Author: digby

Running Of The Bullshit

In an interview on PBS television Thursday, Wolfowitz said Zapatero’s withdrawal plan didn’t seem very Spanish.

“The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven’t run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don’t run in the face of these people.”

I’m beginning to think that the lead in the water in DC is a much bigger problem that we realize.

All Hail Howard Dean

I knew he was the right man for the job. I am still not as sangiune about Nader as everyone else seems to be:

Dr. Dean’s new Rx:

“To that end, according to a well-placed source close to Dean, Kerry and Dean have discussed Dean’s projected role in challenging Ralph Nader, whose fourth run for president has Democrats, Independents and even some Greens apoplectic. Dean has been careful to praise Nader’s accomplishments before urging people not to be seduced by a quixotic campaign. This is a tactical move to avoid driving people into Nader’s arms by being too combative. But should Nader manage to get on the ballot in some key states and threaten to throw them to Bush, expect the gloves to come off.”

In The Supreme Court is suspicious. By Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate, she discussed the case I referenced below in my post about a national ID card. The case was heard by the court today:

One after another dismisses the national ID card debate as not at issue here. One after another suggests—and to a rather frightening degree, at times—that this case has nothing to do with innocent people, or ordinary people. This case has to do with “suspicious” people, and—as you were no doubt aware—suspicious people are not like you or me.

[…]

We all seem to want to live in the world inhabited by most of the justices: where our names are private, and no one needs to incriminate themselves—unless some policeman decides they are suspicious. Then, there is a duty, a responsibility, a constitution-negating requirement that you come forward—to use Scalia’s formulation—and cooperate. This idea that the “suspicious people” (read: dark-skinned, poor, urban etc.) have some heightened duty to cooperate with the police is utterly backward, in light of the police’s historical treatment of them. It’s a shame Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t speak today. One can imagine that he has at least some idea of what it means to hold “suspicious” people to a different constitutional standard.

Read the whole thing. Somehow I’m getting the idea that the court is in the process of abandoning legal principle generally in favor of some sort of “common sense” view of the law that says the government can do what it wants because an innocent person has nothing to worry about.

Clarke and Wolfowitz and Mylroie

Matthew Yglesias says:

…you really ought to read Peter Bergen’s article on Laurie Mylroie. Especially in light of Wolfowitz’s pre-9/11 remark (reported in Clarke’s book) that rather than go after al-Qaeda we should go after Saddam Hussein because he sponsored terrorism against the United States it appears more and more to be the case here that a big part of the problem is simply that Wolfowitz is a believer in her conspiracy theory. I’ve heard in a second-hand kind of way that this is the case, and Clarke’s stuff seems to lend that account even more plausibility than what Bergen gives us.

Actually, there’s quite a bit more evidence. In a post from last August, in which I wrote about this Wolfowitz/Mylroie connection I linked to Josh Marshall’s reporting on the backround controversy surrounding Sam Tannenhaus’ article on Wolfowitz in the August 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Josh said:

As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is “confident” that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had “entertained” the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz’s ideas about Oklahoma City to a “longtime friend” of the Deputy Secretary.)

The exact quotes remain on backround and have never been revealed. But, in an earlier story, Time magazine reported:

One reason so many hawks seemed ready to make the case for retaliating against Saddam as well as bin Laden may have been the influence of Laurie Mylroie, a conservative scholar who had convinced herself and a number of influential conservatives, although not the U.S. intelligence community, that Iraq had been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was very likely behind 9/11, too. But as eccentric as her argument was to the U.S. intelligence community, it was hailed by Wolfowitz, who wrote in a blurb to her book that it “argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence.” And invade-Iraq cheerleader Richard Perle, formerly head of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, wrote in his own blurb: “Laurie Myroie has amassed convincing evidence of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. If she is right, and there are simple ways to test her hypothesis, we would be justified in concluding that Saddam was probably involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks as well.”

Clarke said that after 9/11 Wolfowitz wondered why the government was spending so much time on one apparently irrelevant man. Two days after the attacks, Wolfowitz made his famous Al Haig style comment in which he said (and which was slapped down immediately by Colin Powell):

I think one has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that’s why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.

It is indisputable that Wolfowitz swallowed whole the ridiculous theory that terrorists are unable to function without state sponsorship, as his comments above illustrate. This theory was set forth again last July by Mylroie testimony before congress in which she said:

Prior to the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, it was assumed that major terrorist attacks against the U.S. were state-sponsored. But that bombing is said to mark the start of a new kind of terrorism that does not involve states.

That notion is dubious. Rather, the claim that a new, stateless terrorism emerged with the 1993 Trade Center bombing was a convenient explanation in that it required no military response. Once promulgated, it was hastily accepted–even before much progress had been made in the investigation of that attack itself.

There isn’t time to properly address that issue in this testimony. Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against America contains the fullest account of this author’s argument that there is no new source of major terrorist attacks on the U.S. They were state-sponsored–and remain so. That that is not understood is the result of a major intelligence and policy failure that occurred in the 1990s.

In the time allotted here, I want to address three major terrorist plots that have been attributed to so-called “loose networks,” including al Qaeda, and illustrate that there is significant evidence to suggest that Iraq was involved: the 1993 Trade Center bombing; the 1995 plot in the Philippines to bomb a dozen US airplanes; and the 9/11 attacks.

According to Tannenhaus, as of August 2003 Wolfowitz still agreed with her about the WTC bombings. Perhaps by then he had accepted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but his statements right after the attacks certainly comport with what Richard Clarke reports was his reaction to the information that Al Qaeda was to blame.

Loser

Via SK Bubba I finally got to see the clip of the notorious Dennis Miller Eric Alterman “interview.”

I don’t think Jon Stewart has anything to worry about. Conservatives are not funny and they aren’t entertaining. It’s just a fact.

Big Night

Clarke’s interview was even more devastating than I anticipated. Perhaps it was his delivery and demeanor, but it was the single most hard hitting criticism I’ve yet heard of Bush’s terrorism policy. His charges were very ineffectually rebutted by Steven Hadley who seemed to be describing a Bob Woodward daydream rather than the Bush Whitehouse. Nobody ever really believed that Bush was in charge, particularly before 9/11. Even those who support the Bush administration always trusted in his advisors — the vaunted grown-ups. In light of these charges, Hadley’s description of Bush fighting his own team and insisting that the terrorism threat be a priority is embarrassingly absurd.

I have had some conversations recently with independent men who were completely persuaded after 9/11 that Bush was a ballsy guy who would do what needed to be done. They believe that the government knew things that the rest of us couldn’t possibly have known. But, when they see a guy like Clarke, the ultimate non-partisan expert/insider saying that what we knew was ignored, these fellows are going to be pissed. If Bush loses these guys, he loses the election.

This may be the most important moment of the campaign. Bush’s only real strength is the hagiography that was carefully cultivated after the attacks. Without that, they have very little. In fact, he becomes a failure of epic proportions. His entire campaign rests on the idea that Bush handled 9/11 flawlessly.

The press must be pushed on this. I already knew all of this stuff and it seemed very powerful to me. I would hope that the media would feel the heat from this story as well. The Democrats need to get together and push this over the next week, as the testimony at the hearings is highlighted. It is the chink in Bush’s codpiece and it’s time to administer a deadly blow.

Show Me Your Papers

Kevin the Political Animal muses about a national ID card, wondering a bit why some people are so adamantly against it. But, he has some reservations after reading this post by Mark Kleiman in which Mark wondered if it might be a good idea to curtail people’s ability to buy alcohol rather than their ability to drive by using the drivers license to designate that a person convicted of an alcohol related offense isn’t allowed to drink — just as minors’ drivers licenses do. Kevin then asks:

…when a driver’s license starts becoming overtly more than just a driver’s license, where does it end? Once people get the idea that it can be used to regulate more than just driving, why not use the same card to regulate and track sex offenders? Or resident aliens? Or handgun licensing? Or criminal records? It would be mighty handy to have all that stuff in one place, wouldn’t it?

Yes it would and that is just one of the reasons you can add me to the list of libertarian wackos who are horrified at the prospect of a national ID card. It’s not out of a knee jerk hatred of government, it’s out of a lifetime observing bureaucrats, cops and politicians. I don’t trust bureaucrats to handle information well; they screw it up a lot already and it’s only getting worse with more information about individuals that’s being collected.

This is one of the main arguments against the CAPPS II system, which is really a beta test of a national ID card database. Aside from a humongous error rate, and total unaccountability, you can see that the slippery slope has already had an effect. Here’s how Anita Ramasastry explains the problem in a column from last Wednesday on FindLaw:

CAPPS II is designed to use commercial and government data to verify passenger identity, and to decide whether individual fliers pose security risks. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the agency tasked with implementing this program.

The program was initially intended to detect terrorists and keep them off airplanes. In August 2003, however, TSA announced that CAPPS II would also serve as a law enforcement tool to identify individuals wanted for violent crimes.

Based on privacy concerns that I have discussed in a previous column, Congress voted to block funding for CAPPS II unless the TSA could satisfy eight criteria relating to privacy, security, accuracy and oversight. (TSA may, at this time, move forward in testing CAPPS II, however.) In addition, Congress also asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to conduct a review of CAPPS II to determine whether it met the relevant criteria.

This February, that report came in. And it concluded that CAPPS II has numerous problems, as I will explain.

Then today, March 17, a second report was released by the DHS. It confirmed that the TSA was involved in the transfer of JetBlue Airways passenger information to a Department of Defense subcontractor, Torch Concepts, for use in a data mining study (which I also discussed in an earlier column). Moreover, the DHS report found that, “The TSA employees involved acted without appropriate regard for individual privacy interests or the spirit of the Privacy Act of 1974.”

[…]

Readers may object that we can live with a few errors in order to get greater security. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has pointed out that even a small error rate would create huge problems.

With CAPPS II checking an estimated billion transactions, the ACLU points out, “[e]ven if we assume an unrealistic accuracy rate of 99.9%, mistakes will be made on approximately one million transactions, and 100,000 separate individuals.” (Emphasis added.) So even a tiny error rate will lead to many, many errors.

She also note that the commercial information they included such as credit reports are notoriously subject to error (or criminal manipulation as with identity theft) and much government information is secret and unchallegeable. The slippery slope is already in force as the TSA — the Transportation Safety Administration is now in the business of helping law enforcement track down criminals. Why would they stop at that? How about IRS leins, bounced checks, or criminal convictions? And certainly there is no reason that they wouldn’t use political activity as a criteria. In fact, they seem to have done that already.

As for law enforcement, I believe we need to hold the line on the fourth amendment in general. If we require people to have a national ID card, then it stands to reason that we will also be required to show it to law enforcement. And it won’t be just another picture ID, it will likely be a hi-tech card with a magnetic strip that connects to a huge amount of information that I don’t think the police have a right to access without probable cause. Right now a case is before the Supreme Court challenging a Nevada law that makes it a crime for a person to refuse to identify himself to police.

Under Nevada law, a citizen must reveal his or her name to a police officer who has reasonable suspicion that the person might be involved in a crime. Even if the suspect is innocent, the mere act of refusing to identify oneself is – itself – a crime.

Analysts say the law creates a legal irony. If the police officer possessed enough evidence to place the suspect under arrest, the suspect would be given a Miranda warning that he or she had the right to remain silent. But if the police officer possessed only reasonable suspicion – not the higher standard of probable cause needed to justify an arrest – a suspect could be arrested and convicted merely for refusing to identify himself.

[…]

In urging the US Supreme Court to overturn his conviction, Hiibel and his lawyers argue that police are free to ask a suspect any questions they want, but the suspect does not have to answer.

A law that can send someone to jail for refusing to speak violates both Fourth Amendment privacy protections and Fifth Amendment guarantees against being compelled to make incriminating statements, they say. “It is inimical to a free society that mere silence can lead to imprisonment,” writes James Logan, a Nevada public defender and one of Hiibel’s lawyers, in his brief to the court.

The Nevada Attorney General’s Office counters that the state’s interest in investigating crimes outweighs Hiibel’s interest in keeping his identity private. “A person does not have a Fourth Amendment right to refuse to identify himself when detained on reasonable suspicion,” says Conrad Hafen, senior deputy attorney general, in his brief. Asking someone’s name is a minimal intrusion, Mr. Hafen says. Rather than forcing a suspect to make incriminating statements, repeating one’s name does not provide evidence of a crime but merely assists an investigation, he says.

“Though the name may link the person to an outstanding warrant, it does not compel the person to inform the officer that he has an outstanding warrant,” Hafen says. “A person’s name is more like a fingerprint, voice exemplar, or handwriting analysis. It is used by law enforcement to identify the person.”

Experts in electronic privacy disagree. “A name is now no longer a simple identifier: it is the key to a vast, cross-referenced system of public and private databases, which lay bare the most intimate features of an individual’s life,” says Marc Rotenberg, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

A national ID card would make it simpler to access all that information that the government has no business knowing unless they have probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. It should not be simple. Law enforcement should have to make a case before a judge in order to get it.

I don’t trust politicians ever to do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts. Privacy and freedom are so closely linked in my mind as to be the same thing and they must be protected in law with sufficient safeguards against political repression and government surveillance. Allowing the government to access commercial information and generate even more, while requiring citizens to carry and produce a card that has the means for any government representative to access it, is a recipe for a police state. I know that sounds hysterical, but these things do happen, even to free nations if they don’t remain vigilant against it.

Jon Stewart Wonders:

“Are they going to make us marry gay?”

“I think it must be mandatory because why else would anybody care? Unless the government is going to force you to make man-love, I really don’t know why it would keep you up at night.”

Little does he know that the next step is mandatory polygamous man-on-dog love with Fido and Fifi, as well. It’s only a matter of time.

Via: The Sideshow

Preserved In Amber

I can’t wait for this interview with Richard Clarke on 60 minutes and I can’t wait to read the book. Judging by this article on the CBS website, it looks to be a doozy, as predicted.

First we find out that Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/11. This does not surprise me. He wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/10 and the attacks on the WTC were a dandy excuse to go ahead with it. But, what’s interesting is Clarke’s account of the meeting in which he said it as opposed to the account of that meeting as duly recorded by Bob Woodward.

Woodward’s version has a bold and manly Bush taking charge of his confused and befuddled advisors who have more questions than answers until the steely-eyed rocket man gives them proper direction:

Shortly after 9:30 p.m., President Bush brought together his most senior national security advisers in a bunker beneath the White House grounds. It was just 13 hours after the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in the country’s history…

“This is the time for self-defense,” he told his aides, according to National Security Council notes. Then, repeating the vow he had made earlier in the evening in a televised address from the Oval Office, he added: “We have made the decision to punish whoever harbors terrorists, not just the perpetrators.”

Their job, the president said, was to figure out how to do it.

That afternoon, on a secure phone on Air Force One, Bush had already told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he would order a military response and that Rumsfeld would be responsible for organizing it. “We’ll clean up the mess,” the president told Rumsfeld, “and then the ball will be in your court.”

Intelligence was by now almost conclusive that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan, had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the aides gathered in the bunker-the “war cabinet” that included Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George J. Tenet-were not ready to say what should be done about them. The war cabinet had questions, no one more than Rumsfeld.

Who are the targets? How much evidence do we need before going after al Qaeda? How soon do we act? While acting quickly was essential, Rumsfeld said, it might take up to 60 days to prepare for major military strikes. And, he asked, are there targets that are off-limits? Do we include American allies in military strikes?

Rumsfeld warned that an effective response would require a wider war, one that went far beyond the use of military force. The United States, he said, must employ every tool available-military, legal, financial, diplomatic, intelligence.

The president was enthusiastic. But Tenet offered a sobering thought. Although al Qaeda’s home base was Afghanistan, the terrorist organization operated nearly worldwide, he said. The CIA had been working the bin Laden problem for years. We have a 60-country problem, he told the group.

“Let’s pick them off one at a time,” Bush replied

And then he hitched up his codpiece and went to bed. It was, after all, 9:30.

Here’s Clarke’s version from the CBS article:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.

“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years. For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’

“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”

Clarke also describes the foreign policy advisors in the administration as “preserved in amber,” (much more evocative than my earlier characterization of them as fossilized) which supports my observations over the last couple of years that the central problem with these guys is that they are unable to get past the cold war mythology that hooked them somewhere in their formative years and never let them go. It’s like watching a bunch of middle aged freaks at a LOTR convention. Not a pretty sight.

And what’s even more staggering about all this is that they still haven’t learned their lessons. CBS reports that Steven Hadley of the NSC describes the Iraq misadventure as a success by basing it on the lie that al Qaeda and Saddam were in cahoots AND on the dangerous fallacy that terrorism has something to do with rogue states:

“Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists.”

Jayzuz. The bombings in Madrid, Istanbul and Bali sure as hell didn’t need any rogue state sanctuary — they were all carried out by terrorist factions loosely connected to al Qaeda and managed on local soil. I can’t even begin to comment on the ridiculous concept that we’ve somehow provoked a positive change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But, we can be sure that the Iraq war has contributed to terrorism all right. It served as an extremely useful rallying cry and cause for manipulation for no goddamned good reason other than a total lack of imagination and openness to changing facts on the ground.

It’s not only the White House that refuses to see terrorism for what it is instead of what they’d like it to be, the right wing punditocrisy is similarly clinging to their outmoded cold warrior worldview. All this talk of appeasement in the Spanish elections fails to account for the fact that it doesn’t really matter how any single country reacts to these Islamic terrorist actions. You can’t appease them or not appease them because they are not operating from any real premise.

Al Qaeda terrorists have a delusional view of world events that’s only rivaled by the neocons here in the US. And they share a similar misunderstanding of the forces that bring about change in the world. For instance, they BOTH believed that they destroyed the Soviet Union through their own superior military prowess. I think we all know that the American right wing is dedicated to the proposition that their God Ronald Reagan single handedly ended the cold war. Osama bin Laden takes similar credit. From a 1998 interview:

Allah has granted the Muslim people and the Afghani mujahedeen, and those with them, the opportunity to fight the Russians and the Soviet Union. … They were defeated by Allah and were wiped out. There is a lesson here. The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan late in December of ’79. The flag of the Soviet Union was folded once and for all on the 25th of December just 10 years later. It was thrown in the waste basket. Gone was the Soviet union forever.

[…]

Today however, our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. Americans have committed unprecedented stupidity. They have attacked Islam and its most significant sacrosanct symbols … . We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.

You couldn’t make this shit up. Al Qaeda thinks it brought down the Soviets and thinks it can bring down the US, too. Yep. And meanwhile, here in the new capital of Western Civilization we’ve got President Hopalong spewing nonsense about Good n’ Evul while the SecDef says that we should bomb the countries with the best targets.

Dr. Strangelove, your table is ready.

Oh, and by the way, somebody ought to send a memo to the White House that its attempted character asissination of Clarke is extremely lame. They say he wrote this book to “audition” for the Kerry campaign. Yeah. The guy who ran counter-terrorism for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Junior would need to audition. I hear Tom Cruise is doing a screen test for the next Mission Impossible movie, too. Paramount needs to see if he can do the job.

GOPUNKS

A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support:

“I look like someone who should be hanging out with Marilyn Manson. In fact I have hung out with Marilyn Manson,” Mr. Graves said. “It doesn’t affect what my morals are.”

“I think George Bush is a wonderful, competent leader,” he added. “And I believe that he is bringing this country on a right and just course and he understands the true nature of evil.”

I think we’ve finally found Ann Coulter a boyfriend.