Month: November 2008

Poppy’s Legacy

by digby

I’m not too sure where E.J.Dionne is coming from here, but it sounds as if he thinks it’s some kind of great thing if Obama decides to become the president son George Bush Sr never had. But it pays to remember that the vaunted “realism” of George Bush Sr led to a war that’s still going on today. He’s the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:

Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.

The story, improbable from the start, was first reported by the Daily Telegraph in London on September 5 1990. But the story lacked the human element; it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies.

That was soon rectified. An organisation calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10m contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill & Knowlton, to campaign for American military intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait.

The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and Hill & Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the babies’ story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking with tears at the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to continue. The congressional committee knew her only as “Nayirah” and the television segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution on the faces of the congressmen listening to her. President Bush referred to the story six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam’s regime.

In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just five votes. John R Macarthur’s study of propaganda in the war says that the babies atrocity was a definitive moment in the campaign to prepare the American public for the need to go to war.

It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.

(For more on the propaganda war, read this award winning article about John Rendon in Rolling Stone.)

That was, of course, the least of it:

ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” said a grave Ted Koppel, “that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam’s Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy.”

Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.

Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage? Certainly, if you watched Nightline or read the London Financial Times or the Los Angeles Times, you saw this monster grow. But if you studied the news columns of The Washington Post or, especially, The New York Times, you practically missed the whole thing. Those two papers were very slow to come to the story and, when they finally did get to it, their pieces all too frequently were boring, complicated,and short of the analysis readers required to fathom just what was going on. More to the point, they often ignored revelations by competitors.

The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam’s arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.

Iraqgate was another of those scandals that Clinton and the Democrats in congress left on the floor because they didn’t want to play the blame game. It’s ended up costing a lot of lives.

I recognize that in the beltway, there is a belief that the only “serious” foreign policy schools are Neoconservative and Realist (also conservative.) We know that Obama is not a neocon and it’s a great relief. But let’s hope that Obama is forging a different path than that taken by the Realists as well. After all, the king of the realists is none other than Henry Kissinger and he’s left his fingerprints on every American made foreign disaster in the last 40 years.

I suppose that if it makes the villagers happy to believe that the really, really old “grown-ups” are back in charge, it doesn’t matter a whole lot if it’s just a PR stunt. But let’s hope that people in foreign lands don’t get the idea that we’re taking a trip back to the 80s because that wasn’t a particularly successful time for American foreign policy.

And revisionists who are trying to turn Poppy into some kind of kindly, avuncular old coot need to take a little trip down memory lane. He was a ruthless piece of work.

Resolute Mules

by digby

Speaking of injustice, here’s another story that makes my head hurt. From T Chris at Talk Left:

I recall sitting at my computer at work a few years ago and hitting a link to Paris Hilton and up popped about 35 successive links to porn sites and I couldn’t get them all to close no matter how hard I tried. It went on for about a minute before I started laughing and pretty much gave up. It was a common computer problem at one time and I can see how if you were flustered in front of a bunch of kids you’d flounder around a bit before you figured out how to deal with it.

Apparently the prosecutors’ case rested on the fact that she was criminally liable because she failed to immediately turn the computer off. They actually tried to put her in jail for it.

As T Chris says:

… imposing criminal liability on a relatively computer-illiterate teacher because she didn’t think quickly enough is reprehensible. The result is a ruined life because the school system couldn’t manage its IT competently and because prosecutors couldn’t bring themselves to admit they made a mistake.

That last is a big problem. Most prosecutors are honest and exercise common sense in situations like this. But once they get dug in, or convince themselves that they will lose respect and authority if they admit they made a mistake, they just keep plowing ahead.

In fact, you could say the same thing about many in government. Even the highest offices in the land.

Taser Talk

by digby

A reader from France alerted me to this interesting story about tasers:

A Paris court on Monday began hearing a libel case by the head of a company that supplies Taser stun guns to French police against a Trotskyist leader who said the weapons can be lethal.

The hearing began just a few days after Antoine Di Zazzo, head of SMP Technologies, was charged with spying on the man he is suing, Olivier Besancenot, leader of the Communist Revolutionary League (LCR).

SMP Technologies is seeking 50,000 euros (66,000 dollars) in damages from Besancenot because he said in a blog and a newspaper interview that Taser guns had “probably silenced more than 150 people in the US.”

Ex-presidential candidate Besancenot says he was simply drawing attention to an Amnesty International report on Tasers that said that nearly 300 people have died around the world after being zapped with a Taser.

He is calling for a moratorium on the weapon’s use while a full investigation is conducted into their safety.

Like Taser, Di Zazzo, whose company has supplied Tasers to the French army, police and gendarmerie since 2004, adamantly denies the guns can be lethal. Darts fired by the Taser pack a 50,000-volt punch that can paralyse targets from 10 yards (metres) away.

Di Zazzo was arrested last week, along with several people who included police officers, private detectives and a customs official, on suspicion of having spied on Besancenot and his partner and gaining access to their bank details.

Obviously the French libel laws are different from the US, but it does point out just what kind of hardball these taser companies play. Here in the US, they fight every allegation of wrongdoing with equal zeal. But they lost their first products liability case last summer and there will likely be more as the numbers and scope of taser misuse becomes more known.

But they do other, much more insidious, things as well. The taser company is pretty much the sole purveyor of information about the safety and use of the weapon. Representatives are relied upon as “experts” in court proceedings and police hearings. But this really takes the cake:

The Globe and Mail has reported on the cozy ties between Taser International and some coronors, the officials often responsible for investigating Taser related deaths; a cozy relationship which creates an appearance of bias on the part of one very prominent Canadian coronor.

In Taser firms picked up coroner’s lecture tab the Globe reports that Taser International has paid hotel and travel expenses for prominent Canadian coronor Dr. James Cairns, Ontario‘s deputy chief coronor, who has given seminars “on the phenomenon of “excited delirium,” a medically unrecognized term that the company often cites as a reason people die after being tasered“. The article indicates that Dr. Cairns does not see any conflict of interest on his part. [The Globe & Mail also reports that Dr. Cairns admitted in testimony yesterday at an Ontario inquiry that he had helped shield disgraced pathologist Charles Smith.]

In Symposium aims to define ‘excited delirium’ DEATHS IN CUSTODY: TASER HELPS FUND RESEARCH the Globe and Mail reports on the second annual Sudden Death, Excited Delirium and In-Custody Death Conference underway in Las Vegas. Many of the nearly 20 talks touch on the role of Tasers. “The key issue is excited delirium, a collection of symptoms that is quickly becoming the leading explanation offered when a person dies in police custody or after a taser is used.” Two researchers who presented disclosed that Taser International funds their research. As reported by the Globe & Mail, the Taser subsidized research presenters “conducted research on the negative effects of taser use on the human body; they found very few“.

Obviously there is tremendous pressure, both the from industry and police, to keep the use of tasers unrestricted. And why not? There’s a lot of money to be made and the police love having the ability to force compliance with their weapons, just as they used to love using a billy club for the same purpose. It makes their jobs easier, and I understand that. The problem is that in our system you aren’t supposed to be punished before you have been found guilty of a crime. Certainly, we don’t believe police should have the right to hurt or kill people they already have in custody, which is what often happens when they taser people who are already on the ground and handcuffed.

If police really did only use them in situations where they’d otherwise use a lethal weapon, then they would be a useful tool. But because they are considered “harmless” they are being used indiscriminately to make people compliant, which is not the same thing. They are dangerous weapons when used on people who have certain conditions the police can’t know about ahead of time and they should be used very, very judiciously and they aren’t.

And the main reason for this is the fact that the Taser company is spending a lot of money settling lawsuits and lobbying and greasing the palms of police officials and politicians. Their behavior suggests a company that knows very well its product is harmful and is using all the levers at its disposal to silence critics and keep the money flowing in for as long as it can.

And wait until the next generation of torture devices hits the streets.

Update: This one’s just unbelievable. The good news is that they changed the rules: police can no longer taser people when they are sleeping.

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Kewl Kid Kabuki

by digby

I don’t know how long it will take for Halperin and Kurtz to get the kewl kidz on board the train (they are all worried about their own 401ks, after all.) But it’s out there.

I’m starting to feel a little guilty about the media’s treatment of President-elect Barack Obama — and I may not be the only one.

Chalk it up to a phenomenon I’d like to call “Obama-remorse.” You know how you feel buyer’s remorse after you’ve spent a lot of dough on some big-ticket item, only to realize that you might have made a mistake? Well, it’s going to happen to the president-elect as well.

Perhaps this sort of recognition prompted Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz to do an incisive piece called “A Giddy Sense of Boosterism” on Nov. 17. As Kurtz noted, the media have tripped over themselves to celebrate and cash in on Obama’s victory. NBC News is preparing a DVD called “Yes, We Can: The Barack Obama Story.” ABC is readying a documentary on the campaign, too.

As I see it, the media are having second thoughts about their performance over the past year.

[…]

I’m thrilled that he won the election, underscoring the American ideal that we live in a forward-thinking democracy, where any man or woman can rise to the highest office in the land. And I’m proud that even Obama’s staunchest foes — particularly the man he defeated, John McCain — seem to be willing to accept his victory and pledge to help him turn around the economy and cure the nation’s other ills.

But I also feel guilty because I know that the media’s Adulation Express — never to be confused with McCain’s old Straight Talk Express — is going to hit a few speed bumps before it inexorably grinds to a halt.

It’s inevitable… that Obama will eventually have his turn under the microscope. When the media start picking apart some of his Cabinet choices or his pronouncements on the state of the economy or his declarations about Iraq, he may be surprised to find that the afterglow of his stunning victory turns sour so fast.

This is a member of the media writing this as if its something fated by the Gods — something over which these media professionals simply have no control. It’s inevitable! And it’s inevitable because reporters have buyers remorse and will have to “turn sour” in order to assuage their bad feelings about themselves.

It’s all about them, you see.

I agree with this fellow that this is probably going to be the dynamic. It was predicted long ago. But it certainly doesn’t have to be. The media could develop some self awareness and not play out their adolescent psychodramas on American politics for a change. But I’m not hopeful when media establishment leaders like Halperin and Kurtz are bringing the hammer down so hard.

Meanwhile, it looks like the old innocent bystander excuse is coming into play heavily. This person, who is a paid media professional, is “observing” how the paid professional media is going to turn on Obama as if his publishing this story isn’t helping them do exactly that by pretending that it is some sort of inexorable certainty. It’s kewl kid kabuki, same as it ever was. I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’re doing it.

h/t to Charles

Torture Zombie

by digby

I have always been in favor of prosecutions for the unitary executive torture regime. Recently, however, I have reluctantly concluded that the best we could hope for is a “9/12” Commission investigation since Obama has been making it quite clear that he doesn’t intend to pursue government officials through the Justice system (and congress is congenitally incapable of it.) I was impressed by Charles Homan’s article in Washington Monthly that at the very least we needed to establish some official narrative of illegality and abuse of power lest this become an established option for future presidents.

But I am persuaded by Dahlia Lithwick that such a commission won’t get the job done, even if done perfectly and that prosecutions really are the only way to ensure that this won’t happen again:

It’s sweet and fanciful to think that with a grant of immunity and a hot cup of chai, Bush-administration officials who have scoffed at congressional subpoenas and court dates will sit down and unburden themselves to a truth commission about their role in the U.S. attorney firings. I agree completely with Charles Homans, who, in this must-read piece for the Washington Monthly, argues for the release of classified information at all costs. But I just cannot bring myself to believe that the full story will ever be told to our collective satisfaction. Even if every living American were someday to purchase and read the truth commission’s collectively agreed-on bipartisan narrative, weaving together John Yoo’s best intentions and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torment on the water board, sweeping national reconciliation will elude us.

As my friend Jack Goldsmith points out in an op-ed today, we already know the truth of what happened. Not all of it, to be sure, but we know a good deal about who made which critical decisions and when. Just read Michael Ratner’s devastating new book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld. Read Philippe Sands’ Torture Team. Read Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. Read this painfully detailed new report from U.C.-Berkeley, in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights, chronicling the experiences of former detainees held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These writers are not crackpots. We may not have every memo, and we may not be able to name every name. But do truth commissions alone ever reveal the full story? If we decline to hold lawbreakers to account, we may find out a whole lot of facts and arrive at no truth at all. Is the truth that if the president orders it, it isn’t illegal? Or is the truth that good people do bad things in wartime, but that’s OK? Is the truth that if we torture strange men with strange names, it’s not lawbreaking? What legal precedent will this big bipartisan narrative set for the next president with a hankering for dunking prisoners?

In any event, we already know what the other side of the story is. Michael Mukasey holds that those who authorized lawbreaking did so out of “a good-faith desire to protect the citizens of our Nation from a future terrorist attack.” Witness after witness will tell the truth commission that they were scared; they were making quick decisions in the heat of battle, and that their hearts were pure. The real problem, they will go on to say, was that there was too much law—a crippling maze of domestic and international laws that paralyzed government lawyers and the intelligence community. Goldsmith makes that same point in his op-ed today, in arguing against criminal investigations or even a bipartisan commission: Under the threat of criminal sanctions or even noncriminal commissions, “lawyers will become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment.” It seems that after 9/11, the solution to the problem of too much law was to simply do away with the stuff. And the solution to the lawlessness that followed 9/11? Do away with any legal consequences for the perpetrators. If there exists a more perverse method of restoring the rule of law in America than announcing that legal instruments are inadequate to address them, I can’t imagine it.

She’s right. I have been being overly “pragmatic” (depressed is more like it) in assuming that a 9/12 commission will be better than nothing. It would actually be worse than nothing, creating a shallow self-serving narrative of fine, hard working public servants who may have strayed over the line from time to time because they were only trying to keep us safe. It’s always been out there. After all, Rep. Henry Hyde famously said about Iran-Contra:

“All of us at some time confront conflicts between rights and duties, between choices that are evil and less evil, and one hardly exhausts moral imagination by labeling every untruth and every deception an outrage.”

(Of course, he also said:”Lying poisons justice. If we are to defend justice and the rule of law, lying must have consequences,” but that was about the high crime of unauthorized fellatio so it wouldn’t apply to such things as shadow governments, torture and suspending of the constitution.)

This movement conservative zombie was created at the time of Nixon and his pardon, extended through Iran Contra, went through the insane era of partisan investigations in the 1990s which culminated in a trumped-up, partisan impeachment, a stolen election and the lawbreaking Bush years. Nobody has ever paid a price for any of that.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the next time a Republican is elected to the presidency he or she won’t pick right up where they left off. That is the story of the last 40 years and until there is some price to pay they will keep right on doing it, escalating each time. For all the Colin Powell’s who have come over from the Dark Side, there a many more who were trained in this worldview during this long conservative era. At some point they will try to keep power permanently. All it would take is just the right kind of crisis for them to justify it. After all, the precedents are all lined up — normalized and legalized each step of the way by Democrats who didn’t want to spend their political capital to stop it.

Thanksgiving

by digby

It just occurred to me that it’s the perfect day to say thank you to all my readers, who keep me on my toes all year long. Thank you.

For those of you who are bakers, as I am, I thought I’d share a recipe for a very nice holiday season buttermilk pumpkin cake. It’s quite tasty:

For cake

* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs

Icing

* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.

Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.

Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.

Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.

Icing:

Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.

Easy as pie (easier, actually.)

Happy T-Day everyone.

Prop. Thamaaniyah

by dday

I’ll allow myself a brief respite from vacationing to post this bit.

The Iraqi Parliament did pass the withdrawal agreement mandating the end of a US military presence in Iraq by the end of 2011, but Juan Cole notes that the Sunnis extracted a price for their support.

Of 275 members of parliament, 198 attended and 145 voted in favor. That means it barely passed from the point of view of an absolute majority, though it was a clear simple majority. Apparently the al-Maliki government bowed to Sunni Arab demands that the agreement be submitted to a national referendum, California-style. If that is true, it is possible that it could still be rejected by the Iraqi people. But al-Maliki got it through parliament by painting opponents as implicitly opposing a US withdrawal, and that campaign tactic may work with the general public, too.

I think such a tactic is more likely to work with skittish politicians than an Iraqi public which wants the occupying forces out, and knows that if they vote down the agreement the forces would have to leave immediately. The Sunnis demanded other concessions from the Shiite government in exchange for their votes, including the release of political prisoners and an end to Shiite suppression of the minority, and when those promises get predictably reneged, that would threaten the referendum’s passage as well.

It is, however, interesting that the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, politicians throughout the Parliament, and now every individual Iraqi will have a chance to weigh in on this security agreement with the United States, yet basically one “decider” in this country is allowed to do so.

We are, however, a shining city on a hill, so that balances things out.

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Smarts

by digby

David Broder feels that it’s a really good time to have a super smart president. For years he thought that being smart wasn’t very important in a president but now he does because the problems are so severe. He gives no indication that he understands there might be a correlation between having a really stupid president and the problems which we now need a really smart president to fix.

He also names Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as primary examples of why you don’t want a smart president — they don’t achieve anything worth achieving. The dumb ones do. Of course, they all happen to be Republicans. One wonders if the Dean is aware that the achievements he cares about might be associated with a certain ideology rather than the personal characteristics of the president?

He is certainly relieved that a smart person has been elected to clean up the mess made by the frat boy and his neo-con posse, as are we all. But this pattern isn’t very healthy. Perhaps Broder and the rest of the villagers could stop deciding which presidents we are allowed to have based upon their own prejudices (which they attribute to some mythical white working man in small town America) and some shallow psychoanalysis picked up while loitering in the self-help section at Barnes and Noble and just examine their agenda and whether they are qualified. This Oprahization of presidential politics hasn’t gotten us anywhere.

Center Right Watch

by digby

John Amato does a poll every week on AOL. It tends to trend conservative for some reason.

This week he asked whether this country is now a center-left nation. It got surprising results.

It’s unscientific, of course, but interesting nonetheless.

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Expletive Deleted

by digby

In this article about the missing little girl Kaylee down in Florida, they describe some of the computer searches and messages on the mother’s computer. One of them was this:

In an instant-message exchange with a boyfriend who calls Caylee an expletive for wanting more lunch, Casey responds, “Ha. Ha.” She follows with “I’m pretty vicious.”

I’ve wracked my brain and I can’t for the life of me think what an expletive for “wanting more lunch” is. Can anyone explain it to me?