens to news, aside from whatever it is that's piped in from the Pentagon, because CNN (no prize themselves) was actually reporting a different take on the al Qaeda/Zarqawi Berg murder video link. Hours before Debbie and Dan began their nightly pantings CNN aired the following interview with their own senior editor for Arab affairs Octavia Nasr. Here is what Nasr had to say with respect to suggested al Qaeda and Zarqawi participation in the Berg murder. Including the US governments official translation of that video:

CNN - LIVE FROM:
O'BRIEN: Interesting. All right, now one final thought here. You did a very careful translation of your own, of the statement. And in it, you see no reference to al Qaeda. And yet the official U.S. government translation does. Explain how that happened.

NASR: Oh, I find it very interesting, because out of the blue, there is a mention of al Qaeda on the U.S. government translation. It says: "Does al Qaeda need any further excuses?" Any speaker of the Arabic language is going to notice a difference between the word al Qaeda, which means "the base," and al qaed, which means "the one sitting, doing nothing."

My translation says: "Is there any excuse for the one who sits down and does nothing?" Basically they're telling people, you have no excuse for not doing anything, for not acting and defending Islam and so forth. Whereas the U.S. government translation has this factual error, I'm sure it's an honest mistake, but basically it sort of adds al Qaeda to the statement, which is not on the statement.

O'BRIEN: All right, Octavia Nasr, we don't know exactly how that got in there. We'll try to get more on that. We appreciate you bringing that all to light and appreciate your insights, of course.

NASR: You bet.

Shucks no, how could something like that possibly git in there. Jeepers! So in other words the official US gov. translation is either mistaken or intentionally bogus? Or, Nasr is wrong when she says that the tape makes no mention of al Qaeda whatsoever. Nasr then indicates that the man alleged to be Zarqawi (speaking on the tape) does not have a Jordanian accent, which leads her to believe it is not Zarqawi:

O'BRIEN: Well, let me ask you this. You've had a chance to really listen to this tape and get a sense who might be responsible, just by deciphering, say, accents. And certainly, there in the Arab world, they're very attuned to that. And given the fact of who this may or may not be, does that have some effect on how it is being played?

NASR: Yes, and if you listen to these voices that we're hearing on Arab networks, Iraqis are condemning this execution. And they're saying these are foreigners. These are not Iraqis. They do not represent us and so forth.

Now, of course, the original claim was that Zarqawi is the actual man who performed this execution. Our experts listened to the accent, as you said, and they determined the accent is not Jordanian...

O'BRIEN: He is a Jordanian who is working supposedly, allegedly, at the behest of al Qaeda in Iraq. So go ahead.

NASR: Right, he is very close to bin Laden, and works, you're right, as an agent of al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, the accent is not Jordanian so that takes the Jordanian element out of the story immediately.

The interview with Nasr took place on Wed. afternoon, May 12. You can read it all here: CNN - LIVE FROM... Berg Family Has Questions;...Intelligence Gathering | May 12, 2004 - 12:59 ET.

Similarly, an Associated Press report from early March, 2004 suggests that Zarqawi himself may have been killed some time ago. It also reports that Zarqawi has an artificial leg, which did not appear to be the case with the man in the Berg murder video, who is allegeded to be Zarqawi. See: Alleged Statement Says Extremist Killed - 3/4/04. (Associated Press)

Update: al-Zarqawi had a leg amputated, al-Zarqawi did not have a leg amputated? From April 2004:

A U.S. official said Tuesday that al-Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for treatment of a leg injury but, contrary to previous reports, appears not to have had a leg amputated. The official would not discuss the reason for the change in assessment. via CNN

Thanks to "anna" (see comments) for digging up the link to the blockquote cited above. You can also visit with anna at her blog annatopia.

And then there was this: From MSNBC's parent company NBC. Which apparently didn't merit any windy vetting from Debbie or Dan or anyone else at MSNBC-TV as far as i can recall.

Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq | By Jim Miklaszewski -Correspondent, NBC News | Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 02, 2004

With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.

But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.

[...]

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

As I said, I don't recall hearing anything about that from any of the nightly cable news-noise television theater departments. Not even Joe "Hollywood did it!" Scarborough, who, no doubt, was busy investigating Hollywood's appetite for farm animal sexual molestation, or girls gone bad videos, or something really real and really important like that. Uh huh.

In any event, all of this is yet again another fine example of why the television news-o-tainment opinion-yawp industry (how'd you like to depend on Maureen Dowd or Maggie Gallagher to cack up the "news" each evening. Yeeks!) is designed for no other reason than to offer up one more boing-eyed allegation after boing-eyed allegation, to trowel on one layer of bullshit after another. One on top of the next until the allegation becomes the "real" story and any competing information is shoveled off to a compost heap.

None of these awful shows are designed to peel back the onion and poke around at what is under the surface skin. To find any answers or disseminate any greater detailed understanding of a particular issue, event, or political debate. It's all about scripted story telling. And like any cheap thrill, once the script is booted into the vein there is no end to the junkies that will show up to help enhance the high.

Note: As far as I know none of the usual evening news crickets at CNN made any mention of Nasr's earlier observations either. Certainly not CNN's official White House Press release reader and translator John King. At least I didn't catch it. So, either I missed something, or Nasr's analysis was rejected by the script writers and producers and conventional wisdom apologia wonder clucks at the home office. Whatever. What the hell do i know? Not a goddamned thing.

On and on it goes.... reductio ad absurdum.

More classics:

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismayed?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
  Someone had blundered:
Theirs was not to make reply,
Theirs was not to reason why,
Theirs was but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.

Who said that Tennyson wasn't capable of irony?

Weird. Make of this what you will.

Mystery surrounded not only Nicholas Berg's disappearance but also why he had been held by Iraqi police for about two weeks and questioned by FBI agents three times. Berg's family disputed U.S. officials' claims that Berg was never in U.S. custody.Berg was last in contact with U.S. officials in Baghdad on April 10, and his [beheaded] body was found Saturday in Baghdad.

"The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do, the FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they're kidding?" Berg's father, Michael, told The Associated Press from his home in West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb.

Berg first worked in Iraq in December and January and returned in March. He was inspecting communications facilities, some of which were destroyed in the war or by looters.

During his time in Iraq, he struggled with the Arabic language and worked at night on a tower in Abu Ghraib, a site of repeated attacks on U.S. convoys and the location of the notorious prison where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi inmates.

Since Iraq remains under U.S. military occupation, it seems unlikely that the Iraqi police would have held Berg, or any other American, for such a length of time without at least the tacit approval of U.S. authorities.
(AP via LA Times)

Tinfoil hat time? Or what Berg just in the wrong place at the wrong time—like so much about this wretched war?

UPDATE Alert reader rickfman comments:

While this is interesting and I await further substantive developments, let's be sure we don't morph into the Vince Foster realm of tortured conspiracy theorizing. "They became what they beheld" and all that...

I agree. And probably the post above poses the same danger, no matter how much I qualify it.

On the other hand, I'm continually amazed by the fact that no matter how cynical I become about this administration—and I do try very very hard—I have never been cynical enough. If I've finally gone over the edge... Well, alert readers will drag me back.

In living color....

Military intelligence tries to get the story straight:

[Special Agent Tyler Pieron of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, a] key Army investigator in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal has testified that he found "absolutely no evidence" that the military chain of command authorized any of the mistreatment of detainees, but rather that it was the work of a small band of guards "just having fun at the expense of the prisoners," according to court-martial documents obtained today by the Los Angeles Times.
(via AP)

Unfortunately, that's not what one of the accused soldiers says (""Chain of command" said "Smile for the camera!", back)

Not all intelligence officers agree with Special Agent Pieron, either:

Also testifying at the hearing was Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, a staff member of a military intelligence battalion. He said that interrogators would sometimes seem to go too far in trying to extract information from detainees.

While Pieron said his unit interviewed all of the military interrogators and found no examples of them encouraging the abuse, Provance said that intelligence officers never reported the abuse.

He said one day in the interrogators' office he heard his "peers" talking about "what MPs did to the detainees." He described it as "things like beating them up and using them as practice dummies and knocking them out."

He added that a colleague from a Nevada National Guard unit, whom he described as an older female soldier, told him of "some stuff that she saw going on." He said she documented the abuse but that her chain of command admonished her for reporting it.

I wonder why? Seems like the National Guard soldiers don't know enough to keep their mouths shut, doesn't it?

"She was afraid of her chain of command," Provance said. So, "she sent the documentation to her relatives."

Maybe Seymour Hersh should give her a call....

Hey, and whaddaya know? AP manages to write the entire story about an accused spy for the Chinese without once mentioning that she was a Republican fundraiser!

[Former FBI agent] James. J. Smith pleaded guilty to a single count of making a false statement and agreed to cooperate with the government.

Smith admitted only that he had a sexual relationship with the woman, Katrina Leung, and that he lied to the FBI about it. He did not plead guilty to any counts involving misuse of classified information.

Smith, 60, was the longtime handler of Leung, a naturalized citizen and San Marino socialite who was recruited 20 years ago to work for the FBI, gathering intelligence during frequent business trips to China. Prosecutors claim she began working for China around 1990.
(via AP)

"Socialite"?! Wowsers.

Boy, if Katrina Leung had been an intern...

This will certainly get Inerrant Boy's knickers in a twist!

Democratic challenger John Kerry said on Wednesday his first choice as defense secretary would be Republican Sen. John McCain as he criticized the Bush administration for failed policies in Iraq.
(via Reuters)

Wonder if Kerry checked with McCain first? Heh.

UPDATE: Several alert readers (thanks cs, PFC, and The Trooper) have left comments explaining the context of Kerry's remarks, which was a discussion on Imus In The Morning of why it wouldn't be a problem to have Rumsfeld resign, (assuming you weren't a puppet/Emperor like "W"); Imus wondered if that would leave Wolfowitz in charge, and Kerry, challenged to name a successor, remarked that there were any number of fine replacements at hand, McCain being first among others, including John Warner and Carl Levin. Kerry didn't actually make an annoucement that once elected, McCain would be Kerry's first choice. The cross discussion on that program is always intense; if Kerry finds it necessary to clarify, watch for immediate charges of another flip-flop; see how difficult it is to be a presidential challanger when you're up against an incumbent whose record is so free of evidence of having made serious errors. And yes, it does depend on your definition of "serious" and "errors."

UPDATE My fingers outran my brain in the comments section—I don't actually want quotes taken out of context even if it does get Inerrant Boy's knickers in a twist. Not liberal behavior, that. Fortunately, good citation enables readers to check. My bad. —lambert.

Recall that:

On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn't been mistreated.
(back)

Looks like the court is the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the case name is Berg et al v. Rumsfeld, the plaintiffs are Berg, Suzanne Carol, as Next Friends of Nicholas Evan Berg; Berg, Nicholas Evan, by and Through; Berg, Michael S, and the defendant is the Honorable [ha] Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense. The case was brought before the Honorable Mary A McLaughlin. The attorney is Alfred A. Gollatz of
Gollatz, Griffin & Ewing, Philadelphia, PA.

The docket number is 2:04cv1497, and the filing date is 4/5/2004.

This is as far as I can go right now. Can any alert readers come up with the court filing for the case, so we can see why the Bergs were suing the DOD to get their son released from jail?

UPDATE The administration is denying that they ever held Berg. Seems kind of weird that he would be released the day after the suit was filed if they weren't holding him, but maybe I'm just being too cynical.

Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said.

His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.

Senor said that to his knowledge Berg ''was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces.'' (via AP

"He denies it," the Red King said. "Leave out that part." Well....

Notice Republican operative Senor's very, very artful wording. He says: "at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces." What about civilian "contractors"? The whole thing stinks of the Fog Machine (back). Who made the phone call to get Berg released one day after the parents filed suit? Who did they call? Above all, into whose custody was he released?

And keep reading, since it gets weirder. Here's what Briefing General Kimmit has to say:

Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg's confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because ''he was still an American citizen.''

"Still"?? So Kimmit thinks Berg was "still" an American citizen, despite... Well, despite what, actually?

If Hillary had done this—can you imagine the fury?

President Bush's campaign is rolling out a television and Internet ad campaign today that includes the first lady stressing the importance of education.
(via WaPo)

Hey, and they're even hijacking our "W" meme:

Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt said education spending overall has risen 49 percent since Bush took office. Holt said that the ad was aimed at women and that the campaign plans to unveil a "W Is for Women" coalition, headed by former White House counselor Karen Hughes.

Wrong conjunction.

The slogan should read "W is behind women"—as in hiding behind their skirts.

Think about it: There really could be a club called "Enablers for Bush": KaWen, Waura, Condi ("husband")...

Maybe someone can explain to me how the Berg atrocity makes our torturing prisoners OK? I don't get it, myself.

"A city on a hill," and all that.

Sure, "I was only following orders" is no excuse, but it would still be nice to know who gave the orders:

The Army private facing a court-martial for being photographed with naked Iraqi prisoners says she was following orders to create psychological pressure on them.

Pfc. Lynndie England told KCNC-TV in Denver on Tuesday that her superiors gave her specific instructions on how to pose for the photos. Asked who gave the orders, she would say only, "Persons in my chain of command."
(via AP)

Hmmm.... Wonder if that question will be answered in a Pentagon show trial? Not... Especially if England's lawyer can plea bargain....

The Village Voice has so much good stuff I can't even begin to excerpt it. Go read—and report back ;-)

Thanks to alert reader Riggsveda.

Light blogging for me today, probably.

The Daily Show, 5/11/04:

Jon Stewart: Stephen, what do you think about this idea that we are hearing from Rumsfeld, and now Sen. Inhofe, that the press was somehow irresponsible for releasing these photos of abuse?

Stephen Colbert: Jon, I agree entirely with Secy Rumsfeld that the release of these photos was deplorable, but these actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media.

Stewart: The journalists did something wrong?

Colbert: I'm just saying those journalists don't represent the journalists I know. The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists--the journalists that hurt America.

But what they don't talk about is all the amazingly damaging things we haven't reported on. Who didn't uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Queda connection? Who dropped Aghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipehunt? The United States press corps, that's who. Heck, we didn't even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury it on "60 Minutes II." Who's on that--Charlie Rose and Anglela Lansbury?

Stewart: Stephen, what do you think is at play here?

Colbert: Politics, Jon, that's what. Pure and simple. I think it's pretty suspicious that these tortures took place during a Presidential campaign. This is a clear cut case of partisan sadism. You know, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those Iraqi prisoners want Bush out of office too. You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a pile of hooded, naked Iraqis has a job waiting for them in the Kerry Administration.

Then they took the joke meta by bringing on Tim Russert to tap dance around Stewart's repeated questions about the press' somnolence and suffocate the airwaves with brain-crippling bromides about the Greatest Generation and the presidential campaign. Did you know that if things continue to deteriorate, it will help Kerry's campaign, but if we have security and prosperity come November, Bush will probably be re-elected? Does Russert think he could pass the Turing test?

Stewart's offer to trade England "one Aaron Brown, two Britt Humes and a Van Susteren" for one of their journos was also spot on.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


WB Yeats, The Second Coming (text and links to explication)

Recall that Nick Berg was (for some as yet unknown reason) held by the US Army before being released into whatever circumstances eventually caused his death:

Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death. He said if his son hadn't been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened.

"I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy."
(via PennLive)

Irony of ironies, the son disagreed with his father, and was a Bush supporter.

Splendid. A fundamentalist snuff film. Flame, meet gasoline!

Berg was from the Philadelphia area, by the way.

Some interesting detail on Berg's last days:

Berg, who was in Baghdad from late December to Feb. 1, returned to Iraq in March. He didn't find any work and planned again to return home on March 30, but his daily communications home stopped on March 24, when he was jailed by Iraqi officials at a checkpoint in Mosul.

The FBI on March 31 interviewed Berg's parents in West Chester. Jerri Williams, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia FBI office, said the [FBI] had been "asked to interview the parents regarding Mr. Berg's purpose in Iraq."

On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn't been mistreated.

The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he said he would come home by way of Jordan, Turkey or Kuwait. But by then, hostilities in Iraq had escalated.
(via our own Philadelphia Inquirer)

Huh?

NOTE More from Tresy and Leah.

You know, the civilians who were giving soldiers orders?

The Army general who first investigated abuse in an Iraqi prison told Congress on Tuesday the mistreatment resulted from faulty leadership, a "lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision" of the troops.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba also left open the possibility that members of the Central Intelligence Agency as well as armed forces personnel and civilian contractors were culpable in the abusive treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

"A few soldiers and civilians conspired to abuse and conduct egregious acts of violence against detainees and other civilians outside the bounds of international laws and the Geneva Convention," Taguba told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
(via AP)

Taguba's looking more and more like the administration's second line of defense, to me.

Taguba keeps saying "few."

Taguba doesn't dissect the chain of command that enabled civilians to give orders to soldiers ("the fog machine").

And Taguba resolutely refuses to ask on what system the photo and video data was stored, who built the system, who had access to the system, what the distribution list for the photos was, whether there were backups, and where these backups were now.

Keep that word, "systemic," in the front of your mind.

And let's hope Seymour Hersh doesn't go up in any small planes, meet anyone in a deserted parking garage, or take candy from strangers....

LIMBAUGH: All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, "Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver.
(via Media Matters)

Islamic extremist site shows American's beheading

"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael, my mother's name is Susan," the man said on the video. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sarah. I live in ... Philadelphia."

After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and putting a large knife to his neck. A scream sounded as the men cut his head off, shouting "Allahu Akbar! (God is great)" They then held the head out before the camera....

On the Web site, one of the killers read a statement:

"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused."

"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."

Tresy tells you (up) about this terrible tape. The commentary on the tape indicates the group aligns itself with Al Queda, and apparently there is some question about whether the group is made up of Iraqis, the spokesman's accent is being tentatively identified as Egyptian; he says exactly what you'd expect, that this outrage is revenge in blood for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The young man has been identified as Nick Berg; he may actually have been what one thinks of when the word contractor is used, someone who was looking for business in wireless technology, although the reporting is incomplete here.

Fox is showing the part of the tape where Nick Berg identifies himself, and names members of his family; I couldn't make out what he was saying, but it does bring home the reality of the horror this young man must be experiencing. The anchor at Fox then goes on to describe in exact detail a particularly horrifying form of decapitation.

I'm glad Fox decided to be clear and open about what goes on on that tape. And I felt that Shepard Smith's outrage on behalf of Berg was genuine, and as yet, unpoliticized, as it ought to be.

Berg's family has been notified.

This is a horror and an outrage. There is no other way to describe it, and no need to find any other way. Nick Berg did not deserve to be abducted, held, or, most importantly, to be tortured to death, because that is surely the only way to describe what the tape reveals. Nor did his family and friends deserve to have to live through this horror.

I feel loathing for the men who carried this out, loathing and disgust for Al Queda, and all its off-shoots.

Those feelings only serve to focus my own determination to defeat an administration that has proved itself, again and again, utterly and completely inadequate to the task of protecting this country at home, and advancing the true interests of America abroad.

I don't have to tell you what the right in this country will make of this tape. It will become another way to divide Americans, another way to dump on huge swathes of this society, i.e., everyone who doeesn't agree with them. Jonah Goldberg will find evidence that he was correct that publication of the prisoner pictures weren't necessary, since investigations were already underway, and now those pictures have probably contributed to the gruesome death, so much worse than anything done to Iraqis, of an innocent American. Which will be nonsense, of course. As if a jihadist group like this one required actual pictures to justify bloody revenge, as if the mere descriptions of what was being done in Abu Ghraib wouldn't have done the trick.

Denis Prager will contrast the inadequacy of outrage about Nick Berg with the surfeit of outrage on the part of the those Americans who love to hate America.

Well, that didn't take long. I went back to check on what was happening at Fox and just heard the most demented discussion between Shepard Smith and one of Fox's resident Middle East experts Mansoor whathis name, Ijaz, I think, you've seen him if you've ever watched Fox. Shepard's outrage needs an outlet, and politicizing it comes naturally. Will this tape have the effect of bolstering America's resolve, he asks. Yes, it must, replies, Mansoor. Resolve to do what? To re-engage in Iraq on a heightened military basis. To go after the terrorists in Iraq, even more than we have. And if Iraqi civilians get in the way? The questions remain unasked. So much for hearts and minds.

In other words, with this tape, Iraq is once again the front line on the war against Al Queda.

If any one person shares some responsibility for Nick Berg's death, besides the people who carried out their ghastly task, and let's be clear, they bear all of that responsibility, but surely the man who said "bring 'em on" has something to explain to the rest of us. I jest, of course. He has no inner life save Jesus. No, I'm not making fun of his religion, I am expressing contempt for it.

Think about this for a moment. How is it possible that we have not been able to do better against these fundamentalist jihadists, who are so utterly inept, except in the brutality they are willing to bring to any situation. I can assure you that this tape will not be cheered by Iraqis. It will infuriate most of them; clearly these are outsiders trying to take advantage of Iraqi suffering. Iraqis will be fully aware of the way that these jihadists have potentially damaged the case Iraqis wish to make against the way the US is handling this occupation. And this administration will jump to the bait and drive a further wedge between this country and the Iraqi people.

One last prediction; watch Andrew Sullivan spin around in place and pretty much wind up where he always does. Yes, it seems Andrew has had one or two dark nights of the soul, because of those pictures. This will no doubt stiffen his spine, and enhance his amnesia. Andrew, this is your Iraq-as-flypaper in action. Goody, goody, we get to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here. Remember? Did anyone else notice that Arab anchor on one of the two networks who interviewed Bush last week, ask the President specificaly about the morality of inviting Al Queda to join him in Iraq for a dance to the death, or words to that effect? They noticed, Andrew, they noticed that the occupiers thought it just nifty as hell to turn their country into a battlefield. And their lack of delight at that prospect? Iraqis just aren't equal to our task. God help us all.

Orcinus updates news on his "Manifesto" here.

I need to rechunk that original post... Time pressure, but it's coming. Thanks to all the thoughtful posters!

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas....

Blackwater also works other angles. One of the firm's founders is Michigan native Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. His father, Edgar Prince, helped religious right leader Gary Bauer found the Family Research Council in 1988. Erik Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party.
(via Salon via Kos)

Whaddaya know! Republicans get a pop from privatizing the military! Who knew?

Even, though, really, what Taguba has to say is not all that controversial:

Asked directly in "your own soldier's language" what had caused the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, once the feared symbol of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba recited a litany of ills.

"Failure in leadership, sir, from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision. Supervisory omission was rampant," Taguba, the author of a Pentagon report on the abuse, told the latest Senate hearing on the scandal.

At the Pentagon's insistence, Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Cambone, who is in charge of intelligence, and other Pentagon officials also appeared with Taguba to testify on the scandal that has sparked international outrage and calls for Rumsfeld's resignation.
(via Reuters)

And whaddaya know? The political appointees disagree with Taguba:

At the same time, questions about ultimate responsibility for control of the Abu Ghraib prison produced a disagreement between Taguba and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Taguba said that control had been turned over to military intelligence officials.

Cambone said that was incorrect, and it resided with the military police.

In a further disagreement, Taguba said it was against Army rules for intelligence troops to involve MPs in setting conditions for interrogations. Cambone said he believed it was appropriate for the two groups to collaborate.

Taguba also told the committee his investigation had not found "any order whatsoever, written or otherwise," that directed the military police to cooperate with intelligence forces at the prison.

Regardless of any disagreements, Cambone and others told the panel that troops in Iraq were under orders to abide by the Geneva Conventions, which dictate terms for humane treatment of prisoners.
(via AP)

No order?! That's the fog machine in action. "Lack of supervision" was the result of policy, designed to do exactly what it did. Who were the civilians giving orders to the soldiers? And who were the "foreign nationals" involved? On what computer system were the photos stored? Who had access? Who was on the distribution list? Were there backup copies? Who has the backups now? And so on. Oh, if only we had a free press...

Looks like Bush is losing the thinking man's wingers:

When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud -- the story of Iraq's attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.
(via WaPo)

This seems to come as a surprise to Will. In fact, there was a very well-developed critique by liberals, especially in the blogosphere, on all these points well before Bush started the war. WE WERE RIGHT. We were right on the yellowcake uranium stories—and all the other fraudulent justifications that we painstakingly demolihsed. We were right on the planning. We were right on the facts of the looting, and the implications of the looting. We were right on the force levels. THE LIBERALS WERE RIGHT ON THE WAR.

Apologize, George Will, apologize! Not the the liberals "your side" (as David Brooks so elegantly puts it) slandered as traitors; we're used to it. Apologize to the dead in the war you, your columns, and your fellow operatives enabled so assiduously.

This morning, David "I'm Writing as Bad as I Can" Brooks has this to say on the Op-Ed page of the Pulitzer-light, increasingly hapless World's Greatest Newspaper (not!)

The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have.
(via Times)

Gee, and who were those "others"? Why—liberals! Even some Democrats! And, of course, millions of marchers.

Apologize, David Brooks, apologize! Not to us, even though your winger allies called us traitors. To the soldiers and civilians that got killed through the war you, in your role as scripted Republican operative, enabled.

Surprise!

An Army reservist [Lynndie R. England, 21,] who was photographed smiling and pointing at naked, bound Iraqi prisoners had been ordered to pose because her presence would be especially humiliating to the men, her attorneys said.

The photos were staged by intelligence agents to intimidate other prisoners, and appearing naked in front of a young woman would be especially humiliating to Iraqi men, attorney Rose Mary Zapor said Monday.

"The (soldiers) pictured were congratulated. They were told the photographs were successful in gathering information," Zapor said.

Another of England's Denver-based attorneys, Giorgio Ra'shadd, was at Fort Bragg, N.C., where England is now stationed, on Tuesday. He said in a telephone interview that he planned to spend the day meeting with Army lawyers and his client.

He said his client was being offered up as a scapegoat for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

"What is offensive to me is that we have generals and the secretary of defense hiding behind a 20-year-old farm girl from West Virginia who lives in a trailer park," Ra'Shadd said.
(via AP)

Nice shot! It's offensive to a lot of people.

Say, the "commander" in "chief" of those generals, and the "boss" of that secretary, our "CEO President," is doing a pretty good job of hiding too, isn't He?

Operation Iraqi Freedom—straight to video...

Say, where are those videos, anyhow? And the coverage really doesn't seem to be focusing on those civilian contractors giving the soldiers orders.... Or the foreign nationals... I wonder why? And do any of the six soldiers who are going to be in the show trials have book deals yet... And have any of them stashed copies of the photos and videos away to help them in their plea bargaining...

Well, too much for my feeble brain at this late hour. And I broke down and bought a Times this morning. I feel so... so used.

Quoted in its entirety:

Just to pass on some added information, about which we'll be saying more. There is chatter in Pakistani intelligence circles that the US has let the Pakistanis know that the optimal time for bagging 'high value' al Qaida suspects in the untamed Afghan-Pakistani border lands is the last ten days of July, 2004.
(via Talking Points)

Duly noted.

How can I read this and remain sane?

The Google Terrrorist
It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.
(via US News via the essential Atrios)

Those playful FBI agents!

OK, "one day last April." But there's funny "ha ha", and then there's just funny...

Here is a historical first:

No Pentagon or administration officials appeared on television talk shows yesterday,
(via WaPo)

Can it be they can't even figure out how to lie?

Those cheese eating surrendur monkeys and flaming liberals over at Army Times have written a fine editorial:

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a [total] failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.
(via Army Times)

Leave aside the fact that the editorialists believe Bush didn't know anything until he was told—the entire fog machine was obviously set up to give the West Wing plausible deniability. It's still a pretty good editorial.

I'd say the real six morons are (in no particular order):

1. Bush
2. Cheney
3. Rumsfeld
4. Wolfowitz
5. Sanchez
6. Bremer

Not that there aren't other morons. There's plenty of moronicity to go around. Readers? Do we have the right six here?

The Taguba Report is available at
Army Times (PDF) Here are the excerpts that contain the word "video":

We reviewed numerous photos and videos of actual detainee abuse taken by detention facility personnel, which are now in the custody and control of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command and the CJTF-7 prosecution team. The photos and videos are not contained in this investigation. ...

(U) The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) .. also uncovered numerous photos and videos portraying in graphic detail detainee abuse by Military Police personnel on numerous occasions from October to December 2003.

The allegations of abuse were substantiated by ... the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence. Due to the extremely sensitive nature of these photographs and videos, the ongoing CID investigation, and the potential for the criminal prosecution of several suspects, the photographic evidence is not included in the body of my investigation. The pictures and videos are available from the Criminal Investigative Command and the CTJF-7 prosecution team.

And that's it. Very very interesting.

We know who has the photos now: The CIC and CJTF-7 prosecution team. But we still don't know:

1. Who gave the orders to take the photos and videos? Soldiers, or civilians?

2. The system on which they were stored, and who had access to it. Where were the photos "discovered" or "uncovered"? An Army system, or a civilian one?

We also don't know:

3. If there are backups anywhere.

One thing is certain: The Privates and Specialists now on trial are nothing but fall guys. I certainly hope to see another story from Hersh in next week's

UPDATE: I remarked earlier in comments that Lehrer was living in Australia. My mistake for missing the line in the Sunday Herald article that notes that Lehrer lives in Santa Cruz, California. Thanks MJS, for pointing that out. (see comment thread back HERE. Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming. - the farmer.

From a comment by farmer, who dug up an interview with sensitive singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer:

'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."
(via Sidney Morning Herald)

And since it's spring time still, I think I'll quote from one of my favorite Tom Lehrer songs:

Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don't you? 'Course you do.
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes every Sunday a treat for me.

All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Every Sunday you'll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.

When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.
The sun's shining bright,
Everything seems all right,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
(Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park")

Ah, the 1960s... So innocent!

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has a terrific take on the depth of the cluelessness suffered by the establishment press; even when David Broder seems to getting it, i.e., that someting is stinking up the country, his getting it is riddled with denial.

Also notable there, long quotes from Tim Burke's Primal Scream about Iraq, a much linked to and completely worthy must read. Not only is Avedon continually generous in the way she links us to what she finds interesting, as worthy as are the links, so are her intros, often only one liners, like this one: "It is my opinion that stories about IQ tests are themselves IQ tests." So go and have fun while you're enligthened.

Bush Lies has a nice discussion and link to Michael Massing's explication of the meaning of "bad apples."

Kos is back from a visit to Central America and tells us, with feeling, all about it.I hope to have a post up about Latin America, then, when it was seen exclusively as part of the cold war, and now, when something hopeful is happening there that the current American government will be incapable of understanding and therefore encouraging, to the peril of all Americans. (I hope my link is the correct one; I find Kos's new site endlessly confusing)

Quiddity at Uggabugga has got so much great stuff up, all I can do is recommend, if you haven't been there in awhile, that you go there and take a look for yourself. Among the "Don't Misses," Safire Maxtrix , and one of Quiddity's masterful diagrams, this one of "the situation."

It's Mustang Bobby's Bark, Bark, Woof, Woof half year blog anniversary, he's got new stuff up so go visit if you haven't recently.

I don't quite know how to describe Norbizness.com, except to say that it is consistently witty, deeply smart and always unexpected; it's also worth visiting for the exquisite picture of two dogs, one a puppy, I believe, being canines, that is regularly displayed there. Currently, you will find a very interesting negative take on the offer by the DNC of convention credientials to bloggers. "Gotta Type Something" is also typical of the kind of weirdly random brilliance this particular blog achieves fairly regularly, but keep on scrolling, there's lots there.

Surprise!

GENEVA – Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and "not individual acts" as President Bush has argued, according to a Red Cross report disclosed today.

Bush has said the abuses were the result of the "wrongdoing of a few."

A senior Red Cross official added: "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system."

Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse that prisoners alleged, it said.

The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern.

"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said.

"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."

[Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations] said the abuse of prisoners represents more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to Abu Ghraib.

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.

(via WaPo)

NOTE The subcription WSJ publishes the full report in PDF. Do any readers have links to the full report?

[BUSH] "You're doing a superb job. You're a strong secretary of defense and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude," Bush said.
(via Reuters)

Well, now we know.

Yes, The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!) does manage to print the horrific picture of US personnel setting dogs on on Iraqi prisoner (back). Below the fold

But it looks like the rest of the Pulitizer-light Newspaper of Record just hasn't gotten the memo.

We've already looked at "Fluffer" Bumiller's disgraceful exhibition (back).

But in the entertainment section, hapless Sharon Waxman is still euphemizing torture as "abuse"—in a piece titled "At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil," for heaven's sake.

The caption editors (see here) are using the "abuse" euphemism too.

And the "serious" reporters aren't doing much better. Thom Sanker seems to think that the story is the pictures, not the acts. Should we release the pictures? Or not? Only at the end of the article does Sanker allow the crucial word, "systemic," to be used, and to open the possibility that there might be responsibility up the chain of command:

Senator Levin also warned that the degrading treatment of detainees might be "much more systemic than just a few guards abusing prisoners," and that it might have been part of a wider effort "to extract information from these prisoners."

"And this was part of a new intelligence policy which goes right on up to the Pentagon and perhaps even beyond," Senator Levin said.

He said that "some of the environment here was actually set at the White House when they said it was a bunch of legalisms to discuss whether or not the Geneva Conventions would apply to prisoners directly or whether they would be treated consistent with the Geneva Conventions or in the same way but not precisely."

The headline writers do just the same thing. It isn't the torture that is the problem, it's the images. (The WhiteWash House thinks the same way (back)):

"U.S. Must Find a Way to Move Past Images of Prison Abuse"
(via The Times)

The headline is over an article by David Sanger who, in the very last paragraph, gets round to the idea that it's the facts that are the important thing:

If Mr. Bush has a strategy for undoing that damage beyond the television appearances he made on two Arab networks last week, White House officials freely admit they cannot describe it.

"I'm not sure such a strategy is possible," one senior official said late last week. "The facts are simply not with us."

Of course, Facts rule. I love it that Hersh's work is being published in The New Yorker in the "Facts" department. Why can't The Newspaper of Record deal with this?

Facts, facts, facts....

From drip, drip, drip to splash, splash, splash....

Light posting from me this morning. Talk amongst yourselves.

Heaven knows there's plenty to talk about!

If the moon isn't hiding its face from us, that is.

Merciful heavens. Setting dogs on prisoners? What have we come to?

What an outrage. I've had enough. The Pulitzer-light Times really does suck. From now on, I'm going to think of my dollar in the morning as the Times tax and resist paying it. Can you believe Fluffer gets paid for this?

...Mr. Bush's relationship with Mr. Rumsfeld seems complicated right now, but it is nothing compared to the relationship that Mr. Rumsfeld had with Mr. Bush's father...
(via The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!))

Fluffer, repeat after me: I don't give a flying fuck about Rummy's relationship to aWol's Father. Again. I don't give a flying fuck about Rummy's relationship to aWol's Father. Thank you.

What I'd like is some actual NEWS REPORTING. You know, like those SCOOPS the weekly New Yorker keeps getting? And they don't even have a whole news department over there, just this one guy, Sy something? Who'd he used to work for, anyhow? Can we hire him?

What I'd like is some answers to the kind of questions a JAPANESE paper is asking. Is it too much to ask that an AMERICAN paper ask the same questions?

Yet, we feel that the secretary evaded mention of the true crux of the problem. For example, what prompted young American troops to engage in such heinous behavior in the first place? Was this abuse the result of organized instructions or policies handed down by the military or intelligence services? When did President George W. Bush first learn of the mistreatment, incidents which came to light in January through a whistle-blower in the U.S. military?

Well, Fluffer? If the NOTORIOUSLY POLITE JAPANESE can ask these questions, can't a REPORTER FROM THE NEWSPAPER OF RECORD?

Readers! Feel free to share your views on this point with the sadly overworked and increasingly co-opted Times Public editor, Daniel "Bud Man" Okrent, here public@nytimes.com.

NOTE: Memo to Mr. Okrent. I know you don't like "Newspaper of Record," but the customers are right. Deal.

[LIMBAUGH]: This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.
(via Rush Limbaugh

Of course, maybe to Rush, setting the dogs on a helpless prisoner would be a good time. Who knows, anymore?

From Seymour Hersh's interview with CNN:

HERSH: The important thing about the group in this photograph is that it's not -- there's seven people being prosecuted from the -- by the Army from a unit known as the 372nd MP Company.

BLITZER: And today the first court martial was announced where the specialist Jeremy Sivits...

HERSH: Sivits. Right, and this photo came from somebody in a different unit, the 372nd MP Battalion, also at the prison. But it's a whole separate group of people. So now all of a sudden we're not looking at six or seven possible suspects.

No, we're looking at an entire system. And taking these photographs was part of that system:

HERSH: [The New Yorker] photo department analyzed the camera. There were two cameras operating at the time. This was a 12-minute sequence inside a prison. There were two cameras shooting these photos over 12 minutes, so we know two cameras were working.

And we know from the other -- in the other photographs we've seen, and from stories from one of the prisoners who was interviewed last week by The New York Times, one of the guys that showed up in the horrible pictures the week before, one of those naked people being forced to do awful acts to themselves. And he said all during that process there were cameras going.

So I'm here to say that the evidence suggests that cameras and the use of cameras was part of the interrogation process. And I'll tell you what somebody has told me, which is that one of the ways you could possibly get more leverage on a potential witness or if it's somebody you want to interrogate, is to threaten ... a prisoner with taking these photographs and showing them to neighbors or showing them to others. It would be a greater source of humiliation to have others actually see the problems he had in prison.

And where does the fish rot from? The head:

BLITZER: So what are you suggesting? That there was a systematic policy to humiliate, to abuse these prisoners, and it came from where? The order came from where?

HERSH: The article is called "Chain of Command." And what I'm saying is you have to turn the whole way we're approaching the story over. We have to sort of turn the hourglass over from looking at the kids, who were directly involved, and looking at the high-level policy level.

We have to go up the chain of command to see where did this order come to change the rules?

And one of the things I discovered as I wrote about it, is that last November the general of Iraq, General Sanchez, Ricardo Sanchez, the lieutenant general, three-star general, promulgated an order last November to all the prisons, saying from now on Military Intelligence are in control, they run the prisons.

And under Army regulations, the MPs, the military police, they're prison guards. You don't want prison guards involved in interrogations because that leads to an enormous amount of hostility. And you want prisons to be tranquil. Otherwise you're going to have people always at you.

And so the guards are forbidden by Army regulations from getting involved in the interrogation process.

Sanchez, the three-star general in charge of everything, changed it, and [Sanchez] based that change on a recommendation from guess who? Major General Geoffrey Miller, the man that was formerly at Guantanamo, who did a study last summer for Sanchez and who's now back running the prison system.

So, let's go up one more step. Who gave Sanchez the order? Hersh doesn't say. But he does say what they were thinking:

BLITZER: Well, what was the theory behind stripping these prisoners, having dogs there, forcing them to simulate sexual acts, what was the possible logic behind any of that?

HERSH: Well, last fall, if you remember, was a time when the insurgency started blooming again. It was very rough for us, and it was at that time people like General Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, and others, the commander of all of the region, and General Sanchez were talking publicly, we think there's 5,000 people in the insurgency.... They saw it as a finite force. They sort of misread the sort of mass anti- Americanism that obviously exists. Fhe idea was, I guess, to escalate the pressure on them, do everything you can, humiliate them, have the sexual stuff, have photographs there that can be used as leverage. And the idea was to get the names, the magic names of the 5,000 people, so we can go arrest them.

Battle of Algiers, anyone? And the implications are very, very bad:

HERSH: I've talked to Middle Eastern people in the last week, and they say the damage is much more acute. The average person who follows the Islamic word, and believes in it, is really horrified in a profound way about who we are, that we would use women and sex in the way we use it, is to them, it's so degrading and, as I say, perverse.

This is a strategic issue. We're picking a fight with 1.3 billion people. And I'm not sure that the guys -- you know, if you look at the way Rumsfeld and the president handled this, this sort of, "Oh, my God, let's rearrange the deck chairs of the Titanic for the last four months," God knows what they were thinking about. This has been a train coming down the tracks.

You begin to get a sense, [the people in charge] can't cope with information they don't want to hear. They haven't been able to listen to the generals in the Pentagon, who have been saying for six or eight months that we were really in trouble.

They won't listen to them. And it's not because it is a cover- up, it's because they don't listen to what they don't want to hear.

And now we're getting into a strategic struggle with the whole Middle East. This is expanding. And I'm not sure that the guys running the government really know that the high stakes involved.

This is truly a clusterfuck. The only way we're going to get out of this alive—and hopefully with all our cities intact—is to repudiate Bush in the most decisive way possible, come November. Though impeachment would not go amiss.

NOTE For more detail on Military Working Dogs, and why there may be a smoking gun here, see below at Who let the dogs out?", especially the comments by alert readers.

Ethical journalist Seymour Hersh writes:

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.
(via New Yorker)

OK.

The photos were part of an intelligence gathering system. They were digital photos, and that means they were digitally stored on a system somewhere—a CD was burned from them. Where was the system? Who owned it? The military, the contractors, the CIA, the CPA? Who was the system administrator? Who had permission to access the photos?

Note that poor old Donald "Wolf Meat" Rumsfeld might even be telling the truth on this one. If, as we surmise, the distribution of these photos was part of a Fog Machine intelligence gathering system, outside the chain of command, indeed the Pentagon would not have the photos.

In any case, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have the photos now, and are "reviewing" them. What was the chain of custody from the soldiers and/or contractors taking the photos to Rumsfeld?

Above all, are there other sets of the photos, videos, etc., stored on by the military, the Pentagon, or the mercenaries? What about the White House?

Maybe there is a smoking gun.

.


Well. It will be rather difficult for the MWs, the Sabbath Day Gas Bags, and the WhiteWash House, Inerrant Boy and poor old Donald "Wolf Meat" Rumsfeld to portray the torture at Abu Ghraib as individual failures after these photos.

MWDs (Military Working Dogs) are worked as part of a team.

Here are some regulations, from Department of the Army Pamphlet 190­12 (PDF). To quote:

1­7. Quality assurance
Every level of command within the Army has specific responsibilities for making sure that the MWD program is properly established and efficiently managed. This includes ensuring that operational units are provided with trained dogs and handlers to form teams, and the necessary equipment and facilities to maintain effective local MWD programs. The Air Force is the executive manager of the MWD program for the Department of Defense (DOD), and is responsible for the procurement, initial training, and initial distribution of MWDs used by the military services and several Federal agencies. Specific responsibilities are per AR 190­12.

Right up the chain of command, eh? "Every level." Somebody's got to authorize the dogs, the kennels, the handlers, and the purpose. To quote the regulations again:

Requests for authorization of MWDs and their shipping crates are submitted through command channels according to AR 310­34 and AR 310­49 on DA Form 461 0­R (Equipment Changes in MTOE/TDA). Part I is self­explanatory. The request for authorization must identify the nomenclature and line item number (LIN) for the type dogs being requested, as well as specify the number of dogs of each type being requested in Part II. Part III, Personnel, also should be completed so the approving authority has verification that the correct handlers (by number, ASI, and rank/grade) are being requested. Part IV, Justification, contains a complete justification for the dogs being requested as required by AR 190­12. If additional space is needed, continue on plain white, letter­size paper. DA Form 4610­R is forwarded through command channels as a letter request for authorization of equipment. Approval authority for all requests for authorization of MWDs is at Headquarters, Department of the Army (DALO­EARA­A).

So. "Forward through command channels." Who let the dogs out?

NOTE These regulations are from the Army site. If we have an alert reader who is military, perhaps they can give us more detail on current MWD regulations.

Hersh drops the other shoe. Read "Chain of Command".

Eesh. Setting dogs loose on the prisoners. And taking photographs was a standard part of the process of dehumanization.

Reading Hersh, it looks to me like there's no smoking gun issue, but I think it's a "fog machine" issue, not a smoking gun issue.

It's no coincidence that the chain of command that led to the torture was chaotic; the chaos would be a matter of policy, intended to produce exactly the behavior it did produce, with plausible deniability built in. Standard operating procedure for Bush. The fog machine was deliberately built to replace the chain of command.

The intelligence produced by the fog machine would from from civilian contractors/military intelligence people out of uniform to.... Where? Nobody will say. My guess, FWIW, is that information flows through operatives at the RNC/CPA right to the West Wing (that is, it's Iran-Contra all over again, just a thousand times worse).

I'm guessing that the workings of the fog machine that has replaced the chain of command, in both Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably Gitmo, have a distinctive feature: What historian Ian Kershaw's calls "working toward the fuhrer". For example, wasn't necessary for Hitler to issue specific orders for the final solution, since all his supporters knew what He wanted anyhow. It was Hitler's executive style to leave the details to others, and as a result there are very few of his fingerprints on policy.

In consequence, it's highly unlikely that there are orders for torture flowing down from the West Wing; with the chain of command replaced by the fog machine, specific orders would not be needed. It's highly probable, however, that information—in the form of digital photos, interrogation reports, perhaps voice—flowed up to the West Wing and is stored there, even today. Over the top? Think: It seems that the abuses, though present since Afghanistan, became much worse during the hunt for Saddam. Can anyone seriously believe that interrogation results, and methods, for the Saddam hunt didn't flow up to the West Wing?[1]

Nacht und nebel ... In my own country.

Oh, and not to make anyone seriously paranoid, but the fog machine principle of "working toward the fuhrer" would be quite easy to implement in the multi-level marketing scheme that Rove has set up for the 2004 campaign. Eh? If that structure becomes any sort of "permanent campaign."

Notes
[1]It would be interesting to see if an enterprising defense lawyer—perhaps even a brave Army lawyer at the show trials about to take place in Baghdad—could work out a way to subpoena such information, perhaps before an international court.

You know, when I heard RNC/CPA flak Dan Senor call for "a fair and transparent process" for dealing with the Iraq prison tortures, I had a momentary feeling of hope: that these guys would change, that just this one time, they'd stop trying to play us for suckers, and have exhibit a little common decency.

Not a chance.

You know what "fair and transparent" turns out to mean? Show trials for the the Privates and Specialists!

A 24-year-old military policeman will face a public court martial in Baghdad next week, the first of seven American soldiers to be tried on charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners, a U.S. military spokesman said Sunday.
(via Reuters)

How can they expect anyone to be fooled by this?

Meanwhile, Rummy takes responsibility by uttering the words "I take responsibility" (thereby proving, if anyone didn't already know, that in the malAdministration it's truly impossible to get fired—except for telling the truth). Too bad the troops can't do the same thing. Well, shit rolls downhill, right?

Now, a show trial for Rummy in Baghdad—that might get people's attention. He's so very, very duck pit ready.

I'd call it a total failure of leadership

"Additional features and a whole new look."

Readers, I assume you'll be able to read, but we'll be unable to post. I guess we'll find out!

You should read this piece from Newsweek about Rumsfeld's creation of a "report no evil" culture at the Pentagon. Here's the "money quote":

And yet there was Rumsfeld and his faithful (perhaps too faithful) JCS chairman, General Myers, telling Congress last week that they had read the report of their own investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, only after it was widely quoted by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Rumsfeld, who commands the most powerful military in the history of the world, verged on the pathetic in the hearings, complaining that he had been unable to get hold of a plastic disk with the offending pictures until only the night before. At one point he lamented that nobody had come forward to rescue him from his own poor PR instincts. "It breaks our hearts," he said, "that in fact someone did not say, 'Wait. Look, this is terrible. We need to do something ...' " If Rumsfeld had been a better leader, maybe someone would have.

You should also read this piece by Fareed Zakaria that really hits the nail on the head:

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."

...

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

Indeed.

Surely this is finally it for Rumsfeld, right? There's no way he can stick around now after screwing up damned near everything he's been involved with for three and a half years, right?

It's a frightening thing that this is such a pathetically immoral White House that is so concerned with its political future that it would keep Rumsfeld the ghoul on only to avoid admitting what everyone knows by now: they've screwed the pooch a hundred different ways in Iraq.

W's Iraq policy has been an abysmal failure. Everyone knows that. It's time for W to quit playing politics with American lives and actually effing do something about it.

To Los Angeles readers: When you bring the breakfast tray to Mom, make sure you fold the paper so this story is on top:

Concerns are growing that Al Qaeda or a related group could detonate a "dirty bomb" that would spew radioactive fallout across an American or European city, according to intelligence analysts, diplomats and independent nuclear experts.
(via the Pulitzer-heavy LA Times)

Well, Cassandra's looking better and better:

Intelligence agencies have reported no reliable, specific threats involving dirty bombs or nuclear weapons...

Well, that tears it. Bush doesn't have the date, the time, and the target, so the intelligence isn't "actionable." We're doomed.

... but senior U.S. and European officials and outside experts said several factors had heightened fears in recent weeks.

The threat of attack is great enough that a senior European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it is
"not a matter of if there is a nuclear-related attack by Al Qaeda, but when it occurs."

Experts inside and outside government said sophisticated extremists have the ability to plan and execute the detonation of a dirty bomb. They had no answer for why a dirty bomb has not been unleashed.

"I'm very surprised that a radiological device hasn't gone off," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "There is a bigger puzzle — why no Al Qaeda attacks since Sept. 11 in the U.S.?"

It's quiet.... Too quiet...

The European intelligence official said planning for a large-scale attack has suffered setbacks with the arrests of numerous Al Qaeda operatives. But, he added, "the division is still focused on spectaculars, and they take three or four years to plan and execute."

Nearly 10 million containers of radioactive material — including the detritus from medical facilities — exist in the United States and 49 other countries, according to a 2003 survey by the congressional General Accounting Office.

The agency said that each year, hundreds of containers are lost or stolen in the U.S. and other countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union. The report warned that the radioactive material posed a "national security threat" and urged that controls be strengthened worldwide.

Tell me again why Bush is so good on keeping us safe? Oh, wait, I forgot! Cities vote Blue! They're not "us"! (And they probably deserve to be cleansed from the Fire on High anyhow.) Fuck 'em. And if you don't think His thinking is exactly that cynical and callous, recall that the Republicans treated first responder money as campaign spoils, and passed the money out to their base.

See "Bush's Reckless Indifference to the Nightmare Scenario" (back) for the ugly, ugly details.

Dateline 2004: Second Sunday in May.

To the Editor of the Evening Sun: Sir - I consider it nothing short of blasphemous to allow symphony concerts on the Sabbath by the City Band. On my way to church Sunday evening with my school-teacher daughter and several others of my little brood we had to pass the Lyric Music Hall, and there we saw a mass of people going in to spend their evening listening to worldly music instead of going to their respective churches. It makes it so hard on a mother trying to raise her loved ones properly to have them see that the city itself is a party to this desecration of the Sabbath.... My school-teacher daughter, who is well up on music and sings in the choir, later saw the program, and she tells me that there was not one piece of the music played that was written by an American. I confess that it gave me some relief to see that our good Americans will not allow their names on a program of that sort, yet it is not right that foreigners should be allowed to make money by desecrating the Sabbath and thereby keep their families in affluence. If any of those foreigners who wrote those pieces live in Baltimore they ought to be arrested under our Sunday laws. - An American Mother

That letter, and many more just like it, all signed "An American Mother", were published by the Baltimore Evening Sun during the early and mid 1920's.

I love this kind of stuff because I like to read old newspapers and magazines from those years and sure enough the pages of those old publications are filled with correspondence exactly like the example above; all holding forth on a wide variety of topics and questions and opinions of the day; all generating further reactions from engaged readers.

I found five letters (including the one above) penned by "An American Mother", and reproduced in an article titled "Letters from 'An American Mother'", by Eric Lund, (then assistant city editor for the Chicago Daily News.) Lund's article appears in the December 1969 edition of the American Heritage Magazine and begins as follows:

Except in their lovelorn columns, newspapers today discourage the use of pen names by their letter writers. Gone are "Civitas," "Veritas," and "Pro Bono Publico" of an earlier time. Less and less frequent opinions signed "Angry," "Disappointed," or "Irate Taxpayer."

Sure enough i can't think of any newspapers today who will print a letter to the editor that doesn't require some variety of full disclosure and a traceable verifiable background check. Phone number, address, drivers liscense, pets name, and so on. There's probably some kind of clause contained in the Patriot Act which would make the publication of an anonymous letter to the editor a federal offense punishable by fifteen years in some underground SuperMax facility on Guam. God only knows.

But (and who would have thunk it in 1969) now we have blogging. We have Atrios and Digby and Hesiod and Lambert Strether and all you lovable characters out there to many to list. You know who you are. Returned are the "Civitas," "Veritas," and "Pro Bono Publico" of a bygone era. Welcome back-forward Roger Ailes (not the ugly baldhead one).

Lund continues:

"Mother" was an unyielding moralist, a militant Prohibitionist, a staunch defender of the Sunday blue laws, and a devoted churchgoer opposed to the theory of evolution, to Italian opera, and to nude statues. She had a knack for taking something that nearly everyone regarded as fairly innocent (an opera, for instance) and discovering that it was immoral (she objected to Tristan and Isolde because it "condoned freelove"). Frequently she offended someone or some group, always perfectly naturally but in a way that demanded response. Almost invariably committed some blunder in stating her argument, an error of fact or logic that called for correction. In 1925, during the Scopes trial over the legality of teaching evolution, one of her letters began: Sir: I think that trial of religious liberty down in Dayton is the most wonderful thing since Martin Luther stood up before the Cardinals and said, 'Give me liberty of give me death!'..." [...] ...she proposed a Get-Baptized Week, prayer meetings on streetcars for young people on their way to work, and enforcement of the Ten Commandments by the police.

Sounds eerily familiar even today doesn't it? Think Judge Roy Moore (a judge only "An American Mother" could love.) Or Nude statues, hehe. Yes siree it sure does ring some bells these days and there ain't no doubt "Mother" was a fairly accurate reflection of the views and sentiments of thousands of Americans in the early decades of the 20th century. Listen to "Mother" hold forth on the rule of law and the war on intoxicating substances, retro-stylie.

To the Editor of the Evening Sun: Sir - ...I have never had military ideas, but for the life of me I cannot see why right-thinking people should object to our army and navy enforcing the laws of our country. Surely a man who drinks liquor when it is forbidden cannot complain if right-thinking people put him to death... - An American Mother.

That outta take care of the Coors family once and for all. "Mother", if she were with us today, would love Little Green Footballs and The Presidential Prayer Team. The only catch is, "Mother", was a parody. A put-on. A clever subtle caricature, a mirror held up (reductio ad absurdum), to the opinions, religious sentiments, fears, and politics of pre World War 2 America. Mother was a merry prankster.

While reading Lund's article and the letters from AMM to the Evening Sun i couldn't help think about our own prolific letter writing version of "An American Mother": Jesus' General himself, aka: General J.C. Christian, patriotboy. Granted the General would be easy to track down as a satirical/parody effort but i have to wonder how many of the people who receive his letters would actually catch the spoof if those letters simply appeared on their own merits, free of the General's weblog source. I'd be willing to bet that if the General were to sign his letters "An American Patriot," and have them accepted by any number of small town newspapers across today's latter atomic age America, he'd be greeted without a second thought by an alarming number of mis-wired specimens who would immediately recognize him as a sage and prophet and keeper of the moral compass. An heroic "right-thinking" 100% Murican defender of women, children, human property, and the Christian conservative realm. For all the wrong thinkin' reasons of course. If i thought the General could pull a fast one on the local editors of any number of reactionary sheets, without ending up in a hidey-hole on Guam, I'd try to talk him into introducing the Chamber of Love and Correction to the inhabitants of Abbeville, South Carolina. Or some crazy assed place like that.

Many readers of the Baltimore Evening Sun recognized "Mother" as a leg pull and would respond in turn. Many also believed that H.L Mencken was responsible for "An American Mother". He wasn't.

Alas, "An American Mother" died in 1944, and in the news stories that followed Mother's departure the Baltimore Evening Sun revealed that "An American Mother" was in actuality a mother by invention only, and in fact not even of the female persuasion, but rather the dean of Baltimore's consular corps, representative of Denmark, one Holger A. Koppel. (born male, in Copenhagen, in 1871)

Koppel was however, as it turned out to be, an old friend of Henry Mencken. (Google "Holger Koppel") In 1909 Koppel and Mencken worked together to translate five Henrik Ibsen plays into English, including A Dolls House, which were then later published, no doubt, to the angst of those who opposed the women's rights movement at the turn of the century.

What kind of people do really believe in this evolution nonsense? Am I to believe that I have come down from monkeys? As far as I and my family are concerned, we are satisfied to trace down to Adam and Eve, even though, of course, Eve was wicked enough to eat the apple the serpent offered her, but she, poor woman, was new to the ways of the wicked world. I say, put the people who believe in such silly nonsense out in cages with the other monkeys in Druid Park and they would soon learn sense and believe in what the Bible tells us.... - An American Mother.

So there ya have it. Viva An American Mother! Toss one back for mom! while listening to an Italian opera - or wading in a pool at the base of a fountain of buck naked nymphs.

Happy American Mothers Day.

*

This was really the Day of the Long Posts, wasn't it? First farmer's napalm in the morning, then a B52-scale carpet bombing from me...

Sorry for the military metaphors, but war seems to be on my mind these days. And, or so, tonight I went out and combined two great pleasures: To eat at Pasion and, to read while I ate, a new book: David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer—August 1914.

Surely an expensive dinner, and an expensive book, is reckless extravagance in one so old; I should be saving my pennies, instead of getting, tonight, replete and drunk, as farmer was this morning.

On the other hand, if Cassandra turns out to be right (the Howler), why save my pennies at all?

[Richard Gephardt, on Hardball last November:]

GEPHARDT: What are we worried about? We’re worried about an A-bomb in a Ryder truck in Washington, in St. Louis, in L.A. It can’t happen. We have to prevent it from happening. It cannot happen.

“We have to prevent it from happening,” Gephardt said. But readers, it won’t be prevented from happening if we clown about peanut butter! We can’t put idiots in charge of vital functions—and idiots currently run our press corps.

Not to mention our government. The Bush administration, in its combination of fickle certainty, militarism, diplomatic ineptitude, and reckless indifference to consequences, reminds me of nothing so much as the Imperial Court of Kaiser Wilhelm.

So, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow (back)....

Rationalization? Let's devoutly hope so. Night all.

NOTE For any cursor readers directed to this link, here is Two words.

Gee, there's a morale booster. I wonder why they're doing it?

Kathryn Kramer and Electrolite via Scaramouche.

UPDATE Perhaps, just perhaps, this is why. Via Modo:

In the information age, [Rumsfeld] complained to senators, "people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

That's interesting. "Against the law." Is Rummy suggesting that anyone should be prosecuted for distributing and printing the photos?

Yawn.

Readers, if you've been following the story, you know that the the Taguba report says the torture was a systemic problem.

YABL, YABL, YABL.

UPDATE It's really pitiful, isn't it? At this point, all Inerrant Boy is doing is giving ways for desperate believers to avoid cognitive dissonance. The truth isn't in him. Whoops! I meant, "the truth isn't in Him." Sorry.

The ever essential Orcinus has had enough and issues a manifesto here. I hope this post from him is one day known as Orcinus's "Long Post", following George Kennan's "Long Telegram," since both will have inspired a strategy for a winning another long, cold war.

Memo to the SCLM: We're coming.

UPDATE: I'd like to respond to Orcinus's manifesto with a lengthy posting of my own.

Alert readers as good citizens
I'll begin with the notion of "alert reader." I started using this phrase for contributors in the comments who shared information I thought was especially useful or interesting, when filling in for the mighty Atrios. I stole the phrase from Dave Barry, partly to honor him, and partly to honor the readers and their efforts.

But after reading Orcinus, I'm thinking that being an "alert reader" is one qualification for being a good citizen. It takes a lot of alertness and desire to be informed: To get the real story, if that's even possible, from reading our "free press." Why is that? What can we do about it? And can the blogosphere help? I think so, through a "Revolution in Media Affairs", whose ethical, business, and technical foundation I will sketch below. Readers, your feedback will be greatly appreciated. I hope the spark that Orcinus struck with his manifesto roars into life quite quickly.

"Beautiful plumage!"
We the People can't "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" if we aren't informed, because if we don't know what's going on, we can't exercise our responsibilities as citizens. The First Amendment establishes a free press for this very reason: To keep power in the hands of the people by keeping them informed. A long train of abuses shows that press has shamefully abandoned its responsibilities to inform. I don't care whether this is due to corporatization, media concentration, or millionaire pundit values: Despite the best efforts of dedicated individuals like Seymour Hersh, the free press, institutionally, is pushing up the daisies.

There's an old Navy saying: "You can't buff a turd." And, really, that's what I was going to do today, and maybe what I've been doing for the last year: To follow along after the Unfree Press, trying to clean up the distortions, make the unmade connections, read between the lines for the real story, hiss the villains, and cheer the heroes and heroines. Trying to clean up our discourse by buffing one turd at a time. It can't be done. Too many turds, and not enough hours in the day.

A Revolution in Media Affairs (RMA)
What is to be done? The question brings us at once to the blogosphere. Orcinus, if I summarize correctly, hopes to intensify the role of the blogosphere as a "central clearinghouse for information in the media revolt," a "media watchdog", an uber-ombudsman, campaigning to bring pressure to bear on the legitimate media and thereby freeing real journalists—they do exist—to do the jobs they need to do, campaigning for the reinstatement of the Fairness doctrine, and so forth.

I disagree. With Carlyle, recall the words of the courtier Liancourt to Louis XVI: "Sire," answered Liancourt, "It is not a revolt, it is a revolution." Revolt would mean that the blogosphere would help the Unfree Press to be a little more free, so they can do their jobs better. Revolution would mean mean the blogosphere would become the Free Press that the SCLM can no longer be.

What needs to be done: Gut the Unfree Press by taking our discourse back from them, and create a Free Press to bring our stories forward.

Creating a Free Press
The requirements for creating a free press fall into three categories: Ethics, Business Model, and Infrastructure.

Ethics. Since the beginning of the slow-moving, Unfree Press-fuelled winger coup that began with Whitewater and ended with Florida 2000, we've seen—with the exception of a few shining individuals like Seymour Hersh (back)—a complete collapse of journalistic ethics. See The Daily Howler, day after day after day. Orcinus summarizes the relentless and corrosive trivialization of our discourse relentlessly in his "Long Post". The Unfree Press simply doesn't cover the story! Rather, as the Howler shows, the Unfree Press recycles the same old scripts (example) [1].

The remedy is an ethic with two parts: (1) Facts rule, and (2) Theories are disclosed.[2] This should be the contract of Free Press bloggers with their readers.

Facts rule. A simple example: I just read a story in the print Atlantic about oppo research, and there, right in the lead paragraph, was the false meme that Gore claimed he invented the Internet. Obviously, a publication with an immune system too weak to defend itself against that meme is doomed to die—eviscerated by faster, smaller, smarter creatures—like thecreatures living in the blogosphere. To defend my interests as a citizen, I should have put $4.95 in a blogger's tip jar, not given it to an enterprise that's corrupting my discourse.

Facts rule! Not stories about hair cuts, peanut butter, interns, cute children, "court news, ... who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out", and all the other phases of Operation Steaming Load. The Media Revolution has to follow the facts wherever they lead, as a Free Press should do. Maybe that's going to contradict some cherished beliefs. Fine. If it turns out that the earth really is 6000 years old, as the fundamentalists claim, then we had better be prepared to accept and deal.

Note, with Orcinus, that the blogosphere has "just in time fact checking" built in. Get a fact wrong, and alert readers write in at once with links to the correct information.

Disclose theories. By "theory" I don't mean bias; I mean a picture of how the world works that is testable. Where necessary, the theory (if any) under which a news story is being told should be disclosed. Example: In my role as Sultan of Snark, I slammed Bush as a narcissist and a sociopath (blog). [Readers: comments on this are OT.] Alert reader Rebecca Allen commented that the two were quite distinct, and as a professional, ethics restrained her from making a diagnosis without having met the man. She fully disclosed the theory under which she was operating, and that raised the level of discourse and moved the story forward.

Here again, the blogosphere, in the person of Rebecca Allen, had "just in time theory checking" built in.

Checks and balances I think I'm getting this twin ethic—that facts rule and theories are disclosed—from the academic/professional notion of the footnote: Footnotes provide alert readers with a check on the authors. (One of Anne Coulter's worst perversions is her abuse of the footnote mechanism.)

Here again, as we have seen, the blogosphere excels. With links and URIs, facts are checkable, and theories can be named and disclosed. For example, when we cite the PNAC plans for a series of wars beginning with Iraq, the militarization of space, and so forth (PDF), we can link to their report, and use "PNAC" as a shorthand for what that picture of the world is.

Note, however, that this ethic requires some revision to existing editorial practice in the blogosphere. Now, a blog is all about authorial voice in the present. Granted, there may be several authors. And granted, the present may mean anything from "the top post" to "this week's posts." But the ethics outlined above mean that there must be more voices than the author's: the alert readers will have voices, too. And fact and theory checking are based on linking, perhaps into the deep past. This means that rich links within, between, and outside of the blogosphere will take on great importance.

Readers, thoughts?

Business Model
The difficulty with the blogosphere—and possibly why Orcinus confines its effect to that of revolt, rather than revolution—is that at present it is still dependent on the Unfree Press. For the most part we are, like it or not, parasites on a news stories generated by others. There are matchbook covers for truck driving, art school, and so forth, but none with "Get paid to blog!" on them.

Reportage means funding. A business model is needed to sustain a Free Press, RMA-enabled blogosphere. A Free Press can't create all its own content for free. Commentary is reasonably easy. All the blogger needs for commentary is a laptop and a connection. Reportage, however, is key. If we have an ethic that facts rule, facts are something we need to go get, not allow to be brought to us. And reportage takes sustained effort, involves travel, may involve liability, and can involve a lot of risk—from nobody taking the story up all the way to getting killed. If there is no reportage in the blogosphere, there is no RMA, and we're still buffing the turds. Finally, in the case of a massive, RIAA-style assault on the blogosphere over "fair use" issues, generating our own, unencumbered content will become critical.

Existing practices. To take the story away from the Unfree Press, and replace it with a story based on the ethics of a Free Press, at least some story writing in the blogosphere has to be funded; no other solution will scale. How can work in the blogosphere be made to pay? Existing practice (besides foundation money and patronage) for funding falls into the following categories:

1. Make the leap to mainstream journalism.


2. Sell site advertising and promotional items. The money right now can be "beer money," but could become substantial with time.
.

3. Solicit donations to cover costs: the server, and so forth.


4. Solicit donations to cover a story: the Iowa primaries, for example.
   
5. Open a tip jar; use PayPal, or some similar service.

Model 1 ("mainstreaming") is all to the good, but not revolutionary. It does not take the stories away from the Unfree press.

Models 2 ("advertising") and 3 ("cover costs") enable revolution—"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one"—but are not in themselves revolutionary, since they are neutral in regard to the relation of writer to reader (see "Ethics", above).

Model 4 ("cover a story") is genuinely revolutionary: Imagine! Readers funding the writing they want, with no intermediary.

Model 5 ("tip jar") is also revolutionary, since again the contract between reader and writer is altered by disintermediating the Unfree Press.

Proposal. I would like to propose the following extension of the "tip jar" model:

A tip jar for every contributor

This model is also revolutionary, since it insists that any alert reader can become an informative writer. Hopefully, this will create a virtuous cycle, as writing communities develop in which more and more readers support more and more informative writers.

Readers, thoughts?

Infrastructure
Finally, let's turn to the technical infrastructure that would underpin an RMA. Without speaking of particular technologies (this or others) I would like to throw out some thoughts, which experts (I am not one!) may wish to clarify:

Storage. Storage needs to decentralized and permit replication. We have to assume that people are going to want to take the system down. If storage is decentralized (yet retrieval from store is transparent) that will be much harder. Similarly, information needs to be stored redundantly (with retrieval again transparent). If the Free Press goes down in country A due to attack, it should be able to switch seamlessly to country B. It may be that P2P techniques have their place here.

Licensing. Creative Commons. Part of me wants to be able to have writers own their material, a la Xanadu. But I'm not sure that's possible with the storage model above. It may be that the answer is in the ethical realm: Material put into the blogosphere belongs to the blogosphere (modulo "fair use" material). The tip jar takes care of compensation.

Protected identity. It will be best for the Free Press if contributors are identifiable. Readers will find it easy to return to contributors they trust, and writers will find it easier to build their tip jars and increase their congtributions to the story the Free Press is telling. (It may be that the tip jar is sufficient reputation system, but of that I am not sure. Readers?) This does not at all imply that contributor's "real world" identities should be revealed; quite the reverse. [3]

Open source blog tool. The Free Press will be much less vulnerable to attack if it runs on open source software. For example, if the Free Press ran using proprietary software on servers owned by a large corporation, no matter how benevolent, one may easily imagine a text-based algorithm built into the software for detection of certain word clusters in certain blogs, with the identities of the contributors data-mined and forwarded to the relevant authorities. If the software on which the Free Press runs is open source and widely distributed, and the storage and identity features listed above are in place, this nightmare scenario is much less likely to happen.

Plug-in architecture. The "facts rule" and "disclose theories" ethics of the Free Press demand a lot of linking, as we have seen: The self-correcting nature of the blogosphere depends on this. Smarter links may be needed for sites that handle particular kinds of stories, facts, and theories. It's highly likely that existing linking techniques are not robust enough to meet these requirements on a global scale. Is it sufficient to arrive at a page without knowing why? Probably not; certainly not in the case of a speaker whose native language is not English. The "class" attribute in the (X)HTML <a> attribute seems to be ripe for exploitation here. (Readers?) In addition, different media must be accommodated. I would like to be able to blog from my mobile phone, send pictures from my phone, send voice, etc. A plug-in architecture would accomodate these different media types.

Conclusion
To summarize: For the safety of the Republic, a Revolution in Media Affairs is required to re-establish a Free Press, and as a consequence disintermediate and gut the SCLM and its MWs. The RMA will not be televised, but will take place in the blogosphere, where a lot of people have "had enough." The RMA needs a foundation in ethics, business, and technology. The ethical foundation: Facts rule; Disclose theories. The business foundation: All contributors can get a tip jar. The technical foundation: Decentralized and replicating storage, creative commons licensing, protected identity, and open source software with plug-ins that support robust linking and content submission in multiple media types.

That's my thought today. I put "[draft]" at the top in case there's sufficient interest in developing these ideas further.

Readers? Thoughts? Post them to the comments or mail me here.

Notes
[1] As farmer (back) shows, we're seeing one such story now on CNN with Rumsfeld: A story named by the authors of Military Misfortunes "The Man in the Dock."
[2] The distinction comes from a wonderful story by Adam Gopnick, who explains how his Parisian friends were astounded by the idea that The New Yorker would have a "fact checker." On the other hand, New Yorkers would be astounded to hear of a "theory checker," which wouldn't give the Cartesian French a moment's pause.
[3] We might, following current practice in the executive branch, call this "Blogosphere Privilege": In the current climate, citizens will not feel free to give "unfettered advice and counsel" to their government unless their identities are protected.

Which is:

A "total failure of leadership".

(on Iraq prison torture, the Iraq war, the WMDs, and so much else).

The string is up to number six now (Atrios, of course). But the "feeling lucky" link is not.

Let's all try to do our part. Granted, it's a simple, mindless pleasure. So?

What's with all this: Listening to CNN last night (Friday, May 07), the shut-ins at CNN were breathlessly yammering on about Donald Rumsfeld's revelatory bombshell announcement, made during congressional hearings, that there are more ugly photos, even videotapes, depicting torture and possibly the rape and murder of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (and god only knows where else).

Here's CNN's dozy porch dog Aaron Brown yapping about the matter to Jamie McIntyre: (bold emphasis in transcripts is mine)

[excerpts] CNN Newsnight, May 07, 2004

BROWN: The secretary before the Congress today. As you heard, even as he apologized the secretary dropped a bombshell, within the Pentagon there is more, more photographs, videotapes, perhaps more to tarnish the country in the eyes of the world, at the very least more to investigate and explain.

With that side of the story here's CNN's Jamie McIntyre. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (voice-over): The revelation that there are many more photographs, even videotapes said to show prisoner abuse described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman, resulted in an ominous warning.

[...]

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: Apparently, the worst is yet to come potentially in terms of disturbing events.

MCINTYRE: But there are no plans to release them.

RUMSFELD: If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse. That's just a fact. I mean I looked at them last night and they're hard to believe.

"Bombshell"—"revelation"—???—Since when? Why didn't this bombshell revelation warrant a revelation, or at the least a bombshell mention from CNN on May 02, 2004 (back here) when Seymour Hersh revealed the exact same information to that CNN "news" delivery automaton Wolf Blitzer?

BLITZER: And I just want to point out, General Myers said he has not read that report yet, it hasn't reached up to him yet in the chain of command.

HERSH: I certainly believe him, which as far as I'm concerned, more evidence of the kind of systematic breakdown we're talking about. But let me read you the kind of stuff he said that predated the photographing.

"Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoritic acid liquid on detainees, pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with broomhandle and a chair, threatening them with rape, sodomizing a detainee with chemical lights and perhaps a broomstick, sicking military dogs on detainees." I mean...

[...]

BLITZER: So, what you're suggesting is that the six soldiers who have now been indicted, if you will -- and they're facing potentially a court martial -- they were told to go ahead and humiliate these prisoners? And several of these soldiers were women, not just men.

HERSH: In one photograph, you see 18 other pairs of legs, just cropped off. There were a lot of other people involved, watching this and filming this. There were other cameras going. There were videotapes too.

And this -- I'm sure that, you know, in this generation these kids have CD-ROMs all over the place. We'll see more eventually.

[...]

BLITZER: Well, beyond the politics of this, but you're assuming that this is much more widespread than this one incident, and then that these pictures that we have -- we don't have pictures of other incidents. That's what you're...

HERSH: It's not just a question of what I'm assuming. General Taguba says it's systematic, it's out of control, it's a problem, we've got to deal with it. This is what the report says. It's a devastating report, and I just hope they make it public.

[...]

BLITZER: We heard from Dan Senor earlier in this program, suggesting he said he didn't know of anyone who died at Abu Ghraib prison.

HERSH: I have some photographs I'll be glad to share with him anytime he wants to know.

Hersh said all that on May 02. Hersh also revealed this information during a radio interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.

I myself listened to Hersh's interview with Goodman while driving around in the countryside hither and fro in search of a nice old isolated farmhouse where I can raise me up an airforce of agile attack starlings that will be trained to pounce from the sky upon my command. For instance, to plummet from the azure firmament upon Sean Hannity and sodomize him in front of a bus load of horrified pilgrims bound for a Legion of Christ picnic. I have photos too. Of the starlings that is. I'm still working out the logistics of plummeting and pouncing and swooping and bird sodomy and so forth, but you get the idea. Plus, I have some other shit to do so it's not like I can just be driving around all day thinking up good ideas. But you get the idea.

Where was I? Oh yeah.... CNN's attempt to portray Rumsfeld and the Pentagon as forthcoming and on top of the whole Abu Ghraib "scandal" in order to mask the impression that Rumsfeld would not clearly answer the important questions he was asked. Like when, where, and how did he really learn about the bullshit taking place in Abu Ghraib.

Leave it up to CNN to conveniently forget what Seymour Hersh had told them on May 2nd, five days before Rumsfeld's later "revelations". Why? To shine all later hosannas for any forthcoming-like glorious strikes and bombshells of enlightenment upon the heroic leadership at the Pentagon. Not to mention the gallant exploits of His Holy Archangel of the first circle of the de hierarchia celesti, the Seraphim Rumsfeld.

No, I don't recall any excitable declarations of bombshells and great revelations from the celebrated porch chimes at CNN following Seymour Hersh's earlier visit with Parade Marshall Blitzer. Not until May 7th, following Herr Rumsfeld's self serving regurgitation of the already obvious revelations, do we get any big CNN noise making and falling bombshells or any other manner of how should we say, erect manipulated grand attentions.

Just listen to that awful crypt keeper Judy Woodruff filling in for CNN wax museum doorstop Paula Zahn: May 07. 2004

JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, I'm Judy Woodruff in Washington. Paula Zahn is off tonight. It has been a day of drama and political tension, as the Iraqi prison scandal led to an extraordinary round of hearings on Capitol Hill. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WOODRUFF (voice over): Donald Rumsfeld says he's sorry. He says there are more and even worse pictures of prisoner abuse that we haven't seen. And while he didn't resign, he says it's possible.

[...]

WOODRUFF: Here's what you need to know right now. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he is sorry for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. In testimony today on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld warned that even more graphic videos and pictures of abuse will likely surface. Rumsfeld later announced three of the four people who will sit on an independent panel to investigate the scandal.

Judy also informed us that the donut-crap manufacturer Krispy Kreme Worldwide issued its first diabetes—I mean profit!—warning.

Krispy Kreme issued its first profit warning. The doughnut maker blames the low-carb diet craze. It says earnings for fiscal year 2005 will be 10 percent lower than expected.

Thanks Judy—Who the FUCK cares! (fairness correction) No, really, we can't learn about this kind of important corporate news-o-mercial gah-gah grabass just anywhere. If it were not for CNN how would we learn about important shifting investment opportunities in the sexy fast paced global junk-pastry manufacturing sector. You're on top of your game Judy, and don't let any unwashed low bred rust-belt flyover leech like me tell ya different. Smooches!

Hey. Screw youz guys. I love Judy Woodruff. Without Judy i wouldn't be able to inform you that whenever i watch Judy on my cheap third world 20th century low definition TV display device I am reminded of tragic domestic pet tragedies. Judy always has that bereft faraway look on her face which always reminds me of the grim stranger who shows up at your front door to tell you that they have just run over a cat on the road in front of your house. And it's almost always, almost certainly, your cat. Know that "look" I'm talkin' about? Eh? Have you noticed that about Judy too, or is it just me?

Judy also reminds me of a chattering stringy haired shrunken head being jostled around on the end of a fireplace poker—but that's obviously partisan and not really the point is it?

What was the point anyway? I can't remember. LOL! Uh-oh, wait... I recall Larry King and some old guy with dignified hair named John Warner (R-Virginia) babbling about revelations and "worst yet to come" scenarios but I can't remember why those worst case yet to come scenarios were supposed to be worse or why or who John Warner (R-Virginia) even is. Even though his hair was very attractive to people who buy magazines in drug stores. Is John Warner (R-Virginia) one of those nuts Larry King always interviews who can communicate with dead people on cell phones? Could be. Tune in to CNN Saturday night as Nancy Grace asks the question, "Should dead people who communicate from beyond the grave over cell phones be allowed testify against defendants in death penalty cases?" Very compelling. Get all you need from Gateway for under 500 bucks! Welcome back. I got a letter from an escort service lady in LA who would like a reciprocal link to her web-log! She seems pretty cool and sits on a balcony in a pink bikini and rubs ice cubes all over her thighs. (Who can argue with that.) I like her. Next: Have you heard about Lynndie England's upcoming Playboy shoot?! Oh my gawd! I'm so sure—Hey, shout out, like yo, I should be working for CNN totally! Awe my Gawd!—Wows of the week!—I am!

Update: Never never never try to operate self publishing machinery when you are drunk!

*

Rummy. So very, very duckpit ready.

First day with a hint of Philly's steam heat summer. Spring was nice while it lasted....

Riverbend has given me an opportunity to link back to one of Tresy's more essential posts: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind; click here to re-read it.

Tim Dunlop rightly calls it challenging, and warns that if you think it unAmerican, you are part of the problem.

There is no better evidence that both Tresy and Tim are right than the agonized cry from the heart this young Iraqi woman shows us in her latest post, dated today.

I can't bear to quote from it; just read it. And then think about it. Don't take easy vindication from it, either, just because you were against this war.

I'll have more to say about it on the weekend, I suppose; it deserves something more than easy reponses.

The Sidster:

bu Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration imperatives and policies.

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Toguba report, gave orders to US soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the Bush military strategy of invading with a relatively light force.

"This is the only one where they took pictures," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocate of Human Rights Watch, and a former staff member of the National Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures.
(via Guardian)

On the contractors and the staffing, what we said. See The perfect shitstorm (back).

On the gulag: Yes, and it would be nice to see this on the nightly news.

It's the combination of thuggishness and ineptness that's driving me nuts. When you're being totally fucked by these guys, you never know if it's because they're true thugs and they've targetted you, or whether you're caught up in a clusterfuck they created when they didn't get the memo on something.

Eesh.

In The Sopranos this week, we find Little Carmine Lupertazzi dealing with the fallout from his ill-thought out decision to whack Joe Peeps over a dispute about protection money. Nicknamed "Brainless the Second" by Tony, Little Carmine has seized the reins of power after his father's death; his idea of being a Leader is handing out washing machines to his friends while boasting of his tacky "trompay la oil" paintings. In this scene, he tries to dismiss the growing worries of his older, loyal lieutenant, Angelo, and is supported by his second in command, the conniving toady Rusty Millio:

Little Carmine: The point I'm trying to illustrate is that of course no one wants conflict, but historically, historical changes have come out of war.

Rusty: As far as I'm concerned, it's a new day. All treaties and old ways of doing things are null and void.

Little Carmine : Exactly.

Angelo: And the Joe Peeps thing? Where does that leave us?

Rusty: When you've had a quadruple bypass like I did, it gives you a lot of time to think. The only thing Johnny understands is force.

Angelo: But the fact is, though, we pissed on a bees' nest.

Fourth Thug: So what's the other option--roll over?

Angelo: [pause] We could have had a sit down. Captains maybe...

Little Carmine: This isn't the UN, Angelo. I won't let what happened to my father, happen to me.

Rusty [unctuously]: God forgive me, but you may be a stronger man than your dad was.

[Carmine places his arm on Rusty's shoulder, affectionately.]

Little Carmine: The fundamental question is, will I be as effective as a boss as my Dad was? And I will be, even more so, but until I am, it is going to be hard to verify that I think I will be more effective.

Is it just me, or do you not have to be Jean Baudrillard to deconstruct this scene? Map Little Carmine, Rusty, and Angelo to Smirk, Dick and Colin, and you have a near-perfect fit, right down to Cheney's cardiac history, Shirk's Oedipal obsessions, and his sophomoric, macho gibberish.

Consider, too, that this episode was probably in the can at least six months ago. Who needs Bob Woodward?

I think "Little Carmine" is going to be my new nickname for Smirk.