Month: April 2006

Bush’s Nuclear Dictatorship

by tristero

Billmon’s rightly praised post makes it all too clear why the US press must demand this administration answer the question: Does Bush Plan To Start A Nuclear War?

Billmon’s discussion of the global and strategic consequences of American nuclear tyranny are as trenchant as his comments always are. And his impression of what the “day after” will look like in the US is quite realistic. But by focusing on the largest pictures, Billmon neglected to mention one very plausible and important reaction to an American nuclear war. That is a massive, and rapid, emigration from this country of people with brains, capital, and simple human decency.

Billmon is absolutely right: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other sociopaths in charge of this country’s foreign policy think nuclear bombs don’t count if they can be described as “tactical.” But many Americans surely know that they do indeed count, they will want nothing to do with a government insane enough to use them, and will get the fuck out of here. And among those people will be hundreds of thousands of scientists and intellectuals that no country can afford to lose and thrive, even a nuclear dictatorship.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall is right. It’s pointless to “engage” the Bush administration. The only thing to do is to hem them in. However…

In this post, Josh failed to mention the mushroom cloud in the room and, in fact, seems to want to avoid bringing it up. That is no mere “particular,” Josh, but a brand new level of insanity. The way to hem them in is by focusing on that insanity, and then push from there. If Josh thinks a successful defense against Bush’s latest madness can be had by ignoring the fact they are brandishing nuclear weapons in the world’s face, then he has learned absolutely nothing from the run-up to the Bush/Iraq War, when Josh himself was far too late in understanding how seriously nuts Bush’s plans were. In 2006, trying to brush anything as criminal as first strike nuclear war under the table is what Bush expects “thoughtful” liberals to do. NO. It has to be rubbed in their faces. Once nuclear weapons are made inconceivable again, then the rest of Bush’s mad scheme can be confronted.

Josh promises a second post on the subject. Let’s hope that in that one he fully understands that a failure explicitly to denounce the nuclear war plans of the Bush administration is not a shrewd tactic but sheer moral cowardice.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters think I’m coming down too hard on Josh’s failure to mention nuclear war in his first post. I certainly hope they are right. But I have this in mind, where Josh cut the neocons some rhetorical slack when he should have simply denounced and ridiculed them. As I wrote then, Josh really isn’t that important in the big scheme of things. However, every little bit helps to shape the debate. As I see it, Bush, et al, is hoping that everyone will be too embarassed to make nuclear war a salient topic until it is too late or think it is merely some kind of perverted saber-rattling that reasonable people should simply ignore.

That is all the reason to rub the mushroom clouds and the horribly mutilated children to come in their faces.

Real Men Go To Khuzestan

by digby

Here’s an intriguing theory about Iran from Grand Moff Texan.

It would be a brilliant diabolical plan were it not for the fact that Tony Soprano’s drunk younger brother and his gang of thieving crony morons would be running the thing.

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They’ll Have To Throw Their Daughters In Jail

by digby

Jumping off the shocking article in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine about the criminalized abortion doctrine in El Salvador, Eric Zorn has begun an interesting dialog about why anti-choicers don’t logically insist that women be tried for their crime? The usual answer seems to rest on the idea that women are so dumb or brainwashed that they don’t know what they are doing so they can’t be held liable for their crime.

I can see how that might have played in the years before Roe when it much more common to infantilize women. But I suspect they are going to have to completely turn back the clock to at least before WWII if they want to pull that off. Nobody is going to buy that women are all just victims of the “culture of Roe” and can’t be held responsible for what they do. There are going to have to be prosecutions.

Zorn suggests that this be used against the forced pregnancy extremists the way that “partial birth” was used against the pro-choice movement and I agree. By using the extreme argument you expose the illogic of their most cherished delusion: that from the moment of conception, the fetus has the full rights of every other human being. Once they are forced to face the full implications of that argument they lose. In arguing this with a pro-lifer, Zorn said:

Your own logic locks you into prosecuting women who seek abortions for murder. You write of such women as “secondary victims” and hem and haw about transition periods and the ineffectiveness of coercion because you know how utterly unpalatable such prosecutions would be for the vast majority of Americans who do, in the end, see, feel and sense a real distinction between an embryo and, say, a one day old baby.

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Dark Vision

by digby

And I thought I was depressed about this Iran gambit. Billmon lays out a very convincing case that the US can probably launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran — and nobody will really care. Indeed, it might serve everybody’s interests quite ably.

Damn if it won’t be a heckuva show, the kind we really love with handsome flyboys taking off from aircraft carriers and big beautiful explosions that make us all feel good about how our high tech “surgical” weaponry only kills the bad guys.

For most Americans, then, the initial impact of war with Iran could play out in the same theatre of the absurd as the first Gulf War and the opening phases of the Iraq invasion — that is to say, on their living room TVs. And if there’s one place where a nuclear first strike could be made to appear almost normal, or even a good thing, it’s on the boob tube.

After all, the corporate media complex has already shown a remarkable willingness to ignore or rationalize conduct that once would have been considered grossly illegal, if not outright war crimes. And the right-wing propaganda machine is happy to paint any atrocity as another glorious success in the battle for democracy (that is, when it’s not trying to deny they ever happened.) Why should we expect something as transitory as a nuclear strike to change the pattern?

Let’s be honest about it: For both the corporate and the conservative media, as well as for their audiences, a air campaign against Iran would make for great TV — a welcome return to the good old days of Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. All those jets soaring off into the desert twilight; the overexposed glare of cruise missiles streaking from their launch ships; the video game shots of exploding aircraft hangers and government buildings, the anti-aircraft tracers arcing into the night sky over Tehran — it would be war just the way we like it, far removed from the dull brown dust, raw sewage and multiple amputees of the Iraqi quagmire.

And to keep things interesting, we’d have the added frisson of nuclear weapons — a plot twist that would allow blow-dried correspondents to pose in borrowed radiation suits, give Pentagon flacks the opportunity to try out new euphemisms for killing people, and encourage retired generals to spice up their on-air military patter with knowing references to blast effects, kilotons, roentgens and fallout patterns.

What I’m suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, eve n though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully — thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president — for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know that a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.

More to my point, though, I think it’s possible that even something as monstrously insane as nuclear war could still be squeezed into the tiny rituals that pass for public debate in this country — the game of dueling TV sound bites that trivializes and then disposes of every issue.

We’ve already seen a lengthy list of war crimes and dictatorial power grabs sink into that electronic compost heap: the WMD disinformation campaign, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, the de facto repeal of the 4th amendment. Again, why should a nuclear strike be any different? I can easily imagine the same rabid talk show hosts spouting the same jingoistic hate speech, the same bow-tied conservative pundits offering the same recycled talking points, and the same timid Beltway liberals complaining that while nuking Iran was the right thing to do, the White House went about it the wrong way. And I can already hear the same media critics chiding those of us in left Blogostan for blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It’s just a little bunker buster, after all.

Read the whole thing. I don’t think I’m a panic artist. At least I never have been. But after the last few years I have to say that Billmon’s dark prediction sounds entirely believable to me. This Iran thing scares the hell out of me, and I’m not sure what anyone can do about it.

This president has asserted a doctrine of presidential infallibility. He does not believe that he can be stopped. And the way things are going I think he may think he has nothing to lose. There has been a sense of craziness in the air ever since 9/11, but it’s just taken a very, very surreal turn.

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Neverending Story

by digby

This is an interesting attempt by the NY Times to suss out the “narrative” of Fitzgerald’s case based upon his recent filing:

Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but also to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Mr. Fitzgerald’s account of what was happening in the White House in the summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration’s narrative, which suggested that Mr. Wilson was seen as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Mr. Bush relied.

[…]

Mr. Fitzgerald said he was preparing to turn over to Mr. Libby 1,400 pages of handwritten notes — some presumably in Mr. Libby’s own hand — that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.

One effort — the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate — was taking place in public, while another, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby involved.

Last week’s court filing has already led the White House to acknowledge, over the weekend, that Mr. Bush ordered the selective disclosure of parts of the intelligence estimate sometime in late June or early July. But administration officials insist that Mr. Bush played a somewhat passive role and did so without selecting Mr. Libby, or anyone else, to tell the story piecemeal to a small number of reporters.

But in one of those odd twists in the unpredictable world of news leaks, neither of the reporters Mr. Libby met, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post or Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, reported a word of it under their own bylines. In fact, other reporters working on the story were talking to senior officials who were warning that the uranium information in the intelligence estimate was dubious at best.

I don’t know why the NY Times fails to mention this but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear in his filing that this “piecemeal” story was designed to discredit Wilson not just with the selective (and misleading) leaks of the NIE but with the bogus notion that his wife sent him on this “junket.” After all, Judy Miller wrote the words “Valerie Flame” in her notebook in the first meeting she had with Scooter in June of 2003. They were the same operation.

And that operation almost assuredly involved at least one other person who was conspicuously absent from Fitzgerald’s narrative. That person told Fitzgerald all about the “concerted effort” inside the white house to discredit Wilson. Once again, here’s Murray Waas:

President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel’s investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

The NY Times seems to take at face value that this secret cabal only involved Bush, Cheney and Libby — and Bush only tangentially. That is very doubtful. Karl Rove is likely the mastermind of this campaign. Discrediting critics is his job.

The question for Bush, Cheney and Libby is whether Karl is cooperating even more fully with Fitzgerald than when he spoke proudly to the FBI of this campaign to discredit Joe Wilson (probably assuming that John Ashcroft would never let the information see the light of day.) His lawyer certainly has been tightlipped lately.

If Waas’ story is correct, Karl Rove undercut Libby’s defense from the get. No wonder Libby wants to see what Karl specifically said.

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Basket Case

by digby

This is funny.

Good work by the firedoglake brigade and Matt Stoller. There’s more to come.

Needling is a tried and true political tactic. I recommend that people needle Republicans relentlessly for their blind support of every crackpot scheme that George W. Bush has set forth for the last five years. Tie them to that dramatically unpopular piece of work so tight they can’t breathe. They deserve it.

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Blind Man’s Bluff

by digby

Bush and Rumsfeld take questions from the press:

Q Sir, after you’ve studied today the military capabilities of the United States and looking ahead to future threats, one thing that has to factor in is the growing number of U.S. allies, Russia, Germany, Bahrain, now Canada, who say that if you go to war with Iran, you’re going to go alone. Does the American military have the capability to prosecute this war alone?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, if you’re asking — are you asking about Iran? The subject didn’t come up in this meeting. But, having said that, we take all threats seriously and we will continue to consult with our friends and allies. I know there is this kind of intense speculation that seems to be going on, a kind of a — I don’t know how you would describe it. It’s kind of a churning —

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Frenzy.

THE PRESIDENT: Frenzy is how the Secretary would describe it. But the subject didn’t come up. We will obviously continue to consult with our friends and allies. Your question makes certain assumptions that may or may not be true. But we will continue to talk with our — with the people concerned about peace and how to secure the peace, and those are needed consultations. Not only will we consult with friends and allies, we’ll consult with members of Congress. Yes, Terry.

[…]

Q He has said that he is drawing up war plans to provide you with credible options. Now, should the American people conclude from that that you’re reaching some critical point, that a decision is imminent?

THE PRESIDENT: … one of the jobs that the Secretary of Defense has tasked to members of his general staff is to prepare for all contingencies, whether it be in the particular country that you seem to be riveted on, or any other country, for that matter. We face a — the world is not stable. The world changes. There are — this terrorist network is global in nature and they may strike anywhere. And, therefore, we’ve got to be prepared to use our military and all the other assets at our disposal in a way to keep the peace.

Would you like to comment on that?

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: I would. As the President indicated, one of the things we discussed here today was the contingency planning guidance that he signed. I then meet with all of the combatant commanders for every area of responsibility across the globe. I do it on a regular basis. We go over all the conceivable contingencies that could occur. … That’s my job. That’s their job, is to see that we have the ability to protect the American people and deal effectively on behalf of our friends and our allies and our deployed forces. So it is their task to work with me and ultimately with the President as the chain of command goes from the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States, to me, to the combatant commanders. And they’re doing exactly what I’ve asked them to do and what the President has asked me to do.

Ooops. I made a typo. This press conference was from August of 2002 and the country in question was Iraq. We suspected then and now know for a fact that Bush had already set in motion his inexorable plan of attack when he made these remarks. Now Bush expects the world to take him at his word again when he says that he isn’t planning to launch an attack against Iran. Unfortunately, he no longer has any credibility so when he says these things, the default position of most people is to assume he’s lying, and that includes the leadership of Iran.

Kevin Drum addresses this and rightly takes to task the thick literalists who say it’s ridiculous to worry about this Iran thing because “of course he has contingency plans.” With Bush’s history, that is entirely beside the point. He says:

…what’s important isn’t the existence of the contingency plans. Rather, it’s the fairly obvious fact that the Bush administration is publicizing them as part of a very public PR campaign in favor of a strike against Iran. The problem is that even if this is a bluff, it’s one that has a profound effect on both Iran and the American public. As James Fallows says:

By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create ‘excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices.

In other words, if the PR campaign is too successful, then Bush will have boxed himself in. Eventually he’ll feel obligated to bomb Iran solely because he’s now under pressure to make good on his threats and doesn’t want to look like he’s backing down. World Wars have started over less.

His “PR campaign” unfortunately may very well be successful (as it was the last time.) This is deja vu all over again. But Bush no longer has the option of bluffing even if he wants to. He tossed that in the toilet along with America’s integrity and reputation back in the summer and fall of 2002. After the Iraq debacle, bellicose saber rattling has the perverse effect of bringing about the event it’s designed to avert.

There can be no doubt that Iran believes we are planning a strike and there is every reason to fear that Bush’s threats will push them to make decisions that will force the US into the corner that Fallows predicts. The only question is, as Sy Hersh reports, whether the military will go along this time.

After five years of disasterous foreign policy, the Bush administration has left this country with almost none of the tools it used to have to shape world events. He pushed arrogant military unilateralism for years and now he’s stuck with it as his only option. We are weaker as a world power, we have no moral authority and nobody trusts this government’s intentions. The US now exists in a universe of vastly reduced maneuverability because of what he’s done and not just because of our stretched military. Our credibility is in shreds.

Kevin says that World Wars have started over less than this and that’s absolutely true. Bush may have pushed this country to the point where the only option it has is military force because nobody believes a word our government says. This may be the scariest moment we’ve faced since 9/11.

Update: Just to scare everybody witless even more on a Tuesday morning, Josh Marshall writes:

It is also not too early to point out that the evidence is there for the confluence of two destructive and disastrous forces — hawks in the administration’s Cheney faction whose instinctive bellicosity is only matched by their actual incompetence (a fatal mixture if there ever was one), and the president’s chief political aides who see the build up to an Iran confrontation as the most promising way to contest the mid-term elections. Both those groups are strongly motivated for war. And who is naive enough to imagine a contrary force within the administration strong enough to put on the brakes?

Not me. These people are like cornered animals desperate to recapture that bullhorn moment and redeem their failed ideology. It’s a very, very dangerous combo.

Oh and is everyone aware that Dick Cheney’s daughter is “freedom agenda co-ordinator” and “democracy czar” in charge of the Iran propaganda group at the State Department? She is. I knew that would make you feel better.

Did I hear something about Cheney accusing Joe and Valerie Wilson of nepotism? I didn’t think so.

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What IS It About Republicans And Their Dogs?

by tristero

Santorum. Woof! Goldstein. Woof! And now, an unhealthy dog obsession from a fellow that knows a helluva lot about barking up the wrong tree:

Billionaire right-wing godfather Richard Mellon Scaife — who famously funded an investigation of Bill Clinton’s sex life that resulted in a presidential impeachment — is having female troubles of his own.

Police responded to a call last week when Scaife’s estranged and apparently enraged second wife, Margaret (Ritchie) Scaife, arrived at his estate in Pittsburgh. She allegedly assaulted his housekeeper, his security chief and his cancer-ridden secretary while a cook fended off her violent attempt to take the family dog.

“He’s in a trauma. He was almost choked to death when she was grasping the leash,” the 73-year-old Scaife, who almost never gives interviews, complained to Lowdown’s Nicole Pesce yesterday. “She claims that the dog belonged to her because the dog is in her name on the registration papers. But she gave the dog to me nine years ago. So he’s my dog.”

There is no truth to any rumors that the estranged Mrs. Scaife was trying to rescue the pooch from unspeakable abuses. Yet.

Hitchens Encounters A Pink Elephant

by tristero

Christopher Hitchens seems to be arguing with hallucinations. In a recent Slate article, Hitchens makes the claim that, contra-Joe Wilson, Iraq indeed did seek to buy uranium from Niger.

However, unless I am misreading Wilson’s original op-ed, Wilson never disputed that, for the simple reason he never discussed what he learned about Iraq’s seeking behavior. What he said, and quite clearly, was regardless of what Iraq may have been seeking, such a transaction was extremely unlikely, given the amount of oversight and the politics of the countries involved in the Niger uranium mining. That is, Iraq may have sought yellowcake, but they did so in vain.

In fact Wilson’s mission was not to learn whether Iraq was seeking uranium. Instead, according to Wilson, his mission was in response to a report which described “a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake.” From his time sipping mint tea in Niger, Wilson learned this report was mistaken; no such sale could have taken place (in fact, Wilson says, the “memorandum of agreement” appeared, from press reports, to be a crude forgery ).

True, in re-reading the op-ed, Wilson does seem to go somewhat further than this simple assertion (which may be part of the reason for Bob Someby’s numerous howls at Wilson). Without saying so directly, he seems to imply that it was so utterly unlikely for Iraq to have succeeded in seeking yellowcake from Niger that by simply including the 16 words in such an important speech as SOTU, Bush grossly and irresponsibly exaggerated how far Iraq had gotten with whatever inquiries Iraq may have made. That implication is what made Wilson’s op-ed so alarming to the White House.

Nevertheless, Wilson does not dispute that Iraq was seeking yellowcake, only the seriousness with which those inquiries can be taken. (To be clear to our cognitively challenged rightwing pals: Wilson knew Iraq was serious; the question is whether there was a serious possibility they could ever succeed. He concluded there wasn’t.)

Assuming I haven’t misread Wilson, his focus is on whether a deal went down and if so, then Hitchens is debunking a pink elephant. Furthermore, if Wilson is right about the contents of the initial report that sent him to Niger in the first place, then Hitchens is dead wrong in asserting that “It has never been claimed that an agreement was actually reached.” Apparently, someone did.

Translations From Republican Into English

by tristero

““Wild speculation” is defined as “I’m gonna nuke Iran. Try and stop me.”

“Preposterous” means “Of course it’s true.”

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was “preposterous” to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved. The phone records of calls to the White House were exhibits in Tobin’s trial but prosecutors did not make them part of their case.

Democrats plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.

Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002…

While national Republican officials have said they deplore such operations, the Republican National Committee said it paid for Tobin’s defense because he is a longtime supporter and told officials he had committed no crime…

Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.