Month: May 2008

Howlin’ Wolf

by digby

Gosh, if they weren’t such proven liars about everything, I might even believe this. In the middle of the debates about the military tribunals in Guantanamo, not so much:

A former Kuwaiti detainee at the US camp at Guantanamo Bay carried out a recent suicide bombing in northern Iraq, the US military has said.

A spokesman for US Central Command told the Associated Press that Abdullah al-Ajmi took part in an attack in Mosul on 29 April that killed several people.

Ajmi and two other Kuwaitis blew up two explosive-packed vehicles next to Iraqi security forces, media reports say.

This administration, and the Pentagon too, have a credibility gap as big as the Grand Canyon. Sorry, I’d need something more definitive to believe something like this. Just a little too convenient.

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It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

by digby

Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in …

Telecom companies have presented congressional Democrats with a set of proposals on how to provide immunity to the businesses that participated in a controversial government electronic surveillance program, a House Democratic aide said Wednesday. Congress has been wrestling for months with an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with the immunity issue the primary sticking point. Many Democrats want the companies held accountable for participating in the program, which was initiated in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The White House, however, has insisted that the participation of the telecoms is crucial to monitoring conversations between potential terrorists. President Bush has vowed to veto any bill that does not contain immunity. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday a FISA deal is “still in flux” but he described the latest developments as “promising” and said he hoped to have a solution soon. House officials declined to discuss the specifics of the proposed immunity language by the telecoms.

This is an piece of legislation which we can feel proud to have battled back since last August. But Bush wants this one very, very badly for some reason and he’s going to push it right up until the day he leaves office. It’s a zombie. And it’s not just about money. These are huge corporations that can easily afford to litigate these claims and since it is unlikely that any of the plaintiffs suffered huge damages they don’t face outrageous financial liability. They don’t even face much bad PR: if they lose, they just say they were trying to help the government fight terrorists and there won’t be a whole lot of customers who will switch to other carriers when they find out they violated the fourth amendment. This is about the Bush administration and keeping civil liberties lawyers from having access to discovery documents.

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Deal And No Deal

by dday

The good news – President Bush and top Democrats have the framework of a deal that would provide us with a working FEC for the general election. The bad news – it’s an exceedingly strange “deal”.

To break the impasse, President George W. Bush nominated three new candidates to serve on the panel, but he refused to withdraw his nomination of Republican Hans von Spakovsky to serve on the FEC despite Democrats’ opposition.

They have blocked his nomination because of his work at the Justice Department’s voting division, questioning whether he tried to inject politics into the group meant to independently oversee the country’s voting laws.

The White House believes he “would be confirmed by the Senate if allowed a vote,” said White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in a letter to Reid on Tuesday.

As part of the package, Bush nominated Democrat Cynthia Bauerly, legislative director to New York Sen. Charles Schumer, Republican attorney Donald McGahn, and Republican Caroline Hunter, who works on the Election Assistance Commission.

Let’s look at that again. Bush nominated von Spakovsky and two new Republicans. One of them would replace current FEC commissioner David Mason. Mason, one of two remaining on the FEC at present, has been a thorn in the side of presumptive GOP nominee John W. McCain.

In February, the McCain campaign notified the FEC that it was withdrawing from the public financing system for the primary. Although McCain had once opted in, his campaign said that it had never received public funds and so could opt out. The move meant that McCain would not be bound by the $54 million spending limit for the system.

But Mason balked. McCain couldn’t just opt out — the FEC had to approve his request before he could. And Mason also indicated that a tricky bank loan might mean that McCain had locked himself in to the system. That would be disastrous for the campaign, since the Dem nominee would have a tremendous spending advantage through August. So McCain’s campaign has continued to spend away, far surpassing the limit already. The Democratic Party has filed a complaint with the FEC and has also taken the matter to court.

And now Mason is getting the boot.

So the Bush Administration fired Mason, in essence, for insubordination, and will offer the same vote suppression expert von Spakovsky as part of their “deal.”

‘Scuse me?

The one concession in this deal is that von Spakovsky will get a separate vote. Now, the Bush Administration fully believes he’ll pass under that standard, while Harry Reid’s office says they “expect” to defeat von Spakovsky. But I don’t know what they’re basing that on. As far as I can tell there’s no “upperdown vote” agreed to here, so his confirmation could be filibustered. Still, Mitch McConnell is wily and there are so many obstructions they’ve thrown up in the past, that I could easily see a scenario where they agree to move forward on some minor initiatives in exchange for von Spakovsky’s nomination. Alternatively, the Republicans will relent on von Spakovsky in exchange for retroactive immunity for the telecoms. There are a lot of balls in the air.

That must not happen. Christy at FDL details why von Spakovsky is simply unacceptable and urges you to call members of the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction. It’s not worth it to get a known vote suppressor installed on the ruling electoral body in the United States, and pick off a Republican who seems to have a functioning independent mind in the process.

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Bush’s Terrorist Has A Coming-Out Party

by dday

Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist wanted for crimes in Latin America, had a nice dinner the other night.

…the man being honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala was Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago […]

Venezuela’s ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, condemned the celebration of Posada as a mockery of justice and evidence of a Bush administration double standard in fighting terrorism.

“This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about violence,” Alvarez said of Posada. “He said that the whole thing now is ‘to sharpen our machetes’ ” for a confrontation with leftist regimes in Latin America.

The U.S. government has never given Venezuela a formal answer to its 3-year-old request for extradition of Posada, despite a treaty providing for such cooperation that has been in effect since 1922, the ambassador said.

Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, is alleged to have masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 on which all 73 on board were killed, including a youth fencing team returning from a tournament in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. He is also suspected of plotting a series of hotel bombings in Havana in the late 1990s, one of which killed an Italian tourist.

He has boasted of his many attempts to kill Castro and has allegedly been involved in, according to court documents, “some of the most infamous events of 20th century Central American politics.” […]

Analysts speculate that the U.S. government has dodged calls for prosecution of Posada for fear he would disclose details of CIA involvement in coups, assassination plots and scandals, including the Iran-Contra Affair.

Peter Kornbluh, head of the Cuba Documentation Project at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, has compiled declassified CIA and FBI documents on Posada that show he remained in close touch with Washington handlers throughout his covert service.

“The spectacle of a wanted international terrorist being publicly feted as a hero in Miami makes a mockery of the Bush administration’s commitment to wage a war on terrorism,” he said of Posada’s coming-out party.

I seem to remember a speech wherein the President averred that “we will make no distinction between terrorists and the states who harbor them.”

Hm.

Let the bombing of Miami commence!

More on Posada Carriles from my archives. He was a CIA operative, by the way, involved in all of these plots to overthrow governments and assassinate sovereign leaders, when a guy by the name of George Bush was CIA Director. In fact, the Cuban airliner bombing was carried out with full knowledge of the CIA, while it was under the auspices of Mr. Bush.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye

by digby

So I hear that Village High Commissioner Tim Russert declared that we have a Democratic nominee. The Town Crier, Drudge, immediately followed with an official announcement The real leadership of our nation — the punditocricy — have handed down their decision. Hallelujah!

Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate. The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC. “Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they’ll say: ‘What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you’re staying in the race?’ And tonight, there’s no good answer for that.”It was not exactly Walter Cronkite declaring that the Vietnam War would end in stalemate. But the impact was apparent almost immediately, starting with The Drudge Report, the online news billboard that is the home page to many political reporters in Washington and news producers in New York. It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

It reminds me of the halcyon days for Democrats in November 2000, when Russert used his little marking board to show us “the math” and declare that Gore needed to bow out for the good of the country. Good times. (And when did that GOP washing machine Drudge become an “online news billboard?”)

Look, I have the same analysis of the outcome of the elections in Indiana and North Carolina that most people have this morning. Clinton’s best argument — which was essentially that the voters were taking a second look at Obama and showing some buyers remorse — didn’t pan out last night. And there’s nothing wrong with political junkies sitting around the virtual pot-bellied stove and saying the race is “over” or exhorting her to drop out. We’re citizens and, in some cases, political players. There is, however, something unbelievably distasteful about a handful of powerful, millionaire, celebrity pundits “declaring” such a thing and having the paper of record breathlessly report it as if it was decisive and meaningful.

Who the fuck anointed Tim Russert as the final arbiter of anything? His job is to analyze the political landscape not declare the decision as if he were some kind of Roman Emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s bad enough that these gasbags put those thumbs on the scale as hard as they do, but actually taking the initiative to say when the race is over is even worse. To coin a favorite Village phrase, “it’s not their place.”

It may be that last night really was the tie breaker that showed that Obama’s campaign could withstand some harsh press and rebound from setbacks. It’s not a bad thing for Democratic voters to test that out and give him some practice. If he’s the nominee and then the president, he’s going to have to get used to it. But if it is the end, as I think many of us suspect, it’s for Senator Clinton to be the one to declare it, not Tim Russert or any other fatuous overpaid Village gasbag who is no more insightful or informed than any of you.

The idea floating around, even in the blogosphere, that once Tim Russert “says it” it’s true is so galling that I can hardly keep from projectile vomiting. Giving him that power will come back to bite us hard down the road.

By the way, the rumor I’m hearing this morning is that the Obama campaign actually approves of the idea of her going on through West Virginia and Kentucky in order that he not lose a couple of races by large margins just after he becomes the presumptive nominee. There is some wisdom in that idea. I have no idea if it’s true.

I think we all see the writing on the wall. Obama has plenty of money and there is no great problem if this thing goes on for a couple of weeks. I think everyone should relax about the campaign and start regrouping around the ideas that brought us here — one of which is the fact that the mainstream media are tools, that Drudge is a Republican pimp and that our nation is not well served by a bunch of corporate whores who all sit around sipping mojitos on Nantucket playing with our politics like they are a rousing game of cribbage.

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Errol Morris

by tristero

On Abu Ghraib and Torture:

Abu Ghraib was not just one cell corridor and a few MPs with cameras. By the end of 2003, it was a de facto concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni triangle with close to 10,000 prisoners. There was systematic and horrendous abuse. Constant mortar attacks putting both guards and prisoners at risk. Thousands of prisoners rounded up in sweeps and kept indefinitely in outdoor ‘tent cities;’ repeated rioting because of food shortages and squalid conditions; illegal renditions to Jordan; kidnapping, hostage-taking; children behind bars; torture, water-boarding – even murder…

While I was working on Standard Operating Procedure, many people asked about “the smoking gun.” “Have you found the smoking gun? Have you found the smoking gun? — presumably linking the abuses to the upper levels of the Defense Department and to the White House?” The question puzzles me. There are smoking guns everywhere but people don’t see them, refuse to see them or pretend they don’t exist. How many torture memos does an administration have to promulgate before the public gets the idea they are promulgating torture? Bush has recently admitted that he was present at these meetings and approved “harsh interrogation techniques.” And yet this has scarcely been a news story. Well-documented attempts to subvert the Constitution, abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and simple human decency. What does it take?

We are surrounded by smoking guns on all sides. Crimes have been committed; we have ample evidence of them. But there can be no justice if there is a failure to stand up for it, if we fail to demand it. Here’s the flip side of the torture memos. John Yoo can argue that the President can do anything. Let him do what he pleases, but does that mean he can’t be held responsible for the things he has ordered or the things done in his name?

It is easy to dismiss all of this as the unfortunate product of war. But this is not about war, it is about us. How complacent have we become? What does it take? Each day that we allow these crimes to go unanswered erodes the very ideals that this country stands for.

That, my friends, is how you talk about torture. With outrage and disgust. With dismayed horror that this country simply refuses to look at the truth about our government’s leaders, refuses to hold them accountable, and refuses to bring them to justice.

God doesn’t have to damn America, Reverend Wright. America is damning itself. It is simply unconscionable that this country not only permits the president to torture whomever he chooses to, but that this country’s ruling class feels they are too politically weak to stand up and shout, “No!” as our Constitution gets shredded into tiny, blood-stained pieces.

Nuns

by dday

The primary results from Indiana and North Carolina should be pretty much projected by 8:00ET or so. But we already know who’s won, at least in Indiana – voter suppression advocates like the 9 robed figures on the Supreme Court.

About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.

The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,'” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.

They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”

This is merely the one story that’s been reported. You have to expect there are many more; in fact there are several more later in the story. Of course, the Scalia-Thomas-Alito-Roberts faction on the Court will tell you that’s just the price we have to pay for dealing with the scourge of non-existent voter fraud.

Today’s vote was kind of a test market for the fall. There’s high turnout throughout the state anyway so I don’t expect this aspect of the vote to be widely reported.

…a group of voting rights advocates that established a separate hot line reported receiving several calls from would-be voters who were turned away at precincts because they did not have a state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

One newly married woman said she was told she couldn’t vote because her driver’s license name didn’t match the one on her voter registration record, said Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center Justice at New York University’s law school, coordinator of the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hot line. Another woman said she was turned away from casting her first-ever ballot because she had only a college-issued ID card and an out-of-state driver’s license, Perez said.

“These laws are confusing. People don’t know how they’re supposed to be applied,” she said.

In case you’re interested in continuing the mentality that allows voter suppression to be codified into law, there is a Presidential candidate that’s right for you.

Here’s what McCain was really telling the party base: If you liked George W. Bush’s nominees, you’re going to love the judges John McCain will put on the bench.

McCain also touted his support for the so-called Gang of 14 as a supposed sign of moderation. But the fact is that he has voted to give lifetime jobs as federal judges to every one of President Bush’s most dangerous and damaging nominees. And they’re already eroding individual rights and legal protections. We’re all going to be living with the consequences of those votes for a long, long time.

The two Supreme Court justices nominated by President Bush are already making it harder for workers mistreated on the job to get justice. They’re letting politicians get away with making it harder for some people to vote. They’re redefining our Constitution and laws to erode progress on women’s rights, educational opportunity, environmental protections, and more.

We all know that a vote for McCain is a vote against women’s reproductive rights, a vote against consumer rights, a vote against worker rights, and a vote for massive corporate power under the law. And we know that the Republicans aren’t able to win legitimately, so laws like Indiana’s will be replicated wherever possible in an attempt to game the system. In a sense awareness is a powerful way to counteract this – sunlight is the best disinfectant. At the same time part of me believes that the vote margin in November needs to be higher than the last two elections in order to get a result in line with the will of the people. But this is not a cause for despair, but a clarion call to get to work right now.

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Showdown At The House Judiciary Committee

by dday

Not only did they vote to subpoena David Addington, Cheney’s Cheney, about acts of torture authorized inside the White House, but John Yoo has agreed to testify without a subpoena. Doug Feith will be there too, and John Ashcroft. The whole Torture Team is getting back together for one more round of fun.

Maybe they can track down Sami al-Haj and have Addington and his buddies face him.

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj has just been released from Guantanamo Bay. The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders issued a statement Thursday saying Sami al-Haj had been tortured while at Guantanamo and subjected to 200 interrogation sessions. He’s lost forty pounds, is suffering from intestinal problems and bouts of paranoia, according to his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.

Asim al-Haj, who is Sami al-Haj’s younger brother, told Al Jazeera he doesn’t recognize his thirty-nine-year-old brother, because he now looks like a man in his eighties. We spoke to Asim al-Haj on Thursday night, a few hours before Sami al-Haj landed in Khartoum […]

SAMI AL-HAJ: [translated] I’m very happy to be in Sudan, but I’m very sad because of the situation of our brothers who remain in Guantanamo. Conditions in Guantanamo are very, very bad, and they get worse by the day. Our human condition, our human dignity was violated, and the American administration went beyond all human values, all moral values, all religious values. In Guantanamo, you have animals that are called iguanas, rats that are treated with more humanity. But we have people from more than fifty countries that are completely deprived of all rights and privileges, and they will not give them the rights that they give to animals.

For more than seven years, I did not get a chance to be brought before a civil court. To defend their just case and to get the freedom that we’re deprived of, they ignored every kind of law, every kind of religion. But thank God. I was lucky, because God allowed that I be released. Although I’m happy, there is part of me that is not, because my brothers remain behind, and they are in the hands of people that claim to be champions of peace and protectors of rights and freedoms.

But the true just peace does not come through military force or threats to use smart or stupid bombs or to threaten with economic sanctions. Justice comes from lifting oppression and guaranteeing rights and freedoms and respecting the will of the people and not to interfere with a country’s internal politics.

If he’s not available, maybe Emad al-Janabi can be found.

LOS ANGELES – An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months.

Emad al-Janabi’s federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003 […]

The lawsuit also claims the contractors conspired in a cover-up by destroying documents and other information, hid prisoners during periodic checks by the International Red Cross and misled military and government officials about what was happening at Abu Ghraib.

Al-Janabi was released in July 2004 and wasn’t charged with any crime, according to the lawsuit. He also was forced to form a human pyramid in the nude with other prisoners, according to the lawsuit, but his Philadelphia-based attorney Susan Burke said it wasn’t known if he was in the infamous photo that became public.

“Most of this conduct was repeated on more than one occasion,” Burke said.

There are bound to be dozens of others that the House Judiciary Committee could ring up if these two can’t fit the hearing into their busy schedules. It’d be nice for the living consequences of their monstrous policies to be staring this gang in the face.

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Juan Cole On Iran/Hezbolollah Tales

by tristero

Yestereday, I noted some major problems with Michael Gordon’s story “Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran” and I wasn’t the only one. Now, a genuine expert, Juan Cole, weigns in and he echoes our concerns that the story either is totally bogus or the informants were tortured and told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. But Cole goes further, asking, even if the story is true, how important is it? Go here:

The Mahdi Army is tens of thousands of slum kids. Sadrism goes back to the 1990s in Iraq and is a mass movement. Iran had nothing to do with them historically. Moreover, how important is all this? Have, like, 4 Lebanese guys really trained all that many Mahdi Army militiamen? How many exactly? How much more effective would they be as a result? Wouldn’t the political support of millions of Iraqi Shiites in the South really be the source of Muqtada al-Sadr’s power and authority?

What is being alleged is too small to produce a really big, nation-wide effect in Iraq. The Mahdi Army fought the US military for two long hard months in spring of 2004, and for another month in August. Iran was not around.

Occam’s Razor dictates that we do not need Iran as a hypothesis for explaining the Sadr Movement or its activities in Iraq. Behind the scenes opinion polling suggests that the Sadr Movement has become more and more popular with the electorate. This, despite Iran’s having helped buy the election for the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq in 2005. Having gotten their clients in power, why would Iran now try to blow up Badr commanders who have become provincial governors or deputy governors.

In the same post, Cole notes that former president Khatami may have hinted that Iran is, in fact, meddling in the affairs of its neighbors. Or not.

Needless to say the Middle East is a complex place in which the simplistic narratives of the Bush administration and the mainstream media just won’t fit.

My Sincerest Apologies

by tristero

Dear readers,

Recently, I wrote a post criticizing Sam Harris. When it received many negative comments, I wrote a follow-up post defending my criticism of Harris. And to be frank, I liked writing both of them and felt I had made a good case. I was under the impression that Sam Harris was a legitimate, if somewhat under-intelligent and morally naive, voice who deserved at the very least to be taken seriously. Hoo, boy, was I ever wrong.

Turns out Sam Harris advocates torture. Perhaps some freshman who’s passed a philosophy course with a c+ or higher would like to decimate his I-use-the-term-loosely reasoning. It won’t take very long to expose Harris as a total fool on the subject, and I would do so myself, but I have some paint drying and frankly, watching that would be a far better use of my time.. His arguments are unworthy of serious comment. No wonder PZ Myers called Sam Harris a “dingbat”, abeit for an entirely different screwy argument he made. Apparently, his fans confuse being different with being smart and bold. Sometimes, my friends,”different” is just plain stooopid.

So, dear readers, I apologize for the waste of time dealing with Mr. Harris. I won’t do so again, except in passing. Perhaps on some other subjects he has something useful to say – maybe he’s an expert on collecting string! – but chances are good that then someone else, who knows better than to advocate torture will also say it.

Thank you, Night Light for bringing Harris’ pro-torture comments to my attention.

love,

tristero

P.S. I wrote about torture here.