Month: April 2008

A Member In Good Standing

by digby

Even before the Iraq invasion, I used to do a ton of writing about some of the wackier neocon loons like Laurie Mylroie. I had been aware of her even before 9/11. She was a Saddam obsessive who, like Chalabi, had gotten the attention of some very influential neocons and had been welcome in their innermost circles. Right after the attacks she was on PBS peddling the “Saddam masterminded 9/11” stuff. When they started beating the drums for the Iraq invasion, it was obvious that she was at the table.

Here’s Laurie Mylroie on a CNN online chat in October of 2001:

CNN: You believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in both attacks the 1993 and September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Why?

MYLROIE: You can demonstrate to the high legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, which is used for criminal conviction, that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, by showing that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bomb, was an Iraqi intelligence agent. I do that in “Study of Revenge.” That bomb, in 1993, aimed to topple the north tower onto the south tower. Eight years later, someone came back and finished the job. Since Iraq was behind the first attack, it is suggestive of the point that Iraq was behind the second attack.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is there any proof at all that Hussein is involved in the anthrax scares?

MYLROIE: There is no proof that Saddam is involved in the anthrax scares, but proof is different from evidence. Proof, according to the dictionary, is conclusive demonstration. Evidence is something that indicates, like your smile is evident of your affection for me. There is evidence that Iraq is behind the anthrax scares. First, it takes a highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the lethal form that was in the letter sent to Senator Daschle. Not many parties can do that. Second, there is an additive in that anthrax, bentonite, which is used to cause the anthrax to not stick together, and float in the air. Iraq is the only party known to have produced anthrax with bentonite.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Should the U.S.take action against Iraq?

MYLROIE: Yes. It is necessary for the United States to take action against Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War never ended. We continue it in the form of an economic siege whose origins lie in the Gulf War. And also, we bomb Iraq on a regular basis, and Saddam continues his part of the war in the form of terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used at some point, for example, in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us. He wants to do to the U.S. what we’ve done to Iraq. One way he can do that is terrorism, particularly biological terrorism.

CHAT PARTICPANT: What is the connection between bin Ladden and Saddam?

MYLROIE: Bin Laden and Hussein work together. The contact between the two was made in the 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan. Iraq intelligence also had a major presence in Sudan then. There were other widely reported contacts between bin Laden and Iraq intelligence, such as in December, 1998 when Farook Hajazi traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Hajazi is a senior intelligence officer. Bin Laden provides the ideology, he recruits the foot soldiers, and he provides a smokescreen. Iraqi intelligence provides the direction and training for the terrorism.

CNN: You hold the Clinton administration responsible for Hussein’s involvement in all of these attacks. Why?

MYLROIE: Iraq is a difficult problem, and has been since the Gulf War. Many mistakes have been made, because it’s inevitable that in human endeavor there are mistakes. Under the Clinton administration, specifically in February 1993 with the first attack on the Trade Center, Clinton dealt with the issue dishonestly. New York FBI believed in 1993 that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. That was accepted by the White House, that New York FBI might well be right. In June, 1993, Clinton attacked Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He said that that was punishment for Saddam’s attempt to kill George Bush when Bush visited Kuwait in April, but Clinton also believed that it would deter Saddam from all future attacks of terrorism, and that it would address the WTC bombing, too, so that Saddam would not think to carry out further attacks against the U.S.

And then the Clinton administration put out a false and fraudulent explanation for terrorism, saying that terrorism was no longer state-sponsored, but carried out by individuals. That false and fraudulent explanation was accepted and allowed Saddam to continue to attack the U.S. The reason Clinton dealt with terrorism in that fashion was because he did not understand the kind of threat that Saddam could pose, and by taking care of the terrorism in New York in that fashion, he avoided riling American public opinion, which might have demanded then, back in 1993, that he do a great deal more.

It goes on. She was taken very, very seriously within the highest reaches of the Bush administration:

In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie’s book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said.

The DIA’s Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, “Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.” But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. “The message was, why can’t we prove this is right?” said the official.

There was more. From from 2004:

History is going to show that a nutcase by the name of Laurie Mylroie and a group of equally nutty followers, including the Vice President and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, led the United States into a war on the basis of a daffy conspiracy theory.

The proposal, pressed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, called for President George W. Bush to declare Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as an enemy combatant in the war on terror. This would have allowed Yousef to be transferred from his cell at the U.S. Bureau of Prison’s “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colo., to a U.S. military installation.

Wolfowitz contended that U.S. military interrogators—unencumbered by the presence of Yousef’s defense lawyer—might be able to get the inmate to confess what he and the lawyer have steadfastly denied: that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent dispatched by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 as revenge for the first Persian Gulf War.

The previously unreported Wolfowitz proposal—and the high-level consideration it got within the Justice Department—sheds new light on the Bush administration’s willingness to expand its use of enemy-combatant declarations inside the United States beyond the three alleged terrorists, two of them American citizens, who have already been designated by the White House.

Actually believing this nonsensical conspiracy theory about Ramsi Youssef, and attempting to change 200 years of legal precedent in order to prove it, would be the equivalent of Bill Clinton using Oliver Stone’s JFK as the basis for prosecuting the remaining members of the Johnson administration for the assassination of Kennedy.

There is no greater reason to get rid of Bush than to put this little Mylroie/Wolfowitz freakshow back in its little Lyndon Larouche conspiracy corner.

As you can see, Mylroie was at the center of the ridiculous decision to invade Iraq and her cuckoo conspiracy mongerings were even used as justification to try to torture someone who had already been convicted of a crime and was serving his sentence in an American prison.

How mordantly amusing then, that she’s been belatedly been repudiated by none other than Stephen Hayes, the last remaining hold out of the “Saddam was in cahoots with Osama” school. Via MoJo blog:

Mylroie comes up In several of the books written about the Iraq War as a terrorism analyst who led the Bush Administration into making questionable claims about Iraq and al Qaeda. (George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of the otherwise well-reported book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” makes this mistake.) This vastly overstates her role. Although her emails may have occasionally made their way to Bush administration officials, no one I know took her arguments very seriously. For good reason. Mylroie has seen an Iraqi hand behind virtually every terrorist attack on American interests. Indeed, in our one brief conversation, she faulted me for failing to understand that al Qaeda is little more than an Iraqi “front group.” That’s crazy. Iraq was an active state sponsor of terror and, as the recent Pentagon report confirms, a willing sponsor of al Qaeda leaders, their terrorist associates, and a wide variety of jihadist groups.

Yeah, who could have ever believed her? Of course, there was the business of her book:

She laid out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the ’93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, is thanked for his “generous and timely assistance.” And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife is credited with having “fundamentally shaped the book,” while of Wolfowitz, she says: “At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”

Just because Hayes is now embarrassed about his batty aunt in the attic, don’t think her influence has really waned in conservative circles however. She has already established herself as one of the keepers of alternative history:

Mylroie published a … book, Bush v the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. The book charges that the US government suppressed information about Iraq’s role in anti-American terrorism, including the investigation of 9/11. It claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the now captured mastermind of 9/11, is an Iraqi intelligence agent who, like his nephew Ramzi Yousef, adopted the identity of a Pakistani living in Kuwait.

The US government doesn’t seem to have explored this theory. Why not? Mylroie explained to the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks: “A senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism.”

I suspect that little conspiracy will find its way into conservative conspiracy lore. The charge of “bureaucratic obstructionism” on the part of the CIA and the State department has been used as the excuse for conservative failure for half a century. Why stop now? Remember, the neocons have always been wrong about everything.

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And Now, For Something Completely Different

by tristero

Now this is cool:

A team of Hewlett-Packard scientists reported Wednesday in the science journal Nature that they have designed a simple circuit element they believe will enable tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.

The device, called a memristor, could make it possible to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips, which are rapidly reaching the limit in how much smaller they can be made.

The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, like a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are today widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly.

Potentially even more tantalizing is the memristors’ ability to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s as conventional chips do. This makes them function like biological synapses, which would be ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech…

The most significant limitation that the H.P. researchers said the new technology faces is that the memristors function about 10 times more slowly than today’s DRAM memory cells.

That’s still mighty fast. I can think of all sorts of usages for my biz that could use memory that tiny and that power-stingy – can you say really, really, expressive electronic instruments, perhaps? Or extending existing ones like electric guitar?

But having available intermediate states between on and off…won’t that require some serious rethinking of programming languages? And won’t that increase the complexity of the task of programming (translated: the potential for bugs)?

If you know programming, please feel free to weigh in.

WVWV

by digby

Good morning, America! It just gets better all the time.

Due to the fact that I was voted favorite female blogger by people who read their site and participated in their PSA encouraging women to vote, I have been inundated with angry emails demanding that I disavow Women’s Voices Women’s Vote for their “campaign to disenfranchise voters in North Carolina.”

First of all, I have no affiliation with Women’s Voices Women’s Vote. I was asked to do a little Public Service Announcement last fall and there was nothing partisan about it. I did not do it to “pimp Hillary” as one of my concern trolls so pithily put it. Neither did I think there was any need to investigate or “vet” a well known organization that registers women to vote. So no, I didn’t look into them to find out if I should agree to “lend my name to voter disenfranchisement.” The production company asked and I said yes.

I had nothing to do with the contest other than noting on my site that I had been nominated and that I’d won. If they have some sort of devious political agenda, I’m completely unaware of it. I know absolutely nothing about these robo calls.

Here’s the explanation from WVWV at Huffington Post. That would be all the information I have on the matter.

And yes, I disavow any and all attempts to disenfranchise voters no matter who is doing it. After all, I’ve been writing on the subject for many years — as recently as yesterday.

Update: Let me make this clear. I have no personal or professional relationship with WVWV. I have never even spoken with a person who works there.

The only people I ever dealt with were the production company in Los Angeles that handles their ads. I have no unique ability to “get to the bottom of this.” I’m sure others will.

Update II: Matt Stoller has posted an email from a person involved in the WVWV voter registration drives.

Also, for those who are unfamiliar with blogging style, I did link to the original charges in the first paragraph of this post.

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A Question of Character

by dday

Hey, look at this: John McCain is lying about his role in creating public policy! Doesn’t that sound to you like a character issue?

An Arizona Republican, McCain has all but locked up the Republican presidential nomination and is preparing for a fall campaign in which his support of the Iraq war is sure to be a major issue. Yet the former Navy pilot and Vietnam POW makes himself a target by refusing to endorse Webb’s new GI education bill and instead signing on to a Republican alternative that focuses more on career soldiers than on the great majority who leave after their first four years.

Undaunted, Webb, who was a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, is closing in on the bipartisan support needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate, where the cost of his package — estimated now at about $52 billion over 10 years — is sure to be an issue. But McCain’s support would seal the deal like nothing else, and the new Republican bill, together with a letter of opposition Tuesday from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, threatens to peel off support before the Democrat gets to the crucial threshold of 60 votes.

“There are fundamental differences,” McCain told Politico. “He creates a new bureaucracy and new rules. His bill offers the same benefits whether you stay three years or longer. We want to have a sliding scale to increase retention. I haven’t been in Washington, but my staff there said that his has not been eager to negotiate.”

“He’s so full of it,” Webb said in response. “I have personally talked to John three times. I made a personal call to [McCain aide] Mark Salter months ago asking that they look at this.”

Put aside for a moment the fact that McCain’s bill would basically hold soldiers hostage inside the military the same way employees are held hostage at their jobs for health care benefits. Put aside that the goal of the McCain bill is not honoring the service of our veterans but making sure enough people are locked into the military to fight all the extra wars he wants to wage. And put aside that the current benefit levels, which McCain’s bill seeks to for the most part freeze, are insufficient to the task of covering the cost of higher education.

This is McCain’s shtick. He looks to control the stakes of bipartisanship and define it as “everyone agree with me,” and he’ll lie about your intentions if you dare to defy him. Webb’s GI Bill has 57 co-sponsors, pressure is being applied (good on Alaska Senate candidate Mark Begich to trap Ted Stevens on this), and then McCain barrels in, offers his own competing measure and threatens to blow up the whole deal, all because he didn’t come up with it himself in the first place.

Now, aren’t those VALUES we could all use as a guide to making our choice in November? The fact that McCain puts his ego above the treatment of veterans is one thing, but the idea that he has no faithfulness to the truth and will take credit and impute bad motives at the drop of a hat, all in the name of receiving glory for himself – aren’t those QUALITIES that we should consider when making a choice for President?

Or should we just send him to a bowling alley and see how he does, instead?

…oh yeah, and where is McCain on the horrendous condition of our stateside military barracks like the one at Fort Bragg? If he wants to keep all these soldiers in the military, shouldn’t we be providing slightly better conditions than a river of shit? Has anyone bothered to ask him? Or any of the Democratic candidates? This happened in the upcoming primary state of North Carolina, fercryinoutloud! … UPDATE: Sen. Clinton has called for a Congressional probe into the Fort Bragg barracks, and I’m glad to see she has done so.

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Wow

by tristero

Glenn’s on fire. The self-deception and corruption of the national media is breathtaking, especially when you recall that the military “experts” were just one piece of the misleading – no, make that lying – coverage.

Go read.

Betrayal

by digby

I have frankly been a little bit confused by the reaction to Reverend Wright’s recent comments around the sphere and even here on this blog. I thought most people in the Netroots were big Obama supporters and yet they defend Reverend Wright, which I find rather surprising considering what he did.

It’s true that after Obama’s Philadelphia speech, I too defended Wright’s sermons and even got a more positive sense of Barack Obama’s worldview as a result of hearing what he’d said and listening to Obama’s explanations for them. Other than a vague sense that he was something of a showboater, I was not hostile to to the man.

But Wright’s latest round of media appearances have not seemed to me to be any kind of defense of liberalism or the black church or even Black Liberation Theology so much as one man’s desire to deny a rival his destiny. This was personal and I find it very creepy.

John Amato shared some of my impressions:

Seeing Wright go on Moyers Friday night—at first, I didn’t understand why he’s doing this. Why did he need to come out now and use such loaded rhetoric that the media would pounce on? In the middle of a ugly primary race, he makes himself the story for another three news cycles. Then after I watched his National Press Club appearance, I wondered if he was actually trying to hurt Obama’s chances of winning even the primary because his ego wouldn’t allow him to hang back until December to have his say. It seems Obama has the same feelings.

And rightly so. Reverend Wright called into question the entire premise of Obama’s campaign, a campaign built on changing the very nature of politics, when he said, “he did what politicians do.” There was no need for him to speak out now except to gin up the controversy at the worst possible time. Any person of sensitivity would have at least waited until this tough, hard fought primary had ended. It was a self-aggrandizing, personal attack and it says something important about the man.

Obama said yesterday:

…
What mattered was him commanding center stage…

I don’t think that he showed much concern for me…

[T]here wasn’t anything constructive out of yesterday. All it was, was a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth. And you know, I can construct something positive out of that. I can understand it. I, you know, the — you know, the people do all sorts of things and, as I said before, I continue to believe that Reverend Wright has been a leader in the South Side. I think that the church he built is outstanding. I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons. He provided, you know, valuable contributions to my family. But at a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me.

Clearly he sees it as a betrayal and a deeply personal one. And so it was. So much so that I felt uncomfortable even watching it. Obama trusted Reverend Wright. As he pointed out, Wright had married him and Michelle, baptized their children, prayed with them over major events in their lives. Obama was very generous with him in his Philadelphia speech, offering a personal endorsement of his good character. And yet, knowing that Obama is fighting this ridiculous rumor about being a Muslim, Wright shows up at the National Press Club with bodyguards from the Nation of Islam and praises Farrakhan? Outrageous.

I watched Obama today and felt very sorry for him on a human level. As Joan Walsh pointed out in a series of sensitive posts on the subject, this is a guy who has written a book about being abandoned by his father and here comes father figure Wright, so self-centered that he apparently couldn’t accept that his own star burned less brightly than the younger man who was very possibly on his way to becoming America’s first black president. James Carville famously called Bill Richardson “Judas” recently for endorsing Senator Obama over Hillary Clinton. I would say Wright has a much greater claim to the name.

We don’t know how much Obama has been politically hurt by this. But we can be sure that the right wing will flog it with everything they have in the fall. They can’t run on issues and their candidate is second rate (although he’s the best they can hope for, which says something.) They can only win by attempting to destroy the Democratic candidate. And as bad at governing as they are, they are very, very good a character assassination. Wright seems intent upon helping them — perhaps so that he can drag Obama down into his martyrdom with him, I don’t know.

I also think this is a direct result of the image makers in the party deciding that religion needed to be brought front and center into Democratic politics and I want to thank them for that. Walter Shapiro wrote a nice piece on that today:

“The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is … between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to ‘get religion,’ even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular.”
— Barack Obama, from “The Audacity of Hope”

This is a week when the Illinois senator probably wishes that he could say, “I’m from the stubbornly secular wing of the Democratic Party.” Back in the days when religion in presidential politics was mostly limited to greeting Billy Graham when he arrived for an Oval Office photo op, White House candidates did not have to worry about off-the-reservation reverends. But that was before the 2008 Democrats called out the image engineers to bridge the God Gap. In Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democrats boast the most overtly religious cross-on-their-sleeve presidential candidates since Jimmy Carter prayed alone.

[…]

The point is not Clinton’s and Obama’s private religious beliefs, but their political calculation in searching for every possible forum to signal to religious voters that Democrats too are devout. The Republicans have long blurred the line between God and GOTV (Get Out the Vote), with Mike Huckabee, the runner-up for the GOP nomination, becoming probably the first major presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan who unequivocally does not believe in evolution. Until recently — with the exception of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 born-again boasting — the Democrats in their role as America’s secular party have been far more reticent about reveling in religion.

[…]

In a sense, the Democrats have been lucky since they are blessed with two candidates who have been walking the pews of religion for decades — from Obama’s lyrical autobiographical account of joining the Trinity United Church of Christ to Clinton’s public flirtation with the religiously based “politics of meaning” during her early White House years. But now the Democrats may be dealing with the dread consequences of answered prayers.

Amy Sullivan, one of the primary proponents of putting religiosity at the center of Democratic politics doesn’t seem to know what to make of the problems Wright has caused for Obama. Apparently, she never considered the possible downsides of hewing so closely to religion that people think it’s definitional. She and he friends didn’t seem to realize that all the blather about secular Democrats was never about religion, but about social conservatism. You get no points for going to the “wrong kind” of church. You’d think they would have figured that out a long time ago.

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Nobody Likes A Whiner

by dday

You know you’re trying to bluff with a really bad hand when the AP opens its story with this lede:

President Bush put politics ahead of the facts Tuesday as he sought to blame Congress for high energy prices, saying foreign suppliers are pumping just about all the oil they can and accusing lawmakers of blocking new refineries.

Even I’m embarrassed for Bush trying to pull this switcheroo. But he didn’t stop with gas prices, he blamed Congress for the farm bill, stopping nuclear power plants, foreclosures, the economy, and I think Miley Cyrus’ photo spread. If Truman said “The buck stops here,” then Bush’s mantra must be “Who wants this buck?”

It goes without saying that his remedies for the nation’s domestic ills are ill-chosen and ridiculous, but the AP went ahead and nicely summarized some of them.

Bush renewed his call for drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge, but his own Energy Department says that would have little impact on gasoline prices […]

Blaming “the lack of refinery capacity” for high energy prices, [Bush] said Congress has rejected his proposal to use shuttered military bases for refinery sites.

FACT: Global oil supplies are tight, in part because OPEC nations including Saudi Arabia are refusing to open their spigots. But Saudi Arabia has considerable additional production capacity. It’s pumping a little over 8.5 million barrels a day, compared to about 9.5 million barrels a day two years ago and has acknowledged the ability to produce as much as 11 million barrels a day.

On refineries, Congress has ignored Bush’s proposal to use closed military bases. But the oil companies haven’t shown much interest in building refineries either and have dismissed suggestions that military bases might be of use […] When top executives of the country’s five largest oil companies earlier this month were asked at a House hearing whether they wanted to build a new refinery, each said no.

And it just got worse from there. I hate to even give these little temper tantrum press conferences even the most minor notice, since they all come down to a series of wild charges with no basis in fact, and the country has tuned this guy out already and can’t wait for him to leave, anyway. But the thing is that the Republican Party is desperate to get out from under the impression that they broke the economy, and many in their House leadership (like David Dreier, for example) are starting to raise this whole “Democrats in Congress did it” approach, particularly with respect to gas prices (which sets every politician’s pander meter to “stun”) so it’s important to get out in front of the spin.

* Now on the farm bill, I don’t totally disagree with the President in theory about subsidies, and the farm bill is traditionally used by home-state legislators to give out gifts to their constituencies. Congress is responding, though I can’t help but think that Bush doesn’t really want to stop payments to wealthy farmers so much as to transfer them to agribusiness. So far the information on the actual changes is all secret. In the Age of Bush, as we know, it can always get worse.

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Gitlin

by tristero

As mentioned in my previous post, I often disagree with Todd Gitlin. And I disagree with this post of his. Sort of::

Obama has to say full-out where he disagrees with Wright. He has to say so full-throatedly. It’s not enough to say he’s “wrong and divisive.” He has to divide himself–from Wright.

Of course, Obama should continue to explain his positions on the history of race and American history. Of course, Obama should also discuss in further detail his positions on present day issues of race in this country.

So should all the candidates.

But I have no idea what Gitlin means when he says that Obama should “divide himself” from Wright. Been there, done that. The last I checked, they were different people and both had made a very careful point of saying they often disagreed. In fact, in the link to Wright’s q&a that Gitlin gives, Wright even makes it clear that if Obama becomes president, he’s going to go after him! I didn’t think for a moment he was joking; I think he meant it.

Regarding Wright, Obama said what needed to be said in his Philly speech. Obama dissociated himself from Wright’s wacky ideas. saying he was like an “old uncle” if I remember correctly. Will Gitlin now call on McCain to pledge never to take Pat Robertson’s phone calls if he is elected president? Or James Dobson? All these men have acted at least as, if not far more, clownishly. I recall seeing Robertson blame 9/11 on the gays, and nuking Chavez, fercrisssakes.

Anyway, the real issue is how the candidates differ. And far more importantly, how do they envision a federal role in addressing the complexities of the racial issues in the United States? And not only race: what about gender issues, including abortion, an issue that I, at least, perceive as inseparable from the politics of race and class? What about economics? And perhaps most importantly, what about this godawful, immoral war that has created so much harm, not just death and mutilation, not just property damage, but is also wrapped up in Bush’s disgraceful violations of the Constitution?

Enough.

“We Can’t have Acquittals”

by digby

Another day, another example of the Bush administration illegality. Not that anyone’s paying attention, what with the pressing need to obsess over the utterances of an obscure Chicago pastor:

The Defense Department’s former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.

Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.

[…]

Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have “strategic political value.”

Davis said he wants to wait until the cases — and the military commissions system — have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

“He said, ‘We can’t have acquittals,’ ” Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. ” ‘We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.’ “

Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. “To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind,” Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that “everything was fair game — let the judge sort it out.”

It doesn’t get any more sickeningly corrupt than that and because we know that they did this in the Department of Justice in the US Attorney scandal, it’s completely believable.

The ACLU has someone observing the hearings who adds some detail to those observations in this Daily Kos post:

Many of Davis’s direct conflicts were not with Haynes but with Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, the legal advisor to the commissions. Hartmann was particularly intent on prosecuting the “9/11 cases.” He told Davis that the election was coming up in 2008, and “if we don’t get these cases started, the commission system will implode. Once we get the victims’ families energized, we’ll be rolling, and when the train is rolling, it will be hard for the next president to stop.”

Hartmann wondered why Davis, who had repeatedly made clear that he would never permit the introduction of evidence extracted through waterboarding, believed he had authority to make that decision. Other senior officials believed that waterboarding was acceptable, said Hartmann, and the judge not Davis, should sort it out. Hartmann also demanded a faster pace in bringing and prosecuting charges, even if that meant proceeding with classified evidence in closed proceedings. Davis insisted on transparency as a key to the commissions’ legitimacy.

In August of 2007, Davis wrote a detailed complaint laying out what he believed to be the improper actions of Hartmann, and delivered the complaint to the military commissions’ chief official, convening authority Susan Crawford. Crawford had left early that day for a Johnny Mathis concert but she responded eventually by informing Davis that Hartmann did not report to her, so she had forwarded the complaint — to Jim Haynes. In October, Davis was summoned to Haynes’s office, where he learned that the chain of command had been altered to place Haynes at the top.

Davis resigned immediately. He explained: “The guy said waterboarding was A-OK. I was not going to take orders from.”

Davis then submitted another detailed complaint to the Department of Defense’s Inspector General. In response, he received a one-page, typed letter. It informed him that his complaint had been referred to the department’s “legal expert” — Jim Haynes.

Joseph Heller couldn’t have come up with that scenario.

I don’t know what will become of all this. All the presidential candidates, including McCain, say they will close Guantanamo so I guess that’s something. But the process in this was so deeply corrupt and immoral that the next government simply has to do something about this to expose the wrongdoing and take steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Without presidential leadership, I don’t see how it will happen.

I’m sure McCain would do nothing. He’s part of the culture that did this and has shown a total willingness to provide cover for the military on these issues during the Bush administration. I would really like to hear something more from the other two about what they will do about this if they become president.

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Media Declares War

by dday

Just to follow up on Tristero’s piece on Rev. Wright, I completely agree that this is an attempt to silence liberal voices and make them an automatic political problem. That’s certainly what we saw yesterday. Forgetting the fact that the revelation in Wright’s weekend remarks was actually that the media misinterpreted practically everything he said, and taking the position that any appearance of the former Trinity Church pastor is simply incedniary regardless of content, the cable news was pretty much an uninterrupted parade of concern trolls warning that this independent individual’s public appearances would be like death to Obama’s presidential campaign. Because the speech was at the National Press Club in Washington it became real for the Village. He came to the center of THEIR universe, and dared to assail the media for their actions. In short, he trashed the place.

Hardball was of particular note. Tweety was breathing fire, jumping on these appearances, talking about how damaging they were without even really referring to them, asserting bluntly that Wright is now “the lead surrogate for the Obama campaign.” His main point of contention was that – get this – Wright has a “raging ego.” And he even brought on black minister Rev. Eugene Rivers, without of course mentioning that Rivers has been working with George Bush for the past two terms and wants to be the new voice of the African-American community of faith (he got particularly incensed when Wright deemed the attack on him as “an attack on the black church” – that’s of course his role to speak for all black people of faith).

After about 45 minutes of this, Ryan Lizza finally spoke up with a point that I’ve seen Ezra Klein make (can’t find the link right now):

LIZZA: There should be a principle in these cases in this campaign. There is no guilt by association. This guy has one set of views, Obama has another set of views. If the views match up, then it’s fair game. But the guy’s been in politics since the mid-90s. He has a record in the State Senate in Illinois. He has a record in the US Senate. He’s laid out an agenda as a presidential candidate. Where do his views match up with Jeremiah Wright’s? And why as journalists are we confusing the two? It seems to me totally unfair that this guy is getting smeared with the views of someone just because he’s his former pastor.

This whole time there’s this shit-eating grin on Tweety’s face, as if to say, “Oh, you dear boy.” Tweety of course thinks Lizza is being naive, but he’s making the very simple point that journalists shouldn’t keep pretending Obama and Wright are somehow the same person given that they’ve charted vastly different visions and worldviews.

Then Tweety goes on to do just that, opening with one of his typically unintentionally hilarious moments:

MATTHEWS: Let me give you the proper way of putting it in literary terms. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde… who was the bad guy, Dr. Jekyll was the good guy, Mr. Hyde was the bad guy, right?

LIZZA: I’ll trust you on that…

MATTHEWS: I think so.

Mr. Literary Allusion, Tweety is. Not that he knows anything ABOUT Jekyll and Hyde other than some snippet he saw on late-night cable after coming in from yet another cocktail party, but he’s so urbane, no?

MATTHEWS: So every time you have a problem with Barack, because you don’t really know him and he seems a little foreign to you, you think of him as both these guys. They’re different faces of the same guy. Jeremiah Wright to a lot of people is Barack Obama. They’ve become the same Chicago character running for President. One is the good doctor, the other is the monster that shows up at night.

LIZZA: Look, I think there’s a danger of that happening. But as journalists I think there’s a responsibility to make it clear…

MATTHEWS: OK, carve it apart, separate the two. Try.

LIZZA: This guy went to a church. This guy is the pastor of that church. Now one of those guys is running for President and has laid out a vision that is radically different than anything his left-wing pastor had to say. Yes, it tells you something about who he is, it tells you something about the community where he came from. But it doesn’t tell you anything, and nobody should confuse one with–

MATTHEWS: Do you think it might be hurting a good man like Mitt Romney and his family, and good members of the LDS Church, that they’re being embarrassed by this breakaway group down in Texas in the last couple weeks? You don’t think that story hurts Mitt Romney’s chances of being on the ticket? Yes it does. So I’m saying, these associations, fair or unfair, birds of a feather, it’s the way people think.

My favorite passage. “Fair or unfair.” In other words, I know I’m talking bullshit, but this is my impression of what the unwashed masses think, so, you know, I’m going with it.

Jill Zuckman chimed in, calling Lizza “a little high-minded,” Tweety went on to call “GOD DAMN AMERICA” one of the greatest quotes in history, and it went on from there. Lizza, of course, kept his Village standing by calling Wright a “doctrinaire left-winger.” And then Matthews launched into his defense of his profession for continuing to harp on meaningless trivialities – it’s apparently the Democrats’ fault.

MATTHEWS: For years the Democratic politicians have been lambasting Republicans for hanging around with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And now they’re going after Pastor Hagee. This is the way politics is played, you get the guy’s associates.

The difference, of course, is right inside Lizza’s original comment – Falwell and Robertson’s policy prescriptions did indeed “match up” with the conservative Republicans who associated with them, whereas in the case of Obama, he’s charted his own policy course. There’s also the fact that Falwell/Robertson associations never got more than a half-hour’s worth of coverage on something like Hardball at all, and never without a spokesman rebutting anything negative (remember, Falwell GUEST-HOSTED Crossfire back in the day). Wright is some “character from Chicago” but Falwell and Robertson were media members in good standing.

This is about the media Heathers using their limited view of politics to make sure that Obama is slapped on the wrist every time Jeremiah Wright speaks. The learned response is that any “doctrinaire left-winger” is radioactive. That’s certainly the effort being made here. Usually how a John McCain reacts to something like this on his end is to completely ignore it. Liberals are of course not afforded that luxury.

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